Paulie and Paula

I've decided to hijack my wife's blog again.  In fact, I hope to subvert it more often to my desires for amateur expression.  Lately I have decided to begin cooking again.  A lot of my hobbies were suspended when Matthew was born.  Some hobbies were lost when I got married.  With so little time available during the day I have found that cooking, as a hobby, serves a second productive purpose of moving the "home" forward to the next day.  There is laundry, paying bills, accounting, changing diapers, feeding Matthew, washing bottles, etc. etc. And yet we still have to eat.  I noticed all of this was stretching Becky thin.  In the meantime I would  often selfishly play the "dumb clueless man" card and not take the initiative to do many of these unpleasant things.

I started cooking back in college mostly to impress women.  Seriously.  I still do.  I'm just trying to impress my wife now.  But cooking has other advantages besides impressing a woman and providing needed sustenance.  I like being able to immerse myself in an activity, to focus on the process and render an end product.  Moreover, it yields something (hopefully) delicious and satisfying that fosters bonding with family and peers.  Growing up as a Roman Catholic Christian it has long stuck in my mind the comments of the pastor: that eating is holy.  Jesus sealed the new covenant through his last supper with his disciples.

Anyhow, before I get too deep into it, let me share what has transpired in the past three weeks where I have done the majority of the cooking.  Bear in mind that I generally have no idea what I am doing.  I'm learning as I go along.  I'm not a trained professional like my friend, Joey McCool, chef at Canebrake, or even an exceedingly gifted amateur like my friend, Ben Wilson, competitive BBQ champ.  I could never cook as well as they do.  I cannot deviate far from a recipe, because that is all I know how to do: follow recipes.  There are a couple of dishes that I need no recipe for because they have been passed down through memory like Filipino Chicken Adobo.

So here is the rough menu of what I am working on for the week:

1) Chicken schnitzel with sauerkraut and fried potatoes.  Living in Huntsville, Alabama, there is a subtle undercurrent of German culture that has its genesis in the German rocket scientists settled at Redstone Arsenal after the war.  Werner von Braun and the other rocket boys left a cultural imprint of beer-loving and kraut-eating on this town that continues to grow into a cultural hallmark of Huntsville.  Coincidentally, schnitzel was one of Bex's pregnant food obsessions.  I have heard of pregnant women inhaling jars of pickles. Bex became obsessed with schnitzel for a time.  We would grab takeout from the Schnitzel Ranch and have date night at Hildegards.  Schnitzel, for those who do not know, is a lightly breaded and fried meat such as pork or chicken.  It is usually pounded thin and served with a cabbage dish.  This is Becky's request for the week.  Last time I cooked schnitzel I used sauerkraut from a can.  Becky prefers the Boar's Head kraut in a bag, but the can was pretty delicious when I simmered it for over an hour with some Sierra Nevada pale ale and brown sugar.  I'll get the Boar's Head this time and cook it the same way and see how much better it tastes.

2) Bulgogi. This is Korean beef barbecue and it is obscenely delicious.  The first sit down meal I had as a married man was a Korean restaurant since vanished at Main Street South.  We had bulgogi sauteed on the table-top stove.  Becky has long cooked bulgogi, but its been too long.  We will probably have it with a side of rice and steamed broccoli florets.

3) West Texas Asado. I was reading about Argentinian asado cooking when I stumbled on this recipe from someone's blog (The Homesick Texan).  It looks amazing.  It is not Argentinian obviously, but "West Texas" caught my mind. It comes almost as a stew, but seems thick enough to roll into a tortilla. The recipe calls for a ridiculous amount of ancho chiles and garlic.  I'm not sure what ancho chiles are. I have not even googled them yet.  I can always buzz my friend Joey to see where he would pick them up from.

That's what I have so far.  The great thing is that in the past three weeks we have been stocking all sorts of non-perishable ingredients that simply allows us to cook a wide variety of dishes by just buying the meat and vegetables.  Slow perishables still have to be maintained such as cream, eggs, sour cream and cheese.  But we have plenty of spices, pastas, pre-made sauces, dried chiles, dried mushrooms, oils, etc. to cook some amazing things.  Probably the most yummy thing I made in recent weeks is truffle and potato soup.  This was a derivative of a recipe I found online that really only called for potatoes, truffle oil, garlic, onions and some other dry spices.  But how can you have a mushroom soup without any actual mushrooms?

The truffle oil was bought from Costco for around $16.  Unfortunately it is synthetic truffle oil.  There is no true truffles in the oil.  This stuff seems to have been all the rage back in the 90's even among professional chefs, but it fell out of favor and is regularly panned by foodies.  Its like when the Allman Brothers experimented with synthesizers and Don Johnson's song-writing in the 80's... a period your ears would rather forget and skip right back to the 90's when they gained sense (and taste) again.  I'm keeping it around, but it will always be used in conjunction with black truffle salt which I picked up at the Spice & Tea Exchange in Asheville, NC.  This stuff has real flecks of truffles and boy it is musty and pungent.  So this soup was sauteed with white mushrooms and dried shiitake mushrooms with truffle salt to taste before being blended up into a heavenly, creamy soup that almost recreates a similar truffle soup I have had Mezza Luna.  Just incredible.  And then to sop it up with some baquettes?  Wooof.