Applied Quesadilla Theory

I have definitely laid this down in print somewhere else.

David’s Kitchen Axiom No. 5: With a little imagination, anything can be a quesadilla.

And I mean it. Given tortillas, grease, and heat, anything in your kitchen can be made into a delightful quesadilla! But wait, you say. David, doesn’t quesadilla just mean ‘little cheesy thing’ in Spanish? Don’t you need cheese?

Oh, America. How little you know!

… Well, okay. You are right, technically. But I am more right, because anything in your kitchen can be successfully encased between two tortillas and cooked with some olive oil in a skillet, and rather than calling that a “pan-fried tortilla sandwich”, I propose the more familiar title. You can call it what you want, America.

But really. When in doubt, a sandwich is almost always your best option, especially when you’re trying to clean out the fridge. I kid you not, this can be done with anything: I made a quesadilla once with leftover tilapia and tarragon cream sauce, and it was delicious. Give it a try. What’s in your fridge right now, for example?

Say you’ve got some leftover barbecued chicken and some steamed broccoli (this is what is in my fridge at present, among other things). In fact let’s see what happens, here! Let’s do this, America!

Okay. Leftover blackened cajun chicken that Mama barbecued from the evening previous. We got some of that, we got some broccoli, we got… oh! Oh hell yeah! We have some jalapeño pepper that I chopped up about four days ago. Ooooh this is gonna be good.

Okay, I like to make my quesadillas primarily about the vegetables. You may have noticed that I am now eating poultry. Well. Yes. Red meat is a no, often enough, with rare exceptions (well.  medium rare exceptions)  But I’m trying to get the entire family to scale back on eating meat, and I think we can all have a little animal protein, so long as we have less of it overall.  So we have lots of vegetation to counteract it.

So note the proportion: three or four parts vegetable to one part animal.  I think that’s probably going to be my general rule of law from now on.  We have, looking like a weather-worn Italian flag (or a brand new and spunky Irish flag), orange bell pepper, onion, and broccoli, with that little sidebar of garlic and jalapeño.

A quesadilla is one of those foods that can just sort of fit around anything in the fridge, like I said; you can clean out the refrigerator with it, you can stretch a single barbecued chicken breast into a meal, it gets lipstick stains off your collar, it’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned, it never needs winding, never needs winding, never needs winding (apologies to Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan).

So a little olive oil and a skillet and I am in business, here.  And I’m not picky; I put it all together in the one pan.

A little cheese, a few tortillas, and you’ve got yourself a sandwich.  I like to squeeze lime juice over it.  Not a lot – just a lil’ spritz.

Fabulous.  It all works out really nice, and tastes lovely.  At least, with savory things.

Behold the fabulous train wreck that was the frutaycremadilla, a concoction J. and I came up with a few weeks ago.

Uh.

That was my idea.  We had a lot of fruit at the time.  And some whipped cream.

Look, I’ll say right now that this was maybe a dumb idea.  But it was a fantastic dumb idea.  (Those are the best kind.)

Yeah, don’t do this.

Sure, it seems like a great idea.  The warm fruit, the crispy tortilla, the soft, cool whipped cream…  … the soft, cool whipped cream.   … Damn it, I should have thought that through.

David’s Kitchen Axiom No. 5: Think it through.

So J. and I tried to make a quesadilla with fruit and whipped cream (and J. decided that it should be a cremayfrutadilla; nomenclature to, y’know, fit the contents), and everything was going swimmingly until that first incision.  I think those are J’s hands, not mine, because A) of the way he’s holding the knife and B) the fact that the backs of my palms are hairier.  Yeah.  Sorry.

J. made the cut, and…

There was splattage.  There was leakage.

The whole thing was a gorram disaster.  I will not post the image of J. attempting to eat said disaster, because it got all over him and it’s embarrassing for both of us, okay?  I don’t even have those pictures.  He does.  … Because I took them with his camera.

-D

Auberginenschnitzel: der Zweite Teil

I told you it’d get crazier.

The set-up:

My sister J. and I have made a veritable bounty of delicious eggplant schnitzel, laid out in detail in the previous entry.

But now we’ve got leftover egg and flour and bread crumbs.

What ever is to be done?

(More below the break)

Auberginenschnitzel

Geshundteit.

I wouldn’t call myself a vegetarian, and neither would most vegetarians. But, in the name of local eating (see The 100-Mile Diet), I haven’t eaten any poultry or red meat for about three months. I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Yeah, shut up. I still eat fish, because that ecological disaster’s a horse of a different color. (I enjoy mixing metaphors, e.g., “I wouldn’t touch that one with a ton of bricks.”)

But to hell with all that. I have adjusted to my semi-vegetarianism (there has to be a better word for that.) with what I see as some level of aplomb. It only took a couple weeks before I got past that first New Vegetarian realization: “Good God! Everything is food.” At first I was going, “Nope. Can’t eat that, there’s meat in that. Can’t do that, that takes meat.”

But the world of plants is so lovely and expansive. Everything we make from vegetables need not be pale imitations of the meatly world. I am pretty sure that the Meatworld is what you call the real-life portion of a two-pronged cyperpunk society. Irrelevant. Where was I? Oh yes. Pale imitations of meatworld, and avoiding such.

Well, put that notion aside for the following experiment: eggplant schnitzel.

No, I’m not a hypocrite; I just play one on TV.

Food is food is food. At least it’s not veggie burgers (and if I have another one of those [phase one of David Learns to Forsake Meat - be glad you missed that], it’ll be too soon.)

It was my mother’s idea, if that’s any kind of cop-out. She’d gotten those skinny Chinese eggplants from the Garden Fresh and said “This should work with these, because they’ve got thinner skins.” I will eventually try this recipe with regular eggplant, and I’ll keep you posted on that front.

The Set-Up

My friend J. associates me very strongly with eggplant. It seems every time I’ve cooked in her apartment, I’ve made something, somehow, that involved eggplant. I figure I’ll do the french roman à clef thing and only refer to people by their initials. It makes me feel important and mysterious.

1. A note on cutting eggplant:

Humility is key.

A cookbook from my formative years – Clueless In The Kitchen: A Cookbook for Teens by Evelyn Raab – declared the Eggplant to be mysterious and inscrutable (perhaps this is why, wishing to be like the Eggplant, I refer to my friends only by their initials.), and not to be trifled with. But just remember to be humble in its presence, and don’t bother with using your big ol’ santoku, as I have done. This is hubris.

When you have a really, really big hammer, every problem looks like a railroad spike. Nobody’s gonna make fun of you if you use a small, serrated knife. It worked a lot better on my eggplant, because the skin was so glossy.

So slice your eggplant into quarter-inch slices, as shown. I’m going to try this again by cutting them into different, lengthwise configurations. Or you try it, and get back to me.

2. Get two plates and a bowl out. It’s DREDGIN’ TIME. I here imagine Ben Grimm (The Thing from The Fantastic Four), wearing an apron and waving a whisk.

So. Plate 1 = flour! Bowl = 1 egg, beaten, with a little water to let it out a little. Plate 2 = bread crumbs. Do the Alton Brown thing and designate one hand to be the Dry Hand and one hand to be the Wet Hand. The picture lies. my right hand was the Wet Hand. What I mean by this is that one hand should deal with the flour and the bread crumbs, and the other should deal with the egg. Otherwise you’ll just batter your hands and build up layer upon later of delicious that you’re never gonna eat.

A light dusting of flour, a quick eggy bath, and then it is to the breadcrumbs with our little slices of eggplant. Don’t feel bad for them. They quite enjoy it. See?

I couldn’t help it. Sorry.

The Heist

1. The Frying

Is everything ready?

Okay, good. Heat some vegetable oil in your favorite frying vessel (I like frying pans. Do whatever you want. I bet this’d work in a wok, too. I’m not picky.) Then place your little slices in there and GET TO COOKIN’.

I wanna say about 2 minutes on each side. maybe less. The key is getting them golden-brown and delicious on the outside – they’ll likely be nice and tender within.

2. The Eating.

Drain, serve, eat immediately.

So delicious.

But the party isn’t over. Oh, no. PREPARE YOURSELF for the second half of the night.

Yep. Part two: forthcoming. You thought it couldn’t get crazier?

You were wrong.

-D

Possibilities with Demi-Glace.

Demi-glace is sauce.  I mean, that’s basically it.  Think of demi-glace, or its knock-kneed cousin, the bouillon cube, as a concrete foundation (or in the bouillon cube’s case, a parquet floor) for saucecrafting, to borrow a Kingdom-Of-Loathing concept.  But yeah.

If you’ve got demi-glace like I had demi-glace, you can do crazy things from Classical French Cuisine.  There’s tons of ‘em.  Let’s just crack the ol’ Jacques Pépin to see a sampling:

* Marchand de vin sauce

* Madeira-truffle sauce

* Chasseur sauce

Stuff like that.

Well, Dad and I made a Chasseur sauce (a hunter’s sauce) over break with one of the demi-glace ice-cubes.  Here comes one now!

Put a little brown ice cube in your favorite one-cup heat-resistant kitchenware, and add nice hot water to it, to get a delicious brown liquid.  Also, drink San Pellegrino (It’s In The Background! TM).

Let me see if I remember right, with Jacques helping out, although we didn’t use his recipe:

I know I started with a roux – which, if you didn’t know, is another one of those Classical French things: equal parts fat and flour.  It also features heavily in Cajun cooking, and it retains a lot of heat very well.  It’s a thickener, and it’s sort of dangerous; they call it Cajun Napalm sometimes.

Anyway, start with a roux.  Then a few shallots, a clove or two of garlic – wilt these for a while, add some diced tomato, some mushrooms, a little chives, maybe.  and some white wine, and a (small!) knob of butter for sheen.  Add the wine slowly, and cook it down – forgive my poor recollection of the recipe; my memory of this is not so fresh.

Anyway, Chasseur Sauce is great for pretty much any kind of poultry; it goes really well with the duck leg I put it on, and I’m willing to hazard a guess that it goes well with turkey and dark-meat chicken.  I had it on rabbit once, at Le Bouchon in Chicago.  It was fantastic.

Anyway, duck.  Duck is amazing.  America, eat more duck.  And less beef.  Actually, yeah.  Eat less meat, but when you do eat meat, try some duck.  No, I’m serious.  Score it, broil it, let all that fantastic fat render out (Save it for something!  Don’t throw it out!  Don’t be a fool, America!).

There we go.  From now on, the object of my addresses will be the country in which I live, writ large.  Hello, America the country, or women named America.  Or men named Amerigo.

Anyway, duck is fabulous, and it just wants a little love and a roasting pan.

What could possibly be wrong about some crispy duck on a bed of angel hair pasta with the chasseur sauce on top?

Maybe I could have used a little French bread to sop up the sauce.  Maybe.

Draw your own conclusions.

-D