Not surprisingly, I woke up Saturday with a bit of a hangover. As my glands tried to suggest possible remedies by sending secret coded symbols that my subconscious tried franticaly to translate into reason, I became overwhelmed with a desire for sausage, greasy, swilly sausage delivered via some nice starchy sponge that would be transformed into ambrosia as it soaked up all those swilly fluids the sausage would release. Yes, I hadn't even put on my boxers but the truth was plain to me. Sausage grease would set me free.
Some people, when they get a hang over, they go to McDonalds or they have someone else prepare their fatty starchy gutbomb for them. Maybe because this hangover wasn't too severe, and maybe because I'm just that kind of guy, but this probably more involved than most people's hangover meals.
I started with a few links of spicy Italian sausage that I browned over a medium heat in my everyday pan. I then reserved the links and added about 7 cloves of garlic, sliced about 1/8" thick and a few tablespoons of olive oil, reducing the heat to low and making sure to get all the juicies and sausage gunk up from the pan and interacting with the garlic.
At the same time I cooked some tortiglione pasta. This kind of looks like your common elbow macaroni extended into a spiral shape about an inch and a half to two inches long. These are pretty sturdy pasta that can take a lot of tossing and can also trap a fair amount of sauce and whatnots.
Into the garlic and oil I added some baby spinach and red peppers, then let that take on the oil a little bit before adding some diced tomatoes and the sausage cut into 1/2" thick pieces. I made sure to scrape all the oil that escaped from cutting the sausages back into the pan as well.
Once the pasta was starting to pass for au dente, I drained it and added it to the everyday pan and stirred it in with everything else. I then added adobo seasoning, dried basil, dried oregano, parmesean cheese, goat cheese and enough milk that the whole thing would stir. I tossed this while still cooking at a medium high heat to thicken a little bit. I had a huge bowl with some adobo garlic toast and then promptly crawled back in bed for a nap. It was exactly what my glands had been clamoring for.
That evening for dinner I went to dinner with the girlfriend's family in a Portuguese restaurant in Newark, NJ. The dinner was served in several big courses. Somehow I never really got near the salad, if there was one, but I did dig in to the appetizers. There was a bowl of shrimp in garlic and olive oil, sliced Portuguese choriço, and an assortment of some traditional Portuguese deep-fried delights.
Most recognizable to those unfamiliar with Portuguese cuisine would be the lules, m.c.k.a. calamari, or fried squid. That was two days in a row that I was eating squid and it definitely marks my highest post-Japan squid intake.
In another Japanese-Portuguese food connection, there were also beef croquettes in the fried Portuguese sampler platter. These were not quite the same as the ones I ate regularly in Japan. In Japan, the croquette, or "koroke," is more of a patty of mashed potatoes covered in panko bread crumbs and then deep fried. In the case of "beef koroke" it's usually the case that the mashed potatoes were flavored with beef stock with very little actual beef involved. The Portuguese versions, in contrast, were much smaller, about the size of mini-egg rolls, and they definitely had a good amount of finely shredded beef mixed in with the potatoes. The texture was much drier than the Japanese version and somewhat off-putting. This would have been a great time for some kind of sauce or gravy. The calamari would have also benefited from having something to dip them in. I experimented with a few liberal spoonfuls of choriço oil and shrimp-and-garlic-infused olive oil, but I didn't want the gf's family to realize what a fat junky I am just yet.
The pasteis de bacalhau ("pastry of codfish," sort of a deep-fried codfish meatball, but more bread than fish) were a little less dry than the beef coroquettes, but not by much, and not nearly as good as my gf's mother's so I only had a enough to show my general acceptance of codfish as food.
And the last of the appetizers, and my favorite, although again, not as good as my gf's mother's, were the rissois de camarão, small empanada-esque pastry pockets filled with shrimp. I could easily eat two dozen of these in a sitting, but I think I managed to contain myself to three or four.
The entree was a sirloin steak with fries. I'd ordered mine medium rare. My girlfriend asked for hers well done. There was absolutely no perceptible difference between the two. It's hard to argue with a waiter over the quality of a free steak, though. It's not like I didn't eat the entire thing and most of my girlfriends, especially all that charred fat and gristle I love so much.
Then, deserts; this shouldn't take too much longer than appetizers did...
Let's see, stuff you're likely to recognize by name: a slice of chocolate cake shaped like an Eagles football helmet, rice pudding, slices of pineapple and flan.
The cake was a swirl of chocolate and white cake. I don't know if the white bit qualified as vanilla per se, so I won't make any such audacious assumptions. It was cake. You've had it before and my description here probably won't be worth reading.
The rice pudding was also very simply good, no big tricks like raisins or shavings of chocolate truffle, just a dusting of cinnamon over the top. The consistency was perfect, though. The rice wasn't too hard and obtrusive, the pudding itself was very sturdy and creamy. It was a nice transitional desert course.
The flan I didn't finish. Flan is one of those things, like horchata, macaroni and cheese or meatloaf, where the vast majority of it commercially available is mediocre at best if not an insult to the homemade versions so near and dear to true fans of the stuff. This flan was crap. As my girlfriend repeated several times, her aunt's flan is so much better. The flan itself tasted empty and the caramel sauce was noxiously cloying where it wasn't bitingly chemical. Blech.
As far as things you probably don't recognize the name of unless you are or are dating someone who is Portuguese there was serradura and pasteis de nata, both fantastic.
Serradura is somewhere between meringue and custard, with crumbled Maria cookies over the top. It manages to be creamy as well as fluffy and hits all the sweet and rich desert buttons you have.
Pasteis de nata are also very rich. To call them a heavy desert can be taken fairly literally. For their size these 3" custard cups do weigh your hand down. You could probably throw one across a football field and still hit someone rather solidly in the head. The crust is a dense layering of flaky pastry dough filled with a very rich egg custard. I am a big fan of the variety where the custard is tinged with lemon, though there are also your standard plain custard versions available. These were the lemon, and sadly there just was not room for two of them inside of me. I managed to hold myself to one and let that tangy custard hang on my palate as I sat trying to
soak up Portuguese phonetics and smile and nod when everyone else was smiling and nodding.
I should also mention that through the course of dinner ran a pleasant stream of a white wine with a pleasant subtle sparkling edge. Describing this wine would be a lot easier if you knew what "vinho verde" was. Literally, the name means "green wine," but they are most usually actually white in color. The "green" part refers instead to the exuberant, youthful character of the wine and its short life in the bottle. They are not a "sparkling wine" as defined by the International Cartel of Wine Fascists, but they do have enough disolved CO2 to have a noticeable fizz or, as the VFCI calls it, pétillance. They are a regional wine, coming from the Minho region of northern Portugal. They are intended to be enjoyed within a year of bottling. There, that's more than you will likely ever need to know about vinho verde and you probably still can't pronounce it properly. ("veenu vairday," but with faster vowels, not like you're from Georgia)
This was not a true vinho verde, as it was produced in a more southerly region of Portugal, but it was still a nice dinner wine. It was maybe a little too sweet to be carried through all courses of a meal, but I made do. Red wine would have left me with an even worse hangover than the one I woke up to today. This wine was very light on alcohol and as such it was very easy to find and maintain that sweet spot of muscle relaxation that allows the stomach to comfortably distend that extra inch without stirring up any real retaliation from my body's chemical defense systems.
It was a very welcome compliment to the meal and language barrier, and since everyone else was drinking mostly the red, I drank more than 2/3rds of the bottle.
This entry took me over two weeks to nail down. It's gigantic and way longer than your average internet attention span. I apologize. I'll try to make the Old Country Buffet entry a little easier to digest. BAHAHAHAHAha-a. Yeah, nm. sorry.
Most recognizable to those unfamiliar with Portuguese cuisine would be the lules, m.c.k.a. calamari, or fried squid. That was two days in a row that I was eating squid and it definitely marks my highest post-Japan squid intake.
In another Japanese-Portuguese food connection, there were also beef croquettes in the fried Portuguese sampler platter. These were not quite the same as the ones I ate regularly in Japan. In Japan, the croquette, or "koroke," is more of a patty of mashed potatoes covered in panko bread crumbs and then deep fried. In the case of "beef koroke" it's usually the case that the mashed potatoes were flavored with beef stock with very little actual beef involved. The Portuguese versions, in contrast, were much smaller, about the size of mini-egg rolls, and they definitely had a good amount of finely shredded beef mixed in with the potatoes. The texture was much drier than the Japanese version and somewhat off-putting. This would have been a great time for some kind of sauce or gravy. The calamari would have also benefited from having something to dip them in. I experimented with a few liberal spoonfuls of choriço oil and shrimp-and-garlic-infused olive oil, but I didn't want the gf's family to realize what a fat junky I am just yet.
The pasteis de bacalhau ("pastry of codfish," sort of a deep-fried codfish meatball, but more bread than fish) were a little less dry than the beef coroquettes, but not by much, and not nearly as good as my gf's mother's so I only had a enough to show my general acceptance of codfish as food.
And the last of the appetizers, and my favorite, although again, not as good as my gf's mother's, were the rissois de camarão, small empanada-esque pastry pockets filled with shrimp. I could easily eat two dozen of these in a sitting, but I think I managed to contain myself to three or four.
The entree was a sirloin steak with fries. I'd ordered mine medium rare. My girlfriend asked for hers well done. There was absolutely no perceptible difference between the two. It's hard to argue with a waiter over the quality of a free steak, though. It's not like I didn't eat the entire thing and most of my girlfriends, especially all that charred fat and gristle I love so much.
Then, deserts; this shouldn't take too much longer than appetizers did...
Let's see, stuff you're likely to recognize by name: a slice of chocolate cake shaped like an Eagles football helmet, rice pudding, slices of pineapple and flan.
The cake was a swirl of chocolate and white cake. I don't know if the white bit qualified as vanilla per se, so I won't make any such audacious assumptions. It was cake. You've had it before and my description here probably won't be worth reading.
The rice pudding was also very simply good, no big tricks like raisins or shavings of chocolate truffle, just a dusting of cinnamon over the top. The consistency was perfect, though. The rice wasn't too hard and obtrusive, the pudding itself was very sturdy and creamy. It was a nice transitional desert course.
The flan I didn't finish. Flan is one of those things, like horchata, macaroni and cheese or meatloaf, where the vast majority of it commercially available is mediocre at best if not an insult to the homemade versions so near and dear to true fans of the stuff. This flan was crap. As my girlfriend repeated several times, her aunt's flan is so much better. The flan itself tasted empty and the caramel sauce was noxiously cloying where it wasn't bitingly chemical. Blech.
As far as things you probably don't recognize the name of unless you are or are dating someone who is Portuguese there was serradura and pasteis de nata, both fantastic.
Serradura is somewhere between meringue and custard, with crumbled Maria cookies over the top. It manages to be creamy as well as fluffy and hits all the sweet and rich desert buttons you have.
Pasteis de nata are also very rich. To call them a heavy desert can be taken fairly literally. For their size these 3" custard cups do weigh your hand down. You could probably throw one across a football field and still hit someone rather solidly in the head. The crust is a dense layering of flaky pastry dough filled with a very rich egg custard. I am a big fan of the variety where the custard is tinged with lemon, though there are also your standard plain custard versions available. These were the lemon, and sadly there just was not room for two of them inside of me. I managed to hold myself to one and let that tangy custard hang on my palate as I sat trying to
soak up Portuguese phonetics and smile and nod when everyone else was smiling and nodding.
I should also mention that through the course of dinner ran a pleasant stream of a white wine with a pleasant subtle sparkling edge. Describing this wine would be a lot easier if you knew what "vinho verde" was. Literally, the name means "green wine," but they are most usually actually white in color. The "green" part refers instead to the exuberant, youthful character of the wine and its short life in the bottle. They are not a "sparkling wine" as defined by the International Cartel of Wine Fascists, but they do have enough disolved CO2 to have a noticeable fizz or, as the VFCI calls it, pétillance. They are a regional wine, coming from the Minho region of northern Portugal. They are intended to be enjoyed within a year of bottling. There, that's more than you will likely ever need to know about vinho verde and you probably still can't pronounce it properly. ("veenu vairday," but with faster vowels, not like you're from Georgia)
This was not a true vinho verde, as it was produced in a more southerly region of Portugal, but it was still a nice dinner wine. It was maybe a little too sweet to be carried through all courses of a meal, but I made do. Red wine would have left me with an even worse hangover than the one I woke up to today. This wine was very light on alcohol and as such it was very easy to find and maintain that sweet spot of muscle relaxation that allows the stomach to comfortably distend that extra inch without stirring up any real retaliation from my body's chemical defense systems.
It was a very welcome compliment to the meal and language barrier, and since everyone else was drinking mostly the red, I drank more than 2/3rds of the bottle.
This entry took me over two weeks to nail down. It's gigantic and way longer than your average internet attention span. I apologize. I'll try to make the Old Country Buffet entry a little easier to digest. BAHAHAHAHAha-a. Yeah, nm. sorry.
1 comment:
i think you mean "al dente" instead of "au dente" and "lulas" are not "lules"
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