Roving Gastronome: The Blog

In the same way that I only got a grill a couple of weeks ago, I just managed to perfect my zucchini bread recipe with the last two fresh zukes in the tristate area.

And in the same way that I always thought I was normal growing up, and then it turned out I totally wasn’t, I first went looking for a zucchini bread recipe in Joy of Cooking. It’s a standard recipe, you know? I was a little disturbed to see it wasn’t in there. I guess it’s a standard only if you grew up in 1970s New Mexico, and you had a garden that disgorged 800 tons of zucchini every fall. In that alternate hippie universe, zucchini bread is just as normal as zucchini chocolate cake, for instance.

The disappointing thing about zucchini bread, as I discovered while tinkering with some recipes I found online, is that one loaf uses up only one medium-size zucchini.

Even this one turned out to be a tiny bit too big, but believe me, I shoved all that shredded zucch into the batter. What was I going to do with the extra?

With the smidge extra zucch, it still bakes up just fine, but isn’t quite as fluffy.

And lord knows it goes down just fine too.

After making several loaves, I think I’ve made some breakthroughs. Two secret ingredients: walnut oil and nutmeg.

The nice thing about walnut oil is that you get a nutty ambience without the nasty texture of baked walnuts. Also, by using oil in the batter, I have no qualms about putting butter on the finished product. (Not that I would anyway, but this way I can eat it for breakfast and feel especially dandy.)

As for nutmeg: I like it. I think too many baked goods rely on cinnamon too heavily, as a little crutch. Nutmeg is just more interesting. I thought I used a tad more nutmeg than called for, but when I actually measured I saw that I used about four times what’s called for in other recipes. (And why don’t recipes ever tell you how much of a whole nutmeg to use, while they’re advising you to grate it fresh? Who in their right mind grates the nutmeg _then_ measures it?)

Try it, you’ll like it. If you can find any zucchini left.

Secret-Ingredient Zucchini Bread

1 large egg
2/3 cup sugar (make a little of it brown sugar, if you like)
1 teaspoon vanilla (or more)
1/3 cup walnut oil
1 1/2 cups shredded zucchini (about one medium zucchini)
Large pinch salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg (about 1/3 of a medium whole nutmeg; use a bit less if you’re using pre-ground spice)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, if that
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour a standard loaf pan (5-by-9-inch). In a large bowl, whisk egg, sugar and vanilla together until well blended (but don’t worry about dissolving sugar). Add walnut oil and stir to combine, then add zucchini and stir to coat well. Sprinkle over salt, nutmeg and cinnamon and mix, then add baking soda. Add the flour in three batches–don’t go crazy mixing in the last batch, as the texture of the bread is actually a little fluffier if you don’t overwork it. The batter will be pretty thick. Pour it into the loaf pan and bake for an hour. Remove from oven and let cool in pan for about 10 minutes, then remove and let cool on a rack. Serve with salted butter.

A couple of years ago, I ranted about the utterly heinous Pistilli conversion over by Astoria Park. Due to the suckitude of Yahoo, all the brilliant comments are now lost, but at least I don’t feel alone in my loathing of Pistilli and its distinctly horrible aesthetics.

But bitchery always has a price. Now there’s a Pistilli project going up on the very next block from me.

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Tal forwarded me this Straight Dope column about circus peanuts. I do not like them. They are a disturbing texture and just plain taste bad.

Buried in the middle of the column is this:

“Over the years the best-selling item has been orange in color, banana in flavor, and peanut in shape.”

Banana flavor? I never would’ve identified it as that, being misled by the color and the shape. But now…yes, banana. I guess that’s what it is.

No wonder I dislike them. “Banana” is perhaps the worst of the artificial fruit flavors, with “lime” coming up not far behind.

I wrote this a year ago, and forgot to post it after my rage subsided. I recently biked on the east side quote Greenway unquote again. Turns out nothing’s changed–which makes me mad all over again. File under “Mranh”, with all the other fodder for cranky letters I need to send.

On Sunday, I cursed the alleged Greenway effort a little bit, when Peter and I biked to Kew Gardens and attempted to ride through a big park–on an alleged bike path–but never saw any suitable signs to get us on the path. As a result, we biked for several miles, in traffic, lost, in our respective pissy snits, and also failed to make it to the movie on time. Adequate signage would’ve been the easy path to marital bliss–as it was, the best we could muster was, “Hey, thanks, Robert Moses, for actually putting an underpass under one of your motherf–king expressways…and then dumping us god knows where.”

Monday morning, I cursed the alleged Greenway in much more colorful language.

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In a roundabout way, I just really amused myself and got a little trip down memory lane. Randomly, at the end of a post, Cook Eat Fret sent me to the following link:

Shoney’s

Yeah, that Shoney’s. Now click the link. And once you’ve laughed, close the window. Otherwise the terrible music starts–complete with yokel-y whistling–and the pictures of the food start–and lord knows, you don’t want to scorch that onto your little eyeballs.

I’d laugh even harder, except: I kinda like Shoney’s. Or I used to, the last time I at there, which was probably at least half my lifetime ago (that’s 18 years, people–18 years! holy crapola).

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Yesterday’s New York Times had a good long story about the in-house butchering at a group of Brooklyn restaurants.

I got to see the group’s butcher, Tom Mylan, hack up half a pig at The Brooklyn Kitchen a couple of weeks ago. It was illuminating, and I came home with many pounds of meat.

I knew things were off to a good start when Tom introduced himself and said, “I just came from work, so I’m about half-drunk.”

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A few weekends ago, Peter and I went down to DelMarVa for crabs. On our way back, we took the slow way through New Jersey. We needed to stop for dinner, so we picked a town at random–Lakewood–where we’d stop.

Downtown Lakewood, it turns out, is entirely Mexican–except for the Hasidic owners of Gelbstein’s Furniture. I finally got an inkling of what it might feel like, as a non-Mexican American, to have your town demographics shift in just a decade.

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Last night at one of my freelance jobs, a woman I work with was musing on the current financial mess: “I figure, my family lived through the Depression. It wasn’t pretty–but they survived.”

Survival is key. But I worry that people today don’t have the same survival skills they did back in the 1930s. I mean, indoor plumbing was still pretty novel then. People still got blocks of ice delivered, in lieu of refrigerators.

We’ve gotten dangerously soft.

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A while ago, we had a Code Red in the house: We ran out of butter.

Holy crap, I’m shivering with fear again right now.

No–it’s over. It was all just a bad dream. We solved that butter problem.

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Our friend Katie had a significant birthday, which called for dinner. I haven’t been cooking much recently, at least not in a big way. It was very soothing to go through my cookbooks, make my lists, do all the mental tinkering, get the shopping done and get down to business.

First, though, the decks had to be cleared. Tragically, this meant the Spanish ham bone had to say good-bye. He’d been lingering in the freezer for more than a year, and much as I took satisfaction in having a little gauze-wrapped cloven hoof at eye level every time I went in to see if I had any more frozen bananas for smoothies…well, the time had come.

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