Food, cooking, eating, and me

OK, homefries are supposed to be gluten-free. They’re just supposed to be potatoes fried in a pan, golden brown and crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and seasoned with salt and probably pepper and maybe a little cayenne. You would think that would be a simple thing to do, but between badly-made traditional homefries which seem to be little more than lukewarm unseasoned leftover potatoes and those that are deep-fried and breaded or batter-coated, let’s just say the bar doesn’t seem to be particularly high nowadays.

It’s a shame, because making excellent homefries is so easy to do. I’ll let you in on my “secret” method, which is so much easier than any I have seen before, and it’s much more reliable, too. But first, a little homefry talk.

Years ago I read a discussion in an old cookbook that said that the difference between homefries and hash browns was that the homefries were made from raw potatoes, while hash browns were made from precooked ones. Linguistically this makes a lot of sense, as the word “hash” is generally used for things that are precooked and then panfried, like corned beef hash. Meanings have drifted, so now “hash browns” are generally raw shredded potatoes pressed into a patty or a pancake and fried until set, while “homefries” are recooked precooked potatoes. (We are going to ignore the abomination which is breaded or batter-fried potatoes masquerading as “homefries” from this point. If you like them, you can buy them from Sysco, just like the restaurants do.)

I have read over and over again that you have to boil potatoes before making them into homefries, not only to “save time” but because they won’t come out right otherwise. I can tell you with certainty that neither of these are true. It’s much faster to make them without an extra boiling step, and homefries are made more reliably with raw potatoes than with precooked ones. Another issue – one I would make a great effort to avoid – is that there are certain varieties of potatoes that set up and get hard when refrigerated. They do not soften up again when reheated, and no matter what you do with them subsequently, they taste like leftovers. Potatoes like these make terrible homefries when precooked, but make excellent homefries using my method.

The method:

Scrub potatoes and peel them if the skins are thick. Dice any size you like, from 1/4″ to 1″ cubes. Put in a pan with a little extra fat – olive oil, butter, bacon fat, chicken fat, and beef fat all work. Heat on medium high, stirring every five minutes or so until they are about 50% brown. Season with salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes or cayenne for heat, paprika for color. Cover and lower the heat to medium-low. Continue to stir every five minutes until potatoes are cooked through. Cooking should take maybe 20 minutes for large cubes, less for small ones. Any excess oil can be removed from the pan by blotting with a paper towel at the end.

That’s all there is to it. I used to make these almost every day when I was cooking breakfast for my family. It’s just a matter of stirring occasionally, so the cooking process takes very little time, and is easy to coordinate with eggs or meat or toast to make the breakfast I call a “blue plate special”.

A favorite variation is to fry up bacon and cut into pieces. Set these aside while frying up the potatoes. In a separate pan saute onions until they start to get translucent, then cover until cooked through. Add to the potatoes, top with the bacon, and serve as is or with cheese melted on top – a huge favorite from my cheese-eating days. We used to love that on a cold morning.

OK, the word is spelled ‘gluten’. It’s not that hard, and it makes a difference.

• gluten: a tenacious elastic protein substance especially of wheat flour that gives cohesiveness to dough – Merriam Webster on ‘gluten’
• glutton: 1 a : one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking b : one that has a great capacity for accepting or enduring something {glutton for punishment} – Merriam Webster on ‘glutton’
• glutten: not a word
• gluton: not a word, but perhaps they will someday give this name to a newly-discovered subatomic particle

As long as I’m on proper spelling, the word celiac is derived from a Greek word meaning abdominal cavity. The disease is spelled celiac with a small ‘c’, celiacs is the plural of celiac, referring to a group of gluten-intolerant folk, and celiac’s is something that belongs to a person with celiac.

It really is possible for just about everybody to either learn how to spell properly in the first place or look up the words that they are unsure about. Garbled writing that is full of typos is hard to read and fails to communicate its message. Typos are just carelessness. Proofread once and fix those typos. We are not writing for our own consumption on the web, but for many people, each of whom must take extra time to decipher an unclear post, and some of whom may be unable to figure out the intent, owing to the fact that their native language may not even be English. One person’s saving 30 seconds on proofreading may result in hours of extra work over many readers.

Thank you.

What can I say? There I was, thinking about back when I used to mix rum with maple syrup and heavy cream to make what I called the “Sea Captain’s Return”, back in the days when I was still enjoying dairy products. Foraging through my refrigerator, I pulled out a carton of store brand rice milk (no gluten ingredients). I filled a glass with ice, added a shot of rum, an ounce of maple syrup, filled it to the top with rice milk and stirred. Not bad at all. I could get used to that.

Suze has requested a recipe for gluten-free mayo. First of all, I’ll let you guys in on a secret – mayonnaise should always be gluten-free if it’s made according to the traditional recipe, which contains only egg yolks, oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and salt. Obviously the food industry has no respect for the purism of traditional recipes, so lots of products are unaccountably glutenized, as we know.

I have found the traditional recipe to be a bit hard to make successfully unless I’m making it in quantity, and it tastes quite rich if you’re used to commercial mayonnaises. So instead I make whole egg mayonnaise, and I use a blender, which gives the best-emulsified mayonnaise I’ve made, much better than handwhipped mayo, at least from my experience.

I use pure olive oil, which is lighter in flavor than extra virgin olive oil, which I’ve heard is harder to work with and more likely to separate in processing or storage. I think olive oil is healthier than unsaturated vegetable oils, which regardless of what the establishment is trying to tell us, are not a natural part of the human diet, having been in existence in sufficient quantity for human consumption only since the advent of factory extraction and processing.

So you do need a blender to make this. A funnel to sit in the top of the blender will help keep you from getting covered with little oily mayonnaise spots while the mayo is beginning to emulsify, and a measuring cup with a spout will make pouring the oil easier.

Then, patience, patience, patience. If it seems like you’re taking forever to drizzle in the oil, then you’re doing it at about the right speed. It should take about 5 minutes in all. Keep in mind that even at the end, the mayo will break if you add oil too fast.

After about half the oil is added, the mayo will start getting thick enough to stop mixing in the blender. When this happens, you need to stop the blender, take off the lid, and stir with a spatula occasionally.

Things I especially like to serve mayonnaise on:

• cold cooked asparagus, especially peeled
• hard-boiled eggs
• fresh ripe tomatoes, sprinkled with salt
• any cold cooked meat or fish, especially canned fish

I spent some time in Spain, where mayo is king and is served in generous quantities. Canned white asparagus with mayonnaise was served at every restaurant where I ate. I substitute green asparagus spears which I have peeled before cooking, though it is not the same. One thing I was served there was a first course consisting of a halved hard boiled egg topped with oil-packed tuna (that’s the kind they like there), and served with a giant blob of mayonnaise. While I enjoyed it, I only used a tablespoon of the mayo. I did observe a Belgian eating the same dish and finishing the mayonnaise with gusto. Definitely a different sensibility.

I desperately need to update my site. But for now, the recipe link has been fixed.

Mayonnaise

So sorry, it’s been too hot to bake. I’ve used up all my frozen cookies and brownies, but until we have a break in the heat, there’s no way I’m going to turn on the oven.

Of course we did have a couple of nice days this week, but those were the days when my hot water heater was dead and waiting to be replaced, so I didn’t want to make a mess in the kitchen until I was able to clean it up again.

But I did make some awesome garlic shrimp.

Now the problem with cooking shrimp in sauces or glazes is that raw shrimp give off a lot of water when cooked. You could saute them in a little fat at a very high temperature, high enough so that all moisture evaporates immediately. But cooking them at a high temperature will generally overcook them. The unfortunate tendency is for them to give off their water and then stew in their juices. This is made worse by adding a sauce for them to simmer in. You end up diluting the sauce with the shrimp juice, which upsets the balance of the sauce. Then the shrimp get overcooked if you try to boil down the sauce, and if you don’t, it’s just a soupy mess.

I find that the key to making tasty shrimp is to poach them first, then add the finished sauce or glaze, toss, and serve. This will make sure the sauce or seasoning you use clings to the surface of the shrimp.

Considerations in poaching shrimp:
If you can get fresh raw shrimp, and you can afford them, then go for it. Raw gulf shrimp are never available here. Frozen raw shrimp should be soaked in a lot of water to get rid of any fishy or stale taste and remove the slimy polyphospate they add.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. (Enough salt so it only tastes a little bit salty, of course!) Drop in the raw shrimp, peeled if you intend them to be eaten with a fork. When they start to curl up, fish them out or pour into a sieve or collander and add a little cold water to stop them from cooking. With most shrimp it takes less than a minute, so be ready. THE SHRIMP SHOULD NOT BE HARD AND WHITE. A raw shrimp is floppy and curved, a properly cooked shrimp is springy and shaped like the letter ‘c’, and an overcooked shrimp is hard and firm, curled up in a little circle.

To make garlic shrimp, crush raw garlic cloves, added freshly ground black pepper and red pepper flakes and sauteed this very gently over low heat in butter and olive oil. Add plenty of salt – it should taste too salty. This is a seasoning used in the dish, not the main dish itself. When the shrimp are cooked, drain completely, then add the shrimp to the garlic oil and toss thoroughly. Serve over rice or rice noodles. Pea pod with red peppers will go well with this.