Sunday, June 30, 2013

This is Not Ridiculous *Horny,* I Don't Believe in Retail Therapy, & Good Eats @ San Marcos Brewery...

Before I write about yesterday's best laid plans, to the accidental readers who found this post looking for "sex with giant clams," or "sex with geoduck," I'm sorry to have disappointed you.

NOT.

Moving right along...

BBQ Ranch Burger

Notwithstanding the fact that The Man and I both hate big box strip center shopping (which is second only to mall shopping on the Migraine Meter) this morning started out with the best of intentions to get to Old Navy before 9am to take advantage of their $1 Flip-Flop Sale as well as to get some Summer clothes for the older monsters, after which we planned to head to T & H Meats to buy some pig parts to smoke when The Man's parents visit next week.

Chicken Wings

Well, by the time I'd had my morning coffee, posted a pic of the sunrise, gone grocery shopping at two separate markets, cleaned the kitchen, fed the family, folded some laundry, watered the plants, barked at the kids to get ready to go out, packed up Izzle's diaper bag and waited for The Man to put The Separation Anxiety Wiener in her prison of forlorn misery dog pen, it was practically lunch time.

By the time we got to Old Navy, the line just to get in was at least thirty to forty people deep, and girlfriend does not do lines... Specially not for non-food shopping. (If you guessed that I don't do Black Friday, either, you would be entirely correct.)

So we decided to shop some other big box retailers in the area to get what we needed and then have lunch at San Marcos Brewery in Restaurant Row before heading over to the butcher's.
Snausage Platter

Refreshingly drinkable beer that isn't overly complicated, hyper hoppy, or shrouded in craft brew elitism.

Golden Ale & Oatmeal Stout

Great chicken wings that weren't overly sauced or overcooked and even better burgers with perfectly pink and juicy medium rare patties on super-fresh brioche-y buns. The sausage sampler with stewed red cabbage, while not as well executed as the burgers, was easy enough to finish.

All in a casual, friendly, Old West-inspired, and well air-conditioned (which was a huge plus on one of the hottest and most humid days we've seen this year) environment with prompt, friendly service.

I would return in a heartbeat for those burgers if I found myself out San Marcos way again.

San Marcos Brewery & Grill
1080 West San Marcos Boulevard
San Marcos, CA 92078
760.471.0050
www.sanmarcosbrewery.com

shinae

Full album HERE.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Rice,김 & 김치

Lots of people are familiar with the use of toasted seaweed sheets in Japanese cuisine (in which it's called nori), but it's also a popular food, prepared slightly differently, in Korea, where it's called gheem (aka gim, kim).


The Korean style preparation is rubbed with toasted sesame oil, lightly sprinkled with salt, then toasted until it's crisp and nutty.

It's actually become so popular in certain parts of the States that you can buy it at Trader Joe's, Costco, and a number of other mainstream food sources now.


One of the most popular ways to eat it is as a wrap for steamed rice and any number of other fillings and condiments.

Today, it's just rice and kimchi, which is probably my favorite way to eat it because it reminds me of my childhood.

And now it'll remind my kids of their childhood, too. ^^

shinae

P.S. Seaweed is also generally high in Vitamin C, iron and potassium! :)

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

On Love, Luxury & Lobster Tails on Sale...

In another life, I had twice the money, owned three times the number of houses, and shopped ten times more than I do today, yet I feel infinitely richer now than I did then.

And though the journey to this place was rocky, winding, complex, complicated and downright dangerous at times, if I had to distill the difference between then and now down to one thing, it would be LOVE.

My Love and I, we love the lobster... :P

That I came to love myself enough to live a life that was right for my soul and my conscience, even if it meant painfully extracting myself from a life that others thought was right for them and in which I played a big part.

And that in so doing, I found true love with someone who loved all the things about me that I love about myself, including my children. Who was capable of loving me fully when it looked like I had absolutely nothing in the world to offer but love.


Who supported and enabled me to spend my days doing what I love without promise of anything returned but my love and respect for him.

And I don't mean that pacifistic, feel good, all you need is love kind of love.

A life and identity that took decades to build and almost all of the relationships that came with it had to die for this love. Assets and net worth and credit ratings and legal rights and even maternal rights for a time, had to die for this love.

We also love a good lager to wash down the lobster...

The path to this love was a battlefield, and war was Hell.

But when you can sit down at the end of the day to a lovely little lobster roll with the love of your life having spent your day doing what you love, even if that lobster was only $5.99 per tail on sale, it is an absolute privilege and luxury afforded you at that point in your life when you're willing to pay with all the things you think you possess that don't really matter for the one thing that really does.

shinae

Full album HERE.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Just Ramen & Kimchi

Sometimes, there is nothing so delicious as a piping hot bowl of really good instant ramen sprinkled with nothing but green onions and freshly cracked black pepper with a side of kimchi that's just begun to ripen.


Luckily, when you work at home, you can indulge in that kind of thing for lunch.


Sapporo Ichiban Original is my favorite ramen from a packet, and you may not know this, but it matters if your instant ramen is fresh. If you buy your ramen from a place that doesn't sell much of it, and the oil on the noodles has gone rancid, it can really spoil the flavor. It won't taste awful, and it probably won't make you sick, but it'll taste off and wrong - kinda like roasted peanuts that have been sitting in the pantry a little too long.

I've put one jar of the kimchi I made on Saturday in the fridge to keep it at this stage of ripeness. The other jar will be left in the garage to ripen another 2 or 3 days so it'll be nice and sour for the Monsters who prefer it that way.

And now off to drink lots of lemon water to flush some of this salt from my system. >.<

shinae

Facebreak...

To say I've been agonizing over whether to keep my facebook account alive is a little dramatic and yet not completely untrue.

For the past year or so, my relationship with facebook has been like a relationship with a boyfriend in high school - breaking up with it on a Monday only to make a jackass of myself and get back together with it on a Wednesday and restart the drama cycle until I decide on a Tuesday three months later that we're not compatible, and I need some space, and it's not facebook, it's me...

This definitely looks like a break from something, doesn't it?

I conflated my presence and activity on facebook with real connectedness to friends I was afraid to alienate by ceasing an activity that I no longer enjoyed.

So, like the 16 year old me (who talked daily for hours on the phone with my friends after hanging out with them all day at school) would have done, I tried intermittently to get my friends to join me over on G+ so I could be with them all the time wherever in the social networking world I went.

And that was a fail.

Because people like what they like when they like it, and some of my friends just happen to like facebook right now, even though I kinda hate it. Just like they might listen to music, eat foods, watch shows, read news articles, and explore hobbies in which I have no interest, and which make them no less my friends, but which facebook is determined to let me know about in truly creepy stalker-like fashion anyways.

So I kept on going back in order to keep in touch with people who know full well how to get a hold of me outside of social networking (and vice versa), answering the subliminal call of that little red number that alerted me whenever someone said or did something that had about a .1% chance of really sustaining a relationship that should extend beyond the blue, white, and irrelevant ad littered confines of facebook.

With every begrudging login of the past few months, I was coming that much closer to the realization that I had become a servant to this thing that had ceased to serve me. That I was feeding my precious limited time and attention to a thing that no longer fed me. And not that social networking doesn't actually serve a great purpose in my life - just not facebook style.

So as a 40 year old woman with a marriage to nurture, a family to care for, a career to rebuild, friendships to further, and a self to preserve, I've realized that I should take a decisive and unapologetic break and reclaim however many minutes or hours better appropriated to the aforementioned.

My friends know where to find me, and I them. :)

shinae

Friday, June 7, 2013

15 Minute Fresh Tomato Sauce for Pasta

I normally buy about a dozen tomatoes every week and for the most part end up using all of them, but this past week found me choosing recipes that hadn't much to do with tomatoes, and I had half a dozen of them left in my basket.

While Summer is generally a time of tomato abundance and surplus, sometimes you have a surplus that's too much to use up in salad, but too little to can or sauce the old fashioned way.

Enter this easy 15 Minute Fresh Tomato Sauce with just five essential ingredients: tomatoes, onion, garlic, herb(s) of choice, and enough olive oil. (That *enough* part is important for reasons I'll explain in a bit.)


EASY 15 MINUTE FRESH TOMATO SAUCE
Sauces 3 to 4 servings of pasta, depending on how saucy you like your pasta

This is a basic recipe to which you can add any number of other seasonings like crushed red chili flakes, capers, olives, lemon zest, anchovies, grated Parmesan... Just make sure to adjust the salt down accordingly if you add salty seasonings.

If you only have half a pound of tomatoes and 2 mouths to feed, you can totally halve the recipe with no problem.

- 1/4 of an onion, minced
- 4 to 6 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/4 cup chopped parsley and/or basil or 2 to 3 teaspoons of dried parsley and/or basil and/or Italian herbs
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1 generous pound of fresh tomatoes cut into roughly 3/4" pieces (about 6 large plum type or 5 medium of the fatter round ones like the ones you buy for burgers, you know, the kind whose generic name I can't think of at the moment)
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt to start
- 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

I used my wok last night because, well, it was already on the stove because I didn't put it away, but a 10 to 12-inch saute pan or even a Dutch oven would work just fine.

1) Pour the 1/4 cup of oil into your pot or pan and turn the heat to medium high. When the oil is preheated, but not smoking (i.e., when a piece of onion sizzles but doesn't splatter when you put it in), add your onion, garlic and herbs and saute them for 3 to 4 minutes, until the onions begin to turn translucent.



2) Add in your tomatoes, salt and pepper and 2 Tablespoons of liquid (water, wine or unsalted stock) and gently stir to evenly incorporate with the aromatics. If your tomatoes are specially tangy, add a pinch or two of sugar to help mellow and round out the acid in them.

 



3) Turn the heat up to high and bring your mixture to a sputtering boil for 30 seconds, then turn the heat back down to medium high, cover completely, and cook for another 5 to 7 minutes at a very active simmer (you should hear the sauce cooking even with the lid on), giving it a good stir or two halfway to ensure that the sauce cooks evenly. Remember to replace the cover after you stir.

If you're going to add any of the additional seasonings I mentioned before, this halfway point is a good time to add them.

With this volume of tomatoes and this short a cook time, the additional heat from the amount of oil we're using along with the relatively high heat - oil not only gets hotter faster than solids and other liquids, but it just has the capacity to get hotter, period - will help the natural sugars in the tomatoes caramelize and produce not only a sweetness but a depth of flavor you wouldn't achieve without it.



4) Adjust the seasoning as needed, and !Voila! your sauce is done. You can either spoon it over your pasta, or toss your freshly cooked pasta with the sauce then serve.

Last night, I used shrimp as our protein. Shrimp, or seafood of any kind, tends to cook quickly, so it's a great option when you're strapped for time. I used about a pound of shelled and deveined shrimp and sauteed it in a well oiled medium hot pan until it *just* turned orange on both sides. Any more than that and your shrimp begins to get exponentially more rubbery with each passing second.




Sauteed chicken breast cut into 1-inch cubes is also a great option for adding protein. Storebought rotisserie chicken, even easier.

Quick, easy, delicious, balanced.

Hope you enjoy. :)

shinae

Full album HERE.

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

STRANGE GRUB - Giant Penis Clam (aka Geoduck)

Now that LAM reads my blog regularly, I debated for 2.5 seconds whether to use the word PENIS, but I figure since I'm talking about FOOD and not my sex life, she'll get over it.

Ain't that right, Mama? :P

Moving right along...

So the name geoduck is derived from a Pacific Northwestern Native American word and is pronounced GOOEYduck or GWEEduck - essentially nothing like it's spelled. And one can only assume that the guy in charge of that transliteration had an iffy grasp on English phonemes.

If we just called it Giant Penis Clam, we wouldn't have that whole pronunciation issue and people wouldn't ever have to wrack their brains trying to remember what it's called, but I guess that might cause marketing issues and people would want to eat them less than they already do.

Unless of course we're talking about the exports to China (most of our geoduck crop is exported to China, BTW), where they'd probably sell doubly well if they were called Giant Penis Clams because superstitious Asian people in Asia seem to have an affinity for eating anything that remotely suggests that its consumption would result in penis or potency enhancement. (I never said I wasn't going to talk about other peoples' sex lives...)

And if you think I'm making a big penis-pumped phallic to-do about this clam, when you see the pics, you'll know why it's near impossible not to.

So the flesh of geoduck, if you've never had it, tastes like a cross between your average fan-shape shelled clam - say, a Littleneck - and the sweetest scallop you've ever tasted, with texture ranging from a cross between firm jello and oyster on the shell end becoming progressively firmer toward the *ahem* protruding end, otherwise known as its siphon or neck, to where it's downright crunchy at the tip. (The Man says that was so wrong, but WHAT - IT'S TRUE.)

The one I photographed here has a rather short neck and I think he had a pretty bad attitude about it as a result, making it extra challenging to pry him from his shell.


Before you get started have a pot of hot tap water or boiled water ready for purposes you'll see in a bit. Then cut through the tough ligament thingies attaching the clam to the shell on both sides.


Then pry the shells apart, and !Voila! Dumbo.


At this point, give the geoduck a good and thorough rinse in cold water. If it smells like anything but fresh ocean water, it's probably not so fresh, and you might not make yourself sick, but you'll most likely turn your palate away from geoduck for a very, VERY long time if you eat it.

If it smells murky or rotten at all, you should get your not small amount of money back. (This stuff ain't cheap.)

When you pull the body of the clam away from the shell, you're going to find this thing that looks like bwalls, and well, it is a gonad, so it's basically bwalls.

People tend to discard this part, but it tastes sweetly of the ocean and makes a wonderful stock for seafood based soups and stews.


By the way, this tubey thing isn't a clam penis, nor is it some kind of parasite. It's something called a crystalline style and is part of their digestive system. Tastes like a mildly salty chap chae noodle, actually. :P


Ok. Once the gonad is removed, you have the mantle (the fleshy part that was covered by the shell) and the siphon (the fleshy part outside the shell), and it is all covered by an outer rubbery *sheath* called a periostracum. To remove that sheath, dunk the clam in that hot water for 15 to 20 seconds. Doing this will not only facilitate the removal, but it'll firm up the flesh and make it easier to slice. 


Start from any edge and rub the periostracum away. Once you've got about an inch pulled away with which to pull, slowly and gently pull on the periostracum toward the end of the neck. It should pull away with ease. You may have to do this a few times to get all of the stuff off the clam.


Pile o' RubberIMeanPeriostracum

In the front, the siphon, in the back the mantle, both completely edible.


I like to separate them into a mantle piece and siphon piece, then cut the siphon piece in half so I can wash away any sand or dirt that's accumulated there.


On the day I took these pics, we ate the entire clam as sashimi, so I cut them thusly. (That's an Alton-ism.)

mantle pieces
siphon pieces

And served them with choh gochoojahng (Korean style), wasabi and shoyu (Japanese style), and paper thin slices of lemon.


This is geoduck sushi from another day from Nozomi in Carlsbad. Mirugai (MEErooguy) is the Japanese word for geoduck, so you'll likely find it presented on the menu as such. And they for the most part only serve you siphon pieces.


But the stuff also makes delicious soups and ceviche among other things as well.

The fact that this is a Strange Grub post does however indicate my awareness that geoduck is not for everyone. You have to have an open mind and adventurous palate to allow yourself to get past the obscene appearance and uncommon texture. But if you, like I, are a sucker for superfresh raw things that smell and taste of the ocean, you may want to give The Giant Penis Clam a blow go.

Mama, you may pick your jaw up off the floor now. <Turns off phone.> :P

shinae