His Name is Beansy

March 1, 2000 - November 19, 2016

His name is Beansy, named after a The Sopranos character Matic and I misremembered. In reality, we wanted to name him after Tony Sirico's character Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri but had incorrectly thought that character was in fact nicknamed 'Beansy'.

Days after adopting him, the realization of our error sunk in but was quickly replaced with amazement as the shelter he was adopted from had our intended name right all along - they had named him Paul. He and his three litter-mates (named George, John, and Ringo) and mom (named Jude) were removed by animal services from a feral situation. Since the kittens were too young for vaccinations, the policy was immediate euthanasia but a local no-kill shelter took in the whole lot and fostered all until adoption was possible.

Ultimately we thought it fitting to officially stick with Beansy but unofficially, he went by many other names - Pickles, Pickle Pants, The Great Bon-Zini, Mr. Tiger Pants-Lion Paws, Chalupa Cheetoh, Baron von Fuzzy Bottoms, on and on it went.

Beansy was the very first thing we sought upon securing our first apartment together. He was with us through our education, the beginning of our respective careers, our home purchase, our dating relationship, our engagement relationship and our marriage.

There are far more stories about Beansy than is possible to recount at this moment but I will share one Kodak moment and perhaps more in the future.

Beansy adored crab and believe me when I tell you that there is no adjective sufficiently strong to adequately describe that adoration. His first experience with crab was at nine months old. He paid no mind to the frozen snow crab going into the steamer, but once that briny aroma began to waft through the apartment, he frantically came running into the kitchen, screeching meows and ferociously smelling the air. From that point on, Beansy could visually identify snow and king crab in its frozen form and would linger in and around the freezer awaiting its inevitable removal to the steamer pot.

Typically during meals, Beansy would beg, but in a gentlemanly manner - sitting on the floor letting his interest be known but never pressing the matter forcefully. With crab all such manners were gone - he actively tried to get his body (specifically his mouth) as close to the crab as possible. He would climb into your lap, injecting his head under your armpit in an attempt to intercept crab. He would use his paw to guide your hand containing crab meat away from your mouth and towards his. He would paw at the platter in a desperate attempt to jostle free a leg. It was both hilarious and frustrating as crab dinners became quite challenging.

Once while hosting my aunt and uncle to a king crab feast, we decided to lock Beansy into the Florida room that adjoins our dining room. Beansy continually howled as he was carried and deposited into the Florida room. As we began to dig into the crab, his howls became increasingly more frantic. After a few moments Beansy began to thrust his body into the sliding glass door, rattling the entire wall. My uncle looked over and asked 'is your cat okay, he reminds me of one of those raptors from Jurassic Park'. Of course the only recourse was to shell an entire leg and toss it in the room which too was reminiscent of a scene from Jurassic Park.

Beansy permeated nearly every aspect of our lives for sixteen years and though he was just a cat, he was adored, revered, and cared for to the highest degree possible. He was a terrific companion that provided a lifetime of joy. His is a spirit that Matic and I dearly hope to reunite with again.

Beansy on May 10, 2016 perched on his chair in the kitchen observing the evening's meal preparation

That Funny Feeling (Part 1)

It is odd how one is reminded that they have more numerical youth in their rear-view than in their windshield. Of course there are the normal signs of aging - grey hair, creeks and cracks, increased crotchetiness, an uptick in yelling at clouds. Those symptoms are all expected of course and are typically received without much fanfare or consternation; just a few more dashes of salt in the get off my lawn stew.

Its the subtle reminders of one's diminishing youth that tend to land the harshest. Reminders whose intent, at least on the surface, are not nefarious at all, yet upon deeper inspection, their true intention is revealed - nostalgia. Recently, I have experienced two such reminders that brought just as much glee as sigh.

It was the Spring of 1992. Yours truly was working in a mom-'n-pop seafood restaurant directly off the beach on the east coast of Florida. I was still very much in high school, but had worked in this restaurant for over a year and a half despite being much too young to legally work when I first started.

In short measure, I quickly learned of an underground economy that thrived in the local restaurant scene. A restaurant is supplied by dozens of vendors, ranging from the benign (paper goods) to the lust-worthy (steak, seafood, and desserts). No matter one's craving, satisfaction could be obtained through well-placed offerings to a desired vendor's delivery dude.

I never personally paid much attention to this pipeline of backscratching and pilfering until that fateful Spring when rumor spread that Pepsi would be releasing a clear version of their cola. Back then, Pepsi was my jam, it was after all the choice of a new generation! The idea of having a Pepsi that smelled like a Pepsi and tasted like a Pepsi but was clear as water was simply irresistible. I had to get a bottle as quickly as possible.

Immediately, I began questioning our Pepsi delivery dude, yet week after week we went around and around in the same song and dance circle:

"Crystal Pepsi? I have no idea what you are talking about."

"But come on man, you like work there! You drive their giant truck! You get to go inside their giant warehouse! You are like a Pepsi Oompa Loompa!"

"Whatever dude, listen, your tapped Mountain Dew is pretty low, you want me to leave you an extra one?"

"Yeah, sure, we can use an extra Dew. Listen, all I am saying is should a Crystal Pepsi make its way onto your truck, what can we do to ensure it finds its way here rather than say that crappy restaurant at the pier or in the hands of those rude New Yorkers that run that pizza place? What's it gonna take to bring that Crystal Pepsi to someone who will honor and respect it?"

"Dude, I don't know anything about Crystal Pepsi, hell I can't even stand normal Pepsi. Here is an extra Mountain Dew, I got to go"

"Thanks. Alright, I hear you, listen, all I am saying is that we have something special here. You are much more than just the Pepsi guy to us, you are part of the family here. All I am asking is that you keep your eyes open and don't forget who gave you this box of fried shrimp and hushpuppies for that long ride back"

Week after week turned into month after month of constant questioning and denial until one day when during his normal delivery, Pepsi Dude walked in with a metallic silver briefcase. Now I know what you are thinking - a metallic briefcase, this sounds straight out of a bad spy movie! A blue-collar delivery guy rolling in with a briefcase like that? All that was missing was the obligatory handcuff and chain permanently tethering him to the case.

He put the case down on the counter, looked me square in the eyes, and popped it open. Inside the case were three plastic bottles of Crystal Pepsi. Now mind you, at this point in time Crystal Pepsi had only been announced, not released. Yet here in my work area was a briefcase containing three bottles of this carbonated unicorn.

"They had some at the warehouse, said we could distribute to customers who might add it to their inventory, here you go"

Ultimately, Pepsi Dude gave me one of the three bottles and oh how I prized it. The bottle stayed in my workstation that night, perched like the true prize that it was. The servers asked when I planned to drink it, "maybe on graduation night" I fantasized, despite graduation night being well over a year away.

In the end however, like most fantasies, mine was short-lived and never realized. During the night's cleanup, my beloved bottle of Crystal Pepsi was commandeered by the restaurant's head chef (err cook) 'Big John'. He claimed that the entire staff should get to enjoy the bounty of my windfall. And that is how it came to pass that on a random Wednesday night in a sleepy Florida beach town, the staff of a humble seafood restaurant sat and laughed while sipping a clear carbonated beverage that tasted like Pepsi ... sorta.

To this day, I can easily remember that Wednesday night, even recalling oddly specific details. There has never been however a quantitative realization of just how many years have passed between that night and now. That was until very recently however when a good friend informed me that Pepsi had brought Crystal Pepsi back for one more round.

As you can imagine, a company that last year spent over two billion dollars on advertising alone spared no expense announcing the re-introduction of a nostalgic pop-culture legend.

Front and center in their advertising onslaught - the year of original introduction and poof, just like that, now associated with that epic Wednesday was a numeric reminder that that night occurred in a very different time than the one in which I currently reside:

http://www.pepsi.com/en-us/featured/crystal-pepsi-returns

The second nostalgic kick to the tender-bits is coming very soon, but this one is more of the 8-bit variety!

Poulet For All

Yesterday I presented a recipe that while delicious, is one that cannot be prepared on a whim. In a twist of coincidence, tonight's menu fell on the opposite side of the spectrum.

The concept of roast chicken is quite simple, but its successful outcome can prove elusive to the home cook. I have attempted numerous variations through the years, but this version time and again carries the day as my favorite.

Its inspiration comes from the fantastic America's Test Kitchen but its true origins come unsurprisingly from the country of culinary excellence - France. Classic French rotisserie chicken is prepared over trays of sliced potatoes thereby allowing the savory juices from the cooking chicken to drizzle down over the normally bland starch throughout the cooking process.

Here is what you are going to need:

• Whole chicken, 3-4 pounds. Buy the best quality chicken you can.
• 5-6 russet potatoes, peeled and sliced, preferably with a mandolin
• 4 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Whatever additional seasonings you like. I personally like thyme for the chicken and garlic and onion powder for the potatoes
• Whatever vegetable you like. Tonight, we rolled with roasted Brussels sprouts

Prepare a large cookie sheet by thoroughly covering in aluminum foil, then preheat the oven to 500-degrees Fahrenheit. 

While the oven is preheating, we need to butterfly the chicken. We do this by cutting the back out of the chicken, then partially cutting through the breast-bone from inside the breast cavity. You can certainly have your supermarket's meat department do this for you, just ask for a whole chicken, butterflied.

I like to season the underside of the chicken with a light sprinkling of salt and pepper. Once done, set aside and prepare your potatoes by peeling and slicing into a mixing bowl. 

Once all potatoes are sliced, add two or so tablespoons of olive oil and a light sprinkling of salt, pepper and whatever seasonings you like. Give the potato slices a good toss and transfer to the cookie sheet in a nice even layer:

Now place the chicken directly on top of the potatoes, skin side up. Ensure the skin is dry by blotting with paper towels and get ready to have some fun. With your hands, smear the room-temperature butter all over the chicken's skin. Be sure to cover all of the skin with a nice layer of butter. 

Once your bird is good and greased up, give your hands a good cleaning, then sprinkle the chicken with salt, pepper, and your preferred seasonings. One important note - if you are an over-achiever and are roasting a chicken you brined, omit salting the chicken here:

Place the chicken into the oven and roast for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, rotate the pan 180-degrees and roast for another 25 minutes. Keep an eye on the chicken during the final 10 or so minutes, if it is darkening too quickly, loosely tent with foil. 

Once cooking is complete, you will have a deliciously crisp chicken and a nice assortment of potatoes in varying degrees of crispness:

Allow the chicken to rest for 10 or so minutes, carve and and serve with the potatoes, a nice wine, and whatever vegetable you rolled with. Bon appetite!

But then it would be a bolognese sauce...

Two years, three months, twelve days; far too long between posts. There are a myriad of reasons for the prolonged gap between posts, but detailing those does not interest me at the moment, so lets just jump into it.

One of my favorite hobbies to learn and read about is food, wine, and spirits. I am a sucker for old, long-forgotten cooking shows that can thankfully now be found in remote corners of YouTube. One of our kitchen closets is lined with numerous cookbooks collected through the years. The earliest examples belonging to my mother, still inscribed in her own hand with her contact info as she often loaned the books to friends.

Because my family knows of my love of cooking, when we get together for various events, I tend to be one of the primary worker bees in the kitchen helping prepare chow for the group. This has especially been true during our annual vacations to the islands with my brother and his wife.

On the most recent island excursion we found ourselves having a picnic lunch with an extended group of friends that would be coming by our place for dinner that night. While the group was planning the menu, one member of the group said they would prepare a marinara sauce for our dinner but then said how they love to toss browned ground beef into the sauce.

Never one to pass up some snark, I blurted out 'but then it would be a bolognese sauce' which caused an immediate silence.

"A bolo-what sauce!" exclaimed one which thus allowed me to channel my inner-Frasier Crane as I illuminated the group to the classification of Italian pasta sauces.

A bolognese sauce however is not quite a marinara sauce that one tosses meat into. In reality, a bolognese is a sauce comprised of numerous vegetables, meats, and liquids and employs both low and slow as well as high and fast cooking techniques. There is no singular, definitive recipe for bolognese which allows each preparer to adjust and tweak to personal taste however they see fit.

Below is my current interpretation of a bolognese. Its origins go back to an Italian woman named Ada who was the co-owner of a restaurant I worked in during my teenage years. Ada was fierce, precise, curt, and had an absolute maniacal attention to detail while cooking. She demanded excellence at every step of the cooking process, had an ever-watchful eye and a foolproof palate. She was the perfect person to introduce me to proper cooking and I will be forever grateful that our paths crossed.

First up - the ingredients:

• olive oil - 2 tablespoons or so
• butter - 4 tablespoons or so
• 1 large yellow onion, finely and evenly diced
• 4 carrots finely diced
• 4 stalks celery finely diced
• 4 garlic cloves very finely diced
• 4 to 5 ounces diced pancetta
• Kosher or sea salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 2.2 pounds ground meat (blend of veal, pork and beef – or just beef)
• 1 cup dry red or white wine
• 2 cups milk
• 28 ounces of diced tomatoes
• 1 cup beef stock 

As I said - there is no fixed recipe for a bolognese. What is listed above should be considered more of a guideline than a precise listing. For the bolognese I made this weekend, you will see that I threw in a leek, some shallots, tomato sauce, and used ground beef, veal, and buffalo:

Now for what to do with all this great stuff.

I prefer to use a dutch oven so that I have plenty of depth to work with. Toss the pan over medium heat and once hot, add the oil and butter followed by the onions, carrots, celery and garlic. Toss in a nice dash of salt and a few grinds of pepper:

Give everything a good toss, then reduce the heat to medium-low. We want to sweat the vegetables for a good ten or so minutes, tossing every now and again. We do not want to brown the vegetables here, if you start to see browning, reduce the heat. 

Once the vegetables are soft, it is time to add the meats. We are going to add the meat in four stages, pancetta first, then the ground meats one-third at a time.

Add the pancetta, give a good toss, then increase the heat to medium-high. We want to cook the pancetta through, ideally adding a bit of golden color to it, but your browning mileage may vary depending on how much moisture is in your pan. After about ten minutes, its time to add the first third of the ground meats. 

By adding the ground meats in one-third increments, you are allowing the meat to cook while simultaneously letting the moisture in the meat evaporate. If you were to add all the ground meat in a single shot, the amount of moisture produced would overwhelm the heat in the pan, preventing effective evaporation, and you would more or less boil rather than sauté the meat.

When you toss in the first third, break up the big pieces and continue to stir and toss. Let the meat cook and when the steam from evaporation dies down, add and repeat the process with the second one-third portion of meat. Once complete with the final portion of meat, increase the heat to high and begin to stir and toss the meat as the sizzling intensifies.

What you are looking to do here is caramelize the meat. There is however a fine line between caramelized and burt, so keep a close eye and constantly stir. If you feel the meat is beginning to burn, reduce the heat. Caramelization will typically take 15 or so minutes, but again, stay vigilant. 

Ultimately, you are looking to take the meats from this:

To this:

At this point, its vino time baby!!

Reduce the heat to medium and toss in at least a cup (perhaps a splash more). With your spoon, stir aggressively to deglaze the pan, pulling up any stuck bits on the bottom. The wine will cook out within a few minutes - you can tell this by smelling the steam rising from the pot. Immediately after adding the wine, there will be a definite alcohol burn in the nose, once the wine is properly reduced, there will be no more 'burn' in the nose. 

After the burn dies, toss in the milk, diced tomatoes (and all juice), and beef stock. Give everything a good stir, bring just to the boil, then half-cover the pot, reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting and set a timer for four hours. Yeup, four hours, this is not a dish that is just 'whipped' up on a whim. 

Give the sauce a stir every thirty or so minutes. After four gentle hours of braising the sauce will not be soupy, rather it will have the consistency of oatmeal:

Technically the sauce is 'done' at this point - flavors will be concentrated and married. If you give the sauce a taste, it will be intense, not weak in any way. As you taste, gauge the salt level - it should taste just a whisker on the 'salty' side but not in an unappetizing way. If the salt level tastes low, add a sprinkle, stir, and re-taste. If the sauce tastes too salty, do not fret, we will address that in the next step.

In reality, the sauce you just made is a bit too stiff and intense to eat on its own. To loosen and complete the sauce, grab another saucepan, place over medium-low heat, plop in a couple of tablespoons of butter, then ladle in some of the bolognese sauce. Now comes the fun part - stirring in nothing other than double or heavy cream (you do have a good cardiologist right?):

As to how much cream - that is entirely dependent on how much bolognese you are adding. I can only recommend that as you add cream, you constantly taste. What you are looking for is the point at which the cream mellows the intensity of the stock bolognese without washing out the flavor. Don't worry if you overshoot the cream, you can always add more bolognese. Once you achieve that flavor balance, congratulations, NOW your sauce is done! 

You did make some pasta right? 

Traditionally bolognese sauce is served with tagliatelle pasta, but any wide pasta will do. Go ahead and prepare, then drain and dump straight into the saucepan. Give it a good toss and transfer to a bowl. 

One final step remains and this one is crucial. Grab a fine grater and top your masterpiece with oodles and oodles of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, the authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, not some domestic imposter. You have come this far, now is no time to take a short-cut, you must procure a wedge of the real thing, it is the King of Cheeses after all...