Homemade Sichuan chile oil—it used to be called Burnt Ridge Red, after the hills and the road that ran by the farm. It was a way to use up all the cayenne peppers that wouldn’t give up the ghost, even after the first few frosts, and our go-to holiday present. We threaded the chiles and hung them on the back porch, and we’d pull down two or three ristras at a time for a big batch.

Sichuan chile oil, or hong you (red oil), is a pantry staple and close to an all-purpose condiment. It’s essential for dumplings and noodles, and it’s good mixed with a little soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil as a dressing for cold chicken or vegetables (asparagus, lotus, cucumber.) You can buy it in Asian groceries and many supermarkets, but it’s never as smoky and fragrant and rich tasting as the homebrew.

The process is simple–you heat peanut oil until smoking, cool it to 250 degrees, and then pour it over coarse chile flakes. The flakes sizzle and swirl and then sink to the bottom, the oil turns a beautiful orange, and after a few days, it’s ready to use. The traditional chile is called “facing heaven,” but I never see it in the markets. There’s an unverified rumor about import restrictions, but that might be confusion stemming from the defunct sichuan pepper ban. It’s a short, blunt, dark red variety, so named because it grows pointing skyward, and it’s supposed to be mellow and aromatic, with a tangy citrus-y bite.

This vintage is actually Ranch 99 Red, but the source and variety of the peppers is unknown, because they came ground in a package labeled only “dried chile.” I also tried a variation with the very special dried chiltepin, using only about half the amount of chiles. It’s much hotter, with a fresh and fruity flavor. So far I’ve only tried it on an egg-and-greens taco and some boiled potatoes, but I can also see it on steamed or grilled fish, with green onions and cilantro and a squirt of lime.

Hard to pick from the many pepper-themed songs, but I’m feeling soca superstar Allison Hinds’ Keep Wining, dedicated to my best Bmore high stepper.

Re: Clear eyes, full plates. Two women in my life can be counted on to watch Friday Night Lights with what I consider an appropriate level of appreciation. The three of us could be Rally Girls. Except one of us would be a Rally Girl for Tyra, and the other was a real college cheerleader and would make us do advanced moves. Cheering takes a lot of attention to detail, which is why Sara had to tell me that Landry asked Devin to “go to the Knot Hole and eat cobbler.” File under LINES THAT WILL WORK ON ME ANYTIME.

In almost three years, I’ve heard (and proposed) countless versions of “What Davis needs is a good ____.” By and large, decent pizza fills in the ____. A worthy burger joint was up there until B&B opened with burgers good enough to make up for the frequently sorry service and silly no-split-check policy. But Davis fantasy dining sometimes has more to do with function than food, especially functional combinations. Like, why can’t you study and drink good coffee at a cafe after 10 pm? Wouldn’t a taco truck on campus be great? Where’s the cozy bar with 1) an eclectic microbrew selection; 2) 80s rock soft enough to hear your ladyfriends talk over; and 3) no need for ladyfriends to dispatch drunken 21-year old boys from conversational entry?

For me, an edible croissant and a fast-and-cheap dumpling shack would bring this town pretty close to perfect. It’s funny, in Kentucky that would have been a ridiculous statement, but when you live an hour from the Bay, you get uppity. Like, if Tartine can make a first-rate pain au chocolate why can’t Ciocolat? Maybe it’s a spelling problem. But having mixed and turned and folded and cut and shaped (and ruined) hundreds of pounds of croissant dough in my life, I know the answers–time, skill, and the high price of butter.

Still, next to my croissant air castle, I think a bricks-and-mortar dumpling bar could actually make it here. Poor students + large Asian population + everyone loves dumplings = entrepreneurial potential. Until then it’s DIY, as we did the weekend before last. Four dumpling maniacs forced unsuspecting friends into slavery on the jiaozi assembly line…

Manipulated into servitude with beer and Super Titi 33s…

Wait, what’s that? Super Titi 33s? We weren’t the first to discover these, but we did pioneer the Super Titi Bar. Not unlike the early adopters who didn’t discover oxygen but opened those O2 counters in the airport. It’s about the concept, not the product, which is an Indonesian garlic-flavored wafer that explodes into a peculiarly colored and essentially tasteless puff after a few seconds in hot oil.

Titi is apparently a tree back east, but I looked it up to see what it might mean in Indonesian. No luck, although many languages have the word, translating variously as: monkey with long beautiful fur, little cat, water, walking softly, common woman’s name, and body part which doesn’t come in pairs and which women don’t usually have.

ST33s marry well with biajui, that mighty Chinese potable of distilled sorghum. Yes, I should have taken the shot before the shot.

We made half our jiaozi with pork filling, a mixture I adapted from Fuschia Dunlop’s book on Sichuan cuisine, one of my DICBs. It’s ground pork mixed with some water that has had crushed ginger, garlic, and green onion soaking in it, chicken broth, a little sesame oil and a splash of Shaoxing rice wine, and pinches of salt, pepper, and sugar. My only tip is make the filling much looser and wetter than you think so the dumplings are soft and squirty, not dry hard little meatballs-in-a-wrapper. Erin’s luscious chicken filling uses egg for binding and juiciness and Chinese leeks for flavor and lovely green flecks.

Plaid uniforms strip away ego for solidarity on the dumpling corps.

Our man at the stove was no less exacting with the traditional triple boil (drop jiaozi into boiling water, bring to boil again, add a cup of cold water, bring to boil again, etc., for a total of three times–here’s a nice demonstration vid) than he was with the evening’s craft project.

Although it had been previously discussed, we didn’t decide until around midnight (6 pm biajui time) to enter the Washington Post’s peep diorama contest, which ended the next day. My “Michael Peeps-Phelps” vision lacked strong execution and we decided he would live where the original phone-cam pic should have, on the InterNOT. But now I think, c’mon MPP, where’s the showmanship? There’s no glory in getting stale on the counter when you could be flexing your marshmallow six-pack for an underwater centerfold. Since I know you can’t tell, that’s a mini-swim cap, some sleek racing goggles, a Team USA thong, and a tiny little bong.

“The Incon-peep-ient Truth,” however, was a sobering success. I have shots of the creative process, but stay tuned–I’ll try to get a photo of the magnum opus from the artist himself when he returns from Mexico.

An evening of cooking and crafting with friends–what could be more delicious?

Postscript re: Alice Waters’ treasonous hearth-cooked eggs. Back in Kentucky, after I saw this documentary, I was gifted the best Valentine ever—an iron egg spoon made by a local blacksmith. Many eggs have been cooked on that spoon. It’s February, it’s Appalachia, your house is insulated with Hefty garbage bags, there’s a fire going in the fireplace, you save gas, it takes 45 seconds. Although Alice can probably afford a more eco-friendly masonry heater/stove.

My egg spoon is beautiful but not mandatory—a cast iron pan, a ladle, a piece of tin foil is fine—and it works even outside of Berkeley.   And for cooking all kinds of things in the hearth, from pot roast to tarte tatin, William Rubel wrote a super book on how to pimp your fire.

Most of you know about my obsession with Friday Night Lights. Really, I won’t be doing long posts, but I’ve been thinking about this one for a while…some foodie observations for my fellow fans.

—————————-

Across Dillon electric lines stretch for miles against a sweeping Texas sky. Shabby stucco and bleak brick ranchers line the fading oil town. It’s endless scrap yards and empty parking lots and chain link fence, and there’s a dreary high school with a witless vice-principal and a whole staff just to coach football. And there’s the Alamo Freeze and Applebee’s and a steakhouse and a roadhouse, and behind closed doors, there’s oatmeal and scrambled eggs and cookies with Panther blue frosting and parties with racks of ribs and refrigerators with nothing but beer.

What is it about Friday Night Lights that tells a story of time and place like no other TV show? It’s not just the small-town particulars of Christian radio and copper wire thieves and fathers in Iraq. It’s more than the one-take camera work and the mostly believable accents. It’s how sharply these details make concrete the experience of life as the opening and closing of possibilities, and the reality that we are directed but not determined by where we come from.

Most of the show’s characters are teenagers, and those who aren’t are tied to teenagers as teachers and parents. But on FNL, adolescence stands for something more ageless than high school hormones. It concentrates the lifelong state in which imagination leads beyond family and hometown and drab daily life to dream about what could be. Teenagers begin to unpack the possibilities, fantasize about who they will become, and also grasp their limitations. This last part is one of the things that make the show stand out: it completely rejects the teen invincibility cliché. In Dillon, teens follow a truer path to identity, one in which they learn that they are affected by other people, that to desire is to be vulnerable, and that time runs out, and not just on the Jumbotron.

But back to the Alamo Freeze. From FNL’s first episode, I’ve noticed who’s eating what and where in Dillon. Has a TV show has ever used food to imply so much? It’s run through every season, sometimes as an obvious plot element (Riggins ordering rare squab at a schmoozy steak dinner) but usually in subtle ways (pancake breakfasts, team cookouts.) It’s part of how the show introduced its characters from the start. We got that Coach Taylor’s family would be central and solid because he only came into the Freeze for takeout. Matt Saracen was obviously responsible beyond his years from the way he handled himself scooping ice cream. Tyra made her penchant for bad boys and her mission to get out of Dillon clear from the minute she sashayed up for a bite of Smash’s burger.

Speaking of the cocky running back and his path to greatness, I want to eat at the Williams’. Smash’s mother’s doggedness comes out at the table, in platters of chicken and big bowls of green beans and baskets of soft rolls and pitchers of sweet tea. The Taylors’ two-parent, two-income household can swing takeout, but Mrs. Williams juggles two jobs and three kids on her own. As a single black woman who hopes and fears her son will be a sports superstar, she’s got a serious spread on the table every night. Cookies for visiting recruiters might fuel the NCAA dream, but supper is where she’s guarding against the uncertainties—steroids, fistfights, a knee injury, a worldly white girlfriend.

Unlike say, the Riggins household, where the refrigerator is bare except for a couple of twelve-packs, and the counters and coffee table are strewn with empties, and someone is always cracking a cold one. Every once in a while, Billy up and tries to parent Tim a little, but it usually comes out in mild threats or dangerous advice. Billy’s more likely to get Tim arrested than he is to make a shopping list or open a can of soup. (Though there was that time the hot mother next door seduced both Riggins brothers and then straightened up and bought groceries.)

But what is Tim eating, my fluttering female heart wants to know, because he can’t look like that that on a liquid diet. Maybe he’s shopping at the gas station, at least for bologna and milk and cheese and chips. The morning Lila’s jog led her to Tim’s kitchen, there were even scrambled eggs. So Tim is drunk at practice or passed out on the couch in his sleeveless tee, and he’s bedded half the women in Dillon and rally girls do his homework. He’s the player of the players, but he’s also the most tender-hearted, and you’re always aware that he’s yearning for more. And on that sleepy golden morning, the way he asked Lila if she was hungry and shyly held the forkful of egg to her lips was all it took to know he had fallen hard for his best friend’s fiancée.

Speaking of sweetness and hotness, most women viewers probably remember those last moments in Mexico. FNL lost some magic in its short second season with an unconvincing murder and a trip across the border for miracle surgery. The writers struck and the lights went out and when they came back on characters had vanished and plots were dangling. But even as the show swung too close to soap, it was still riveting, and Lila and Tim and Jason evoking the jukebox scene from Y tu mama tambien was especially lovely and graceful. Jason won’t ever walk again, and Tim seems to have lost everything, and Lila’s heart is in a spiral, because it’s just a fact of life that you can love more than one. But best of all, while Lila takes turns slow dancing with the boys, are the inscrutable men at the counter eating tacos and nursing their beers. In that quiet melancholy detail, danger and defeat and love are nothing but small secrets among people far from home, about to fade into the rest of the unseen, unspoken world.

Tim’s my favorite character for romantic reasons, and I love Landry for the laughs, but Buddy Garrity, King of the Boosters, is the most interesting and complicated Dillon-ite. Buddy is a pompadoured buffoon but he’s also the man most likely to cry or die for the Panthers, and there is unmistakable innocence in his shiny, shady red face. Buddy’s thematic strand, culinarily speaking, is steak. As a newly single dad, he demonstrates his parenting superiority by serving his daughter a forty dollar piece of beef. His wife kicked him out when he cheated, but what really stung was she took up with a vegetarian. And remember when he was going to adopt a homeless football player, and Tami wanted to see if he was up for the job? Of course she looked in his refrigerator: “You got a lot a steak and you got a lot of sausage. You need some vegetables.”

I’m wondering if we’ll ever see Buddy with a steak again, though, after that camping trip, which repelled his kids even further from their sweaty, sentimental, football fanatic of a father. Buddy hurling his beautiful steaks into the woods and puffing out of the campground on those skinny legs should go down as one of the great TV quitting scenes. It was a stunned show of disbelief—but it’s the great state of Texas! Football! Prime beefsteak! And for a lonely car salesman decades past his high school glory, it was also the perfect act of resignation.

I could go on about how food and fragility in FNL, like that cozy night Julie and Matt ate veggie dogs at the lake and it was plain they’d have something to blush and grin about at church the next morning. Or the palpable frustration of old age in Grandma Saracen’s refusal to eat her oatmeal. And her alienation when the wrong cookies are brought home by an estranged daughter-in-law. Or the loss of Carlotta’s French Toast Tuesdays, the showdown over fried chicken in the living room, etc. The relationships in the Saracen household are particularly affecting in how they reveal another dimension of adolescence–the first call to take care of people, the time when what we do for others begins to shape who we are.

I have some fantasy FNL episodes, mainly because I’ve wandered the Central Texas barbecue trail and I know that Coach and Smash would stop in Lockhart on the way to tryouts. They would lean against the hood of the car, oil pumps silhouetted against the sky, the air smelling of pecan and hickory smoke, and they would eat their ribs from Smitty’s or brisket from Black’s and talk about being a man and having heart and all those other football-of-the-soul subjects. Also, Carlotta would lie her head in Matt’s lap as he drove her into the outskirts of Austin for tapado and tamales, and Herc would make a mean green chili, and Mindy and Billy would bolt down to Galveston for an oyster-shooting, shrimp-sucking, tequila-drenched shotgun wedding.

But I’ll take what I can get—the Landing Strip crowd rounding up a crawfish boil, Julie’s free-range egg declaration that might as well already be a tattoo, and the smoothie truck at football practice that says everything that needs to be said about new money and overbearing sports parents. I do sometimes get a little claustrophobic at the Freeze, but that’s just because I know that what we love is often what we want to leave, and also what we can’t stand to lose.

Tune time: Born in Texas/a land of beef/Never cared much for greens/you oughta heard I love my meat…Crucifictorious’ first gig was off the hook, but this one’s for Buddy. He’s Dillon’s Jerry Lee, who’s still standing after a life that might be seen as one long fall from grace. JL married his cousin, divorced four times, was widowed twice, lost two sons, shot his bass player, battled drugs, was busted by the IRS, and never got over not being Elvis. JL in his twilight years is my favorite—like Buddy, lonely, wistful, and still talking shit.

There’s a foodie firestorm over Alice Waters’ recent appearance on 60 Minutes. She cooked an egg over an open fire, praised some special grapes at the farmers’ market, and said food was a spending choice just like tennis shoes.

If you ever had even the most benign experience as a media subject, you know you can’t escape being filtered. A few lines are distilled from hours of footage to illustrate the editors’ angle. In this case, the lens wasn’t the goals or traction or impact of the local food movement. It was the perception that the cost and inconvenience of eating locally make it a lifestyle choice for the rich.  Equating a call for change with elitism in the name of populism is now customary, especially when it’s working class people that are making your industry money (fast food, credit cards.)

Waters influenced generations of chefs to appreciate ecological diversity, fresh flavors, and local farms. Chez Panisse is a long-time, high-volume customer of many small farmers in these parts, and so are many of its offspring on the Bay area restaurant scene. The Chez Panisse Foundation spends more than a million dollars a year on school gardening and cooking programs, and not just in Berkeley, but across the country.

Waters isn’t that smooth in the limelight, but she didn’t ask to be a prophet. I’ve heard her speak several times, and her vision is pretty clear: she wishes fresh wholesome food was more prized and more accessible. She wishes people spent more money on food, and by that she means people with money to spend, not those in poverty, not those suffering from hunger. She believes that growing and preparing food is a powerful way to teach and civilize children. She thinks a delicious meal can move people to be kinder and gentler, help them enjoy life and each other.

Edible Schoolyard New Orleans, modeled after Waters' original

Waters did not suggest that prix fixe dinners and breakfast by the hearth will solve everything.  She has helped to demonstrate that large bureaucratic institutions and complex regulations can be changed. Her farm-to-school work is testimony to the idea that our food problem is not simply about personal behavior. It’s a model of corporate and governmental responsibility for better food production, distribution, and consumption.

The dots weren’t all connected in twelve minutes of sound bytes. Waters didn’t raise how health and wealth inequities are systemic problems in the U.S. She didn’t describe the public policy measures that could provide more incentives for corporations to change production methods, communities to improve food access, and individuals to choose better diets. And people who like their fresh kicks might be a little bitter, just like those Pennsylvanians Obama shouldn’t have tried to characterize.

Waters may not articulate the “external costs of the industrial food system” argument like Michael Pollan, but she’s a chef. Pollan’s salads probably aren’t as brilliant either. We need Pollan’s finely honed reasoning, but there’s room too for heirloom tomatoes, celebratory feasts, and artistry on the plate and palate.

It’d be better to take 60 Minutes to task for its slanted coverage and the message that change is impossible and we should relish the status quo. Skewer Leslie Stahl’s naivety (“so these are really vegetables?”) instead, which made gardening sound exotic and cooking breakfast look indulgent. The market for local food is increasing, and the policy environment may be improving too. Good restaurants and social justice are not mutually exclusive, and in this case one strengthens the voice of the other.

Last week friends were rallied for a John Henry-like showdown, in which the machine was a Presto deepfryer and the man was Edna Lewis, or at least her fried chicken legacy. Lewis left rural Virginia for New York in the forties, where she became a cook to homesick southern writers and Greenwich Village politicos and bohemians. She had a long career as a chef, author, and passionate advocate for the preservation of southern foodways. Long before the high church of fresh-local-seasonal was built in Berkeley, Lewis was celebrating the homegrown culinary traditions of African-Americans in the rural southeast–country ham and trout roe and headcheese and cream biscuits and sorrel and ramps and benne wafers and kieffer pear preserves and blackberry wine.  And chicken shallow-fried in homemade lard seasoned with country ham.

Deep- vs. shallow-frying. The key purported benefit of deep-frying is that it produces a sealing effect that keeps juices in rather than letting them escape through the crust. Theoretically the exposed sides of pan-fried chicken parts wouldn’t allow steam pressure to build up and create that barrier. Also, the larger amount of fat used in deep-frying should be less inclined to drop in temperature, and so the chicken would absorb less of it. On the other hand, pan-frying advocates like Edna say the skin’s contact with the pan allows it to cook hotter and faster than the oil itself, so you get more caramelization and a crispier crust than you would from a deep fry. It’s also been suggested that you want some steam to escape, because then the skin will adhere better to the meat.

The protocols. Edna’s method calls for a dual brine–salt water then buttermilk—but both the pan-fried and deep-fried contenders got that treatment. They were also submitted to the same dredge of flour with a little cornstarch and salt, pepper, and cayenne, although toward the end we threw some eggs in for a battered version. We still had a few jars of lard left from our last Clark Summit pig, and we used the last scraps from this year’s Broadbent country ham to infuse the frying medium (pork fat) with flavor (other pork fat.)

The deep fryer was filled with corn oil, which made those of us too close to finishing dissertations somewhat anxious about methodological standards and data incompatibility. We also conflated the dredge/batter factor, put multiple operators at varying levels of sobriety on the equipment, and neglected to perform blind testing.

The results. Next time Sara will design a more rigorous experiment, but here’s a brief summary of our subjective, sloppy, statistically unsound conclusions:

1. Edna won because chicken that tastes like pork is better than chicken that tastes like chicken.

2. Edna also won because we would rather take sustenance and inspiration from an earthy spirit and her sultry way with lard than a plug-in device with dials, lights, and buttons. Technically speaking though, the equipment didn’t make a noticeable difference.

3. Getting chicken to submit to the crisp isn’t easy. I’m pretty sure we did the best we could as far as keeping the temperature up by not crowding the pan or the fryer. But could we have improved the dredge? While you’re trying to dry, brown, and crisp the flour-coated skin, the moisture from the meat is bubbling away and the coating is subjected to the escaping water vapor. You’ve got stewing working against the frying. Our skin wasn’t tough or mushy, but it didn’t snap and crackle either.

My guess is that more cornstarch would help. We used a small amount in the dredge, two tablespoons per cup, or about 12.5 percent of the flour. Chewiness in the crust is likely a product of the gluten that develops in wheat flour. Also, flour absorbs plenty of moisture and fat, so it can also be blamed for a slight sogginess. If we were to reduce the flour and substitute with cornstarch, the chicken might fry dryer and crisper. Rice or potato flour could also minimize water and fat absorption and help avoid the chewy effect.

Many recipes call for leavening in the form of a dash of baking soda and/or baking powder. It makes sense that sodium bicarbonate would lighten the coating because of the gas bubbles, but mostly in a wet batter. And as for our wet batter, the protein from the eggs did seem to make everything stick better, but if I tried it again I would dip the chicken in flour first. The slightly wet, smooth surface of the chicken resists the wet batter and a rougher, dryer undercoat would probably help it adhere.

4. We could have used some Nashville. Our dredge was pepper-short and flavor-shy, and no one would have described our chicken as “it’s a cleansing and we need it.”

5. A small flame ring and low BTUs made it hard to keep a steady temperature in a 12″ pan. Next time we’ll try the propane turkey fryer base in the back yard. (And the house won’t smell like KFC for a week.)

6. I should have braved up and made gravy, because there’s no evidence that avoiding saturated fat prolongs life.

Oh, and #7.  It’s not chicken dinner without hooping on the grounds.

Thematic tune. The Dynatones do it better, but this has a little footage from Gus’ Fried Chicken in downtown Memphis. I liked the original way out in Mason, but it burned down, like every good chicken shack, roadhouse, and barbecue joint does at some point. If it’s ventilated, it just can’t be that good. Anyway, Gus’ has nothing on Prince’s chicken but Nashville doesn’t have Memphis women.

OK, one more. Even though  D’Angelo apparently uses Crisco. Note that he only shed one piece of clothing on the Chris Rock Show. Unfortunately.

and thanks for coming by. I’ve had this bashful blog domain a while. It’s sat in silence because most days I think the 50,000 or so food-leaning personal blogs out there are enough. Also, coffee is my favorite meal of the day.  And cameras get nervous around me because they know I’ll spatter oil on their lenses or smear chocolate on their buttons.

But this week the almond trees bloomed and the clocks turned ahead and Root and growl sprang up too. I appreciate the small exchanges of ideas and experience that blogs make possible among like-minded people. I need to reassure my camera. And I have the urge to hold on to time a little tighter, and not be a stranger to family and friends. They know I do this best with flour on my front. They also know that I might not be able to commit to a blog, but if I do it will be mostly about the life and death of plants and animals, and especially the afterlife of both in the kitchen. Root and growl is homage to those two kingdoms. It’s also short for the old expression “grab root and growl,” originally used to encourage Dust Bowl farmers to stay strong, hold down the farm, and wait for rain. Eventually it came to mean “sit down and eat”– more immediately gratifying advice, and sometimes just as uplifting.