When it Strains it Bores

Boiling anything other than rice or pasta should be punishable by death by, you got it... boiling. So put away your strainers America and start steaming, sautéing and yes, simmering.

Okay okay, sure, there are wonderful dishes like corned beef, or even some English boiled meat dishes that threaten to make my point invalid. I say however, that those dishes are “poached” and not boiled. There is also the occasional Brussels Sprout or Broccoli that does great when boiled quickly and then shocked in ice water. But my main focus of this episode of Guerrilla Food is to do battle with the notion that it is okay to boil vegetables. It’s not.

Sure childhood images of huge pots of simmering green beans with ham hocks and black eyed peas being beaten into submission by a couple quarts of rolling H²O pop into my mind. The key word here however is simmer. That’s right, 212˚F is simply too hot for essential nutrients as well as many flavor components to survive. I’d feel much better about eating beans that were simmering away at 180˚F for three hours, than at 212˚F for 30 minutes.

Who has three hours to dedicate to simmering black-eyed-peas you ask? Well shame on you for asking. Nothing produces more lifeless and limp boring psydo-vegetation than boiling. I hope you do something really awesome like cure cancer during the couple hours you “saved” by boiling your vegetables.

What the Hell is Guerrilla Food?

Guerrilla Food is all about taking the culinary bovine by the horns and wrestling it to the ground until it mooo's uncle, and then roasting that fucker whole, kalua-style. I want to shut down and shut up all those “I’m a chef, and I have the certificate to prove it” posers of the world. My mission is to humiliate weak-hearted kitchen-boys and girls with their All-Clad home kitchens, while making women want to do thing to me they haven’t even thought about since freshman year of college… all on the cheap and all with food.

I plan to slash and burn new paths through the jungle of “the food world”. This blog is for anyone who has ever felt their heart hesitate a second when they tasted a Brasato al Brolo that they themselves cooked, using a hand towel to pull an $8 speckled aluminum roasting pan that they found stashed behind their mother’s collapsible steamer basket, out of a cheap apartment oven.

I don’t care if your poison is Coq au Vin served over a Saffron Pilaf or is it’s boxed macaroni and cheese that you “fancied up” with Oscar Meyer hot dogs. While the later is a revolting thought, if you do it with passion and you feel that gut-extending pride as you relax on the couch after demolishing said Weeniemac, and you did it without insultingly expensive gadgets, you have experienced Guerilla Food. And it was good!

...except for the heart-burn.