Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at September 9th, 2004

My wife bought a wine making kit last weekend, intending to pick the grapes in our backyard and use them to create wine. Amusingly, it turned out that unlike last year when we had so many grapes that we had to give them away, this year we had perhaps one bunch.

Thus, Kristen ended up going to the store to buy grapes to reach the minimum amount needed.

She needn’t have bothered. According to the book on wine making she bought, you can apparently make wine from anything that isn’t nailed down. This includes fruit (peaches, apple, raspberries, blueberries…), but also stuff you’d never expect such as carrots, turnips, potatoes and beets.

I’m mildly interested in trying some of the weirder ones. This interest is mixed with another thought that goes something like this, “If beet wine were any good, they’d sell it in stores, right?”

I’ve never seen beet wine in stores. Not even at one of our local liquor stores whose freezers on the same day contained not only a half eaten sandwich, but also a large piece of cheese that had turned grayish-green from mold.

Vegetable wines apparently don’t even meet their low standards.

For the moment, however, Kristen seems to be limiting herself to grapes. She’s stirring the stuff daily, checking to see if it’s fermenting, and generally waiting for the point at which she can move the wine out of the plastic bucket and into actual wine bottles. After that it will age in our cellar for six months.

At this point we will have to make a choice. Should we drink it all ourselves or should we inflict it on our friends and relatives?

I lean toward drinking it all ourselves. That way there will be no witnesses if we have to throw it all out.

My wife is a wonderful person and I’m sure that she can become quite good at making wine if she wants to, but I’ve done a bit of reading on winemaking recently. Here, as I understand them, are the stages hobbyists go through when making wine:

1. Actually making the wine. Everything seems possible in this stage.
2. Aging the wine. The hobbyist waits with growing anticipation.
3. Inviting your friends to drink the wine.
4. Actually drinking the wine. At this point it is discovered that the wine is not only bad, but it is actually the worst wine made by a sentient being in the history of the universe.
5. Your friends are all very polite.
6. The vomiting begins.
7. You don’t want to know about 7.

So, anyway… The wine will be ready in six months. I’ll tell you more when it happens.

Posted by Jim at August 14th, 2004

Downtown Grand Rapids finally has a sushi restaurant.

Though I noticed it was going in a couple weeks ago, I only realized it was open on Wednesday. As it happens, it had opened on Monday.

It’s at 47 Monroe Center. That’s right next to Grand Rapids’ police department. Grand Rapids’ police department is in what used to be Mackey’s World (an attempt at a children’s mall) and was before that a mall for grown-ups.

Marado Sushi itself is in a space that I’ve visited in several of it’s previous incarnations. First as “Dr. J’s,” a Jazz themed coffeehouse that was sadly doomed from the start. First, because it charged a cover for live music while free live music was going on just a block away at an open city amphitheater. Second, because it tried to be a nightclub that served coffee. You can markup alchol much more than you can coffee.

The second restaurant was a combination sandwich shop/coffeehouse. It was also doomed, competing with a restaurant that did exactly the same thing just across the street. Also, it occupied a space much larger than it needed for what it did (large enough to host Jazz bands…) and I’m pretty sure they were paying rent by the square foot.

Still, you’d think that a place that sold coffee and donuts and was located next to the police department would survive.

So now we’ve got Marado Sushi in that same place. The sushi seems good. At least it did when I got take out on Thursday. I bought the very cheapest assortment of sushi they sell (10.95). The woman who took my order seemed unsure that I would be full on something that small and gave me a house salad for free. It turned out to be 6 pieces of sushi plus a tuna roll (cut in 6 pieces) plus the salad. For me at least, that’s filling enough for lunch.

Apparently, it’s the first time that the cook/owner has actually run a restaurant. Previously, she’s run a sushi stand (something like that). They’re currently still figuring out the system for getting the food to the diner in reasonable time and how many waitresses they really need.

Once they get their system down, it seems possible that they’ll survive. More spaces seem to be occupied downtown. The old Steketee’s department store looks like it will become the local offices for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The new art museum will be a short block away. This kind of professional, cultural environment might bring enough people who like sushi downtown.

At any rate, I hope so.

Posted by Jim at July 4th, 2004

It turns out that toddlers will eat Thai food. It just has to be the right kind.

Today’s lunch included cod, red Thai curry, coconut milk, green beans and rice noodles. I did not quite follow the recipe exactly. The bean sprouts that were supposed to be part of it had been in our refrigerator a bit too long and Kristen didn’t want to deal with them. So, I threw them out.

I also put in less than half the required amount of red curry (4 teaspoons as opposed to 3 tablespoons). It still burned. Not unbearably, but the taste definitely stayed in one’s mouth.

Nonetheless, Abby (3) and Rebecca (2) still ate the stuff. I’m thinking that the primary reason was that they both really like noodles a lot because they don’t have any great fondness (or hatred for) fish. It also can’t be the green beans because those were completely ignored.

To my shock, Rebecca actually picked up her plate and tried to drink the sauce. The sauce (composed of fish stock, coconut milk, nampla and the curry) was the single most spicy part of the curry.

She showed no sign that she was drinking anything that was at all spicy. It’ll be interesting to see what she eats as an adult.

Posted by Jim at June 19th, 2004

I do almost all of the cooking in my house. As someone with a background in social science (sociology, psychology, anthropology), Biblical studies, and a general interest in other cultures, I tend to lean toward learning about ethnic cuisines as opposed to learning techniques for making a specific type of food (bread, cake, soups…).

Given the amount of time I actually have to cook, I should be getting cookbooks named things like “Simple, Easy, Fast Reciepes for the Clueless Cook” or perhaps “Recipes from Foriegn Countries That Children Will Actually Eat.”

I actually lean toward cookbooks that have names like “The Complete Indian Cookbook” or “(Insert Ethnicity Here) Cuisine.” The are generally thick, have no pictures, plenty of text, and extensive explanations about how the climate, cultural beliefs, and thousands of years of history contributed to the creation of the meals found within the book.

They generally include glossaries describing the ingredients. Generally, you will need the description.

Titles like “Chinese/Indian/Korean/Whatever Cuisine” do not actually convey the contents of the books. They should actually have names along the lines of “Meals Requiring Obscure Ingredients Not Found Anywhere Near You” or “Recipes That Assume You’ll Start Two Days in Advance.”

In short, they are the cookbook equivalent of O’Reilly books, describing obscure meals much as your average O’Reilly book describes unix (the least intuitive operating system ever) or certain programming languages/techniques. One difference might be that these cookbooks put more of an emphasis on the authenticity of the ingredients.

My most recent cookbook is a pretty good example of stuff I like. Its named “Lebanese Cuisine” and appears to include meals that are made more or less as they would be made in Lebanon. Most of them look very good, but, it does include a few meals I will probably never get up the nerve to make.

That group includes:
Snails (live snails preferred, they die in the process of being boiled)
Eggs Fried with Chicken Giblets
Lamb Tongue Salad
Brain Appetizer
Brain Omelet
Raw Kibbi (i.e. raw ground beef)

Nonetheless,I can’t help but be curious. Perhaps I can find a restaraunt that includes a few on their menu.

Posted by Jim at April 8th, 2004

Over the last two weeks, I’ve made four meals that involved Thai food. I’ve been curious about it and Kristen bought me a Thai cookbook in February, but I hadn’t really thought much about it till recently.

Some observations:

1. Thai food seems to make a lot of use of lemon, lime, ginger and coconut. Almost all the food I’ve made so far contained at least 3 of those.

2. Green curry paste burns. Early this week, I made a beef curry. It required 4 tablespoons of green curry paste. Though it was great stuff (both Kristen and I liked it), it was closer to inedible than it ought to have been. I checked the cookbook later to see if I might have put it too much. I didn’t. I’m currently thinking that people in Thailand like their food much like people in India do–burning hot. The Thai use more fish sauce though.

3. As for nam pla (fish sauce), I am currently meditating on various brands. I most recently bought fish sauce from the local grocery store. It looks very much like ethnic food packaged for US use. It’s kind of reddish in color, but slightly transparent.

The last time I bought fish sauce was at Saigon Market, a local Vietnamese grocery. That sauce was obviously shipped straight from Vietnam. It was silver and black in color–similar in color to the rotting fish that lie on the beach of my hometown most summers.

I can’t help but wonder which is more authentic, but bearing in mind that the flavor seems the same, it’s a bit of a moot point.

4. Here’s something I’ve never had to do before: brown dry rice in frying pan, grind it up in a coffee grinder and mix the resulting powder into ground beef. It turned out just fine, but I’d never have come up with that myself.

I may write more about Thai food when I’ve had time to cook more of it. We’ll see. I’ve also got a mostly unread Japanese cookbook I’m tempted to actually use.

Posted by Jim at March 22nd, 2004

Our church does something called “Dinners for Eight.”

The core idea is that 6 or 7 people are assigned to go to someone’s house for dinner, creating a semi-organized potluck. The host organizes the categories of people’s contributions (for example: salad, side dish or dessert) and does the main dish.

We hosted and I did the main dish. In this case, the main dish turned out to be “Daube D’Avignon” or something like that. It is a lamb stew. The meat is marinated in red wine and cognac, flavored with thyme, garlic and onion, cooked for 5 hours in the oven, and served over buttered noodles.

I replaced lamb with beef, but it is still wonderful stuff.

Unfortunately, you sometimes pay for what you enjoy. The juices boiled over and baked on to the cassarole dish, making a hard brown crust on the outside of the dish and a hard black crust on the bottom of the oven.

I dealt with the dish by soaking it for almost 12 hours. The water turned brown, but ultimately the crust came off.

I am still trying to figure out the best approach toward dealing with the oven, but, soaking (alas) seems out of the question.

Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2004

Kristen and I postponed Valentine’s Day one week.

When we did celebrate, we went to San Chez Bistro.

San Chez Bistro serves Tapas foods. What’s that? A long time ago Spanish bartenders started putting food on top of the drinks they served. Tapas is the cuisine that developed out of that idea.

They don’t balance it on top of the mugs anymore, but it is interesting. The portions are small. You order several different dishes and find that you’re full faster than you’d expect. That’s the good news. You also spend money faster than you’d expect. It’s one of the more expensive restaurants we go to.

That being said, it’s cheaper than good sushi.

San Chez serves a mixture of Spanish, Carribean, and Mediterranean food.

Here’s what we had:

1. A black bean, corn, red pepper, and cream salsa.
2. Pheasant and snake sausage.
3. An asparagus cassorole, placed on toasted bread.
4. Flan (for dessert)

I don’t know what kind of snake was in the sausage. The server may have said rattlesnake once, but the menu wasn’t specific–and the crowd was noisy, so I may have been hearing things.

Oh… And to drink… double chocolate stout.

It was all good.

One cool thing about San Chez is that the waiters actually know what they’re talking about. They can intelligently talk about the effects of different types of containers on beer. They also know about the food and can explain what certain things are.

I recommend San Chez to all–assuming you aren’t bringing kids and assuming you’re willing to try foods you’ve never heard of before.

Posted by Jim at February 20th, 2004

We go to more restaurants than we ought to.

I do all the cooking, and, when I work late, eating out becomes a necessity. Tonight was one of those nights. The eggplant that I bought for a meat and eggplant curry had become slimy. Rather than waiting for me to go to the store, we went out to Miller’s.

Millers’, like Travellers’ Club & Tuba Museum in Lansing, used to be (in the late 1800’s) part of a chain of ice cream parlors. It still serves ice cream (at least 30 flavors). It also serves what I’d describe as diner food–burgers, fries, beef, mashed potatoes, and deep fried shrimp.

But wait, as they say in the Ginsu knife commercials, there’s more. They also serve breakfast all day. And… Owing to nature of the multi-cultural society we live in, the new owners are originally Lebanese. Thus, Millers’ now serves Lebanese food too.

It’s both good and cheap. We generally get out for under $20 for two adults and two kids.

Where is this wonderful place? Here.