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For half of the Savorist household, no alternative to coffee is really necessary, but Dr. Savorista has a tough time with coffee, and tea wasn’t really doing it for her anymore, so she went looking for something new.  She found Choffy:

Choffy is, essentially, roasted and ground cacao beans that are then brewed like coffee.

Several regional varieties will eventually be offered, but they’re currently shipping Ivory Coast.

So how does it taste?  Unadulterated?  Pretty much like dirt.   But, to be fair, in your heart of hearts, you know coffee also tastes like dirt, and you acquired a taste for that.  Of course, if you add a little cream and sugar, brewed Choffy starts to taste a little more like a mild chocolate bar, and the overall effect is quite pleasant.

There are, purportedly, some health benefits (pdf) to the stuff, but I’d recommend absorbing those with some skepticism.  For instance, if cacao “contains a significant amount of iron per serving,” the FDA disagrees:

I wouldn’t count on ground cacao for all of your health and dietary needs, but you could certainly do worse.  And as far as I can tell, your only option for acquiring your own stash right now is ordering it directly from the folks at Choffy…and then waiting patiently.  The order we placed on March 16th arrived in a Priority Mail box on March 29th.  At $15 for a 12 ounce bag, it’s not much more expensive than a fancier coffee like the Oren’s I occasionally enjoy on break from my go-to-coffee, Chock Full o’ Nuts.

Though I won’t be supplanting my daily coffee consumption with Choffy, the experience does pique my interest in what *other* seeds, beans, and nuts out there might yield drinkable results after a good roasting, grinding and steeping.  Anyone tried this with lentils?

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Choffy on the web, twitter, facebook.

I used this recipe from AllRecipes.   Nothing particularly complex about this process.   In previous iterations, I hauled out a candy thermometer and hovered over the pot to get the caramel *just* right so it would harden on cooling.  This adds a step by pouring a thin caramel over the corn and then baking at low heat (250) for up to an hour.  Notes: Reviewers suggest you can halve the butter with no discernible effect on the final product.  Next time, I’ll add peanuts.

I came very late to the sweet potato.  Here was Thanksgiving, the greatest tribute to the varieties of savory taste, and right in the center of it, foul tradition had inserted a sickly sweet bright-orange casserole, sometimes implausibly studded with marshmallows, of all things.  What was to like?  But I have an adult palate now, accustomed to the superficially disgusting constituents of grown up connoisseurship: coffee, beer, wine, yogurt…sweet potatoes.

My first and only memorable experience with sweet potato fries was at Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia (sadly shuttered, for the moment, I believe).  They were thin, crisp, liberally sprinkled with Old Bay and delicious.  Unfortunately, I’ve never found their equal elsewhere.  Most subsequent attempts I’ve sampled have been limp and mushy, with none of the snap I like in a french fry.

With my relocation to a much smaller kitchen in NYC, space is at a premium, but through some combination of nostalgia and luck, an ‘heirloom’ deep fryer made the cut, so I thought I’d give my own sweet potato fries a try:

Some notes:

1. Moisture is the biggest enemy of sweet potato fries.  I cut these into a fairly small julienne and lightly salted them, leaving them on paper towels to weep some of their liquid for an hour or two.

2. Everything I’ve read says you really have to fry twice to get a crisp product.  The first time should be about 325 and the second at 375.  I fried these a little too hot both times.  You should let them dry and cool between fryings.

3. Leave the skin on.

4. Though Ortlieb’s fries were heavily seasoned, I loved these with just a light salt.

Video action:

The song is Ludwig by Sax Kari & The Codes, found at the Internet Archive and used in accord with the Creative Commons License: Attribution.

I love my local West Philadelphia Eritrean and Ethiopian restaurant Dahlak, and one of my favorite dishes is their potato salad.  I never want it to end.  Here’s a recipe for Ethiopian Potato Salad, some of which I’ve adjusted for volume and taste below.  Why you would ever want to make less than 5 pounds of this potato salad is beyond me:

• 5 pounds of potatoes (Any kind will do, but I used Golden Yellow here.)
• 10 tablespoons of lemon juice (Adjust up or down to taste)
• 12 tablespoons of oil (Again, virtually any will do.  I used about 70% Canola and 30% olive)
• 2 cups finely minced onion (white or yellow)
• 10 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley.
• Salt, to taste.
• Pepper, to taste.
• Four chopped jalapenos (Despite what the original recipe says, these are NOT optional)

1. Peel and chop the potatoes into 1.5 to 2 inch cubes.
2. Get them boiling in a pot of water and get to work on the other ingredients.
3. Chop, mince and juice everything else and drop it in a big bowl with the oil.
4. When the potatoes are still a little hard but edible drain them, cool them off a little with cool running water and then drop them in the bowl with the other ingredients and toss.  Warm potatoes absorb flavors better, so don’t let them cool down all the way.
5. Put the mixed warm potatoes in the fridge to cool for as long as it takes.

This potato salad just gets better the longer it sits.

Back in May, I brought you the Scrapple Hoagie to what can best be described as partial acclaim.  To be fair, neither Scrapple nor the Hoagie is native culinary terrain.   I grew up in the great Southwest–dividing my youth between El Paso, TX and Tempe, AZ–where Mexican food is king.  But in the ten years I’ve lived in Philadelphia, the Taco Gap has slammed shut.  The Mexican food you can get in this city is as good as can be found anywhere in the United States.  It won’t be long before even Joey Vento‘s offering a zesty tomatillo salsa on his cheesesteaks.  (The Mexican Torta will eventually eat his lunch.  Objectively speaking, it’s a superior sandwich.  It’s a hard-working sandwich.  It has dreams, but it never forgets where it comes from.)  Anyway, in a relentless pursuit of everything fusion and maybe a little…healing, I present the Scrapple Taco:

What you’ll need:

• A pound of Scrapple
• An onion
• A lime
• Some tortillas (I used flour, but corn will work just as well)
• Cilantro
• A bottle of hot sauce of your choice

I cubed the Scrapple, but given it’s steady degradation once on the fire, you may as well just mash it into the pan.

You don’t need any oil since the Scrapple will render enough fat to take care of all that.  Keep a lazy eye on it, but basically, you want your Scrapple to brown and evaporate most of the liquid.  I scraped the pan occasionally.    It took about twenty minutes to cook a pound of Scrapple down to this fistfull of chips.  Delicious delicious chips:

In the meantime, slice your lime, dice your onion and chop your cilantro.  All are essential to a fine taco unless you’re part of that small and unfortunate tribe of folks who taste cilantro as soap.

Set aside the Scrapple chips and keep the heat on the pan.  In the residual fat, you’re going to want to lightly saute your tortillas (whether corn or flour).  I cook them until they just start to bubble.  They need to retain their softness so they can be folded, but a little browning really brings out the flavor and adds a little crispiness to the final product.

Assemble your tacos and season with lime juice and salsa to taste:

These were seriously delicious, and I think Scrapple presents some great opportunities for more subtle seasoning.  Before cooking, while the Scrapple is still soft, you could easily mix in additional ingredients like seasonings, jalapenos, or even cheese.  Incidentally, I had originally intended to include Queso Fresco on these, but my local supplier was depleted.  That mild Mexican cheese would make these even better.

As a first step in the Pennsylvania Dutch-Mexican fusion movement, this isn’t bad.  Could the Soft-Pretzel Sopaipilla be next?

There’s a new web series,  Peter Arthur Stories, launching May 14th as part of a Pennsylvania tourism initiative.   From the trailer, it looks like it’s going to follow a young man on a romantic and food-filled (Shoo-Fly pie!) adventure through Pennsylvania, and it got me thinking about some of the great Pennsylvania foods.  So, of course, I made this Scrapple Hoagie.  If you’re not familiar with Scrapple, think of it as the meatatarian’s tofu, and it makes a damn fine sandwich, if I do say so myself:

Pretty standard chocolate cake recipe except that I discovered that if you whip all the ingredients enough, you don’t really have to pay any attention to sifting all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately.  Under the gun, you can throw everything in a bowl at once and go to town with your burly hand mixer (thanks Santa!).  The icing/drizzle was coconut milk and a lot of powdered sugar finished with some flake coconut.  A little butter probably would have made it stand up but would have added to my arterial constriction.  Alas.

I know, I know.  Week-old bagels don’t sound like anything you’d want to go near unless you’re looking for a paperweight or a christmas ornament.  (?!)  But hear me out, and consider how much store-bought croutons cost, and more importantly, how much they suck, before you dismiss this idea out of hand.  

When fresh, bagels typically cost at least 50 cents each, but my local grocer sells day-old bagels by the bag-ful at the end of the day for just 99 cents.  As it turns out, you can still get a few more days out of these rejects if you keep them bagged, refrigerate them, and don’t mind toasting them when you’re ready to eat.  But I almost always end up with 6 or 8 bagels that are too stale even for my accommodating standards.  These I convert to croutons.

Cut it as you would if you were going to eat in the usual manner.
 

Cut in half vertically, and then cut in a radius to create small wedge-shaped pieces.  Note that I am carving up a cinnamon raisin bagel here.  I find that the sweet bagels add a nice variety to the croutons.  To some, of course, the non-savory bagel is best left to a temporary flirtation, and I’m not about to get all partisan about it. 

 

Once you’ve reduced the bagel to wedges, douse them with pretty much whatever you’ve got for herbs and spices.  Salt and pepper are key, but garlic powder, terragon, and rosemary usually make an appearance.  And if it’s good for nothing else, powdered parmesan cheese–the cheaper the better I’d say–goes very nicely on these croutons.

Next, oil them up with anything edible.  Olive oil is nicest if you can afford it, but I’ve made them with canola, vegetable, even peanut oil, to delicious effect.  Make sure you toss them thoroughly in a large bowl so each wedge gets a taste of the oil and spices.  Spread them out on a tray or cookie sheet and toast the hell out of them.  No precise numbers here.  I usually drop them for 30 minutes in the middle of a 375 degree oven and if needed finish them for a couple of minutes under a high broil, as I did here: 
 

Once they’ve cooled, you can seal them in plastic bags or tupperware and they’ll pretty much keep for ever.  I eat them on salads, for late night snacks, and, on very special occasions treat my dog to one or two.  They’re also a great addition to a hasty panzanella salad should you happen to stumble across a little fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and basil.

So there: Week-old Bagel Croutons.

I used my Philadelphia Collard Greens and a heapin’ helpin’ of bacon for these savory scones.  I judge them a success, though I don’t think I could reconstruct the recipe exactly, and it involved a great deal of finger-in-the-wind on-the-fly estimates, if I may mix those metaphors.  As almost always, the Joy of Cooking is a good place to start.

Video proof that you can bake and talk on the phone at the same time.  ”Oh really? Awesome!”

The beats are by Aeon, about whom you can read and hear more at Aggregate Dope.

The pig is pretty damn good in almost all its edible forms, or at least all the edible forms I’ve tried.  Sure, there might be a tail fritter or hoof souffle that I’d find disagreeable, but until I make that mistake, I’m sticking with pig.  This summer I found a pork picnic at my grocery store in the 10 pound range for less than $8.  I promptly froze it, and this weekend–some six months later–I turned it loose for pulled-pork.  

The prep for a chunk of meat this large is non-trivial.  There’s a half-inch think slab of fat and skin along the bottom of the piece of meat that you’re likely to want to cut off.  I didn’t want to waste it, so I decided to try my hand at making crackling.  I went here first but then just figured I could fake it.  I cut the slab of fat into thin strips and just set to cooking. 

Pork fat splatters a lot, so I upended another frying pan over top of this one to contain some of the mess.  Here’s how it looked about half an hour later: 

In the meantime, I seared the chunk of meat in a heavy-bottom pot.  After browning it all the way around, I added a couple of spoonfulls of rendered fat (from the crackling) and sauteed three onions until softened.  Then I deglazed the pan with a mixture of red wine vinegar and water and added the meat back in along with some dried lemon grass, some salt, and a hearty squirt of Vietnamese hot sauce.  

And while I was dishing out rendered fat, I figured I’d make up a little cornbread using a variation on the recipe in the Joy of Cooking  (or “Rombauer” as it’s known around here).  Here’s how that looked going in: 

And coming out: 

The pulled pork is still cooking, but a preliminary taste indicates I have about a week’s worth of delicious pulled pork sandwiches in my future.