MARCH 2013
Sunday 2013.3.31 - Easter Sunday
I Scream for Ice Cream
Well, maybe not for ice cream. Perhaps more so for pizza, but that's another subject.
Ice cream is the subject today because this week I made two kinds of ice cream, Fresh Strawberry Gelato and Boysenberry Ice Cream. Wednesday was the first day of spring, at least for many of us here in the USA (some regions were getting snow). So ice cream seemed an appropriate subject for the second season of my TV show, which will start airing in May.
I had to do some research to determine why gelato is different from ice cream, besides being Italian. Gelato is often made with fresh fruit or juice and might be considered an artisan ice cream, made in small batches with only fresh ingredients. Ice cream, especially here in the USA, is a commercial product, usually made in huge vats, and containing artificial flavors, preservatives, and other chemicals to improve texture. There are good quality ice creams available in the stores, and they are usually expensive. You will also find large containers of cheap artificial ice cream in which pretty near everything in the bucket is synthetic.
That, for me, is the main reason to make ice cream from scratch. Not only does it engender feelings of pride and accomplishment when you serve your guests your very own homemade ice cream ("Yes, I made this myself, but it wasn't all that difficult, really, because I had nothing better to do for two days..."), but you can also control what goes into it.
The fresh strawberry gelato was fun because I was able to work with fresh strawberries. The frozen berries will suffice, but gelato is known for using fresh ingredients. We are just getting into strawberry season here in Southern California and the flavor of fresh strawberries is magnificent. The ice cream has a delicious flavor of fresh strawberries, unlike the pink strawberry-flavored ice cream you usually find in the stores.
For the other ice cream, more in the French vein, I cooked a custard first. Rich in egg yolks and cream, it is an exotic ice cream. You could flavor it with a scraped vanilla bean for a classic French vanilla ice cream, but I decided to employ an old trick to make boysenberry ice cream. Use good quality seedless boysenberry jam. It's important to use seedless, and especially not boysenberry pie filling, because boysenberry seeds are obnoxious little things. I've experimented, and I didn't like the result.
Although I indicated above that ice cream takes a long time to make, it doesn't. Most of the time is waiting for the base to cool, and then churn, and then freeze. The actual hands-on part goes quickly. That was the reason I made two kinds. One preparation provides only enough video to fill about 15 minutes of show time. I need to fill half an hour for a TV show.
You do need an ice cream maker. They are available in many stores and most are inexpensive. Mine cost between $30 and $40 several years ago. The canister needed to be replaced after a few years; otherwise, it still works well. I don't use it often, but when I do it makes excellent ice cream. See my recipe for Chocolate Ice Cream. The two I just made will be uploaded here and to YouTube in coming weeks.
Wednesday 2013.3.27
What's in a Number?
It's odd how important some numbers are. I don't mean as in numerology, although back in the 70s when I had one of those flap card clocks, 11:11 seemed to be the numbers I saw most often. No, I mean a different sort of importance.
It's all related to the TV show. You see, the people at the TV station want my shows to be between 28 and 30 minutes in length. I won't be sent off to Gitmo if I turn in something 27 minutes and 11 seconds long. 28 to 30 simply makes it easier for them because they have stuff to easily fill the gap, however small it might be, between the end of my show and the beginning of the next.
Now, minutes and seconds are related to gigabytes. A few days ago I videoed the Sweet Onion Quiche I mentioned in Sunday's blog. Total gigabytage came in at a measly 7.69. I knew I was in trouble. That wouldn't give me enough time to fill my half hour, even if I dragged my feet a little about selecting in and out points for each clip. I ended up with about 25½ minutes. So I trotted off to the store and bought some vegetables to do a side dish. That added 1.09GB. 8.87 is low, I like to see at least 10, but I had enough to bring the show in at 29:15.
28 minutes is more pressure than 30. I can always do some cutting to get a show down under 30 minutes. I did a butternut squash show, making a purée, risotto, and soup with butternut squash. Total video was 14.7GB. That's whopping! When I put it all together it was over 30 minutes. Snip here, snip there, and it didn't take long to end up at 29:58—the closest I'd ever come to 30 minutes without going over. 28 minutes is impossible when I have less than 8 gigs of video. You can't add something that isn't there.
One person wrote to me to say I should do something about the clock on the wall of my kitchen. During a video the time jumps all over the place. I explained it was because I was 1½ minutes short when assembling that video. I had to set up my camera and shoot several cutaways to fill in the missing time. Not only were the times on the clock way off, but had he been able to read the day and date he would have seen that the cutaways were shot on a different day. (I don't know what to make of the clock on the wall getting more attention than I do. Is the clock really more interesting to watch than me? Maybe I should consider another pastime. Videos showing how to string beads? Snail racing?)
On Sunday, after I uploaded the week's YouTube video (Homemade Applesauce) and my web site updates, I made a shepherd's pie with eggplant. It was a long day. I started at 9:00 in the morning and wasn't done until around 6:00 in the evening. The shepherd's pie didn't take nine hours to prepare—the video did, what with all the shifting of the camera, setting up all the shots, repeating a "take" again and again until I got it right. I am always exhausted after shooting a video.
But the evening was sublime. When I off-loaded the video files onto my computer, I had 12.0GB of video clips. It put a smile on my face and let me relax, knowing I had enough material to fill a half-hour show without needing to shoot anything more. (Finished length was 29:49.) There is always a bit of anxiety as I plug the camera into my computer. Will I have enough? When I do, the day ends well. Sunday did.
Sunday 2013.3.24
Quiche
Not only do real men eat quiche, I've heard from some very real men who really love quiche. I like quiche.
I've made some good quiches—my Smoked Salmon Quiche, the idea for which came to me while I was riding my bicycle to work one morning. And I've eaten some really awful quiches—chicken gizzard custard pie, which wasn't a bad idea; it was ruined by the inclusion of half a cup of dry sherry. Half a cup?!? I went with it, and it was truly disgusting. I made it again, as chicken giblet quiche, with a normal amount of sherry, a tablespoon or two, and it wasn't bad. However, it doesn't rank up with the good quiches I've made and therefore you won't find the recipe in the Recipe Archive.
I found and made another quiche last week. The recipe came from a trade journal. Those are magazines that are sent only to businesses and industries. You won't find them on the magazine rack at your local grocery store or book store. The advertisements in a restaurant trade journal—for five-pound cans or jars (with squirt pumps) of ketchup, or 220-volt steam tables—are clearly aimed for restaurants, not well-equipped fashionable homes.
The daytime maître d' at a local restaurant saves the journals for me. I like them because they often contain recipes created by chefs for their restaurant. Sometimes the recipe feeds 40 and therefore must be scaled down. Most often the opposite is true—the recipe feeds 4 to 6 and professional chefs are expected to scale the recipe up for commercial use.
This brings up a point about commercial recipes, especially among bakers. The upper part, with the list of ingredients, is called the formula. The lower portion with the directions is called the MOP or method of preparation. Some recipes don't include a MOP because pastry chefs are expected to know what to do with the formula, which includes using a calculator to scale a formula up or down for use.
The quiche recipe with which I experimented this past week was from a restaurant in New York City. It featured onions. When I first saw the recipe I grabbed a red pen and started making changes. Canadian bacon was changed to prosciutto. Swiss cheese became Gruyère. And I made my own pie shell rather than use a ready-made shell. Finally, "yellow onions" was lined through and I wrote "sweet onions." Vidalia and Texas Sweets are the ones I know best, but they are usually available only when in season for a month or two each year. Nonetheless, the local grocery store stocks some sweet onions year round (which just happened to be on sale at a reduced price last week).
The pie was incredibly good. It was both sweet and savory. The cheese and prosciutto gave it its savory flavor. Caramelizing the sweet onions, and adding a tablespoon of sugar, provided the sweetness.
As usual, I made a few changes while I was working in front of the camera. The filling didn't look like enough to fill the pie shell; so I added a quarter cup of cream and a fourth egg. And, afterward, I changed the salt in the recipe from "1 teaspoon" to "½ teaspoon." I like less salt. I thought about adding some chopped artichoke hearts, but I decided to save that for a future experiment when I make the quiche again—maybe when the Vidalias are in season.
The recipe and video will be uploaded to this web site and to YouTube in coming weeks. The video will also be part of an episode of my TV show, The Mobile Home Gourmet, on a local station here.
Wednesday 2013.3.20
Entertaining, and…
Sometimes things go really well. I needed to do another TV show for season two. I want to get the entire season submitted before they finish broadcasting season one. They are currently airing episode 6, my Bread Show. I have eight episodes done for season two. So, I'm ahead.
I was also hosting a dinner for a friend. She and I had chosen to watch The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on DVD together. Neither of us had seen it. So, all that was needed was the dinner.
When possible, I like to get two for one, i.e., I want to get a show out of the dinner, as well as feed my guest(s) something special. I chose to do a show on butternut squash. I had already made Butternut Squash Soup, but this time I would do cream of butternut squash soup. That made the task easier because when does soup taste better? The following day.
I peeled and chopped three butternut squashes. Two for soup, one for purée, and I set aside a few pieces to use for risotto. I roasted the squash as I usually do, dressed with olive oil before going into the oven. It took about an hour.
Using the recipe already on this site in the Recipe Archive, I prepared the soup almost the same way. At the end, before adjusting for salt and pepper, I added a cup of heavy cream. It tasted fantastic. I let it cool, refrigerated it, and I was done for the day.
The following day I puréed the squash I'd roasted the previous day. Flavored with a little genuine maple syrup and a little freshly grated nutmeg, it would provide the perfect balance for the spicy kicker I was planning.
The last step was to make the risotto. I diced the pieces of squash I set aside the previous day, heated my stock, sautéed my onions, and then stood at the stove for 25 minutes, stirring the Arborio rice mixture constantly while I added a little stock each time the rice had absorbed nearly all the liquid. That's risotto. If you know risotto, you know that you live with it until it's done.
Then came the little kicker I had planned. I pan fried some chorizo. Risotto is mild, if a little bland. Butternut squash is a little sweet. The soup is smooth and delicate. Something was needed to ramp things up a little. Ergo: the chorizo, which I spooned alongside the risotto so that we could scoop up a little with our fork when eating the risotto. The squash purée was a refresher, to sooth the palate.
Dinner went well. The chorizo was an excellent plan for the risotto. The squash purée balanced the spicy flavor of the chorizo. The soup as a first course was an excellent introduction to three ways to serve butternut squash. My guest said she felt like she was eating a gourmet restaurant meal, not home cooking.
And, of course, I videoed it all for a TV show. When I downloaded the camera's memory to my computer, I had over 12 gigs of video files, enough for a 30-minute show. That's always the worry. Will I have enough? Each episode needs to be between 28 and 30 minutes. Yesterday I edited the show and its finished length was 29 minutes and 58 seconds. You can't get much closer than that.
Sunday 2013.3.17
Wearing of the Green
Actually, green was more than a little appropriate this week. Green as in lawn.
Mobile home living has its issues. I've lived here for 18 years and the ground beneath my home has been safe during that time. Fortunately, unlike Florida, we don't have sink holes that might swallow us up in our sleep. However, gophers can be a problem.
Most mobile homes don't have a foundation like houses do. They rest on metal pillars, which in turn rest on the ground. They are not as precariously supported as that might sound. There are many pillars and my home, like many here in California, is earthquake braced. We don't have major quakes in this part of California. The worst I'd been through was a 5.1. There was very little damage; nonetheless, I knew of one mobile home that was knocked off its pillars. The damage was such that the home needed to be replaced.
Gophers dig tunnels and when they collapse, the ground subsides an inch or two. That might be enough to loosen a pillar and maybe even tip it over. Many years ago, when I was under my home replacing a plumbing connector, I saw that one of the pillars had fallen over. I have a two-ton floor jack. It wasn't too difficult to position the thing beneath a girder and hoist up the home the little amount necessary to put the pillar back in its place. That was at the back of my home.
Last year a gopher started a tunnel system under the front of my home. I got to it early enough to stop the progress. A garden hose down a tunnel, with plenty of water flowing, forced the varmint up another hole. When its head appeared I bashed it with a shovel. That might seem a little harsh, but gophers are like rats. There is no inclination to humanely trap them and relocate them to a better place to live. There were no further signs of digging after that.
Gophers are opportunists. They'll move into a vacant home. This past week there were new signs of tunneling. I tried the garden hose twice. It didn't work. So I bought some Gopher Gassers. They look like little sticks of dynamite. You open a tunnel, light the fuse, insert it down the tunnel, and cover the hole with dirt of sod. Watch for smoke coming up through other holes and block them too. I put three gassers down three different tunnels. Again, there has been no signs of new tunneling during the past few days. (I just checked a moment ago. All is well.)
There is another benefit, at lest temporarily. Gophers will avoid a tunnel system in which there is the stench of rotting dead gophers. So, until nature itself has disposed of the remains properly, I think I'm safe from future residents.
I also bought some "poison peanuts" to put down holes, should that be necessary. So far I haven't needed them.
It will be an ongoing problem. Gophers don't go away permanently. I am on the lookout for a gopher snake. I like them. They are some of the most docile and gentle of snakes. I used to catch them when I saw them, keep them for a few days to show the kids in the neighborhood, then let them loose at the golf course. They want gopher snakes, for obvious reasons. A gopher snake can live underground for many months, feeding on its victims.
So, that is my St. Patrick's Day story. Hopefully you are enjoying your day in green. Top o' the mornin' to yeh.
Wednesday 2013.3.13
Extending My Software Horizons
I'm one of those people who only learns enough to get a task done and then I learn no more.
For example, when I wanted to build this web site I bought a book. I started at chapter 1, doing the exercises, after which I practiced what I learned, using my own ideas for a site. I continued working through the chapters until suddenly I had a complete web site—this one (well, a few embellishments were added later). So, I closed the book.
The same was true when I learned the software to edit my videos, sort of. I have a book, but that's more for reference. Rather than working through chapters in a book, I let a friend give me a few instructions. When I'd learned enough, I stopped learning.
All this comes up because of an issue with my TV shows. All the shows I submitted for season 1 have the same problem: When I stop talking or do something quietly, the volume goes way up on the TV. If nothing is going on, there is an annoying buzz. If I'm tasting food, I sound like a barn full of cows chomping silo corn.
I think the problem was in the way I set the camera. Sometimes my head is up, looking at the camera; sometimes my head is down, looking at the kitchen counter. My microphone is at my chest. When my head is down, I am speaking directly into the microphone and the audio is quite loud. I thought setting the camera to automatic would solve this problem. It does, except when I'm quiet. Then the camera appears to automatically raise the volume. "Normalizing" the volume doesn't work because that just adjusts everything up or down. Soft clips are still quieter than loud clips.
For season 2 I set the camera to manual audio. The volume dials only go up to 10, not 11, but that's okay—7 is good enough. However, that takes me back to a loud voice when I am looking down. (When my friend worked behind the camera, he'd adjust the volume up and down as we went along. With only me operating things, I don't have that luxury.)
So, I started to explore my software again. It turned out that I have really good sound editing software on my computer—a program I didn't even know I had. When I set up my computers' menu systems, I only put in the shortcuts I knew I'd use. All the others went into a menu folder named Junk.
The audio utility allows me to load all my sound clips into it. Using one clip as a reference (my introduction, which I recorded a long time ago and which is therefore always the same), the software will adjust the peaks and valleys, the dynamic range I think it is called, to the reference clip. Voila! The quieter clips are a little louder and the loud clips are a little quieter. It isn't perfect. A hard knock of the bowl on the counter can create a false peak, but there are so few of those, I can fix them manually.
I won't know for sure how well it sounds on TV until the second season begins airing. I've videoed and edited seven shows of the next 15. Tomorrow I'll record show number 8, about butternut squash. I think season 2 begins in late May.
When it comes to cooking, I'm always learning, always doing research. Software? Just give me enough information to get the job done and let me get back into the kitchen.
Sunday 2013.3.10
For many of us here in the USA, Daylight Saving Time begins today. Did you set your clocks? Spring forward.
Filling the Vault Again
I often us the expression "in the vault" to refer to the recipes and videos I put aside for future publication here and on YouTube. It helps to have a few tucked away, just in case I can't complete a cooking project due to other obligations or interruptions.
Case in point: The TV show. Before my first TV show aired on a local channel, I had about ten projects in the vault. Then I saw the first show. Yikes! It looked awful. I felt disheartened, discouraged, demoralized—well, you get the point. I withdrew into a dark corner and wondered what I would tell people who might see the show and ask, "Do the doctors offer any hope for your recovery?" I really looked bad in those shows.
It was several weeks as I struggled with my feelings, worked with the TV station, and examined how I encoded my videos. In the end, it turned out the problem was simply inside my TV. It has an old digital decoder. Although it has a digital tuner and the TV is high def, the decoder can't fully process some video. A sort of rendering is displayed, a best guess, and it looks awful.
During all the down time, as I licked my wounds and tried to recover some dignity, I wrote no recipes, nor did I shoot any new videos. The projects in the vault dwindled from ten to three.
Well, I'm back. By getting a proper signal decoder for my TV I was able to watch my show in all its glory and, if I can toss modesty aside for a moment, my show really does look good, better than most of the shows on that channel, even the ones produced by the station. (A friend told me I am using I really high quality encoder that makes the best use of the 1080p video clips produced by my camera, which is also a high quality professional video camera.)
As of this writing I have seven projects in the vault again. I pushed myself (too hard sometimes, as I discussed in Wednesday's blog), doing up to three projects per week. And oh what projects they were!
The beef tenderloin steaks were a real achievement for me. I hadn't cooked steaks in decades. It surprised me that they turned out so well. I finished the week making cupcakes with a cream cheese filling flavored with chocolate. The challenge of that recipe was making them look good. I first saw the recipe in a magazine (Bon Appetit) and it intrigued me because the ingredients looked promising but the photograph of the cupcakes was awful. They didn't look at all appetizing. I wanted to make them look good. I found a way and the recipe, along with the beef tenderloin recipes will be on this web site and on YouTube in coming weeks.
So, it feels good to be back in the groove. My goal is to get ten projects in the vault again before I take any time off.
Wednesday 2013.3.6
Recent Freebies (sort of)
Some foods I buy for this web site are expensive. I try to be economical, but sometimes an extravagant recipe made with luxury ingredients can be fun. Buying those ingredients are less fun. That's why I like the rewards checks I get from my warehouse store membership and from the credit card offered through them.
For two recipes that will appear on this web site in coming weeks I bought USDA Prime beef tenderloin steaks. Four of them cost me $50. For one of the recipes I also needed Alaska king crab meat. I bought four crab legs for $23. I used a rebate check of about $83, which left about $9. So I bought a 750g package of Italian butter. It cost nearly double the price I pay for a 1.81kg (64 oz.) box of butter, but it was practically free—so why not?
I think that will be the end of my big ticket items for this web site for a while.
On the other hand, WHAT WAS I THINKING??? No, not about the money. The stuff was practically free. Back strain was the issue.
I tried to prepare Beef Tenderloin with Mushroom Sauce and Broccoli with a Mock Béarnaise Sauce all in the same day. Remember, I work alone. I do all my own camera work. Between hiking back and forth, interminably, all day, to erase bad clips and shoot them again, and standing on my feet in front of the camera "acting," my back was burning long before the meat and broccoli went on the heat. The sauces didn't take a horrendously long time to make. It was just all the shooting and re-shooting.
I generally try to begin shooting around 10:00 in the morning and finish the day by 3:30 or 4:00 to have enough daylight left to get my final still photographs, my "royals," before the sun goes down. I always use natural lighting for the royals. (On Sunday most of us in the USA will change to Daylight Saving Time; so that will help.) During a normal shooting day there is a lot of moving the camera around. I shoot from four different positions in and around my kitchen.
A burning back, at least in my case, means I'm in trouble. If I don't do something to release the strain, the strain turns into a sprain, and I'm in bed for four days wishing I'd thought about food and water before crawling into bed. I soldiered on, taking several breaks to lie on the sofa and ease a little pressure off the back. Ultimately, I got through and I lived to walk another day.
The problem is having a TV show. Before the show, time wasn't the essence. 13 minutes? Big deal. 27 minutes? So what? 8 minutes, or 11, or 16, it made no difference. Whatever I ended up with, that's what went on YouTube. Now I need to have a finished show with a length between 28 and 30 minutes. Therefore, if I know one recipe won't come close to filling half an hour, I need to do two. Doing both in the same day might not seem necessary, but it is if you want to show steak on a plate with a side of broccoli, both of them garnished with sauces.
Making the sauces a day in advance isn't always an option. I tried that with a béarnaise. It looked great going into the refrigerator. When I carefully heated it over steaming water the follow day the sauce broke—the butter separated from the egg yolk mixture. There are ways to bring an emulsion back together again, but they are almost as much work as starting over by making a new sauce.
There is one bright point in all of this. The first time I did the steaks I somehow didn't get photographs of the meat on the grill. I felt certain I took those shots, but maybe I pressed the wrong button and erased the photographs. I did, however, video them. By displaying the video at high definition in full screen on my computer, I was able to grab some screen captures and post-process them through Photoshop to make them look like the photographs I needed to complete the recipe PDF. I love my computers (until I build new ones later this year—I might video that process).
Sunday 2013.3.3
Pork Chops
My mother always cooked pork chops thoroughly, and then thoroughly some more, and then some more. I only ever knew them to be tough enough to require a steak knife and a strong set of teeth.
The need to cook pork thoroughly comes from the risk of trichinosis, an infection of parasitic worms common in pigs and rats. If I remember correctly, in the USA there hasn't been an infection of trichinosis from commercially raised pigs for many decades because pig farms are government inspected and regulated. Ten to 15 cases of trichinosis are reported each year, usually by people who raise their own hogs or who eat suspect pork while traveling in other countries.
In 2011 the USDA revised their recommended cooking temperature for all cuts of meat to 145°F (68°C). All ground meat should be cooked to 160°F (71°C). Most of us balance the risk with the flavor. I am willing to increase the risk factor a little for some cuts of meat, such as rack of lamb, to increase my enjoyment of the flavor and tenderness of the meat. I take no risks with chicken or other fowls.
I cooked my pork chops, which were an inch (2.5cm) thick, to an internal temperature between 130 and 135°F (54 to 57°C). Then I transferred them to a platter and covered them with foil to rest. Allowing the meat to rest allows time for the heat to penetrate the meat. It might be very hot at the surface where the meat was browning in the pan, but the middle will be cooler. The resting time allows the heat to migrate to the center. The final temperature of the meat can climb another 5 to 10 degrees. That finished temperature is the goal.
The pork chops were magnificently tender and delicious—the best pork chops I ever ate. I made a bourbon reduction sauce that was finished with fresh chopped mint. Served with cooked sugar snap peas and cold applesauce (the colder the better), the food was excellent. The recipe and video will be uploaded here and to YouTube in coming weeks. The two recipes combines, Pork Chops with Homemade Applesauce, will be episode number four of my TV cooking series next season.
As for the show being available on the Internet, I upload them to YouTube the same as I did all my previous cooking videos.
The mention of the TV show reminds me of the new logo screen I designed for season 2. If you've seen my YouTube videos, you've seen the nighttime picture of the little camper trailer with the table and chair outside, lit by candle light. I use the same drawing of the camper, but I enlarged it a little and put it over a white background. The look is cleaner and brighter, better for TV. With this week's YouTube video, I started using the new logo screen. I hope people like it.