Week 3 Dinner Guest

Here are the answers of this week's dinner guest plus his prologue:

Before we get into your questions, I wanted to call attention to the posting header that precedes yours on craigslist: 'hungry to suck some loads today.' I didn't click on his, but it created a stream of consciousness so when I read your heading I expected something entirely different from your ad: cum guzzling and all that. Anyway, it made me laugh that it's quite the opposite.

1) What is the most intense of vegetables?
I think that depends on your idea of intense. Durian is very intense, it's a fruit, I suppose (not a vegetable), but it's pungent like cheese; something entirely unexpected from a spiky pod. But if you mean the most intensely pleasurable vegetable, which I bet you do, then I'll have to slightly bend the rules again, because bean dishes are always the most intensely tasty for me. I know technically speaking, they're legumes. In the Bay Area there are many great lentil dishes, but the thing I'm craving the most at the moment is Frijoles Charros from Tamarindo, in Oakland. It will change Mexican food for you forever.

2) What is your guilty pleasure when it comes to food?
My guilty pleasure is old school sweet and sour pork. I grew up on the crap. It was always a treat when my parents took us out to dinner at the Chinese (American) restaurant in my tiny home town, so I associate it not only with my first taste of MSG - which by the way is fantastic and should be used more often, not less - but with great memories of my family eating happily together, in a darkened red, sensual room, around a table heaped with a feast of cheap Chinese food. It was heaven, and I make no apologies for my memory. But it is a little tacky, especially with all the authentic and very tasty Chinese food in San Francisco, to order sweet and sour pork. So I rarely do, and NEVER in company.

3) Tell me about a cooking disaster:
I haven't had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, because I tend to follow the recipe fairly closely until I'm comfortable enough to venture on my own. And I learn much more from my mistakes, especially because it's so disappointing. I have this emotional response and sense memory that prevent me from ever doing something so stupid again. Like this one time, I'd spent at least two hours on a yellow Indian curry, and the final step was to add in yogurt to thicken it. There was this terse caveat to not let it curdle, but by that point I was tired and hungry, not really paying attention, and I put the yogurt in when the curry was too hot. Of course it curdled; I was so upset. It still tasted okay, but the texture was all wrong. But like I said, I've never done that again!

And a bonus! Although I didn't pick this guy, he had a great food disaster:

So last year I started making yogurt (clearly I am a foodie too). I usually make thick Greek-style yogurt, so I have a pretty good handle on it. Eventually, I wanted to branch out. I found a craigslist ad for fresh goat's milk. Now, any goat's milk available in stores is ultra pasteurized, negating any possibility of culturing. Through a strange blip in California dairy code, it is illegal to sell unpasteurized goat's milk for human consumption. So, I contacted the goat lady from craigslist and arranged to go to her place in the Oakland hills to procure some black market milk. I am not always a talky one, but the goat lady was happy to do all the talking. She had me meet the goats. She made me go through the extensive milk cooling process (so gamey-tasting bacteria doesn't form in it). She had me taste test the milk from each of the two goats (different breeds & ages). She made me try the six different kinds of cheese she makes from each kind of milk. This goat lady was very, very, very excited about her goats. She mentioned that she had once tried making yogurt, but it didn't work out too well. That didn't worry me, I was a yogurt making pro. After about an hour of standing awkwardly in the goat lady's kitchen and listening to all manner of goat stories, she made me sign a guest book that certified that I was buying the milk for my cat and not myself (purchase for livestock consumption is perfectly legal). I handed over $25 for two gallons of milk. I can't believe I paid $12.50 for each gallon of milk! What was I thinking? I was thinking this was going to be the best damn yogurt ever. I rushed right home and got to work. Since this is a disaster story, you know how it turned out. Twelve hours of careful fermenting later, I had... slightly syrupy sour milk. I didn't have the heart to throw away the most expensive sour milk I'd ever purchased, so I choked some of it down in smoothies and stared at it in the back of the fridge for a month or so. I learned my lesson: do not doubt the goat lady.