I need some help.
Here’s the thing. Between work (day job plus periodic mental health on-call crisis), time with family, reading, and writing, I don’t really have a heck of a lot of time to cook. Maybe a generous hour a day if I want us to eat at a comfortable time. As I’ve said before, even then, we do a lot more fast food than I would like. And yet, as long as I’ve been cooking, I’ve been fascinated with Slow Food, even before I knew there was a name for it and a movement behind it. I remember in college making pasta from scratch and homemade sun-dried tomato pesto without a blender or mortar and pestle–I just sort of chopped the hell out of it for, like, half an hour with a WalMart chef’s knife. I once made homemade tonkotsu ramen with from-scratch egg noodles and pig’s feet broth. The pig’s feet burned to the bottom of my pressure cooker because that much steam escaped without blowing the safety valve. If something can be bought, I like experimenting to see if I can make it from scratch.
Never, ever burn pig’s feet to the bottom of a pressure cooker if you can help it, by the way. That’s my advice for the day. Honestly, I need advice myself. Because every now and again, as a consequence of my fascination with preparing the mundane, I make something like this:
- Yes, it really is green–made with a particularly dark extra virgin olive oil.
A whole 8-oz. cup of aioli. I used Brian Polcyn’s recipe from his book, Charcuterie. We’re not big sports fans at our house, so the Superbowl tends to be an excuse for me to cook something a little extra ambitious in the spirit of the game. In this case, I whipped up a whole batch of aioli so I could add a shmear or two to our cheeseburgers.
Only one problem–now we’ve got pretty much a whole cup left of aioli left and the clock’s ticking to use it all up before all that nice extra virgin olive oil goes to waste. Any suggestions?
Cats and Caffeine Dependence 