If I am so Frugal why do I use Truffles?

I am frugal; I like to think I got to retire from high tech because I was cheap, not because I was rich. But I also think life is too short to eat bland food.

I have a nice little collection of fine ingredients that I use on a regular basis. Truffles, nut oil, salt packed capers, Greek olives, fine cheeses and expensive vinegars frequently find their way onto my plate.

A fourteen dollar bottle of walnut oil might seem like an extravagance but if it enhances fifty meals out of it it works out to 28 cents per meal. And it tastes great.

I love condiments made out of boiled down grapes, from the balsamico we know to unusual items like must, which is simply boiled down grape juice. A drop of that on a plate packs a lot of flavor. I love putting just barely a drop on a piece of apple or cheese or a slice of beef. Sweet and sour with a lot of depth it's really worth looking for.

Truffles are the sign of a special meal here. They have the cachet of being rare and expensive but if you use them right they can be a very cost effective way of packing some powerful flavors. I buy jars of truffles or peelings to make sauces for beef or chicken or vegetables. Just a dollars worth sauteed in a little butter in a pan where a steak had cooked will make your whole house smell like truffles and with a few drops of cream you have as good a sauce as can be made.

One area I don't suggest spending a lot of money on is fancy salts. I have tried grey salts, pink salts, sea salts from all over and cheap salts. Use a good brand of kosher salt for most things or everything and you'll do well. There are some fun salts like Maldon, which are little crystal pyramids and crunch when you eat them, but is that worth the bundle of money it costs? Maybe, but it's hardly frugal and doesn't pack a flavor punch.

So if you don't know what to get or how to use it I suggest you start with a single item like a good nut oil or maybe an aged balsamic vinegar. Spend ten or twelve bucks. Then taste what you have been missing!

The Cure for Bland Food

Today I was inspired as I set slabs of bacon to cure in my fridge. I actually took my son out for Japanese food for lunch today. More on that later.

I know what a lot of you are thinking - there's a lot of sodium in them thar foods. It's true of you ate nothing but cured food you'd be in salt overload but that's not how I eat. These foods are condiments or sides designed to make other food taste good.

Well known cured foods include ham and salami and lox.

Some of my favorite cured foods

 

Curing is the rubbing or soaking food in substances that remove moisture from the cells of the food and through osmosis replaces the moisture with a solution that is downright inhospitable to bacteria. Usually it's sugary or salty. It's a method that has been used for thousands of years to preserve and improve food.




Pickled foods are almost always cured. Pickling is the action of acetic acid (vinegar) on foods. Some pickles don't list vinegar as an ingredient. In that case the vinegar comes as a result of the action of beneficial bacteria created in the salty environment.

My mom used to make great pickles in a ceramic crock in the garage. She's British and the spiciest thing I ever saw her eat is ketchup - except for those pickles, which she cured with jalepeños. 

Here we have some of my favorites including my ubiquitous peppers and onions, boquerones, salt-cured capers,  Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers and my mother's recipe for quick cucumber and onion pickles.

Salt cured fish are wonderful. Not only do they have a wonderful flavor but the enhance the taste of other food.  These boquerones aren't too fishy, like some anchovies or oilier fish like herring or mackerel. 

These fish also bring umami to your food. Umami is the mouth-watering flavor that seems to have the effect of bringing out the savory qualities of other food. It's found in many seafoods including oily fish, clams, seaweed, etc.

Trappey's pickled tobasco peppers are a nice treat. They are spicy but not really frightening. The liquid they come with is a handy seasoning, a little bit spicy and sour from the vinegar. I love to eat them with fried chicken or well cooked meats.

Capers are a fun food, at once flowery and salty. They are the unripe bud of a small bush. I planted two of these in my backyard last month. It will be years before I get any buds.  The ones in the picture are salt-cured, just packed in salt with no water or vineger. They taste more flowery than the ones packed in water or vinegar.

Of course you see one of my favorite cured foods, onions and peppers.

The cucumbers on the plates here were pickled overnight in a solution of salt and sugar. I make it like my mom did, simply slicing the cucumbers and onions and adding salt and sugar to the water until it tastes right. I've never measured it but you can tell when you taste it if is right. There was almost always a bowl of these in the fridge when I grew up.

Slabs of my home cured, hot almond smoked bacon

Note: For lunch my wife and son and I went to one of our favorite local restaurants, a place serving Silicon Valley for many years. Tomisushi has the usual Japanese menu items but the qualtity is there in everything.

It's the kind of place where everybody at the table says 'you have to try this' when the food arrives. Even the miso soup is delicious. Chicken teryaki tastes smoky and not too sweet. The sushi is always high quality and the fried foods come out greaseless and crunchy.

One of the World's Best $2.50 Lunches

Beautiful, cheap and delicious. Just like me!

Oh yes, here it is. The chicken is really high quality fresh chicken I bought at my favorite Chinese Market.


I poured some olive oil in a bowl and mixed in some of my spice rub. I rolled the chicken around in it and rubbed it into the skin. I put it on a foil lined tray and into a 425° oven for five minutes, then I turned the heat off.


When they just firm and done all the way through I took them out. Simple and delicious.

Cost: at $.89 a pound they were a real bargain. The two cost about $.60. Let's add a tablespoon of olive oil and some spices and call it $.70.

Lettuce is really expensive right now and quality is difficult to find. But I found these little gem lettuces for $1.59 each. It's dressed with hazelnut oil and a 10 year old balsamic vinegar. Not trendy right now but very tasty. On top for a quirky garnish is some enoki mushrooms and below is a few sliced almonds to add some depth.

Cost including the few drops of expensive oil and expensive vinegar and the mushrooms and almonds: about $.85

The sourdough was toasted over a flame and topped with onions and peppers and boquerones, those fishy little fish from Spain.

Cost: about $1.

Yum factor is very high for this meal. Cost is really low. I made a big pile of this chicken since the whole family is here all of a sudden. While the chicken was in the oven I made the onions and peppers.  When the chicken was done I cooked the Branzino I had for lunch yesterday. There were a lot of good textures in this meal too. The chicken skin was cruncy and flesh nice and moist. The bread was really crunchy and had a flame-toasted flavor. The lettuce was cruncy too and the little bit of hazelnut oil on it make the almonds taste really nutty.

Good stuff all around. Glad I got to eat it.