SEPTEMBER 2010
Sunday 2010.09.29
Looking Back, Ever So Slightly
September is nearly gone. One more day. This is the first full month on the Internet and despite the infancy of this site, it has seen 10,000 hits during the month. That's a milestone for me, although it is dust on the scales compared to those sites that get as many hits per minute. So far the stats show this site has reached eight foreign countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Russian Federation, Seychelles, and Taiwan. There may be others. The most popular download so far continues to be the PDF that illustrates how to fillet an entire chicken. This blog is second in popularity, followed closely by the PDFs for Pasta From Scratch and White Bread. I feel like a proud dad showing off his baby's pictures.
I am proud. I knew I could cook. I have some great cooking stories that demonstrate that, one of which I'll share. I was at the home of some friends, sitting in the living room petting their dog, and a helpless cry came from the kitchen. "Dennis. Help!" On the stove was a skillet in which there was supposed to be gravy. It looked like brown curdled milk. She had decided butter would enrich the gravy, but she added the butter after the flour had been absorbed by the drippings. "Can you rescue this?" she asked hopefully. "I'll try." I spooned out the melted butter, mixed up a little cooked flour in some water and stock, and worked it into the gravy over the flame. It all came back together again, smooth as silk. At the table she graciously announced, "I want everyone to know that Dennis is the one who saved this gravy."
As Julia Child so adeptly demonstrated in her French Chef cooking shows on PBS, knowing how to cook involves more than just following a recipe. Sometimes we need to know how to fix a problem when something goes wrong, or how to save a failure by calling it something else. When my mother's cake fell, she mixed it with pudding. As children we loved "Cake Pudding."
Now it's time to look forward to October.
Sunday 2010.09.26
Rethinking It
I mentioned earlier that I was attending a Dreamweaver class. One of the important points I recently learned was this: "If you want a Web site because you think it might be fun, keep that as your goal and don't get too serious about it." And later in that handout: "Web sites can become a black hole for money and time." In the push to expand this site in as many different ways as humanly possible I began to feel overwhelmed by the need to learn a gazillion different things about web site design and construction.
When the idea of a web site first began gestating in my mind several months ago, it was the encouragement of others that created the impetus. "You should share your recipes with others." That was my original intent. Many of my recipes are unique, in that I created them myself. My Pesto Lamb recipe, which won me a place in a national cookbook by America's Test Kitchen, is one example. I'll be creating the PDF photo recipe soon.
And so I decided to set aside my lofty goals for the sake of simplicity, at least for now. In the coming months—perhaps years—if the growth becomes exponential, then maybe I'll rethink it again. But for now, I'm content with the way things are going.
Wednesday 2010.09.22
Foray Into Chinese Sauces
There is an Asian restaurant near where I work. We eat lunch there almost weekly. I've tried to flatter the owner into sharing his recipes for the sauces they use. No go.
Chinese cooking is more than just chopping vegetables and swishing them around with oil in a hot wok. It's all about the sauces, which are more challenging to us Westerners because we don't know things like oyster sauce or sesame oil; we know ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. I've written before about cataloging flavors in the mind. Taste ingredients, get to know their flavors, so that when confronted with something like a delicious sauce on pork chow mein you can analyze the flavor. "This tastes a little fishy; it must be oyster sauce. And I can taste soy sauce and sugar. And there is some sort of vehicle, like chicken stock or beef stock. And, of course, corn starch is holding everything together."
I had an "Ah-hah" moment this week when I was eating chicken and cashews. I bit into a little piece of ginger. I hadn't detected ginger before. It has since been added to my recipe for this dish.
The vegetables can be almost anything. You can easily recognize carrot, green onion, bell pepper, celery, bean sprouts, and zucchini in Chinese dishes. Some mushrooms look a little strange when cooked. Of course, there are some obvious requisites. Beef and broccoli isn't made with chicken and zucchini. But it's the flavor of the sauces that make a Chinese dish stand out. You can't buy them in a bottle. You can get the ingredients, like hoisin sauce or black bean sauce, in many markets, but combining them creates that special sauce that makes Chinese food taste so good.
Any good Chinese restaurant is going to protect the recipes for their sauces. I've heard about some restaurant owners who are extremely particular about whom they hire to work in the kitchen, lest the secrets get into the wrong hands. But there is no way a restaurant can protect itself from a customer with a good sense of taste. Not everyone can distinguish the ingredients in the food they are tasting, but I believe many people have the potential. It only takes practice to perfect the skill.
Sunday 2010.09.19
More Growing To Do
I started attending a Dreamweaver class this past week. So far it has been helpful. I am hoping to learn some of the techniques I need to expand this site. I have many plans, but the development has been slow because there is so much to learn.
As for that Facebook "Like" button issue mentioned below, I finally figured it out. Facebook's code generator didn't work correctly and the code I changed was exactly the code that needed changing to make the button work properly. All is well.
The only other cooking news to report is that I am returning to my efforts to make delicious Chinese American food. I have some Chinese cookbooks, but the recipes are rather bland because they use genuine Chinese flavors. The Chinese restaurants here in the USA offer something called fusion cooking, or Chinese American food. The food is a fusion of Chinese ingredients and American flavors. It's all about the sauces, folks; and I don't mean the sauces that come in jars and bottles. You need to combine flavors to make a rich sauce. If you know what I'm talking about, and you have any great ideas, send them to me on the Contact page (button at left) and I'll give them a try.
Wednesday 2010.09.15
You Figure It Out.... (then tell me)
I am not a lost ball in a field of tall weeds when it comes to computers and web sites. I build my own computers and I created this web site starting from scratch, knowing nothing about Dreamweaver. (I even did my own drawing of the camper trailer using Adobe Illustrator.) I have been—for days—trying to figure out how the Facebook "Like" button is supposed to work. It seems easy enough. Enter a few parameters in their code generation form and click the "Get Code" button. The new "Like" button says I have more than 74,000 fans in love with this web site. Really? I only just started a few weeks ago. I'll take the fans, but really...can that number be accurate?
I did some Googling around and found some alternate "Like" button code that is supposed to work better. It says I have a more reasonable number of fans, but it still pointed to the wrong web site even though I entered my URL correctly in that code generating form. I got into the code and changed some things I think I was supposed not to change, but I don't care. I did it anyway. I like the way it looks and it seems to work even though it's not supposed to work. Go figure.
So if you like what you see, click the "Like" button and hopefully a small country on another continent won't slip into a sink hole because I messed with the code when I shouldn't have. I'll keep testing it, and I expect I won't be satisfied for a while.
Sunday 2010.09.12
Trying Not To Cook
Sometimes I think I expend as much effort trying not to cook as I do cooking. "We should have you over for dinner. You can make your pesto lamb for us." How's that for an invitation? Or, "I want you to teach me how to make homemade pasta." That from someone who doesn't own a pasta machine. Buy the machine, then call me.
Some friends once offered to provide all the ingredients if I would make one of my special pizzas for them. I gave them the list and they purchased the cheapest stuff they could find. The pizza was awful. They looked at me with some disappointment and I said, "Now you know how much it costs to make a really good pizza." Many years ago I had one friend who'd invite me to dinner and ask me to arrive early, in the middle of the afternoon, "So we can talk." Bull. When I got there he'd put me to work in the kitchen. After a couple of these incidents I got wise and responded to his next invitation with: "Sure, that sounds like fun. But I'm right in the middle of something. I'll get there as soon as I can." I didn't show up until 5:30. He never invited me to dinner again, which was exactly what I wanted.
My all-time favorite will always be the friend whose home I wanted to borrow to serve a special dinner to some special friends. My home at the time was a small trailer in a storage lot behind a car wash, not a place for entertaining. "Sure," she said, "but let's do a practice run first." A practice run? I know how to cook. Either too gullible or too trusting at the time, I agreed to the practice run. I bought all the ingredients and cooked all the food in her kitchen, after which she packed it all up in her car and brought it to her sister's house where more than a dozen of her friends and relatives were waiting to be fed. The special dinner never happened.
Worse yet are those who invite themselves to dinner because they want to eat your best food. "You're such a fantastic cook, I can't keep myself away." Yeah, like I haven't heard that one before. Manipulative flattery doesn't work with me. I learned. I've shed whole congregations of friends who wanted the food, but not the cook. None of us need friends that badly.
On the other hand, I do have friends I happily feed. They never show up without something to share, like a bottle of fine wine. Others have something worthwhile to offer that helps with this web site or the videos I make. Generous people are always welcome at my table.
Wednesday 2010.09.08
A Quiet Week in the Old Trailer Park
I did bring the large pot of Texas Chili to the potluck on Monday and everyone raved about it. They wanted the recipe and I was ready with my cards. I do have some very nice neighbors. Not everyone is perfect and I could tell you some hilarious stories about them, but I won't because they are my neighbors. For all their faults, I like them, and goodness knows I have enough faults of my own.
For my camera guy I cooked up the chicken wings I set aside from those four chickens I deboned. It turned out he doesn't digest fried foods well. So I ended up bringing the wings to the potluck (where they were still partying into the early evening). The wings were also a home run with my neighbors. I'll write that recipe up some day.
The highlight of today was replacing my decaying old dining room chairs. About 40 miles from where I live there used to be a dozen antique stores on the city's Main Street. They're almost all gone now. The economy. But I was fortunate to find one antique store that had four matching chairs in storage. And the price was great, $25 per chair. I didn't hesitate. As for cushions on the chairs—I am a jack of all trades. I made them myself.
Sunday 2010.09.05
Is My Face Red?
One of my friends kind of put me to task this week. He wrote to me about my web site. "I checked it out today and saw only one recipe. Is that right? Not much of a cooking web site." I had to point out that my site is, after all, only two weeks old, but he's right. What good is a cooking site if you can only find one recipe? So today I added the Recipe Archive page. You'll find a button to it toward the bottom of that panel on the left. It only has three recipes in it as of this date, but as time goes by it will expand.
My recipes take up a lot of space because of all the pictures. For the archive I distilled new PDFs at the lowest resolution. I am thinking of making the high resolultion versions available on my Facebook fan page (which doesn't exist yet). So, this week my project is to create a Facebook fan page. When ready, there will be a link to it on the left panel.
Another feature to look for will be my videos. I mentioned Eric below in Wednesday's blog. We've done three videos so far. We will hopefully do three more this week.
As for this site, thankfully Dreamweaver has a function to test all links. A few referred to a page no longer on the site. Those were fixed.
Another task this week is to make my recipes more internationally friendly. I do include temperatues in centigrade, but so far I haven't converted my liquid and dry measures to litres and grams. What is the metric equivalent of a tablespoon? (WikiAnswers says it's about 15 ml.) The recipes in the archive have the conversions.
As for today, it was a Minute Meals cooking day. I de-boned four chickens (and we did a video of it), baked all the meat, to be portioned and frozen, and I made a huge pot of Texas chili for a potluck I'm going to tomorrow (where I'll be handing out my cards to those who want the recipe, which I am posting this week).
Wednesday 2010.09.01
Growing Pains
My site is only two weeks old and already there is pressure to expand it in different directions. Later this month I will be enrolled in a Dreamweaver class. My three main objectives at this point are:
1. Communication—some sort of form in which visitors can send me a message. I don't want to put my email address on the site because it will surely become a spam target overnight.
2. A better blog page in which people can respond.
3. A forum. This one has me the most concerned because I don't want to babysit the thing, censoring inappropriate content.
Future ideas include links to the videos I've made with my friend Eric (he has a "pro-sumer" 720p video camera) and an archive of past recipes. I need to create a fan site on the social networking venues. There is a lot to do. Stay tuned....