supertaster

Orange Cranberry Scones

Despite my love of scones, I’ve never actually made them myself until last week. It was Saturday morning and I was craving something fresh from the oven, as opposed to our typical stovetop scrambled eggs. I had some buttermilk in the fridge, and some dried cranberries in the cupboard, so I threw them into a batter and made some cranberry orange scones. They were delicious!

I combined the best of two recipes from two of my favorite sources, Everyday Food magazine, and Fields of Greens with slight modifications. I’ve been waiting to use the whole wheat flour I bought recently in an effort to eat a bit healthier, so here I substituted half the flour with whole wheat flour. Well, I’m happy to report that they came out great and were enjoyed with morning coffee, followed by afternoon tea. Delicious!

Zest of 1 orange
4 tablespoons fresh orange juice
1 ½ cups unbleached white flour
1 ½ cups whole wheat flour
½ cup dried cranberries
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ lb cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2/3 cup buttermilk
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon milk

Preheat the oven to 400F. Soak the cranberries in the orange juice. Sift the dry ingredients together. With a pastry blender or two knives, cut butter into dry ingredients until it resembles coarse meal. (Hint: I don’t have a pastry blender and have no idea how to use two knives for that, so I just used my hands. First, I made sure my hands were cold so the butter would not melt by holding a few ice cubes for as long as I could stand. Then I dried them off and smashed the butter into the flour with my hands).

Make a well in the center of the mixture. Add the zest to the buttermilk and pour it into the well. Add the cranberries and orange juice. Stir until just combined; do not overmix. If the mixture is a bit too dry, you may need to add a little more buttermilk. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface and shape into an 8 inch round, about 1 inch high. Transfer to a baking sheet. Cut the round into 8 wedges, spacing them ½ inch apart.

Whisk the egg yolk and milk together and lightly brush the scones with the mixture. This will form a nice lightly brown crust on the top of the scone while baking. Bake until the scones are golden brown, about 20 minutes.

The Thanksgiving question

It's just under two weeks to T-day, so the husband and I have been thinking about what to do for the occasion. For the first time ever, we're many thousands of miles away from everyone in our immediate families. For several years we celebrated in Minnesota or Iowa with his parents, and the next several were either in Philly with mine or at home in New Haven with my parents and his sister from Boston visiting. A few times I made a dinner party out of Thanksgiving orphans, which was a blast.

This time, with no family within driving distance and the thought of how much we're already going to be spending on Christmas airfares making me queasy, I think we're on our own. I was thinking it might be fun to have a destination Thanksgiving, like in Napa, but couldn't dig up anything online. Even a local restaurant that does something special for the holiday could be good. One year when we were in Connecticut I thought about going to Old Sturbridge Village, just across the border in Massachusetts, one of those living history places. They were offering a traditional 19th-century Yankee Thanksgiving dinner, which sounded kind of fun until I realized it was glorified cafeteria food and something like $30 a head. It still might have been fun in a cheesy way.

So I'm calling on the collective wisdom of the Supertasters: are there tasty alternatives to cooking at home for Thanksgiving?

Cookware Fetish

Lately, I've been thinking about purchasing another skillet to accompany my lone IKEA skillet.  That's when I shamefully realized that all my cookware is IKEA. It is time for an upgrade and I came across this hilarious column from SFGate columnist Mark Morford as he drools over All-Clad and Calphalon One.

*Update: Bloomingdales is having a cookware sale!

Moshi Moshi

The past few days have been full of some great eating, and I'm still catching up with the posts. Saturday we went to Moshi Moshi, a Japanese restaurant just east of us across I-280. It's not much for atmosphere, but it's reasonably priced and most important, the food is good. We split the Moshi combo, in which you get two pieces each of tuna, yellowtail, salmon, and eel, plus one soup and ice cream for under 20 bucks. Since neither of us was particularly hungry that night, it was just right for both of us.

The soup wasn't the usual miso, but something like a chicken broth with a few soba noodles. I liked it. It seemed like something your mom would make for you. The sushi came next. I figured sushi would be pretty fresh in San Francisco, it being on the ocean and all, and wow was I right. My first piece was the yellowtail, and it was so much fresher than any yellowtail I've had before that I didn't even recognize the flavor. I had to figure out by process of elimination that that was what it was. The salmon was even more fantastic. It was so smooth and fresh and... well, just incredibly tasty. I noticed as I was eating it that the special of the day written on a whiteboard near the entrance was salmon sushi, so they must have gotten a special shipment in. The tuna was good, but after the other two it was almost a letdown. Sad, but true. In any other restaurant it would have been the star.

The service was spotty that night, mostly because of a giant birthday party group taking up half the place, plus a small party that arrived just before closing that made the waitress scramble to get their order in. Near the end of the meal our waitress asked us if we'd rather have green tea ice cream or sherbet for dessert, then a few minutes later brought us the check. We had to flag her down and explain that we hadn't gotten our ice cream yet. She apologized and brought out our dessert right away.

There probably are better places for sushi in this city, but you gotta love the price and the fact that it's within walking distance. I could become a regular here easily.

2092 Third Street (at Mariposa), 415 431 3136

Chez Maman

On Friday I told Nate we were going to Chez Maman for dinner. No ifs, ands or buts. I've been wanting to go since we moved here, but somehow we managed to not go for 2-1/2 months. I decided tonight was the night we were actually going to eat there instead of walking up to it, seeing how full it was, and walking on by and eating elsewhere. It's tiny -- just a counter and two tiny 2-person tables, so it fills up fast. We put our names on the list and stood outside and waited. It was totally worth it.

We both ordered crèpes, mine was the savoyarde and Nate's the complète, then split a side of ratatouille, and each had a glass of wine. The crèpes were as delicious as imagined, but what really stole the show was the ratatouille. It had this complex sweetness to it, as if all the vegetables had caramelized a bit. I think I could have been happy just with the ratatouille side and a glass of wine.

For dessert I ordered the crème brulée, which I always have to have if it's on the menu somewhere. At least once to see how it stacks up. I figured it should be good considering the rest of the dishes, but was a little surprised to see it come straight out of a fridge with a short stop under a culinary torch before it was delivered to me. The top was well-caramelized and just crunchy enough, the custard was deliciously creamy and vanilla-y, but about halfway down it was still fridge-cold and had the texture of cookie batter. Too bad.

Otherwise this was an excellent meal, and fairly reasonable for what you get. It's fun to watch the cooks while you're waiting for your food, especially when they ladle the crèpe batter on the special pans. Even though it's a little crowded, it feels homey, like someplace I'd want to be on a rainy winter night. There's lots more on the menu I want to try (I think the mussels marnière are next), so I'll definitely be back. Sooner than 2-1/2 months from now, I hope.

1453 18th Street (at Missouri), 415 824 7166

Best-ever chili

1 lb. ground turkey or beef
1/2 diced onion
1 can stewed tomatoes (14.5 oz)
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
1 can kidney beans
1 can corn, optional (I like Green Giant Niblets)
1 to 1.5 T medium-spicy chili powder
1/4 c ketchup
1 T cumin
1 T oregano
pepper to taste
salt not usually necessary

Brown meat and onion together, breaking into small chunks as it cooks. Drain fat. Add stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, kidney beans, and corn if using, including all the liquid in the cans. Add chili powder, ketchup, cumin, and oregano.

*Secret ingredient*
Add a small handful of semi-sweet chocolate chips or one wedge of Mexican hot chocolate mix.

Stir to combine, and simmer about 1 hr. Serve with any of the following: sour cream, grated Jack cheese, chopped scallions, Fritos (the scoop kind work great -- it's a utensil... and food!).

*Note on chili powder*
We get ours from Penzey's and it's stronger than other kinds we've used. If using more conventional chili powder, you may need to double the quantity.

Recipe courtesy Gloria Christensen, reinterpreted by Lisa Melsted and Ahree Lee and Nate Melsted.

This week in dinner

This past week was a particularly good one for home-cooked meals. First Nate made chili, from recipe originally from his mom's roommate in the Sixties, modified by us, with a few extra modifications by his sister Lisa. It's damn good. Whenever we make it for gatherings at our place, the pots always end up practically licked clean. It's also great for leftovers, and only tastes better after the flavors have been able to mingle for a few days. We usually make a double recipe just so we can eat leftovers for days afterward. It has a secret ingredient. I try to make people guess what it is after they try it the first time. (See recipe for answer)

The other dish we made this week was chicken cacciatore with portobellas and sage, from the Cook's Illustrated website. I started getting the magazine last fall and got the big cookbook, How to Cook Everything, for Christmas last year, and everything I've tried has turned out incredibly well. I was missing East Coast Italian food after our move from Connecticut (the most Italian state in the country -- really!) to San Francisco in August, so when this recipe showed up in the Cook's e-mail newsletter I thought I'd try it out.

I don't know if I can post the Cook's recipe without getting into trouble, but I'll post the chili one.

Super what?

The name of this blog comes from a discovery I made about my tastebuds several years ago. The Yale alumni association took a handful of professors around the country to give lectures at the various Yale Clubs, so when they came to Minneapolis, where I was living at the time, my husband and I thought it would be a good excuse to get out of work for an afternoon.

One of the lecturers was Linda Bartoshuk, a taste researcher, who as part of her presentation, passed out little squares of paper and told us to put them in our mouths and chew them. I did, and found myself chewing the most disgustingly, powerfully bitter thing I'd ever tasted. Bleahh! My husband found his mildly bitter but not overpowering. Bartoshuk explained that there was a chemical on the paper that could only be tasted if you had enough taste buds in your mouth. Some people will taste nothing, and are considered low tasters. More people would find the paper somewhat bitter, and they are medium tasters, like my husband. A few people will find it extremely bitter: super tasters: me. She showed slides of low, medium, and super taster tongues that she photographed as part of her research. The low tasters tongues were sparsely dotted with tastebuds, the medium tasters' had more, and the supertasters' tongues were densely packed with them. Yep, that was what my tongue always looked like.

Now my husband likes to give me crap about being a super taster. Whenever he thinks I'm being finicky about food, he hints that maybe it's not good enough for the super taster. I think it's kind of fun being a super taster. I feel like I have super powers... of a very limited sort. Bartoshuk's research found that super tasters tend to have specific likes and dislikes in common because of their sensitivity to taste and texture. Dislike: raw broccoli (too bitter and dry), foods that are too sweet (overloads the taste buds), foods that are too salty (same reason), food that are too fatty (lipids feel heavy on the tastebuds, which also sense touch). Like: I don't remember these so well, but I think I finally have an explanation for why as a 7 year old I had a fondness for soft French cheeses.

So here come the musings of the super taster. In my book, super taster should not equal super snob. I enjoy Peeps as much (but perhaps in a different way) as I enjoy roasted salmon in maple-soy glaze (which turned out really well when I made it at home a couple of weeks ago). Bon appetit and happy reading!