A Foodie Moment

About a year and a half ago, we took a private docent-led tour in New York City with Elizabeth Knight as part of a “History of Tea” tour arranged by Context Travel. Context no longer offers this tour, but you can still take custom tea tours and get tea training with Elizabeth via her own company, Tea With Friends. I highly recommend it if you are in New York City and have the time.

You might think that New York is a rather odd place for this, but as it turns out it was a brilliant choice, as it offers a broad range of cultural, historical, and culinary traditions that immigrants and business people have brought to this urban environment. Perhaps the most stunning thing we discovered even with all the diverse types of teas in the world is that they come from one type of plant – Camellia sinensis.

The base types of tea – white, green, oolong, black – are produced by processing the leaves and buds of the tea plant in different ways. There’s a great article on tea processing at Wikipedia.

Be that as it may, one of the things we learned with Elizabeth (and elsewhere) is that most tea-bag tea is made with tea “dust” or “fannings“, which are typically (but not always) lower grade leftover bits of tea leaves. In various tea tastings over the last couple of years we have also found that for certain types of teas, such as green and oolong, the flavor and aroma of brewed whole leaf teas is generally far superior to tea-bag teas. Subsequently we have raised our tea standards, as life is too short to drink mediocre tea.

My tea making accessories

While there are some great companies that specialize in tea bags with whole leaf teas, including Tea Forte, Mighty Leaf, and some of the teas from Harney & Sons, I generally find it more satisfying and less expensive to buy tins or bags of loose leaf tea and use the tea that way. The other nice thing about brewing your own loose leaf teas is that you can blend your own tea combinations to brew the perfect tea for the occasion.

Speaking of brewing, I have a drawer full of tea strainers, tea balls, and other tea infusion gadgets, but honestly I have not found anything which competes with the Teavana tea maker for properly and easily steeping and brewing tea.

Tea balls and infusers tend to be a pain to fill – leaves tend to fall out and things get messy. And tea strainers tend to be either too tough to clean after use, or have sieve holes which are too large and let tea bits through.

Teavana offers two sizes of tea makers - large and personal

The Teavana tea maker, on the other hand, has a very dense pair of screens at the bottom which both prevents tea bits from getting through as well as getting stuck after brewing. Better yet, the tea maker also acts as a steeper so that you can steep and brew your tea for however long the tea requires and then drain the steeped tea into an appropriate vessel.

Let me diverge with a quick comment on steeping tea. The lighter the tea (e.g. white or green), the more delicate it tends to be, and thus the more care you need to treat it with when brewing. If you over-steep or use water that is too hot, you could burn the leaves and/or make it very bitter, thus ruining your tea experience. There is a nice basic chart to follow here.

For a while I was very anal retentive about measuring the water temperature of my hot water, but then an elderly Japanese lady in an underground market near the Shibuya Station in Tokyo showed me a cool (literally) trick. To get her boiling water cooled off to an appropriate temperature for the green sencha tea she was brewing for the tea samples she was offering, she would pour the boiling water into a room temperature tea cup, swirl it around, and then pour it over the green tea leaves (sencha) in the small teapot she used for brewing. That decanting into a colder container was enough to cool off the water temperature, and also served as a way to warm up the tea cup to avoid “shocking” the tea when it was poured for consumption a couple of minutes later.

So now, when I brew my white or green teas, I pour the boiling water into my cup or pitcher first, swirl it around a bit, and then pour it over my tea leaves to steep them without burning them with water that is too hot. For a 16 oz cup of tea I normally use a bit more than a teaspoon of loose leaf tea, while for a pitcher (almost two quarts) I will use about five (5) teaspoons of loose leaf tea, or even a bit more if I am decanting over ice to make an ice tea.

Gyokuro green tea in my large Teavana tea maker

The Gyokuro tea steeping in the tea maker

The steeped tea drains into the tea pitcher

And my tea leaves are invariably in one of my Teavana tea makers (large to make a pitcher of tea, small to make a big cup of tea) as pictured above.

One of our two Breville electric water kettles

To heat my water, I have found the best thing is an electric hot water kettle like the one shown above. It’s faster than using a traditional stove top tea kettle, and easier to see exactly how much water you’re heating up. A microwave will do as backup for a cup of hot water, but I don’t have any assurance that I’ve reached boiling temperature in a microwave so I only use one when I don’t have a better way to heat my water (like in a hotel room).

My favorite teas are green teas – I particularly like the grassy nose of a decently brewed sencha, and also have become fond of oolong of late, with a splash of vanilla extract. In terms of blends, I like to steep fresh lemongrass and then add green tea leaves to it to produce my own lemongrass green tea. Oh, and I almost never sweeten my teas, with the exception of a chai-style blend.

I have been finding that more and more supermarkets appear to carry loose leaf teas now, but in a pinch you can probably find dedicated tea shops in a local shopping mall or town. Teavana appears to be the most populous in the U.S., with a very broad selection of teas. If ordering on-line, I have had great success with Teavana, Mighty Leaf, and Harney & Sons. I find the Japanese green teas to be best from Harney & Sons, but like Teavana’s Moroccan Mint and Masala Chai better than the equivalent products from Harney & Sons. Mighty Leaf has an amazing Orchid Oolong as well as the fragrant Celebration blended black tea.

All in all, I think if you have an interest in tea, once you go to loose leaf tea, you’ll find it hard to go back to plain old tea-bag tea. In fact, for my upcoming Antarctic trip, I bagged a bunch of loose leaf teas in my own tea bags because I didn’t want to suffer with normal tea, and couldn’t fit the Teavana tea maker in my limited luggage space. I also packed some low-sugar hot chocolate mix and my own datil and ancho chili pepper blend to make spicy hot chocolate to keep me warm on the inside. But that will have to wait for another blog post.

I happened to stumble across a recent article from Food & Wine this morning about crispy fried chicken skin. Looks like I’m not a lone voice in the woods about this delectable treat, which I wrote about exactly one month before the aforementioned article from Food & Wine.

Food & Wine suggests that chicken skin may be the next bacon. And another article in Toronto Life mentions that David Chang of Momofuku Ko (a restaurant that’s on my dining bucket list) uses crispy chicken skin as a garnish with pasta. Wise chef!

I believe self congratulation is in order for my being, unwittingly, a trend setter.

After a year of making chili rellenos with jalapeño peppers instead of the poblanos required in the original recipe, we finally found poblano peppers here on Bonaire! Even making the recipe for the last year, it is far from perfected, but we have discovered ways to make it easier on my mom and myself.

Krystyana and Linda's low carb Chili Relleno

What makes our recipe low carb is that regular chili rellenos recipes require a corn flour batter to coat the peppers with. Flour is obviously not low carb. So we use beaten eggs instead.

The first thing to do when looking for the perfect pepper for this recipe is an unblemished jalapeño or preferably poblano pepper.

- 6 poblanos (or 10 jalapeños)
- 3 x 8 oz. packs of full fat cream cheese
- 1 x 8 oz. Four Cheese Mexican blend pack
- 4 eggs
- 3 paper bags

First of all, set your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then wash the poblanos and dry them off well. On a gas stovetop, lay a flat grill rack on the burner area. You need an open flame for roasting the peppers. Strategically place the peppers so that they are directly over the flame. Turn the pepper when the side facing the flame is entirely black with bubbling skin. When the pepper is black on all sides, stuff the pepper into a paper bag and roll up the opening to keep the steam in. After about 5 minutes, the peppers should be cool enough to pick up.

At this point, and when using jalapeños, I would search for gloves or a victim. The burn in a jalapeños can vary but I would not ever take a chance with getting a hot one while barehanded. This is due to a previous accident when making chili rellenos with jalapeños. After gutting about 10 of them, my fingers started hurting like crazy. My mom and I tried everything to make it stop, from sour cream to aloe. It did not work…. And that is why I suggest gloves.

Take a pepper out and start peeling off the skin while attempting not to break apart the flesh of the pepper. My mom used a small knife for this, but finger nails are almost as successful. We peeled the skin into the sink because this is long process.

Take a knife and slit one side of the pepper, from the stem to the very tip of the pepper. The seeds will be just as hard to take out of the pepper as the skin was to remove and just as sticky. The likelihood of making a gaping hole in the opposite side of your slit is high, so be wary of pulling on strings of the flesh. And wear gloves if it’s a jalapeño.

Mix the cream cheese and the four cheese Mexican blend in a bowl until thoroughly mixed.

Take out a large casserole dish and spray with Pam or grease it with butter. Lay the peppers on the bottom of the casserole dish and start stuffing the peppers with the cheese mixture. Don’t overstuff them. The rest of the cheese can rolled up into little balls and placed around peppers. They melt really well and are yummy to eat separate from the peppers as well.

Beat the eggs in a bowl and brush it over the peppers and dump the rest into the dish. Put the peppers into the oven for 30 minutes, or until the egg is cooked.

Bon appetite!

Our stand-up freezer stopped freezing sometime in the last 20 hours, so we found ourselves performing freezer food triage earlier today. Fortunately we have a couple of refrigerator/freezer units still functioning in the house, so key frozen meats and other frozen products could be kept ice hard.

However, we did find there wasn’t quite enough space for everything, so in addition to feasting on now thawing left-overs tomorrow, we enjoyed a special treat tonight – Crispy Fried Chicken Skin.

We discovered a couple of months ago that our butcher simply throws out the chicken skin from thighs and breasts when packaging meat for retail sale. What a waste. So we kept a stash of chicken skin in vacuum sealed bags in our now malfunctioning freezer.

As long time fans of pork rinds (zero carbohydrates, and only saturated animal fats if prepared right), chicken skin ranks right up there for us. When fried correctly, chicken skin is like great popcorn – a nice crunch, a bit of greasiness, and a lot of satisfaction in both taste and emotion, but none of the carbs. Ignore the misguided advice to have fat-less (and thus bland and dry) chicken, and instead enjoy the skin, if you can find a good source for it.

Frying up chicken skin is incredibly easy. Get out your deep fat fryer, and turn on high (450 degrees Fahrenheit on the model I use). If your frying temperature is too low, the chicken skin ends up very chewy, so fry at a high temperature.

Cut your chicken skins into small pieces (I find one inch squares to be a good size), and once the oil is at full heat, put the skin in the fryer. Stir a bit to make sure your skins cook separately instead of in a large chunk.

After about 4-6 minutes you should see the skins browning and losing their rubbery textures. Remove from the hot oil onto a plate with a paper towel to drain off the excess oil. Lightly salt with your favorite seasoned salt (I use Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning – love that stuff). Let the hot skins sit for a few minutes to allow retained moisture to evaporate, and to let the skins cool down enough to safely eat. Then enjoy.

Crispy Chicken Skin at Kori & Fay in Berlin, Germany

I will note that several Asian restaurants I’ve eaten at offer crispy chicken skin on their menus as well. I have had it Yakitori-style (grilled on a skewer) at Japanese restaurants in New York and San Francisco, and most recently in a spicy sauce in Berlin at Kori & Fay (see picture above).

As we have been researching nutrition and dietary practices and the impact thereof on human health, including the connection between diabetes and heart disease and high carbohydrate diets (a.k.a. the “Western diet” most folks in the western world eat, including bread, pasta, sugared drinks, etc.), we have found that our desire for chocolate has not abated.

Our solution has been to try to find the best sugar free chocolates we can, and our search led us to Godiva, an internationally known chocolatier chain. For years we have greatly enjoyed their sugar free chocolate bars, which we found to be comparable, if not better, than their sugared kin.

Godiva Sugar Free Chocolate Bars

However, after trying to look up a link for Godiva’s excellent sugar free dark chocolate for the chocolate peanut butter pie recipe I posted last night, I came up empty. This morning I contacted Godiva’s on-line help service. Here’s the transcript:

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
You have been connected to Ed .
Ed : Hello Jake. How may I assist you today?
Jake: Hi Ed. It appears that it is no longer possible to order Sugar Free chocolates from the Godiva web site. Is that a permanent change?
Ed : correct
Jake: Has Godiva discontinued all of its Sugar Free Chocolates? That would be tragic. They were the best ones out there.
Ed : sorry, but they have
Jake: How sad. Thanks.
Ed : Thank you. Have a nice day.
Ed : and Holidays!
Ed : bye

And that’s all she wrote.

Godiva Sugar Free Chocolate, rest in peace. And now we have to try to buy all we can before the stores sell out. Sigh.

I’ve already mentioned one of my favorite versatile food items is mayonnaise. And when I cook savory dishes, I find myself eagerly looking towards garlic as one of my ingredients.

That’s why it’s probably no surprise that my favorite hot dip combines mayonnaise and garlic, and to provide some substance, it also includes Parmesan cheese and artichoke hearts. And it’s incredibly easy to make, although I have not come up with a good and short name for the Garlic Parmesan Artichoke Mayo Dip.

First, pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit (190 degrees Celsius).

Then, get a baking dish, and then combine equal portions (by volume) of grated Parmesan cheese (like Kraft’s), canned artichoke hearts, and mayonnaise. I usually use a cup of each.

Then add as much minced garlic as you think you can handle. I personally add 10-20 cloves depending on whether I will be meeting with others the next day (less cloves if I like the people I’m meeting, more if I don’t or am not meeting with anyone). I should add that while you can sometimes buy minced garlic at the supermarket, the acidic liquid they package it in robs the garlic of a lot of its pungency, so I prefer fresh or at least some of the garlic that I have pre-minced and stored in oil with salt for later use.

After you have thoroughly blended all the ingredients and smoothed out the top to make it nice and flat, pop the baking dish into the oven and cooking until the top is a nice light to medium brown color. Remove from the oven and let sit for about 15 minutes.

Serve with something nice and crisp. Folks who eat carbs might enjoy it with tortilla chips, pita chips, or toasted wafers of baguette. Low carbers can use cucumber slices or pork rinds. At home we also use the dip as a condiment for meats like steak or pork.

The Garlic Parmesan Artichoke Mayo Dip is also a great thing to bring to pot-lucks and BBQs.

One of the common misnomers about folks who consider themselves foodies is that they are food snobs. Food snobs are people who turn their nose up at ordinary foods because, well, they are ordinary, common, or pedestrian – choose your description. Food snobs require expensive bottles of wine to show their food elitism. They order foie gras or dishes with truffles because they are considered to be delicacies, and not necessarily because they like those things. They turn their noses up at BBQ and home-style country cooking. Food snobs won’t try regional dishes like guinea pig, stinky tofu, or pig’s intestines.

And food snobs probably ask to have their meals modified when they ordered. A scene from the 2006 movie with Queen Latifah “Last Holiday” where a table full of diners orders various specialties and then asks to have them modified in ridiculous ways comes to mind as an excellent example of this type of food snobbery.

A true foodie delights in trying local cuisine wherever he or she happens to be. A true foodie will, barring allergies or significant dietary restrictions, also trust a chef to produce a dish properly, meaning with all the ingredients and accoutrements the chef designed the dish with. This applies as much to single courses as it does to so-called “chef’s tasting menus”. Back to “Last Holiday”, Queen Latifah’s character is a true foodie, taking her passion as far as to order multiple main courses just to try the various combinations of flavors and textures.

Diners who presume to tell a chef how to cook and what to serve or not are food snobs, not foodies.

And people who denigrate ordinary foods merely because they are not expensive or rare are not foodies either. An example of an ordinary food that comes to mind would be a side dish of fresh green beans boiled with bacon that we enjoyed at the homey Calico County Restaurant in Ft. Smith, Arkansas this past August. It was only a side dish, and simple home cooking, but it was heavenly, as were the cinnamon rolls served with the meal. And I’m pretty sure no food snob would even enter that wonderful place because of the simple exterior and kitschy interior.

In summary, a foodie is passionate about good food, regardless of its source. A food snob adds artificial criteria in his or her evaluation of food, many times including what other people think of the food instead of trusting their own senses.

Even foods we consider ordinary can surprise when they are prepared differently. Surprisingly, the preparation doesn’t need to be very different to make a difference.

A perfect example is scrambled eggs. In the past, my favorite way of making scrambled eggs was simply to crack the eggs over a pan and scramble them as they cooked. The result looks colorful, and the texture varied based on the combination of yolk and albumin (the clearer part of the egg).

Linda, my wife, would scramble them in a bowl before cooking them. Some folks may add a bit of milk as well, and over at IHOP, they add a bit of pancake batter (at least that’s what the menu suggested the last time I ate at an IHOP).

But a book I have been reading on and off – Harold McGee’s most excellent “On Food and Cooking – The Science and Lore of the Kitchen” (2nd edition) – suggests that chefs have known for centuries that adding a bit of acid to scrambled eggs makes them extraordinarily fluffy when cooked. In the voluminous chapter on all things “egg” in his book, McGee explains in depth the structure of proteins in egg yolks and albumin, as well as the impact that acid has on those proteins.

Even if you don’t care about the science involved, you can still benefit from McGee’s analysis. The next time you scramble up some eggs before cooking them, add a small squeeze of lemon juice or a bit of fruit juice or even vinegar – a quarter or half teaspoon will do. The amount of lemon juice or other liquid you add is so miniscule you cannot taste it, but the result will astound you – you will likely never have had eggs so fluffy.

And you will likely never go back to chewy or rubbery scrambled eggs again.

Julia Child was a huge fan of butter, and I wholeheartedly agree that butter is a foodie staple. However, in that same vein, I’m also a devotee of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is an excellent condiment – just ask my Dutch friends who eat it liberally with “frites” (french fries), a habit I have now adopted as well.

Of the store bought varieties, I find Kraft and Hellman’s regular mayonnaise to be the best, while at the same time, I believe that low-fat mayonnaise is an abomination as it has the wrong flavor and consistency (and it has carbs to compensate for the reduction in fat).

However, my absolute favorite mayonnaise is home made. The only implement you need is a good blender. Personally, I’m a fan of Vita-Mix blenders.

The basic ingredients for a good home-made mayonnaise are egg yolks, salt, mustard, lemon juice, and oil. You can use olive oil, but unless I want a strongly flavored mayonnaise (tasting like olive oil), I tend to use nut oils like peanut or sunflower oil. As a general principle I stay away from corn oil and generic vegetable oils.

Place three or four egg yolks in the blender, along with a pinch of salt (sea salt preferred over iodized table salt), a teaspoon or so of Dijon mustard (although any mustard will do), and another teaspoon of lemon juice. On very low speed, blend those things together quickly (keep the lid on the blender because you will get spattering).

Once those four items have been blended together, with the blender still on, slowly dribble in the oil. Feel free to increase the blender speed a bit as you do this. As you continue dribbling in the oil, you’ll find that the mixture will start to thicken. Keep adding oil until you get the consistency you want for your mayonnaise. You don’t want to add too much oil, as the mixture will become too thick. However, if that does happen, you can stir in a little bit of water to thin out the mayonnaise.

Voila! You have mayonnaise!

But here’s the really cool thing – in the early stages, after you’ve added some oil but your mayonnaise isn’t too thick, you can also add other ingredients to flavor your mayo before aiming for the consistency you want. For example, mince up a clove or two of garlic and add it to the blender to make a garlic aoili. Or add curry powder to make a curry mayo. Or chipotle peppers to make a nice spicy Mexican chipotle mayonnaise. The possibilities are endless. In any event, after you’ve added and blended in the extra ingredients, resume with the oil dribble to get the consistency you want.

Also, if you stop adding oil, you can blend your mayonnaise for extended periods of time without impacting its texture or flavor. That’s a great way to make sure your extra ingredients are well minced and distributed by the blender.

Once you try making your own mayonnaise you’ll be hard-pressed to go back to the store-bought stuff.

One final tip and trick – that blender will be a bit greasy after you’ve extracted all the mayo you can with your spatula. A great way to clean such a blender container is to rinse it out, and then fill it half-way with warm or hot water and a bit of dish detergent, and then, with the lid on, blend away on high for a minute or so. You’ll find that your blender container, once you get all the bubbles rinsed out, is clean and no longer greasy feeling (or at least less so than before).

We recently completed a trip to The Netherlands and Germany, and found, to our delight, that many cafés offered fresh mint tea on their menus. We became fans of mint tea in Morocco last year, but Moroccan tea, made with dried mint leaves does not compare to the fresh flavor and color of tea made with fresh mint leaves.

After we got back home from our trip we attempted to make Fresh Mint Tea ourselves, and it was incredibly easy. Basically, you get a large sprig of fresh mint, put it in a large mug, add boiling water, and wait for it to steep. We find that muddling the leaves in the hot water helps add more mint flavor to the tea. We also like our mint tea sweetened, and use one or two packets of Splenda for that purpose instead of sugar (in order to avoid unnecessary carbs).

Fresh Mint Tea in The Netherlands

A small footnote about terminology: Technically, a “tea” is only a “tea” when it includes leaves from a tea plant or bush. Fresh mint tea is actually a “tisane“, a term used to describe hot drinks made from herbs and other non-tea plant leaves and ingredients.