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Our old pepper mill gave out on us a month ago. It had been steadily going down hill for some time as it got progressively harder to produce any pepper. One day a screw fell out of it and into our food. Fearing for our safety, we decided it was time to get another one. It was a cheap Chinese made one from Farberware. It lasted for about five years so we saluted it goodbye and searched for another pepper grinder. Normally I’d just get another cheap grinder, but fresh ground black pepper is used a lot in our kitchen, almost at every meal. We’re big fresh ground pepper fans, and for a tool you use everyday, it’s best to find something that’s good and will last. Well I had a gift card to Williams and Sonoma and we set out to get the best pepper grinder ever. Everything at W-S is expensive and generally overpriced la-dee-dah stuff. $30 for an All-Clad Food Turner? Seriously? They had a $110 dollar Peugeot pepper grinder, a ridiculous price for a ridiculous object d’art. Finally I saw this model from Kuhn Rikon for $40. After a few weeks of use, I really find it to be worth the extra cash. Here’s what I like about it.

• The grinding element is ceramic instead of steel. Ceramics are much harder than steel and the shape of this grinding bezel makes short work of those pepper corns, and the pepper flakes are consist in size.
• The large diameter of the spice vase gives you plenty of torque for grinding, so it’s easy to use.
• What’s super awesome is that the grinding end stands up instead of down like other grinders. This keeps your counters and tabletops from getting dirty with pepper. I don’t understand why every pepper grinder doesn’t do this
• Another interesting feature is that it has interchangeable spice canisters that you can load into the grinder. I don’t think I’ll use this, but if I wanted to switch from black pepper to sichuan pepper, interchanging the canisters would be a snap.
• It’s really well made and comes with a 25 year warranty.

It also stands for Royal Crown soda. I always feel bad that RC is such a distant third to Coke and Pepsi. If you’ve never had an RC and Moonpie, you’re missing out on a piece of Southern Americana. So while searching for RC products I stumble upon their premium product, RC Draft Cola. It looks just like a Japanese beer can from far away. I’m sure that’s not entirely accidental. I’m really curious as to what this premium draft experience is like, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. So if any of you out there (all five readers) find it, please let me know - because I am so post cola.

This isn’t a new fighter jet from the military. Instead it’s Doritos new flavor. I saw the new dorito in a Turkey Hill whilst paying for my gas. The mysterious black packaging had me hooked immediately. The addictive thing about X-13D isn’t the taste. It’s the cognitive dissonance X-13D creates because your brain can’t accept what it’s tasting. This is similar to how clear pepsi messes with your head. Even though the caramel coloring doesn’t affect the flavor, our brains associate caramel color with pepsi like flavor while clear soda usually gets linked with sprite like flavor. Similarly the X-13D looks like a normal dorito, but your brain doesn’t have any visual references to put the flavor to an actual foodstuff. At least with cool ranch doritos, your brain thinks about ranch dressing, and hence the lack of confusion when eating them.

All of this palette discombobulation made me eat another and another as I tried to decipher the taste. I finally cracked the mystery of X-13D when K asked to try one. I told her she wouldn’t like it, and I was right, she didn’t. But how did I know this? So I started going through foods in my mind that K hates until I figured out what the secret ingredient is. Warning this is a spoiler of sorts so if you want to know read on. (more…)

My new year’s resolution for this year is to read a book every two weeks. I thought a good way to keep me on track is to blog my book reviews. The first book of this year is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Pollan writes in the same genre as Thomas Friedman and Eric Schloss. The narrative is part editorial, part journalism, and part evangelism. It’s a surprisingly easy read, but often find the switch between preaching and teaching not so smooth. As a journalist Pollan wants you to believe that he’s a neutral observer, but at the same time he also wants to advocate a change in society, and at some times his narrative gets a little too Berkeley-ivory-tower idealistic. The sentimentalism gets to be a bit much especially in the third and fourth parts of his book. The first and second parts of the book are very good though, and I would recommend everyone read the first half of the book.

El Yucateco
Originally uploaded by bladesdna.

This is currently my favorite hot sauce. Unlike some other habanero sauces, like Dave’s Insanity Sauce, El Yucateco is extremely flavorful. It has a bright and fruity flavor with the right amount of heat. Locally I’ve only seen it served at El Rodeo, but fortunately I found a good Mexican restaurant that sells it. My favorite thing about El Yucateco is the claim at the bottom of the bottle, “Much More Habanero!” because some habanero just isn’t enough…

Best website of the week… America needs a national pho registry. Fortunately for us, America has one. Nice to see South Central (PA) reprezentin.

So this week the wings crew went out for some Thai grub. Thai food can get really hot, as is typical for most south and southeast Asian cuisine. Like a lot of restaurants, they asked us how hot we wanted our dishes on a scale of 1 to 10. Of course those of you with any kind of empirical acumen can realize how flawed this scale is. Krazylegz was the first to bring the absurdity of this scale to my attention. One’s relative tolerance for heat makes the scale worthless. Krazy and I are both of the Asian persuasion and thus have a higher threshold for capsaicin concentration. We both ordered an “8″ and felt that if 10 is supposed to be an inedible inferno, then the dishes we ordered were a 3 for our palete. Of course for someone else out there I’m sure it would be an 8. Krazy wondered what would happen if you ordered a 10, would they totally overwhelm your dish with hellfire to punish your audacity? I wondered what would happen if you ordered an 11. At any rate the whole relativistic scale needs to be replaced with one that makes sense. Krazy suggested scovilles, but that’s still too abstract. What I think restaurants should do is base your heat tolerence based on the pepper you can handle. So let’s say 1 equals cracked black pepper. 3 could be a paprika pepper. 5 a jalapeno and so on. Actually that sounds like a good idea for a restaurant. “One Through Ten”, coming to a strip mall near you.

Purple Potatoes

Rishel mentioned about purple potatoes. So I thought the next time I got some purple potatoes from our CSA, I’d blog them up. They taste pretty much the same as regular potatoes, although you can tell the difference between them and other varieties of potatoes. They tend to be more on the starchy side than the waxy side. I sliced these up into steak fries. The more you cook these potatoes, the more they lose their color. They tend to turn gray after prolonged cooking. All around good eats though. (more…)

pupusa

Here’s the antithesis of what I’m talking about the new gourmet bland. This is a pupusa. It’s street food, comidas rápidas, at it’s best. It isn’t fancy food, but it’s more flavorful and appealing than what passes for lunch at most sit down restaurants. It was a cheap meal at less than $3 It’s essentially a savoury pancake that uses corn flour (masa) as the base instead of flour. Inside the pancake is any variety of vegetables, meat, and cheese. This one has zucchini and onions in it. It’s garnished by a slice of avocado, a chile, salsa, sour cream, and a side called curtido which is some sort of mysterious form of pickled cole slaw (but nothing like kimchee). Apparently pupusas are only native to El Salvador but appear elsewhere in central America. It’s a wonderful lunch and I’d love it if someone opened up a pupusaria around here. I think the Blanding of America could use more of this kind of find to spice things up.

Thanks to the Food Network and the rise of celebrity chefs, food has been getting better everywhere. McDonalds is now offering “premium” salads which are a vast improvement over their salad shakes which were milkshake cups filled with processed cheese, bacon bits, and iceberg lettuce. However, even though the quality has improved, we’ve achieved a new level of boring. We have merely replaced the iceberg lettuce house salads and meat and potatoes staples with a new limited range of equally uninspiring albeit higher quality food. E.g. a new “Irish” pub opened in town. It has all the trappings of a pub, the high stools, beers, and Guinness paraphernalia, but look at the menu. There’s no mutton, kidney pie, thick cut rashers, chips with curry sauce, and marmite sandwiches. Nothing that is remotely Irish or English. Instead it’s the new bland gourmet fare. Here’s what’s on the menu at this Irish pub:

• Mixed mesclun green house salad with some kind of fruited vinaigrette
• Wraps, IMHO the worst thing that ever happened to tortillas, Mesoamericans have had tortillas for centuries and never made anything as bland
• An “angus” burger
• Chicken caesar salads, making romaine the new iceburg lettuce
• A seared tuna steak rare in the middle
• A grilled salmon fillet with garlic mash potatoes
• A grilled chicken sandwich

I defy you not to find all of these menu items at any restaurant today. I could blindfold you and take you to any sit down restaurant in America and you’d be hard pressed to tell me anything about where you were, and what the regional cuisine is. I’m even noticing big cities and metropolitan areas have the same redundant menus, they just have more of them with fancier names and decorum. It’s the Ruby Tuesday-ing of America. I’m glad the US is getting a more sophisticated palate. However I wish we would get more adventurous as well and actually try and celebrate daring dining and regional cuisine. I’m not saying everything needs to be Nobu-like vanguard haute cuisine. Simple regional folk cuisine is fine. Why don’t we have more wonderful local dives with real flavor not faux sophistication? Food is becoming more superficial, all presentation but no character. Do your part and dine more adventurously. Standards for dining have gotten better, let’s just push the bar higher.