Mailbag: Homemade Orgeat

UPDATE 3/17/2011: I've done more testing; the recipe is all finished (for now). Check it out here! This version will stay up for posterity's sake.

UPDATE 3/7/2011: I made two batches by this recipe, a beta 1 by this recipe and a beta 2 with twice the almonds. Neither one came out with much of any almond flavor. There were a couple of hiccups during the first round of testing, so I think I'll retest this before going back to the drawing board, probably by adding even more almonds.

Some time this morning while I was slumbering, a bottle with a note inside washed up on the shore just steps from the back door of Casa de Jester. I popped the cork, slid out the note, and the magnificent calligraphy read:

Would you be so kind as to tell us about how one makes orgeat from scratch?
--Volstead's Conundrum

Why of course, Mr. (Ms.?) Conundrum, I would be delighted. First, a little background information: Orgeat is an almond-flavored syrup that is a tiki bar mainstay. Victor "Trader Vic" Bergeron favored it, using it in such famous drinks as the Scorpion, the Samoan Fog Cutter, and his magnum opus, the Mai Tai. While there are numerous commercial orgeat syrups (including one made by Trader Vic's), making it at home is pretty simple.

Oh, a little secret: This is a work in progress, my untested Mk II version. If you make it, let me know how it turns out.

Start out with ½ pound of blanched whole almonds. Blanched slivered almonds are a poor substitute; they are inevitably stale. If you can't find blanched whole almonds, you can blanch your own; the technique is readily available online. You can use raw almonds with the skins as a shortcut, but you'll end up with a tan colored syrup instead of the opalescent white color orgeat should have. You may be tempted to toast the almonds for a deeper flavor. Don't do it! At least, not if you're trying to make orgeat. You'll get toasted almond syrup. Mind you, toasted almond syrup is quite delicious, it just isn't the desired end result. Anyway, chop up the almonds any way you see fit. A knife works well, a food processor will do it in a blink, a Ziploc bag and rolling pin is fine too. Don't worry about precision; some of the pieces can be coarsely chopped while others are close to powder. Add 1 cup of sugar and a quart of bottled or filtered water to the pot. Bring it to a boil, remove it from the heat, and let rest 12 hours.

Next step: strain out the almonds. Put a double layer of cheesecloth in a strainer, and pour the almond mixture into it. Once the liquid has stopped draining out, twist the cheesecloth closed over the top and squeeze out all the liquid you can. If you're feeling perfectionistic, you can give it a second straining through a coffee filter, but the cheesecloth should do just fine. Pour the almond liquid back into the pot, and add 7 cups of sugar. Heat this until the sugar is completely dissolved. Make sure that all the sugar is dissolved, but don't let it boil! There are consequences to be had either way! If the liquid doesn't get hot enough, the sugar will crystallize into almond rock candy. If it gets too hot, you'll have a very sticky boil-over on your hands. Bad juju either way. Once the sugar is completely dissolved, take the mixture off the heat and let cool to room temperature. Once it's cooled, add in rose water and orange flower water to taste. The taste of the flower waters should be a subtle background note. If it tastes like orange flowers or roses, there's too much in there. At this point, If you wish you can add a shot or so of vodka to the syrup to act as a preservative. Pour the cooled syrup into bottles, and store it in the fridge.

When homemade orgeat syrup sits, the flavorful oils will separate from the sugar syrup. Just insert a chopstick to break up the top layer, then put the cap back on and shake vigorously until the mixture is homogeneous once more.

There are some things I need to test on future versions. Foremost is the amount of almonds. I plan to test this by making a batch with ½ pound of almonds and another batch with 1 pound of almonds, then combining equal parts of those to see how a batch made with ¾ pound of almonds works. I also need to get a precise amount for the flower waters down. And it will be fun to test the effect on taste of various preservative spirits. Vodka will be neutral, but cognac or silver rum may add pleasant notes.

Now that I've told you all that, I'll tell you the quick-and-dirty version: Buy almond milk at a health food store (it's next to the soy milk), mix 1½ parts sugar to 1 part almond milk (2:1 if your almond milk is unsweetened), heat until all the sugar has dissolved, and once cooled add rose and orange flower waters to taste. Since commercial almond milk has soy lecithin as an emulsifier, it will not separate like homemade orgeat.

So to the elusive figures behind Volstead's Conundrum, there's your orgeat from scratch. I bid you, and everyone reading, good drinking.

Speaking of good drinking, you didn't think I'd leave you without things to do with your freshly made orgeat, did you?

Trader Vic's Original Mai Tai
Juice of one large lime (about 3/4 ounce)
2 ounces aged dark Jamaican rum
¼ ounce orgeat
¼ ounce rock candy syrup (simple syrup made 2 parts sugar to 1 part water)
½ ounce orange Curaçao
Shake everything with crushed ice. Pour into a double rocks glass, and garnish with a mint sprig and spent lime half.

Momisette
1½ ounces absinthe (or pastis)
½ ounce orgeat
Sparkling water to fill
Build in a Collins glass with ice cubes, stir gently.


Orgeat syrup is fun to play with. You can substitute orgeat syrup for some or all of a syrup ingredient (e.g. simple syrup, grenadine, etc.) in your favorite drink recipes. Yes, you can substitute it for grenadine. You'll have a different drink, but that's the idea! And don't stop at cocktails... Orgeat-sweetened coffee, iced tea, lemonade... the mind reels.

Mailbag: Turkey Time!

Brenda from Utah sent via carrier pigeon this missive:

So what are your best tips for cooking Thanksgiving turkey? Nothing fancy, just flavorful and not dry.

The classic Thanksgiving dilemma. So many people eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and so rarely does it come out tasting as good as it looks. Good news: The secrets are simpler than you think.

The biggest thing for a moist bird: Don't overcook it. Most birds come with a little pop-up thermometer thingie. It's cute, but using it means that your turkey is going to suck. The pop-up thermometer goes off at 185°, guaranteeing breast meat as dry as chalk. Get a digital probe thermometer like the excellent ThermoWorks Cooking Thermometer and use that. The meat should register 160° in both the thigh and breast. Usually the breast meat races ahead of the thigh meat; you can mitigate this some by filling a gallon Ziploc bag with ice cubes and draping it over the breast for 20 minutes to half an hour while you heat up the oven. Also on this topic, as tasty as stuffing cooked inside the turkey is, cook the stuffing on the side. If you stuff the bird, the stuffing has to also hit 160°, and the turkey itself will be way overcooked by that point. If you insist on stuffing the bird, put it in a covered dish in the microwave, and zap it, stirring every couple of minutes, until the temperature of it is 130° throughout.

Second thing for a moist bird and biggest thing for a flavorful bird: Brining. Introducing salt to the meat will both keep the bird moist, and make it taste better. Most supermarket birds are already brined. There will be something on the label mentioning it, usually saying something like "Moisture enhanced with up to 10% of a solution". Don't brine these, you'll end up with a bird that is closer to a salt lick. Just take it out of its package the night before cooking and let it sit uncovered in the refrigerator so the skin can dry a little for crisper skin on the finished product. If your turkey has not been brined, then brining it will greatly improve it. Lots of people brine theirs by putting it in a salt water solution, but I find this to be a huge pain in the ass when doing it with something as big as a turkey. I prefer to use a method I do for roast chickens: dry brining. Just sprinkle salt (about 3/4 teaspoon per pound, be generous) and pepper all over the bird two or three days in advance, and let it rest covered loosely in the refrigerator. If you want, before sprinkling on the salt, loosen the skin on the breast and thighs, and slide a few sprigs of herbs (thyme, rosemary, sage, what have you) underneath.

Glad you asked, Brenda! Thank you!

If you have a cooking conundrum of your own, just drop me a line and I'll be glad to help you out.

I Got A Grill!

Not just any grill, mind you. I went and got myself a Big Green Egg. It's sort of the home version of the Chinese wood-fired oven we use at work. The main difference is that the BGE goes back to Japan, while the Chinese wood-fired oven is, well... Chinese. I have some beer-butt chicken going right now (wherein one takes a can of beer and jams it up a chicken's back end, creating an impromptu vertical roaster) and some baked potatoes. After that, I'm going to turn up the heat and bake a loaf of bread. There was temptation to also make some peach cobbler, but I'll save that for another time. Wish me luck!

Fiddling With the Test Kitchen

The current issue of Cook's Illustrated features something they have done in the past: Omelets. I tried out the recipe and whaddya know, it turns out a nearly flawless omelet. While I was making a few for friends, I couldn't help but think that the recipe became too fiddly for its own good.

The big idea this time was that adding little bits of frozen butter to the beaten eggs would slow down cooking and keep the whole thing from browning on the outside (which with this style of omelet is something to avoid). I tried melting down all the butter at the beginning and the end result was exactly the same as with frozen butter. I also found the idea of using 2 whole eggs and one egg white to be just plain silly. I'm never going to use that extra yolk for anything (and the time I need an extra yolk I'm going to forget it's in the freezer), so I tried making the omelet with three whole eggs and it's just fine. The last thing I wondered about is the use of black pepper. When making something such as an omelet where nothing is supposed to get browned, black pepper shows through as little specks, making the diner wonder what you spilled into said omelet.

One thing I would like to work on is tenderness. I know that cold eggs and eggs handled with a heavy hand both contribute to a tougher end product. Will room temperature eggs make the omelet overcook? Will gently pushing the cooked egg with a spatula make for a more tender omelet than one stirred vigorously with chopsticks? If my memory serves me correctly, adding salt toughens the egg proteins too, so that may have to wait until later instead of getting stirred in at the beginning.

I'm currently having problems with excess fat on the plate once the omelet is served. It's entirely possible I'm using too much cheese, but too much butter is the more likely culprit. I'll try weighing the cheese to get a more precise amount than "2 tablespoons shredded cheese"; are you supposed to pack the cheese in or leave it kind of loose?

Anyway, here's the working recipe:

Soon To Be Perfect Cheese Omelet
3 eggs
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/8 tsp regular salt)
Pinch white pepper
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons shredded Gruyère cheese (1 ounce?)

Warm an 8 inch nonstick skillet over low heat for about 10 minutes while preparing ingredients. In a medium bowl, beat eggs, salt, and pepper just until combined. Add butter to skillet, and melt until foam subsides. Swirl butter around sides of pan. Add eggs, and stir with two chopsticks (hold them like you normally do chopsticks), pushing cooked egg toward center of pan until eggs are set on the bottom and still liquid on top. Turn off heat (or remove from burner on an electric stove), sprinkle cheese on top, cover tightly, and let sit for 2 minutes. Remove cover and return to heat for 20 seconds to warm, then fold omelet, turn onto plate, and serve.

Thanksgiving Aftermath

(or, Holy Crap, He Updated the Damn Blog)

First off, your calendar is correct, Thanksgiving is this coming thursday, the 27th. Since I work in the hospitality industry, it's a lot easier for me to move a holiday to a more convenient date than to try and actually get the holiday off. By some miracle I actually have the big day off this year, so I get to do Thanksgiving twice! I'm rather glad I'm not doing the whole shebang twice in a row... For me, Thanksgiving is a three-day cooking marathon. I don't care if there's only six people over, I'm going to make dinner for sixteen. The bird should be big enough to make people worry that it's going to eat them this year. There should be enough sides that you aren't sure where the turkey is supposed to fit on the plate. There should be enough desserts that a diabetic goes into anaphylactic shock five paces from the dessert table. Hey, you have your special holiday traditions, I have mine!

The main event is, of course, the turkey. For the last several years, I did the Morton Thompson Black Turkey, which is quite the exercise in old-fashioned cooking methods. It also requires more attention than my roommate's cat, who only requires about as much attention as a six month old baby. You really need an assistant to pull it off, and I was flying solo. I went back to my old standby of turkey recipes, the one from the November 1995 issue of Martha Stewart Living. I did make one change, and that change is the one that's going to be on everyone's lips next year... dry brine. Brining is a good thing to do to your bird, making a normally dry, tasteless piece of protein come out flavorful and juicy. It's also a major league pain in the ass, requiring either a cooler chest or half the space in your fridge, along with half a box of kosher salt. The dry brine is what Judy Rodgers does to her incredible roast chickens at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. A couple of days before the chickens get cooked, fresh herbs are slid under the skin, and are rubbed down with salt (about 3/4 teaspoon of salt per pound of bird) and pepper. The birds then rest in the fridge for a couple of days while the salt makes its way into the meat. The drying effect of leaving the bird uncovered also gives you incredibly crisp skin. Martha and Judy worked together brilliantly. The bird was deliciously juicy, and you could almost cut it with the back side of the knife.

Of course, there were tons of sides. Mashed potatoes are de rigueur, and after going with a trusted recipe, I've now broken it down in my mind into a simple formula that can be multiplied to however many people are coming to dinner.


The Jester's Perfect Mashed Potatoes (Per Person)
1/2 pound Yukon Gold potatoes
1-1/2 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon salt

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into 3/4" dice. Rinse them under cool running water for about 30 seconds to get rid of excess starch, then put into a pot and add enough water to cover the potatoes by 1 inch. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and simmer until the potatoes are tender (about half an hour). While the potatoes are cooking, mix the butter and cream together, heat until the butter melts, and keep the mixture warm. When the potatoes are done, drain them well and let them sit for a couple of minutes to let excess moisture evaporate. Run the potatoes through a food mill (or a ricer, or just mash them with a hand masher). Add the dairy mixture and salt, stir well to combine, and serve.


Something new for me this year was the stuffing recipe, from The Nantucket Open House Cookbook by Sarah Leah Chase. If you don't have a copy of this book, run out and get it RIGHT NOW. It's helping me fall in love with cooking all over again after getting out of the Cook's Illustrated mindset of "It Must Be PERFECT". Speaking of Cook's Illustrated, I find lately that their recipes aren't nearly as good as they used to be. Five or six years ago, the reaction I got when making one of their recipes was "Oh my God, this is the best [insert food here] that I've ever had!", and anymore I just don't hear that when I make their recipes. I think it's sort of like New Math, where exotic, complex techniques were much more important than actually getting the right answer. I tried the pumpkin pie recipe from the latest issue and for all of the tweaking (maple syrup I could deal with, but CANNED YAMS?!), it was just a meh pumpkin pie. But more about dessert later.

Now where the hell was I... ah yes, the stuffing! It was the one from the Thanksgiving part of the book, with some minor changes to fit the local palate. It was a sausage stuffing with pecans and brandied apricots, and it was some of the best stuffing I'd ever had. The only things I changed from Chase's original recipe were pecans instead of chestnuts (I don't think AJ's even carries 'em around here, and pecans are very much an Arizona thing), and the use of sage and thyme instead of rosemary (the rosemary in the test batch was like eating pine needles). It's so good that I may very well forget that there's a big turkey to be eaten and just happily nosh on the stuffing for breakfast, lunch and dinner... I may have to stock up on some bubbly, Champagne goes with it extraordinarily well.

Creamed spinach from Cook's Illustrated was an utter dud last year, so this year I went with the home version of the recipe from Lawry's The Prime Rib restaurant up in Vegas. The secret of better creamed spinach was simple: Bacon. This was utterly divine creamed spinach. I'll have to make a special trip to Lawry's the next time I'm up that way so I can have someone else make it for me. Another recipe from Sarah Leah Chase was a sweet potato-pear casserole. It was very delicious, but I think next time I may try cutting the sweet potatoes and pears into smaller pieces, and I'm also tempted to leave the lid off the casserole dish to see if that helps the sauce reduce some. Cranberry sauce was pretty close to the back of the bag, with two twists: Champagne instead of water (I used Freixenet cava, don't tell anyone), and some currants thrown in. I hereby christen it Cranberry Sauce à la Kir Royale, and I think I shall make it a regular part of the Thanksgiving table. Speaking of a regular part of the table, I'm adding pumpkin biscuits (from Sarah Leah Chase again) to the regular repertoire. These were simple to make (and freeze well), and absolutely bursting with pumpkin flavor. I'm strongly tempted next year to do the entire Nantucket Open House Cookbook menu; everything from the book was nothing less than terrific.

There were three desserts to be had. The smash hit winner was pecan pie, made from a Cook's Illustrated recipe from their earlier days. It was easily the best pecan pie I've ever had; rich, caramelized, buttery, nutty... I may have to go sneak a slice here in a moment. Or maybe I'll wait until I can snag some vanilla ice cream to put on the side. The pumpkin pie... was enh. Cook's Illustrated made a whole lot of "improvements" to the recipe, and I think that if I was to taste the new recipe side-by-side with the one on the back of the can, I'd pick the can. There just wasn't much oomph to it. The CI pumpkin cheesecake, however, was very nice, truly one of my standby recipes for something delicious to bring to a dinner party. Now all I need is one of those new auto-scrape beaters for my Kitchenaid so I don't have to scrape the bowl down eight times while mixing the batter.

The one dud this year was Pommes Anna. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious. It just doesn't hold for squat, and making it in advance is really the only way you're going to pull that one off. So next year, I think I'll be going for a casserole type thing. Maybe tater-tot hotdish to please the Midwesterners. I know you're supposed to use the canned cream of chicken soup, but... do I have to?

Five-Minute Bread: Broa

I had been eyeing the recipe for broa, a rustic Portuguese yeast-raised corn bread, in Artisan Baking in Five Minutes a Day for quite some time. Tonight, I baked my first loaf of it. Halfway into mixing the dough, I found out too late that I was about a cup of flour short. I almost ran out to the store for more flour (speaking of which, since when did Wal-Mart start carrying King Arthur all-purpose flour? Whoever is doing the buying for Wal-Mart is being slow but increasingly thorough in wooing my shopping dollars!), but when I was reading up about broa on Wikipedia, I found out that the bread is commonly made with rye flour. I have plenty of rye flour around here, so in went the missing 4.5 ounces of flour as rye instead of all-purpose. The bread turned out very good, one of the best I've made with the five-minute recipes. The flavor is very complex, and the texture looks like it will hold up well for making sandwiches. There isn't as much rise as with the regular boule, and the crumb is pretty tight. I think that because of this, I'll make this one a double loaf at a time on future batches. Next up, I think I'll do the challah, and make some French toast with it.

More Five-Minute Artisan Bread

The mania over freshly baked bread has slowed to the point that I have some dough still in the bucket coming close to the two-week mark. It really does improve over time! The later loaves have a nicer chew to them, and a much improved sourdough type flavor. Since I just baked off the last loaf of a batch, I started two more batches: One is a full size batch of the European Peasant Bread, which replaces some of the flour in the regular loaf with rye and whole wheat flours. The other is the Brioche, which both the roomie and myself are greatly looking forward to trying.

Love Great Bread? Of Course! Get This!

I love making homemade bread. So much of the whole process just connects on a deep level. It feels great, from the smell of the yeast getting started, to the feel of kneading dough, to the incomparable sensation of biting into a slice of bread still barely warm from the oven. However, for something that is so simple (just flour, water, salt, and yeast), fresh home-made bread is an absolute pain in the ass to make. Even though you don't have to proof the yeast (thanks to quick-rise yeasts) and knead the dough for 15 minutes (thanks to the trusty Kitchenaid on the counter), the dough takes quite a bit of babysitting, and somehow the entire kitchen ends up covered in flour.

In November of 2006, cookbook author Mark Bittman released a recipe for something new called No-Knead Bread. In normal bread, kneading is what develops gluten, which gives the bread its structure. In No-Knead Bread, kneading is replaced by a very wet dough (87 percent of the flour's weight in water; a traditional recipe is closer to 55 percent) and a very long rest (at least 18 hours in the fridge). There is an Achilles's heel to the No-Knead Bread, and that is that you have to start the bread 18 to 24 hours before you actually want the bread.  What's a bread lover to do?

Enter Dr. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François¹, authors of the new book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. He's a bread-loving physician, she's a CIA²-trained baker and pastry chef.  Boy, that sounds like a movie waiting to happen, doesn't it?  They realized that a wet dough not only doesn't require kneading, but also keeps for a good long time in the refrigerator... up to two weeks.  Now all you have to do is mix up the dough, let it rise, and then toss it in the fridge.  When you're ready for bread, you just shape the loaf, let it rise, and put it in the oven.  That's it.  The only part of your kitchen that gets dirty is a spoon to mix the ingredients.

The bread is wonderful stuff... nice crumb, crackling crust, and great flavor.  Apparently, the longer you let it sit in the fridge the more complex it tastes.  I'm looking forward to finding out, but I don't know that I have the willpower to let the bread dough just sit for that long!

1) Just have to say I love how easy it is to do accented characters on a Mac... option-c gets you the ç, where on Windows it was Alt-some four digit number.
2) Culinary Institute of America.

I Call It Spaghetti alla Fata Verde

I had some friends over for dinner tonight. I was in the mood for spaghetti and meatballs. I started out with the Cook's Illustrated recipe, and CHANGED IT! Yes, Christopher Kimball, I didn't feel like buying ground pork, so I made meatballs with (gasp) all BEEF.  They were better that way.  And since I didn't have basic white sandwich bread, I used sourdough.  Then, I thought that their Quick Tomato Sauce could use a flavor boost.  I remembered my favorite thing to add... red wine.  Nice meaty Cabernet, to be exact.  Then, that got me thinking about what else I could add to give it a twist.  I remembered the nice new bottle of absinthe sitting on my extensive bar shelf.  Italian sausage often has lots of fennel in it, which gives a bit of a licorice-y flavor.  Absinthe has similar notes to it.  So, in went a little splash into my tasting bowl along with a little of the sauce, and... magic.  The two went together splendidly.  I added a couple of ounces of the infamous spirit, and everyone was thrilled.  Try it the next time you make spaghetti sauce.  I'd give you my recipe, but I already know you have your favorite and not much is going to sway you from it.

Late Night Cooking: The 65° Egg

I just got done with the night's Wii Fit.  It's a terrific game, and wildly succeeds in its mission to get my tush off the couch and moving more.  Go get a copy if you can find it.

But anyway, this blog is about my culinary adventures, so on with those.

When I was reading through Lynne Rosetto Kasper's excellent new book How To Eat Supper, I saw mention of a little bit of molecular gastronomy from Hervé This that one could easily do at home: The 65° egg.  You see, proteins in eggs set at different temperatures, starting at 142 degrees Fahrenheit.  So, if you cook an egg at a low enough temperature, say around 65° Celsius (149° Fahrenheit), you can get the white to softly set, and the yolk to be still soft.  As a bonus, you can cook the eggs as long as you want, even overnight.  So, tonight, I've decided to try the 65° egg.  Before I started up the Wii tonight, I set my oven to right around 150 degrees, and rather unceremoniously placed some eggs in there to cook.  This was about an hour and a half ago.  Now that I'm getting hungry, I'd say it's about time to get them out of there.  I just fixed up some toast to go along with them (Archer Farms whole wheat from Target, good stuff).  The eggs are a bit tricky to get out of the shell; they're set, but very soft and quivering.  I have to dig around the inside with a spoon to get the whole thing out in one piece.  It looks pretty much like any other hard boiled egg.

Now, for a taste.

*munchmunch*

Mmm.  These eggs are good.  I think the oven has a cool spot near the front, as the yolk is set firmer than the recipes I've seen suggest.  Still, the yolk is tender, and the whites are ever so softly set.  I'll definitely be making these again.

A Short Treatise on the Perfect Hamburger

I recently was going through articles on a food site when I came across a video describing what the editors of the site considered the "perfect hamburger". In the video, I saw a number of things done to the burger that I considered to be complete atrocities. This is my response to their video.


The perfect burger starts with ground chuck. It has enough fat in it that it's not dry when it comes off the grill, but not so much fat that the burger is greasy. It's best if you grind it yourself. you can do this in a food processor with minimal fuss. The burger should be cooked over a searing hot flame, no further than medium unless you enjoy eating hockey pucks. It should only be turned once, and never, ever pressed. The only thing that pressing will accomplish is drying out the burger. If you choose to add cheese, it should go on the burger before the burger itself is finished cooking so it has time to melt without giving the meat a chance to overcook. The cheese should have a personality of its own; American, Colby, and Monterey Jack all melt nicely but are quite bland. Better to go with sharp Cheddar, Swiss, or even crumbles of your favorite blue cheese.

The bun must not be an afterthought. The ones in the bread aisle at the supermarket are almost always flavorless, waifish things that can't hold their own once loaded down with toppings. Find yourself a good bakery and buy their hamburger buns. They should have some flavor of their own, and be big enough to hold up through the entire burger without collapsing, but not so big that all you taste is the bread. Toasting the buns is mandatory. Buttering the buns before toasting is highly recommended.

Toppings are up to you. Some people prefer the clean, minimalist lines of only burger and bun. Daniel Boulud lavishly tops the signature burger at his restaurant with braised short ribs, foie gras, and black truffles. I believe that a burger should come with a standard set of green leaf lettuce, ripe tomato, sliced red onion, and slices of pickle unless such things are not complementary to other special toppings. A dollop of a spreadable condiment is always welcome even on the simplest burger creation. Mustard, mayonnaise, or ketchup are all classic standards. More inventive creations may include Thousand Island dressing (or for that matter, any creamy salad dressing, blue cheese is especially wonderful), homemade aïoli, a red wine pan sauce if you happened to pan-sear the burgers... Really, anything in the kitchen that's savory and spreadable. From there, the sky is the limit for toppings. Bacon is ubiquitous; the excellent bacon from Niman Ranch can elevate an otherwise normal burger to ethereal status. One of my favorite toppings that is often overlooked is a fried egg. Any manner of roasted vegetables do well on burgers too. Look over the topping list at fancy burger joints, such as Burger Bar in Las Vegas, for some terrific ideas. Don't limit yourself to just those lists; if you think it sounds like it's going to be good on a burger, it almost certainly is going to be delicious.

Cooking: Red Curry

I have a friend who is, when left to her own devices, entirely un-Chowhoundish. I invited her and her beau over to my place for dinner one night, and they turned down the invitation in favor of a trip to Olive Garden. They could have at least been a little diplomatic and said they weren't sure where they were going yet! She lived in a house with three college age guys at one point. The default meal was Hamburger Helper. She figured it was one of the few things that everyone could devour without putting her in the poor house. Something about the idea of dinner from a box scares me. Maybe it's the list of ingredients that look like they belong in a science lab, or the tendency for different flavors to taste less like the real items they're trying to emulate, and more just like each other. I'm utterly tired of mass-produced, processed junk masquerading as a wholesome meal. I want my food to resemble FOOD, darn it!

Fear not, good citizens. Your friendly local Asian grocery store is to the rescue! There's all kinds of wonderful things inside, but this time I'm focusing on curry, specifically Thai style red curry. Three styles of Thai curry are known by colorful names- Green curry, with green chilis and shallots; yellow curry, with plenty of turmeric and usually potatoes and onions as ingredients for the curry; and red curry, with red chilis. This time, I'm making red curry. There's a lot of ingredients in the curry that are pretty hard to find outside of specialty grocery stores, including galangal, lemongrass, and kaffir lime. Thankfully, red (and green and yellow) curry pastes are available with all of the herbs and spices already mixed together for you. All you need to add is some coconut milk, meat, and vegetables, and tah-dah! It's dinner!

If you can make any of those dinners in a box, you can certainly make Thai red curry. Take 3.5 ounces of curry paste (for a less spicy curry, use less curry paste, down to half as much), and moosh it around in a 12 inch skillet over medium-high heat. Then, add two cans of coconut milk one at a time, mixing thoroughly before adding the next ingredient. Add 8 ounces of any meat you like (we've been doing chicken a lot here just because I always have some frozen chicken breasts from Trader Joe's at hand), and let the mixture simmer until the meat is as done as you like. Add 4 to 8 ounces of your choice of chopped vegetables (we like carrots, onion, and snow peas quite a bit, but let your imagination go wild), let that simmer until the vegetables are done (just a couple of minutes), and serve. Yes, it's that easy, and there's only one pot to clean up afterward. Well, two pots... steamed rice on the side is essential.

Speaking of rice, here's how I do rice for any Asian meals. Mix 3 cups of water with 2 cups of rice (I use jasmine rice) and about half a teaspoon of salt. Let that boil over medium high heat until the water level drops below the surface of the rice, about 10 minutes. Cover the pot, turn the heat down to low, and let it cook for another 15 minutes. Take it off the heat, give it a quick stir/fluff to stop the cooking, and serve.