Tomatilla!

Inspired by David Lebovitz’ fantastic Shakshuka, I set out to make a simple supper tonight. First I put on some basic polenta (boild 2 cups water, as boils add big pinch salt and 1/2 cup polenta and then turn down low and stir throughout the rest of the cooking).

I took an iron skillet and added two tablespoons of olive oil – set on high heat. Drop in generous sprinkle of red chili flakes. Dice half an onion and toss in along with 1/2 teaspoon of cumin seeds. As onions start to soften add pinch of cayenne and 1/4 tsp smoked paprika. keep stirring and add 2 cups of frozen roasted heirloom tomatoes (or a can of tinned tomatoes if you haven’t got what I used). add a pinch of salt and stir in as tomatoes cook down. add 1/2 cup red wine. Turn down to simmer. Add a little water if necessary to keep it a little runny as the polenta cooks. When polenta is ready (still a bit runny) turn it off and crank up the heat on the skillet and crack two eggs into the middle. Baste with tomato sauce a couple of times then turn down again and simmer for 1-2 minutes until whites are set but yolks are still a little runny. Serve over polenta with a little crumbled feta on top.

The red wine I think serves to deal with both the honey and the vinegar in the original and I think simplifying the spices is actually good as well. Having great tomatoes certainly helped. This was absolutely scrumptious.

My last real post on this blog was back in August of 2008(!) That would be criminal if I had really had time to keep up, but I just haven’t. And I still don’t. But this piece of nes is just too much fun and too worthwhile for me not to write again.

A couple of close friends – one a chef and one a developer – are launching a completely fantastic new restaurant – and completely fantastic new idea. It opens this weekend on College Ave in Oakland in the Rockridge area and the reason it is so exciting? It is really over 20 new restaurants, ever changing, in one.

It is called The Guest Chef and the idea is that the restaurant has a new chef every two weeks. Why is that interesting? Because YOU could be the chef (or you could if you can show you have the chops to give it a shot). The restaurant is going to give anyone who has the culinary background to give it a real shot take over and run it as their restaurant for two weeks.

How does it work? Anyone (ex-chefs, aspiring chefs, food bloggers, anyone who has always thought they COULD but has never been sure, etc.) can apply for a slot running the restaurant. The chef (and team) supplies the food and most of the culinary labor. The restaurant supplies equipment, space, a restaurant, drinks, bar staff, a dishwasher, a licensed food service helper. Proceeds get split (percentage of food and all the bar proceeds to the restaurant, the rest to the chef team).

Given all the people who have always really wanted to try doing this, this is a great idea. The aspiring chef and friends and family are going to supply a core clientele from which to build every two weeks. People are going to drop in to see if they can make a find. And chefs who have struggled to get the chance to run a restaurant or who want to test a concept or who just want two weeks of fun all get a chance to show their skills.

The opening weekend (Nov 4, 5, 6) is a benefit held by several of the top chefs of
the Oakland Fire Department with proceeds going to The Burn Foundation and
Oakland Firefighters Random Acts. The restaurant is at 5337 College Ave in the Rockridge District of Oakland.

You can find out more at theguestchef.net

Apologies for the site near death. I got hit with a SQL injection hack and had to take the site all the way down and have been slowly bringing it back to life.

It looks like Paper Chef is starting up again and I am going to get back to helping run it. Go take a look.

I spent a little time working on the multi-site recipe search and fixing some bugs and cleaning it up and trying to improve the way it gives you results so that the recipes presented are a little higher quality and there is a little less junk in there. And I succeeded!

So take a look – enter three ingredients in the boxes in the recipe search on the right hand side and see what you get!

What is interesting about this search? Well, it is searching across multiple sites and filtering the results based on the ingredients list. It uses searches from Google, Yahoo, and several other recipe sites and then uses Yahoo Pipes to filter, sort and otherwise clean up the results to give you a page of links to recipes that come from all over.

The recipe search is working again – remember this runs across LOTS of sites (between twenty and thirty) – try it in the right hand sidebar. Images are reloaded and connected. Despite the time it took it was actually a pretty painless migration even though I know there are broken links from an SEO perspective – I did not 100% exactly mirror the old URLs. But that is OK. The traffic will return – such as it was.

I’m currently migrating Tomatilla! to WordPress on a new host – so not everything is working yet (mostly images and the super amazing recipe search). Bear with me – we’ll get there…

This little list has been idling around the food blogger world for a few weeks. I decided to take a look and I am sad to say that I have eaten 90 of these and know for a fact that I will never hit 100 since I have no intention of eating fugu and I’d probably skip the kaolin too – although I may have eaten it and never known since it IS an additive. For the record I have not eaten crocodile, vodka jell-o shots, phaal, fugu, poutine, kaolin, durian, pocky, three-star tasting menu and maybe epoisses (that one is a maybe since I would assume I have eaten some but I might not have). I have eaten the rest – yes, even roadkill, insects and a big mac meal.

I have to say that if I were to make a list like this it would be very different. It might be time to resurrect the much more interesting list of 50 things every foodie should do at least once.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (this is a very famous amazingly stinky cheese)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O shot
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal (apparantly the hottest kind of curry made in india – noticably hotter than vindaloo)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Single malt whisky
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi (japanese pickled plum)
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine (Canadian dish – basically french fries topped with cheese curds and smothered in brown gravy)
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (basically food grade clay)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu (distilled sorghum drink – chinese)
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (some kind of japanese crackery snack stick)
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
100. Snake

Some friends of mine have launched a new food community site called Foodproof. What does that mean? This is a real social community with membership and blogs, forums, videos, recipes, cross connections and a lot more – and everyone gets access to everything in clever ways so you can make the site what you want it to be. I like the forums, the videos and just the general ambience.

Note this is a site for everyone – it is specifically NOT just for foodies – so expect that not everyone will be so sophisticated as to know how to rustle up their own buckwheat blinis with passionfruit and durian cream.

Anyway – do me and yourself a favor and go take a look.

It is with great pleasure that we have a guest post here at Tomatilla! My lovely spouse, Doc Gurley, has a wonderful medical blog (it helps to be a doctor – just imagine if I had a medical blog…OK, don’t, let’s just say it would be bad) and she has been doing her bit this past week to support research and healthcare for pediatric brain tumors. How? well read on – and then go visit her blog and Zippy’s. And yes, there is something food related at the end…

Zippy got down with the beat at the famous Lafayette Summer Music Jazz Workshop for kids. Hundreds of kids came to the workshop from around the country, including New Orleans.

It made Zippy’s heart swing with the rhythm of happiness to see all these kids, learning, growing, and joyfully playing together. Here is Zippy on-stage, getting ready to count off the next combo set. There were 24 small groups of young musicians, showing off all they had learned in the five days of the workshop.

the incredible Bob Athayde.

Zippy’s got a thing for coffee – it makes him even more perky about spreading the word to stamp out pediatric brain tumors. At the Doc Gurley home, Zippy got a special treat – a chance to roast his own coffee. Doc Gurley’s husband is an avid roast-your-own man, and he and Zippy spent a morning bonding over the grill. Zippy was surprised how pale and soft the green coffee beans looked -kind of like a lobster after it’s molted its shell.

Wow, look at those beans – roasted in a simple modified Jiffy-Pop popper! Zippy was stunned at how much smoke and chaff comes floating off the beans as they roast. Now he understands why Doc Gurley hides in the house during the roasting.

Zippy smelled like coffee the rest of the day – he kind of liked that. Zippy and the Mister Doc had a bit of a discussion about whose beans these were – both wanted to give them to each other. Then Zippy remembered the best thing to do is share – it doubles the fun. They both headed inside to grind a cup and taste it. It was yummy – and Zippy got jazzed all over again!

I am so excited! My sharper-eyed readers will have noticed a little web form thingy over on the right hand sidebar that has three little entry windows that say ‘first ingredient,’ ‘second ingredient,’ and ‘third ingredient,’ with a button below that says ‘Get Recipes.’ Anyone who tried it found out that it did nothing.

Not anymore!

Now it searches a conglomeration of web sites that let people search recipes and delivers a page of results from those sites – all based on the three ingredients you put in. Go ahead and give it a try!

Note that you do have to clear out the fields if you want to put in fewer ingredients – otherwise it will use the ‘first ingredient’ text in the box already and that won’t work out so well.

So how does this all work? I am using a Yahoo programming tool for RSS feeds called Yahoo Pipes and then taking the inputs and querying about six recipe sites and then trying to clean up the results to make them unique. Then puting the output out on a simple web page. Let me know what you think….