Actually…

Cumin seeds appear frequently in my kitchen. They are essential to much Indian cuisine as well as Hispanic foods, likely a cultural remnant from the Arab rule of Iberia. Black bean soup benefits from a healthy dose of the ground seeds and chili is positively insipid without them.

I am a proponent of using toasted cumin in heartier foods as the complexity the heat induces imparts a wonderful depth and richness. Toasting the seeds is a bit of a trade off though, as the heat drives off or decomposes many of the essential oils that give cumin its distinctive flavor. Thus you may want to mix toasted and untoasted cumin in your preparations.

Properly toasting cumin seeds is something of a dark art. Like roasting coffee, there is a sweet spot measured in seconds to maximize the effect. Too little time and you will fail to awaken the depth of flavor; too much and you will evoke an unpleasant bitterness. Luckily, the later is easy to determine because the seeds will take on a espresso bean color and will emit an acrid smell.

To toast the seeds, first you need a heavy skillet or sauté pan. Avoid using a non-stick pan as the high heat required can produce toxic gases. I like using aluminum core stainless. The key is to have a pan heavy enough to keep high even heat. Cast iron will work fine in this regard, but the black color can make it difficult to see the desired final color of the toasted seeds. I suspect that a more even toasting can be achieved in the oven, but the constant checking needed toward the end of the process renders its use ineffective (for me).

It is important to work in small batches. I use no more than 2 teaspoons of seeds for a 6 inch pan. The important thing is to get a single layer on seeds across the cooking surface. For most home recipes this isn’t likely to be a problem as it should be rare to need more than a tablespoon.

Finding the correct heat setting on your cook top is a little tricky, doubly so for electric ranges. To find the best setting, heat your pan on the lowest setting for several minutes then add the seeds. Cumin seeds have an amazing quality that they simply will not brown below a certain temperature, about 350°F. Once you have determined that the seeds are not browning, after about 30 to 60 seconds, increase the temperature slightly and repeat the process. Once you see the seeds begin to brown, you should be able to go straight to this cook top setting when toasting cumin seeds in the future.

Once the seeds begin to toast, they will take on a increasingly darker brown color. Toss or stir the seeds frequently. If the seeds start to jump and pop, the heat is too high so back it down. The closer to the end you get, the more you will need to stir or toss. When the seeds take on the color of a medium roast coffee bean, you are done. Immediately dump the seeds onto a plate or sheet pan to crash the temperature.

The real trick here is determining the correct color. You are going from a brown color to a brown color so any determination is going to be largely subjective. Also if you are browning slowly, and if you are doing it correctly you will be, the mind will play tricks on you, convincing you that the color isn’t really changing. For this reason, I recommend having a small bowl of the “raw” seeds nearby while toasting for quick comparisons.

Like coffee, toasted cumin seeds will lose their potency quickly with time, so don’t toast them more than 8 hours in advance if you can help it and grind them in a spice grinder when needed. To reiterate, use the ground toasted seeds immediately after you grind them to maximize their contribution.

It takes some practice to get it just right. Cumin seeds are cheap too, so it is worth it to burn a batch or two to know the site and smell. Chances are you’ll do it a couple of times without trying. Above all, be patient, it is well worth it.

New Flash! Higher gas price do make people drive less. Really shocking to find out that economics works.

I can hardly wield a shish kabob skewer without drawing blood. I was always surprised there weren’t rashes of burn victims and accidental dismemberments in the Star Wars movies.

A very long time ago , Google commented to supporting SIP with Gtalk. Well with three years running, there is no SIP interoperability with Gtalk and Intenet voice is still a mess. What’s worse, is that few people seem to be caring.

SIP is used extensively, if not almost exclusively, through the telecom world for IP voice. Also it has the ability to be completely distributed like email. Why has it not been widely adopted for Internet telephony?

Very little of what I cook is purely of my own invention. The following recipe sprang forth from my kitchen several years ago with no external direction (to my knowledge). Being at the time almost completely ignorant of Mexican cuisine, I named the concoction “Mole Poblano” meaning Poblano Chile Sauce, not knowing that the proper sauce by that name has a deep long rich history, and is damned good to boot. But the name caught on around the house, so instead of changing it, I opted to sprinkle in some quotes.

The sauce has a similar character to tomato sauce, and as such can be used similarly. We make simple pizzas using it with Monterey Jack cheese. It is a great braising base for chicken or pork. I also like it straight on grilled marinated meat, like kabobs, although I add a little Worcestershire sauce for this application. For course, it substitutes for other sauces extremely well in making enchiladas.

I almost forgot; this sauce also makes an outstanding foundation for chili.

Ingredients:
1 tbl. cumin seeds
1 tbl. ground mild chile (such as mulato)
3 poblano peppers
1 red bell pepper
1-3 fresh jalapeños (optional)
1 large onion
1 tbl olive oil
1 tbl. tomato paste
1/4 c. red wine
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tsp. salt
pepper to taste
1/2 c. vegetable or chicken stock (roughly)

Directions:
Toast the cumin seeds in a small sauté pan over medium heat. When the seeds are dark brown and smell fragrant, remove from the heat and grind into a fine powder. You can grind your dried chile at the same time if you like.

On a gas cook-top*, char the poblano, red bell, and jalapeño peppers. Place in a glass or metal bowl and cover (I use a plate to cover) for 15 minutes. Roasting and seeding the jalapeños will knock some of the heat out of them, but you may wish to omit them altogether depending on the tolerances of you audience. If they can stand it, I recommend keeping them in as they uniquely elevate the flavor of the final sauce.

After the peppers have steamed and cooled, seed them and scrap off the charred skins. I strongly recommend wearing latex gloves for this operation. Many people rinse the skins off of flame roasted peppers, but I find this also washes away a lot of the caramelized sugar, and thus a lot of flavor. It does take longer to scrap than rinse, but it is worth it. Dice the flesh of the peppers and set aside. If you are lucky you will also find about a tablespoon of yellowish syrup in the bottom of your steaming bowl. Be sure at add that to your diced peppers. It is flavor gold.

Thinly slice the onion into half-moons**. Place a medium sauce pan over medium heat, then add the olive oil. After the oil comes up to temperature, add the onions. Cook slowly, with frequent stirring until the onions are thoroughly browned. Add the garlic and sauté for thirty seconds.

Add the tomato paste, and mix thoroughly. Stir vigorously being careful not to let the mixture burn. Once the tomato paste has cooked out (about 1.5 minutes), add the red wine. Reduce to near dryness.

Add the diced peppers, cumin, powdered chile, salt, pepper, and 1/4 cup of the stock. Simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, stirring occasionally. Once cooled slightly, puree in a blender. You may need to add additional stock to properly blend the sauce, but use sparingly as any additional liquid will dilute the flavor. You can use a stick blender, but the texture won’t be as uniform. Adjust the salt and pepper at this point.

Use immediately, store in the refrigerator tightly covered for up to 5 days, or freeze for up to two months. The flavor of the sauce will mature in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

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* I suppose you could char the peppers under a broiler, but then you wouldn’t have an excuse to go out and buy a gas cook-top, which is what you should be doing if you haven’t done so already.

** For the best time management, I recommend cleaning and dicing the peppers while cooking the onions as the onions will take a while to brown. However, the onions will require frequent stirring or they will burn. So if you have trouble multitasking in the kitchen, you should proceed serially.

The last twenty seconds of the new Iron Man movie (past the credits if you missed it) mark the beginning of the end of the Marvel movie empire. OK, maybe that is a bit harsh, but it does signal the theatrical adoption of a marketing strategy that I recommended, much to my own chagrin, exactly a year ago, the super hero comic book cross-over. To illustrate:

1. In Iron Man, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury practically announces the Marvel Studios agenda for the next three years, The Avengers.

2. Check out the IMDB entry for The Incredible Hulk movie hitting theaters in a month. Recognize any actors/characters from a recent blockbuster?

3. Marvel announced yesterday the lineup for the next three movies, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and (surprise) The Avengers.

4. Guess who is featured in the Avengers movie: none other than Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America, and Thor from the five previous Marvel features.

I have to say that I have a soft spot for the Avengers. Issue number 4 from way back in 1964 is a perfect example of why Marvel eventually came to dominate the comic, and eventually the comic movie, domain. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby took a World War II era one dimensional smash and thrash “the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi” patriot character into an introspective regret-filled authority-questioning badass with an indestructible shield. That is to say, they made Captain America interesting.

On at least one occasion I asked for a series of Avenger based movies. But now, as I am prone to do, I am questioning whether all this cross-linking of the Marvel movies from now to 2011 is such a good idea. Soapoperatic crazed tween geek males might have a tolerance for such things, but adults shelling out 30+ bucks for a night out to the movies are probably going to get a little tired of being driven back to the theaters to see what happens next. Even my psycho ex-comic-book fanboy self is already grumbling about it.

Most politicians, regardless of affiliation, sooner or later insult my intelligence. That politician must be repudiated in the strongest terms and thereafter in my mind disregarded. Luckily when a politician loses my respect, there wasn’t much to lose.

For example, on September 1, 2005 President George Bush publicly stated that he didn’t feel anyone could have predicted the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans. Yet the Hurricane Pam study, commissioned by his own administration, made that very conclusion. But if he was genuinely unaware of the results of the study he commissioned (I sure am glad my tax dollars are going to good uses), there was a resource he could have turned to, found in most of our homes, that made this very same prediction, The Weather Channel. Needless to say such a statement strains credibility to the breaking point. Either President Bush is an idiot, or he thinks I am one. Either way, my brain rejects anything further he has to say.

Recently Senator Hillary Clinton proposed to eliminate the federal gasoline tax for the summer in order to reduce the burden of higher gas prices on the fuel consuming public. When asked how she proposed to pay for this tax reduction, she indicated she would impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Unfortunately no reporter thought to ask her exactly how moving the taxation of gasoline, dollar for dollar, up the supply chain was going to reduce any burden on consumers.

This is analogous to someone dumping toxic waste in the river in front of your house telling you they are going to do you a favor by dumping their waste ten miles up stream instead. The junior senator from New York is either an economics moron or she thinks I am one. In either case, I can no longer hold stock in anything she has to say.

Any discussion of barbecue sauce is dangerous territory. My natural inclination is to launch into the historical background by asserting that it was likely an evolution of combining native American roasting techniques with the English practice of basting meat with vinegar in seventeenth century Virginia. Unfortunately there is little historical documentation of barbecue sauce, thus such an assertion would be highly speculative.

The likelihood is that there is no linear heritage of barbecue sauce. Different sauces evolved somewhat independently across the Americas based on cultural tastes and ingredient availability, with some sharing of ideas and techniques as different communities came into contact with one another. It is a certainty though that barbecue sauce arose out of European expansion into the New World. Tomatoes and chilies were known only in the Americas, where vinegar and mustard were brought by the Europeans.

One unavoidable topic is the classic, but still heated, argument over eastern versus western style barbecue sauce, western style being any sauce originating west of the U.S. Atlantic fall line. Let me at least go on record as saying that I like sauces with and without tomato; they just serve different purposes. In my humble opinion, tomato based barbecue sauces add to the flavor of the meats on which they are served, much like tomato sauce is used in pasta dishes. Tomatoless* barbecue sauces are used to heighten the flavors already present in the smoked meat, much like soy sauce is used with sashimi.

I personally prefer using an eastern style sauce with my pulled pork barbecue because, frankly, it is so damned good it really doesn’t require a sauce at all. I like to think of the sauce more as an unfiltered infused vinegar. As such it should be used sparingly like a truffle oil or saffron water. A little sprinkling of the it on the meat will open up the taste buds making them more receptive to the smoky goodness.

I do not in any way represent the following recipe as traditional eastern North Carolina barbecue sauce. It has a cider vinegar foundation and lacks tomato, but that is where the similarities end. It contains mustard, which is enough to send many Wilsonians, of the North Carolina town not the president, into fits of rage.

Some describe this sauce as spicy. As my five year old daughter sops it up like gravy, I cannot really agree. Vary the size of the chipotle pepper to adjust the heat for your personal taste.

Ingredients:
1 c. Apple cider vinegar
1 large whole dried chipotle pepper
1/2 tsp paprika (smoked if available)
1 tsp fine ground yellow mustard powder
1/4 c. dark brown sugar
salt and black pepper to taste

Directions:
Finely grind the chipotle pepper in a spice grinder. Normally when working with whole dried peppers, I like to seed them. I have just not found a way to effectively do this with dried chipotles.

If you are starting with whole yellow mustard seeds, grind them now. Make sure the resulting powder is very fine. Coleman’s yellow mustard powder will work well in this recipe so long as it is not too aged.

Heat the apple cider vinegar in a small non-reactive sauce pan to 150°F and add the mustard, chipotle, brown sugar, and paprika. If you only have light brown sugar, you may want to add a touch of molasses. Add a little ground black pepper and a pinch of salt. If you brine your pork before smoking (as I do), you must be careful not to add too much salt to the sauce. The level of salt needed will vary depending on the saltiness of the target meat.

Whisk to incorporate and let steep for 5 minutes at that temperature. This level of heat is sufficient to dissolve the sugar and extract the flavors from the ingredients into the vinegar without damaging the final taste.

Remove from the heat and let come to room temperature. I like to store in glass jars, as I have (unfounded) concerns that the vinegar reacts with substrates in plastic. Strictly speaking, the sauce does not require refrigeration, but I put it in the refrigerator anyway. Wait at least twelve hours before using.
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* I don’t like the term “vinegar based barbecue sauce” because most sauce, either with tomato or without, have vinegar in them.

Anthony Bourdain once wrote that the stink of failure will hang over a location long after a restaurant closes, tainting the chances of any subsequent establishment trying to operate there. I don’t know if 210 West Water Street in Charlottesville suffers from this curse, but Cassis seems to be having trouble airing out the scent of decay from Metro, the one-time crown jewel of the downtown restaurant scene, even after three years of operation.

I knew we were in for a ride when during the reservation call the host put me on hold, more accurately loosely cupped his hand over the receiver, to intervene in a dispute over a customer’s check. After being treated to, “Tell him the menu was wrong. If he balks, comp him the four bucks,” I was set up with a reservation for Saturday night.

The first waft of failure hit us as we walked into the nearly empty restaurant, a troubling sign downtown on the weekend. Despite the light customer load twenty-five minutes passed between being seated and seeing a waiter, with the exception of two idle staff members discussing their post-closing reproductive agenda at Mas, the local (and exceptional) tapas bar. The appearance of the fresh bread was no solace given its distinct carbonized character.

The arrival of the first courses did liven our mood. Fried oysters in spicy remoulade sounds stodgy, but the lightly breaded perfectly cooked mollusks that literally melted in your mouth pointed to a skilled chef. The superior flavor of the oysters too showed the chef’s interest in selecting the best quality seafood.

I am torn about the “BBQ” brisket on a fried polenta cake, though. If I see such a thing on a menu, there had better be some smoke connected to a chunk of meat somewhere. Braising a brisket in a molasses and ketchup sauce does not a barbecue make. I have to begrudgingly admit, though, that this dish was imaginative and tasty. The tangy braising reduction and the succulent strands of meat blended perfectly with the crispy grits.

The salads, though combining an interesting array of ingredients, were way over dressed. Dress your salads in a bowl, people, then plate. Greens swimming in vinaigrette aren’t good.

I was flummoxed by the grouper. The mind refuses to comprehend how such a beautiful piece of fish perfectly grilled could be served atop an assortment of bland cold vegetables. The potato slabs probably were good the previous day when they had been roasted, however by the time they reached the table they were better suited for shuffleboard than consumption.

I am aware that tenderloin of venison is best when treated to a minimum amount of heat, but there is a minimum. Below that point, the meat is uncooked. This should be an easy thing for the Cassis cooks to see, as they presliced the meat before serving. So there is no mistake, when the meat is purple, as was the meat served to me, it needed to be cooked more. Additionally, the silver skin on a tenderloin, even a one cut from a deer, needs to be removed prior to cooking. Otherwise you might as well wrap your food in string tape before serving because it has the same effect.

It is clear that the kitchen in Cassis houses some talent. The thoughtful, if misnamed, brisket was noteworthy and the oysters both in quality and preparation were exceptional. Nothing we were served was misguided, there was just a stunning lack of thoroughness. Burnt bread, uncleaned meat, and old potatoes all point to an absence of standards. If the chef had shown as much concern over the product leaving the kitchen as he had in the product going in, I would be returning. As it stands, I am content to let Cassis go the way of space’s predecessor.

In a word, I dig barbecue. There is just something about slow smoked meat, especially pork, that makes we weak in the knees. So when I found myself in Columbia, Missouri about 2 hours outside of Kansas City, I set out to find a popular smoke pit. Based on a couple of local recommendations, I wound up at Buckingham Smokehouse Bar-B-Q.

They apparently had just moved into new digs, so it was a bit cleaner and tidier than what I am used to in a barbecue joint. This was also the first time I have seen a granite top bar in such a place. The staff though was extremely pleasant and attentive without being oppressive.

The thinly sliced smoked brisket, the meat in which I was most interested being in Missouri, had a great flavor, but was very dry. The sauces supplied table-side mitigated but didn’t overcome this condition. The sauces themselves were good but unremarkable. Generally, I recommend a quick brining of the brisket prior to smoking and finishing in a high moisture environment (like rapping tightly in foil) to deliver more succulent results.

The pulled pork barbecue was a major disappointment, being exceptionally dry like the brisket and not having the depth of smoky flavor for which I look. There is a myth that pork shoulder cannot be overcooked, but I suspect that Buckingham thoroughly dispelled this. It was also missing the level of salt required to heighten the overall taste.

The horseradish coleslaw was quite nice, complementing the brisket very well. It was swimming in very thin dressing though, most likely the result of dressing too early allowing the salt to pull moisture out of the cabbage. The pit baked beans too paired well with the brisket. The sweetness of the beans was well controlled, something many cooks miss, but they were otherwise ordinary.

The smoked Andouille sausage, referred to on the menu as “Hot Links”, was by far the most spectacular item served. The heat and smoke were perfectly balanced while the firm flesh was cooked to perfection avoiding the dryness found elsewhere on the plate. The waitress indicated that the sausage was not made in house, but was smoked there. Regardless its cooking was masterful.

There are obviously some problems with Buckingham Smokehouse Bar-B-Q, but overall the dining experience was pleasant. I can recommend any place where the wait staff is spot-on and I walk away raving about anything I ate. So if you just happen to be in Columbia Missouri and you are looking for a warm comfortable place to grab a beer and dine on some smoky goodness, you might consider Buckingham’s, just be sure to sample the Andouille.