I’m going to do a bit of straightening up here at Eight by Seven.
If you’re a regular reader, you’ve doubtless figured out that the title isn’t strictly accurate any longer. That’s fine: I’m happy with it, whether it has the original meaning, it works well enough.
I do want to give myself space to fiddle around more with the frequency of my postings, which I know overwhelm some subscribers and don’t follow Official Substack Branding Advice [tm] which I’m happy to ignore generally. For the moment, at least, I’m going to stick to the following schedule:
Monday: Gastrodome (Cooking, whether with cookbooks or otherwise)
Tuesday: The Photo
Wednesday: The News
Thursday: Academia
Friday: The Read, The Re-Read, The Play, The Watch
I may occasionally use Friday as the miscellany day as well.
I’m going to generally avoid posting on weekends for my sanity and yours.
With Gastrodome, a light reconceptualization of my Cookbook Survivor column, I’ll keep writing about my cookbooks, with occasional stress-tests that might lead to another one exiting my collection. But I think after more than two years of that column, I’ve run out of books that I feel like testing in that way. If you’ve been reading part or all of that time, you know I’ve only bumped off about seven or eight books anyway. (And bought more than eight cookbooks in that time, so it isn’t really helping solve my shelving problem.)
So I want to write a bit more freely about cooking and food, which I have been to some extent with Cookbook Survivor anyway. The new title is too aggressive compared to the spirit of how I engage food, but all the obvious food/cooking titles have been used many times over.
I honestly find food zealotry of any kind (several types of which were covered in the New Yorker recently) frustrating. I understand that there’s a lot at stake in food production and consumption at a global scale, and that food and cookery drive a tremendous amount of fear and loathing when it comes to bodies and health. It just isn’t how I want to think about cooking and eating, which for me is both a source of personal pleasure (to excess, certainly, but that’s my business, not yours) but also one of the things I love to do with and for other people when I can. I hate the idea of yammering at people about what they ought to do to food, with food, for food. Think of this more as a cooking diary, for whatever that is worth. That is more in the spirit of how blogging was, way back in the day, and less in the spirit of Substack’s zealous promotion of a narrowcasting, attention-grabbing, polemical engagement. I am an old-timey blogger and so it goes for me.
(Not my kitchen, sadly. Though Midjourney does put those jars way the hell up there where you’d need a ladder, which seems like a bad idea.)
So what was my cooking weekend like?
First I made my next batch of fermented chile sauce.
This one had a fairly large amount of grapefruit in it, and only a few really hot peppers, so it came out as fruity, sharply acidic, and only slightly spicy. I decided to subdivide it and tried cold-smoking half the batch with my new gadget.
(For some reason, my smartphone thought that this image might be dangerous, warning me when I uploaded it to cloud storage. Not sure what set the algorithm off.) I may do another round of smoking the sauce in a few days. One of the cool things about fermented sauces, after all, is that they keep fermenting, if very slowly, in the refrigerator. I also learned I need a better sealant on the bottom for the smoking cloche—the improvised set-up above didn’t hold the smoke very well. The cold smoker in general is going to take some technique to develop. On my first two uses of it, I’ve found it hard to sustain the process for as long as I would like.
Then I decided to make a red curry with two duck breasts. I did a bit of cookbook searching and decided that none of the recipes I found really worked. A lot of them were for bone-in duck legs and thighs (or chicken thighs) where some stewing would do them good, whereas I had tender breast meat that really just needed a quick stir-fry.
So what I decided to do was cut some peppers, string beans and carrots in long strips, fry those quickly, then do sliced breast meat, and then make a deep red curry sauce with coconut milk and assemble the whole thing over hot rice. The sauce, I thought, could be cooked with the rendered fat from the skin to start, then the curry paste, then a bit of wine and rice flour, then the coconut milk.
I thought it came out really well. I might have cooked the sauce in a separate pot and that way have had the meat and vegetables go in hot off the stir-fry rather than have to get a warm up from the sauce and rice, but it was fine. The sauce was almost too rich, I think because of the duck-fat base—it needed some acid, perhaps from lime juice, right at the end.
Sorry, I know this was not the main point of today's Substack (I like the new arrangement, btw) but I can't get past the image warning. Racking my brain to figure out what was flagged.
I think maybe it was interpreted as a breast.