Left Coast Cowboys

I’ve got a lot of small subjects that aren’t, in themselves, worthy of a whole post, so perhaps, since I’m experimenting with Slow Cooking, I should just throw them all in the pot.

Actually, while we’re on the subject, let’s get right to that Slow Cooker. Long days on the crushpad or in the vineyards, then Sonoma’s cool nights creates a perfect environment for the kind of cooking you start early in the cool morning, then let simmer all day unattended to eat at night when it’s cool again. But I’d been having unsatisfactory results until I started to experiment. Maybe it’s because I’m armed with the chemistry of winemaking that I started looking at Slow Cooker cookbooks with a more critical eye. And my conclusion is that most are clueless about the dynamics and physical properties of what happens in a slow cooker — hence so many tasteless watery results. Firmly pulling my Alton Brown Food Science Nerd cap on, I set out to experiment.

The key thing to remember about Slow Cooking: condensation. The liquid recycles and never evaporates. So you need to take other steps to concentrate flavors.

First off, don’t accuse me of not doing my research. I think I own every current Slow Cooker cookbook out there. Sadly, the vast majority are of the “chop stuff up, throw it in the pot and let it stew” variety. Nothing with that little effort is ever going to yield anything good. And as I added ingredients and experiments, I’ve found some Slow Cooker secrets that most cookbooks will never tell you:

1) The Slow Cooker, by the nature of the way it cooks, can’t concentrate flavors (nothing evaporates), so don’t fergawdsake ever add water to any recipe. Substitute the appropriate stock for anything that calls for water. I had wild success with beans cooked in stock and a very special beer as documented here. You’ve got to try these beans. FABULOUS!

2) Poultry skin, raw bacon and any other fat is nasty unfried and uncrisped. Why on earth would a recipe to ask you to put such a thing in the Slow Cooker where it will just stew and get slimier? But most of them do. Bollocks, as my English husband would say. Add bacon, by all means, but fry it up crisp first. I did this with my fabulous beans and with a recent Cassoulet and it was just the ticket. All the bacon flavor and, after hours of slow cooking, it was still crunchy.

3) And while you are crisping up all that bacon, use the rendered fat to brown any meat or root or hard veggies you are planning to put in the pot. That goes for onions, carrots, parsnips, etc. Believe me on this one point. When you brown things first, you get a depth of flavor that the Slow Cooker can never achieve on its own. And stop freaking out about that fat. Most of it stays behind in the skillet. Just enough makes it to the Slow Cooker to make a world of difference in the result. I used these techniques in my Slow Cooker Cassoulet and Cousin John had three helpings and declared it “restaurant quality”.

Did I mention that one of Cousin John's careers was a deejay at fancy European ski resorts? Cousin John knows his food!

Okay, there is a reason that I am not a food blogger, nor do I play one on the Interwebs. Because, I’m not a trained enough cook to come up with anything original. Yet, 99.9% of Slow Cooker cookbook authors don’t tell you what I’ve just learned, but one does.

If you buy only one Slow Cooker cookbook, make it this one. Andrew Schloss has cracked the secret code of the Slow Cooker.

Andrew Schloss is no “throw it in the pot and hope for the best” slow cooker and he’s way ahead of me on all the things I thought I discovered. He explains the science of the Slow Cooker, what it can do and what it can’t do. He will only steer you to cooking with the ingredients that are truly enhanced by the cooker. And he’s got some great ideas, such that one about removing all skin from poultry, rendering it and using the fat to brown the veggies and the meat. The result: the same depth of flavor you get from cooking something long and slow in the oven — without the oven’s requirement that you hover over the pot and make sure it isn’t scorching.

Another great suggestion/technique he advocates: thicken liquids and sauces BEFORE you put them in the Slow Cooker. Or, strain the ingredients afterwards and thicken the strained sauce by boiling it. Hey, it’s a bit more work. But if you want to do zero work in cooking, go to McDonalds!

New subject: Cousin John and the great Fermentation Face-Off. Twitter and Facebook have been lit up since I told of this culture clash now happening on our crushpad. (People, talk to the blog!) I hear the odds are changing in Vegas hourly as our college educated UC Davis yeasts compete with Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent local yeasts. Which will produce the best wines? It’s going to take at least a week for us to see how fermentation goes, and months after that to assess the final results. Meanwhile Cousin John, on behalf of his yeasts, has thrown down the revolutionary rhetoric:

“My wild yeast shall prosper after the revolution while your decadent intellectual yeast shall be sent to reeducation camps in the countryside to learn how to be productive members of the ecosystem without sucking at the tit of the corporate funded dogs of Davis!”

Signed The FSRF
(Free Saccharomyces Revolutionary Front)

Just call Cousin John’s yeasts Che, Ho, Cinque and Patty Hearst.

Hey, Did Someone Mention Salma Hayek?

I once mentioned the Mexican Bombshell in connection with a Spanish class I’m taking. I was unprepared for the groundswell of worldwide interest. My web hits quadrupled. From around the world. So I had to follow with this completely gratuitous Salma Hayek post. And since that date back in June, the most frequent Google search that drives hundreds of readers to my blog, from Internet cafes as far-flung as Indonesia and Mali, is “Salma Hayek Cleavage”.  Then just the other day, a sometime reader sent me an email telling me that he’d be a more frequent visitor if I’d include more pictures of Salma Hayek.

Okay okay. Can we count this as the post that seamlessly melds wine, terriers, slow cooking, eccentric English friends and husbands into one post, and still open the door for dozens of completely gratuitous shots of  Salma Hayek’s…er…assets.

Tonight was my first Spanish class at Community College of San Francisco. I approached it with some trepidation. It’s been years since I learned a language and I’m worried that part of my brain is rusty. But trying to manage the grape harvest last fall using just my vaguely-remembered Latin and a lot of hand signals convinced me that I needed to master at least the basics. However, I’m starting to have second thoughts about trying to do it in the accelerated summer session where a semester’s worth of learnin’ is crammed into six weeks.

It took awhile for the jury to decide whether I’d made the right move on this.

Class is Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6PM to 10PM! Not good if it cuts into my Law & Order nights.

Instead of being held on the main campus, my class was convening at one of the local middle schools, a Mission Revival baroque fantasy that wouldn’t look out of place in Alhambra. Good. I’m all for setting the scene.

As we students took our seats and started introducing ourselves there were a suspicious number of people with last names like Gonzalez, Ortega and Munoz. Mucho unfairo. This is supposed to be Bonehead Beginning Never Even Ordered a Taco in Spanish Class.

Luckily, I had loaded a Conversational Spanish program on my iPod.

Unluckily, it was a British program aimed at helping British Lager Louts score chicks on the Costa del Sol.

Nope. Won't be using this program much in class.

The professor walked in and he was German! German? There’s no German in Spanish. Well unless we’re talking Laurence Olivier as an escaped Nazi torturing Dustin Hoffman. This didn’t seem good on any level.

Luckily Senor Hahn quickly proved himself to be exactly my kind of teacher — one who sprinkles the subject with lots of trivia and humor.

By the way, our Governator has been pronouncing Hasta La Vista all wrong. The H is silent.

By the end of the second hour, I could hold an excruciatingly polite conversation with a Spanish speaking native. Well, if that native followed exactly the script I learned:

Buenos tardes. (Good afternoon.)

Como esta Usted? (How are you?)

Muy bien, gracias. Y Usted? (Very well, thank you, and you?)

Muy bien. (Very well).

Como se llama Usted? (What are you called?)

Me llamo ____. (I’m called ____.)

Then I had a choice of two possible answers:

Mucho gusto! Which means “much pleasure”. (And here I always thought that was something you said after a really good enchilada.)

Or I can say Encantada. Which means, Enchanted. That makes me feel as if I’m in a Spanish version of Pride and Prejudice. (And wouldn’t Antonio Banderas make a really good Senor Darcy?)

Then it was on to the alphabet where Herr…er…Senor Hahn taught us to remember the vowel sounds by imitating a donkey. I always thought donkeys said “Hee Haw” but apparently in Spanish speaking countries, donkeys say a e i o u.

To remember the burro-vowel connection, we even learned to say El burro sabe mas que tu. (A burro knows more than you.) Which is true, given that, less than an hour later, I’ve now completely forgotten how to pronounce the Spanish vowels.

But, cry my male readers, what about Salma Hayek? Yes well, apparently our text books are very up-to-date because they reference all sorts of Hispanic Pop Culture icons.

No wonder the professor was so insistent that we HAD to have the latest edition of the book. I imagine earlier versions may have referenced Carmen Miranda and Dolores Del Rio instead.

And the Dos XX? Well, in the course of learning the alphabet in Spanish, Senor Hahn told us that the beer was named Two Xs in 1900 after the Roman Numeral XX in honor of the turn of the century. Great, that sticks in my head but not those vowel sounds.

Wait, I’ve got my notes: ah ay ee oo ouuuu. Okay, say it fast. Does it sound like a donkey? If not, there’s only one thing I can say:

El burro sabe mas que tu!

These cuties, George and Alan, are featured performers over at The 7MSN Ranch. See them at http://the7msnranch.com

As many of you may know who tried to access this site recently, this blog has been down due to a heinous crash. During the last 36 hours, I’ve been glued to my service ticket screen as the tech guys at my blog hosting site tried to restore it. Quickly, it became a scenario much like The Three Stooges playing Chinese Whispers. The techs would start working addressing the issue, then something would come up such as mis-entered billing information for my credit card, they’d “down tools” and there would be a three hour delay until we all reconnected and it got settled out. Turns out there must also have been an attack of sun spots since the sites of much higher-priority clients kept happening, kicking my blog recovery further down the chain.

Through all this, I Twittered and added updates to Facebook to let my loyal followers know what was happening. Turns out my loyal followers are not so much loyal to me. Several of my readers (all male) emailed in a panic because they were worried that the crash might have lost a particularly bodacious and completely gratuitous cleavage shot of Salma Hayek I had recently posted here. Okay, after the initial shock, I decided to use this misplaced loyalty. So I instructed those followers to link hands, pray to the Gods of the InterWebs for my blog’s recovery, and, in return, I would post an All Salma post.

Your prayers worked, so here goes. A veritable Salma-Palooza. Starting with the original Salma cleavage shot.

Here’s Salma in her native costume:

Sorry, neckline too high? How about a shot of Salma’s other good side:

Just ignore that man in the picture.

Most of my readers probably don’t even know that Salma has great legs:

Never let it be said that I am not committed to my readers.

By the way, Salma sez [cue sexy Mexican accent] “Gracias mucho, hombres.”

So I was scanning the news feeds and I came across this article about how the Republican party is splitting in two ideological directions. One faction, the Florida Model calls for more moderate views and reaching out to swing voters. The Texas Model says the GOP should consolidate around a staunch right wing agenda as far and as differentiated from the Democratic Party as possible. But what really caught my attention was a synopsis of the 2008 Texas GOP platform, which outlines the issues the Texas Model is rallying around. Among the planks in that platform: “We support adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States.” Oh, I’m aware of the danger those tricky newcomers pose with their refusal to speak perfect English two weeks after arriving here. You take a stroll to a place like San Francisco’s Mission District where most of the billboards are in Spanish and Hey Presto! before you know it, you’re singing “La Cucaracha”. Do I even need to enumerate the insidious danger of bi-lingual instructions? Hey, I signed up for a Spanish course at the community college, so they’ve already got me.

You let these foreigners have their way, and soon your kids are talking like Cisco and Pancho instead of like REAL Americans Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Now granted, I’m not that educated on the issue. I was under the impression that English was the language of the United States. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t all government business — from the Oval Office to neighborhood association meetings — conducted in English? If English is not “official”, it’s at least de facto. I mean, can you name me anyone who’s risen to the top of any profession here or is enjoying any sort of success who DOESN’T speak fluent English? Okay, besides Salma Hayek. Still, I foolishly thought that most immigrants were desperately trying to learn English. At least the huge crowds in the English As A Second Language classes at San Francisco Community College would seem to say so. (Although in the early stage of the classes, I’m sure the students appreciate the bilingual signs to the bathrooms. I know I do as I’m sure it’s saved some embarrassment.)

I'm not quite sure how to define American English. But I know Yosemite Sam speaks it.

Anyway, what caught my attention was the specification of AMERICAN English. Not just English, and apparently, not Pigeon English or Australian English or Spanglish or any other flavor of English. But AMERICAN English. Okay, that’s touching a raw nerve. You think that growing Hispanic population is threatening our ability to keep speaking our native tongue? Let me tell you about the British. After nearly thirty years over here, Andy still has the plummiest English accent this side of a Merchant Ivory adaptation of an E.M Forster novel. He’s married to an American, he works surrounded by Americans. But like most immigrants, at least according to what I’m hearing from the Texas Republicans, he’s not only clinging ferociously to his language, he’s forcing native-born Americans to adapt to HIS needs. You think I’m talking just his accent? No, I’m talking a whole different language than the “American English” the Texas GOP wants to make official.

Can I tell you how many times I’ve gotten to the grocery store and stood in confusion because I can’t remember the American words for the foods Brits call Courgettes and Aubergines? It’s an outrage, I tell you.

Here’s where the Brits are far more dangerous than even those insidious Hispanics: they don’t just speak a different language, they further confuse matters with a secret subset of that language.

I'm a college-educated American. And my husband has forced me to talk like the Artful Dodger. See, these are the dangers of not designating American English as our official language.

Yes, I’m talking about Cockney Rhyming Slang which Andy and our predominately British cast of friends lapse into without warning. You can find all about CRS here, but in a nutshell, it was an argot developed by underworld denizens of London’s famous East End to confound cops and informers. The basic premise is that you come up with a rhyme for a word. Like Apples and Pears for Stairs and Plates of Meat for Feet. Then you really confuse matters by sometimes (but not always) dropping off the rhyming bit. Thus Andy often announces it’s time for bed by saying he’s going to “take me plates up the apples to Bedfordshire”. (Bedfordshire, not being rhyming slang, but just another weird Britishism.) Now some Cockney Rhyming Slang is as quaintly Victorian as a Dickens novel. Say Syrup, which is short for Syrup of Figs (Wig), Barnet, short for Barnet Fair (Hair). Butchers, short for Butcher’s Hook (look). Put it all together and it will make your head spin: “Take a quick Butcher’s at the Syrup on that bloke. Better to have no Barnet.”

But just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, Rhyming Slang changes with modern references, which somehow all Englishmen transmit to each other by osmosis. So you have Becks and Posh for Nosh, which itself is an English slang word for food, comparable to “eats”. (And if you don’t know who Becks and Posh are, this whole post is lost on you.) The same site I referenced before has a pretty good Dick’n'Arry (Dictionary) of terms, but I still can’t keep up with it.  As cute and quaint as you might find this, it’s only funny until you find yourself yelling at Bill O’Reilly on the screen and accusing him of “telling Porkies” (Porky Pies, Lies). Or, worse yet, understanding when your husband talks about his “Trouble”, he’s referring to YOU (Trouble and Strife, Wife).  

And there will always be some people who will get around the rules. Probably by looking like this.

Yes, these foreigners must be stopped. I’m here to tell you, it’s a slippery slope and I’ve been pushed down it.   My question is: what’s the enforcement? Deportation seems a little harsh for slipping into Cockney Rhyming Slang or any other non-sanctioned form of English. After all, the non-native born in my life do provide many things, not least of which is a certain amusement factor. Fines, too, would be draconian. How about a re-education program? Okay, all violators will be sentenced to American English Immersion. Since there may be some question as to what is “American” English, I say we expose them to a broad spectrum. They have to navigate Marge Gunderson’s “Ya sure, ya betcha” in Fargo, then master Valley Girl in Clueless, pick up some Southern Fried English with Billy Bob Thornton in Slingblade and take in a dollop of surfer-speak from Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High… I think you’re catching my drift. I hope all my British friends and relations are taking notes here. There will be a test. And if I have to become a Texas Republican to see this gets enforced, I’m going to do it.