iamaneviltaco

Time to get french, and technical. This sounds complicated, but really isn't. It's the basis of every cream sauce you've ever had, for the most part, and IMO is one of the 2 most important tricks to cooking (the other being mirepoix, and combining them is even better).

The Bechamel roux is a simple recipe, but remember that it's a base. I'll give you ideas for things to do with it later.

so the ratio goes as follows:

1 tblsp butter
1 tblsp flour
2 cups milk

Preparing it works as follows:

over medium low heat, melt the butter. add the flour, and mix well. You want to cook the flour/butter mixture until it's reached the color of peanut skin, or a bit past it. The key is toasting the flour well. Whole wheat flour tastes better.

After the flour is toasted, slowly add in milk and mix until it's a creamy consistency.

There's your Bechamel roux. Now, if you were to add an extra cup of milk, slowly, and fold it in, then thicken it back up with some parmesan and romano cheeses (1-3 parmesan-romano ratio, do it until it feels thick enough) and add a bit of garlic powder, you would have just made home made alfredo, from scratch.


There's a secret many fancy places that make alfredo don't want you to know. You can make it at home at any point for less than a dollar to feed your whole family, in about 15 minutes or so. You can grill up shrimp, chicken, broccoli, red onions, chopped spinach, or one of about a million other ingredients, and fold them into the sauce or top the sauce with them. Diced tomatoes and toasted bread crumbs are another great addition, as a topping.

I linked to this in my last post, and feel the need to elaborate. Mirepoix is, like wikipedia says, the holy trinity of french cooking. However, this doesn't mean you must limit it to french cuisine. Use it as a base for a soup or sauce, and it'll give it that tiny intangible depth that makes people say "What did you put in this!?!". Mirepoix goes great in just about everything sauce based. It'll put extra flavor in your alfredo, spice up any soup, and it's that secret flavor in most pasta sauces you've ever said "damn, I want this recipe" about.

The formula is simple. 2 parts onion to 1 part celery, 1 part carrot. I favor baby carrot, since it's sweeter. Mince the hell out of them until they're almost a paste, or cuisinart them to a gel for extra win.

For most recipes, the golden rule is 1 tsp of mirepoix to 1 cup of water/milk/meat broth. Fiddle with it to taste, as always.

When I'm feeling particularly culinary, I keep a bulk amount of it in my fridge or freezer and pull it out and toss it in just about every soup or sauce I make. Freezing mirepoix will make it last forever and a day, so you can prepare it and pull it out as you need it.

Protip: add a tiny bit of it to ramen noodles. No matter what the flavor. If you toss this in the water, let it boil before you toss in the noodles, use the water for the broth, and cut out about 1/3rd of the flavor packet, the results will surprise the hell out of you. The noodles will be slightly seasoned and the broth will take on a dimension you'd never expect to pull out of ramen. It's particularly tasty in the varieties listed:

• Chicken
• Beef
• Roasted Chicken
• Shrimp
• Mushroom
• Oriental

As always, if you find an innovative use for this, please let me know.

This is the part where I find something relatively cheap and give you my impression of it. I've got a chicken and corn chowder recipe which is vaguely famous, so when I say that this is the best corn chowder I've ever had, that is a statement and a half. I *hate* canned food. I detest pre-made stuff and I absolutely *have* to tinker with it.

There was nothing I could have done to improve this. It tasted like Wolfgang Puck himself came over and cooked it for me. It's a combination of corn, vegetable broth, potatoes, carrots, a touch of cellery, butter, cream, and spices. The base was understated, and obviously had a very well crafted mirepoix base. Often times with canned soups when they even try to not use "vegetable flavoring base" and actually go with the real deal, it's a culinary trainwreck. This was subtle, well layered, and solidly prepared.

The vegetables were well mixed and perfectly proportioned to the broth. It didn't overwhelm with corn, and had a good bit of texture to each bite. My only small nit pick was that it was a tiny bit thin for a corn chowder, but hell. It worked here.

The best part? It cost me 2.50 at my local organic grocer. For food this good, that's a hell of a deal. Usually I don't much care if something's organic or not, but I'm becoming a convert to organic canned soups. On the whole they have less or no preservatives, and the difference in taste is astonishing.

I'd recommend looking into more of Puck's recipes. I'm doing so, right now, and I think Emeril might have some competition as my favorite cook.

I've decided I want to make a cooking show. It'll be called "Cooking With Sparky" and the main character will be a 3 toothed homeless man with incredible skills of cooking over a metal can filled with burning paper. He could teach you how to make eggs in a bean can, all the while screaming about how the government is beaming thoughts into his head with giant radio towers, and how the radio waves make his penis not work.


Even better, we could swap out which hobo it is every week. They'd get paid well, be off the streets for a bit, and we'd have the best thing since iron chef.

This is a simple post. The secret to fresh herbs is easy. Use 2x what I suggest and give them a fine chop.

If the herbs start to wilt, fire up the oven to the lowest temp you can find.

bake them for about 20 minutes and throw them in a cuisinart. Again, a stone will help. Put them on a shelf and use them as you will. If you have the patience to grow them yourself, you'll taste the difference. Your home grown food doesn't need pesticides. You will taste the clean.

So my mission for this blog is to make recipes that someone on a bachelor's salary, and mindset, could make. College kid with an apartment. I'm trying to include a cooking secret in every post. Some may fall short of this. This post is one of those. There is no deep secret here, just damn good cooking. Each of these will cost you about .25 - .50 cents not counting toppings. Pepperoni is a negligible cost for the amount you get. I'll suggest toppings later, for the full blown pizzas, but expect another quarter for the exotic stuff. This is great party food. Make them build their own and set a timer to remove them. You'll fit at least 6 in an average oven if you don't use a stone.

Ingredients:
pitas (as many as you need. I buy bulk.)
shredded mozarella or italian blend cheese
my pizza sauce
toppings to taste

This one? easy. Take a bit of aluminium foil, and assemble the beast on it. If you have a pizza stone, more power to you. I think everyone should. I live by mine, and it was 10 bucks. If you do, cook directly on it, and ignore the aluminium directions. If you don't? Put the aluminium directly on the rack and buy a pizza stone. You'll thank me later. It makes all baked goods better.

Bottom oven rack, for crispness. Preheat oven to 425. wait 10 minutes. Put sauce on pita, cheese on pita, topping on pita. Because of the fast cook time, you'll want to pre-cook or defrost veggies. cheese first, toppings second. Sauce the pita and top/cheese it to within a centimeter or 2 of the crust. CLOSE. You don't want too much of a crust on this since it's a mini pizza. Normally I advocate the opposite, toppings under the cheese, but this is really REALLY quick. Throw the pizza on the aluminium and bake for 5 minutes, preferably rotating once for even heating. Warning: depending on the oven, sometimes it's 4 minutes. This cooks FAST. You want a firm, crisp undercrust. Use a spatula to remove, and pull it onto cardboard, if you don't have a pizza paddle.

Cut, eat, enjoy. You'll get a crispy thin crust home-made pizza that blows any frozen crap out of the water, and for as cheap as it is it's a great dish to impress a date or appease roommates. Want something different on your pizza? We all do. Now it's cheap and easy to do.

Many local pizza joints use conveyors, which do not have stones in them, so the quality you can get out of this (unless you're in cali, or the belt between chicago and ny) is probably at least equal to local places. Most likely, you'll beat out a local place. Hardcore.

If you disagree with the texture and find it too soft, brush the pita with oil before saucing and cook as directed. If it's too hard, brush it with melted butter and cut out a minute from the cook time. For a really soft pizza, cut the temp to 400 and increase the cook time to "when I think it looks done". I go for about 7 minutes in that case.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER TRY TO STUFF THE PITA WITH PIZZA MIXINGS. I promise you, your oven will hate you for it. It's not a good idea. I could teach you how to make food glue to seal the thing (flour and water?), but in the end the result is nasty and leaky and not worth the effort.

This is basically going to be my food journal. I'll review places, post recipes, that kinda deal. If you have suggestions, by all means. If there's a dish you like, but can't find a good recipe for, poke me and I'll give you one. I've got a library of them in my head and I'm good at putting stuff together if I don't have a recipe. I've cooked at a lot of places in a lot of styles of food, from a vegan camp to a pizza joint. This is the result of my learnings from all of them.

First up is a simple one, but something most people don't do right. Not to say that I haven't had some INCREDIBLE renditions of it, but there's a key step everyone seems to miss, that works incredibly with pasta sauces as well. So, ingredients. This makes.... some. I tend to make a LOT of pizza, so I make a bit of a surplus. You can use fresh ingredients, I actually recommend it for the parsley, but this works just as well either way. Remember, tho, that fresh ingredients taste stronger. Post a request and I'll give you the recipe for all fresh herbs.

Ingredients:
2 cans of tomato paste/puree (should be about 10 ounce cans)
the equivalent of 3 cans of water (you want a 1:1 ratio of water to puree, but feel free to experiment with this one. The extra can is to replace what you'll lose in boiling.)
1 tblsp of the following:

• basil
• oregano
• thyme
• parsley

1 tsp garlic powder (or 1 big clove of fresh chopped garlic, I use powder for smoothness)
1 tsp crushed red peppers
1 bay leaf

Here is the trick to this. BOIL THE HERBS IN THE WATER FIRST. You'll get a longer simmer, extract WAY more of the flavor, and get the full value out of your bay leaf. Boil the herbs for about a half hour on medium high heat. Pull out the bay leaf, then throw in the puree. mix it up and cook on medium low heat for about 5 minutes to let the flavors blend. If the sauce ends up too thick, add more water.

This is really easy, and makes a damn good (if simple) marinara, as well. After you make this a few times, feel free to experiment with my ratios. I tend to go with an equal ratio of the green herbs, but cooking is an art, so feel free to warp this to your own tastes.