More Brussels Sprouts

A variation on an old theme tonight: Brussels sprouts sauteed with lemon, toasted pine nuts, shallots, and butter. I have come to the conclusion that you pretty much can't go wrong once you've gotten as far as sauteeing the sprouts with shallots and butter, and throwing some lemon zest or juice or both on at the end. The most impressive part of this recipe I thought was how quick it was.

Unlike Fine Cooking'sbrussels sprouts with hazelnut butter or brussels sprouts with brown butter, there is no roasting or butter-making or anything fancy in this one. It is *dead easy*:

This one comes courtesy of Edible Vancouver (whose cover is responsible for my brussels sprout cravings BTW):


Brussels Sprouts Saute

1 1/2 lb brussels sprouts trimmed and sliced in half lenthwise (I only had 1 lb, so I 2/3'ed the butter, but kept the lemon and shallots and garlic the same)

5 tbsp butter, divided (I used 4: 3 at the beginning, one at the end)

6 shallots or 1 medium sized onion (I used 3 monster sized shallots), finely sliced

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 1/2 tbsp fresh lemon juice

2 tsp lemon zest

1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted

1/4 cup parmesean cheese, finely grated

Heat 4 tbsp of butter in a large pan on medium high. When butter starts to bubble, add shallots, cook until shallots just start to brown. Add garlic and cook for 30 sec. longer. Add brussels sprouts. Turn heat up a little and saute until sprouts are tender (they suggest 6 minutes, I'd say closer to 10). Stir in lemon juice, zest, and remaining 1 tbsp of butter, and half of pine nuts. Transfer to a large bowl and garnish with remaining pine nuts and parmesean. And voila! That's all there is to it.


We served ours with grilled Mahi-Mahi ala Trader Joe's frozen section, and some left-over herb baguette from the bakery (and of course, red wine). Not to bad for a thown together at the last minute meal, if I do say so myself.

A new (mathematician's) scale for grading restaurants

Most restaurant critics or reviewers rate restaurants (and movies, hotels and other things for that matter) on scales that don't really mean very much. Some critics will give scales of 1-10. But this raises a whole slew of questions. It is very hard to know what a restaurant being a 1 means or what a 10 means. If you give a restaurant a 5.0 score, does that mean you liked it or that you thought it was average? What does average even mean? Most restaurants, unless they are particularly bad or expensive, are still fun to go to. So your average restaurant is probably still worth going to if you want to go out and relax. But when we say a restaurant is "mediocre" or "average," we usually are criticizing it.

Then there are the scales from 1 to 5. These suffer from the same problem except even worse with less granularity. No one wants to give a restaurant a 1 because unless you were poisoned it couldn't have been that bad. But no one wants to give a score of 5 either unless it was the best restaurant ever. So you are left with 3 scores, plus maybe a couple half points. Don't get me started on the "thumbs up/thumbs down" measurements. (How can you have "1 and a half" thumbs up? What if you put one thumb up and the other down?)

The "thumbs up/thumbs down" method, while having a granularity problem (not enough variety in the scale), does have one very interesting feature: symmetry. If the reviewer gives 0 thumbs up, we have a good idea of what the restaurant means: "eh" Not so bad that you'll regret going, but not so good that you'll just have to go back again. In other words, "average"

Based on this, I'm proposing a new way to rate restaurants (or for that matter movies, hotels, books, or almost anything else). We'll judge on a scale from -10 to 10. This is more mathematically sound because of the symmetry and effectively is modeled like a "reward" function in machine learning. If a score is greater than 0, then it was worth going to, but if a score is less than 0, it was not worth going to. This score takes into account factors such as cost, distance to travel, etc. So if two restaurants serve the exact same food in the exact same place with the exact same setting, but one costs more than the other, the restaurant with the lower prices will have a better score.

Here is an outline of what scores could mean:

10 - This is one of the top 2 or 3 restaurants you have ever been to of this style food. (In Montreal, Halal 786 gets a 10 for Pakistani, Y Lan gets a 10 for Vietnamese, Olympico gets a 10 for coffee, and Dieu De Ciel for Micro-Brewery.) It is impossible to order something at a 10 restaurant that isn't incredible. In fact, the best way to eat at these restaurants is by randomly choosing items from the menu as otherwise you'll always get whatever you got the first time you came to this place. These are restaurants that you'll go halfway across town (or the country) to get to.

8 or 9. Very, very good restaurant. Not quite worthy of a 10, but pretty darn good. You crave going to this restaurant and will go there whenever you get a chance.

6 or 7. Good restaurant, but a notch below the 8-10, which are really elite restaurants. You won't necessarily go out of your way to go to these places, but if they are near where you are, you'll have a fun time there. Examples in Montreal: Cafe Local, EM Cafe, the "up-stairs Chinese place," the Vietnamese place across the street from Y Lan that I almost never went to because it was across the street from Y Lan. (How did that stay in business anyway?)

3 to 5. These restaurants are still worth going to. They have good food and if you are nearby you may go there. It is unlikely that you will go unless you are specifically feeling like going out that night. You mainly are going here for the atmosphere of going to a restaurant, the convenience of not having to cook, and the convenience of a lot of choices. Once in a while, they'll surprise you with a really great dish, but for the most part, you can probably cook stuff this good yourself. I would generally say this is an "average" restaurant as an "average" restaurant is still a rewarding experience. Even though you could have cooked the food yourself, it would have taken a long time to put everything together.

1 to 2. You won't regret coming to these restaurants, but you won't get very good food. Generally, for a restaurant to end up in the 1-2 category, it will be cheap-otherwise you'd regret coming since the food isn't all that special. Either that or it used ingredients that would have been difficult or annoying to find.

0. No gain, no loss

-1 to -3 : This restaurant was bad. You left and feel like you wasted your money. You could have cooked this yourself and it would have been cheaper and tasted better. You will never come back to this place again unless one of your friends drags you to it.

-4 to -6: The food was terrible, the service was incredibly slow, and the place was overpriced. (They ran out of baked potatoes! The ice cream was melted once they gave it to me! The waiter spilled salad on me and I was happy because I didn't have to eat it!) You won't come back to this place again unless your friend convinces you that the head chef was sick that night and the restaurant changed ownership.

-7 to -8 : One of the worst restaurants that you have ever been to. You still have nightmares about that weird mystery meat they served you.

-9: Gave you E Coli or some other stomach problem.

-10: After trying one taste of their specials, you immediately get up and leave because the food is that bad. Even that one spoonful, however, is enough to make you sick, and you spend the next week working up the nerve to go outside.

One other interesting thing about the scale is you may have to make it context-dependent (yes, this sounds like my work at school). For example, I'm not a big fan of Subway normally. I think their sandwiches cost more than they should since I can usually make them myself. I'd normally give Subway a score of 1 or 2. (I only give the points because it would have been wasteful for me to buy the many kinds of meat that they offer.) However, at a rest stop on a road trip, I'd give subway a higher score. Maybe 5 or 6. I know that it won't make me sick, it will be pretty healthy, and I know what to expect. When I see a Subway sign on the highway around lunch, I generally will go there.

Well, that's my food scale. I will be using this food scale from now on in rating restaurants.

Fish Biriyani Fix

Top 5 signs of a good Indian recipe:

1. Garlic is measured in heads. not cloves.
2. Spices to actual ingredients ratio is at least 1 to 1.
3. Two words: Serrano Chilies (ribs, seeds and all).
4. The house begins to smell like an indian restaurant about halfway through the prep process and continues to smell that way for a week.
5. Involves creating a paste of herbs, spices, garlic ginger, peppers etc. that looks and smells like a medieval cure for pneumonia.

This one has all 5. And we needed it.

One of the (many) let-downs we've experienced since we left Montreal is the Indian restaurant situation. We were really hoping, Seattle being the tech hub that it is, that we could find some decent, cheap Indian food. Sadly, this seems not to be the case. The situation seems to be bleakest around the area of spiciness (we have asked for 5/5 on the spiciness scale and not even broken a sweat) and biriyani (which some places appear to have confused with rice with chicken curry glopped on top). Now, rice with chicken curry glopped on top is not a bad thing...but it ain't biriyani. Biriyani, done right, is supposed to be dry, but still remarkably spicy (despite the lack of sauce). The trick here is to cook the rice in such a way that the rice itself becomes spicy. The meat, if it hasn't disintegrated completely into the rice, should be falling-off-the-bone tender, and flavourful, but again *not drenched in sauce*. And so, we did what any 2 desperate chefs would do in such a state of deprivation: we made our own.

Fish Biriyani (Recipe courtesy of Suneeta Vaswani, shortcuts courtesy of us)

Ingredients:

Fish and Potoato Layer

- 3 dried Indian red chiles
- 1/2 tsp saffron threads
- 2lbs fish (we usually use tilapia or red snapper fillets)
- 3 serrano chiles (possibly more. depending on how brave you're feeling, you can leave the ribs and seeds in, or remove them)
- 1 head of garlic (about 25 cloves)
- 1 piece of peeled minced ginger root (2"x1")
- 2 tbsp oil
- 3 sticks of cinnamon (1" each)
- 3 green cardamom pods, cracked open
- 4 whole cloves
- 10 black peppercorns
- 8oz all-purpose potatoes, cut into 2" pieces
- 8 dried apricots, halved
- 1/2 cup plain yogurt at room temp.
- 1tbsp salt, divided
- 1tbsp corriander powder
- 1/2 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp garam masala
- 1/4c fresh lime or lemon juice
- 1/2c cilantro leaves
- 10 - 12 mint leaves

Rice Layer:

-1 1/4 cups basmati rice
- 2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup crispy fried onions (you can buy these in giant bags at indian grocers, and they keep forever)
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1 stick of cinnamon 2" long
- 3 whole cloves
- 3 green cardamom pods cracked open


Prep:

1. Rinse fish and pat dry. Cut into 2" pieces and set aside



2. In a mini-food-processor, combine red chiles and soaking water, serrano chiles, garlic and ginger, blend to a paste.

3. In a large saucepan, heat 2 tbsp oil, over med. heat, add cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and peppercorns and saute for 1 min. Add potatoes and saute for 6-8 min until golden on all sides. remove potatoes and set aside. In the same pan, add the chile paste and saute until mixture is fragrant (this will be hard to miss--and good for anyone with sinus troubles) and almost dry (2 to 3 min.)



4. Add apricots, yogurt, corriander, 2 tsp salt, turmeric, and garam masala, cook stirring continuouly, until almost dry 3 to 4 min. Return potatoes to pan and mix well. Reduce heat to low, and cover and cook until potatoes are about half cooked (5 minutes)

5. Carefully arrange the fish in the pan, sprinkle with remaining salt. Drizzle lime juice, saffron and soaking water over top. Spoon masala on top of fish (I usually just mix it briefly with a silicon spatula -- to avoid breaking up the fish too much). sprinkle with cilantro and mint. Increase heat to medium, and cover and cook for 5 min. Uncover and cook until liquid has reduced by half, leaving a fairly thick gravy in the pan. Set aside.



6. Rice Layer: Place rice in a large bowl with plenty of cold water, swish vigorously with fingers. Drain. Repeat 4 to 5 times until water is fairly clear (I usually just put the rice in a fine mesh seive, and lift the seive out of the water to drain). Cover rice with 3"-4" water cold water and soak for 10 min.

7. Fill a large saucepan 3/4 full with water. Add 2 tsp. salt and bring to a boil over high heat. Drain rice and add to sauce pan. Return to boil and cook until rice is cooked on the outside but uncooked in the center, 2 to 3 minutes. Do not overcook. Drain immediately and spread in a shallow pan to cool. (Shortcut: spread 1/2 the rice in an 8"x12" pyrex baking dish to cool, leave the other half to cool in the seive).

8. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Once the layer of rice in the baking dish has cooled enough to be warm to the touch, rather than hot, spread the fish and potato mixture over the rice. Spread the remaining rice on top of mixture. Sprinkle fried onions on top of rice (1/2 cup seems like a lot, but you won't regret it).



9. Heat 2 tbsp oil in a small pan. Add cinnamon, cloves and cardamom and saute until fragrant, 30 sec. Pour mixture over top of rice. Cover mixture tightly with foil, and bake in a pre-heated oven for 30 min. Let cook 5 min. before serving.

10 (optional) Carefully spoon rice into a mound on a large platter, taking care not to break up fish, place some fish and potatoes on top of rice. (We never get this far, we always just scoop it out of the baking dish--and out fish and potatoes usually disintegrate into tiny chunks anyways, but it still tastes *amazing*.