I cooked some dang good pizza too late for Pi Day.

(Photo courtesy of The Petit Chef - who included figs in their pizza!)

I missed Pi Day (3/14) – what a shame! – so I am backdating this entry commemoratively. Every year since I first discovered π Day I manage to miss it in favor of my enthusiasm for the Ides of March (3/15). Oh the conflicts of multiple nerdy interests. Come hell or high water, though, I am NOT missing the epic, once-a-century Pi Day of 2015 (3/14/15)!!!

In any event, I accidentally celebrated with a pie - a Spinach Procuitto Pizza Pie!

Apparently, you can get a mean trio of imported cured hams from Trader Joe's (I used this one). I use about half a package per pizza. Matt and I are suckers for these kinds of meats, particularly as it pairs so well with our vice for expensive cheeses.

And speaking of - don't skimp on the prosciutto or the parmesan reggiano! It's well worth the extra coupla bucks for the fancy stuff.

Enjoy this salty pizza with a glass of tart red wine (I picked Liberté Cabernet Sauvignon) and chocolate dessert!

I learned about Japanese mayo.

This weekend we got some Meghan Janssen. In honor of this getting, we made a jaunt to Little Tokyo to look for manga art supplies and prepare our moods for Japanese dinner and My Neighbor Totoro!

The weather rapidly changed from rainy to sunny during the short jaunt down I-110 from Pasadena to the heart of LA. It made for some wonderful pictures:

Upon returning home, unsuccessful in acquiring neither art supplies nor boba, we received Meghan who cooked for us her Japanese students' favorite dish: Omuraisu (pronounced roughly oh-moo-rys-oo... or "omelette rice oo" said really fast.) On our fried rice omelette we drew faces with ketchup and Japanese mayonnaise. Another friend of mine once told me that Japanese put mayo on everything green - no uncooked, un-mayonnaised veggies for the Japanese! And Meghan told me that there is a special Japanese word for someone who has extra love for mayonnaise. Having now tried this incredible condiment, I think understand why!

Japanese Mayo > any other kind of mayo.

I'm not sure I could tell you why... perhaps its the slightly more tart/sour flavor - but in any event, it stands a fact!

I learned that the taste map is a LIE!

(illustration by everevese - whoever it is)

Yesterday we got back from an impulsive, weeklong stay at the in-luvs (in-laws) in Paso Robles. Again! It was a great week of industry for both Matt and I: he went to APE in San Francisco with Malachi to exhibit their new comic, EXPANSION [buy it here!], while I stayed in Paso and was waited on, hand and foot, by his mommy. I dunno what he was doing up there but I was cooking pies, crocheting & knitting, quilting, birthday-ing, and I even got to meet my sister-in-law-in-law's mother (who is an amazing artist) and learn a bit about wet- & needle-felting! I left with my head so full of ideas (not to mention a car full of vegetables from the Sheean garden), I could help but come home with the domestic-midas touch.

Last night, I made dinner with the produce we came home with. I didn't really have a plan, but all the pie making has given me the chance to work with all kinds of whole foods, see how they cook, and understand their complimentary tastes. The last two pies where apple and squash based. Seeing as how I had both at my disposal, I decided to make a soup.

There doesn't seem to be a huge difference between soup and pie fillings...

Pie filling	Soup base
bake/puree ingredients add some cream if desired add flour & sugar spice	bake/puree ingredients add some butter if desired add chicken broth & milk spice

I could be totally wrong, but all-in-all, it seems that soups are just liquid-y-ier pie fillings!

In any event, I cut up a butternut squash and some apples, baked the butternut squash in butter and the apples in brown sugar, boiled the almost-soft butternut squash in some chicken broth and half-&-half while the hot apples sat in a couple cups of orange juice, and finally pureed the whole dang thang. It was already tasty, but the seasoning had yet to be added!

And this is where I learned of the LIES!!!! As I taste tested, adding a bit of salt and some left over butter from the butternut squash pan, I pulled out my brain (iPhone) to see what parts of my tongue were wanting for stimulation. I definitely nailed the sweet/sour balance by adding more broth and butter to tone down the sweetness - but I wasn't quite sure what my tongue (between the edges and the center) wanted. SO I looked up a taste map!

Much to my dismay, the image I chose came with the following article from LiveScience explaining the myth of the taste map. Christopher Wanjek, the columnist and author of Bad Medicine, explains that basically the taste map has persisted because no one has taken the time to really refute it. The map was developed based on some loose and subjective data (D.P. Hanig, 1901) and then arranged into graphs (Edwin Boring, 2942) that translated to the map (Virginia Collings, 1974) decades after the initial study. But apparently (and, I must admit, somewhat obviously), the whole tongue and other parts of the mouth can taste every flavor.

The article didn't really give much information concerning how taste actually works or present any alternative maps or interpretations of how taste is process, but I suppose that isn't really the its point... if you want real information on the debunking and exploration of tastes, check out this article by Cathy Pelletier.

So how did that effect my soup?
I basically decided I didn't care and tried to forget the information I read. I knew that even though the map is outdated and inaccurate, I was still trying to stimulate that certain part of my mouth, right around the salty/sour area. I pulled out all the complimentary spices I could think of and added them in different quantities to test bowls of the soup base I set aside. Like a good scientist (maybe), I repeated my taste testing until finally I had my solution: a dash more of salt and a buncha ginger. YUM! The completion of my make-shift recipe left my whole mouth tingling with delight.

Still, my mind is reeling a bit from the news of this faulty map. Would you judge me harshly for saying it feels a little like when they said "Pluto's not a planet"?

I Cooked Chili! Without Chili...

9 weeks ago my mother bought a very expensive plane ticket to come see me three days earlier than her previously purchased plane ticket because Petra decided to be uncharacteristically Sheean/Northend and get borned early. A few weeks later my dad joined us and, with my mom, stocked our fridge and freezer with all kinds of food! One of these food items was a pound of ground turkey that, until last night, went unused.

In the past I have used ground turkey in a pseudo-Kenyan dish that my friend who dated a young Mossi man briefly described helping prepare at his home. That's not simply the most interesting way to put my original encounter with ground turkey - it's actually that vague... I remember her saying something about tomatoes and other vegetables simmering on top of the cooking turkey meat, and then later adding a bunch of seasoning and a lot of curry powder...

Anyway, it was different every time I made it, but this post is about CHILI!

I don't follow recipes very well, but I love them and, thus, have the AllRecipes.com app on my phone. I don't grocery shop very well either, and, thus don't use the app all the well. But this time I managed to get all the ingredients missing from my kitchen for our Black Bean Turkey Chili dinner! Unfortunately, I had mistaken one of my three bottles of Paprika for Chili Powder - a discover I made after having already begun cooking.... in any event, my last ditch effort to make a somewhat southwestern chili for the mouth-watering, fresh Whole Foods Bakery corn bread I had just bought resulted in, what Matt says, is the best chili he's ever had:

Chili without Chili ingredients: 2 Tbs vegetable oil (we use olive oil for everything, in truth) 1 yellow chopped yellow onion 3-4 sliced fresh tomatoes 4 large cloves of garlic 1/2 lemon 1 lb of ground turkey 2 cans of black beans 1/2 Tbs of Paprika 1 Tbs of basil 1 Tbs of crushed red pepper (or to taste) 1/2 Tbs of ground Black Pepper (and I bet you could add bell pepper in and that would taaaa-sty!) directions: in a fairly large pan, heat oil on medium and stir in onions and garlic until they become translucent (if desire, bell pepper can be cooked with the onions at this time). turn the heat up to medium-high and add in the turkey, stir until it browns. when it has mostly cooked, add all spices, stirring them into the turkey evenly.* drain 1 of the 2 cans of black beans. add the contents of the undrained can and mix over medium (medium-low it needed). next (here is the kenyan cooking influence) add the drained can of black beans to the top of the mixture spreading it evenly, and as thinly as possible over the top. do the same with the sliced tomatoes, using enough tomatoes to cover the surface. cover and let simmer for 30 minutes remove the cover, squeeze fresh lemon juice into the mixtures and stir in all the ingredients, mixing the tomatoes and the beans into the rest of the chili. return cover and let simmer for another 15-25 minutes, until ingredients have become pasty. remove from heat and serve hot with cornbread, butter and honey!

*at this time, I should have added some kind of vinegar or wine (preferable red vinegar) to help slow the cooking process down while the more fresh ingredients simmered. Instead, I basically just burned and lost the bottom layer of turkey, which wasn't too much of a loss!