My Three Culinary Shadows

Three pantry ingredients I can no longer be without.  Each member of the trio brings an essential element, but lurking deeper within are mysterious savory subtleties.

I cannot be without molasses, balsamic vinegar and soy sauce.  I mix them together for marinades, glazes and vinaigrettes.  I use them as a triangular base to build bigger flavors.

They each come from different parts of the world, but combine to create something of a different planet entirely: sticky yet sharp, sweet yet earthy, salty and round.

Let me tell you what I love about each of the Three Shadows:

Molasses: The dark, syrupy by-product of extracting sugar from the cane.  White sugar bores me.  I prefer turbinado sugar for my dry rub and molasses for wet applications.  Molasses brings sweetness, but also a savory rich darkness.

Umami.  That fifth flavor, along with sweet, salty, sour and bitter.  I like my ingredients to bring more than just one note to the song.

Soy Sauce: Fermented soy beans with roasted grain, salt and yeast.  Aged then filtered and bottled.  From wine and beer to salami, kim chi and bread, where would we be without fermentation?

For allergy reasons, we use Tamari gluten-free in my house.  I often use soy sauce instead of salt.  Together with molasses, it balances the sweet with salty while delivering its own version of umami.

Balsamic Vinegar: The boiled and aged pressings of Trebbiano grapes.  Reduced over the years in casks of various woods.  I'm not using the century old stuff here.  Just the $3 a bottle stuff.

It brings that necessary tangy acidity with its own sweet woodsiness.  I like vinegar for providing a penetrating sourness and aroma.  It adds tart to the sweet and salt of the other Shadows, again with its own style of umami.

Where's the Heat?

The only core flavor not represented here is spicy. Add it in your own favorite way.  A hot sauce of some sort would be appropriate.  Something smokey like a chipotle works well.  If simmering the Three Shadows into a thicker sauce, chili flakes or poblano peppers make a good fourth player.

Already Asia, Italy and the Caribbean are represented.  Pick a spice from anywhere on the globe you like.  You know the heat tolerance of your audience.  Don't burn them.  Just wake them up.

How Will You Use Them?

Play around as you like, but here are three ideas:

Vinaigrette: Add one part each to three parts of toasted sesame oil.  Heat the molasses first or it will be too thick to mix.  Add Sriracha or another chili sauce to taste.  Shake well.  Adjust the proportion of Three Shadows to suit your preferences for salt, sweet and acidic.  Put this on salad, cooked vegetables or whatever you like.

Glaze: Add the Three Shadows in equal parts to a saucepan.  Add dried or fresh whole chilies.  Apply low heat and stir often.  Reduce it to the consistency of honey.  Remove the chilies.  Then drizzle over your favorite cooked meats and grill quickly.  Do not allow it to burn.  Or place the cooked meat directly into the pan and stir to coat.

Marinade: Microwave the molasses until warm then stir in the other Two Shadows.  Add hot sauce to taste.  Consider adding dried herbs or a squeeze of citrus.  Place in a zip-top bag or sealed container with your meat.  Top off with apple juice, wine or beer.  For small pieces of meat, let rest in the refrigerator at least overnight.  For larger cuts, marinate for a few days if possible.

I will revisit my friends, the Three Shadows, with future recipes in more detail.  Until then, play around with them and enjoy.

How to Make 86 Rub

Now that I'm rereading the title, you could twist that the wrong way.  Screw it.  It's staying.

I posted this recipe once before.  I use it all the time.  I always have a jar around.  I've shared it with my parents, in-laws and co-workers.  More than just a barbecue rub, it's a multi-purpose seasoning.  More than just a recipe, it's a process.  Customize it.  Put your own spin on it.  Do it a little different each time.

The Eighty Six Barbecue Rub

Ingredients:

Dried Chilies

2 parts Turbinado Sugar

1 part Salt

1 part Various Seasonings

You will also need:

Food-Processor

Jar with a Lid

I like using a food-processor to grind everything into a fine consistency.  This way the seasonings get into the meat better.  You could make this with pre-ground chili powder or paprika, but it will be much more coarse.  You need a decent food-processor around.  It's like a power tool for the kitchen, men.

Step One:

Measure your jar. Find out how many cups it holds and divide that by five. That will be “one part”.

Step Two:

Take the stems from a handful of chilies and grind them in the food processor. I get pasillas, arbols and anchos cheap at my favorite market, so I typically use those, but use what you like. I can't say that I count or measure them.  If you want to be technical, you should weigh the chilies so you know how much you use.  Maybe I'll do that one day.

I don't know how hot you like it.  This whole thing will take some experimenting before you get it the way you like.  I have to dial mine down a little because my family doesn't have my tolerance for capsaicin.

Grind the chilies for a half-minute or so until they've broken into little bits. Take the lid off the food-processor and take a deep whiff. If you have a cold. Or just love to sneeze.

Step Three:

Add the sugar and give it another spin. The graininess of the sugar will break the chilies down further. I like the turbinado (raw) sugar because it has more flavor than white sugar without the moisture of brown sugar. If you make this with brown sugar, it will clump together.

Step Four:

Add the salt and spin it again. I use kosher salt, sea salt or both. Adjust the amount of salt to your personal taste.  I try to never over-do salt.  You can always add, but never remove.

Step Five:

Add the seasonings. Whatever you got. Whatever you like. Onion powder, garlic powder, ginger, cumin, curry, ground black pepper, dry mustard. If you're feeling funky add celery seed, coriander or a tiny bit of anise. When you use seeds, add them before the finer seasonings.  Again, the graininess of the sugar and salt will help break them down.

Often this portion is a bit larger than the salt portion because I have so many good things I want to put in there. Spin it again.

Step Six:

Take off the lid, being careful of the atomized spices, and give it a taste. It should be intense. It should grab you by the boo-boo. You should get a balance of sweet, salty, spicy and savory. Decide now if you need a little more of any flavor. When it's done, pour it into your jar and stab some holes in the lid.

Step Seven:

Put it on anything. We put this on everything but cereal in my house. Of course, I like this on things I'll barbecue, especially ribs, but that's another post. For tips on barbecue or anything food, ask my cooking guru Alton Brown.

I chose this as my first food post because we will be referencing it in the future.  As I said, I put this on everything.  I dusted some corn tortilla wedges with it and toasted them in the oven for the Super Bowl.

Good morning Seahawks fans, Vultureheads, Cigar Lovers and Artists of all Kinds

It's a brand new day.

February 3rd marks a new era in my career as a writer and a new start for the 86 the Poet blog.  First of all, more stuff.

I'll be doing my best to post daily.  This week, I'll be doing more than that.  I have my Seahawks Super Bowl reaction piece coming soon.  More in-depth analysis coming later.

This blog used to be about what I was up to as a writer.  You could find links to everything I was doing and examples of my work, plus the occasional post about my thoughts and activities.  While work, family, The Penalty Flag and Bright Hub kept me busy, my posting became less frequent.  It got down to once every month or two.

TPF and Bright Hub made 2013 a notable year for me.  TPF made me more involved in the NFL than I ever had been.  I was always a fan, but now I was looking wider and deeper into the game than ever before.  Also, at a point I was reaching more readers.  I had an article reach 12,000 in half a day. It popped up on MSN.com and was discussed in various chatrooms around the web.  I was a bit hot during the fall.  Almost everything I wrote about the Seahawks grabbed a couple thousand page views in the first day.  My fantasy football writing was not as popular, but I was writing weekly about that too.

Then, for who-knows-what reasons, TPF's views dwindled.  It's difficult keeping a site together when it's mostly one guy doing it all.  A guy with integrity and guts, by the way, so I'll accentuate the positive.  I was made leader and editor over the AFC West and NFC West divisions for the second half of the season.

Bright Hub continued to give me between two and six assignments a month.  Topics ranged from specific writing styles to dead poets to history.  Lately I've been writing about the modern state of education, including technology in the classroom and the changing environment.  I never get a good feel about who's reading what I do, but they pay me and keep asking for more.

The dark side, however, is that I wrote almost nothing for myself in 2013.  I did publish The Cheshire House on Valentine's Day, but that was completed by Halloween the year before.  I did compile Growing at the Sun, but the words in that were written between 2012 and (damn) 1993, I guess.  I did write In the Toaster and a couple spoken word pieces last year, so it wasn't a complete desert.

So in 2014 I'm getting back to being me.  Or being Eighty Six.  Everything I wrote for TPF was as David Klenda.  So was all my Bright Hub stuff.  I just asked them to change that.  My most recent articles have "Eighty Six" as the byline, and it's pretty to see.

I'm getting back to creative writing and being myself.  I'm doing it for me, my wife, my kids and our future.  Another child coming in July, by the way.  I learned a lot at TPF but I think I achieved all I could.  I never made much money compared to the work I did.  I didn't have all the control I wanted.

So that brings me back to today.  This has never truly been a blog.  A blog, in order to be successful, needs to have a focus and post content routinely.  Until today, this has been what I called "digital office-space".  This was where you could find me.  I might not be here, but feel free to look around.

But now, it's a blog.  I've mentioned my 5 Fingers of Death on Twitter.  It's a dramatic old Kung Fu movie reference.  Maybe too violent.  Perhaps I should borrow a Gary "the Glove" Payton image.  He's the point guard who brought five players together as one for the Seattle Supersonics.

So here are my 5 Fingers of Death, 5 Fingers on the Glove, 5 Toes of my Ass-Kicking Foot. Whatever.  The five things I'm writing about every week: my wife's art, my writing, football, cigars and food.

Jajamilevska, or My Gorgeous Illustrator, is talented with pencils, ink and paint.  She has produced a couple of abstract pieces in our house and all my book covers.  As a mother, she lacks time to submerge herself into the craft.  But primarily, she lacks the confidence.  She looks at what she does and sees what it isn't.  I see what it is and always want more.  As readers, you can help me do one thing: encourage her to work more. Don't worry about my confidence.  In my mind I have a black and gold "86" shield on my chest.  But my wife needs a nudge.

I said we have another baby coming in July.  So anything I really want done I should do by June.  I want to write another creative piece.  I've been thinking about a mystery series.  Some of the most popular collections of stories and most loved characters have come from mysteries.  Look at most of the dramas on TV: one hour of crime-solving.  Problem in, I've never really written a mystery.

I'm good with character, at least on a shallow level.  I'm good at setting and color and snappy bits of dialogue.  So picture this: on a beautiful but troubled Caribbean island, a charter fisherman and dive-guide of unknown origin also solves problems for the local police and citizens.  His name is Marcel, or at least that's what he goes by sometimes.  He speaks French, English, Spanish and the local Antilles-Creole dialect.  He lives on his boat and makes a living from the tourists.  He keeps a low-profile to avoid trouble from his past.  His sleuthing is primarily to keep the local government happy so they don't hand him over to anyone asking about him.

So I'm putting the first story together.  I'm building it here.  I'll be posting a chunk weekly.  We'll see where it goes.  Maybe every week will be about Marcel, maybe not.  I'll stay fluid like the transparent waters of the Caribbean Sea.

I'll keep writing about football, with an emphasis on the Seahawks and fantasy football as the season approaches.

I'll write about cigar collecting.  An article on getting started by selecting the right humidor is coming soon.  Already I've been posting occasional deals.  The key to getting cigars at good prices is to take advantage of short-term sales.  Things go on discount for days or hours.  I'll try to keep you from missing out.

I'll write about food, both cooking and my experience in the F&B business.  My BBQ rub is central to most of what I make.  That recipe will be coming soon.

What?  There are seven days in the week?  So I need two more.  OK.  Got it.  So here's my weekly schedule until I change it:

Monday: What I'm up to.  Recap of the week.
Tuesday: Recipes and restaurant stories.
Wednesday: My writing.  A story, poem or a story about a poem.
Thursday: My Gorgeous Illustrator.
Friday: The Oscuro Corner.  (Oscuro is a dark, earthy cigar wrapper.  My favorite kind.)
Saturday: Video of me reading something.
Sunday: Football.
All posts at 10am PST.

So that's the way it is and it's like that.  Stay tuned.  Please share and give feedback.