Celery and Cantaloupe salad January 25, 2012
Posted by inspiredbywolfe in Vegetables, Wolfe recipe.Tags: Snacks
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Nero Wolfe sometimes likes to put strange things together. In particular, his combination of fruit and savoury things is something I often question. Sometimes I understand the end result and completely agree that the apparently strange combination works, but sometimes, I don’t. I’ll always try making it – but that doesn’t mean I like or understand the end result. This cantaloupe salad is one of these occasions.
I started by chopping up celery hearts and cantaloupe, trying to keep them approximately all the same size. I ended up using some normal celery pieces too, so I had a good ratio of celery to cantaloupe.
I made a dressing of tarragon vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. The recipe called for currant jelly to be added to the dressing; not having any currant jelly, I substituted plum jam. Here’s the dressing all mixed up.
I tipped the dressing over the salad, and added a generous amount of poppy seeds and coriander seeds.
I mixed these all together and served.
I admit I wasn’t sure of this. The crunch of the celery was nice, and the dressing provided a nice vinegary tang. However, the overwhelming sensation was one of sweetness, from the cantaloupe. I understand that the sweetness was mitigated somewhat by the dressing, poppy seeds and celery, but overall I thought this was too sweet for my thought of what a (savory) salad should be.
Nero Wolfe still hasn’t converted me to his way of thinking about sweet and savoury together. However, I am willing to continue experimenting with these recipes in the hope that Wolfe’s theory of sweet and savoury will grow on me.
Relapse: Garlic January 22, 2012
Posted by inspiredbywolfe in Relapse, Vegetables.Tags: Lunch, Snacks
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Relapse: An occasional series where I discuss several ways of preparing an ingredient.
Garlic: enemy of vampires and polite dinner parties alike. It appears that Nero Wolfe is not overly fond of garlic, except in shrimp bordelaise. He sometimes uses a miniscule amount, but in general seems to prefer using onion and other aromatics. Well, Nero Wolfe may well disapprove, but when I was presented with a large bunch of freshly picked garlic, I needed to put it to good use.
Roasted garlic
Once all the bulbs were washed, it was time to start looking at recipes. To start with, I put some pieces in a muffin tin and drizzled them with olive oil.
I covered the garlic with foil and roasted them in a hot oven for about an hour. This is not a particularly new way of preparing garlic but I really like garlic like this way. The roasting removes the sharpness, and the resulting pieces can be eaten as is, or blended into a paste (useful to add to sausages or stews).
Garlic soup
When reading through Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail, I was struck by his garlic soup recipe. It had an awful lot of garlic in it but the soup itself seemed that it would be soothing and mild. I began by adding a number of cloves to some chicken stock.
I left this to simmer for about 40 minutes, until the garlic was completely soft. I then removed all the cloves and squished them through a sieve to produce a fine garlic paste.
I added the paste back to the soup, and while it was heading up again, I quickly grilled some stale bread I had sprinkled with a bit of parmesan cheese.
I served the soup by adding pieces of the bread to it, so they absorbed the soup.
As promised, this soup was soothing and satisfying. The garlic produced an almost nutty flavour, which permeated the soup and made it somewhat creamy. As with the roasted garlic, the long cooking time meant the garlic was no longer sharp or strong in taste, allowing many other flavours to come through. I also really enjoyed the addition of the bread which added a nice texture and a bit of saltiness from the parmesan. This is definitely something that I think will become a regular fixture.
Pickled garlic
Finally, I decided to pickle some garlic. I used a recipe I found online (which I can’t find now!), and started by making a brine with vinegar, sugar and water. I brought this to the boil to dissolve the sugar, and also added the garlic to cook it briefly. I added some chili, fennel and peppercorns to a jar, and poured the brine and the garlic in with the other spices. I added a thin layer of olive oil on the top and left it to pickle.
The recipe I used said the garlic would be done in a couple of days – I ended up leaving mine for about a week and a half. I suppose it depends a bit on how pickled you like your garlic. I pickled mine until they were going a little soft, but were still quite firm inside and held their shapes well. The addition of the sugar meant they had a tangy sweet and sour flavour, which was very nice. I’ve used both the pickled garlic and the brine it pickled in, in salads, stews and so on, as the brine has also taken on a nice garlic flavour.
I think because we add garlic to so many different recipes, it’s easy to forget that it’s a great ingredient in its own right. These recipes certainly put garlic in the centre of the dishes created, and I appreciated learning new ways of preparing garlic.
Ransom (letter) cookies January 15, 2012
Posted by inspiredbywolfe in Sweet things.Tags: Snacks
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When, on a recent trip to the art gallery, I spied some brilliant cookie cutters in the gift shop, I bought them – and did not question why an art gallery may be selling cookie cutters in their gift shop. I thought that these cookie cutters were extremely versatile and could be used in many situations.
They were billed as alphabet or printing press cutters, but we all know they’re really for writing cookie ransom notes and other suitably murderous messages. I wasted no time in putting these cookies to use, by making a suitably Nero Wolfe message.
I also tried a new sugar cookie recipe, by Sweet SugarBelle. I must say this will be my go-to sugar cookie recipe from now on – it doesn’t require chilling before using, the cookies rose consistently, and the cookies were very smooth on the top – perfect for decorating. I began to stamp out the letters.
I found the best method was to cut out the shape, then dip the cutter in flour and stamp the letter. I dipped the cutter after each stamp to ensure it didn’t stick to the dough. After cooking and cooling, I started decorating them. I stuck to simple colours but was able to vary the cookies by icing some of them in outline and filling some of them in.
And finally with all the letters coloured in.
So what message did I spell out? I wanted to do something Nero Wolfe-related…
Now, before you think that’s a little morbid, this is actually a quote from “Help Wanted, Male”, part of the Trouble in Triplicate collection, and it is mentioned that it is from a movie playing at the time of the case.
The great thing about this message – unlike the one in the story – is that you can quickly remove any trace of it in an effective and delicious way.
I’m sure there are lots of nice messages I can make with these cookies, but for now I’m thinking of more murderous messages I can make and send to people!
Pork ravioli with mushroom sauce January 11, 2012
Posted by inspiredbywolfe in Pork, Vegetables.Tags: Dinner
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Or, what to do with the leftovers of a suckling pig christmas dinner. It may surprise you to learn that there were indeed leftovers after Christmas day, for which I blame the general excesses of Christmas and the ridiculous amount of food this holiday seems to encourage. While eating leftovers straight from the fridge was fun for a few days, after that it was time to do something more exciting with the remains of the pork. I decided to make ravioli with the rest of the meat, and boiled the bones to make something between a stock and a headcheese.
As I was starting with pre-cooked meat, I used the approach taken with the Saucisse Minuit recipe: make a slurry, add the meat, and mix everything together. I used some fat left over from making pork confit, and cooked some onions and garlic.
When the onions were softened, I added wine, pistachios and breadcrumbs, and mixed them together until it turned into the aforementioned slurry.
Meanwhile, I minced the pork meat (and some of the skin), and once the slurry had cooled, mixed everything together.
Meanwhile, I set to work making a sauce. I made a bechamel sauce, and thinned it down with wine and stock. I added some finely chopped mushrooms and let it all simmer together for a while. I didn’t want the sauce to be too creamy, so I added some red wine vinegar to provide some acidity and tanginess.
I’d already made some pasta dough, which had been chilling in the fridge until now. I started making the ravioli – which was fun for about the first 20, and got rather tedious after that…
As the filling was already cooked, I only needed to boil the ravioli for a couple of minute until they done. I served them with the mushroom sauce, with some basil on top.
It’s hard to make light-brown things look attractive, so you’ll have to take my word that this was a very nice combination. The ravioli were quite rich from the pork, there was the odd crunch from the pistachios and this was contrasted with the tangy mushroom sauce. I was very happy to find such a nice way to use up the remains of our Christmas feast, and, given the quantity I made, we can be reminded of Christmas for many meals to come.
“Miraculous crispy pig ear”: an analysis of the Charcutepalooza tweets January 3, 2012
Posted by inspiredbywolfe in Charcutepalooza.7 comments
This isn’t a food post – apologies – but it is sort of food related, as it contains an analysis of tweets using the #charcutepalooza hashtag. Never fear! Food posts will resume shortly.
When I’m not making brain-shaped headcheese or silly detective cookies, I work as an archivist. Some of the stereotypes are true – I do work in a basement, and sometimes I wear cardigans. However, archivists and records managers aren’t just interested in old stuff, and serious time and research has gone into looking at methods of preserving electronic information – which increasingly includes information contained on social media sites. The capturing and use of social media records is something I’m interested in, and the charcutepalooza twitter archive provided me with the opportunity to conduct some analysis.
I originally set up the charcutepalooza twapperkeeper archive in February so I could look back on the scheduled twitter chats as they were always held at a time when I couldn’t attend. In December, I was reminded that I’d set this thing up, and sure enough, it had continued to merrily tick along, capturing all tweets using the #charcutepalooza hashtag. Since I had this great data source to use, I thought I’d see if I could do some basic analysis and see if any trends emerged. I closely followed some of the analysis methods used by Dr Axel Bruns as part of the Mapping Online Publics project, after I saw him speak earlier this year.
Capturing the tweets
I originally created the Twapperkeeper archive on 14 February 2011. At that time, Twapperkeeper was one of the main ways I’d heard about to capture tweets on a particular keyword or hashtag. However, in March of 2011, the ability to export Twapperkeeper archives was removed, as this was deemed a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. This removed one of the most useful features of Twapperkeeper, but at least the tweets were still being captured. Then in early December 2011, Twapperkeeper announced it had been purchased by HootSuite, and that existing twapperkeeper archives would not be available after January 6, 2012, unless you moved to the (paid) HootSuite model.
Luckily (and thanks to twitter!), I was directed to the blog of Martin Hawksey, who had written a script to extract twapperkeeper archives into a google spreadsheet. I lost no time in immediately exporting the existing charcutepalooza archive to a google spreadsheet, and then set up a new google spreadsheet to continue capturing tweets using the charcutepalooza hashtag (thanks again to Martin Hawksey). This will continue to capture any tweets using the #charcutepalooza hashtag into the future.
Basic information
- The following analysis was done on tweets captured from 14 February – 28 December 2011 (so does not include the announcement of the finalists on 29 December and subsequent tweets)
- The archive contains all tweets tagged with the hashtag #charcutepalooza – but not tweets which do not have this hashtag. This means if you have replied to a #charcutepalooza-tagged tweet but have not used the hashtag, it won’t be in this collection
- It contains manual retweets (ie if you have used “RT”), but not retweets done using the automatic twitter retweet button
Some statistics
- Total number of tweets: 15,244 – which means an average of 1270 tweets per month and 48 tweets per day
- Number of words contained in tweets: over 235,000
- Number of retweets (using “RT”): 5042, meaning about 33% of the tweets were retweets
- Total number of tweeters: 1524 (including people who only used the hashtag once)
- Number who used the hashtag more than 10 times: 149
- Number who used the hashtag more than 50 times: 50 (while I haven’t cross-checked, I would suggest this would correspond with the final 33 participants, those who completed the majority of the challenges, plus leaders/advisors such as Mrs Wheelbarrow, Kim Foster, Michael Ruhlman and Bob Delgrosso.
Trends over time
Not surprisingly, there were many more tweets towards the start of charcutepalooza than in November-December. I suggest this is because many people signed up for charcutepalooza, and were very enthusiastic towards the start, but as people dropped out, and there was less publicity surrounding charcutepalooza month by month, the overall number of tweets reduced.
Tweets over time - click through for a bigger image
While the overall quantity of tweets reduced as the months progressed, there was a definite spike on the 15th of every month – corresponding, of course, with the time that everyone’s posts for that month had to be in. There was a larger dip in posts in July (while it still spiked on the 15th it was less dramatic than other months): it seems that the blending challenge did a few people in.
Top topics
When I first took a grab of the Twapperkeeper archive on December 11, I created this chart of the top words in the charcutepalooza tweets. This was done using wordle then some simple manipulation to get it into an appropriately-themed image. The size of the words relates to how often they were used.
Charcutepalooza keywords - click through for a larger version
I removed several symbols and words, such as “RT”, “@” and URLs. As you can see above, the top words also included people’s twitter names. I used a program called wordstat (you need to pay for it – I used the demo version) to analyse the text in the tweets. Here’s the top words in the tweets, once the word “charcutepalooza” and the names of participants were removed.
Top keywords - click through for a larger image
Not surprisingly, everyone announcing their new posts each month meant that “post” was the top word (I assume this was pushed higher by other people commenting saying “great post” and similar). Both Ruhlman and BobdelGrosso were also mentioned quite a lot; I suggest this is because of the twitter chats conducted each month, and people generally asking them questions. Most of the other words related to charcuterie ingredients or techniques (Wordstat also let me look at the top phrases – things like “corn beef” is probably no surprise, but my overall favourite was “miraculous crispy pig ear”!).
Here’s another look at the top words – the size of the bubbles indicates how frequently the words were used, and the different colours indicate the words were used together, or grouped frequently.
Click through for a larger version
Top tweeters
Finally, I wanted to look at who was tweeting, and the frequency. This is a graph with all tweeters who used the charcutepalooza hashtag more than 50 times.
Top tweeters - click through for a larger version
Not surprisingly, Mrs Wheelbarrow led the tweeting charge, by a fair amount. Some tweeters changed user names during the year; I grouped them together as the twapperkeeeper harvest had no way of knowing these were the same people (apologies if I missed anyone changing their name).
Another way of looking at the network between tweeters is to use the tags explorer, again developed by Martin Hawksey. This is set up to run off the google spreadsheet, so is only from December 16 onward, and does not contain the full charcutepalooza tweet set.
Network of charcutepalooza tweeters - click through to the live version
This is a live network – it will continue to expand with charcutepalooza tweets, and allows you to replay any users’ tweets and connections from December 16 onward (click on the username to be taken to the replay screen).
This map also tracks top contributors, which we already know, and something we don’t already know: top conversationalists. This looks at how many connections participants have with other participants (ie, how often they are replying, retweeting and generally interacting with other charcutepalooza participants), rather than total number of tweets.
Click through for a larger version
Here we have the interesting case of Janis Tester, who, while not being the person with the top number of tweets, has the most number of connections within the charcuteplaooza twitter network. This means she is probably directly replying to charcutepalooza tweets (and replying using the #charcutepalooza hashtag), and generally actively engaging with other charcutepalooza participants by commenting and retweeting their tweets. On a purely anecdotal level, I would say that Janet being the top conversationalist will not come as a surprise to any charcutepalooza participant 
There’s definitely more analysis to be done on the charcutepalooza twitter collection but I’ll leave it there for now. Thanks for putting up with a non-food post!
