French fries with Grueyere cheese and Beef Burgundy.

Psych!

It's really thirteen spices. 

A large and well-shaped russet potato from the exalted land of Idaho, a state in the American empire, is sliced as if turning it into a brick, that is roughly. Four sides, top and bottom. That is all the peeling it gets. It leaves a lot in the trailings that could be formed into potato sticks, but they are not, so a good deal is wasted. 

And that's such a shame.

See, if you were doing this for a family then all the little bits would be gathered too.

The container of five-spice is at least fifteen years old. I'm guessing.

It's been used twice that I know of.

It needs to be thrown out.

The container repurposed.

This Chinese 13-spices (from the back of the box):

* star anise

* fennel

* Sichuan pepper

* galangal ginger

* tangerine peel

* black pepper

* nutmeg

* ginger

* licorice

* amomum

* clove

* angelica dahurica

* ...

Should be 12-spice because this is all that is listed.

* Sichuan pepper is not a variant black pepper. It is not a chile. It has slight lemony overtones and it makes a tingly numbness in the mouth due to hydroxy-a-sanshool. 

* Galangal ginger, also Thai ginger, similar rhizome, while the varieties of galangal all have the same hot spicy flavor as ginger, they are not considered synonymous with regular ginger.

* Amomum is a Chinese plant genus that includes black cardamom. The plant genus is remarkable for its pungency. 

* Angelica dahurica is an Asian plant whose roots are used mostly for medicine in the Far East. The plant blooms look like Queen Anne's lace.

Well, we're left to guess what the 13th spice is. Let's say, cumin. 

No wait, let's say, some stupid crap like burdock.

No, wait, wait, wait. Let's say, fenugreek.

Turmeric. 

Something brown. Asafoetida (hing).

Whatever.

What we have here is a curry. I don't know why they're so resistant to using the term. Five-spice sounds so exotic. It's a curry! Thirteen-spice sounds over twice as exotic. It's a curry!

Star anise and fennel both have a licorice taste, then combined with actual licorice the whole thing will be heavily licorice-ified. 

Just like five-spice does. Due to the star anise alone. 

And it's cheap as H-E-Double cinnamon sticks. 

You can buy half the spice store combined into one thing and it's cheaper than buying them separately. It's so cheap that it makes me not want to buy it. Like what are we getting here, the floor sweepings of the spice shop? 

The original idea was to fry the potatoes three times to overcome the high altitude handicap that is preventing soft fluffy insides with crisp outsides. No matter how crisp, the moisture inside them transfers to the surface and makes them go soft.

That's how it is in a desert. 

The water moves automatically to even itself out. It passes right through the surface crispness leaving it softened. And that happens immediately.

That experiment was a massive pain in the butt and it failed because so much with moisture was added to them after they were cooked. The fries were already soggy before they were brought to the table.

What a bummer. 

I have another potato and the oil is still out, so I might try it again right away.

The Beef Burgundy was frozen leftover. It tastes weird. The big round thing is a potato, odd, because it's added to French fried potatoes. 

Whispers: It wasn't very good.