Sheets Culinary Feats

So last week I was strolling through the cheese section at the Deli of King Soopers when I came across a cheese that really caught my eye. There sat this light cream colored cheese with some beautiful marbling of spices running throughout it.

I stopped and picked it up, and the name stuck with me then as well, No Woman. The lable told me how the beautiful marbling was actually Jamaican jerk seasonings, adding a delicious nutty flavor to the cheese. It made it directly into my basket and I whisked it away home.

It is with the deepest of regrets that I must report that this cheese was in fact quite awful. While the texture was ok, not over flaky, it wasn’t overly creamy either. Tasted more like a medium quality white American or low quality white cheddar cheese. I know that I can’t expect much out of an american cheese that must be pasteurized, but I was hoping for at least some mouth feel, but alas there was none.

Next we’ll come to the flavor…the cheese itself brought nothing to the table. Not even a hint of that velveeta or kraft oily knockoff cheese flavor. It seems that Beecher’s sought to support the entire cheese on the Jamaican jerk spices alone…and of that they did a poor job.

The jerk seasonings that I have had before have all exploded on to my tounge instantly with a tremendous spicy yet totally delicious flavor. One that did not simply burn out your taste buds but danced across it, bringing tears to your eyes because of the heat but making you laugh out in joy at the life it brings to your buds.

No Woman failed at that one too. The only thing that I tasted was a bitter burned flavor, with nary a distinct or happy spice to be found. Perhaps if they had even made the attempt to be like spicy pepper jack and just burn my mouth it would have been acceptable.

All I was left with in the end was a poor destitute triangular shaped white hunk of nasty. I didn’t even move on to trying to cook with it, didn’t seem like it was anything other than a waste of my hard earned $7 for a 1/4 pound.

One final comment, this cheese has made my list…it is the first cheese that I have never liked. I can even appreciate lousy American cheese slices that are individually wrapped, velveeta, feta, Chevre…all of it I love..but not No Woman.

So I know that there are a lot of blogs out there from people who love to review food, restaurants, and everything in between. I’ve looked at this niche, and I think I see room for one more. I want you all to know that I want more from this blog and my site than just a small following of readers.

I would love for this to become something truly informative and helpful for everyone out there. I don’t want to be the cynic that dogs on everything he eats because it doesn’t live up to his ideals. Sure there is a lot out there that I don’t care for but there is so much that I do love.

That’s one of the things that I always try to stick by in every dish that I create. Love, it’s that one secret ingredient to food that can’t be identified in any recipe, but without it all food becomes lifeless and boring. There are cooks who can sling hash on a plate in less than 30 seconds, and it’s good in that, “well at least it’s warm and brown” kind of way, but there’s no passion in it’s design.

Food can be the ultimate expression of friendship or love. It can cross all cultural boundaries and bring people together over a table. For thousands of years there have been strict customs and guidelines for how people should break bread with each other.

Sometimes I think that we’ve forgotten all of these things in our new highspeed world of the McDonalds drive through. When families don’t make the time to sit together and talk about how they are doing, or how their days have been. Maybe it is a little cliche, but if people look at it, I bet it’s one thing that they miss from when they were children.

As I mentioned above I would love for this blog to be more than just a review site, or a totalitarian diatribe of my own beliefs. So I’ll work my hardest to make it more than that. However, to make things better it’s going to have to change and evolve. I’ll gladly listen to any ideas, complaints, or compliments you have on this and I’ll work to make it better.

So, a little about me.

I didn’t grow up in a small village in France, learning to appreciate the finer things in life such as the amazing foodstuffs that can only be found on the side streets of Paris.

I grew up in a suburb of Denver Colorado. Arvada was never very exciting, kind of a small town on the western end of a relatively small metropolitan area. My grandfather was alergic to so many things that my grandmother was forced to cook with a very limited repetoir of ingredients, and I think that really colored my mothers cooking. So growing up I never really got to experience a lot of wonderful foods, as we didn’t have a lot of money it was mostly comfort and convienence food. Dishes all prepared in one pot to save on the cleanup, barely any salt or pepper, and there were almost never any other spices to compliment it.

So from an early age I always wanted to experiment more with other flavor combinations and spices. Like most families we had those 20 year old spices in the cupboard that were never used. I tried them though, mixing and matching when no one was home. Sure I made a lot of mistakes, being 8…and having no experience, but I began to learn what I liked and what went well together.

As I grew older I began watching the cooking shows on Public Television. I longed to be like them, some day I would have my own show I swore. When I would sit in my nightly bath I would pretend like I had my own show, mimicking my heroes: Graham Kerr, Justin Wilson, Julia Child, and Martin Yan.

Then, I suppose, as all children experience my dreams faded as I grew older. We are taught that to follow our passions is unrealistic and our goals are unreachable. Teachers educate us on how to be round pegs and go through the round holes of life, and to not be different.

I found myself adrift after highschool. I moved from job to job, working in the fast food industry, security, casinos, banking, IT…and all of it seemed to leave me unsatisfied. However I coninued to experiment with my food at home, occasionally trying out new dishes on my family at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Eventually I married, and she was much like my mother. She didn’t appreciate fine food, or the blending of different spices all working to compliment each other. But still I cooked, it was the only thing that ever made me truly happy, it was still the only thing that could get my energies and juices flowing no matter how lousy my day had been.

Then one day I got laid of from my IT job. Not knowing where anything was going to lead I decided to take an even larger plunge and finally go to college. So I attended Johnson & Wales University here in Denver. Finally I had found where I truly belonged, in a huge kitchen, producing on the hotline for scores of hungry people. I excelled in my classes, maintaining a 3.76 GPA while working one full time job, and sometimes a second job just to keep the bills paid.

Unfortunately as I moved closer to my following my dreams my wife worked hard to quash them. Constantly leaving passive aggressive signs that she didn’t approve of what I was doing. Newspaper clippings about failed restaurants, magazine articles about the lower numbers of people eating out, the constant off hand comments about how I couldn’t do it. So once I finished my internship at the Stanley Hotel and graduated, I left my wife and moved on.

Since then life has had it’s ups and downs, I’ve worked catering jobs, restaurant jobs, and times have gotten hard and I’ve moved back to IT to get health insurance. But still I cook for those I care about, and I explore my culinary career in other ways.

For the past two years I have done a Japanese Cooking presentation at the Anime convention that I volunteer for. It has proven to be an overwhelming success and only looks like it can get better.

Currently I am working on expanding into other areas, with ideas that are low cost but can bring me and others a great deal of satisfaction. Stay tuned here and I’ll update again with more information.

I suppose technically that’s Molé…

Any ways, this last weekend I decided to try out my hand at making some authentic Mexican sauces, and I whipped out a molé sauce. I found the recipe on one of my favorite sites www.foodnetwork.comof course. I took Tyler Florence’s recipe and played around with it just a little bit.  I wasn’t able to find any anaheim or serrrano chillies so I added more anchos, a few extra chipotles and the adobo sauce from the can.

As well, I don’t have a coffee grinder for spices, I plan on getting one soon, but I just used my food processor and it came out a bit thick, but I like that rustic look. (Note: in professional culinary terms when something doesn’t look perfect it’s rustic.)

The chocolate flavor should not be overpowering in the sauce, you should just be able to detect the hint of it at the back of your mouth. As well with the mixture of peppers it should not be so spicy that it destroys your taste buds on contact, but rather just enough spice to say, “HI, I’M HERE!!!!” but with a wonderfully complex flavor, which the acid in the lime juice brings to the forefront of your palette so wonderfully.

First I tried it out on some wonderful Beef Ribs and it turned out pretty well. I didn’t think it had quite as much flavor as I wanted so we headed back to the store where we picked up some round steak. I portioned out all the steaks and marinated them in the mole for about 3 hours.

From there Maggie (that’s my girlfriend) and I headed off to her company picnic where I was determined to enjoy the sauce a little more. By then the recipe had married into itself a little more like all good Mexican sauces do and it tasted twice as good. So with a few SNAFUs with the grilling (read: don’t ever buy the light in the bag charcoal, it don’t work.) Anywho, the steaks turned out to be a pretty big hit, I cooked 24 of them and there were only 3 left when we decided to head off for the night.

Here’s my altered recipe:

Mole sauce:

6 dried ancho chilies, stemmed and seeded

4 canned chipotle chilies, plus 3 T adobo sauce

1/4 cup golden raisins

1/4 cup whole almonds

1/4 cup sesame seeds

1 tablespoon whole black peppercorns

1 cinnamon stick, preferably Mexican, broken in pieces

1 tablespoon dried oregano, preferably Mexican

4 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves only

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

2 onions, sliced

3 cloves garlic, chopped

2 serrano peppers, stemmed and seeded

6 plum tomatoes, chopped

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, preferably Mexican, chopped

The juice of 1 lime

 

Directions

For the mole: Tear the ancho, anaheim, and chipotle chiles into large pieces and toast them in a dry skillet over medium heat until they change color a bit, about 2 minutes. Put them into a bowl with the raisins and cover them with hot water. Soak unti softened, about 30 minutes. In the same skillet over medium heat, add the almonds, sesame seeds, peppercorns, cinnamon stick, oregano, and thyme. Toast for 2 minutes, grind in a spice grinder, and add the powder to a blender. In the same skillet over medium-high heat add the olive oil, onions, garlic, and serrano. Cook until lightly browned, then add the tomatoes. Cook until vegetables are softened, about 10 to 15 minutes, then add to the blender. Add the chocolate and the soaked chiles and raisins to the blender along with some of the chile soaking liquid. Puree, adding more soaking liquid as needed, to make a smooth sauce. (This makes about 4 cups sauce, the recipe uses 2 cups, the extra can be frozen).