mac'n cheese - a classic w/ nuggets

what teenfooding really means to me (by h.chiurciu)

one of these days i was probably fooding when thought to myself about the exact limits between teenfooding and regular cooking - at least when concerning my own experiences.

all the cook-alone/cook-with-friends part is very important; you are not being fed, nor providing solely the food.

but to me the most beautiful part comes from experimenting.
and when experimenting, i think it is important to always avoid onde or another tradition.

for example, whenever i'm teenfooding i tend to plan a dish without the traditional structure, or at least making a new version of the carb-protein scheme. i never cook rice or beans to myself, and always look for something i can make with one pan only.

it is the audacity of being lazy efficient!!

minute-eggs at midnight (by H. Chiurciu)

as some of you may know by now, besides being a Teenfooder I am also a true egg-enthusiast (although not an Eggmäister, such as my fellow fooder Ricardo);

to-night, I felt the desire for a good japanese-style Onigiri - but I had no japanese rice, no japanese skills, and wasn't feeling like driving all the way to the japanese neighborhood on a late monday night in search of an open place which could serve me a decent Onigiri.

being so, I decided to put my hunger at rest with a good and old soft-boiled-egg.
the most common soft-boiling method me and my pals have been using is simply boiling the water and then adding the eggs, waiting for a few minutes [but not too many!] and then opening it's butts with a spoon - the true caricaturesque style, I'd say, and very delicious.

but this time I decided to test my grandmother version: the Minute-Egg:


simply put the eggs with room-temperature water to heat;
wait for the water to boil and THEN count one minute!

it may not seem much, but i felt some interesting differences among these two methods.
later on, I've decided not to dig my eggs with a spoon, but to peel them completely.

the experience was quite something.
the first egg was tricky, alright: I started with the bottom, as usual, but , for starters, the skin between the shell and the white wouldn't peel so easily. when I reached the tip of the egg, the softness of it made me struggle to break and remove the last and narrowest part of the shell.

but, when I finished it... O, great joy upon me!!!
I delicadely held the tiny, soft and warm white ball in my palm... with one soft bite, I reached the creamy, almost entirely raw yolk of it, and felt a great chill down my spine.
yes, I know I sound like an egg-junky or something, but that's how it was.
then I added a small pinch of salt and engulfed the rest of it, stirring the yellow juice with my tongue and feasting like a wild badger.

then, there came the second one.

I felt right away that it was a mistake to eat the first before peeling the second... but there was nothing to be done, then.

I was in such a frenzy, craving for more of that divine sensation, that I just went for the peeling as fast and wildly as I could. the result, my dear friends, was that the second egg was not blessed with the same perfection as the first. fear not!: it was not rotten - but me, O, dear...
my mental balance was completely lost. I couldn't grasp my patience again, and so I ended up with a messy egg, with most of the skin on, and just threw the whole thing down my mouth. not that good.

maybe it was an act of gluttony - having two eggs when just one could be enough;
maybe I was so blinded by my lustfull first experience, that it completely ruined my second attempt;
who knows?

this method of mine, I then realized, is a body-and-mind ritual - almost a tantric excercise.
it may be much more difficult than the spoon-style, but when you are really craving for a fresh egg it can bring an unbelievable sensation.

and having pleasure is also a very important part of fooding. ;)

curry hands (by h. chiurciu)

i love curry, so i like to add it to whatever. like eggs, or soup, or risotto, or noodles.

whenever i use it, my hands smell like curry all day long, no matter how much i wash them.

i keep smelling yummy food on my fingers all day long. and it makes me happy!, more often than not.

what about you?

do you like when your hands smell like your favorite spice?

what is your favorite aromatic spice? is it garlic, pepper, cinnamon?

how does it affect your fooding?

(i love cinnamon also, but i'm allergic to it. so i have to use with lots of precaution.)

doomsday meals (by h. chiurciu)

Tonight I speak of Apocalypse Food.

I've always thought of writing here about this specific kind of kitchen disaster, but never really got the time or the inspiration for doing so. Well, time has come.

From times to times, when I'm cooking for myself, things go wrong in a very peculiar way. The food I make comes out tasting like the end of the world. It has something to do with the classic teenfood freedom, as any other mistake has.

But when when I say that a food tastes like Apocalypse, I'm not talking about a simple accident; I'm talking about some less-than-right choices I make, specially when not in the best mood for cooking or missing the best-suited ingredients for something. Not sure if because of my fowl mood and desperate hunger, but most of times it turns out eatable - sadly, I must say.

The most easily recognisable characteristic that all my Apocalypse dishes share is the chaotic combination of strong-tasted ingredients ("a waste of tastes", like my friend Labaki once told me). These are usually anything that lasts for longer than a week on the fridge - basically condiments, conserves and sausage-like meats (sometimes a barely-edible cheese). All that and absolutely no sense nor sensibility.

For tonight's nightmare, as an example, I fried one thinly sliced onion and lots of chopped sausage on butter. The idea was to make a dry-sauce for my instant noodles so, as I didn't want to open a whole can of pilled tomatoes, I added some dijon mustard and lots of catchup to it. With a sip of water, it became a dangerously looking orange goo.

But that was not enough, oh no! There was something missing, I felt. So, I broke an egg on top of the goo and let it cook by itself, without stirring it. When the noodles were done, I just topped them with this mess. And then I ate it.

Everything about it felt wrong: the sweetness of the catchup and the over-dosed sausages completely obliterated the soft-yolk taste; the color and texture were a total abomination; finally, below all this there was a pile of INSTANT NOODLE.

This is what I call Apocalypse Food.

Fast, easy and awful.

Just like the end of the world.

Russian coffee habit

just a quick note: yesterday I met a russian couple. The russian boyfriend had lived in Brazil for 4 years in his teen's Era. But he did not remember our Coffee.

They said they were severly disappointed by Brazilian Coffee Habits: Too much sugar, Too much Milk, less-Hot-than-needed. (I told him putting milk on it was only one of the varieties possible - but, hey, here i am, denegrating milk once again.)

They enjoyed our brazilian beer Paulistania, blond und dunkel, and we had some bottles. But when it was time for coffee, they just said : nyet.

Notea

How happy we are! Those Englishmen enjoy only one family of Tea, that is, that black-tea family. No doubt Black Tea is a Superb Tea, but… would you look to ‘agriao’ and call it ‘vegetable’? I would not. I state this because of my recent reading of George Orwell’s short and funny article “A Nice Cup of Tea”. You can read it by clicking on the very title written on the last sentence.

Eventhough Orwell’s deceased already, I make my stand on discussing with him a few points, being myself a tealover since my kid’s Era:

“Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.”

You can re-read my third sentence in this article to know what I think about this narrow-minded statement. I’m not fond of fruitish and flowerish teas, such as strawberry (nowadays there is even strawberry+chocolate...), chamomille, pekan, etc., but it makes me sad to think that maybe Orwell and Englishmen nowadays know nothing about the marvellous Mate tea, which I am very fond of, or, say, relaxations that come from Peppermint.

That goes to my second point: the Milk.

“Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea”, says Orwell.

I say: should one put any Milk at all? Orwell has much to say about the nonsense of adding sugarcubes on tea, for it ruins the original taste – agreed agreed agreed agreed – but how come Milk does not ruins it also? I think its common, as in for Mate, to put some of it (in my belief, I think it’s manly a Carioca thing, don’t know why), but... gee wiz, I don’t like it at all.

I had a recent teasasterous experience with Milk, for the night I read the article I decided to mix some of it on my Mate. It may sound nonsensical, but it tasted as if a rubber balloon had been melted down and blent to the tea. Much of the herbal and burnt-down taste of the Mate – that is, the teay taste of it – was gone.

And last but not least: I cannot find myself agreeing with all his spiffiness about the pots and instruments. Especially writing this in TeenFood, I believe one should not be restrained to “not making tea without the uses of a ceramic pot”. Go ahead and enjoy your tea as you should and can and would!

That said, I find Orwell’s article most enjoyable. Maybe it is just my problem that I’m not fit for the english-style drinking.