caelum13: January 2012

21 January 2012

food o'clock: home

okay so i guess as a person much obsessed with food i ought to post about food, not just pictures of food. and as a person much obsessed with the merits of home-cooking, i also ought to post about cooking, specifically mine.

a couple months ago, borders went out of business, and i thought, what a great opportunity to get some awesome and beautiful and cheap cookbooks. wrong. by the time my team of book raiders got to the one at columbus circle, most everything worth reading or even looking at was gone (sarah palin books lined a wall's worth of shelves, derpaderp).

i found something. it was a southern cooking book that the previous raiders had missed because...well, it's not really a great cooking book. to be fair, i haven't tried out any of the recipes, but here are my arguments on why this can't possibly be a great cookbook:

1) there are no photos of food. THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF FOOD. instead there are childish b&w drawings of random crap. MUCH ANGER
2) there are, on average, eight recipes crammed onto one spread. simple recipes? NOPE. it tosses around phrases like "fold sugar" and "creamed fish" and "unfold phyllo" like these things are not a big deal. they are a big deal.
3) almost all recipes include hard-to-find ingredients. duck. egg roll skins. crawfish (fresh). Shoe Peg corn (what is this thing??)

ranting done, the title intrigued me and it was about $5 so i got it anyway. "roux to do," catchy no?

i've been using the book mostly as a laptop rest for working (*ahem* watching movies *ahem*) in bed, but the title kept getting to me. ROUX. what is this magical word/food that almost every single recipe relies on?

so, after much research (unwarranted, i might add), i made something with roux.

Roux:
1:1 ratio of fat to flour

after much deliberation on type of fat due to a recent vegan guest, i decided we had a shitton of butter, he was asleep this morning and unlikely to eat the product, so i went with butter.
i don't understand what everyone keeps blabbering about on the internet about this being a difficult thing to make. KEY=keep it on low heat and don't burn or vaporize your butter. funny because MOST recipes ask you not to burn or vaporize your butter.

melt butter, mix in flour, keep mixing until the roux is the color you'd like.

so i can see why this is a great thickener, but honestly, i tried some and it's not that great on its own.

i added the following:
leftover canned corn
the can of green chiles we haven't opened since our last apartment >_<
black pepper
chile powder
salt
(optionally added because i felt like it: mole salt. we've been on an artisanal salt run lately...)

ate with cubed beeeeets on the side.

results: surprisingly delicious for impromptu roux-ing.