So Chip and I are neck deep in recipes - writing, editing and testing. Blogwise, it being Friday and all, we’re sharing a non-food-related diversion that we came across yesterday: Ryan Adams‘ new website.

Since my friend John introduced me to Ryan Adams in law school, a group of us has become part of an extremely serious fan base. If you haven’t listened to his music — either with his former band Whiskeytown, solo, or with his new band the Cardinals, you should.

He’s a musical chameleon, dipping into pop, country, rock, brooding mope. Now, with the accompanying track on the home page (it will start right after the page loads), he’s working some basement-tape Beastie Boys overlaid on some lo-tech Public Enemy, all that funneled through ancient Sumeria. We’ve declared this our fight song. (Caution: if you work in an office where creative use of profanity is frowned upon, put your headphones on.)

Go deeper and the site just gets better. It’s inspired video-game, space-dog ugliness. The meal-building tool we’re developing for Cookthink won’t look like the console of a TIE fighter, but hey, there’s always the possibility of a redesign.

Until the next post: dotcom, mofo.

Recipe: Spicy Avocado Caper Salsa (cookthink)

Recipe: Shrimp Tacos With Cabbage, Avocado, Feta And Cilantro (cookthink)

Recipe: Pork Burgers With Avocado Dressing (cookthink)

Buying spices whole is the way to go. Since they’re intact and less exposed to air and light than ground spices, they keep their flavor much longer. I’m still enjoying whole cumin and coriander seed I bought bulk at Whole Foods last winter (for $1.99 each). Compared to what you pay for a small jar of already ground spices, it’s a significantly better deal and one that adds up over the years.

I use cumin and coriander seed more than any other spices. They’re at home in Mexican, Southwestern, Southern, Moroccan, Middle Eastern, Indian and South Asian dishes. With its smoky flavor, cumin is the quintessential chili spice and pairs great with cheese. Coriander seed has a sweeter, citrusy flavor that softens and rounds out cumin when the two come together.

When you buy seeds whole you have to grind them, of course. Get a coffee grinder that you’ll only use for spices. It’s worth it.

Sauteing ground spices at the beginning of a dish with olive oil, onion, vegetables or whatever goes in the pan first enhances their flavor and reduces any gritty texture.

Try a simple black bean and cheese burrito with cumin and coriander: Preheat the oven to 375F and put a small casserole dish into the oven to preheat it.

Empty a can of black beans into a colander, rinse them with cold water and let them drain. Dice 1/4 onion. Heat 2 tsp. of olive oil over medium high heat in a saute pan and add the diced onion, 2 tsp. ground cumin and 2 tsp. ground coriander. Cook until the onion is soft, 2-4 minutes. Add the black beans and 1/4 cup of water. Simmer until the water has evaporated, 4-6 minutes.

Spoon the beans onto large flour tortillas and top with grated monterrey jack cheese. Roll the tortilla over the beans and cheese, folding in the two sides as you go to enclose the burritos. Put them in the casserole dish (lightly oiled) and cook them until the cheese has melted, about 10 minutes.

You could add rice and any combination of vegetables to the beans to make the burritos more substantial. One of my favorite is a broccoli, white bean and monterrey jack burrito with cumin and coriander. I like sliced avocado, fresh chopped cilantro, a squeeze of lime and a good hot sauce on the side. And a cold beer.

serves 2-4

What you need
3 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/2 lb. shiitake mushrooms
1/4 cup miso paste
1 T. soy sauce
6 cups water
2 cups frozen soy beans
2 scallions
1/8 tsp. red pepper flakes

measuring cup
knife
cutting board
large sauce pan

What you do
The prep: Combine the water, miso paste, and soy sauce in a large sauce pan. Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium high heat.

The chicken: Cut it into 2-inch strips and season it with a sprinkling of salt & pepper. Wash your hands when you’re done with the chicken.

When the broth comes to a simmer, add the chicken and gently simmer until it’s barely cooked through, about 10 minutes.

The scallions: Rinse well and dry them. Cut off and discard the root ends and dark green tops. Slice the white and light green parts thin.

The mushrooms: Wipe any dirt off with a paper towel. Cut off and discard the stems. Cut the caps in half.

Add the mushrooms and soybeans and simmer until they’re heated through, about 10 minutes.

Take the soup off the heat. Add the red pepper flakes and the scallions.

Taste and adjust the seasoning.

I love models. The first time I went to the new Getty Center in L.A., I spent almost the entire day not going through the galleries of the museum itself but looking at all the scale models of the museum that were housed in the basement of one of the buildings. The years and years of design and planning were reflected by a sequence of timestamped miniature models.

Last week, I read a fantastic essay by Tom Vanderbilt about visiting scale-model miniatures of cities and landscapes. Some models, such as the Queen Museum’s Panorama of New York City which still includes the two World Trade Center towers, are outdated snapshots of a city that was. Others though, like the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall’s model of the Chinese capital, show a preformed city, the end result of urban planning still in the works. Vanderbilt calls it “anticipatory urbanism.”

“There is a pristine, uncorrupted sense to models,” Vanderbilt writes. “They are an ideal of perfection yet to be encumbered by realism, by political demands and the other contingencies of full-scale life.”

I thought of this on Saturday after Elizabeth and I botched an attempt to make gnocchi. We had as a model a carefully written recipe by a well regarded chef whose cookbook we’ve successfully used many times. Still, my first inclination was to fault the recipe for not taking into greater account all the encumbrances of realism with gnocchi — namely, all the ways you can screw it up. Boiling vs. baking the potato, overcooking it, working too slowly with the dough, overworking the dough, etc. Usually, there are one or two ways in which you can really mess up a dish. With gnocchi, it seems like every step in the recipe is a potential disaster. To what extent then should a recipe for gnocchi address these potential disasters outright?

It’s a question I often bump up against when using recipes, and it’s one Brys and I are dealing with as we compile and write recipes for Cookthink: how explicit a model should a recipe be?

To some degree, there will always be something pristine and uncorrupted about a recipe. It cannot take into account the skill level of the person using it or the exact nature of the ingredients and equipment he’s using to prepare it. Unlike a scale model of a city, a recipe is not a physical representation of the dish. But it does describe the finished dish by illustrating the process. Even without a picture attached to the recipe, don’t we — based on our past experiences both preparing and eating similar dishes — always visualize the ideal of perfection for a certain dish?

Should a recipe (writer) then be inherently optimistic and assume that everyone using the recipe is capable of translating the written instructions — “peel and rice the potato” — in such a way that will get him close to the ideal of perfection? Or should a recipe be inherently pessimistic and assume that without explicit caution — “warning: you must quickly rice the potato or your gnocchi will turn to mush” — a home cook is going to get waylaid by all the “contigencies of full-scale life” in the kitchen?

Do you prefer shorthand recipes or do you like to have it spelled out?

Recipe: Black Bean Cakes (cookthink)

I’ve been rereading James Beard’s Theory & Practice of Good Cooking, which was one of the first books I read as I started to explore and enjoy cooking for myself. Beard’s calm, sure voice is a tonic for the hysteria and braggadocio we get from most of our current food celebrity hacks.

Beard on sauteing: “There is a great deal of confusion about what is sauteing and what is frying… Frying is like baptism in certain religious sects - there must be total immersion… Sauteing is cooking food on top of the stove in a relatively small amount of fat in, preferably, a heavy-duty saute pan or skillet, and it’s a fast, deft procedure.”

Beard on vegetables: “If you taste certain vegetables when they are raw, when they are partially cooked, and when they are fully cooked, you’ll learn a very interesting lesson.”

Beard on poaching: “Poaching, in which something is brought to a slow simmer and kept there, is known professionally as a feeble ebullition. This is exactly what it sounds like - a boil that is hardly a boil at all, just a faint, lazy bubble that rises to the surface and slowly pops, like a carefully blown soap bubble.”

Recipe: Blanched Asparagus With Vinaigrette (cookthink)