Picture this: Your patchouli stanking, co-op diving hippie friend (she’s really an acquaintance) tells you there’s this miraculous new “indigenous” South American food. It’s cheap, it’s versatile, it’s barely perishable, it’s nutritious as hell, in fact, it’s nature’s only single-source complete protein around. Wait! Wait! (she can see you having wheatgrass flashbacks) It’s also delicious. In between the scoffing, eye rolling, and the yelling of bullshit, she shoves a vegetal-green smelling spoonful of GKW (that’s God-Knows-What) into your flapping mouth and holds your lips shut.

You’d chew, but it’s just disintegrating into your mouth in a mushy, meaty, asparagussy, completely UNSALTED , HORRIFYING, WASTE OF EXISTENCE IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM! She brought a couple troughs of it over, and you’d feed it to the dog, but let’s be honest, he’s used to your mid rare sirloin and mashed sweet potato scraps and has a penchant for honesty. He also knows where you keep your Bordeaux.

Enter: Quinoa. The ovo-vega-breatha-shootmeintheface-arians had a shot at redemption, but they sucked so badly at cooking anything, that they could butcher something as wonderful and as easy to make as Quinoa. Everything they said was true. It is even (wait for it,) delicious. If you avoid two of the most common home cooking problems, undersalting and overcooking, you too can eat quinoa and be Lake Titicaca skinny, and strong like Alpaca.

Grab the mind-numbingly easy recipe here.

It took some super-religious Israeli college chicks serving it to me on a seriously hungover Shabbat morning in Jerusalem for me to find out what I had been missing. They made a painfully simple quinoa, cucumber, tomato, onion, avocado, parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, and for the love of everything holy SALT – salad; one of those dishes you could eat everyday.

Some notes: Quinoa has this bitter resiny crap called Saponin (here, go to wikipedia) that you have to either soak or rinse off. I’d advise a solid three rinses, and you’re good to go. I happen to think soaking makes it mushier, but it could be the other way around for you. I suggest experimenting. Oh, yeah, if you’re paying more than $2 a pound, you’re getting ripped. It really should be $1.20 to $1.80 a pound in the bulk section of your co-op. I never said there was anything wrong with shopping in co-ops/Whole Foods.

I like it at the al dente texture. You want to be able to see these little spiral things coming out of them, because that means it’s actually cooked. I suggest tasting your food as a means of knowing when it’s done. The pot won’t bite you if you briefly lift the lid and take a bloody spoonful.

Serving

Hot: It’s great with black beans, chili, Indian curry, basically anything hearty that you could get away eating with brown rice. Quinoa is actually healthier than brown rice. So soups, stews, and sauced-up meat and fish. It’s also good with thai omelets (that’s another blog). I hear you can make hot cereal out of it, but I hate any hot cereal that isn’t served to me by an Asian lady. So you try it and let me know.

Cold: Here is where it shines.

Let’s just say it’s good. Like, with everything. Use it anywhere you’d see couscous, taboulli, rice, barley, wheatberries, hell even pasta. I’m yet to fuck it up. My personal favorite is my Bastard Chirashizushi. It’s included with the basic Quinoa recipe here.

I don’t suggest that you throw out pasta, rice, and couscous. I eat that stuff too. But give Quinoa a shot, learn how to cook it properly, and you will be pleasantly surprised that you’ll even crave it. C’mon, quinoa’tyou got to lose? (somebody, please, put me out of my misery.)

I’m not pointing any fingers at certain noodle shops in the TC (cough-/..GaSP-.^%spIt :: Tanpopo), but really, Soba is not really hard to make. Without going into a righteous condemnation of certain St. Paul noodle vendors, I’d like to share with you how the magic happens.

There is a great mythology out in public food knowledge that MSG is that unidentifiable, smooth, je ne sais quoi that makes anything magically delicious. I discovered one day (that being earlier this week) that though a Japanese man invented MSG, the real secrets have been hiding out in traditional Japanese cooking technique all along.

Enter: Glutamates.

While making hot soba soup from scratch, I discovered a finger-dipping, blood pressure raising sauce that changed me. Basically, it’s kombu, dried shiitake, and dried anchovies soaked in soy sauce and sake for hours followed by the adding of mirin, sugar, and water with some low application heat to slowly simmer it away into a loose syrup. Throw in some katsuo boshi (shaved, petrified bonito), and let stand for 3 minutes. Strain, consume, repeat. It should look like soy sauce, just more syrupy. Grab the recipe here.

I’ve used MSG before, and it’s pretty bloody good, but it didn’t compare to the painfully smooth, meaty, drug-reaction inducing delciouness. This is the elusive umami. It really isn’t a flavor as much as a sensation. I think you should make this stuff and see for yourself. The chief difference between this natural glutamate sauce and your $2 pack of white powder is refinement – difference between the rough tannins of a young, over macerated Yellowtail and a 20 year old Médoc.

The soba fell into place. Good dashi is easy to make, and even the powdered stuff is fine for this. You add a teaspoon or so of the seasoned soy to the dashi. Tasting it to figure out the right amount is really the way to go. Drop in some al dente soba noodles, add some shichimi (that’s Japanese seven spice chili powder), and pile high thin sliced green onions.

And then, you may find yourself adding the magic sauce to everything from pasta, to tuna salad, to beef soups – fuck, I don’t know, put it on ice cream. It’s that good.

I’m going to lay it all out for you all:

Israel is not exactly a food adventurer’s paradise.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing place; the fact that you can use a bible as a legit guide book is downright awesome, having a snowball fight with a bunch of Muslims right at the Dome of the Rock was ridiculous (and hilarious), the fact that I went there for free is even cooler, but really, I wasn’t particularly captivated by prepared food.

There are some exceptions of course. It is somewhat of a tradition to have Rugelach during Shabbat. What is Rugelach? Well… it’s some kind of really fluffy puff pastry soaked in honey, rolled up with chocolate love, and baked to slightly crispy on top, while sticky, gooey, and pastriliciously chocogasmic. There is one shop called Marzipan in Jerusalem that gets mobbed by half the population every Friday afternoon to stock up on kilos of this shit. Yes, kilos.

Feeling guilty from a half kilo indulgence of Chocolate Rugelach, I would inevitably stroll down the narrow corridors of Machaneh Yehudah (an market outside of the old city where the locals actually shop), and find the greatest thing Israel had to offer.

Persimmons. Dare I say, they were way better than the Japanese persimmons. I ate so many of these juicy orange jewels that everyone around me warned me of impending constipation. “You know, doctors say you can only eat one of these a day. They, uh, how do you say? em… keep ze sheet inside you.”

Try to keep a straight face when three guys with Israeli accents tell you the same thing three days in a row.

Needless to say my bowels did just fine (due to the fact that I avoided falafel and hummus like the plague after week 1), and I was thrilled to get back to NYC where I spent an honest week in Chinatown throwing bowls of sub-5 dollar noodles down my hatch, and finding any way I possibly could to simply eat pork, shellfish, and delicious meat and dairy dishes. I have very different ideas of what Kosher is.

Oh yeah, one more thing: if you think Israel is warm in the winter, look at my sun-bathed smiley face to the left. That’s how snow-less, warm, and freaking balmy Israel is in the winter.