Short answer: no.

But why even ask the question? Once again, radical claims by  Cook’s Illustrated could not go untested. Cook’s Illustrated #99 had the gall to suggest that one could cook crispy, creamy french fries in just six cups of oil.

If six cups of oil sounds like a lot, consider that usually when making fries at home I use at least 3 quarts—that’s 12 cups—of oil. The reason for all that oil is temperature control: trying to retain enough heat in the oil so that adding a bunch of cold potatoes doesn’t cause the temperature to drop for very long. Temperature control is the key to great fries. Cooked first at 325° for tenderness throughout, fries are finished at 375° for golden, crispy exteriors. Adding a pound or two of 75° potatoes can drastically reduce the temperature of the oil, so the more hot oil the better. In my restaurant days, I remember lovingly adding 70 pounds of oil to the fryer every Monday morning. Nothing you could drop in there was going to lower the temperature by much. Sometimes I dream of that fryer.

How did Cook’s propose to cook 2½ pounds of potatoes in such a small amount of peanut oil? By eschewing specific temperatures all together. In this recipe, ¼” matchsticks of yukon gold potatoes (I usually make fries with russets, but those are apparently too starchy for this technique) are added to six cups of room temperature peanut oil in a dutch oven. You then turn the heat on high, and after five minutes the oil will be bubbling happily. 15 minutes later the fries will have reached the state that is achieved by the usual 325° parcooking step: the fries are limp and blonde but cooked through. Cook’s promised that after an additional five to ten minutes cooking, the fries would be golden and crispy.

I waited five minutes. Still limp. Ten minutes. Not much goldener, not much crispier. Fifteeen minutes. My steak was getting cold. It took a full 17½ minutes of additional cooking (for a full cook time of 37½ minutes, which is not that far off the mark from normal fries if you consider the time to heat the oil). I should probably mention here that the small stove in my apartment is seriously weak on BTUs and it’s quite likely that this prolonged the cooking time. But if BTUs and temperatures were going to be a factor, Cook’s could have gone to the trouble of listing specific temperatures. On draining the fries I was disappointed to see that many of them had broken into stubby fragments.

In spite of their short length, the fries tasted fine. They were a little too crispy and not creamy enough in the center—probably a consequence of the long cooking time and the relatively low-starch potato. They weren’t terrible fries, but they weren’t that great either—I have gotten much better results in terms of appearance, flavor and texture using the traditional two step method and more oil. And even though they used only six cups of oil, that’s still kind of a lot of oil. If I’m going to go to the trouble, I’d just as soon use the 12 cups and make fries the right way. As excited as I was by the possibility of fries with less oil and less hassle, sometimes making a bigger mess is worth it. Especially if someone else has to do your dishes.

On my first trip to The Four Firkins I bought several beers, some that I had read about and was excited to try, and others simply because of the awesome packaging. Maredsous 8 Dobbel fell into the latter category; how could I resist a bottle that looks like this?

At the time of my trip I had not reached the Belgian abbey ale section of The Brewmaster’s Table so for a time the Maredsous just sat on a shelf looking pretty. I soon reached the aforementioned section and the Maredsous specific paragraph:

Maredsous 8 Dobbel derives its number from the pld scale of Belgian degreees, referring to the strength of the original wort. The beer has a beautiful garnet color and raises a rocky tan head. The aroma is terrific, a dance of biscuits, rum, and raisins. The beer opens up on the palate with foamy pinpoint carbonation and a light bitterness. It seems sweet at first but then dries as flaors of concentrated raisins, dark sugar, and dark rum combine with a winy acidity to bring the beer to a long finish. At 8 percent, this beer is a bit stronger than most dubbels.

On the color, certainly, Oliver was right on; this beer is beautiful to behold:

Tasting the beer, I realized my palate isn’t nearly as developed or sensitive as Oliver’s (okay, I realized this long before I tasted this particular beer, but it underscored the point). Where he tastes raisins and dark sugar I tasted a very strong roasted, carmelly flavor. Which is not to say the beer was excessively heavy; on the contrary, it had the pleasant floral-citrusy-fruitiness that I usually associate with ales. There was also a slight bitterness from the hops, but it was not strong.

One of the best parts of this beer was the carbonation—it feels spritzy and alive on the tongue with bubbles that tickle, rather than bludgeon, as they burst. And I suppose the 8% alcohol was also a best part, although as you can see I compensated by drinking a smaller glass. All things in moderation.

A great beer on its own, what got me most excited about Oliver’s description of Maredsous 8 Dobbel were the pairing notes:

A fine beer to match with short ribs, beef cheeks, leg of lamb, venison sausages, country pâtés, and wild boar.

Country pâtés! Anytime I see those words my heart brightens up, my brain starts churning and my mouth starts watering (the increased heart activity may be in anticipation of all the fat and cholestorol one of these pork loaves packs into my bloodstream). I’ll take just about any excuse to make a terrine, and a bottle of Maredsous seemed better than most. Terrine is neither a fancy nor a technically demanding dish—it’s just meatloaf!

I used:

• 1# Chicken Liver
• 1# Ground Pork
• 1/4# Bacon
• 1/4# Pork Sirloin Chop
• 1/2 c minced parsley
• 3 sprigs minced rosemary
• 5 cloves minced garlic
• 1 c blanched almonds
• 3 T Bourbon
• Allspice, Nutmeg and Cinnamon
• Salt and Pepper

The main meats (liver and ground pork) are pretty standard for country terrines. I chose the herbs because they were on hand and needed to be used up. I had two reasons for including  the almonds; I wanted the chunkier texture and visual interest  that whole almonds impart, and we recently overbought almonds so I am putting them in everything. The pork chop was also to get a chunkier texture; I cut it into half-inch cubes and mixed it in with the forcemeat. The bacon is there for keeping everything moist and fatty, and the other ingredients are pretty standard.

I really loved the chunky texture of the almonds and diced pork—I prefer coarse terrines to fine. The almonds also gave the whole loaf a strong nuttiness that makes a great counterpoint to the richness of (lots of) pork fat.

The pork fat was really the force that drove this pairing. The carbonation of the beer was great for cutting through all that richness and lifting it off the tongue. The mildly citrusy-fruitiness had a similar palate-cleansing effect. The very slight hoppiness in the beer was magnified by the herbs, and the herbs by the hops. The caramel flavors that were so apparent when tasting the beer on its own were still there but didn’t seem to add or detract from the terrine. A sweeter or more darkly-roasted dish might prove a better complement to those flavors. But with an excuse to both drink beer and make a terrine, I can’t complain. Not that I need an excuse.

Cooking in a modern kitchen is all about control: I have implements for cutting food into pieces of exacting dimensions; I can measure volume and mass;  I apply precise amounts of heat to pans that have been engineered to have efficient and predictable conductivity. Sous vide and molecular gastronomy take control to the extreme.

As much as the modern cook might swear by his coterie of gadgets, for the past few million years people have been making do with decidedly more primitive means:  fire and sticks, maybe a vessel or two. With all the conveniences that abound in the kitchen today, these basic conditions are hard to imagine.

Unless you go camping! While I have my fair share of outdoor gear, my camp kitchen is very basic—I enjoy the challenge of cooking over fire as well as the feeling of connection to those generations past. It helps to go beyond brats and hotdogs—not that there’s anything wrong with brats and hotdogs. Sometimes, though, you need to test just how much you can cook when you’re out on the range with no range.

For example, could I roast a chicken? I just so happened to have obtained a 2.2# young chicken from the Midtown Farmers’ Market (Chase Brook Natural). I was lucky to get a small chicken since the high temperatures of a wood fire would make it tricky to cook a large bird through without scorching it. I decided to butterfly the bird (cut out the backbone and flatten it)—with no good way to form a cover over the fire to trap the heat I wanted to get the bird as flat as possible to ensure even exposure. I rubbed the chicken down with salt, pepper, olive oil and herbes de provence before leaving the safety of our kitchen.

Cooking anything over a campfire calls for coals, not flames. Flames would burn your food. This means you have to plan ahead, starting the fire an hour or so before starting to cook. Playing with fire is one of the best parts of camping, so this really isn’t a bad deal. But if you’re hungry, you’ll wish you had started chopping wood an hour earlier.

Although not the best heat-retainer, aluminum foil works pretty well as a cover, which helps get some of the heat to waft over the top of the chicken while the bottom was getting direct exposure to the heat of the coals. To further improve the speed and evenness of the cooking, I employed the Italian ‘bricked chicken’ technique of weighing the bird down. I’m not so macho as to carry around bricks in my backpack, so I made do with what was available: in this case very nicely squared firewood.

After ten minutes on the cavity-side and twenty more on the breast-side things were looking good. I flipped the bird once more to finish a few stubborn undercooked spots (yes, I bring a Thermapen camping, don’t you?). Then I put it on a tray, tore/hacked it into quarters, and dug in. The heat of the fire resulted in crispy, golden-brown skin with just enough charring to make it attractive looking and smoky tasting.

All of this primitive cooking really brought out the wild beast in me—with the smell of roast chicken I was out of control. And that, after all, is what camping is all about.

On Monday I ordered another PosterHänger, a product that makes for a great cheap (!) frame for just about any sized work on paper. Designed by Jørgen Møller, they range from 12 to 72″ in length. I just ordered a 72″ for Tom’s world map (which is about 69″ wide) that I’ll soon be hanging in our bedroom (Yes. We moved in a year ago and I’m just now hanging it… no big deal). I’ve shared photos of our dining room before, but never specifically to highlight the frame with awesome orange arrows.

If you haven’t heard of PosterHänger before, you’ve almost certainly seen them. They’re used a lot in retail shop windows to hang posters or advertisements. Look around the next time you’re at the mall if you’d like to check out a PosterHänger in person. There’s also a nice breakdown of the parts of a PosterHänger on their site. Just “Clip, Slide, Häng” and you’re done.

I placed my most recent order directly from posterhanger.com, but in the past I’ve found them for less at Fulcrum Gallery’s website where there is a more limited selection. FG’s prices are actually higher; they have an ongoing 15% off promotion that can sometimes make up the difference. Thanks to Julia ordering one as well, however, we are both enjoying the “buy two, get free shipping” offer from posterhanger.com. Assuming I can get a decent photo, I’ll be sure to share the results of the map hanging when it’s all finished.

Each time I walk into a wine store, I am faced with the problem of somehow deciding which bottle(s) to take home. There are plenty of good ways to do this: talk to the staff, get to know a brand, in-store tastings, etc.  Generally though, I go with the most superficial one—the label. No, not the information contained on the label; having tasted vastly different wines from the same species of grape and the same land I know better than to put my faith in varietals or regions. I am looking at the design of the label itself; if I think it looks cool or the graphics/colors appeal to me for some reason I’m pretty certainly walking home with the bottle. As it happens, this is a pretty good system—some books you can judge by the cover.

On a recent trip with family to Michigan’s Old Mission Peninsula, I discovered this rule works for the buildings in which wine is produced, not just the bottles. Most of the tasting rooms in Northern Michigan tend toward the rustic, repurposing old schoolhouses and barns or creating new buildings that are firmly within the farmstead idiom. Which makes it all the more striking when you turn a corner and run into this:

This fancy, modern building houses Old Mission’s newest winery: 2 Lads. Established just a few years ago, 2 Lads produces wines from a few varietals: we tried a Rosé of Cabernet Franc, a Pinot Grigio, and a Cabernet Franc. Merlot, Chardonnay and some Sparkling were also in production but not available yet to try—there should be more this fall. They are working to increase their capacity and variety by establishing new vines, but they chose their location partly because they could get into winemaking immediately with some of the established vines. Oh, and for this view:

In spite of how obviously impressed I was by the 2 Lads’ taste in architecture, there remained the question of the quality of their wine. Had 2 Lads poured all their money into a fancy building on a hill that would appeal to twenty-something hipsters while not worrying too much about making good wine? Not at all. I have been to many wineries on the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas and I can say 2 Lads is making the best wines of its selected varietals by far. The only winery making better wines is L. Mawby, which only produces sparkling wines (2 Lads didn’t have any sparkling wines available for tasting).

Most wineries in the area can produce pretty good whites, but what stands out at 2 Lads is the reds. I had previously believed that red wine just doesn’t work in the cold climate of Northern Michigan and that I shouldn’t expect much more than the thin, one-dimensional pinot noirs, merlots and cab francs produced by pretty much everyone in the area. But 2 Lads’ Cab Franc had real body and complexity; the 2007 was still a little fruity, but the potential with a couple of years cellaring for the fruit to subside and the wine to deepen was more obvious than in any bottle I had ever tasted. Winemaking in northern Michigan is relatively new—the first producer was only established about 30 years ago. 2 Lads represents a coming of age. 

Judging by appearance, of both their bottles and their building, 2 Lads looks like the premier winemaker of the Old Mission Peninsula. Drinking their wine—even before having several glasses—confirms this is the case.