When You Grocery Shop Hungry

I went grocery shopping last night hungry. Very hungry. It was...bad.

My hunger was compounded by having just worked out. My lack of self control was compounded by the snow. It's some sort of New England thing -- it snows, so you stock up on staples and you fill a pantry with dry goods and you prepare to batten down the hatches. I mean, there isn't that much snow yet -- but this same knee-jerk preparation is what got me through last year's snowpocalypse. (I sat inside and worked at my kitchen table and cooked chicken parmesan and chili for the week of epic snow.)

Maybe it's enough to say I was NOT capable of keeping to my grocery list. Or maybe you all need to see pictures. This is what I bought:

This is what I didn't need:

This is what I did need, the purchases for which I went shopping in the first place:

And this is, by NO MEANS, the most lopsided this ratio has ever been. I have been way more out of control in the past. This is just the most recent...incident.

Please Direct Your Attention to the Insane Gingerbread Houses

I almost drew blood biting my knuckle so I could avoid laughing hysterically while my colleague was on the phone. Thank you, someecards, for this majestic series of "The 6 most offensive and/or psychotic gingerbread houses we could find."

My personal favorite: The Gingerbread Asylum

It's funny 'cause they're crazy.

Now THIS is a Chicken Pot Pie

I think the photo speaks volumes, and requires no fuller context. Suffice it to say -- if you want an Epic Chicken Pot Pie the likes of which maketh my jaw to drop, hit up the Daily Grill on 18th and M NW.

Woah.

The gentleman consumer who polished off this beast, my boss Seth, said it was pretty good, although he was disappointed it didn't have a bottom crust.

Regardless -- impressive feat and impressive pie.

Oh, and if you ever take your lunch business to the Daily Grill, get the spinach artichoke dip. It was definitely among the best I've had in memory. My chicken cobb salad sandwich was good, not great, but most everything looked pretty tasty.

Friends, Readers, Foodies -- if you're rocking the Hungry Sam enjoyment, please consider following me on Google my clicking "join" over on the right, and sharing it on Facebook! Also, shoot me recipes! I'll make 'em and if they're awesome, I'll post 'em.

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.

NOT KOSHER.

Thanks, WM, for this superb find.

IT'S A PORK-BASED NATIVITY SCENE!

Via Jezebel: http://bit.ly/ggF0Ts

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.