#king hat

King and Queen Hats

Couple Hat Features:

The relaxed polo-style cap that isn’t just for dads anymore

Unstructured, medium-to-high-profile crown with slightly curved bill

Buckle closure for adjustable fit

100% cotton in all colors except beige (81% cotton / 19% rayon), fabric weight 7 oz. / 240 gsm

Five-panel design with double-wide front panel for seamless printing

Printed in, and shipped from, the USA

Sized for ages 13+

Spot clean with damp cloth

This clears the backlog of things that I’ve already written up, but not of things that I should write up but haven’t yet. Basically, note to future me: all of this is completely unmoored from the date it was posted and is no longer useful as a memory jog in that sense. To anyone else that reads this: ignore this headnote.  A was travelling again, and I was to go see a show, so that meant another of those quick-ish dinners you hear so much about. This one had the added wrinkle of having to be reheatable so that R could eat them when he got home from work, which was to be much later than I was eating. 

I decided, as I usually do in such situations, on enchiladas. Many, I love enchiladas. I’m sure that the business that I do with them, being hideously inauthentic, marks them as more of an affront than a thing to be proud of, but they combine everything there is to like about a casserole with everything there is to like about a burrito. I mean, they’re basically perfect, and they’re delicious almost no matter what you do with them. Plus you can fold any old thing in there and it’s tasty because: sauce and cheese. Just a fantastic convenience food, if you don’t mind giving the vapors to the demanders of authenticity.

Since I’m generally pretty fine giving the vapors to the demanders of authenticity, I went in full-bore on some damn enchiladas.

I had some chorizo out of the freezer (chorfreezo!)*, so I uncased it and got it in a pan. While it browned I shredded a largish potato and got that in there also. When that was all nearly mostly-cooked (that is to say I was cooking everything to mostly-cooked so that it didn’t overcook in the actual enchiladas, and it was nearly to that point) I added some minced up beet greens, because vegetables are good for you and also because I’m wrapping potatoes in tortillas and that always makes me feel a passing twinge of carb guilt. 

Delicious carb guilt.

Anyway. The sauce. This is where the faint-of-authenticity are gonna wanna look away. Circumstances have demanded that I have spent the last couple of weeks out of the house**, so I don’t have any fresh tomatoes. So I made a little melange of tomato paste (like a whole little can)*** of tomato paste and a little mound of stock paste. I softened some onions and some garlic, adding some cumin and some chili flakes toward the end, and then got all that into the bowl along with some ancho chili powder and then added enough water to make it a sauce. I then stick-blended it until it was smooth. There, that’s not so bad now, is it?

I wrapped up each tortilla around a little pile of potatoes, kale and chorizo, with a little queso blanco in there for funsies, then nestled them all together in a pan, poured the sauce over them, sprinkled them with some mozzarella and some cheddar cheese, little more sauce there, then socked them in the oven until they were done. 

They were a wild, rollicking success, given by the absurd number of them that R ate while I was gone for the evening, so I’m happy to have the means and method written down here, even if I probably could have gone for something with a little more depth. As easy throw-it-together things go, it was about as good as it could be. 

* I’m still trying to use up the meat in my freezer, after all, and this is a way to do so. Also this is mexican-style chorizo, not the much-better spanish stuff which would be wildly inappropriate for the inside of an enchilada, but the use of which in an enchilada would make for a terrific prank. 

** I spent a week travelling, some of which I will eventually someday document here, and then a week dealing with a family thing that’s presently-ongoing, which you will never hear about because that’s not what I do here. 

Khachapuri, they’re called. I mean, that’s what they’re called when you do them the Georgian way and you have the right cheese, or if you’re Georgian and you’re making due with what you have. If you’re someone who has never been to Georgia and you’re making them out of your plain old regular cheese and stuff, they’re probably better-suited to being called Georgian cheese breads.

I had the idea that these would be good for a potluck-style gathering (A has one coming up), so I made a bunch of them to see if they held up from being made in advance, and to kind of get the technique down in order to not screw it up at showtime.

It started by making a hot water dough - flour, some salt and some yeast * all went into a food processor, and I drizzled in hot water until it all came together. I kneaded it for awhile until it was smooth, and then got to work putting together a cheese filling. The lade that wrote the cookbook that I took the recipe from recommended cottage cheese, mozzarella, swiss and cheddar as the cheese mixture if you don’t have access to Georgian cheese (which I do not), but I also didn’t have any cottage cheese, so I used some soft goat cheese instead. I used two ounces of each cheese per bread (for a total of eight ounces) and chopped it all together with a bench scraper until it was uniform. I then beat an egg into it, combining it all into one cohesive mass. I mixed in a nigh-silly amount of black pepper.

When the dough had risen, a couple of hours later, I rolled it out into a square. I spooned the cheese mixture into the middle of the square, and then folding all the corners in** I transferred it to the peel and then to the baking stone in the oven, and let it bake until it was done. I then did the same with the other one.

I had other plans for dinner that involved roasted squash, but when I finally got home and got around to making dinner (I was going to see a band that night, so I didn’t have a tonne of time) it wasn’t really going to work out, so I decided to eat some cheese bread with a squash salad.

I reheated the squash and the bread in a low oven while I went about the rest of the salad. I got a pan very hot on the stove and into that pan went some regular cremini mushrooms that I cut into quarters, then salted. When they had given up their water and the water had evaporated, I added a splash of soy sauce to sort of glaze them. Then I removed them to a bowl and added the warm squash, some feta cheese, some basil, some pepitas*** and a shot of pomegranate molasses, and then stirred the whole thing together.

The salad was satisfying but still tasted light, and the simple soy/pomegranate dressing made it the envy of all the other peopel at the ball. The cheese breads were phenomenal. Even without the right cheese or whatever, they tasted fantastic. I don’t understand why there aren’t little khachapuri carts every ten feet around here. Or around everywhere. I never want to be more than a few feet away from a cheese bread, is what I’m saying.

Oh, and they hold up better than the standard advice says they do - they reheated fine, if they weren’t as wildly out of this world good as they were fresh out of the oven, so they make a great potluck-type thing.

Hey, I flouted pesto orthodoxy the other, why not cheese bread orthodoxy now?

* I actually made two versions, one with yeast and stuff, and the other with baking powder and yogurt, but only the yeast version was actually worth repeating, so it’s the only one I’m treating here.

** well, I’m not actually that good at rolling things out, so it wasn’t quite a square, but it did end up a nifty little package when I was done, and that’s the important part.

A requested jambalaya, and my general policy is to not refuse any requests, so there I sat, prepared to make more jambalaya. Or, at least, rice with chicken and shrimp and sausage in it. I’m not hung up on names, such as it is.

So I tossed some shrimp with some cayenne, a little sugar, some smoked paprika, some thyme, some oregano and some black pepper and let them sit. I cut up some smoked chicken sausage* and browned it in a pan, then removed it when it had rendered out. I diced up an onion and a couple of stalks of celery and got them into the rendered sausage fat fortified with a little olive oil. I added a minced yellow pepper** and let it all soften.

When it was done, I added a couple of minced garlic cloves and the rice, and stirred everything around until the rice was coated and everything was well-mixed. I flavored the sofrito further with a generous shake of hot sauce and a healthy glug of worcestershire sauce.

I reconstituted some better than bouillon in some water and poured about a cup of that, followed by a can of tomatoes that I had blitzed with the stick blender. I chucked a bay leaf in there, on the general principle that if you’re cooking something in a liquid, it probably tastes better with a bay leaf in it. I like bay leaves.I let that come up to a simmer and covered it.

When it had been long enough for the rice to cook almost all the way through, I added the chicken and the sausage. The chicken needed time to cook through, and I prefer jambalaya when the rice is softer and cooked to just about bursting. This is probably also unorthodox, in which case I suppose I shouldn’t have someone who is concerned with authenticity over for dinner. Luckily, I almost never do.

When the chicken was nearly cooked through I added the shrimp, which require much less cooking time than the chicken. I stirred them around and when they were no longer translucent, turned the heat off and let them stand in the pot while I made a salad.

Amid the cooking process of the jambalaya itself, I had blanched and shocked some dandelion greens, and then sauteed them in a bit of olive oil. I like the assaultingly bitter flavor of dandelion greens*** that haven’t been tamed, but I’m alone in that argument. A likes them fine if they’ve been fixed up so that they are less aggressive. So I softened them with hot water and then coated them with hot fat and set them aside.

I tossed them in a bowl with some arugula and some basil leaves to bulk out the greens, and then a generous handful of dried cherries. I grated a carrot and ran it over the top. Since the dandelion greens were already treated with olive oil, I dressed the salad with an unmixed dressing, allowing the oil to mingle with a bit of additional oil and adding some salt, the juice of a couple of lemons and a shot of pomegranate molasses, and tossing the whole thing like mad so that it was thoroughly combined.

The salad was fantastic, sweet from the cherries and bitter from the greens. If it needed some onion to really set it off, well, that was an oversight. The carrot was nice, though. Of course, when is a carrot not nice? Never, that’s when. Carrots are awesome and belong in everything all the time. Praise the carrot.

The jambalaya itself was also very good, the rice having taken on a starchy, creamy texture from being a little (intentionally) overcooked, and the rest of it just generally tasting like a tasty stew. It’s a wildly effective way to make a complete dinner quickly. R ate an unholy amount of it, also, so I’m happy to call it a complete unmitigated success.

Except probably I needed an onion in the salad. Maybe a little red dude, you know?

* I almost never have andouille, the traditional sausage for this purpose, around, and so the first major departure from jambalaya orthodoxy is that I used the wrong sausage. I sometimes use lap cheong, which I almost always have around, but this time happened to have some smoked chicken sausage, and was pretty happy to have a reason to use that.

** green peppers being another ingredient that I don’t usually keep around, outside of the period where they’re in season. Whatever grocery-store green peppers might add to food, I don’t know about it, and they’re basically just barely-edible crunch in their mass-produced form. At least fresh, actually-grown green peppers are endearingly bitter and have a nifty vegetal note that I can get behind.

So, when A travels, it’s sometimes necessary to send her with food so that she isn’t stuck in the wilds of wherever she is (sometimes she goes to some really far-off places) with nothing to eat but her own resources and chain garbage. Sometimes this means that it is also becomes dinner for the night before.

One of her favorite of these “giant pots of things” meals is jambalaya, which I suppose I make in a way that isn’t super-authentic and might also more accurately be called somethign else, but who knows? Call it gulf coast chicken rice if you must. I think I will from now on.

Anyway, she requested that I do so, and I was happy to oblige. I knew from the start that I’d have to leave the shrimp out*, and the sausage that I had in the house were some spicy semi-dried chinese sausages, so I decided to lean into the chineseness of the ingredients and goose the flavor profile in that way, making it even less like jambalaya**.

So I cut the chicken into cubes and tossed the cubes with a mixture of salt, sugar, coffee, cinnamon, paprika, and cayenne and laid them aside. I minced a giant CostCo onion*** and got it into some olive oil in the dutch oven. I added a chopped red pepper and 2 chopped ribs of celery. When all that had softened, I added 2 or 3 (I don’t remember) minced garlics, a spoonful of tom yum paste, a chopped roma tomato**** and 3 bay leaves. I stirred all this around until it was a basically homogeneous paste, then re-moistened it with some soy sauce, some chinese cooking wine, a bit of fish sauce, and some sriracha. I got a cup or so of rice in there and stirred it around to get coated in the flavor and toasty. I poured in the better part of a quart of reconstituted chicken stock, reserving some at the end in case I had to adjust the level of liquid in the dish. I covered it and walked away to make a salad while the rice did its thing.

The salad was a fairly simple affair - R was going to be home for dinner, which always obviates doing anything really with the salad - of greens, a grated carrot, an apple, some parmesan cheese and some dried cranberries, dressed with lemon juice and olive oil, finished with salt and pepper. It left me with a whole lot of time to wait for the rice, yay. So I went and played Soul Calibur for awhile*****.

I tossed the chicken and sausage into the rice and covered the pan again and went and played some more Soul Calibur, waiting for the meat to cook through. I used chicken breasts so that they would cook fast enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about. The sausage was cooked and semi-dried, so it also cooked very quickly. A gets particularly worried about undercooking chicken, and I think overcooked chicken is basically the worst thing ever to happen to meat, so I have to be super careful to achieve compromise. When the meat was cooked through to everyone’s satisfaction, I corrected the seasoning with some black pepper and the juice of a lime.

The replacement of the tomato base with the tom yum flavors worked out really well, and the sort of vaguely pan-asianate addiiton of the soy and fish sauces to bring up the savoriness more than made up for the shrimp******. It went over really well, and everyone was very happy.

* this was still during the government shutdown, when the food wasn’t being inspected, because I’m still trying to clear my own backlog here.

** although this would also seem to point it more firmly in the direction of using shrimp - a tremendously southeast asian ingredient - but, again, no food inspectors were at work on this day.

*** I miss my heirloom onions, guys

**** I don’t remember what I was going to do with the roma tomato, but I had it, so I used it here.

***** Kilik 4 Lyfe!

It had been a long day of Accomplishing Things and Doing Stuff, and the idea of going out to eat wasn’t sitting well with anyone, so we didn’t, and instead I made Pan-Romanite Late Night Emergency Pasta. It was not actually that late at night, but it had all the other hallmarks.

Pan-Romanite because it’s basically a weird smashed-together middle ground between carbonara, cacio e pepe, aglio e olio and puttanesca. It’s deeply culturally invasive, and it’s the most delicious way to get food on the table in half an hour.

So it started in this case with soem homemade bacon, which I got into a cold pan to render out while I prepped the rest of the ingredients, and also set some salted water on to boil*. I reinforced the bacon fat with a little olive oil, then added a minced onion. I got some chili flakes in there, and a bit of black pepper at the beginning. When it was all fragrant, I added a dollop of tomato paste to help keep it loose, and then a handful of chopped olives and some minced garlic. I then let it stay hot and meld for awhile.

When the pasta was nearly done, I ladled some of the cooking water into the pan with the condiment in there, and then scooped the pasta into that pan, tossing and stirring it to combine. I got it into a bowl, where I added a bunch of ground peccorino romano cheese, some more fresh black pepper, and some minced parsley. It was as good as it could have been, and it’s always something I mean to make more of, but I so enjoy having it just be something that I only make when it’s an emergency and I need dinner right now that I rarely make it when I don’t have to.

It’s fun to have tricks, is what I’m saying here.