JULY 2012
Sunday 2012.7.29
Restaurant Recipes
This week I once again made a dish I found in a restaurant trade journal. If you're not familiar with trade journals, they are magazines sent to businesses and industries. You don't see them on the magazine rack at the grocery store or bookstore. The advertisements, for example, are for things like commercial ice makers or large buffet steam tables—things you wouldn't order for your home.
I made Lamb Chops Saltimboca. I had been wanting to make a saltimbocca recipe, but they usually require cuts of veal that are not often easy to find. The restaurant recipe used rack of lamb, which are almost always stocked in the meat case at the warehouse store nearby. I do have a recipe for Saltimbocca made with veal scallopine, which is usually found at the same store; so I will eventaully make that as well. Maybe this winter.
I find lamb an odd meat to work with when cooking for this web site. So few people know lamb, and fewer enjoy it as much as I do. It is not popular, but I cook it for the web site anyway. Lamb is probably my favorite meat.
I was not raised on lamb. I cannot recall my mother ever buying it, although it is common in Italian cooking. (My mother was first-generation Italian-American.) She cooked beef. We were Roman Catholic at the time and, of course, Fridays were meatless. Saturdays, in somewhat of a rebound, was a big meat day. Mom would buy steaks on sale and store them in the freezer. On Saturday morning raw steaks would go onto the kitchen counter, still wrapped of course, and there they would sit, all day, thawing and festering in their own bacteria. On many Sundays I was doubled over with abdominal cramps and all the ugliness that goes with them. I decided I was allergic to beef and stopped eating it altogether. It wasn't until many years later that I realized it wasn't an allergic reaction at all; it was food poisoning.
I'm not adverse to beef. I buy it to make Real Texas Chili in winter. Steaks don't interest me, though. I often buy ground beef for hamburgers, spaghetti and meatballs, or, one of my favorites, Tuscan Meatloaf. Most of the time, if I buy red meat it's lamb. There is something about the flavor of lamb, especially rack of lamb, that really appeals to me. Beef is too bland. Even as a kid, when I ate steaks on Saturdays, I doused it with plenty of Worcestershire sauce. Lamb has a lot of flavor and therefore a lot of strong flavors work well with it. My best example: My Pesto Lamb.
Even though lamb dishes won't get me a lot of "Likes" on this web site or my YouTube videos, I cook with it anyway. Sometimes popularity isn't the most important thing.
One Quick Update
On Wednesday I mentioned the stats on my YouTube videos had dropped drastically. It was a reporting error by YouTube. They fixed the problem and the popularity of my videos has remained unchanged.
Wednesday 2012.7.25
Summertime
We are definitely well into that lazy time of the year when we all want to move a little more slowly and do more sitting than standing. Although I was ambitious last week, stocking my freezer with cooked frozen foods, I'm feeling the need to just kick back for a while, put my feet up, and just read a book or watch a movie.
Thankfully I have videos in the vault to cover my uploads for the next several weeks. I haven't stopped cooking entirely. Yesterday I made a carrot cake, which I scheduled for upload on September 16th. This afternoon I will purchase two racks of lamb because there is a recipe for Lamb Chops Saltimbocca that looks promising. Any recipe that contains prosciutto piques my curiosity.
Many people are probably on vacation, or planning their summer vacation. I watch my statistics and the number of daily views of my YouTube videos has dropped to less than half the usual average. The decline started on July 9th and the numbers have remained low all month. I suspect that many fans of the videos watch them at their desk at work. The Tuesday after a three-day weekend usually shows a high number of views. With so many people taking time off from work to relax on vacation, I probably won't see the numbers return to normal until late August or early September.
Already I am beginning to look forward to the fall months. I love summer, but there is some attraction for that time of year when the air begins to chill—not too much—that makes me think of making soups and baking bread. I stocked my freezer with plenty of potato water, saved from boiling potatoes, to use in bread making. And I probably have enough chicken stock for soups to last me well into January.
August will be here soon, and that brings another milestone. It was during the middle of August, two years ago, that I launched this web site. For each anniversary I like to do a biscotti recipe and this year I will publish my Hazelnut and Dried Cranberry Biscotto recipe. It's good, but those who know my biscotti always say that the best biscotti in my Almond Biscotti. That was one of the first recipes I published and it is difficult to do better.
I hope you are enjoying your summer. I am enjoying mine, although, of course, now that I am retired, every day is a vacation day. I love having the time to focus on doing only the things I most enjoy doing.
Sunday 2012.7.22
Minute Meals Week Ends
This has been an excellent week for cooking and storing foods for my Minute Meals. On Wednesday I blogged about all the protein portions I put away, 121 in all. I made stock from the chicken trim and put 14 one-cup portions in the freezer for soup this winter. During the latter half of the week I peeled, boiled, mashed, and portioned a 20-pound bag of potatoes into 81 servings. The water in which the potatoes were boiled was also portioned into 21 one-cup containers and frozen for making bread. Nothing is wasted. This is enough potato water for making 42 one-pound loaves of bread.
One person on the Facebook fan page asked me how I squeeze all this food into the freezer. The answer is simple enough. The freezer was nearly empty. I eat one or two Minute Meals each day until I use up all the food I set aside. Then I do it all again.
Maybe this is a good time to explain again why I call them Minute Meals. I work hard for a few days, being anything but lazy, but then I don't need to cook meals for many months. Each meal is in a small ziplock bag, which I use multiple times because the portions are sealed in little plastic pouches, keeping the ziplock bag clean. Each meal has a protein portion and two vegetable portions, one high in carbohydrates and one low. I snip the packets to vent steam and heat them in a microwave oven. Pour the hot contents onto a paper plate and eat. After the meal, I only have a fork to wash. No cooking, not pots and pans to wash. Not even a plate to wash. Just a fork. How lazy is that?
I considered changing the name. Some women have written to me about my Lazy Man Meals, purchasing the equipment and supplies to make them for themselves. Perhaps the name shouldn't contain the word Man. I named the meals after myself, a somewhat lazy man when it comes to feeding myself. I seem to have almost limitless energy when cooking for the web site, making some recipes again and again until I get them perfect. But for myself, I want as quick and easy a meal as possible, with almost no cleanup afterward. I like the convenience.
Back in November I bought two fresh turkeys at the warehouse store and cooked them for my Minute Meals, making a lot of stock from the trim. This week I ate the last of that cooked turkey. I didn't eat it every day, but often enough. It lasted eight months. At only 89¢ per pound, those turkeys saved me a lot of money. This year I expect the price to be higher. The chicken went from 99¢ to $1.09 recently.
Whatever the name, and whatever the motivation behind them, it is a great source of satisfaction when I put a Minute Meal week behind me, the freezer stocked to the hinges with newly made meals to enjoy over the next few, or many, months.
Wednesday 2012.7.18
Minute Meals Week
I started the week with only five Minute Meals in the freezer. I eat them most days for lunch and dinner. Two of the Meals were the last of the turkey I cooked back in November when the warehouse store stocked fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving. I put a video, Turkey Day, on YouTube, showing how I deboned, cooked, and portioned those turkeys for my Minute Meals.
On Monday I drove to the warehouse store and bought two legs of lamb at about 5 pounds each, 20 pounds of chicken, and a 10-pound pork loin. I also purchased basil to make pesto. The lamb was prepped for Pesto Lamb and roasted yesterday. The chicken was deboned and roasted on Monday. All the trim went into a stock pot with onion, celery, and carrots for chicken stock. That was portioned into single cups and frozen. The stock will be used for soup this winter. The pork loin was cut into chops and also roasted on Tuesday. While the lamb was roasting I finished the chicken stock, skimming off the solidified fat that accumulated as the stock chilled overnight in the refrigerator. I melted the stock and poured it into individual 1-cup containers and froze them. Today I popped the frozen stock out of their containers and put them in ziplock bags for freezer storage, putting 14 cups of stock up for winter soups.
I put 42 individual servings of chicken in the freezer, along with 37 portions of lamb and 42 portions of pork loin. (The reason why 20 pounds of chicken yielded the same portions as 10 pounds of pork loin is that the chicken had bones and skin, from which I made the stock.)
Vegetables are easy. I buy large bags of frozen vegetables and portion them into single servings, sealing the veggies in little plastic bags before storing in the freezer. No cooking needed until meal time. Frozen vegetables are typically blanched, partially cooked, before being frozen. Mashed potatoes are more of a challenge. I buy the 20-pound bag at the warehouse store, then peel, chop, and boil them all before pushing them through a potato ricer to make mashed potatoes. It makes a lot.
As I mention on the Minute Meals page, preparing all that meat is a lot of work, but I only do it two or three times per year. Most of the cooking I do during the year is for this web site, testing recipes, making adjustments, and writing final recipes, with photographs and a video. Last week I made fortune cookies during five of the days until I solved the problems with the method of preparation.
A number of people have written to me about my Minute Meals, adopting the method for themselves. Besides the convenience, the nutrition is an advantage. I never ate better.
One final note: The YouTube video views have been low for the past two weeks. I'm going to assume everyone is watching the Tour de France instead. I am.
Sunday 2012.7.15
Fortune Cookies Revisited
I made the fortune cookies a few more times this week, experimenting with the plastic stencil I cut for the purpose and with different recipe formulas. The stencil worked perfectly. The formula for the batter isn't as important as the thickness of the batter on the baking sheet. A thin layer of batter yields a crisp cookie. I knew I had it correct when I accidentally dropped one of the cookies after it had cooled. It hit the floor and shattered like fine glass.
The success sent me to the local builders' supply warehouse store. It is within walking distance; so I enjoyed a nice stroll in the sunshine. I bought a small sheet of Lexan polycarbonate plastic, 0.050 inch (1.27mm) thick to make a second stencil for testing. You're familiar with polycarbonate if you wear eyeglasses. It's the stuff used to make the lenses. It is shatter resistant, lightweight, and supposedly 250 times stronger than glass.
The material is not easy to cut, but with my Dremel I was able to carve a hole and sand it to the diameter I needed for the cookies. It worked well the first time. When I used it again after the baking sheet had been in the oven, and was therefore hot, the polycarbonate sheet curled up like a potato chip. It cooled flat, though. The plastic that ended up working best was cut from a divider that had been in a three-ring loose leaf binder. It curled also, but very little.
I might have mentioned in an earlier blog a fan's email message. He said Alton Brown once described his Good Eats TV show as one third Julia Child, one third Mr. Wizard, and one third Monty Python. The fan described my cooking videos as one third Julia Child, one third wood shop teacher, and one third teddy bear. I like that. In this week's fortune cookie experiments the wood shop teacher part of me came to the fore.
Vanilla Chai Ice Cream
This week's feature recipe found me a little short-handed. On Saturday I make the updates to these web site pages so that everything is ready to upload to my hosting service on Sunday morning. When I looked in the Photos folder for the "Royals" (the best final photograhs of the food), it was empty. I can only guess that I had intended to shoot those photos later, using the ice cream I had put in the freezer, and then forgot. What to do? The ice cream cannister was, thankfully, still in the freezer and heavy cream was in the refrigerator. I could drive down into the city to buy more chai powder and make a fresh batch of ice cream for the photographs. Or I could be lazy.
I chose lazy. It's July. The days are warm. I don't feel like a drive down into the city. I looked at the photos I had and one was good enough to serve as the Royal. I edited it in software and saved a web version in the web site's images folder. Job done, and I can sit and finish enjoying my morning coffee.
I hope those of you with an ice cream maker will try the vanilla chai ice cream. The idea came to me in an epiphany one day while I was driving down to the city to shop at the other warehouse store where they sell chai powder. The ice cream is delicious, and I would gladly make it again, when the days are not quite so warm.
Wednesday 2012.7.11
Hacking Fortune Cookies
What makes fortune cookies crisp? Damned if I know....
I've been experimenting with different formulas for fortune cookies lately. I can make them look beautiful. Great color. Nice shine on the surface. Beautiful shape. But they are chewy, not crisp. What makes them crisp? Only one recipe so far resulted in totally crisp cookies, but the cookies looked ugly—all bubbly and lumpy.
I know using a lot of fat helps. I experienced this when making chocolate chunk cookies with plenty of clarified butter. The cookies were deliciously crisp all the way to the center. Excellent cookies (and the recipe and video will be posted here in coming weeks). But I fear any fat at all in fortune cookies will give the fortune papers grease marks. That wouldn't look good.
From the additional research I did I learned that I might be spreading the batter too thickly. So I will experiment again this afternoon with fortune cookies. I have an offset spatula and maybe the trick is to spread the batter really thin. It's worth a try.
When I first started this web site someone commented that my way of cooking was very narrow, methodical, and procedural. Yes. That is correct. I want to create recipes and videos that yield the same results every time. I have cookbooks with recipes that, obviously, no one ever tested. The results are disastrous. Pie dough, for example, that looks like a pile of crumbs and will not come together into a ball of malleable dough. I think it is shameful for an author to accept money for publishing a book with untested recipes that lead to failure.
Part of the fun when working with those recipes is looking for the problems and solving them on the fly. It's like solving a puzzle. However, for those who are not accomplished cooks, such recipes can only increase their frustration and discouragement. I want people to like cooking, hopefully as much as I do. And therefore I try to create recipes that almost guarantee success.
And Something Amusing
I happened to be on Facebook, looking at the fan page, and suddenly someone with many Facebook friends, many of whom were on line, put out the word to her friends to "Like" my page. The Likes started coming in, fast and furious, only seconds apart. I sat there and watched as the numbers climbed. This week the fan page gained 194 new likes, up from 164. The Likes more than doubled. It was fun to watch.
Addendum:
WOO HOO! I just used a template I made from a small sheet of plastic, the kind of stiff stuff you often see packaging an item for sale in a store. Using the offset spatula, I was able to spread a paper-thin sheet of batter and baked the cookies for about 10 minutes. Perfectly crisp! The trick is to spread very thin batter for crisp fortune cookies. I'll start working on the video tomorrow.
Sunday 2012.7.8
A Good Time Was Had By All
On Wedesday afternoon/evening here in the trailer park (or manufactured home community, as the manager prefers to think of it) we enjoyed another gathering for a potluck dinner, followed by friendly association leading up to the fireworks display at 9:00.
Probably everyone around the world knows that we in the USA celebrate our Independence Day with a fireworks display after dark. It's the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, sort of thing. The fireworks are launched from a public park only a few blocks from where we live. I can sit on my deck and watch the display, but we all gathered up by the park pool to watch the display. It was a perfect setting.
For the potluck dinner I made the Tomato and Mushroom Crostini that I featured here on this web site back in April. Hot dogs and hamburgers were cooked on grills. People brought all sorts of food. One of my friends here in the park came over to my kitchen to bake her cookies because she lives in a small trailer in one of the RV (recreational vehicle) spaces. Her oven is too small and burns foods easily. It made for a fun afternoon as we worked around each other in the kitchen.
I always enjoy meeting my neighbors. One in particular, Elijah, works for a seafood wholesale distributer. It gave me the opportunity to finally ask someone "in the know" if there are any good fish mongers in this town. As I suspected, there is only the one down at the harbor at the other end of the city. I rarely get down there. I was hoping for one nearby.
The interest in fish is because of a recent suggestion from someone who lives in the Bay Area and is originally from Spain. He suggested a seafood dish, fideuà, similar to paella, but made with noodles rather than rice. I had never heard of the dish. It isn't listed in my food encyclopedia nor in my Mediterranian cookbook. Wikipedia has a listing with a good picture.
Fideuà requires good fish stock, and therein lies the problem. The only fish I buy is the steelhead trout at the warehouse store because it's the only farmed fish that has any flavor. All the others are a waste of money. To make good fish stock you need trim—bones, fins, heads, tails, etc. from lots of fish. Keep the trim in the freezer until there is enough to make a stock.
I do make occasional trips down into the city, maybe once every two months. I think I'll need to include a stop at the fish market.
Hopefully there will be more park gatherings in the future. We really do have fun when whe get together to share food and good times. I really like my neighbors. We have a good manager too.
Wednesday 2012.7.4 — The Fourth of July here in the USA
July 1 - First Year Retirement Anniversary
On Sunday I celebrated my one-year anniversary of retirement. I enjoyed one of my homemade pizzas and I opened a bottle of 2007 Syrah. It hardly seems like an entire year since I left my job. My pension is more than adequate for my needs and I love being gainfully unemployed.
A few changes might be worth mentioning. Most people tell me I look more relaxed. My job wasn't stressful; it was boring. Maybe I look relaxed because I now sleep as much as I want to. I rarely use my alarm clock; I wake up naturally. Some mornings I roll out of bed as late as 9:30. And there are other mornings when I wake up at 6:00, feeling refreshed and ready to begin my day. I usually wake up around 8:00. An afternoon nap of 15 to 30 minutes is not unusual. I am also eating better and therefore I feel better.
I mentioned in a blog entry last month that one friend made an astute observation: "You work harder now than you did when you had a job." It's true. I spend a lot of time working on recipes. I might make something five or six times, maybe more, before I'm satisfied with the results. The waste bothers me, but it's unavoidable. I don't like dumping food in the trash. It might not be perfect, but it usually is edible. I do give food to neighbors and friends, but I most often dump disappointments in the trash and start again.
With plenty of free time now, I enjoy a more leisurely pace. I walk or ride my bicycle to the store many times each week. Rather than stocking the cupboards with one shopping trip, I carry a canvas shopping bag and buy only enough to carry home conveniently. I don't need to efficiently do all my shopping in as few trips as possible. The stores are within walking distance; therefore. I rarely drive. I have a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder with 60,000 miles on it. It's nearly 20 years old. It isn't fuel efficient, but I only fill the tank every other month. It might not be the best vehicle for our planet's environment, but I put more miles on my bicycle than on my car. I thus do more for our planet's ecosystem than many people do, especially here in the USA.
I think the aspect of retirement that I enjoy the most is having enough free time, almost enough, to pursue all my interests. I have so many projects in the works. A pen and ink drawing of a sailing ship is nearly done. I have a few home improvement projects in various stages of completion. You'll notice one change in my future videos. There was always a red hose going from the cabinet and up into the sink. That was my old reverse osmosis water filtration system. I installed a new system on Monday and then made a few modifications.
If you're familiar with these water filtration systems, you know they have a waste ratio of 4:1 to 20:1, meaning it will pour four volumes of water down the drain for each volume it filters and stores when the storage tank starts to fill. It supposedly goes up to 20 volumes when the tank is nearly full. As the last stored volume might be only a few tablespoons, 20 volumes won't cause your water bill to skyrocket. Nonetheless, that's precious water going down the drain.
At the local hardware store I bought a "Tee" coupler and two in-line valves, all quick connect, along with some extra 3/8" OD poly tubing. I cut the waste water line, added the Tee and a valve below the Tee. I then attached about 2 feet of tubing to the Tee and I put a valve at the end. Now I can control where the waste water goes. When I am making a video and I don't want an ugly hose going up into my sink, I can send the water down the drain and hide the additional hose inside the cabinet. The rest of the time I can divert the water to a catch basin.
I capture the water in a three-gallon bucket. The water is used for plants, my evaporative cooler (which I use a lot during summer), and sometimes I leave the lid off the tank of the toilet and fill the tank from the bucket after I flush. Toilets use more household water than any other appliance.
So that will give you some idea of how I am using my retirement. I keep busy. A year seems like such a long time, until it's over. Now I am looking forward to my second year of retirement. I anticipate many good things. Hopefully you are having a happy Fourth.
Sunday 2012.7.1
Celebrating 100
No, I'm not 100 years old yet (although my age is closer to the century mark than to the year of my birth—1951). Today I celebrate my 100th recipe on this web site. Of course, if you came here from the home page, you already know that.
Humans like milestones, and I'm no different. That's why they celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, etc. I get a little snooty about them sometimes. I did not observe midnight January 1, 2000 as the beginning of a new millennium. But I was there for midnight January 1, 2001 to celebrate the beginning of the 21st century. I was in the minority, of course, but I knew I was correct and everyone else had been wrong a year earlier. How's that for snooty?
Having written, photographed, and videoed 100 recipes for my web site gives me some sense of accomplishment. I do, occasionally, enjoy spending a little time examining the body of my work. I am not devoid of all pride. On top of my home entertainment system (which is nothing more than an antique oak school desk on which are stacked two columns of audio-video components) I have 19 DVD volumes, all neatly packaged in DVD cases with liners. Every one of my videos is on those DVDs, with a menu system, and each DVD contains five or six videos, depending on length. I printed indexes so that I could find videos by number or title.
One way of celebrating milestones with this web site is by sharing a biscotti recipe. That is the reason why Coconut Pineapple Biscotti is the featured recipe this week. Another milestone comes in the middle of August. It will be the second anniversary of this web site. I created a new recipe, Hazelnut Cranberry Biscotti, to celebrate that anniversary.
I haven't run dry of ideas. Every six months I write up a list of 24 or 25 recipes that are to be my projects for the coming months. There seems to be endless possibilities for experimenting with food. Sometimes I make variations to recipes I find, improving them for my own likes and dislikes (I don't like bitter ingredients, such as arugula). Sometimes I start with a recipe and alter it drastically to come up with an entirely new recipe. My Goose Isabel recipe was inspired by a Rabbit Isabel made by Clarissa Dickson Wright in an episode of the BBC cooking series, Two Fat Ladies. And on more than one occasion I simply started with some raw ingredients and invented my own dish. Tomato and Mushroom Crostini is one of my own creations.
Food has been around longer than humans have. As our intelligence evolved so did our creativity with food, progressing from sustenance to art. One of the highest food arts is pastry. To see pastry elevated to an art form, look at the two pastry textbooks by Bo Friberg. I haven't achieved that level of artistry yet, but I'm working on it.
To see how far cooking has advanced, research some of the really old cookbooks, such as The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May (published in 1685). I also have an ebook copy of Shakespeare's Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook by Francine Segan. She converted some of the really old recipes, many from Robert May, to use in modern kitchens with modern ingredients. I'll be exploring some for possible use on this web site.
100 is a good milestone, but it is dust upon the scales when one considers the possibilities.
One final note:
Today is also the first anniversary of my retirement. I'll blog about that on Wednesday.