The least hip thing you can do:

Serve all of your friends and customers something they have terrible childhood memories of. Like beets. You remember. Your first beet (most likely pickled, boiled, or overcooked, or something) is a real formative experience; the earthy, sometimes dirty taste and sweet linger of a beet is kind of unsettling. The pickling kills the deep flavor, boiling rounds it out, roasting concentrates it, and leaving it raw is apparently disgusting, wrong, and absolutely forbidden.

I am of the type that pretty much shoves anything into my mouth raw. I was, however, schooled the other day while cooking with the beautiful and lovely Laura who was crunching on raw sweet potatoes.

Me: “::scoffs:: Can you do that?”
Laura: “Yeah…of course,” like it’s really-really obvious.
Me: “Oh. Okay..ccrcrcr-” shoving sweet potatoes into my mouth a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it first.

It was like a less carroty carrot: sweet, light, crunchy, nothing bitter. Good for a veg platter and ranch. Or aoili…mmm…Let’s not go there yet

With the exception of you RAWists, most people don’t sit around and think about eating raw root vegetables. It’s time to take a page out of the Crazy Vegan’s Handbook for Adventurous Eating: Bust out that overpriced mandolin you haven’t used yet, and let’s get slicing!

Introduction: Even the food conscious home cooks and trendy restaurants sometimes suffer from an ignorance of cooking fundamentals. Sometimes it’s an honest mistake. Hiring Holly Hypertension for grill station can result in grossly undersalted food. Timid Timmy will destroy your expensive Tuna dish because raw = not good. We have been trained by our parents, our government, and the coked-up 80’s that we must cook all of our food “well done”, resulting in an unstoppable epidemic of overcooking. People judge ingredients by the store it is in, by the shelf it sits on, by the really hot alterna-hipster at the checkout counter you’re embarrassed to say whose actual gender is unclear, but you’d fillet them any day. And for some ungodly reason, people (and restaurants are not off the hook here either) don’t taste the food before serving. ZOMG, lol, I’ll brb after I HiT (that’s hork in toilet).

I’m going to lay it down for you old school. The “Cooking Fundamentals in Three Paragraphs” series will explore the deepest causes of bad food, and how to fix them. Sit down, get a really strong drink, and prepare for humiliation.

The Over-Under Rule: I can attribute most food problems to two things: overcooking and undersalting.

When recipes go wrong (and they do with shocking frequency), we fall back on fear.

One Minneapolis summer ‘06 evening, I went to a friendly poker game with my lovely girlfriend of the time and a few of her friends. I promised I would bring something new and special to pour down their throats. I had heard about this tongue twisting drink called a Caipirinha. After a bunch of googleing and looking up how to pronounce Portuguese words (it’s Kaipireenya), I was intrigued. Seemed simple enough: rocks glass, an eighth-ed lime , a generous spoonful of sugar. Bash with muddler. Add a few cubes of ice, and douse with Cachaça (Kashasa). Stir. Drink. Rinse. Repeat. If you want to get technical, check out the recipe.

It sounds like a mojito, but it’s not. See, unlike it’s creepy cousin Rum, Cachaça is made from pressed sugarcane juice. Not sticky molasses. And if you’ve ever had Pisco (which is a way more esoteric unaged and unoaked Peruvian or Chilean Brandy) it’s kind of similar. A really light, fruity, easy going rocket fuel. Hailing from Brazil, you can find Cachaça in most of your local liquor stores. It should be at most $20, really more like $14, but since the US economy is in the middle of a fucking 1973-style stagflation, it could be fucking $35 by the time you get there.

Oh, and you lost your job on the way.

All I can say is that there were 4 people, an hour and a half, and one liter of booze down the hatch. You’re all free to do the math. That’s about 8 shots a piece in 90 minutes. It’s called getting fuxored. More importantly, Cachaça is cheap, limes are cheap (for now), sugar is cheap, and this shit is really delicious. I know that after the booze made it’s way single file into our bloodstreams, we all had the terrible idea to go dancing at a NE Minneapolis German Restaurant/Night Club institution, the Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit & Mario’s Keller Bar.

I personally need to be really drunk to enjoy dancing at a club with a bunch of Sunday Special Brosephs and Sorority Sallies. And what do you know!? I was in just the right condition for such an affair.

::shivers::

Here’s my recipe for a classic Caipirinha. I tested it out myself – fuck, someone’s got to do the hard work around here.

Note: I just bought a bottle of Cachaça 51 (The most widely available brand in the US). In the interest of research, I tried a bit straight. It was reminiscent, terribly familiar – like something I was so intimately connected with but had forgotten with the passing of time. And digestion. And then it hit me! This brand tastes like mass market Imojochu from Japan. That’s sweet potato Shochu for all you Japanese liquor n00bs.

As soon as the weather in your local area is warm enough (MN read NEVER), drink some Caipirinhas while enjoying your inaugural grilling session with some good friends.

Just don’t plan on driving home.