Eating Out Mr. Greenjeans

Okay, so he’s really hella dead. So it’d be more like eating old grandpa jerky. Gross right? So instead we’re going to take a cue from a friend of EOF Kattra and attempt a…oh god…I think I might have yarfed a little in my gob. A vegetarian recipe. Oh god! I’m sorry, I’ve gotta empty my sorrow into my porcelain Lord.

Ok! Upbeat again. So vegetarian right? Well crap, I guess I do have a bunch of farm fresh produce, I can turn out at least one semi vegetarian meal. But god damn it, I’m keeping my butter you bloody hippies! You can use your precious olive oil instead… Grumpily moving on.

Veg-gasm time!! We’re gonna make ourselves a tomato vegetable pasta soup with friggin barley! Cuz grains is good.

EOF Veg-gasm Tomater Veg Soup

1.5 pints canned or concassed tomatoes
2 cups water
2 table spoons unsalted butter
1 cup finely minced leeks
3 ribs celery chopped
4 medium carrots chopped
3 stalks of baby garlic minced (or 2 cloves)
6 fresh sage leaves ripped a new one by hand
1 table spoon dry oregano
1 table spoons fresh thyme
1 big pinch cayenne pepper
3 table spoons of violated parsley leaves
¼ cup barley
2 cups sliced zucchini (Italian sausage…SHHHH!!!)
2 bay leaves
¼ lb shell pasta
1 squeeze o’ lemon
Salt and pepper to taste (catching onto a theme here?)

Prep: Cut up shit like I said. You’re golden.



Firstly firstingham. You drop your butter in the soup pot, let it foam up a wee bit and add your minced leek. Cook until translucent and add your baby garlic. Cook for another minute, then add your carrots and celery and/or sundry hard, rigid veg. At the same time, have a food processor on standby and beat the living shit out of those tomatoes. Feel free to add half of your herbs and all of the parsley at this stage to be beaten into a horrible red slurry of yum. Hey, this is how the big boys make their tomato sauce. Keep up!

 So we’re beating our tomatoes for all the world to see. Then take your tomato whip and run it through a strainer. Get all the thyme twigs and machine missed tomato skins stained out, mash everything else past the wires and on top of your hot veg in the pot. Once all the tomatoes are mashed in, toss in your bay leaves and the remainder of your herbs and spices along with the barley and that squeezy lemon, then set to a simmer. Allow to slowly cook down for at least a half hour, adding water as necessary to maintain the consistency of the soup.

At this point sauté the “zucchini” in a little butter and dill. Once they’re just a little under done, toss the slices into the soup as well. For green zucchini, do it close to the end of cooking, for “meat” zucchini, much earlier. And for a more meaty taste, just add some fennel and paprika. Once the barley is al dente, add in the remainder of the water and the pasta and bring to a low simmer. Once the pasta is done, so is dinner!

So there you go. Eating Out Fresno turned out a vegetarian recipe with local ingredients and not so much as a whimper….ok more like a random substitution of zucchini for Italian sausage and some goat cheese on top. But what can I say? I love cylinders in my tomato and the randy smell of goat in my nose. All day.  Besides, zukes aren't in season yet.  But pigs totally are.

And with that we drift slowly off the cliff. With a sultry wave we bid you adieu, auf wiedersehen and who the hell stole my pants? Pants don’t go with soup! But an Irish soda bread with walnuts sure would.



-Pook

Eating Out Tubers and Shrooms

So spring is here and I have begun my seasonal plunder of the Vineyard Farmers Market. It’s still early in the season, so what these farmers lack in bounty they make up for in succulent tenderness. Sweet little tightly coiled bunches of baby romaine, tangy and sweet myer lemons, blood oranges. My money just evaporates every time I come here. It takes two trips to the car just so we’re not loaded down while we try to sip coffee. And naturally, I forget to bring my camera. So you’re stuck with what we brought home.

There were two major scores on the trip. The beloved ladies of Sun Smiling Farms offered their usual delicious array of mushrooms and some beautiful, young leeks. But, oh happy and special day! They have morels! Blow your truffles out your ass, morels rule the fungal world in my crystal castle! The comely lady is quite amused as I do my gangly-pudgy dance celebrating the extra fatness I shall be layering on for the sweltering summer to come. My other major delight was discovering that the veg folks on the northeast corner had Jerusalem artichokes! I have heard of sunchokes before, but have never worked with, or tasted them before. I’m giddy with delight at the prospect of working with a new and relatively rare (for Fresno) ingredient. Now, whatever shall we make with these beauties?

Glad you asked! Time for Sunday dinner. I’m an immediate gratification kinda fellow. So, we’re going to dive right into the middle of the market bounty and make all of the delicacies into a mess o’ vittles. Scouring the interweb for morel recipes is bizarre. Any ‘shroom hunter site pretty much offers 80 variation on fried morels, 1 cream sauce recipe and 1 soup recipe. The rest of the web offered morels and asparagus. How odd. You would think that such a wonderful mushroom would have more variation in it’s popular use. I guess fried highlights the flavor best. Screw that though, I want a brandy cream sauce with these bad boys. How I wish I could find green peppercorns in this town! But a good cook soldiers on. That’ll mean some steaks. Rib eyes look good. Ok, now onto the chokes. Hmmm, sautéed with sage and lemon? Nah. Oooooo! Sunchoke au gratin with ginger and garlic. Now that sounds delicious! And what’s this? Dilled horseradish red potato salad? Yes please. But what’s this crap about using a microwave? Screw that, I’ve got the idea, I can run with it from there.

Rib Eye Steaks with Morel Brandy Cream Sauce

2 med rib eye steaks
6oz morel mushrooms
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
¾ cup diced shallots
4 tablespoons brandy
1 cup cream
2 cups beef broth reduced by 2/3
2 tablespoons green peppercorns (if you can lay hands on these spicy little gems)


Prep: Soak your morels in salt water to wash off the grit and run off any potential hitch hikers. After the soak, rinse and dry on a paper towel. Prior to use, give a rough chop. I like mine fairly chunky. Put your beef broth on a low simmer to reduce. Add in a bay leave if you like. Give your shallots a dice and season your steaks with a little salt and pepper. 

Now, heat up your pan and add the olive oil and 2 tbl spoons of butter. Once the foam has settled, fry your steaks to taste, preferably medium rare. Once done, set aside and rest. Add 1 more tbl spoon of butter to the pan and then add in your shallots. I like to cook mine until they’re getting a bit glassy, around 5 minutes. At this point, add in the reduced beef stock and the brandy. Careful smokers! Booze evaporates. Keep that rockin Tom Selleck mustache in safety. Allow that to simmer a bit, then add in your morels (and peppercorns if you have them). Allow these to simmer until you start to smell the boozy brandy mellow and the mushroom smell starts to dominate. Now add in your cream and simmer until the sauce thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Plate your steak, then top with morels scooped from the pan, then spoon sauce over the whole affair. Your dinner guest will hail you as a golden god of cream sauces. Next course! In reverse.


Sunchoke gratin

2 cups of med sliced sunchokes
2 table spoons butter
1 cup cream
1 & 1/2 teaspoons of corn starch
1 tsp minced garlic
2 tablespoons minced ginger
salt and pepper
1/2 cup crushed walnuts

Prep: Wash and slice your sunchokes, then slice them about 3/16ths of an inch thick.  Crush your walnuts to the desired texture.  Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees and prepare a roasting pan with a water bath

Heat up a sauce pan with some butter, add in your sunchokes, ginger, garlic, salt and pepper and simmer for about 10 minutes.  Mix corn starch with a little reserved cream and add to the pan and simmer for another 5 minutes or until thickened.  Spoon sunchokes and sauce into 2 buttered ramekins, top with walnuts and place in the water bath and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes.  Allow to cool and enjoy.

The recipe worked spot on and was insanely delicious. The only variation I made was substituting the bread crumbs with crushed walnuts. OMFG*! (*Oh My Felicitous Goat) It was insanely good! I had no idea that Jerusalem artichokes would taste so much like sunflower seeds. It makes sense, since it’s a sunflower tuber. But amazingly delicious all the same. And it mixes so very well with the warm oily flavor of the toasted walnuts on top. I think next time I might grate a little nutmeg into the cream as well to add a little bit of a perfume to the flavor. Happy happy happy! And last but first…


Dilled Horseradish Potato Salad

2lb red potatoes cubed
½ cup diced shallots
1 cup mayonnaise
1 heaping tablespoon horseradish (We like it HOT baby!)
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
3 tablespoons dried dill
½ tsp cider vinegar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper to taste

Prep: Wash and cube your potatoes. Boil until fork tender then rinse and cool. Dice shallots.


Take all of your wet ingredients and whisk together in a bowl large enough for your pertaters. Toss in your dill and shallots and mix. Then add in your chilled potatoes and toss thoroughly to combine. You can serve immediately, but the flavors will be more pronounced if allowed to rest overnight.

And that dear friends is, what I hope to be the first of many wonderful dishes made from fresh ingredients sold by Fresnans and from our own soils. This is only whetting my appetite for what bounties may come from the market as well as my own recently planted garden. Thumbs up to ole Maw Nature for kicking down some kick ass grub.

-Pook

Eating Out Comedy

So in a shift from our normal programming. I wound up scoring tickets to the LOL Comedy show at the Tower Theater this past Saturday. Don’t worry! I’ve got recipes backed up and ready to disgorge upon the starry fabric of the interweb. But about the only thing that wars with my love for food would be my love of yuk yuks.

But first, a story. About 15 years ago, I went to the Tower Theater with a girlypal and her family to see the wonder that was Howie Mandel. Things you do for love right? Anyhoo, rather than be able to judge the talents of famed Bobby’s World creator. I wound up just having to pity the poor soul. For, he knew not what he was wading into, this polite Canuck with poor crowd management skills. Fresno was very barky-outbursty at the time and his opening bits were peppered by random howls of “HOWIE!” for no apparent reason. Thinking he can get the better of the crowd, he turns to one of the bellowers and says “What?” assuming that attention equaled shame and therefore garnering silence. WRONGO IN THE NO-NO BUDDY! Without missing a beat the lady shrieks “Take a picture with my kid!”. And the fool buys it! She runs up and happily tells him that by the way…ain’t got no camera! Oh god, it’s all coming unraveled now Mandy-boy! Think quick! “Could I use someone’s camera so this lady will be quiet?” he asks in the same tone an explosive ordinance disposal guys use when the clock has hit 5 seconds. “Sure! If you take a picture with my kid too!!” Just when you think it can’t get any worse, Fresno steps up baby! The next hour was fascinating. I’ve never seen a man complete a set of light hearted jokes with a raging “FUCK ALL OF YOU!!!” in his eyes. After the show, the kids wanted to run up to him at his limo for autographs. I gently bring them back to heel with a simply spoken truth. “Kids, I don’t think Howie wants to talk to any Fresnans ever again. Just let him go.”

So with that nesting in the back of my mind, I opened up my e-mail to discover that I had won free tickets from the The Fresno Beehive (thanks again!), to check out the LOL Comedy show. The lineup is fairly new to me, but then I’m not exactly a walking encyclopedia of working comics. Which, also makes it kinda cool, since I really have no idea what to expect from these guys and no clue if they can handle a Fresno crowd.

The evening kicked off with the music of the Super Lucky Catz. A local group headed up by front man Robert Andrew Gushel-Barron. Described to me as a funk band, they challenged my idea of funk. When I think of funk I think P-funk, Soul Brother #1 James Brown, Bootsy Collins, Curtis Mayfield. Get down and get funky, funk! Super Lucky Catz’ style is a lot softer than I would have expected. That’s not to say that they aren’t good. Just the opposite. Everyone in the band was spot on in their performance. It’s just that deep inside me, I really wish that they would really unleash their bass player and keep that slap bass rolling, turn up the levels on their guitarist and really let him wail on those 4 guitars he has. To my uneducated ears, they’re a little more adult contemporary than funky. But still, a really good performance.

Oh yeah, isn’t this a comedy show? Finally, openers! The first comic out wasn’t on the bill and sadly, I have a memory like an alzheimer’s patient with a concussion. However, I do remember that his bit was actually rather funny. He had a riff on the “you might be a redneck” bit, but with the Fresno twist of “you might be a tweaker”. As well as a pretty good spread of meth themed humor and a couple character quick changes. First out of the gate was definitely a hit with crowd.

Up next was a local cat by the name of Feather Da’wyz. He had a more traditional comedy club style set, hitting various universal topics like ageing, penis size and the frustrations of dating. He owned his material very well and approached some pretty beat up topics with a fresh perspective and definitely got the laughs. He ends his bit with “The Cell Phone Song” in which he sings out 7 numbers and gets the crowd to sing along. Once you’ve done it 3 or 4 times, he lets you know that it’s actually his cell and to feel free to text him after the show to find out other spots he’ll be performing at. And you know, it worked. I’ll be happy to go check him out again, just to see the full spectrum of his material.

Quinn Dahle, a SoCal transplant from Minnesota is up next. Again, another polished comedy club act. He works the observational humor fairly well. And he REALLY skirted the dangerous edge in such a multicultural crowd. But damn it, he actually wrung a few bellows of laughter out of me before I realized I should be self conscious and shut the hell up. Gotta give him props for throwing down a bit of challenging comedy. For sure, a guy to keep an eye on. If he finds his groove you might be seeing a lot more of him.


At last, a break! Quick jaunt through the legions seeking a beer towards the doors for a smoke. So far, I have to say that I’m very pleased with the whole experience. The comedians have delivered actual comedy. And in general I’m actually somewhat shocked at the good behavior of the Fresno crowd. Sure, there are a couple gabblers and some shout outs to the comics. But the comics are comfortably in their element and my fellow show goers are having fun without being total jackasses. Go Fresno comedy crowd!

Headliner time! If you’re 30 years old or older and a Central Valley native that actually chilled with any Latino family, Rudy Moreno will absolutely kill. Maybe some of the younger kids with more old school households can get it, but as a farm kid from the outskirts of town many moons ago, his bits really hit home. Here is where you see a seasoned pro who has done his homework. Not only does he riff on themes from an old school Latino childhood upbringing contrasted against today’s modern snotty little so and so’s, but was able to pander to the crowd by tearing up the neighboring towns like Tulare and even picked on the poor portly security guard and used him as a sounding board throughout his set. It shows forethought and preparation for doing a good show here. It makes me feel good that the headliner REALLY wanted to give Fresno a performance we’d like. Top that off with actually being really funny, he really earned that top slot and did a fabulous job giving us the finale we wanted. Overall, a great show and easily worth the ticket price for 3+ hours of entertainment and comedy. And they served beer!

Oh. So since it’s a food blog, I’m required by internet law to talk about food in some capacity every post? Well, crap. Ok. We actually were pretty famished before the show, so we ducked into the mighty Tower Dog for a bite. My beloved rocked the California Dog, while I was trying to stuff down a Polish Dog like an anaconda sucking down a capybara. Every time I eat there I discover something else that makes me smile. This time it was my mouth telling me that they actually make their relish in some form of a fresh manner. I could be wrong though. Which is why I approached one of the men involved for an interview. Don’t get your merkin in a twist just yet. I’ve got a backlog of recipes I’ve got to spew all over the tummy of my dear bloggy- blog. But SOON™ we’ll give you a secretive peek into what makes these dogs my favorite.

-Pook