PB&J Trio

I just had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for an entire day. Four of them. One for breakfast, one for lunch, two for dinner. Camille went out of town on business. What's a Food Network-educated chef to do without someone to cook for? Other than indulge his base desires?

I've always thought the comforting mush that is soft white bread, mashed peanuts, and jam could be dolled up into a pseudo-gourmet novelty. So, after my cheap, lazy ass got through two-thirds of the day with PB&J, I figured I'd go for the trifecta at dinner. And do it Iron Chef style.

PB&J Trio

Ingredients
four slices white bread
peanut butter
strawberry jam
grape jelly
guava jelly
sliced bananas (optional)

Equipment
sandwich maker or panini press

Plug in your machine and preheat. Slather two slices with peanut butter. Slather one slice with your preferred jam. Split the other slice between the remaining two flavors. If you're using a sandwich maker, be judicious with the fillings as they will become a superheated mash that will explode over your face. A panini press does a better job of melding everything together, so if you've got one (and you should), then go crazy.
Add banana slices. Assemble the sandwiches and cook, 3-4 minutes. Let cool a minute before halving. If competing on Iron Chef, plate with a fruit garnish (preferably one representing a jam/jelly) and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

I only used banana slices on half the sandwichs, so it's actually a PB&J Triple Trio. One thing I wanted to accomplish was eat grape PB&J and strawberry PB&J side-by-side and settle that argument once and for all. Of course, I grew up on the strawberry version, so I'm biased. But in my mind and in my mouth, the grape flavor is too distinct and doesn't meld well enough with the peanut butter. In grape's defense, the fact that it was jelly and not jam makes a huge difference. Jellies are generally too sweet and runny.

Interestingly, the bananas really dominated the strawberry jam and guava jelly. The guava was especially eye-opening. I brought the Hawaiian Sun guava jelly back from (drum roll...) Hawaii on my last trip, only to find it was exceptionally sweet. However, against the peanut butter and paired with the banana, the guava flavor almost disappeared and actually served to brighten the banana flavor.

The banana-strawberry was a little underwhelming. The two fruits always go together so well, and here I thought the starch of the banana would balance well with the sweet jam and creamy peanut butter, but the banana flavor tended to dominate. Also, the heat and pressure of being pressed softens the banana texture, effectively turning it into another jam and undermining my scientific hypothesis for including them to give the sandwich some bite. Thankfully, this science experiment still tastes good and remains cheap and comforting. The master stroke of this preparation is the crispy texture of the bread, which turns an old school comfort food into a warm, crunchy-gooey culinary pleasure. That's how I'd describe it if I were on Iron Chef, anyway.

Kare Kare

Get a slow cooker.

If I've learned one thing over the short life of this blog that I can impart, it's that. Get a slow cooker. It's like cooking but... not. For some reason, I used to associate slow cookers with gimmick culinary contraptions like salad shooters, knuckle guards, or the Ronco Food Dehydrator (it makes turkey jerkey!). In fact, it probably does less than all those Magic Bullet-type devices. The only thing it does is slowly but surely heat whatever you put inside it.

But, oh, the magic it did for my latest batch of kare kare.My recent foray into Filipino cooking was inspired by my recent Christmas trip home to the Bay Area. It was the first time I'd ever spent Christmas day without my parents, who flew south for the winter. So, when I wasn't officially upgrading Camille from girlfriend to fiance or playing Guitar Hero, I was watching Camille's mother cook. Because she's the working mother of four kids, she has an amazing shorthand for pinoy dishes that are notoriously laborious. And using only two burners and a turbo cooker, to boot.

I'd previously tried kare kare, the peanut-based oxtail stew, once before using a recipe from Memories of Philippine Kitchens, which has more traditional leanings in terms of flavor and preparation. The recipe calls for an initial stewing to soften the meat and make a broth, cooling overnight to separate the fat for use the next day while cooking an assortment of veggies. It also uses equal portions of peanuts and peanut butter while more contemporary recipes pour on the peanut butter for a richer flavor and texture.

Camille's mom? She cuts onions and minces garlic, tossing them into a hot pot as she goes, then sears off the oxtail, boils it down, dumps a combination of sauce and flavor packets, then the peanut butter, then bok choy and longbeans. Hour and one-half, two hours tops. She has kids, she says.

And it works. It's really good. Sweet and savory, beefy, peanut buttery goodness. The gooey thickness of the peanut butter sauce with balance from the mildly sweet, leafy bok choy and the bite of the green beans. Except the oxtail meat is just a tad too firm. I wanted to do a hybrid of the two methods, but unfortunately there's really no short cut for breaking down beef into a tender, juicy wonder.

Enter the slow cooker.

Ingredients
2 lbs. oxtail, cut into 2-inch pieces
5-6 cloves of garlic, peeled and mashed
2 medium onions, chopped
1 1/2 - 2 cups peanut butter
2 handfuls (about 1 lbs.) longbeans, trimmed and halved
4-5 heads baby bok choy, rinsed
3 tbs. oil
2 eggplants, halved and chopped into 3/4" pieces (optional)
steamed rice

Equipment
slow cooker
large, heavy pot

(I bought a Le Creuset dutch oven a few years back that's big and heavy and beautiful. There are probably cheaper dutch ovens that are reasonably comparable performance-wise, but they ain't as good and they're definitely not as beautiful, and no one brags about their reasonably comparable and ugly dutch oven. My point: go cheap everywhere else, but indulge yourself with at least one Le Creuset.)

My cousin recommended slow cooking overnight, which I did by simply placing the oxtail in, filling the crock pot with water, covering, and setting to low. No need for refrigeration or fat-skimming or any of that. In the morning, the meat was still a touch on the firm side. So, I just left the thing on and went to work.

When I returned home, the oxtail had been slow cooking for about 18 hours, resulting in suitably beefy broth and meat that was fall-off-the-bone tender. Not a figure of speech, it was falling clean off the bone. The fat and cartilage melted away and the meat fiber sloughed off when I tried fishing it out of the crock pot, leaving white, clean bones that looked like a cross between a biplane and an X-Wing fighter. Cool.Set aside the oxtail, heat the oil, and saute the onions and garlic about five minutes. Add the peanut butter and the broth. I used about eight cups of broth, but if it's not enough you can add more later. Let simmer until the peanut butter has incorporated well, then add the oxtail and eggplant. Continue to simmer for about 10 minutes.

Add the longbeans and bok choy and simmer another 10 minutes for the flavors to combine. Taste and adjust the texture to your liking by adding either more broth or more peanut butter.

Portion rice into bowls, then ladle the kare kare into it. Now, all you need is a spoon. Though Camille and I have been on a brown rice kick lately, I found that the dryer, nuttier brown rice wasn't able to soak up the stew as well as white rice.

That'll do, salt pig. That'll do.

So, last night Camille went out on a company excursion to an LA Kings game that involved alcohol, a party bus, and a luxury suite at Staples Center. I stayed home to write and bake cookies.

It did not occur to me until this morning that, basically, Camille went out for a late night of boozing and sports with the boys, while I stayed in the kitchen and baked.

That's right, I am a domestic god.

In other news, those Nestle Tollhouse break-and-bake cookies are the bomb.

So, my latest purchase from the Church of Williams-Sonoma: a salt pig. It's basically a wide-mouthed container for kosher salt, providing easy access to the flavor-enhancing mineral whenever I'm in a pinch. (Get it? Salt in a pinch? Tip your waitresses.) As it is a pig, I've decided it needs a name. The product is manufactured by Emile Henry, so a quaint French name will do.

I thinking Toulouse.