The Stuff Next to an Empty Brita Filter1

In case you didn't follow the title link, hummus, is that stuff.² The near-ubiquitous³ garbanzo bean dip⁴ is cheap, easy, and delicious. It may seem like some exotic middle-eastern spread, but that's about as full of stereotypes as these pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal as the (shirtless) Prince of Persia. Yes, the video game Prince of Persia (a startling likeness, indeed). Admission: those last two sentences were mere conduits for the JG near-nudie pics. Good thing they let me set my own desktop wallpaper at work.


Back to task: I've had Papa Bull's hummus recipe for the last couple years, and have used it basically any time that I intended to make hummus. "Hummus recipe" is a bit of a stretch. All it really requires is putting some basic and common goodies in a food processor in proportions that you find pleasing. I (barely) upped the ante by adding roasted garlic to this batch. Now, I may have mentioned during my discussion of Tzatziki that I was having trouble finding good tahina in Seattle. Joyva never has been up to snuff in my book. As it turns out, I was just looking for love in all the wrong places. The right place to look was the Latin American market down next to Pike Place. Obvi. That's where I found a container of Cortas, which was right up my alley. Incidentally, that link to the Cortas tahina is from latinmerchant.com. I am confused. Nevertheless, the tahina is just what you want: creamy and sesamey (FWIW, I've had the best luck with lebanese tahina). Grab some and have at this:

{+} Papa Bull's Hummus

Hummus
1 Large batch

2 15oz cans of Chickpeas
8oz (half 16oz jar) Tahina
1 head of garlic (for roasting)
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
S & P to taste
Paprika and Parsley for plating

1. Roast the garlic by cutting the top off of each clove (while leaving the cloves all attached), drizzling it with olive oil, and putting it in the oven @ 350 for 30 minutes or so (until the cloves are soft and can be pried out with a fork).

2. While the garlic roasts, gather your ingredients. The only trick here is that when you drain your chickpeas, keep the liquid. You'll need it for adjusting the hummus consistency. Also, if you're using raw garlic, three large cloves should do the trick quite nicely.

3. Put it all in the food processor.

4. Process until smooth. Salt, pepper, and lemon to taste. Add chickpea juices until just a bit thinner than desired. It will firm up as it cools.
5. If you've got the time, let it sit in the fridge over night. The flavors become much richer and deeper, and the garlic will mellow out.

Plate it with a sprinkle of paprika, a drizzle of olive oil, and a few leaves of parsley and serve it with crackers, pita, cheese, falafel, on sandwiches, or any other way you please. I big-spoon it religiously.

There's also been quite a bit going on in the world of food politics these days. I can't help but reflect on some of it here, but I've collapsed it for your sake. There's a whole slew of good links in there, so I do recommend taking a look and seeing if any of it piques your interest.

{+} Four assorted hand-wavings at recent food news that didn't fit elsewhere

1. I resisted the urge to make a poach pun in my most recent post. Over at IFA, they were not so lucky. Who uses those egg poachers when you can have an adventure like this one?

2. I updated my del.icio.us. Things I've cooked are now tagged 'cooked'. Things I haven't cooked but intend to are tagged 'cook', as in 'to cook'. Blogs I follow regularly are marked 'RSS'. This is great if you're a voyeur and want to see how I spend a good percentage my web-bound life.

3. This very long, ostensibly academic article, has been showing up on food blogs all over the internetz. The inattention paid to the underlying politics of the article has really raised my hackles. Overall, it's near-sighted, anti-progress, philosophy-abusing,⁵ correlation-construed-as-causation idiocy. I can't decide whether it's worth it to respond to the article's central claim that the "moralization" of food (i.e., that there are 'right' and 'wrong' things to eat) is a byproduct rise of sexual freedom in the twentieth-century. The very basic cum hoc ergo propter hoc relationship between the moralization of food and sexual libertinism is plain fallacy; the actual arc of the application of ethics to the realms of food and sex is one that was dictated by some common ethico-historical roots, rather than any sort of brute causality. While the article makes some very true historical observations, what's been crafted out of them is at the very best disingenuous. Even giving this much of a response feels like affording the "policy piece" an undue amount of credibility. It feels like talking to a Fox News anchor. I'd be interested to hear other people's comments on the subject and the article.

4. Mother Jones has a number of great food related pieces: MarkyBman has a podcast interview, which has a few interesting tidbits: when he's asked about why he decided to write his book now, he quips that it "has nothing to do with Omnivore's Dilemma;" he says schools should teach home economics again; and, he gives a shout out to fritatta recipes, which makes me excited because I've got some nice pics of a caramelized-onion, red pepper, gruyere fritatta that I made last week and should become a post pretty soon. Another MJ piece is an interview with Michael Pollan, where he talks about being a journalist and activist, takes shots at the agribusiness-supporting Tom Vilsack, who was just named Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, worries about the efficacy and pragmatism of biofuels, and speaks to something that I worried about in footnote 3, the democratization of local, organic, and sustainable food. Finally, MJ has an article about the complexities of the food industry which go beyond mass production vs. local food sources--an important read, if you feel you lack perspective on today's food politics.

Go make hummus. It's worth it.

Love,
Peter

Now I feel like I need another bit of food porn to balance things out. My haul from the Ballard farmers' market:



Beets and carrots. Also in the image is a book I just received, On Food and Cooking, which is a classic on science in the kitchen. Look for more sciencey posts soon!

¹ Hummus.

² Full disclosure: I may or may not be posting to regain some face after Kibbee and Rachel showed me up with a phenomenal looking pizza.

³ That I call hummus "near-ubiquitous" not only shows the acuteness of SWPL's satire, it lends credence to the accusations of classism/elitism that have plagued the slow-food/foodie/organic/locavore movements. At least since the middle of the 20th century there has been a financial divide between good food and junk food. Nowadays, most of the members of these food-related movements don't want to admit that there is financial floor to being part of the club. In many ways, they should be right about this. Take hummus as an example: the ingredients are cheap and readily available. However, it takes time to find the ingredients at the grocery store, and it takes time to put them together into hummus. It seems like both time, and other social factors that influence the desire to make food at home serve to separate the slow foodies from the rest of the nation. How one goes about changing a situation like this is not entirely clear, but some suggestions and perspective is offered by the recent articles in Mother Jones that I link to later in the post.

⁴ In a bizarre case of planetary alignment Kevin over at Food Junta just posted a white bean spread (read: hummus without chickpeas or tahina) recipe. Our moon cycles must be in sync. I confess to being too hummus-smitten to have made a white bean spread, but I will one of these days.

⁵ If you're going to mention Aristotle and Nietzsche, have more background than Bartlett's Quotations at your back. Especially if you're publishing in a policy journal. To say that Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values" was about free love is about as stupid as saying that Einstein invented gravity. Furthermore, the oblique association of Nietzsche, Hitler, and Vegetarianism in the same footnote is about as calumnious as it gets. And please, if you're going to make gestures at having any idea what you're talking about in the realm of philosophy, spell simpliciter correctly.

Eggs Clean. Eggs Dirty.

David Foster Wallace was right* that one of the repercussions of being a college graduate (and particularly, in his case and mine, a philosophy degree holder) is the gnawing desire to intellectualize all of the banalities of life.** And it's a temptation that's hard to resist. I was in the kitchen two weeks ago with the aim of an eggy Sunday brunch. Now, before I get too deep into this I want to state the simple truth of things: I could not decide if I wanted a robustly flavored brunch (think garlic-onion-feta omelet style, maybe some red pepper flakes, buttered toast), or something more delicate (avocado-fresh mozz-tomato poached egg on an english muffin). So, I went both ways. Actually, I went a third way, which may or may not deserve to be indicted by the "over-intellectualization" accusation. The third way, and the subject of this post is Eggs Clean, Eggs Dirty.



It's a standard solution to any dichotomous but non-mutually-exclusive problem: choose both. I had the time. I had the resources. I had the ganas. I would have some eggs clean (subtle, delicate, fresh flavors), some eggs dirty (halitosis-inducing). A yin and a yang on my breakfast plate: o, beautiful balance. The Apollonian and the Dionysian, if you will.*** My breakfast had a guiding principle, a metaphysical foundation, a real theme that I planned to repeat in variation in weeks to come. This, for the skimmers, is where the "over-intellectualization" comes into play. For Chrissake, it's an omelet. As I cooked I flipped and folded and kneaded and tossed around in my mind the now-titled Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty approach to brunch. From there, it grew. (In the interest of full disclosure, no one loves a two-for-one like I do.)

Now, what makes it worse is that I proceeded to preach Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty. Will heard about it. He was unimpressed. Not to let this crush my enthusiasm, I brought it to Kibbee and Rachel. They let me down a bit more gently, "It's amazing you've got the energy to cook two kinds of eggs..." (Note, ellipsis, not exclamation.) I didn't think this was a question of energy, I thought it was a question of an idea having power. It had balance, it satisfied all sorts of urges, I never had to settle on a single flavor set for my eggs again. These more abstract qualities, however, proved less than compelling in the world of dishwashing (sometimes I rationalize K&R's tepid response by imagining doing dishes in their 8" x 10" dribbly-faucet sink). In response, I've backed off the Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty as a brunch for everyone, and rationalized it to myself as a good way to get two brunch recipes on the blog at one time.

Enough thinking, time to eat. Egg brunch, for me at least, somehow has this wonderful ability to become very complicated without becoming too messy or too time-consuming. I really believe that doing two kinds of eggs at one time is less burdensome than it first appears. You don't have to take my word for it, you can try it. If you're sappy, it's a great love brunch: one person makes eggs clean, one eggs dirty, and you split!**** But you have to call it Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty.

Here it is: a case study, theory in action:

{+} Yin

Eggs Clean I: Avocado Mozzarella
Makes 1 Servings


1 Egg
Half Avocado
Ball of Fresh Mozzarella
1 Piece Toast (an Eng Muff seems apropos)
Salt and Pep to taste

1. Toast your toast!
2. Slice your Avocado and your fresh Mozzarella
3. Prepare your egg cleanly: fried, sunny side up, poached (more about egg poaching in the next post).
4. S and P on Avocado on Egg on Mozzarella on Toast.

And, we're done.

{+} Yang

Eggs Dirty I: Spinach Feta Omelet
Makes 1 Servings


1 Egg
1/2 Cup frozen Spinach
1/4 Onion
1/4 cup crumbled feta
1 Piece toast (I opted for nine grain)
2 Tbs Grated Parmesan (optional)
Salt and Pep to taste

1. Toast the bread.
2. A bit of oil and the onion into the pan! When the onions are translucent, add the spinach. Feel free to add some red pepper flakes. When things are soft, put them on the toast and keep it in the warm oven.
3. Do your egg up omelet-style. I just went for the fold-over method with the feta inside.
4. Parmesan on Egg on Spinach on Toast.

Take note: I did Eggs Dirty first as omelets stand up much more readily to staying warm in the oven.

Regretfully Yours,
Peter

* The 'was right' link is required reading. Here is some suggested reading.

** I'm pretty sure that DFW says "over-intellectualize." I don't want to commit to "over" yet because it seems unnecessarily pejorative to me. I expect my reluctance is nothing more than a knee-jerk defense of my default behavior. Whatever the case, what Wallace is actually after isn't a standard, cut-and-dry, conservative anti-intellectualism. Far from it (see: any non-fiction piece Wallace ever wrote). Instead, Wallace is worried that it's so incredibly easy to become absorbed in our own intellectual life. It's so easy to become caught up in the monologue in our heads and not pay attention to (1) what is happening around us, and (2) whether we are spending these moments of onanism thinking about things that really matter. For the real gist of it (and some better-crafted prose), read the linked speech. I just wanted to point out that Wallace thinks there's nothing wrong with a lot of the abstraction and intellectualzation that we do; and, I wanted to point this out mostly to defend my own habits. On an unrelated note, DFW coined one of my new favorite words in his essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again": niagaracal. Like Niagara falls. This word is so money, but lamentably so rarely appropriate.

*** An abuse of terms, if ever there was one. But (1) I couldn't resist, and (2) we were talking about over-intellectualizing . . .

**** I'm convinced that this really sappy here's-how-to-make-it-if-you're-in-love tone comes from reading too many other food blogs. If I offended you, I apologize. If I embarrassed myself, ignore it.