on tragic events (by h.chiurciu)

Today I write here about something not so great that makes part of the art of cooking (and specially the teenfood cooking): the mistakes.

There are a few examples of how kitchen mistakes turned out to be something new and great - like brownies, rotten-cheeses and penicillin. But it's not easy to transform an error into a jackpot, and most of the times when you are trying to make a thing and something goes wrong, the results are pure crap.

When you are teenfooding, that is, when you are free to experiment and do whatever pleases you on the cooking, these mistakes are much more easy to commit. It is sad, but very important not to forget and admit that errors and failures are a very real and frequent part of the cooking activity.

Today, I woke up late and went straight to lunch-making. I ate lots of meat yesterday, so I thought today should be a vegetables-galore day (much like my sundaytime lunch below). I decided to try new vegetables, like the gilo ("Scarlet Eggplant" fruit) and the green bell pepper I've bought on the street fair last tuesday. Everything was going well, the vegetables stirred on olive oil and a little bit of cabbage and spinach already chopped to be added to the pot. Then I commited the most horrible and stupid mistake one can do when in kitchen: I accidentally oversalted it!

I tried to save it, removing all the salt I could, but I knew it was already doomed. So I did the only thing I could do: in the heat of the moment, I chopped a raw potato - as I've heard all my life that, when you put too much salt on something, all you need to do is to cook a potato with it and it would consume all the salt. That works great on something like cooked beans, but not in this case. The chopped potato cooked and melted, and any salt it could have absorbed was again loose on my vegetables.

It was very sad and awfull to eat it: instead of a dish with freshly stirred vegetables, like I wanted, I ended up with my plate full of "Over-Cooked & Salty-as-Hell Vegetable Purée of Death". Thankfully, I didn't took any photos - it looked truly horrible.

It was not my firt nor last and surely not my worst kitchen mistake (the memories from my kaki-with-shoyu red sauce still haunts me). But it makes me really sad to see that all I did was spoil ingredients and waste time. Everything seems to be worst after a mystake like this - the juice was rotten, the mango I had for dessert tasted like cardboard and some prick threw a stone on my backyard. The dishes remain unwashed as a graveyardish monument, a memento to my unability to do anything right.

But one shouldn't let the mistakes of a life put everything down. It is an unavoidable part of being truly alive, of being young, of making things happen. With time, one learns to reduce the chances of making mistakes, as well as solutions for the mistakes that eventually happen.

The important thing is to keep in mind that everything can go wrong sometimes - and that that's the beauty of it all.

sunday-time lunch (by h.chiurciu)

For who doesn’t know it, I am living alone for a brief season.

The big challenge in this home-reality, at least as I see it, is to go from the state of “quotidian client” to “quotidian server” – that is, to become myself the generator of my own routine.

And what could be more routine-ish in a house than meal time, am I right?

With an erratic presence within the domestic events as mine, the traditional “tons of food => meal for 3 days” scheme doesn’t have much use. Cooking individual plates everyday can be quite a delicade activity, but the freshness of each meal gives the one-man-house style a unique charm.

After a very greasy Saturday, almost entirely based upon the uses of animal protein (a sausage tortilla for lunch and a potato & bacon pie by the afternoon, made with the deep-hearted company of Tiago de Mello], I’ve decided to fill my belly with the vegetables and greenery that I have inside my fridge.

Being so, I made myself a beautiful vegetable dry-stew (with no gravy intented), used as a sidedish for the already-introduced Lithuanian pie [originally called Kugelis]: i used onion and French garlic on butter, zucchini and carrots in slices and a handful of well-chopped Collard greens, all seasoned with shoyu and a pinch of sesame oil. And it worked out pretty well!

Also, i had lunch in my backyard! =3

tosta con tomateen (by h.chiurciu)

So today i had breakfast, and it was my favorite in the world breakfast: the spanish tosta con tomate! Of course, i am no great spanish tomatoaster, but i’ve figured out a rather simple way of enjoying this great dish at home.

First, a tomatoe: ideally big, red and ripe, but i usually use any tomatoe i find on fridge. You peel it (wich can be not so nice in a cold weather, if the tomatoe was in fridge like mine), slice it in four or whatever and microwave it! A minute and a half, within the medium potence, shall be enough. It is supposed to melt down in a fresh pulpy sauce. Then i like to smash the pieces to make the sauce a bit thicker and add a bunch of salt and olive oil (in Spain, they use A LOT of salt, but you can take it easy if you want). One could season it with oreaganne, but i dislike the idea for it is too italian and pizza-ish and everybody puts oreganne on everything and i’m sick of it. (added by Tiago: i’m sick of what we know by oreganne: it seems to me that it is very well possible to have really great flavor with a fresh one, not this “dry” thing we have in the supermakets.) So i stick with the original Spanish Flavor: salt and olive and tomatoes!

Then you use it with the bread. You can use any kind of bread, toasted sliced bread or toasted regular bread or even a regular old bread, like i did. I suggest you stick with the toasted or dried-up breads, because of the delicious way the tomatoe re-hidrates the stiff dough while still leting some parts of it really crunchy and interesting to bite. I used a stiff and 3-days-old mini-portuguese bread - portuguese bread is a kind of bread that i have never seen anywhere outside brazil, not even in portugal (added by Tiago, again: in fact i have heard that in Argentina they have a suppose portuguese bread as well, very similiar to ours, but in paris i went to a portuguese bakery and there was nothing about this.); i find the best here in Pirituba, so when you come for a visit you should stop by and try it!

This is what i find one of the worlds best breakfasts in the world, because of everything: it is simple, nutritious, delicious and makes you feel like a classic anarchist! ~ or even a fascist, if thats your zing, because everyone can enjoy a good tosta con tomate!!!

Tiago: But, what about the beverage? How can it fit to a liquidbreakfast?

H: Personally, i dont use to have liquidbreakfasts; in this case, i find the tomatoe all the liquid i need to have. But if you like, you can combine it with cofee or orange juice, I suppose.


T: ok, i do agree. but, what about tomatoes juice? I mean, as beverage.

H: What about it? I use bottled ones to make gazpacho! But that’s hardly a breakfast. I like it, as a beverage, but when i was a kid i liked it more (maybe because it was the best thing i could have on wedding parties). Maybe it’s quite the young drink, now thinking.