Linguica sausage and bun, mustard and pickle relish

They're hot. Too hot. You wouldn't like them. Advertised as heavy with paprika, heavy on flavor, but not so heavy on heat. That is wrong. They are heavy on heat.

The butcher has only the usual things, bratwurst and Italian sausages in various degrees of hotness, and this. I asked the young butcher if Linguica indicated the sausage has tongue in it. He stopped and looked at me sternly, miffed it seemed, perplexed, finally he said, "I thought that same thing at first, but no. It does not have tongue in it. In ten years you are the first person to put that together as I did back then. I've been sort of waiting for someone else who thinks that way." Then he told me about the paprika and how the butchers like the sausage there even if most people don't. Sold.

Because if it did have tongue in it I'd go, "Ew, gross!" 

Roast beef, Worcestershire, sea salt

Sea salt makes Worcestershire taste sweeter. It is the oddest thing. Worcestershire tastes a lot more like tamarind, like brown sugar is added instead of salt, and with no salt flavor at all. The salt brought forward the tamarind and its pronounced sweetness.

I enjoy this as a snack, a square of this, a square of that, a square of this and that, and  with no fast carbs in it.

Hamburger and buns

Buns for hamburgers and sausages made the usual way with stiff dough rather than loose wet dough, with olive oil but no egg nor milk.

Colorado peach, toast with cinnamon sugar and butter

I'll think of several things to do with peaches, and have done with peaches, and it turns out nothing I think of is good as plain juicy peach at their peak. And Boy, is this peach ever ripe. Another day on the counter and it'd ferment.

Nothing that I do will improve it. No pie crust, no torte, no peach turnover, no puff pastry, no sauce, no ice cream, no paleta nor popsicle, no cobbler, no smoothie, no cake, nor cupcake, no drink, dessert, salad, or anything. Trying to improve on a simple fully ripe peach is futile. So here goes.

We used to mix cinnamon with sugar and sprinkle it on buttered toast when we were children, then we'd dip corners of dusted toast into hot chocolate until enough bread corners fall off and enough additional sugar and cinnamon becomes incorporated that the hot chocolate transforms into a cup of something different, something akin to liquid bread pudding.

Is it an improvement? No.

Roast beef sandwich

Today at the deli the small slices of roasted flank steak were significantly more expensive than this impressively beautiful roasted beef. What used to be a cheaper cut, flavorful but tough, is now more expensive due to demand, I suppose. It's become hip. And there goes another favorite secret thing.

Those guys at the specialty store crack me up. You could take them for arrogant, and haughty, I can see that, but I find that is not the case personally. All of them are trained in pleasantness or else they all just like to have fun. One pushed the other out of the way taking control of the register after the first invited me forward to it. I told the two I intended to eat this roast beef right out of the bag like an animal and left my statement hang as just that. There is no naturally occurring response. The Australian guy held up a head of lettuce when he got to it and asked if I was going to eat that like an animal too. Ha! Found a rejoinder. I said, sure, like a bunny nibbling the edges. The switch from careless carnivore to demure herbivore and the visual imagery had them laughing like two cheerful loons.

See, they're all foodies.

I told them, speaking of nibbling, I landed on the perfect approach for cheese breadsticks that are so light they melt in your mouth to cheese powder. I'm surprised I haven't gained 20 LBS. The two taunted me to prove it. And I'm all, "It's on! Like Donkey Kong." 

So I'll take them. They'll be so impressed, and I mean it,  they'll give me a discount on top of the regular discount. It happened before with Denver sourdough. Because it's such an unusual thing for a customer to do. That is, prove it and strike a relationship like that. 

Tostada

"Toasted" in Spanish, "ado" is past participle and so is "ido." You'd think it'd be "tostado" but it's a tortilla that is toasted and tortilla is feminine and past participles agree with the verb while they can also be used as adjectives, so "ada" it is for agreement, and all that excluding the regular suspected irregulars. You notice the irregulars are always the most common verbs. You'd think they'd be uncommon irregular verbs, on account of their name, rare verbs, but they're not, they're common. So common that people are tired of following the rules with them, it's too much trouble so they elide the verb-construction rules with them, they're used all the time so they're slurred and smashed together evading full pronunciation skipping complete enunciation and compressing them to smithereens. They can also be used with "ser" for passive voice and with "por ser" for the passive doer, the agent not responsible for the action that just sort of occurred, the person present when something happened. 

None of this matters much I cannot eat it all anyway. It's been like that. I wait until I'm properly starved and fully motivated to act then eat only half of whatever I scrounge. More when I force the issue. Tonight I forced it to three fourths.

That's okay. I still have cheese breadsticks. The third successful batch. Rolled out like long pencils they bake to puffed up felt-tipped size caliber and a lot longer. I'm getting good at rolling these quickly. 

I start with 3/4 cup hot water. That determines everything else. Double that amount of flour, at least, 1+1/2 cup closer to 2 cups for stiff dough. Plus oil, plus cheese. I keep forgetting I have bacon grease. That would work too. My dough was insufficiently stiff so each bit of dough cut off with a tablespoon is dropped into flour to coat it on one side, that rolled absurdly quickly into a very thin snake shape, the new flour incorporated into snake by vigorous rolling and spreading to compensate for it being too wet. They're whipped out in seconds. All that makes three of these trays, nearly 30 individual cheese-sticks the length of the pan. The lightest most delicious and delightful batons in the world.

Breakfast burrito

Potatoes fried in the same pan that fried the tortillas. These are shown reversed because the potato was started first in the microwave. The potato is already cooked when it fries. By then the tortillas are finished and the pan available. So is the microwave to re-heat the  refried beans and the pork stew used for sauce. The same pan fries a scrambled egg in the manner of a failed sauce, that is, with a lot of butter and not allowing curd to form.

Cheese breadsticks win

Oven preheated to 375℉.

1 + 1/2 Cup flour

1/3 stick of butter shredded as cheese

the same amount of shredded hard cheese

salt 

sugar to feed yeast

1 teaspoon dry yeast

About 3/4 cup water for stiff dough.

Bake 20 minutes turning tray halfway.

Cut off heat. leave tray in oven to dry out as they cool down. It's not bread. It's more akin to cracker. The objective is to have them become dry and delightful but not stale.

These are perfect. Perfectly dry, perfectly light. 

Status: Win. Fancy restaurant-worthy. Amaze your friends with your posh dietary habits by this one simple trick.

Cheese breadstick fail

Flour with enough baking powder to lift the flour and the cheese.

This would be where I went wrong. If you were doing some kind of forensic inquiry. One of the places. 

Picture it; standing there with an array of spices and flavors in front of me and knowing flour to be pure thud dullness it's easy to go overboard even though I know habanero powder is the most fierce substance on earth. I've made this mistake before. That and other chile, garlic and onion powder. I could have kept going but I stopped, loading it up with even more intensities, broadening its flavor profile all over the place. At at moment I was really holding back quite a lot and by my calculation not overdoing things at all. But my effort ruined it. Insufficient restraint.

Too hot. They'll kill you. I'm nibbling them anyway like a suicidal mouse. They could be used chopped into croutons to spice up a potato and leek soup, a cauliflower soup, a butternut squash soup, what have you, something bland it could kick right up to a new dangerous uncomfortable level but for limited appreciation. 

Baking powder is not a great idea. The ones in the restaurant were lighter and airier than regular crackers.

Status: Fail.