Tips and Techniques | Pen & Palate

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2015 Holiday Gift Guide (i.e. Some Fun Stuff To Buy This Year)

Illustration: Tram Nguyen

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year when you’re supposed to buy people gifts for vaguely religious reasons! I have mixed feelings about Christmas and the present-mania that surrounds it (I can’t comment on any other religious holiday traditions during this season, given my lack of experience with them), but my love for expensive, more or less unnecessary things is pure and unadulterated. Here I present to you a somewhat random list of items that would make good presents for a person who likes to eat, bake, cook, or decorate his or her house with the trappings of a person who likes those things.

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A Song of Ice and Fire

Smoked ice.

Just wrap your head around that for a moment. Conceptually so clean, so minimal, like a perfect Oscar Wilde epigram. This delightful magic trick is courtesy of everyone’s favorite falafel chef, Mr. Grant Achatz. I’d use these in a summery cocktail made with pineapple juice, dark rum, agave syrup, maybe a slice or two of jalapeno, and mint; the smoked ice adding a depth and balance to the brightness and acidity of the fruit.

Now for the fire part, lets talk stovetop smokers. It had only recently come to my attention that such a thing existed, and as soon as I found out (at like, 2 in the morning–I woke Romeo up to tell him our lives had forever changed but he didn’t seem too impressed) I ordered one. I’m usually anti-gadget, (falsely) believing in my heart of hearts that I am a minimalist, but this is reasonably priced, doesn’t take up too much space, doubles as a roasting pan, and it totally works! I have been steadily pumping my foods with carcinogens on the stove from the comfort of my tiny Chicago kitchen, with great success, We’ve smoked salmon, fat little cherry tomatoes, and soon…ice!

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Moonlighting

There’s this new falafel place in my neighborhood, housed in a store front that was formerly home to a greasy, fluorescent lit hotdog joint called CJ’s Diner. When CJ’s Diner was shut down by the health department for rat-related reasons, they closed for about a month and emerged, triumphant, like the mythical phoenix from the ashes, as AJ’s Diner. Alas, the resurrection was short lived, and the restaurant formerly known as CJ’s closed.

I ventured out into the frigid weather yesterday because I was in desperate need of some plexiglass and a new toothbrush. After completing my errands, I felt that I might have had a touch of frostbite, and so I ducked into the newly opened falafel restaurant to warm up. The place was still ill-lit and run-down, but seemingly free of rodents. I decided it would be rude to not order food, so in the interest of politeness (and laziness. Also self-servingness. Romeo looked at me as if I was his sun and stars when I came home bearing Mediterranean food.) I decided to order something. While perusing the takeout menu, which was full of the standard fare one would expect in such an establishment, I came across a sentence that stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Come into one of our locations and try one of our dishes made by our world famous 5 star chef…”

Wow! Like seriously, WOW! When I think “world famous” and “five star” in Chicago, the first name that comes to mind is, yes, Grant Achatz of the Michelin-starred Alinea. People are wait-listed for months and months and do embarrassing things like beg for tickets on twitter to get into his restaurants. I cannot confirm or deny anything, but let me tell you, the beef shawarma was spectacular. As the menu promised, it was indeed “grilled to perfection”. I don’t care what anyone says about Achatz, the man knows his way around the stove.

And that is why, when he is on the Huffington Post giving some real talk about grilling steak at home, on a regular gas stove for mere mortals, I drop that plexiglass I am holding in my hands and force my vegetarian boyfriend to drive me across town to pick up steak. I tried his technique tonight, and Grant was right, as usual. The only drawback is the tremendous amount of smoke that is produced during the cooking process, which is a fine thing in baba ghanoush, but not so much lingering in your apartment for hours afterwards. But if a culinary superstar chef can find time in his busy schedule to moonlight in a fast food place, I can deal with opening a few windows.

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How to Start a Grease Fire

illustration: tram nguyen

So you want to start a grease fire in your apartment?* Okay! It’s pretty easy, if you are committed to abiding by a certain set of rules.

First, be blithely overconfident in your intuitive abilities as a chef. You may go to the beach, for instance, and eat a delicious oyster po’boy, and then you may think, “Of course I can replicate this; I am quite handy in the kitchen.” Decide you will make some po’boys next weekend for lunch.

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Crab Cakes

illustration: tram nguyen

For years, my family took summer vacations at the beach in North Carolina, where we’d all compete to see who could get the worst sunburn (“best tan”) and otherwise lie around a rental cottage stuffing our faces. This was the one time a year my siblings and I were allowed to eat junk cereal, so we really went for it, inhaling those miniature cereal boxes starting at about 9am until they were all gone, which was usually about 9:30. Then we’d move to ice cream. Dinner, however, was always an elaborate family ordeal, involving thousands of dishes and (once we aged into it) copious amounts of white wine. The culinary highlight was always toward the end of the trip, when we’d gather our innumerable relatives together for a crab feast.

I loved our crab feasts for a few reasons: I’m from Maryland, so I am bound by honor to like crabs, and I’m also a little bit attention-starved, so I really enjoy wielding anything reminiscent of a gavel. Smashing a defenseless, barely-dead crustacean with a huge mallet and then literally picking its guts out can be a real pleasure when you are a tween with low self-esteem.