MARCH 2012
Wednesday 2012.3.28
Back in the Kitchen Again
It has been a restful 5 weeks. Only one time did I cook in front of the cameras, and that was to make a Mushroom and Tomato Crostini that will be published in coming weeks. One of the blessings of retirement is that I can cook for this web site any day I choose. I used to have to plan my weekends carefully and use vacations to put additional recipes in the vault, lest I was unable to prepare something on a weekend, or my preparations went into the trash (which happened more than once).
So I put a few recipes in the vault, such that I have enough completed PDFs and videos to cover my uploads through the weekend of April 14/15, and then I took several weeks off. I've been practicing piano. I can play with two hands now. I had to reload a computer, which took 18 hours over two days. (I use a lot of software for my various projects.) And, otherwise, I just relaxed, watched a few movies I'd been wanting to see, and read a couple books. It was refreshing.
As for meals, I have enough cooked food portioned and frozen in the freezer to keep me well fed with Minute Meals for many weeks to come. I need to buy frozen vegetables occasionally, but they're easy.
Now I am throwing myself back into the fire, in spades! My friend Eric wants to do Rum Cake. I've never made it before, but he has. So he has a slight advantage over me, but that also makes him a good resource. Therefore, he will arrive later this morning and together we will make this cake in front of the camera. I've already made some alterations. I don't have the powdered milk for the homemade pudding mix, so I substituted with nondairy coffee creamer. I cooked up some of the pudding to test my formula. You might be surprised how delicious that pudding is. I put the remaining pudding in the refrigerator so that Eric and I can sample it.
I also did at lot of the prep work yesterday evening, covering the windows with my blackout drapes (necessary to maintain constant studio lighting when doing my videos), mounting and prepping the cameras, measuring most of the ingredients, writing my cue cards for the ingredients video clips, writing my step-by-step guide for my still photography. What I wasn't unable to complete last night was finished this morning. Now you begin to get some idea about how much advance work is done before I even turn on the video camera. It takes me about 3 to 4 hours to prepare to do a video.
Today should be a busy day. I haven't used my alarm clock in months, but this morning I set it wake me at 7:00. And thus the routine begins again. I have so many recipe ideas planned, and a few requests from fans, to keep me busy for months to come. I should be fun and I'm looking forward to it.
Sunday 2012.3.25
More About Knives (part 2)
When it comes to my kitchen knives, I have attitude. I got lucky with my chef's knife. It's a 9-inch Henckels Professional-S, no longer available. This was a model made for the U.S. market and was discontinued. There was one on Ebay and I bid $60 on it. I was out-bid by less than a dollar. However, the seller e-mailed me to say he had another one, new in box, that I could have for my $60 bid. I said yes.
I use a 600-grit diamond hone to keep my blades sharp. (I actually have two hones—my best one never leaves the house.) A steel (those cylindrical round sharpeners that typically come with a set of knives) is okay for putting a quick edge on a blade, but if you don't know what you're doing you can ruin a knife. Even "professional" sharpeners can ruin a blade. This happenend to a friend of mine. His father took his chef's knife to be professionally sharpened and it came back more like a carving knive, a shallow "S" curve to the blade. A chef's knife must have one curve, like a very flat "C," such that every bit of the cutting edge comes into contact with the cutting board as you rock the knife from tip to heel against the board. No gaps. When he brought the knife to me, out came the Dremel and the diamond hone. I spent about an hour reshaping the blade until it was properly restored. My friend now lets noone but me sharpen his chef's knife.
A local kitchenware store offers free knife sharpening every Thanksgiving season, to prepare knives for carving the turkey. The employees are mostly college kids, who know about as much about knives as I know about astrophysics. The "sharpener" is an electric thingy you slide the knife through. There is no quality control to make certain the curve of a chef's knife is correctly maintained. You get what you pay for. Bring your carving knife to the store. It's rather difficult to ruin that knife. But only take your chef's knife to a professional who knows what s/he's doing.
I have a knife block for my most-used blades. Other knives—less used but just as important—are stored in leather sheaths I made and placed in a drawer. Even my 9-inch has its own leather sheath, which I use on rare occasions when I carry my knife somewhere. (As I said on Wednesay, it rarely leaves the house.)
Although some people might not agree, a dull knife really is more dangerous than a sharp one. With a dull knife you must use more force to cut through something. If you should slip, you could cut yourself. A properly sharpened knife glides through food almost effortlessly. You have more control because you use very little force. You use your muscles to guide the blade rather than force it through food.
Good quality knives are expensive. Don't spend the money if you're not going to take care of your knives. If you're willing to part with the bucks for a high quality blade, learn to care for it properly. Don't put the knife in a dishwasher, even though the label might say it is dishwasher safe. "Safe" does not mean "advisable." Wash your knives by hand and dry them immediately. Store them in a knife block or a sheath, not tossed in a utensils drawer. I slide my knives into my knife block upside-down, with the sharp part of the blade pointing up so that the back, or spine, of the blade slides against the wood as the knife moves into or out of the knife block slot.
When it comes to sharpening a knife, learn how to do it yourself or take it to a reputable knife sharpener. As mentioned above, an unqualified knife sharpener can ruin a knife, and you pay him to do it. For those who feel confident to do it themselves, I have a video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/R9_XKTpFGvM
Most chefs would argue that good knives are some of the most important tools in a kitchen. I agree.
Wednesday 2012.3.21
About Knives
A while ago a friend asked me which set of knives he should buy because the local warehouse store had a booth in which a knife manufacturer was featuring their knives. Another friend, who knows hunting knives, told me about the same booth and explained that the steel they use in their blades, 440C high carbon stainless steel-ice hardened, is the same metal used in some very expensive sport knives. I bought a new 10-inch carving knife to replace an old cheap one.
Some knife sets might look flashy and pretty, but you get what you pay for. A cheap set will comprise cheap knives that will need to be sharpened often. The blades are stamped out of a sheet of steel, then assembled with a handle and sharpened for sale. For the steel to be safe enough to be stamped without damaging the stamping machinery, the steel needs to be soft and that means it will become dull quickly.
High quality—and therefore expensive—knives are forged. One knife at a time is shaped from molten steel, which is then cleaned, given a final shape and handle, and then finished with a superior cutting edge. Good knives typically have a full-length tang, the metal part that goes through the handle. It should extend all the way to the back end of the handle and typically there are at least three rivets holding the handle to the tang. The tang and blade are all one piece of steel.
Forged knives usually have a solid metal bolster, the thick metal piece between the handle and the blade. This isn't always a sure sign of a quality knife because some manufacturers shape a metal bolster separately and then glue it in place to make a stamped blade look forged.
First, I recommend avoiding a set. They contain a few knives you will use a lot; the others will mostly sit, unused, filling up empty slots in the knife block. The knives you will use most depends on how much, and what kind, of cooking you do.
The chef's knife is typically the workhorse of just about any kitchen. A cook will reach for it more than all other knives combined. Eight inches is the minimum size to buy. Ten inch chef's knives are popular among many professional chefs, but the size might be too large and heavy for the home kitchen. I own a nine inch chef's knife and it seems perfect for my use. I also own an eight inch chef's knife that I only use when I am cooking somewhere else, such as at a friend's house or in a class. My nine-inch rarely leaves the house.
A good boning knife is essential if you fillet a lot of chicken and meat. If you don't like the idea of boning meat, the boning knife in a knife set will go unused. I own two boning knives. The smaller one I use for chicken. The larger one is used for lamb and other larger cuts of meat.
The paring knife is useful for a lot of small jobs, as is the utility knife. They look a little different, with the paring knife typically having a broader and shorter blade, but they are similar enough to do the same work. Get one or the other. I use a paring knife to open plastic packages of meat, trim string when I'm tying a roast, cut small things like olives in half, etc.
A carving knife is essential, of course, when carving a roast. There is more than one style. I use my ten inch carving knife most for cutting up cooked meats or slicing breads. I have a twelve inch carving knife with a long slender blade, but I rarely use it. My cheap eight-inch carving knife goes to potlucks and picnics. Again, my good knives never leave the house.
Which brand names are best? J.A. Henckels makes good knives (they also sell some lousy cheap ones). I like their Professional S line. Wüsthof makes excellent knives. They make a nine inch chef's knife, whereas Henckels no longer does. I also own some Viking knifes, which I really like. Japanese knives are becoming popular and there are some good ones, but I haven't experimented with any; so I don't know which ones I might prefer. I see no reason to recommend one brand over another. A well-made knife is expensive, no matter who makes it, but you get what you pay for.
In my next blog I'll write about sharpening knives.
Sunday 2012.3.18
When It's Okay to Fake It
Confession time. I don't make my own spaghetti sauce, at least not most of the time. I know I have a recipe for Marinara in the Recipe Archive. And there are times when making your own sauce from scratch is necessary. Most of the time I cheat. You might be surprised how many times someone eating one of my pasta dinners looks at me with rapture on their face and says, "You made your own sauce, didn't you?" Yep.
Well, it's mostly true. Maybe it would be more appropriate to say I assembled it myself. I buy Pregro "Italian Sauce" at the warehouse store, along with Classico "Tomato and Basil." Prego is too sweet. They must put a lot of sugar in there. Ingredients are usually listed on the label in order of quantities, with the highest quantity listed first. Sugar is listed right after the tomato ingredients. On the Classico label there is no mention of sugar. Classico Tomato and Basil has too strong an herbal flavor for my tastes. So, how do I make my spaghetti sauce?
I dump an entire jar of Classico in a large sauce pan, then fill the empty Classico jar with Prego and pour that into the pan. (Prego comes in a two-jar package and Classico is sold in a three-jar package at the warehouse store; therefore, the Prego jars are larger.) Mix it up and we're done. It usually gets cooked for about half an hour and it's as simple as that. The Classico offsets the overly sweet Prego and the Prego softens down the overly herbal flavor of the Classico.
If I put this sauce before Gordon Ramsey, he'd probably fillet me. But the guests who eat dinner at my home always enjoy my pasta sauce so much, they think it is 100% homemade. I do tell them how it is really made, and they are surprised. But there is no arguing with the flavor. It tastes good.
So, sometimes it's okay to fake it.
Wednesday 2012.3.14
Anticlimactic Dinner
Sometimes a brilliant idea overtakes me and the outcome goes beyond my expectations. Sometimes this works to an advantage, sometimes to a disadvantage. Case in point:
I knew I was going to need some mushrooms and some fresh Roma tomatoes for a dinner I was planning for friends. In a moment of dubious genius I grabbed a 1½ pound box of crimini mushrooms at the warehouse store while I was there to buy the tomatoes. 1½ pounds is a lot of mushrooms for a single-person household. So I got the brilliant idea to cook them all. Maybe I could experiment with freezing them. They yielded a lot of juice while sautéing, so I got the brilliant idea of making a wine reduction sauce with the liquid. One friend arrived early—so he could watch me cook—and he brought a nice loaf of rustic bread, the kind with large holes in the crumb, good for holding liquid. I also had a lot of Roma tomatoes left over. This gave me another brilliant idea. Make crostini.
So I started peeling, seeding, and chopping tomatoes. I combined these with the cooked mushrooms and the wine reduction sauce, adding extra virgin olive oil, Romano cheese, and salt and pepper. I sliced the bread down the middle, lengthwise, and toasted it under the broiler. We dug in, spooning heaping tablespoons of the mushroom-tomato mixture onto squares of toasted bread and eating it. It had the kind of flavor that makes you close your eyes so that—even though you can't be physically alone in the room—you can be alone in your mind with the flavor. (Closing your eyes also spares you from having to observe your friends' "O" face as they have their moment of serenity with the flavor as well.) It was the kind of flavor that makes you want to ask your friend afterward, "Was it as good for you as it was for me?" It really was that delicious.
Dinner was a success. It always is. I've made this recipe many times and I always follow the same recipe the say way for the same outcome. But the toasted bread with the mushroom-tomato topping: That was the flavor that lingered in the mind. That is the flavor I crave now as I write this. The dinner that followed was good, but it wasn't as delicious as the food that came before it. It was an anticlimactic dinner.
I am writing up the recipe. I'll do photography for the PDF and I'll do a video, all this week. But I don't know how to label it. I'll put it in the Appetizer section, but it is more of a snack. Really, this food would be great for football day, when you invite the guys over to watch the game and you want to put out something to eat that won't require sitting at the dining room table. This would also be excellent for bringing to a picnic or potluck. In fact, I could sit with satisfaction under the trees or on the beach with nothing more than this crostini and a nice bottle of red wine.
Sunday 2012.3.11
I Have a Tooth
How many of you remember that about a year ago I had to undergo oral surgery to build up my lower front jaw with a bone graft to prepare a foundation for a dental implant?
By way of a refresher: The right center tooth in my lower jaw abscessed when I was a teenager because I accidentally hit my chin against the edge of a table when I was repairing a photocopier. (I used to repair typewriters and other office equipment for a living.) The dentist did a root canal and I was back in the chair a few hours later because the pain was even worse. He had to cut down to my jaw and drill through the bone into the base of the tooth to relieve the pressure. I can still remember him saying, "I can numb the tissue, but not the bone. There isn't any blood flow there because of the abscess. So this is going to hurt." It did, but it solved the problem. An hour later I felt a lot better.
Since then, that tooth has undergone a second root canal. Two nerves in a front tooth is rare, but it happens. The tooth has also had two crowns in the past 20 years. 15 months ago the tooth abscessed a third time because it was breaking up. There was no alternative but to remove it and decide what to do about the gap. As a temporary fix the dentist gave me a flipper, a fake tooth that filled the gap for cosmetic purposes. It felt strange and I needed to learn to speak with it so that I could do my cooking videos.
The dentist wanted to do a permanent bridge because it costs less and my dental insurance would pay for most of it. I did a little research and a bridge would require grinding down the two teeth on each side. Why compromise healthy teeth? The alternative was an implant. If you're not familiar, they pack the old tooth socket with bone, let it fuse for a few months, and then drill a hole in which they screw a titanium post, let that fuse, and then they mount a crown on the post. It costs a lot more, but it's better for the jaw and the neighboring teeth. The lower front jaw, however, is too thin to support an implant. I therefore needed a bone graft to make the jaw thicker.
My insurance doesn't cover such surgery, but one advantage to living in a mobile home in a trailer park that is under a rent control ordinance is that I can put away savings to pay for such things. So although the implant put a dent in my savings, I will recover.
One point worth mentioning is that oral surgery and dentistry sure have come a long way in 40 years. The oral surgeon performed two surgeries, removing a chip of bone from the back of my jaw and using that for the bone graft in the front. I was awake through the whole procedure, which was done in under an hour. Several months later he put the titanium post in my jaw. That had to fuse before the final crown was mounted on it, which was done three days ago. As for the crown, it looks so real and natural, I can't distinguish it from my other teeth. And my dentist said this crown would last longer than the teeth on either side.
So, I am back to having a full set of teeth again. I won't need to wear the flipper when I do videos for my web site. Now I can't wait to do another video.
Wednesday 2012.3.7
At a Total Loss
I was at a total loss as to what to blog about this morning. I was hoping yesterday's Super Tuesday voting would be worth watching. It was, however, a non-event for me. In fact, this whole campaign cycle and election season seems to be a non-event.
Why can't the Republican base rally around a single strong candidate? Because there are none. Why are there none? Because, I believe, Obama's re-election in November is such a foregone conclusion that any intelligent Republican who has good potential for being this country's next president is going to hide until 2016. Why waste the money and the reputation when a loss is all but guaranteed? So the Republican party this year is simply looking for the best candidate to throw under the bus. And Mitt seems to be their guy.
It is more fun to watch the news people try to make an event of this election cycle. I watched MSNBC most of the evening. Rachel Maddow was the most amusing. It seemed she was looking for any excuse to put Rick Santorum ahead of Mitt Romney. As much of a liberal democrat as she is, I think she would have voted for Santorum in Ohio. I miss Keith Olbermann.
So, let's talk about something more interesting than politics: Food. Sunday evening I invited a friend to dinner. A long time ago I had made my own mascarpone cheese and I wanted to experiment with freezing the stuff. I had wrapped a block of it in plastic, sealed it in a ziplock freezer bag, put it in my freezer, and then forgot about it. This past week I organized the freezer as I was deciding which vegetables I needed for my Minute Meals and I found the frozen mascarpone. I put it in the refrigerator to thaw.
It thawed a little on the grainy side, but it was still usable. So I bought some steelhead trout. (My friend up in Spokane, who is an avid fisherman, likes to say about me, "Oh, yeah, you fish at Costco." He practices "catch and release" and so I once told him that if I were to ever go fishing with him I would bring a stove, a skillet, and a gun.) I used the steelhead to make my trout with tomatoes, mushrooms, and mascarpone. For a side dish I made this week's Risotto e Fagioli.
I had bought at the warehouse store a 1½-pound box of cremini mushrooms. I wanted to experiment with them; so I sliced them and sautéed them in olive oil and clarified butter. Those of you who have sautéed mushrooms know how much juice they yield. I used the juice with white wine to make a reduction sauce. I had extra Roma tomatoes from the steelhead recipe; so I peeled and seeded them, chopped them well, combined them with extra virgin olive oil, a little Romano cheese, some basil cut into a chiffonade, and then mixed in the mushrooms and reduction sauce. We ate this over rustic bread as an appetizer. It was so fantastic, I will write it up and photograph it as a crostini recipe to be featured on this web site in the future.
For those of you who have been following my retirement—yesterday I engaged in a true retirement tradition. I did some gardening, planting some border flowers along one edge of my mobile home space. Now I feel officially retired.
Sunday 2012.3.4
Thank Goodness for Cooking
I remember speaking before an audience many years ago and the subject was food. I mentioned that we could have ended up like plants, eating dirt, or something like it, for sustenance. If it was all we ever knew, we'd be satisfied because we simply wouldn't know better. We have, after all, only one kind of water that does us any good. You never hear anyone say, "Boy that Aunt Mabel! She sure can whip up an excellent batch of water!"
What if all we ever ate was gray paste? You'd go to the grocery store and in the produce section you'd find fresh gray paste. On the frozen food aisle would be packages of frozen gray paste. Canned gray paste on one aisle and jars of gray paste on another. Heinz One Variety. If all we ever knew was gray paste, we'd probably be content with it, as long as it satisfied our hunger and kept us alive and healthy.
All this comes to mind because recently I made a Torta Pasqualina in front of the cameras. This was a recipe I passed over many years ago because the ingredients didn't stimulate me. The photograph of the pie, on the other hand, inspired me so much I created my recipe for Chicken and Spinach Pie. I returned to the Torta Pasqualina recipe again because I found another recipe for the same pie, but different in composition, in another Italian cookbook. I then looked through more Italian cookbooks and found that Torta Pasqualina is fairly common in Italy. It is most often made in observance of the Easter holiday. One book says there was a time when no Easter celebration was considered complete without a Torta Pasqualina. Easter is next month, on the eighth; so (coincidentally) the timing was good.
Torta Pasqualina is a savory pie made with artichokes, cheeses, mushrooms, and eggs, baked in a very flaky pie shell. It was typically followed by a roast, usually leg of lamb, and in some regions it was eaten at room temperature for a few days following Easter. Here in the USA we would eat it fresh and hot from the oven.
The Torta Pasqualina I made was fantastic. I compared recipes—one used borage, a second one used Swiss chard, another used no green leaf vegetable at all—and came up with my own recipe, using spinach, that I thought might have a pleasing balance of flavors. It did. I could taste the cheese, the spinach, and the artichokes, but nothing came to the fore and overpowered any other flavor. I brought some to a neighbor. She says she likes "food that is pretty, and this is very pretty food!" With its golden color and flaky crust, it really does have a lot of presentation value.
It didn't last long. I kept a third of the pie for myself and late that same evening I ate the last of it for my bedtime snack. It really was delicious.
I guess I should be thankful for more than just cooking. People have been doing that for thousands of years. I am also thankful that we have books in which these recipes are recorded for others to enjoy. And we have a worldwide Internet, which makes it easy to research and share recipes. I really like the genuine recipes, those that come from the "old country." Such was the case with these recipes for Torta Pasqualina. New ideas are fine. Some of my recipes are new, invented by myself. But it's the old original recipes that interest me the most.
I have my recipe for Torta Pasqualina scheduled to be published on this website, and the video on YouTube, next week. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.