Tokyo Monster Steak

21 May 2021 Leave a comment

by scolgin in Humor, Recipes Tags: , , , , , , ,

My pal Curtis — one of my oldest friends, a real-life cowboy and a legit carnivore — is one of the only reasons I still check Facebook from time to time. You see, Curtis likes to send me videos to my Facebook account. Videos of meat.

Examples of these have included “Fastest Tacos in the World — Tijuana” and “Jack’d Up Smoked Meatloaf.” Most recently, he sent me a video called “Massive Ribeye Steaks for Beasts”. It was produced by a group of Tokyo-based foodies who call themselves Hachiko District, and was shot at a restaurant called Monster Grill in that city’s Ebisu district.

Monster Grill is famous for two things — a 7-lb pyramid of six hamburgers which, if you can finish them in 30 minutes, you don’t have to pay your $75 bill; and a giant 2-pound, 2 inch-thick ribeye steak that is pounded down to one inch, grilled, sliced and slathered with creamy garlic sauce and served with a mound of rice. I watched the video. And it sounded pretty darned good. That garlic sauce was triggering something carnal in me. This, I had to try.

Curtis and me — which one is the real cowboy?

Now short of a quick research trip to Tokyo that seemed unlikely to pass the familial budgeting committee, I hit the internet. I have a deft hand with a ribeye, no help was needed there. But my search for “Tokyo Monster Grill garlic sauce recipe” yielded nothing, so I set about figuring it out myself.

Somewhere among the various videos and Yelp reviews, I saw someone describe the sauce as “mayonnaise-based”. Perfect for a blog called “Skinny Girls and Mayonnaise,” right? I didn’t call it that because I had a fear of mayonnaise. As far as the eye could tell, the sauce appeared flecked with orange. How does one fleck a creamy mayonnaise sauce with orange? Roasted chiles de arbol seemed like the answer.

I fried a head of garlic, pureed it with mayo and a few other ingredients, and nailed it on the first try. Does it taste like the garlic sauce at Monster Grill in Tokyo? I don’t know, I’ve never been there. But it looks pretty similar, and I hope for their sake that their’s tastes as good as mine.

BTW, you can also slather the garlic sauce all over that 7-lb burger tower, if you’re ever in Tokyo and really hungry. Or you could just make the steak like I did, and that might just be enough.

Enjoy!

* * *

Tokyo Monster Steak with creamy garlic sauce
serves 4

2 lb. ribeye steak
1 large head garlic
1/2 cup grapeseed oil
4 dried chiles de arbol, seeded
1/2 cup Japanese kewpie mayonnaise
1 tbsp. rice wine vinegar
1/2 cup water
salt & pepper to taste

Pound your ribeye steak with a meat mallet until it is about 1-inch thick. Season with salt and pepper. Pre-heat oven to 350F.

Make your garlic sauce:

Break the head of garlic into cloves, and remove skin. Heat grapeseed oil over medium-high heat, and fry the garlic cloves, turning once or twice, until golden. Remove garlic from pan, and pan from heat. While the pan is still hot, toast the chiles for about 30 seconds in the hot oil, and then remove.

Place garlic cloves, reserved grapeseed oil, chiles, mayonnaise, vinegar and water in a blender and puree until smooth. Season to taste with salt.

Heat a cast iron skillet on high heat until it begins to smoke. Sear your steak for 90 seconds, and flip. Sear for another 90 seconds. Then place the pan in the oven. Cook to desired doneness — 3 minutes for rare, 5 for medium rare, and you’re on your own after that.

Remove pan from oven, and steak from pan to a cutting board. Slice across the grain into slices about 1/2-inch thick. Lay out sliced steak on a platter, and drench with garlic sauce. Serve with Japanese rice and more garlic sauce on the side. (And maybe a salad, what the hell.)

Orange Julius

19 Apr 2021 9 Comments

by scolgin in Beverages, Humor, Recipes, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: , , , , ,

When I was a kid, and we used to go to the Topanga Plaza Mall, I always hoped my parents might find it in their hearts to swing me by the Orange Julius.

You couldn’t miss the Orange Julius — over beyond the Cracker Barrel (or was it a Hickory Farm?), turn left at the Radio Shack, just before the Miller’s Outpost and there it was — the bright orange sign with the curvy type beckoning you.

It wasn’t quite a storefront, yet was more than a stand. In a glass case was a tower of oranges, just to show you that they actually made the drinks from fresh squeezed. I remember the building sense of anticipation as the line moved forward and we approached the counter.

Not me and my father

Forget the sexy teenage girls in their impossibly high hats, knee-high boots and TWA stewardess-inspired one pieces. It was the drink I was after. An ambrosial blended concoction of orange juice, milk, vanilla and ice. Every straw-sucked slurp from the wax-coated paper tumbler was pure heaven, and when I reached the foamy ice-flecked bit at the bottom, I was thoroughly satisfied.

For awhile, there were still a few Orange Julius shops around, hold-out testaments to an earlier, more innocent time. I haven’t seen one in a long while and am not sure if they’ve gone the way of the dodo. But I figured the drink out. So that that one time when I said to my children, “Come closer, let me tell you the story of the Orange Julius…” and initiated them into the legend, and they replied, “Dad, will you take us?” I could ease the inevitable heartbreak with the words, “But I can make you one…”

I call it “Orange Julius-ish,” just in case there are any toupee’d 70s-era vintage copyright lawyers out there in the ethernet, waiting to pounce.

Enjoy!

____________________

Orange Julius-ish
serves 2

1 cup orange juice
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tbsp. sugar
6-8 ice cubes

Place ingredients in a blender. Blend on high. Pour into glasses, add straws and find sexy teenager in knee-high boots and tall hats to serve.

The Accidental Beekeeper, Pt. II

29 Apr 2020 3 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Starlets, Yoga Students & Quinoa (stories) Tags: , , , , , ,

Between my business (which is still in business), my various creative and entrepreneurial pursuits, my art and music, my cooking and food blog — not to mention pandemic, three children at home requiring motivation, homework help and sustenance — I didn’t need another thing.

But the bees thought otherwise.

Olga and me in our bee suits (note: Mexican straw cowboy hat perched stylishly on top of my bee suit)

Considering our chicken coop and pig, terraced gardens that grow nothing but Swiss chard, and my general food nerd tendencies, I sorta fit the profile of someone who would be susceptible to bee keeping. Plus, we use a lot of honey at our house, and I rather like mead. But it sounded like a hassle — there were big boxes, the need to understand the complex societal structure and enigmatic behavior of bees, and goofy space suits to zip into. Oh, and the fact that on the rare occasion that I do get stung by a bee, the sting site swells up like a balloon and itches for three days.

Once, many years ago, I put an owl box in an oak tree off the bedroom deck in hopes of attracting an owl to chase away rodents. A tiny owl moved in for a week, but unable to attract a mate with his fervent hooting, departed. And a bee hive moved in. For several years, we watched the bees come and go, respecting each other’s personal space. Then one windy day, the hive fell. Angry bees swarmed like a buzzy cloud all over the property. Eventually they dispersed and we collected the honeycomb from the ground. It was remarkable to drizzle Greek yogurt with honey that came from bees outside your window.

Flash forward: seven or eight years, and another hive of bees had moved into a cavity in the siding of our house. As luck would have it, we had a new client who happened to be a beekeeper. I sought his advice, and he suggested outfitting a cardboard box with wire and lemongrass oil to lure the bees out of the hive and move them. I set up my box a little too near the hive, making the bees rather angry but fortunately suffering only one sting (resulting in a Popeye right arm), and waited. It sort of worked — at least some of the bees came out, swarming around a tree, and then flooding into the box. But the main colony was still in the wall, and now I had a box full of bees in addition to the hive. Which was not exactly the solution I’d been seeking.

Moving the box bees to their new home

I decided to consult with my friend Olga, who lives a few houses down. Olga is a stylish beekeeper — a fleek Russian who Instagrams curated photos of her beekeeping, her grapefruit-and-rosemary cocktails in Mason jars and her multicolored Martha Stewart-esque chicken eggs arranged in neat circles. The reward of a whiskey sour was enough to get her over with an empty hive box and two beekeeping suits. We social-distance drank and, our courage fortified, climbed into our bee suits.

It was both terrifying and interesting to walk into a cloud of bees. Olga gathered up the box while I sprayed the bees with sugar water to “calm them down.” It seemed to have more the opposite effect, as a swirl of angry buzzing clouded my vision. But I wasn’t getting stung.

“How do we get them into the hive box?” I said as we descended the property with the cardboard box toward a lonely patch of earth down by the chicken coop we had identified as a suitable spot for a new bee home.

“We’ll pour them,” Olga replied.

“Pour them??” I gaped. “You can pour bees?”

Sure enough, while I opened the hive box, Olga tilted the cardboard box and the bees came pouring out — not unlike liquid — into their new home.

“That was stressful!” I said as we reclaimed the deck and stepped out of the white jumpsuits. It was time for another cocktail.

Where do things currently stand? Well, I now have bees in three places instead of one. But I also have a borrowed bee suit and patience. And the hope that one day in the bright future, my bees will all have relocated to the hive box at the far corner of the property, and we will be spooning fresh honey over our Greek yogurt and toasting with glasses of mead. Am I a fledgling beekeeper or merely a harassed homeowner? Too early to tell…

Stay tuned…

And if you’d like to read about our original misadventures in beekeeping, check out The Accidental Beekeepers.

Nixtamalnutrition

21 Apr 2020 2 Comments

by scolgin in Humor, Markets & Stores Tags: , , , , , , , ,

One of the most troubling aspects of home isolation is that it compels you to indulge your worst food-nerd impulses. I was lying in bed this morning thinking about actually making puff pastry, for example.

Unable to pop out on my various weekly forays to my favorite ethnic markets (“How is he sourcing green papaya without access to the Island Pacific Indonesian market!?” you’re probably wondering…), I find myself lurking about food websites, coveting assorted sundries but bristling at exorbitant shipping costs.

The marketers are smart. They have collected enough data on me to know exactly where and when to strike. So it was that I received an email from Anson Mills, my favorite artisanal grain mill (do you have a favorite artisanal grain mill!??) in South Carolina. There were lots of wonderful seasonal products they knew I needed. But none so essential to my current housebound predicament as dried hominy corn and calcium hydroxide (i.e. “lime”).

Among those food-nerd thresholds I had yet to cross was nixtamalization. I had just received, as a pandemic present to myself, Enrique Olvera’s new beautiful Phaidon cookbook, “Mi Casa Tu Casa,” in which the celebrated Mexican chef goes into some depth about the process of making masa, the cornmeal essential to tortillas. I had made homemade corn tortillas many times, but always with masa harina — pre-ground, instant corn dough produced in an industrial process with commercial corn. The product was always good, yet nothing — Olvera assured me — but a shadow of what you got with heirloom corn varieties produced in the traditional method. The eerily coincidental timing of the Anson Mills email (sucker) made me realize the time to take the nixtamal plunge was now.

It took a couple weeks for my Henry Moore varietal field-ripened corn and bag of lime to arrive. Soon the kitchen was filled with the comforting smell of corn steeping in burbling lime water. The next day, I summoned Flynn who helped with making masa balls and pressing them flat in the tortilla press. I had to overcome the technical obstacle of not having a fancy Molinito masa grinder, which was accomplished with the Vitamix and more water than is preferable — resulting in the need to add some masa harina after all to get the proper consistency. That night, we enjoyed spectacular Baja fish tacos and chile verde tacos, wrapped in our own deliciously rustic, corn-fragrant tortillas. A few days later, Flynn and I got in the kitchen and did it all over again.

I was now in deep. But there was further to go…

Enrique Olvera buys his hominy from Masienda — a company that has single-handedly rescued an array of nearly extinct heirloom corn varietals from Oaxaca and other points deepest Mexico. I went to masienda.com, and I didn’t stand a chance.

When I can get stacks of 50 decent, freshly made corn tortillas for $2 at the Vallarta market, is it really worth spending $13.50 plus $18 shipping and several days’ work to make my own stack of 30 heirloom varietal corn tortillas. What do you think?

Next stop: puff pastry.

Easter in Santorini

15 Apr 2020 Leave a comment

by scolgin in Food, Humor, Recipes Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sitting around all day for five weeks, watching my wife and kids walk back and forth, had me longing for travel. So I busted out a 1000-piece Santorini puzzle that had been sitting in the garage since two Christmases ago.

I spent part of my honeymoon in the Greek Isles. I still remember like it was this morning my first revelatory taste of fresh Greek yogurt with honey for breakfast (before Greek yogurt was even a “thing” here). Santorini is a lovely island, the classic vision of “Greek isle” with whitewashed, blue-domed buildings clinging to cliffsides. It’s designation in recent years as “Europe’s favorite vacation isle” apparently has it these days somewhat overrun with continental tourists. But it was reasonably quiet when we were there — we swilled the delicious local Assyrtiko white wine while eating octopus on a balcony cantilevered over the azure blue dolphin-filled sea. Now, hermetically sealed at home with my family, I dreamed of that long, wine-hazy afternoon on the other side of the world.

So I tried to figure out whether the small blue puzzle piece in my hand was Aegean water, a blue dome, or sky. And the next thing I knew, it was Easter.

In years past, when I have been able to dodge the going-to-the-in-laws-for-Easter bullet, I have made a Roman Easter feast. But that required ingredients I knew I didn’t have — fava beans, escarole, mortadella, leg of lamb — and wouldn’t be able to procure without a terrifying and perilous trip to the grocery store. So I decided to see what I had on hand and could build a themed Easter feast around. In the freezer was a lamb shank, a Greek strifti cheese pastry swirl, in the fridge a large knob of feta, and a garden full of oregano… And I was set!

Chard, green onions and oregano from the garden

My garden — two enclosed terraces built with high hopes and much fanfare many years ago — produces almost nothing. If I plant ten tomato plants, I get twelve tomatoes. It sits on a shaded hillside covered with acidic oak leaves, and though enclosed, is under constant siege by gophers, squirrels and birds. The one thing I have been able to grow there — prolifically — is Swiss chard. It is fortunate I like Swiss chard. And because our climate in the coastal mountains of Southern California closely resembles that of the Greek isles, we have no problem with oregano. In fact, our biggest problem is we sometimes have to fight the oregano back from taking over our property.

I spent a good part of post-basket-hunt Easter morning preparing a chard, oregano and feta torta — dough rolled paper thin and filled with cheese and fresh greens, brushed with olive oil and baked to a crisp. Then braised my lamb shank and skewered wine-and-garlic-soaked pork. And in the afternoon, I drank wine and made some fresh corn masa for tortillas just because. (My Anson Mills hominy order had arrived the day before.)

Greek Easter feast

The kids set the table and lit candles, I laid out the platters of food, and we had a delightfully civilized Easter dinner. With the flavor of lamb, oregano and wine on my palate, I could even close my eyes for a moment and be transported away to that taverna patio in the Aegean Sea.

And when that sensation wore off and the plates were cleared, it was back to my puzzle.

*    *    *

Greek garlic lamb shanks
serves 2

2 lamb shanks
2 large garlic cloves
I small sprig rosemary
1/4 cup olive oil
lemon wedge
salt & pepper

Cover lamb shanks in water in a pot, and bring to boil. Skim scum off the surface, add 1 tsp. salt, turn heat to medium-low and cover. Simmer for 2 hours. (Bonus! Broth can be used for su filindeu, a rare and wonderful type of Sardinian pasta.)

Remove shanks from broth, and reserve broth if you choose. As lamb shanks cool, place garlic, rosemary leaves (removed from sprig) and 1 tsp. salt in a mortar and pestle. Grind until smooth, then drizzle in olive oil, a little at a time, continuing grinding it in to emulsify. Squeeze lemon at the end and whip into aioli.

When shanks are cool, using your fingers or a pastry brush, cover shanks thoroughly with aioli.

Heat a grill to high heat. Grill shanks until golden, about 3-5 minutes per side, turning once.

Remove from heat and serve with more olive oil for drizzling.

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