I Love Chipotle and Other Thoughts

I received a poorly spelled anonymous comment on my last post about what happens when I go grocery shopping hungry:

"i aspect a food blaggor too be eatign the fansy stakes nd potaytoes nd vegatabels not the leen packest and soops why do yo thnk yo are a godo food blaggor if yo eet these bad fodos." 

Translated into English, the comment reads:

"How dare you, sir, call yourself a food blogger! This sacred art is sullied by your boxed-rice buying proclivities, your preference for pre-made bread crumbs, and your insistence upon purchasing peanut butter! It is unacceptable that you should have anything in your freezer at all, in fact. I deride you and your affront in the strongest of terms!"

Now, I assume this is one of my wonderful friends having a little fun. (Because God help us all if public schooling has failed some poor soul so thoroughly). But a good point is raised -- isn't the point of food blogging to share exotic recipes and demonstrate a thoroughly epicurean lifestyle?

I say no. At least not at Hungry Sam. I eat like a normal person. Sure, maybe I have an absurd food-oriented enthusiasm streak, and maybe I do cook more than the average 24 year-old D.C. professional, and maybe I'm a tad adventurous (I ate alligator last week!) -- but ultimately, it's silly to think even foodies never eat a frozen pre-made meal.

The fact is, this blog is not about food elitism. If that's what it means to be a food blogger, I don't want any of it. My sole purpose is to share my love of food and the enjoyment I get from it, whether I'm roasting a chicken with some exotic technique, grilling a bizarre meat like buffalo, or chomping on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I'm an advocate for cooking food from scratch because I think it's a good, healthy way to enrich a part of life that so many people see as a chore. But fatigue hits us all, snowstorms spank Districts of Columbia and having some frozen or easy-to make mixes in the pantry is smart.

So, anonymous commenter, prepare to be outraged by today's food fun: I love Chipotle burritos.

Stolen from somewhere.

I've been sick and in a lousy mood, so I went out and bought a fast food burrito for lunch. AND IT WAS AWESOME. It was perhaps the best thing I could have done for my mental health. From the bland, luke-warm tortilla to the greasy yet savory chicken chunks to the diced up lettuce (iceberg!), this burrito was exactly what I wanted to eat and it made me happy and full. I believe in healthy food, home-cooking, and the benefit of kitchen creativity, and yet sometime, you just want a fast food Chipotle burrito.

Why Marinate? And a Recipe. And News.

UPDATE: Chef friends have added info in the comments section. Check it out!

Before I launch into the purpose and science of marinades, two quick pieces of cool, Hungry Sam-oriented news. One, that only I and perhaps my blogger friends might consider interesting -- I'm getting up to 100 views on a couple of my semi-recent posts. Sweet.

Much more interesting: Someone sent a screenshot of my recent post RE: Candy Cane Tootsie Pops to the good people at Tootsie. Said people emailed me AND ARE SENDING ME SEVERAL BAGS OF THEM. WHAT NOW?!?!?!

This is awesome, wonderful news. (Also SUPER public relations. All my readers should go out and spend money on Tootsie products.)

Anyways, to the point: Marinades.

I'll admit, I have gone back and forth on marinades, particularly for meats. Often, I find it easier, faster, and nearly as good to use a good dry rub or some such. However, having decided the other night that I deserved a steak, I opted to whip up a quick marinade since I had tome on my hands anyways.

First, the recipe: For .6 lbs New York strip, I mixed 1/4 cup olive oil, 1/4 cup soy sauce, and pinches each of dried rosemary, garlic, and fresh ground ginger. I seasoned my beef in salt and pepper, threw it in a plastic bag with my marinade, and left it in the fridge for 4 hours, flipping whenever I thought to (maybe 3 times all told).

I grilled my steaks to rare on my Foreman grill, and boy, did they come out beautifully. Savory and well-flavored throughout, they had a perfect caramelized crusting on the exterior. Interior was that just-cooked texture, just-pink coloring that marks (in my opinion) a perfect rare steak.

Now, these particular New York strips had very little marbling of fat, which is often what makes an expensive steak tender, as fat breaks down quickly while cooking. Yet the steaks I cooked had that melt-on-your-tongue-like-a-pat-of-butter tenderness. Why?

The marinade. Chef's know this from experience, but from a chemical perspective, why do marinades tenderize as well as flavor...ize?

Basically, not all connective tissue in meat is created equal -- some breaks down during the cooking process at a faster rate or to a different degree than others. This is why cheap meats are best when cooked for a long time, such as in braising, and more expensive meats tend to have more fat marbled throughout, since fat breaks down VERY quickly when heat is applied. The goal of marinating is to help all the meat break down a little faster, leaving less tough meat remaining when it's cooked fast (as in grilling). Marinades do this by imbuing the meat with enzymes that themselves break down the connective tissue in meat, enzymes such as papain, found in ginger, garlic, papaya, pineapple, etc.

Things to remember when marinating:

• Contact is key -- the smaller the pieces of meat that are marinating, the better able the marinade is at getting in and tenderizing the interior of your meat.


• Marinating breaks down meat -- so don't marinate too long. The more fat (i.e. higher quality) the meat, particularly beef and lamb, the less time, generally speaking, you should marinate.


• Marinating can dry meat out -- so either cook quickly or in liquid after marinating.

Also, as a bonus, I'll tell you that while I'm writing this I'm watching the Patriots crush the Bears while beer-and-mustard braising a beef stew and making fig and walnut biscotti. Yeah Sunday night!

Frying Potatoes, Sustainably

Latke's sizzling away...

Latkes. Delicious, greasy, fried potatoes smothered in sour cream and/or (definitely and) apple sauce. Runs contrary to the Hungry Sam healthy mentality, no? Well, yes, insofar as that mentality is absolute. It's not; treats are an important part of living a healthy lifestyle -- as long as they're infrequent indulgences and not an everyday thing.

But this post isn't about treats, it's about diving, spoons and graters first, into latke making with my ninth grade religious school class last night.

But wait, you ask. What sort of awesome curriculum has room for latke cooking?

The sustainability sort! See, my fellow teachers and I have been teaching our students all about sustainability this semester, how choices can be made to promote a future and a world that can sustain our children and children's children. 

The idea in doing a sustainable cooking program was this: Making the sustainable choice for all of our meals all of the time is hard. But making it SOMETIMES is easy, and doesn't necessarily impact flavor or price of the dish you're making.

Furthermore, cooking is a basic skill that facilitates making sustainable choices. When you're doing the cooking (as opposed to eating out or buying pre-made), you can control the ingredients, you know where they come from, how they've been prepared, what sort of carbon footprint they have, or at least you're more able to determine that information. (There are other good reasons to cook, outlined in Hungry Sam's new "Why Cook? A Guide" page.)

When you don't have a Cuisinart...

So, in order to inject some competition into all of this (of course), I picked up three sets of ingredients: a regular, non-organic set, an organic set, and a farm stand set. My challenge was to buy approximately the same quantities of each set of ingredients for about the same price. I did so -- at least in this case, buying ingredients from a variety of sources didn't need to impact the budget. For their part, three teams of students were to cook the best latkes possible, and our judges (the rabbis and high school program director) were to both select the best-tasting latke and try to guess the ingredients' source.

I have to hand it to them, my guys threw themselves into this, grating, peeling, and frying their way to crispy goodness. Some of our students had solid cooking experience, others had little or none, but the energy was absolutely there -- which of course, as a food enthusiast, I appreciated. These young adults wanted those latkes, and the victory.

In the judging process, our three judges each tried the latkes with their toppings of choice. Only one judge correctly determined the source of the winning batch, the organic latkes, but the judge's decision underscored our very unscientific conclusion: if organic is at all a more sustainable choice, it doesn't need to mean a more expensive or less tasty latke.

A photograph of the winning latkes, one which CERTAINLY fails to do them justice:

The "recipe" we used:
-Some amount of potatoes, like 2 lbs.-ish
-Half an onion
-An eggs worth of egg whites
-Two pinches of flour

Mix, make little latke patties, squish 'em flat and dry, then fry.

Delicious.

Candy Canes Suck. Try These Instead!

It's a well known fact that candy canes suck. Why? Well, a cane shape is perhaps the worst of all possible orientations for candy, and come on, peppermint candy is nothing special anyways. Why unhinge your jaw like an Emerald Tree Boa Constrictor just to fit a damn breath mint in your mouth? Then it shatters and you have shards of freshness piercing your tender gums. And it's a damn mess. Nobody wins with a candy cane.

Fortunately, the good (I might even say inestimable) people at Tootsie (and my colleague AH, whom I have now proclaimed "most knowledgeable holiday candy person within a 40 foot radius of me at work") have brought us an amazing treat -- both an improvement on peppermint candy in general but also an alignment of said candy more consistent with, say, the way a human face works. 

It's a peppermint tootsiepop. Unlike candy canes, they are NOT awkward, painful, and ultimately sticky experiences, AND they are filled with tootsie chocolate. WORD. 

My sneaking, sinking suspicion, however, is that they're seasonal.

Sliders: Yes They [Blackfinn] Can

I'd written a mildly scathing post about Blackfinn American Saloon, where my colleagues and I lunched today. I decided to start over, though, and give you something a bit more positive. It's not that the food or service was terrible, it was just bewildering. I don't feel the need to harp; I'm not unhappy. It was just weird, watery split pea soup (which is, if I'm not crazy, normally luxuriously thick and velvety) and an odd and ultimately unfulfilling skewer experience (my fellow staff had mixed bags, themselves).

But these two lunch fails were bookended with decisive lunch victories. The boss ordered some mix'n'match slider apps, and although the beef patty sliders were mundane, the pulled pork alternatives were EXCELLENT. Tender and juicy, neither too sweet nor too fatty, and well stuffed for the minute vehicle of their little buns. Hungry Sam stamp of approval.

On the flip side, the end of the meal brought sliders of another variety. Ice cream on warm cookies!!! Now, being a Portland Sea Dogs fan (wooo AA baseball!), I know these to be knockoffs of our own Sea Dog Biscuits. But these were pretty legit -- the warm cookie got the ice cream melting just enough and the cup you see in the center is filled with hot fudge.

All in all? Blackfinn, I'm worried at your inconsistency and perplexed at some odd choices. If you don't do it well, keep it off the menu. But definitely continue making sliders of all varieties.

Please.

Smoothies are a Bust

I've been pretty positive-minded about food, at least in the context of this here blog. But I do have unpleasant or disappointing experiences with meals and dishes -- and often, I repeat these experiences. Maybe it's a belief in redemption or just a failure to learn, who knows.

From a vegan food blog at kitteekake.blogspot.com. On another note, Google "smoothie fail" and check out the images results. Hilarious.

One food that I have consistently found underwhelming and yet have given NUMEROUS chances is smoothies, particularly non-homemade smoothies. Smoothies are cold, sometimes icy, theoretically "smooth" blends of fruit and juice or yogurt, often with supplements mixed in. At their best, they're largely comprised of just these elements; at their worst they include syrups, added sugar, or space-age concoctions the likes of which I shudder to consider.

After the gym this morning, being slightly too lazy to cross the street for another awesome egg sandwich from Potbelly, I hit up Robek's (a far-more-widespread-than-I-thought corporate smoothie joint) for my protein/calorie fix. Why, I can't imagine -- as I say, I haven't had many positive smoothie experiences. After receiving suggestions from the very pleasant young man and woman behind the counter, I settled on a Banana-Mango smoothie with added protein powder. I figured this would be tasty, reasonably proteinaceous, and with only a moderate amount of sugar.

In a word? Underwhelming. First off, it was inevitably overpriced ($5), as purchased smoothies ALWAYS are. Second, it was so damn sweet that I could feel my tooth enamel begging for help, the sort of saccharine sweet that makes you want to hit up the dentist for a cleaning afterward. Thirdly, you know how much protein was in that supplement? Six grams. SIX?!?! That's like the protein in a very small glass of milk, or one ounce of chicken. Bah!

I went out an hour later and bought another Potbelly breakfast sandwich.

I promise Thanksgiving montage madness is forthcoming -- ComCast just needs to fix the series of tubes that bring Internets to my house.

Presidential Thanksgiving; the Onion

My post about Thanksgiving is forthcoming (anyone know how to do a photo montage? Or something?) but I'm just pretty pleased that the New York Times (all the news that's fit to print/post on the interwebs) lists the First Family's Thanksgiving menu.

My take: That's a lot of pie, Mr. President.

I prefer the Onion News Network video, in which Obama outlines the moral and philosophical justifications for the annual Turkey Pardon. Enjoy:

Obama Outlines Moral, Philosophical Justifications For Turkey Pardon

And who says legitimate journalism is dead?