MAY 2011
Sunday 2011.5.29
Memorial Day
Tomorrow is Memorial Day here in the USA. This is the day that typically begins the backyard barbeque season, although here in Southern California many of my neighbors started grilling weeks ago.
I get invited to picnics and barbeques and if there is nothing but hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, I'll always choose the hot dog. I'm not particularly fond of hot dogs. In fact, I rarely eat them more than once a year. It's just that I find a plain hamburger patty, no matter how it is grilled, very bland and unexciting. Maybe it's because I am somewhat a purist. I never put anything on my hot dogs (but I do like the bun toasted). As for hamburgers, they need ketchup, mustard, pickle, lettuce, tomato, whatever, to give them some flavor.
I never was much of a beef fan. Maybe there is something genetically wrong with my taste function when it comes to beef. It just doesn't taste like much of anything to me. At least hot dogs have plenty of added flavor. Beef chuck in Real Texas Chili is a treat, but not because of the beef. I really like the chili. And when it comes to buying red meat, I'll choose lamb over beef any day.
So when it comes to my hamburgers, I always add a few additional flavors to the meat. It doesn't take much. I absolutely LOVE my own hamburgers. The friends who have eaten them similarly find them delicious. That is why I decided to upload my recipe for picnic hamburgers this week.
I have another reason for liking Memorial Day. Every year I take the entire week off as vacation. I usually don't go anywhere. I just use the time to relax and enjoy the warm weather. This year I'll be cooking and doing more videos. Already I made the Genovese Savory Pastries another time, for two reasons. I needed to test the pastry formula again, just to make absolutely certain I got it right, and I needed to do the photography. The video was done last weekend, but I hadn't taken the photographs yet. They're finished and the recipe PDF is ready to publish. I'm not sure when I'll put that recipe on the site, as these pastries are more typical of winter fare.
Yes, I do look forward to Memorial Day every year. I like the warmer weather. It is one of the reasons why I moved from New England to Southern California. Even though the days never get very cold here in Southern California, I still like summertime best.
Wednesday 2011.5.25
Puzzle Solving
I suppose it's the challenge of trying to make something work in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles that attracts some of us to a task. As I said in Sunday's Blog, yet again I tried to make the pastry dough for the Genovese Savory Pastries. Yet again I ended up with a lumpy mass that, no matter how I kneaded it, wouldn't become smooth and pliable. In disgust, I almost threw the dough in the trash again. However, I saw my stand mixer on the counter and threw the dough in the bowl and cranked the mixer up. After watching nothing happen, I started grabbing wads of butter and throwing them into the mixer bowl. Voila! The dough became smooth and pliable, perfect for the pastries I was trying to make. I stood amazed. The final pastries were so perfect and delicious, I proudly brought half of them to a neighbor to enjoy.
My best guess is that sugar is not a dry ingredient, at least not in all mixtures. It was the only ingredient I eliminated and I doubled the egg, but I did not get the results I anticipated. Does the sugar combine with the eggs to make a syrup in the dough? Therefore, should sugar be considered a wet ingredient when present with enough moisture? I'm not sure. Using butter, lots of butter, seems to be the trick. So, this recipe is now ready for a PDF and it will be on the site in the future. It is more of a winter food, so I probably won't post it during the summer. It seems appropriate for Thanksgiving (late November). Besides, I need to prepare this recipe at least one more time to shoot the photography for the PDF.
On another note, I made three Tuscan Meat Loaves, as planned, on Sunday, mostly for my Minute Meals. I did experiment with chopping rolled oats in the food processor and using them instead of bread crumbs. There was no noticeable difference in the final meat loaf—neither in the flavor nor the texture.
I invited a friend to dinner because he hates meat loaf, but he loves my Tuscan Meatloaf. Over dinner we enjoyed a good laugh trying to come up with explanations for why I put Chicken Liver Pâté on the site after the phenomenal success of the Egg Rolls.
The Egg Rolls recipe is a runaway hit. In the first 12 hours the recipe was downloaded 360 times. By the end of the seventh day it reached 1126 downloads, surpassing French Bread in popularity, and becoming the frontrunner. Chicken Liver Pâté, by contrast, trudged along slowly in last place. In the first 12 hours it was downloaded only 6 times. I told my friend I felt like I had poured cold water on a horny dog.
So why post it? Friends who know and love my pâté were asking for it. The recipe is so appallingly simple, I couldn't resist putting it on the Web.
After this week I have a week of vacation. No plans to go anywhere. Just cooking and making videos. I'm assembling my summer line-up. Monday is Memorial Day and I'll kick off the barbeque season with my own recipe for better hamburgers.
Sunday 2011.5.22
You're Still Here Too?
Well, wrath didn't rain down from heaven yesterday, despite the predictions. It's a good thing, too, because I was just finishing up a video and I would have been really bummed if the world ended before I finished.
The video is for Genovese Savory Pies. I have never worked so hard to solve problems with a recipe as I did with this one. Maybe I like the challenge. I'll need to make them one more time to confirm that I got everything right, but the finished pastries yesterday looked good and tasted delicious. I gave half of them to a neighbor and pigged out on the rest.
Overall it was an excellent week of cooking. I ate the last of the Pesto Lamb this past week. This was the lamb I videoed when I made the four different kinds of pesto. Among those who ate it, the black olive pesto was voted as having the best flavor, followed closely by the herbal pesto. The traditional pesto came in third and everyone agreed the pesto made with mint was good, but not as delicious as the others.
I love lamb and there is almost always lamb in my freezer, but it is expensive at the warehouse store now. $6.99 per pound. I spent over $70 on two legs of lamb this week, which I prepped according to my Pesto Lamb recipe, roasted, sliced, and stored in my 3-ounce Minute Meal packs. I put 34 servings in the freezer. With the added cost of the basil, etc., the cost per serving is only about $2.35. Not alarming. It will last a couple months.
There is plenty of roasted chicken in the freezer. Tomorrow I'll probably make 2 or 3 Tuscan Meat Loaves. I'm feeling the need to experiment again. Instead of bread crumbs, what if I were to chop old fashioned rolled oats in the food processor? What might that contribute to the flavor and texture? It's worth a try. It certainly would be a little healthier.
As I say on my Minute Meals page, when I cook I cook in a big way and then put a lot in the freezer. Then I don't need to cook again for weeks. It's simpler and it saves money, even at $6.99 per pound. The chicken, thankfully, is still only 99 cents per pound.
I also got to use my new Nikkor AF-S 50mm f/1.4G lens for the first time yesterday. I had done some test shots, but this was the first time I photographed food with it. The results are very pleasing.
Finally, to those who were not raptured to heaven yesterday: Take comfort. You're not alone. It's only a disappointment; it's not the end of the world.
Wednesday 2011.5.18
Spring Cleaning
Every so often I feel a need to purge—not a dietary purge, a clutter purge. I am not a pack rat, but I do hold onto some things longer than I need to. I do not live in a house and therefore I do not enjoy the luxury of a garage or basement in which to store items that are no longer useful but have too much potential value to discard.
This is when I typically fill my recycle bin quickly. For example, a few years ago I stripped down an old desktop computer, placing the plastic and metal pieces in recycling. The circuit boards went into an electronics discard bin at work.
In my quest to find the best storage containers I ended up with a lot of plastic containers I never use. These were tucked away in the furthest corners of inconvenient cupboards, such as the one above the refrigerator. They went into recycling this week. I went through a similar search for better storage jars. I have at least two boxes of them. How many do I need? Two jars? Three? The only jars I continually use are the French canning jars I bought back when I was in college. Again, the excess went into recycling.
Bread pans are probably the most painful issue. I bought quite a few, and some were very expensive, and yet I continue to use the old metal pans I bought back in college because they make the best size bread to fit in my toaster. Why have bread pans gotten smaller? So, more recycling.
Then there are those gadgets and tools that I love because, well, because they are such great ingenious gadgets! I rarely, if ever, use them. And what about those gadgets that came with my vacuum sealer? I never use them either, but they are taking up space. Some will make it into recycling.
Cookware; there's another problem. I have ten skillets. Yes, ten!—which includes a second wok and another large skillet, put away new in their original box, because sometimes these two items are not available in the local warehouse store when I need to find a replacement. I love skillets. Many years ago almost everything I ate was cooked in a skillet. I have three sets of saucepans. Lids, some of which don't match anything, are stacked in a cupboard. Stockpot, the bottom of an old pressure cooker, and a new replacement pressure cooker fill out the collection. Some of these will be difficult to recycle. But....
Bakeware, thankfully, is not as much a problem. However, I do have four enameled cast iron Dutch ovens because each is perfect for something. Those I will keep. And there is a stack of metal bakeware in the drawer at the bottom of the stove. I don't sweat those either because each Christmas season the warehouse store stocks baking sheets and pans. That's the best time to discard (recycle) the older scratched stuff and buy new.
When is summer? June 21st? Hopefully I'll be done by then.
Sunday 2011.5.15
Professional Cooking
This past week I had an opportunity to attend a cooking demonstration provided by three professional chefs. Watching a real chef cook live is a rare treat. TV cooking shows are okay, but they are more for entertainment than education. You only get to see what the TV camera chooses to show. In a live demonstration you can watch what you want. I wish I had gotten the names of all three chefs. I was too busy writing down ingredients and noting techniques.
One of the chefs, Joel, was filling little meringue dessert shells with diced strawberries he mixed with a little sugar and some fresh basil cut in a chiffonade—a food he called Strawberry Pavlovas. His knife appeared to be a 7" Global G-4 Oriental Chef's Knife and I could have watched his knife skill for hours and never been bored.
A second chef, Sean, was demonstrating a vegetarian risotto he called Risotto Primavera, made with Arborio rice, of course, and summer vegetables. He makes his own vegetable stock, which raises his rankings very high on my opinion scale. Working in a professional kitchen, he has the luxury of surplus vegetable scraps—"trim"—from which to make his stocks. The risotto was delicious.
The third chef, for whom I failed to get a name, was stuffing medjool dates with Gorgonzola and wrapping them in soft-cooked bacon. I was so busy watching Joel and Sean, feverishly taking notes and clicking mental pictures, I didn't get down to the third table until after all the bacon was gone. Nonetheless, dates paired with Gorgonzola, even without the bacon, was a fascinating treat.
Thankfully there was not a huge crowd. No waiting in line and plenty of opportunity to chat it up with the chefs. I learned some new techniques, some new flavor pairings, and, best of all, some new recipes. The chefs said I could put their recipes on this site—after I write them up, do the photography, video—you know the drill.... I also handed out a few of my cards. People love my cards.
And to tie up one loose end—the new prime lens arrived on Friday. I immediately started taking test pictures. For those who might be interested, it's a Nikon AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G. At f/1.4 the depth of field is almost razor thin. I have plenty of playing room with this lens. A special thanks to professional photographer Rod Rolle for letting me ask questions and for being so willing to share good advice.
Wednesday 2011.5.11
So Preoccupied, Almost Forgot to Blog Today
My mind had been preoccupied with a dilemma the past few days. Last Wednesday I wrote about my disaster with the Genovese Savory Pastries in Jo Bettoja's book. A friend asked me why I like that book when there are so many problems in it. It's the flavors. Once the mistakes are corrected, the food taste really good! Besides which, I think of the book as a challenge, like a difficult puzzle that is satisfying to solve.
The idea behind the book was that Ms. Bettoja visited many of her longtime friends in Italy and gathered old family recipes, some of which are seen nowhere else but in her cookbook. The concept is fraught with difficulties. One must assume that the cooks have their recipes precisely memorized. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that the recipes were not tested prior to publication.
Many cooks start with a general idea of their recipe and then adjust along the way, probably not even aware of the degree to which their adjustments change the formula for the recipe. It's just something we do without thinking. I remember my mother once trying to learn how her mother cooked something. "How much flour do you add?" "Enough," was my grandmother's answer. "How much is enough?" "Enough!" was her emphatic reply. My grandmother never measured anything. She just knew how much was enough and adjusted if necessary.
As has been remarked about me, I am rather a precise cook. I am not given to flights of fancy, cooking organically, when I am writing and photographing a recipe. "Enough" is not good enough when trying to document a formula and procedure that others might follow, hoping to produce the same results.
Thus enters the scientific method. In the most academic sense, the following is not truly scientific inquiry, but it will suffice.
The last few days I've been trying to solve the problems with that pastries. I knew from the beginning that the formula for the pastry shell wouldn't work. After a couple attempts to adjust on the fly, I threw everything in the trash and turned to a tried-and-true formula that has always worked in the past. The pastry formula is used in my Custard Pie, Smoked Salmon Quiche, and Torta Rustica recipes. Naturally, the volumes change with the size of the bottom crust and whether or not a top crust is needed.
The second problem is with the filling. It expands so much, the top crust breaks free and the filling oozes out and makes a mess. The Béchamel sauce has one of the strangest methods I've ever encountered, starting in a blender. My hypothesis is that the flour in the sauce is not cooked properly and this causes expansion. So I approached the problem by degrees.
First I made a traditional Béchamel using traditional methods and placed that in a little pie dish, leveling the top. Covered with foil, it baked for the required number of minutes at temperature and then I checked for expansion. It expanded very little.
Next I made the Béchamel again, added the cheese called for in the original recipe and doing the baking test again. There was more expansion. Ergo: It must be the cheese. I lifted the foil covering the test pastry and the filling was bubbling madly. Then I was hit with an epiphany. The filling is cooked beforehand. So why bake the little pastries for 45 minutes? A third of that time should be adequate to cook the pastry shell.
Eliminating variables one at a time, I think I solved the problems with the recipe. I'll make them again on Saturday. This scientific approach isn't going to work for everyone, especially those who cook spontaneously and don't worry about replicable results. But it certainly helps me when writing a recipe that you can follow confidently.
As for the Genovese Savory Pasties, they are more appropriate as a winter food. So I'll probably publish the final recipe during the fall. I'd like to test them in front of guests a few times first.
There has been one other issue preoccupying my mind lately—my photography. I met with a professional photographer on Monday and asked him for advice for taking better food photographs. One recommendation was to lose the zoom lenses, which are fine for the flat, clinical photos I use in the step-by-step section of my recipes. For a really shallow depth of field he recommended a 50mm prime lens. I spent nearly $600 this week on such a lens, which should be here by Friday. I'm getting better at the artsy food photographs I use on the main page (although this week's picture of the Seafood Fettuccine is an embarrassment—I knew a lot less when that picture was taken). Hopefully I'll master this skill too.
Sunday 2011.5.8
Heavy Cooking
Sometimes it's just plain fun the dive into a day of extreme cooking without worrying about a video or writing a new recipe. A friend asked me to teach him how to make the Lamb Briouats. He also wants to repay me for a favor I did several weeks go. So he offered to buy two racks of lamb. As a side dish, he requested my Eggplant Parmesan. He normally doesn't like eggplant, but he really likes mine. Yesterday was our day to cook together.
I actually started the evening before, preparing a fresh herb rub (fresh chopped rosemary, thyme, garlic, pepper, etc.) and placing the racks in ziplock bags to soak up the flavors of the rub overnight. I prepped the Eggplant Parmesan yesterday morning so that it would be ready to pop in the oven with the lamb. This gave us the freedom to just focus on the method of making the briouats, which requires some technique and some undivided attention.
The discerning person might wonder why all this food was being prepared for only two people. It's true. I knew we wouldn't eat a quarter of this food. I told him in advance that he would be taking the bulk of it home with him. I'm trying to lose some weight and I don't need all that deliciousness in the refrigerator. The real purpose of the day was teaching someone to cook something, not preparing a meal to eat.
He suggested we video the process, but I put that idea aside. Recording a cooking session is really three times the work, as I have to concentrate on three processes—the cooking, the photography, and the video. I usually have two tripods set up, one with the video camera and the second with my digital still camera. Me cooking at the stove, working around two tripods in the kitchen, is a vision to behold. Sometimes I just give up and prepare a recipe twice—once for the video and a second time for the photographs for the recipe PDF.
The day went well. The weather was overcast, which makes for a cooler kitchen when the oven is on. The food was delicious. I have to admit, watching all that wonderful food go out the door in the evening was not encouraging, but my diet is more important. I am successfully losing weight.
I did eat well. Sometimes you just plain need to throw a diet to the wind and enjoy some extreme eating.
Wednesday 2011.5.4
When Disaster Strikes
This past Sunday afternoon I felt a little playful. So I decided to experiment with a new recipe, something I found in a very problematic cookbook—Southern Italian Cooking by Jo Bettoja. I know to approach that book cautiously. The proportions in some recipes are wrong—very wrong. Example: For a pie crust (page 345) the recipe says 2½ cups flour, ½ cup sugar, ¼ pound butter, and 3 LARGE EGG YOLKS (caps mine). Three yolks? Really? Immediately I knew those yolks were not going to bind all that flour and sugar together into a workable dough.
The book's recipes were "shared" with the author, coming from friends she knew in Italy. Evidently the recipes were never tested by the author.
So I expected problems when I started making the dough. It was just awful. I tried some adjustments that usually help. Nothing worked. I ended up with a pile of crumbly stuff on the counter. I finally scooped up the whole mess and threw it in the trash. I then turned to a tried-and-true recipe I've used dozens of times over the past 20 years. It worked perfectly.
The next problem involved making the little pastries without proper tart tins. I thought I might use my muffin pan. Disaster again. There isn't enough space between the pan's cups to seal the top crust to the bottom crust. Then I remembered the little ceramic bowls a friend gave me about six months ago. They are just the right size and they worked perfectly.
The end result was still far from perfect. I forgot to vent the top crust. The filling swelled, broke the seam around the edges, and oozed out. Thankfully the bowls were on a baking sheet.
On the positive side, the Béchamel, although made in a very non-traditional way, turned out perfect. The filling was very good. A friend and I tasted them and we agreed prosciutto would be better than ham and the crust would taste better if made without sugar. This is the one reason I keep returning to that troublesome cookbook. The flavors are good, once you work out the inaccuracies of the proportions.
I use this as another example of why it helps to do a lot of cooking. After a while you understand cooking. Knowledge helps, but it's the experience that yields understanding. I'll make these little savory pastries again. The recipe and video will eventually end up on this web site, although I don't know when. This food is typically winter fare and I'm currently working on summer recipes. Besides, I like to test a new recipe at least five times before I'm confident it is ready to publish. That's where I differ from authors like Jo Bettoja.
Sunday 2011.5.1
College Memories
One of my oldest recipes in my recipe box is for egg rolls. They aren't true Chinese egg rolls because I got the recipe from my Vietnames girlfriend in college. Like many college students, I was dirt poor most of the time. I could make a lot of egg rolls for very little money and often I'd put 50, 60, even 70 in the freezer, all wrapped individually in foil (I froze them raw for cooking later). It was better, and cheaper, than macaroni and cheese from a box or the ubiquitous ramen. I subsisted on egg rolls much of the time. A surfer friend of mine, Ward, would sometimes call me up. Often he was as poor as I was. "Can I come over for egg rolls?"
My Vietnamese girlfriend in college was born and raised in Saigon. Her mother was Chinese and her father was French. I don’t think of these egg rolls as Chinese. I think of them as fusion cooking, a mixture of Oriental technique with Western flavors. I literally ate hundreds of these during my college years.
There is a story that goes with my egg rolls. One day I was making some for the freezer and I ran out of wrappers. I still had plenty of filling left. I didn’t want to waste it, but I had no money in my wallet. There was one quarter and one dime (35¢ in USA money) in my bowl for laundry coins. A package of egg roll wrappers cost $1.33 back then. I searched through all my clothing, hoping to find a dollar in a pocket. No luck. At the time I was interested in Eastern religious philosophies. I was doing transendental mediation, I was reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I was rather good with the I Ching. I called out to the cosmos. “Lend me one dollar. I’ll pay you back.” A little voice in my head said, “Go to the store. You’ll find what you need along the way.” I put my 35¢ in my pocket, left my apartment, and walked to the store. Halfway there I found a dollar on the side of the road. I purchased the egg roll wrappers I needed.
A few weeks later when I had some cash I bicycled down that road and I dropped a dollar bill in the gutter where I had found the other one, paying back the Universe the money I owed it. This story is true.
All of these memories resurfaced today because I made my college egg rolls for a video and recipe PDF, which will be on this web site in a few weeks. I made two dozen today, giving half of them to a neighbor and eating all the rest. I'd almost forgotten how delicious those egg rolls are. I hadn't made them in many years.
Here again is yet another reason why I like to write down my recipes precisely. More than 30 years has passed since those college days, but I can still produce the exact same egg rolls I made when I was in college.