Dan’s Blog

In a startling throwback to the half-assed vegetarianism of my early twenties, I made a pretty decent jerked seitan appetizer for an Oscar party Jessica and I hosted last Sunday. The basic idea was to make small seitan cubes, and serve them with pineapple cubes of a similar size to create a nice spicy / sweet contrast. Since it’s all cube-style, toothpicks can be involved, meaning that the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where people are standing around and don’t have easy access to utensils. And since it’s seitan, the preparation is suitable for cocktail parties where vegans are standing around and won’t eat animal products. (Will I travel great rhetorical distances for the sake of parallel sentence construction? You bet.)

The first step is to follow the seitan recipe from the post punk kitchen. They don’t include any pictures, because if they did, they would look like this:

Go ahead and pretend that that’s something you want to eat. It looks more like the end result of a particularly excruciating round of any number of bodily processes than food. That said, it’s tasty.

The next step is to squeeze out the liquid and cube your seitan. You want your seitan deeply jerked, and the drier you get your seitan prior to adding the marinade, the deeper the jerk flavor will penetrate, so don’t be shy with your squeezing and pressing.

Now add a jerk marinade of some kind (I used the jerk seasoning from Penzey’s, which definitely saved time) and bag up the result in a nice ziplock. Let it marinate for a day or so.

Finally, cook it up in a pan over high heat, or, if you can, on the grill or in the broiler. You want a nice crust on the outside — which is easier in a regular pan than a non-stick pan — and you want them to be dry-ish in the middle, or they’ll get soggy and mushy as they cool. Plate ‘em up with some pineapple cubes of roughly equivalent size, and stick toothpicks in them. Enjoy.

While shopping at the Giant this weekend, I noticed a bunch of bruised, green oranges under plastic. Upon closer inspection, it appears that Giant has has a sense of humor about its nastier products:

Thanksgiving has come and gone, but the food stays with us, in our refrigerators, freezers and thighs. As promised, here’s the post-mortem.

The heritage bird that Blair landed for us was great; nice flavor without being overly gamey. The roasting instructions I had were for top heavy birds, rather than the mature, thick-thighed Kansan from Hertiage Foods USA that made its way to Brooklyn’s Bierkraft. The breast meat wound up somewhat dry, which was a bit disappointing; thankfully there was a whole mess of gravy to remoisten the meat.

The sausage/polenta stuffing worked out well, thanks in large part to an aggressively meaty brown chicken stock. Also, I did the polenta day in advance, using regular cornmeal instead of quick-cooking polenta, but retaining the 1:3 corn:water ratio, rather than the traditional 1:4 ratio. I also added fontina cheese, because fontina is del.icio.us.

The Persimmon-Cranberry Sauce was as expected; I think one the persimmons may have been not so good, though. I don’t know what persimmons taste like.

As it turns out, I didn’t need to make the Cornbread Casserole and Butternut Squash, Mushrooms, and Ancho Mole, but man is this a good recipe. Traditional pain-in-the-butt fancypants magazine vegetarian entree — “First cut up 7,000 things, then make a sauce that requires a food processor, then a stew, then cornbread, then combine it all and bake it.” All told, though, it’s healthy and worth the effort. The mushrooms are pretty muted (I used oyster mushrooms and a couple of portobellos) and the mole could use a little more spice, I think. And if you’re not a vegetarian, use stock instead of water. Duh.

Also, Blair made some extra delicious stuff. Highlights include a gluten-free pizza topped with shrimp, cocktail sauce and cream cheese; a cocktail involving champagne and Pom (called “Pom-paigne” (I made a “Common Sense” joke that didn’t go over very well)); sweet potatoes; and a pumpkin pie that was awesome.

But obviously the best and most important part of T-Day was the company — Jessica’s family — and they were wonderful guests/company. The fact that everyone was easy going really made hosting fun, and the fact that everyone helped out (going so far as to leave our kitchen cleaner than when they found it) really made a huge difference.

The other night I tried out the Polenta and Sausage Stuffing in preparation for hosting Thanksgiving. There were some problems. One was the consistency. Another was the texture. The final one was the flavor.

Let me back up. What makes stuffing delicious is that it is light, fluffy, and incredibly greasy. The strongly refined carbohydrate base (white bread, traditionally) combined with animal fat is like a slightly sweet lard suspension. Maybe you have some crunchy elements — like celery — but this is a dish that’s fundamentally about light, mildly sweet fat.

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One of the nice things about being 26 is that, foodwise, I’m not associated with a single dish or set of dishes. This means that it’s not yet part of “being me” (or, less charitably, “performing myself”) to bring, say, homemade pickled tomatillos (”I brined them myself. The key is salt.”) whenever presented with bringing something to a potluck or hosting something.

I’ve yet to call anything I make “my patented ____” and that’s all well and good, until something like Thanksgiving rolls around and I’m one of the people responsible for setting the menu and preparing the food. Because one of the joys of Thanksgiving is knowing that it’s traditional. For me, it’s eating my mother’s mussel and tortalini salad and my aunt Angela’s garlic mashed potatoes while watching the North Quincy Red Raiders take on the Quincy Presidents.

So between now and T-Day, I’ve got recipes to test from myriad magazines, but this may be the wrong way to go, as Thanksgiving is a classic meal, and “Classic Periodical” sounds a bit like an oxymoron.

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