Dancing with the Universe

I decided that I've had sufficient luck with root beer that I should take a stab at ginger beer. I hate the stuff on store shelves, as it always has some nasty cloying taste associated with it. I tried a commercial extract, and discovered that the only flavoring in it was ester of pine resin -- it tasted, as you might expect, exactly like a pine board. eww.

So, since I wanted something that tastes like ginger, I took a hand of fresh ginger, some sugar, a little yeast, and water. I worried a little bit that the yeast might take exception to very fresh ginger (it's a pretty good antimicrobial) but apparently I needn't have worried. At all.

What follows is a tentative recipe for my trial batches of ginger beer. It is not alcoholic at all, but it has some heat to it. Do this only if you like ginger (a lot). :)

( Recipe! )

This makes a very clean, crisp ginger beer with enough heat to warm your belly afterward; it's a great way to settle an uneasy stomach. I may try foogod's advice of adding a touch of cardamom to the brew, but I like it plain just fine. Yum. :)

There are alcoholic versions out there, brewed like beer... CHOW makes a very traditional non-alcoholic ginger beer using a "bug", or starter. I like dry yeast because it's reliable, quick, and needs no maintenance, but I imagine a bug gives it more character.

Anybody know of a feijoa in the northeast bay whose fruit is going to waste?

My neighbor's tree didn't bear much this year, and I'm craving them.

More info for those unfamiliar with the plant. They're used in all sorts of places, but not everyone knows that these bushes bear edible yummy fruit and flowers.

I was in downtown San Jose this last weekend, down by the Convention Center. So, as I always do when I'm down there, I bemoaned the loss of my favorite taqueria, Iguanas. That place had very good food, very fast, very cheap -- $10 once bought me more than I could eat, and my capacity is not inconsiderable. Wonderful guacamole, good carne asada, no trouble with special orders; they'd make the food right in front of you, just behind the narrow counter. Oh, and did I mention? Being right next to SJSU, they opened for lunch and stayed open until at least 2am. Midnight munchies at the con? No contest. Sadly, they closed down in 2005, and the word at the place around the corner was that it was because they hadn't controlled the late-night rowdies enough. So poof, they were out.

I needed to grab some dinner that night, though, and on the way to the hotel, Greg drove down third street. So I pointed out where Iguanas had been -- right there, midblock, right where that giant sign is all... lit... up...

It said Iguanas: Home of the Burritozilla.

Hallelujah.



I walked over to it around 10pm, went up the little stairs and to the left, and it's like they were never gone. The same murals of silly iguanas on the walls and laminated into the tables, same menu at the front. I happily ordered two super tacos and a super burrito ($11.50 total), and asked the guy behind the counter what had happened.

Apparently (I'm piecing this together from what he told me and the little I can find online) there was a dispute with the landlord over the lease, which forced them to close down in July of 2005. The owners of Iguanas took the landlord to court, chased him all over the legal system, and finally won the right to stay open. So they handed the business to their two sons, who cleaned and freshened up the place, did a few repairs, and reopened in late 2006. They're doing a roaring trade, and they didn't even hike the prices much.

They're open until 3 now on Fridays and Saturdays, and they host live music and poetry readings. Man, I should have pulled out my student ID card -- the article says they might have given me a 10% discount. Next time...

The tacos were as good as I remember, even after sitting for an hour or so because I got distracted... sogginess didn't diminish them. The place puts garlic in their guacamole. That alone would have me coming back. :)

Even though the whole corn-based ethanol craze has people coming up with pie-in-the-sky predictions and groundless optimism, before it all comes crashing down (and it will), it has at least done a couple of good things:

It's brought the selling price of corn up from its stagnant level of four decades, where it didn't even budge for inflation -- that's good for farmers, and

The spike in price -- it's doubled in the last five years -- has made corn syrup immensely less attractive to food manufacturers. Add that to the organic movement, where cane is not only easier to grow organically but not potentially tainted with GMOs, and we're starting to shake loose the ubiquitous presence of high fructose corn syrup.

On a personal note, I've found that corn syrup has increasingly had a "thickening" effect in my throat, to the point that I end up feeling thirstier after I've drunk a soda with HFCS, and I cough more. As a result, I've started avoiding soda (not easy when you can't drink the water most places). I brew my own, but only when I have time and energy. So I've begun looking for cane-sugar soda... and found that, in addition to good old Hansen's, Whole Foods' own brand uses cane sugar, and (what do you know) so does Jones, which I had never looked twice at before. Safeway hasn't started making standard soda with cane sugar yet, but their organic line of sparkling lemonade/fruit juices is cane-sugar sweetened, and their cranberry juice cocktail is too. I hope that other companies will start joining in as the price of corn continues to rise -- most of my friends prefer cane sugar in their soda anyway, if they don't do diet, so it may sell fairly well.

If nothing else, other processed foods may start quietly getting more beet and cane sugar. One downside is the rising cost of wheat as more farmers grow corn, but that will stabilize soon enough.

When I became sensitive to wheat, I lost a great many foods. Many of those have come back, either through easy substitutions or the growing number of wheat-free convenience foods in supermarkets these days. But a few remained elusive.

One of those was macaroni and cheese. Kraft dinner, I found, could be approximated with wheat-free macaroni and bulk cheese powder; over the years I've perfected that to the point where the difference is only subtle. (Most of you probably remember my hunt for cheese powder not too long ago, which was happily resolved by Barry Farms.) Our family mac&cheese recipe, however, was more difficult.

The origin of the recipe was a Sunset magazine issue, which offered an ingenious means of disposing of a leftover party cheese ball. The recipe basically recreated the cheese ball again and mixed macaroni in, making a strongly-flavored and very distinctive casserole. We took out a few things (such as the sherry and blue cheese), but the modified recipe still makes one of the most unique versions of macaroni and cheese I've ever found.

The trouble was, the base of the cheese ball (and thus the casserole) was condensed cream of celery soup. As any gluten-shy person knows, all cream soups (especially Campbells, who seems to delight in throwing just a little of it into everything) contain wheat flour. We could substitute corn pasta for macaroni, but no matter what we tried -- sour cream, cream cheese, a roux, a rice-flour white sauce -- it wouldn't come out right. We have been without it for most of a decade now, when we used to eat it pretty regularly, it being an easy make-ahead sort of thing.

I had a brainwave at the end of last year, with the result that tonight, we had a cheeseball macaroni that was almost exactly like the old one. The trick: Classico alfredo sauce. It has no wheat in it, which is nothing short of a miracle. (I should write to them and thank them.) It also has a consistency very much like the can of cream of celery plus 2/3 of a can of milk, which we traditionally used as the base. The texture was right, if a tiny bit starchy; more cheese will take care of that. The flavor was only subtly different. foogod said that if no one had told him, he wouldn't have known that it wasn't the original recipe. He's the most discriminating of us; all of us thought it was a success.

Nothing is quite as satisfying as recovering an old comfort food again. Yay!

but I'm getting damn close.

I have a loaf of French bread here. It is crusty, chewy, moist, tastes just right, and is made with only flour, water, yeast, and salt, as all French bread should be. The catch: the flour type I used is rice, and only rice.

When you say "rice bread" to celiacs and wheat-intolerant folk, what comes to mind is something which might be dry, squeaky-dense, gritty, fragile, spongy, or a combination of the above. "Chewy" doesn't make the list. Rice bread is bought at specialty stores or made at home as a batter-bread, poured into a loaf pan and baked like a cake, with all sorts of gums and strengtheners to hold it together. It isn't kneaded, shaped and risen like wheat bread.

This loaf was kneaded twice, risen twice, and shaped into a long flat loaf on a baking sheet. It handled like regular bread dough, rose beautifully, and had to be dusted with flour when it was punched down, just like the standard bread I used to make. Its crust may not shatter like the store-bought loaves, but my home-baked bread never had a crust like that anyway. It tastes like I remember French bread tasting all those years ago, and is crying out for some marinara sauce and parmesan cheese. Yum.

I knew it could be done, and (after a little minor tweaking on oven temps and times, and checking to make sure it's mixer-friendly) I'll have a recipe that will do it perfectly. It's all just little corrections, now.

I promise to use my powers only for good. Pass the garlic and butter...

I grow a lot of garlic. Like, over a hundred heads a year. This last year they were mostly split and cracked, but I'm trying to get some good intact heads this year... I already have a lot of garlic powder from the split heads, so what can I do with intact ones?

That's right: roast them.

Unfortunately, I have had a great deal of trouble making real, crusty, chewy french bread; my main bread recipe turns out Wonder Bread, which is fine for sandwiches and toast, not so good for roasted garlic. Ditto the commercial sour rye, which is whole-grain to the extreme. And let's not even mention the styrofoam rice bread. So what would I put the garlic on?

Focaccia, of course. Flat breads don't need as much gluten for rising power, and focaccia is good with garlic and oil.

I pulled the first one out of the oven a few minutes ago. I used a little too much rosemary, but otherwise it's thoroughly fantastic. Chewy, crispy, tastes slightly sweet and like olive oil and salt and rosemary and rosemary. And rosemary. (I need to remember how intense the winter rosemary gets.) It's almost impossible to get chewy bread without wheat flour, so I guess I figured out the secret -- maybe I can make french bread with this technique too. Hmmmmmmmm.....

This should be fabulous with garlic. I need to tweak the procedure a little -- kneading the wet, proofed yeast into a lump of dough was not my preferred method -- but I think I can make it quite a bit less painful. Maybe I can make more than one at a time, since the dough ball is small, and the top of the light rack (the source of bottom heat for rising) is long enough for two pans.

Mmmmmmmmm focaccia.

Edit: I forgot the link to the focaccia recipe I used. If anyone wants the wheat-free chewy version (I used barley, but it could probably be adapted further for celiacs) let me know.

I've figured out another way to eat artichokes.

( Recipe for marinated fresh artichokes )

In a semi-related vein, I find myself thinking from time to time, "I hope this works." It's getting easier to do crunches and arches, and my calves will soon adjust to walking a half-mile to school in birks (and back again)... and I've been trying to be more careful about eating enough but not too much, with less junk food and more veggies. I'm trying not to obsess about it, and these changes certainly won't do any harm -- but I really do hope I'll get some significant results out of it.

I guess it's the influence of my other fitness-minded friends on LJ posting about what they're doing. Curse you, fitness-minded friends. ;)

On the other hand -- boy, am I glad I don't have to calculate how many points/calories are in my lunch. :) That could really make me obsess, and not in a good way. Too close to OC behavior for me...

Well, I'm here. Several familiar faces right off the bat, and as I was registering I caught the very familiar voice of Rand Bellavia singing "California". It's a good start.

It's quiet, though. After getting my badge I hopped across the freeway to Banana Leaf, had lunch, then came back and settled in the Internet Lounge. The bandwidth is... well... width is not really the applicable term. Still, it's enough to do Lily and crawl around LJ, and ICQ is up. So I do have some fix. :)

Oh... ( about the food. )

There's a concert in almost an hour that I may check out, and there's doubtless some open filk going on, so I think I'll go wander. I'll check in again a bit later.