potato salad

i seem to be keeping an interest in side dishes these days. i made this salad recently for a bbq / outdoor food event at my sister's the other day. eating it within minutes of a perfectly grilled burger was great.

just a side note:  about the burger. it was a wagyu striploin burger. i was not eating it like i would any other burger. it's practically a reformed steak. sacrilege to overcook. the red velvet juices soaked up into the standard kuwaiti white burger bun were perfect.

back to the potato salad. mustard in two forms, dill, celery, and the sauce. the mustard seeds explode as you eat them, releasing a haphazard, yet delicate, punctuation to the experience. as do the other ingredients. they are balanced with the undertones of the potato, baby and cooked until just done. i also like this salad with red potatoes.

there is nothing wrong with focusing on the side notes of a meal. in fact, in a true study of anything one must pay attention to everything. understand the composition, the cosmology of the experience. the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, but you have to know the value of the parts first to understand what the whole is. and more specifically, every part of a meal has to be great, from the smallest to the greatest detail.

shanks and chips

Dinner tonight was lamb shanks and chips, one of my favourite interpretations of meat and potatoes. I let the lamb shanks marinade overnight and the result was a flavourful, melt-in-your-mouth experience. The marinade included mock-wine (grape juice and red wine vinegar), thyme, bay leaves, two heads of garlic and peppercorns. Before braising in the oven, I browned the shanks after lightly dusting them with flour. I then roughly chopped 4 big onions and let them caramelize in the juices of the browned meat over very low fire. Replaced the shanks, poured over the remainder of the marinade, covered with foil then into a moderate/low oven for a couple of hours.

The chips are cooked in the Heston Blumenthal triple-cooked method. The result is a chip that is fluffy on the inside and glassy on the outside. Yes, glassy. Heston explains that the state of any material when it reaches this state, extremely crunchy and can shatter into small pieces. To me it is the only way to cook chips. It's worth the wait and isn't really as cumbersome as many of his other techniques. First you run them under cold water for about ten minutes, then boil until just cooked all the way through. Placed on a wire rack over a tray, the chips should be allowed to dry out until cooled. After a while, heat oil in a pan until you reach 130 degrees celsius. Fry the potatoes until they look dehydrated, a light skin will develop and they will turn slightly yellow. Repeat the drying process, this time in the fridge. Let them cool down and then take them out to get back to room temperature before finally frying once again at 190 degrees. Each of the frying processes must be carefully controlled because if the oil gets hotter than the temperatures stated above, the chips may burn.