Pretentious tuna salad

I mentioned some pinot noir vinegar in my post on bread and butter jalepenos, but I didn't say much more about it other than how good it was.  I'll tell you right now, the brand is Lucini, and I don't know how it compares to the stuff Alton Brown keeps under lock and key in his cellar (if I am to believe the "Good Wine Gone Bad" episode of Good Eats), but I'm really starting to understand where he's coming from.  But growing up, all I knew were white and apple cider vinegar.  Now?  Now...I'm even starting to appreciate those more.  But I digress.

I'm not a huge seafood fan.  Tuna I mainly use to add protein to the mayo and relish I spread on a piece of bread at lunch, and even then more often these days I fall back on salmon.  However, in recent months I've found myself acquiring through no fault of my own some cans of tuna packed in oil, and I had to do something with them eventually.

The idea was really borne of a comment made by my boss.  I'd mentioned having them and how I tended to prefer water-packed tuna because it didn't have all that fat, even if the oil does taste a little better straight up.  He said "Well, if you just dump the whole can over a salad, you just need to add some vinegar for your dressing!"  So obviously true, it was, that I hadn't thought of it that way.

I thought it would be pretty good, too, since the cans I had contained garlic-infused olive oil, so it should be tasty and heart-healthful anyway; but I never got around to make a regular bowl-of-greens salad with the stuff.  My mom did, however--actually she didn't.  She started with water-packed tuna over lettuce and then made a vinaigrette with the Lucini's vinegar and the juice from one lemon wedge.  I'm not normally a fan of fruit in a non-fruit salad but this sounded delicious to me, even factoring in the fact that when she told me about it I hadn't eaten all day.

So, where's my tuna salad idea?  Okay:  start with your oil packed can of tuna, preferably infused with garlic or whatever other flavors you can get.  You don't need all the oil, but don't try to drain it first.  Spread it all over the inside of a submarine sandwich bun.  I managed to find some that weren't spit and cut a longitudinal v-notch to help hold everything in place, like Subway used to do back in the '80s.  Over the top of that I poured a few tablespoons of Lucini's pinot noir vinegar and pressed the v-wedge of bread back on top to start soaking it up so everything didn't fall apart on the plate.

Man, that was good.  Garlic, a little oil, the pungency of a rich vinegar to offset the fish...I could eat this stuff every day and twice on Friday.  Maybe not, but maybe. I tried it both with and without relish (on separate occasions, of course--what kind of enlightened philosopher would I have to be to have relish and no relish at the same time?), and either way is pretty good; whatever your druthers are.

Oh, did you want some bullet items so it looks like a recipe?  Let me sum up:

• 1 can tuna packed in oil (preferably garlic infused)
• 1 submarine sandwich bun
• A richly flavored vinegar, such as Lucini's pinot noir

Split the bread however you want, if it's not already. Apply the tuna; don't drain the oil, but you don't have to sop it all up with the bread, either. Pour vinegar over the top as you see fit, then put the top of the bun on to help soak some of it up.

That wasn't bad, was it?

Lucini's also has a pinot grigio vinegar, which I found at The Savory Swine down in Columbus over the weekend, but I haven't tried that yet.  I'll keep you posted.

Bread 'n' butter jalepeños

Bread 'n' butter pickles were always my dad's favorite, and while I was partial to dill growing up, I've more recently developed an appreciation for things more amenable to his palate.

Last fall a coworker of mine had a get-together out at his farm and, also being a fan of chiles, had some of these goodies out to go with his stewed beans and cornbread and what-all that everyone else brought  (I made butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies).

Fortunately for me, my coworker had a load of fresh jalepeños that were going to go bad before he could eat them all, and knowing I was the biggest aficionado of fiery comestibles there after himself, he let me take them home.

Fresh peppers are great, but there were a lot, and I had to try my hand at bread 'n' butter peppers.

Fortunately I currently reside near Muncie, Indiana, so canning supplies are still relatively easy to find.  I didn't do a real canning job on the peppers, the directions I was given by my coworker started with "You don't actually have to can the peppers," but it was as close to my memories of my mom making pickles and grape juice and chile sauce as I could get without deliberately going all-out.

I started with 1-2 quarts of whole, fresh peppers; most still green, some obviously ripe.  I chopped off the stems and ran them through my food processor with the coarsest slicing blade.  From what I recall of Alton Brown's lesson on the subject, the capsaicin glands tend to be up at the stem end of the inside of the pepper, and I wanted to preserve those while eliminating the stemmy woodiness endemic to most fruits.

As you know now, I'll generally err on the side of convenience when trying something new, and then compare it afterwards to a more old fashioned or purist or honest method of preparation.  The same holds here:  I got some Ball bread & butter pickle mix and followed the instructions.  Much easier than finding a recipe for the brine, making sure I had all the ingredients, and then doing research on canning or hoping to find a close-enough procedure already published somewhere.  Since I knew I didn't have to go through all that trouble anyway, I just followed a rough outline of the instructions on the mix jar.  I won't give you a blow by blow, but here's the rundown:

1. Place a half gallon jar in a stock pot and fill with water until the jar is full and the stock pot is as close to full as you dare. Put on high heat until it boils. Mainly I wanted to reduce thermal shock at step 4.
2. Combine white vinegar, the mix, but no sugar (the mix has dextrose and there's enough sugar in today's foods anyway--but if you like 'em sweet, don't let me stop you) in a saucepan and bring to a boil.
3. When everything's boiling, find a way to safely drain the jar, and then fill it with the sliced peppers.
4. Pour the boiling acid-brine over the peppers, close the lid, and let it steep. At first some of the peppers will not want to submerge, so after the jar cooled a bit (let it cool on the kitchen counter for a while--don't put hot food in your refrigerator), I inverted the jar for a few hours a couple times. I probably didn't need to, the peppers "cooked" and settled well enough on their own in a day or so, but it didn't seem like it would have hurt.

If I were making pickled eggs I'd leave them alone for a few more weeks, but since the peppers already have a lot of flavor and a much higher surface area to volume ratio, they looked ready to eat inside of a week.  Oh yes, they were, gloriously so.

Tangy, sweet, still hot but not rudely so.  Yum!  Great as a condiment on hamburgers, or as a side with beans or in soup.

But I had an epiphany or two while I was waiting for the water to boil.  I'll get back to you when I've had a chance to do some research, but let me give you a preview.

First, why are we only using white vinegar?  Acetic acid has a tangy sourness and a pungency that aren't objectionable, at least at culinary concentrations, but that's like saying sugar is sweet--it's nothing else, and most people with sweet teeth would prefer some kind of candy with particular flavors to spoonfuls of table sugar or prescription strength fructose.

I sometimes use a malt or red wine vinegar as part of a marinade, or a sauce or fond, and it's an important part of vinaigrette dressings.  I'm finding more canned tuna packed in olive oil and even infused with garlic, so I could empty a can of that stuff over a bed of lettuce and be halfway to salad dressing; so why not put some veggies I might have in the pickled condition into a salad, that have been macerated with a nice pinot noir vinegar instead of some corporate brine?  I'll let you know.

I've gotta tell you, though, that pinot noir vinegar?  I could drink that like scotch.  Brilliant.

Second, why use only bread 'n' butter mix, or sugar for sweet pickles, or dill and garlic for dill pickles? I'm using "pickles" as shorthand for any pickled vegetables at this point, natch.  I'm looking at the ingredients on this jar and it's basically salt, spices, and sugar.  Oh, lookee at this other jar also containing salt, "spices," and sugar...maybe, with a respectable dry barbecue rub like this one and perhaps a hit of Liquid Smoke, we could have some barbecue pickles.... I'll let you know.

Pecan pie muffins

Someone at work brings these in for a birthday/holiday treat once or twice a year.  When I asked for the recipe, she said she'd have to get me a copy later; she always brings in the recipe to share because people are always asking, but she'd already run out.  Fortunately she made more copies and got one to me by the end of the day.

Here it is:

• 1 C packed brown sugar
• 1/2 C flour
• 1 C chopped pecans
• 2/3 C melted butter
• 2 eggs, beaten

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Combine sugar, flour, and pecans.

Combine butter and eggs, and mix well; then add to the dry mixture.

Fill either paper lined or greased mini muffin tins to the top.  

Bake 20-25" or until they test done.

Pumpkin brownies

This comes by way of a human interest-type internal newsletter from what we call a "defense and aerospace prime" I was supercontracted to one summer.  Don't worry, this recipe isn't ITAR-controlled, so foreign nationals are welcome to try it.

Ingredients:

• Nonstick cooking spray
• 1/2 C canned pumpkin
• 1/3 C brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• Whites of 2 additional large eggs
• 2 T vegetable oil
• 1 C all-purpose flour
• 1 t baking powder
• 1 t cocoa powder
• 1/2 t ground cinnamon
• 1/2 ground allspice
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/4 t ground nutmeg
• 1/3 C mini chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Spray 8" or 9" square baking pan with nonstick spray.

Mix wet ingredients--pumpkin, brown sugar, egg and whites, and oil-in a large mixing bowl.  Beat on medium speed until blended.  

Add the dry ingredients (you're not sure about the chocolate chips at this point, right?  Good--hold off on them) and beat on low speed until the batter is smooth.

Now you can stir in the chocolate chips, and then spread evenly in to the pan.

Bake 25-30" or until a toothpick comes out of the center clean.  When cool, cut into squares.

Because it's pumpkin, the expected time of year to have this would be fall, but it's good all the time.  Despite the cocoa, they almost come out more like blondies, but really, I'm not going to argue about it.

Breakfast in a glass

Not a weekday breakfast, though.  Treat this one like a mimosa.

Pour into a tumbler:

6-8 ounces of orange juice

Add a shot of:

chilled bacon vodka

Mix well and serve.

I had some Bakon from Kahn's Fine Wines in Naptown, but you can also make your own--thanks to the Pinterest board from Lindsay Allen at the Editor's Taste Buds.

You can drink it on the rocks, but I always keep my fruit juice chilled and my booze in the freezer, so it didn't need it.

My experience was like first drinking a swig of orange juice to wash down some bacon, followed by the taste of having eaten some bacon after drinking orange juice, accompanied by a shot of vodka.

Eventually I will try a bloody Mary with the Bakon (also from Lindsay's Pinterest board).  Not a huge fan of tomato juice, but I like BLTs and I actually had a pretty good bloody Mary at a barbecue joint in Champaign once that was saved through the liberal use of black and hot peppers.

Colorado bulldog

I learned this one from my brother in law, who was a showtender in a previous life; alas, it was at a now-defunct barbecue joint, and I didn't know him then.  Still, he can show me a thing or two.

He actually introduced it to me and my sister at a cousin's wedding, or rather, the reception.  The bartender there didn't know it but he had all the ingredients and was amenable to learning new recipes; once we had three bulldogs in our hands, the people in line behind us immediately said "Ooh, what's that?"

It is, as they say, or at least as I like to say, dangerously smooth.

Start with two shots or a larger one to one mix of vodka and kahlua.  Standard black Russian so far, right?
Top off with cream, or milk if it's all you got:  white Russian territory now.

The thing that sets it apart is now you add a splash or so of Coke.  I've heard root beer works but I haven't tried it yet.

It's not a radically different drink, and there's not enough Coke to curdle the dairy component unless you let it sit there for a while, but the bubbly sweetness lightens the drink up so it's no longer obvious that you're drinking something that's half liquor.

When we went back up for refills, everybody was ordering them; when we went back again, the bartenders were out.

So I'm in the grocery store and I see one of those little cotton candy machines...

...the ones that are also supposed to take hard candy and spin that out into dulcet, not-just-pink gossamer whenever you feel like having some.

I'm not a huge cotton candy fan, I like it but it's so insubstantial that I feel like I'd have to eat about two cubic feet of it to reach that happy place between sated and ill.  Oh, I've got quite the sweet tooth, but I also like eating to be an experience, and cotton candy generally doesn't do that for me.

Spun out hard candy, though?  Maybe we can do business after all.

Still, I didn't buy the thing.  I'm intrigued but I'm already way out of counter space.

I'll keep it in mind, maybe there's a place for incorporating it into cake batter or frosting or something else clever, but I had another idea.

What's stopping us from using something else than can be melted and spun into thin fibers?  Practically speaking I'm expecting it to be mostly a question of melting point and aperture size; chocolate or cheese might be good, but if the melting unit gets too hot and the stuff might burn or clog the thing up.  Heck, even scrambled eggs might be interesting, if we want to cross over into savory territory.  I'm not sure what for, but...hey, actually, I'm not sure it would be practical to do egg and cheese together, but do them separately and then spool them together for a cotton omelette.

Now that might be something.