AUGUST 2010
Sunday 2010.08.29
Minute Meals
I hope people appreciate my Minute Meals. I have mixed feelings. I feel somewhat like a geek coming up with a plan to eat like that. But I delight in the fact that my meals have well balanced nutrition and I am eating healthier meals than at any other time of my life. And I revel in the fact that I only have one fork to wash at the end of a meal.
I've been reading a book I bought, The Professional Chef / The Culinary Institute of America–8th ed. (2006, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey) and on page 21 it says: "Portion control is essential for maintaining a healthy weight." I've been eating Minute Meals for a few years and I always believed the portions were excellent. It felt good to see it written down in a textbook.
I've been down the road and around the block a few times when it comes to finding a way to store well balanced meals in the freezer. My worst experience involved sectioned plastic bowls (one large section for the main portion and two smaller sections) with a snap-on lid. The problem was that the lid didn't come down far enough and the vegetables were always jumping over the wall and getting into the other compartments. Besides taking up too much room in the freezer, the plastic would get brittle in the freezer and break. And the lids often popped off of their own accord. They were Martha Stewart, sold at K-Mart, so there was ample reason to keep my expectations low. They never failed to disappoint; and they all ended up in recycling.
Another disaster was trying to vacuum seal an entire paper plate of food in a single vacuum bag. The plate would curl up like a huge potato chip, launching food in all directions. It was very frustrating.
Then came sealing the portions individually in their own vacuum bags. This solved the problem of keeping things organized, but my vacuum sealer was slow and the bags were expensive, even when buying them at the local warehouse store.
It wasn't until I hit upon the impulse heat sealer and 6-inch poly tubing that I finally found the solution. The roll of tubing is expensive (over $100 with shipping and sales tax), but the 6,000-foot roll lasts for years and I calculated the individual food pouches to be about one penny each. That's cheap. Vacuum sealing is unnecessary anyway. When you buy frozen vegetables at the grocery store they are not vacuum sealed in their bags.
I used to spend between $6 and $10 per day for lunch during the week. Now I carry a Minute Meal lunch to work. It costs me about a dollar. At 99¢ per pound for whole chickens at the warehouse store (about $5 to $6 per chicken), I get 10 to 11 portions from a chicken. And I use the skin, bones, neck, etc. from the chickens to make stock for soup or other cooking. This is economical living and the food is nutritious too. All things considered, it can't be beat. So, geek or not, I'll stay with my Minute Meals. I like them.
Wednesday 2010.08.25
Becoming a Pain in the · · ·
I received my business cards today, and I really, really like them. I put several in envelopes and mailed them to friends. As a favor, I'm hoping they'll distribute my cards to their friends, and hopefully drive some traffic to my web site. One friend owes me a favor. So I expect him to fulfill his obligation by distributing my cards. I can see it all now. Friends will see me coming and whisper, "Oh gawd! Here he comes. He'll pass a handful of business cards to us again, asking us to promote his dumb web site."
Well...yeah.
That's one of the problems of trying to drive traffic to a site. We move from creator to promoter, a capacity some of us find a little unnerving. Many years ago when I wrote and published two books, the process of writing the book was easy—if a little time consuming. I sat alone in my office, undisturbed, and wrote. Then it came time to promote my books. Out there shaking hands, giving presentations, talking on radio, going to seminars, etc. It wore me out. Most artists, by nature, are slightly reclusive people who enjoy immersing themselves in their own creativity. I really am an artist, by the way. I drew that graphic of the camper, using Adobe Illustrator.
Now I have to play the role of businessman. How far can one go in a effort to sell himself? How low can one sink? Already I'm devising some fairly devious plans. Saturday's spaghetti alla puttanesca seems more and more appropriate all the time.
Sunday 2010.08.22
Kitchen Under Attack
You can say one good thing about this past winter: We had plenty of rain without a single mud slide. In fact, we nearly filled our reservoir, reaching 95% capacity by spring. We are all thankful. This weekend the other shoe dropped.
Winter rains make things bloom and grow. There is plenty of food for the field mice. They multiply. During the summer everything dries up, including the food and water sources. The mice go on the move.
On Friday I had heard noises under the sink and set traps. Yesterday I was entertaining friends. During a lunch of spaghetti alla puttanesca (for which I made my own pasta), "whack!" went the trap, with squeaking. Talk about spoiling the appetite. I won't go into the details, but I am confident even PETA would agree that setting traps is not a bad thing if you have mice in your kitchen.
Ultimately I killed three mice yesterday, and I'm sure this is only the beginning. The rains won't start up again for three more months.
There is no moral to this story. There is nothing to do but act the gracious host and apologize for the vermin under the sink.
Wednesday 2010.08.18
Advanced Preparation
If I'm going to cook I do it in a big way and save myself some work down the road.
Recently I caramelized 10 pounds of onions I bought in a large bag at the warehouse store for $4.29. The bag contained 10 large yellow onions. I put my two largest skillets on the stove and I had three fans running to get the fumes out of the house. I can only imagine what my neighbors throught of the aroma of onions cooking. If you don't know the flavor, caramelized onions are sweet because the sugar in the onions is concentrated.
It takes about two hours to caramelize 10 pounds of onions, not counting the peeling and chopping, which goes relatively quickly. I don't rush the cooking. I start at high heat to boil off much of the moisture and then I reduce the heat as the onions begin to change color. The skillets start nearly full of chopped onions and after about two hours they have a dark golden thin layer in the bottom. They have to be stirred and turned often, especially toward the end of the cooking.
After the onions cool I weigh them. In this case I had 2 pounds 5 ounces. 37 ounces divided by 20 equals 1.85 ounces, so I set about putting the onions in little packets—like those I make for my Minute Meals—of 1.8 or 1.9 ounces each to store in the freezer. That's half an onion per packet, which makes it easy to figure out how much I will need when a recipe calls for "1 small or ½ large onion; chopped." (If you do the math, I started off with 160 ounces of onions. At 37 ounces for the finished product, the onions gave up 123 ounces of water, about 7½ pounds. That's nearly a gallon of water (8.3 pounds per gallon).) The finished onions easily fit in one ziplock bag, easier to store than the large bag they came in from the warehouse store.
What do I do with them?
One thing I make occasionally (rarely, because it is so fattening) is a dish I grew up with in New England—American Chop Suey, known by other names throughout the United States. This is an Americanized Italian recipe of macaroni and ragù, which is any chunky sauce made with ground meat and/or chopped vegetables. It took me a while to figure out how my mother made American Chop Suey because I couldn't get the flavor right, until I figured out she caramelized her onions.
I also use caramelized onions on pizza and I add them when making marinara rather than using raw onion. Some people add sugar to their homemade spaghetti sauce. I use caramelized onions because they add sweetness and more complexity to the flavor. I'll post a recipe with photographs some day.
Pretty near anything that cooks with onions can use caramelized onions.
Saturday 2010.08.14
The idea of having a blog seems odd to me. I've never had one and I've never read anyone's blog. I can say with absolute certainty that I don't know what I'm doing.
At the moment I'm nibbling homemade salmon jerky (I'll post the recipe someday) and sipping watered down ginger ale (it's too sweet otherwise). I'll have a glass of Syrah later.
Salmon jerky brings back memories of my childhood. I had an uncle, Charles DiCostanzo, who was a biologist in Alaska. He knew where all the salmon was, all the time. One summer my parents vacationed in Alaska. Uncle Charlie suggested fishing to my father and off they went in my uncle's sea plane. They landed several miles off the coast, baited their lines, and started "fishing." It was more like shopping. My uncle landed his plane above a huge school of salmon and they were hauling in fish faster than you can imagine. They had their limit before the propeller had stopped spinning. My parents brought back so much smoked salmon we were sick of it within a few weeks and we gave the rest of it away.
Salmon jerky is a little different. It's smoked and dried, not just smoked. One year when my uncle visited us he brought salmon jerky. I never forgot the flavor. A rich salmon taste accented with highlights of hickory smoke. When the local warehouse store has wild salmon I always make salmon jerky. I never get sick of eating it, but I still give a lot away.
Food is such a sensuous pleasure. At nearly 60 years old I can forget about being the next Don Juan. But cooking—there's something almost any of us can do, at any age. Walking into someone's home with a gift of homemade bread, or salmon jerky, brings smiles and warms the conversation. A little gin helps too. If I were 100 years old and still able to cook, I could still bring a smile to a pretty face and a twinkle to the eye.
I guess that's my reason for starting a web site about cooking. I probably won't be regular about my blog, but I'll keep up the cooking.