Me and Sandra Lee

I’m still in Portland, and this morning’s Sunday Oregonian had a section about bloggers and the mainstream media. It made me realize that this blog is perhaps too frivolous, so I’m taking this moment to comment on a news event occurring on the TV right in front of me: Food Network personality Sandra Lee is currently hosting a Semi-Homemade Holiday special.

This is the first time I’ve seen Sandra Lee’s show; until now, everything I knew about her came from food discussion sites like [eGullet][], where she is almost universally abhorred. So far on this show, she’s made pepper-crusted prime rib, a dinner roll wreath, some white hot “chocolate” made with Starbucks liqueur and crushed peppermint candy, and some kind of cheese dip. Really, the food isn’t as bad as I’d expected, although I think she just dolloped some Cool Whip onto the drinks. The decor is terrifying: everything in Lee’s kitchen matches her red dress. I’m not sure if Kitchenaid knew the hell they were unleashing when they started making their appliances in designer colors.

[eGullet]: http://forums.egullet.org/

But the most shocking aspect of the Sandra Lee show, one I’ve never heard mentioned, is her neck. It is the longest neck on the Food Network. It is probably the longest neck on any network, with the exception of National Geographic specials featuring those women who extend their necks with metal rings. Sandra Lee seems quite tall, but I think if you subtracted the neck, she’d be a Little Person.

Now (this story is continuing to unfold) she is making Hanukkah cookies. “I love Hanukkah!” Lee enthused, and I know how she feels, because I love Eid, Lughnasadh, and Diwali. Lee has glued two meringue cookies together with frosting and is painting them with blue food coloring. She says they look like little dreidels, but to me they look like onion domes. Thanks for the Hanukkah gift, Sandra Lee! It reminds me of the country my ancestors had to flee due to religious persecution.

Later I watched a Food Network holiday special that brought together many of their most popular hosts, including Sandra Lee, Rachael Ray, Emeril, Michael Chiarello, and Paula Deen. It would show them cooking together in the kitchen, then cut away to the same person, superimposed on a white screen, talking about what an honor it is to be in such august company.

Clearly they missed the opportunity for an awesome hour of television. What if the white-screen portions had given the hosts the chance to say what they *really* thought of each other? You know, like:

> **Sandra Lee:** Here, taste this.

> **Michael Chiarello:** Mmm, that is delicious.

> (cutaway)

> **Chiarello**, on whitescreen: Oh my god, that dip? Christmas is ruined for me forever. And did you see her neck?

At the épicerie

For about six years now we’ve been making an annual spice order from [Penzeys][], a shop based in Wisconsin. When we started ordering from them, they had maybe three shops, all in or near their home state.

[Penzeys]: http://www.penzeys.com/

In the past few years, however, they’ve been opening retail stores at a Starbucks-like rate. This culminated recently in a contest where the city that sent in the most postcards would get a Penzeys store. The winner was Boston, but they decided to give runner-up Portland a store, too, and they say they’re scouting out locations in some of the other cities that made a good show. (Seattle is in the next tier.)

We’re all down in Portland at the moment on a family visit, so I decided to sneak out and hit the Penzeys store here. It’s not *exactly* in Portland–it’s on 82nd, near Clackamas Town Center. Naturally, there was some kind of water main break today that snarled traffic on 82nd for miles, but I persevered, and it was so worth it.

It’s not that there’s a big difference between shopping at a Penzeys store and shopping the catalog, but shopping the catalog is one of my favorite pastimes, and the store has exactly the same selection (I came in with a list of about fifteen items and all of them were in stock; keeping great inventory seems to be store policy). In addition, at the store you can sniff all of the spices, and it’s more suited to impulse buys. I didn’t come in with Spanish *pimentón de la vera* (smoked paprika) in mind, but I walked out with some; it’s destined for a goulash-style recipe from [Italian Slow and Savory][ISS].

[ISS]: https://www.rootsandgrubs.com/2005/12/10/best-cookbooks-2003-2004-italian-slow-and-savory/

Why buy from Penzeys instead of the grocery store? Three obvious reasons: price, selection, and quality. Spices at Penzeys generally run about one-third of supermarket price. Penzeys has spices your supermarket probably doesn’t, like *pimentón de la vera*. And the freshness and potency of most of their stuff will blow you away.

These are my favorite Penzeys products:

* China Cassia Cinnamon and China Ground Ginger. Order some of these. When they arrive, go into your cupboard and find your ground cinnamon and ginger. Stick your nose into the jars and sniff them. Then open the Penzeys spices and see if they aren’t more fragrant before you even get your nose near them.

* Chili powder (medium hot). Since Iris started clamoring for anything with chiles in it, we’ve gone through literally a pound of this a year. Mostly it goes into enchiladas and tacos, but it’s totally acceptable for making chili, or for use as a spice rub. Normal I go for the spiciest version of any product, but the medium really is just right.

* Whole ancho chiles. I buy my other dried chiles at Pike Place Market, but there’s something special about Penzeys’ anchos. They never seem to have the crusty or discolored parts that I find on other people’s anchos (I’m sure these are purely cosmetic flaws, but still). They’re the Angela Bassett of chiles: dark, silky, and alluring.

* Bay leaves. Most whole herbs and spices are fine for a couple of years, regardless of what fussy cookbooks will tell you. But bay leaves really do crap out within a year. Penzeys’ leaves start out with plenty of punch in their, uh, petioles, so by the end of the year they still have some love to give.

Artisan delicacies

Today I decided to make penne vodka for dinner and noticed we were out of vodka, so I headed to the state liquor store.

As a certified food person, I always try to buy the finest handmade artisan products. Liquor is no exception. So I am proud of my selection of a 750ml bottle of Hussar brand vodka. It has a very Russian-looking double-headed eagle on the label, and a coat of arms with a crown, so you know it’s the good stuff.

And it’s imported! From Missouri.

Seasonal dessert alert

This was all Laurie’s idea. I wish I could take credit for it, but I didn’t even know that Dreyer’s (aka Edy’s) peppermint ice cream existed. Laurie did, and she also intuited that it wouldn’t come into its own until topped with an immoderate amount of homemade hot fudge.

I used the hot fudge recipe from Bittersweet, which is basically just ganache (it’s chocolate, half-and-half, vanilla, and salt).

While I was eating my sundae (okay, while I was eating *today’s* sundae; the sundaes began on Tuesday), I realized that hot fudge is always better eaten at home. When I have a hot fudge sundae out in the world, I almost always run into the same problem: the hot fudge is gone before the ice cream. At home, you can solve that problem by setting aside extra sauce to add as needed. I guess you could order hot fudge on the side at the DQ, but I’ll never remember to do that.

The only commercial sundae that avoids fudge imbalance is Dairy Queen’s Peanut Buster Parfait, which puts sauce in the bottom, middle, and top of the sundae. This was a major breakthrough in ice cream service, and we should be thankful they didn’t give it a horrifically stupid name.

Pressure Cooker limbo

Americans have a strange relationship with pressure cookers.

For one thing, there’s the fear factor. Just last night I was at the supermarket, and the cashier asked what I was planning to make with some beef, beer, leeks, and egg noodles. “Probably some stew in the pressure cooker,” I told her. A look of horror flashed over her face. “Those things scare me,” she said.

The pressure cooker scares me a little, too, but not because I think it’s going to explode. My pressure cooker is a modern spring-valve model made by WMF. I say “modern,” because the spring-valve type is relatively new to the US market, having been introduced in 1990. In Europe, spring-valve was the new thing in the 40s. The spring-valve is replacing the old style of cooker, which is called a jiggle-top. If you can hear the word “jiggle-top” without laughing, you are more mature than I.

No, my problem with the pressure cooker is that I don’t really understand how to use it. Oh, I know how to put ingredients in, bring it up to pressure, and release the pressure, and everything comes out cooked in record time. What’s perplexing about the PC (I have to start abbreviating, even though I know it’s impossible not to read “PC” as “personal computer”), however, is that it monkeys with basic physical constants. I’ve spent years coming to an intuitive understanding of what will happen when I put soup or stew ingredients in a pot and cook them, and the PC mocks that.

It’s like if we moved to a planet with slightly different gravity. Everything would seem reasonably normal at first, but then you’d start to get weird aches and your clocks wouldn’t work right, plus it would turn out your wife was actually an alien and you’d keep hearing this voice in your head saying “get your ass to Mars.” In the case of the PC, the high pressure and 250-degree water destroy some flavors and boost others.

My biggest PC success has been with cabbage, which seems to come out perfect every time and only needs to cook for four minutes. The biggest failure was pork carnitas; the texture was fine, but they tasted like pork with gallons of lime juice and none of the other good stuff (poblano chiles, mexican oregano, garlic) that went in.

Yesterday I took Iris out for sushi for lunch and didn’t really start thinking about dinner until after four. A perfect PC night. I cut the beef chuck into cubes and put it into the PC with sauteed leeks and onion and some chunks of carrot. I poured in some dark beer and chicken broth, about a cup total. One thing I’ve learned about the PC is that you need to keep added liquid to a bare minimum.

I cooked at high pressure for twenty minutes and let the pressure subside. While the stew cooked, I quartered the mushrooms and sauteed them in a pan in some bacon fat.

What I envisioned was a rich and dark stew. What came out was beef vegetable soup. The beer was no longer noticeable at all, and the chicken broth was the dominant flavor. Not a failure by any means–we all enjoyed the soup. Iris kept picking up pieces of meat and saying, “That’s some beef!” But to me, the PC is still a roulette wheel in disguise.