APRIL 2015
Wednesday 2015.04.29
Time to Re-Write My Pain de Mie Recipe
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my next "bread day" would be for pain de mie. If you're not familiar with the bread, it is baked inside of a closed metal box, called a Pullman pan, rather than the open-top bread pans typically used. The enclosure keeps the dough contained, forcing the bread to bake to a more dense crumb (the white part inside). It also reduces the thickness and color of the crust. The finished loaf has a very squared looked rather than the rounded "muffin top" of most loaves of bread.
Bread day was Monday. I took my Pullman pan out of storage and prepped it for the dough. The dough rose faster than it should have, which was okay, but it made me wonder if the formula was right. Maybe the day was warmer than when I had made the bread in the past.
For the final rise I place the dough inside the pan and let it rise until it was near the top, then I slid the cover onto the pan and placed it in the oven.
After the initial baking time (25 minutes) the cover is removed and the bread goes into the oven for another 10 minutes to finish the baking. The cover was difficult to remove. The bread had risen too much, applying too much pressure to the cover. I eventually removed the lid and returned the loaf to the oven.
After the bread cooled, I refrigerated it. This is usually a bad idea. Refrigeration makes bread go stale up to six times faster. It has something to do with the starches in the bread. However, I only use my bread for toast, so refrigeration is good. And it reduces the probability of mold before I use all the bread. (Actually, half the loaf went into the freezer, further protecting it from mold.)
If you're not familiar with pullman pans, you can find them on Amazon.
Sunday 2015.04.26
Basics
I like to tell people that good food often starts with good basics. Boneless chicken pieces? Yes, you can buy them, but if you have the time and the enthusiasm, buy whole chickens and fillet off the meat you want. Then save all the trim (bones, skin, wing tips, etc.) and freeze it. When you have two or tree bundles of frozen trim, buy some carrots, celery, and an onion (known as a mirepoix) and make Chicken Stock.
Yes, it's a lot of work, and thus I say "If you have the enthusiasm…" I enjoy the creative process of cooking. I also enjoy the possibilities of good homemade chicken stock in the freezer. I eat a lot of Chicken Soup when I have the stock. I like mine with vegetables — sort of a combination of chicken noodle soup and chicken vegetable soup.
Of course, the stock has many uses. Lately I've been getting into sauces. Velouté sauce, one of the mother sauces, is made by thickening stock with roux (butter and flour). From there you use the velouté to make a finished sauce, such as mushroom sauce.
This past week I needed to make some room in my freezer. It was too full. So I pulled out my bags of frozen chicken trim and made stock. It was more than a little work, but I was able to store 23 cups of homemade chicken stock. I freeze it in one-cup containers, pop them out of the containers, and put them in a ziplock bag for storage. It takes up less room, and my stock is pre-measured for whatever recipe I might be cooking.
I didn't recover much room, but I can eat the stock, not the trim. So yesterday evening my dinner was two bowls of chicken soup. Delicious! The stock won't last long. Every week I'll have chicken soup at least once, if not two or three times. All my stock will probably be gone in two months.
Besides chicken soup, you can use stock to make Butternut Squash Soup, Mulligatawny Soup, Mushroom Risotto — all kinds of delicious foods. Is it any wonder that I buy whole chickens? I really enjoy having homemade chicken stock in my freezer.
As for all the chicken meat, most of that is roasted and portioned for my Minute Meals. Yes, I enjoy the creative process of cooking, but not every day.
Wednesday 2015.04.22
Seasoning
In this case, not salt and pepper. Seasoning as in cast iron cookware.
I was in Costco during the weekend and saw a Lodge cast iron stove top grill pan that caught my attention. I liked it because it is small enough to use one burner on the stove. I have a cast iron grill/griddle that takes up half the stove. It is designed to be heated over two burners. It looks good in a video and it does an excellent job on steaks and chops, especially if you like the looks of bar marks on the meat.
Cast iron requires "seasoning," which is a way of putting a tough coating on the iron to protect it from rusting and to reduce food sticking. The Lodge pan was "pre-seasoned," but with only the bare minimum of coating on the surface. A well-seasoned pan is black. The new pan was dark gray.
I first learned about seasoning cast iron from an article I read in Cook's Illustrated magazine. There is some good science behind it, which I won't explain in detail.
This best information, should you want to do some research, comes from sherylcanter.com. She is credited with having come up with the science that demonstrates the value of flaxseed oil over all other edible oils when seasoning cast iron. In oil there is something called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), of which flaxseed oil is 57%. By comparison, canola oil is 10% ALA. It's that ALA stuff that polymerizes, crosslinking radicals (or something like them) into the hard coating that protects the cast iron pan and gives it a decent non-stick cooking surface.
I looked at my new grill and knew it could be better, much better. I had flax oil in the refrigerator; so there was only one way to proceed. Go forward. After six cycles of very thin coatings of flax oil followed by baking at 500°F for an hour in the oven my grill pan is jet black and shiny. It almost looks wet.
I hadn't used the pan yet, but I have two USDA Prime beef tenderloin steaks in the freezer. One of them will get grilled on this new pan. The other will be used to make Steak Diane, which requires a different shaped pan, a skillet, to capture the juices for a reduction sauce.
I like cast iron. There is something permanent about it. Many cooks describe cast iron cookware as heirloom items to be passed down from generation to generation. I will admit to not using my cast iron as much as I should. There is an advantage to nonstick cookware when it comes to cooking and cleaning. I'm still experimenting. How well would PAM nonstick cooking spray work? Only one way to find out… It actually works quite well.
There is a trick to getting good bar marks on meat when using such a pan. Place the meat on grill and then leave it alone. The more you move it around, the more you obscure the bar marks. Flip it only once.
When the pan cooled, I placed it over the sink and filled it with some water to soak. That is another advantage to good seasoning on a cast iron pan. The protective coating keeps the water away from the iron, preventing rust. To test this, I left water in the pan overnight. The following morning there was no rust. The pan cleaned up well. I gave it a light coat of flax oil, heated it over a burner for a while to polymerize the coating, let it cool, and now it's ready to store away until I can use it again. I like this new pan.
Sunday 2015.04.19
Routine
More than a year ago, in January of 2014, I blogged about my laundry. I do not have a washer and drier in this mobile home. I had been using the park's laundry room. Back then, I brought laundered clothes home one day and saw that the trousers were dirtier than before I washed them. I set up a new routine.
My washing machine is a 5-gallon bucket, and it works very well. During an evening, I fill it with warm water, add some laundry detergent, some clothing, and let them soak overnight. The following morning I agitate them a short while, put them through several rinses, and then hang them to dry on a line over my bathtub.
Drying is the issue, and that is what made me think about writing about laundry again. On Wednesday I saw a weather report that said mild Santa Ana conditions would develop over Southern California. Santa Anas are winds that blow from off the desert toward the ocean. The air is warm and especially dry. It is not unusual for the humidity to drop to below 15%. That is ideal for drying clothes. Where I live the temperature on Thursday reached nearly 85°F with humidity at 13% by 2:00 in the afternoon. (Down in the city they were reporting humidity at 8%.) My clothes were already dry and put away by noon.
There are two advantages. My clothes are so clean. I really like the feel of them. And, I am saving money. Washing isn't expensive. Each washing machine now takes $2.00 and the driers are a quarter per 10 minutes. They usually require 3 quarters to dry a full load. At under $3.00 per load, the cost is not burdensome. But I like the fact that I can do it myself, and do a better job. That might be why I like to cook, or build my own computers.
Doing it myself brings up a third advantage, something I've been doing since I was a teenager, or at least very young. I like being resourceful and self-supporting. I like the idea that I can devise a method to do something and, by doing so, free myself from dependence on something or someone else. In this case, I no longer need the laundry room. This past week, on Wednesday, I stepped into the laundry room for the first time in more than a year, just to see how it looked. Nothing had changed. It felt good, though, knowing I no longer needed it.
As just one example of my resourcefulness, one of my early issues of doing cooking videos was having shirts to wear. All my shirts are like those available in most stores — shades of blue, gray, the occasional red or green. Even the plaids are mostly red. I learned how to tailor when I was doing theatre in college. It's a skill I kept up on. Most of the shirts I wear in my videos were made by me. I call them my "show shirts."
Try to find a wide color variety in any store. And, yes, I tailor all my own show shirts. Then came the aprons. They're more of a gimmick, but they work well in cooking videos. If I could learn to make my own shoes I'd be a happy man.
Computers Ain't Misbehaving
I consider it a good week when I don't need to remove a side panel from one of my computers to jiggle something to get things to work properly. I never liked SATA cables. They don't stay in place well. They cause most of my problems. This week, however, both computers worked rather well. I even put the bottom cover back onto my keyboard.
Wednesday 2015.04.15
The Day Goes Well
I love it when a day goes so well. Monday I did the second of my two videos about velouté sauces. I made three — one for beef, Sauce Bourguignonne; one for game meat such as rabbit, Sauce Chasseur or "hunter's sauce;" and Sauce aux Champaignons or mushroom sauce, which is good on fish or vegetables. All three sauces came out delicious, perfect for their application. All the sauces used Espagnole Sauce, a brown sauce, made with beef stock thickened with brown roux. It is one of the "mother sauces."
The hunter's sauce had a bold flavor, which paired well with the lamb chops I bought (because the store didn't have rabbit). For the Bourguignonne I bought some rather expensive "USDA prime" beef tenderloin steaks. I grilled one steak and two lamb chops. For the mushroom sauce I sautéed Brussels sprouts until very tender and browned. Everything was delicious, which was partly because I was hungry. I didn't eat anything until 3:00 in the afternoon, when I was done shooting the video.
As always, I was exhausted afterward, but I felt the day was well worth the effort. I doubt people will be very interested in the sauces when I put the videos on YouTube. That's okay. The videos will be there for those who might want to explore the subject in videos.
Even better, I was under pressure to finish on time because the Paris-Roubaix cycling race would be broadcast on the sports channel at 4:00. I really enjoy watching the cycling races. I was not only done in plenty of time, I had all the dishes washed and put away. I could really relax and watch the race. For those who might not be familiar, the race is famous for its many segments over cobblestone roads. Not only is it a race to finish first, it's a race to survive. The cobbles wreak havoc on those expensive bicycles. Lots of flat tires.
On Tuesday I shot the first of the Minute Meals videos. I received some useful advice not only from the person up in Menlo Park, but also from friends and fans of the web site. Thanks guys. The suggestions really are helpful. Now I am feeling confident I can complete the 100 minutes of engaging content to fulfill the course requirement.
This Old Computer
The saga continues. Surprisingly, there are followers of this blog, some of whom are rooting for me to someday solve my computer problems. The latest is the keyboard. It started an intermittent failure this past week. A couple of the arrow keys occasionally refused to work. It must be a problem somewhere in the wiring. If I jiggle things around a little, it starts working again. So, the keyboard, a Microsoft Natural ergonomic keyboard (old, but I still love it) sits on the desk with the bottom removed. It's working, but for how much longer?
One fan says his computer boots in the time it takes him to stir his coffee. I believe it. My Microsoft Surface Pro 3 does the same. This computer boots in decent time, but the other one takes 10 minutes to boot. The first thing I do in the morning, before I do anything else, is turn it on. Then I start my coffee, get dressed, think about my day, and if all goes well, I can check my email after my coffee is ready.
And one other thing: Now I remember why I stopped using the Kensington trackball pointing device. I really like the styling. I like the configurable buttons. The ball moves like a cork floating in water — it's almost effortless. But the configuration isn't kind to my carpal tunnel syndrome. I'm still trying to figure out a setup. Maybe if I assembled something to keep it slanting downward on one side…
Sunday 2015.04.12
I'm Glad I Ain't Stoopid
Once again, this is about the computer, or, more accurately, an external component. I've had a 5.1 sound system that I've been keeping working with, literally, tape for about a year. Wednesday was the end of it. The tape fell off and, tried as I might, I couldn't get it working again. I gave up. It's about six years old, so I got my money's worth out of it. However, the day wasn't a total loss. I cobbled together some wire, a small amplifier, and a few stereo connectors and assembled a system that isn't 5.1, but stereo. It works, and that's good enough. I have the two things I most want: Speakers when I want sound in the room and headphones when I'm watching a movie. It's actually a rather good setup. I'm pleased with myself. The sub-woofer doesn't work, but I'm not much of a bass person anyway.
Relearning My Web Site
And speaking of feeling a little stupid, this is the first week in several months I've had to learn how to maintain my web site again. The recipes I featured recently were already here, filed and uploaded to cover reference links I had placed on Curious.com videos. After monetizing my videos on YouTube and seeing them perform satisfactorily, I started migrating back to YouTube. Everything was here. I merely had to change a few links.
Now that I am creating new recipes and videos, I needed to pull out my crib sheet to remember how to maintain the files. It seems odd to me that my site has swelled to well more than 500 HTML pages. Yesterday morning it took more than twice as long to add the updates, compared to when I used to work through the standard routine every Saturday. I could perform all the updates in 20 minutes. Yesterday it took nearly an hour.
Bread Day
Yesterday, besides being web site update day, was bread day again. I finally used up the last of the buttermilk bread I'd made. That recipe isn't on the web site yet. I still need to edit the video and write the recipe. Yesterday I made my tried-and-true standard white bread recipe, based on Julia Child's Best White Bread recipe. As I use bread only for toast, hers is the best recipe for my needs. I liked the buttermilk bread. It was delicious. But Child's recipe is a little simpler.
I really need to make Pain de Mie again. With the days getting longer and warmer, I'm starting to think about sandwiches. Pain de mie, a dense bread baked inside a Pullman pan, makes excellent sandwich bread. Look for Pullman pans on Amazon.
You'll see the pan is an enclosed metal box. That achieves two outcomes. It keeps the bread from rising too much, thus making a dense loaf that is suitable for sandwiches (and French toast). And it holds in moisture, keeping the loaf from developing a crust. In fact, pain de mie is French and it literally means crumb bread, as in bread that is all crumb (the white part inside) and no crust. There is a slight crust, but far less than in a standard loaf baked in an open pan.
The bread isn't as dense as a bagel, but it has more density than the standard loaf of white bread sold in the stores here. For many uses the edges are trimmed off and only the white crumb is used.
One of my favorite uses for pain de mie bread is warm French toast topped with fresh strawberries and whipped cream.
And, Finally, Shakespeare.
Yesterday I finished reading the third and last of the Henry the 6th plays. Onward to Henry the 8th.
Wednesday 2015.04.08
Limping, Limping, Limping…
Not me. My other computer. On Sunday I mentioned my resignation to finally do a fresh install on that computer, trying to limp it along long enough to see a release of Windows 10 before I commit to building new computers. I hadn't taken one issue into consideration — the CD/DVD drive. It works, but not very well. There is nothing wrong with the drive. I switched it between computers and it works well on this computer (the one on which I am writing this blog). It doesn't matter which OS I'm using either, XP or Windows 7. There is some communication problem between the motherboard and the drive that a new cable doesn't fix. It's in the motherboard, maybe the BIOS. I can start loading a program from a CD and it might stall when 30% of the program is loaded. Everything else works well.
What's the story with Antec cases? They were my favorite for building a computer inside. Both my computers are in Antec cases. However, when I looked at their best cases, none of them used the quick-install things for inserting components. Did they go back to using all screws again? I like the quick-install things because sometimes I swap components between computers if I'm trying to trace down a problem.
Thermaltake, however, builds some super cases. I can do without all the colored lights glowing from all the fans, but they aren't a deal-breaker. Their cases feature some really huge fans that are supposed to run almost silently. That has been a problem with the small 5-inch fans that are traditional in many cases. The fans are small; therefore, to move enough air for cooling the fans need to run at a higher speed. The faster they run, the more noise they make. Big fans move more air at slower speeds. Ergo, less noise. I'd buy Antec if they built what I wanted.
Challenged
I had my telephone conversation with someone at Curious.com about the lesson set/course they want me to video. They like my Minute Meals, but would prefer a different name. The ladies up that way (they're in Menlo Park, California) objected to the word "Man." Menlo Park is not far from San Francisco (a famously politically correct city that supposedly hates to be called "The City"); so the influence is understandable.
For that matter, I suggested we do away with "Lazy" as well because "Lazy Man" refers to me. I'm the Lazy Man. I don't take myself too seriously. Lazy might seem negative; so I suggested Minute Meals. (I was thinking the name was close to Minute Man, but don't tell the ladies in Menlo Park, who, come to think of it, might also object to being called ladies. "We're womyn." I think they should start a referendum to change the city's name to Mynlo Park — just a thought. I don't care who I piss off. If I lost half my fans, I'd still have one.)
The challenge, however, is in the content. I have a Lazy Man Meals video on YouTube. It's about 18 minutes long. It pretty well covers everything, at least all the basics. How do I stretch 18 minutes of content into 100 minutes? They want ten lessons of at least ten minutes each. We batted ideas back and forth for maybe half an hour.
My problem is that I don't even want to start unless I see at least a full 100 minutes of engaging content. Motivating myself to begin this project is going to be a challenge.
The 10 (or so) videos on sauces, however, are going well. I've finished four already. Number five is partially done. I just need to buy some steaks. Maybe tomorrow. I want to make a few brown sauces, suitable for beef, and that will complete the topic on velouté-based sauces. Then on to reduction sauces — and more steaks. I don't eat steaks and the beef tenderloin steaks at Costco are expensive. Maybe I can cut them up into little pieces and incorporate them into my Minute Man Meals.
Meanwhile, with a set of videos on sauces underway and a set of videos on Minute Meals still in planning, I haven't done any recipe videos. There are plenty still in the vault that will keep me uploading for several weeks yet. However, I'm feeling the need to cook something original. Maybe another kind of ravioli. I'd like to do something I can garnish with a tomato purée based sauce made with some heavy cream. The pink on white would look good. Plenty of presentation value. I just need to come up with an idea for the filling. Something with shrimp?
Sunday 2015.04.05
Happy Easter
Today is Easter Sunday. I don't have any special plans, but the holiday always brings back a few good memories. One year, many years ago when I was a child, my grandmother made a cake using a mold shaped like a lamb. I still remember that cake. And every Easter the Greeks passed around loaves of bread (we called it Greek bread) made with a whole egg, still in the shell and dyed a rich dark read, laced into the center of the loaf. They were as beautiful to look at as they were delicious to eat. I need to look into that idea.
They're There For a Reason
On Friday I shot the first of two videos on velouté-based sauces. For those who might not be familiar, a velouté is one of the mother sauces. It is simply some type of stock (fish, chicken, beef, vegetable) thickened with a roux (flour and clarified butter). Start with a mother sauce and add other ingredients to make a complex finished sauce. I used fish stock to make Bercy Sauce and chicken stock to make Sauce Suprême. The Bercy is made by adding minced shallot, dry white wine, butter, and chopped parsley. The Suprême is made with mushrooms, cream, and butter.
The information comes from my Culinary Institute of America textbook. They're in there for a reason. Besides being delicious, they seemed like the perfect sauce to go with the fish and chicken breast I put them on — the perfect pairing of flavors.
Not Much Else Happening, Literally
This has been a quiet week. I continue to read Shakespeare plays while following along with the Arkangel recordings on CDs borrowed from the local library. I just started the first of the three Henry VI plays.
Meanwhile, I am becoming increasingly more impatient with my other computer. It's chugging away at something while it's also trying to boot up. Firefox is almost impossible to load. Everything takes longer. If I thought taking the covers off and giving it a major reprogramming with a large hammer would help, I'd do it. I feel like it sometimes.
I decided it is finally time to reload that computer. Part of the process is already done. Back when Microsoft announced they would soon stop supporting Windows XP, I ordered two new hard disk drives and loaded each of them with a fresh install of XP. I got all the available updates and then I removed and stored the drives at the back of a shelf in my home office. Reloading a computer normally takes me two days because of all the software I use. Maybe with XP already loaded, I can complete the task in one day. That's today's project.
Wednesday 2015.04.01
More Toys
I'm not one of the people who are easily given to impulse buying. The candy and gum near the checkout registers at the grocery store don't affect me. When it comes to buying something, I take my time to think about it — maybe years. Sometimes I tell myself to wait until it goes on sale. If it eventually does, at a good price reduction, I'll ask myself if I still want it. Sometimes the answer is no.
This month Costco received a supply of Bose noise cancelling headphones. I love headphones anyway. Several years ago I tried them at a friend's house. They are frequent travelers and the engine noise on jets annoys them. They bought Bose headphones, which they wear on long flights. They let me try them on and it was amazing how much noise they cancel out.
Sitting here in my home office I usually have two computers running at the same time. They each have more than half a dozen fans in them. If it's a warm day the window fan is running. I'm accustomed to the constant drone of so many fans. Then add the noise of the dog barking all day next door and I begin to approach the threshold of my tolerance.
So, after several years, I decided to buy the headphones. Wow. Turn them on, put them on, and it's like suddenly going deaf. All the fan noise, literally all of it, is gone. When the dog barks I can barely hear it. It sounds as if the dog is a long way away rather than just outside my windows.
I've been using the headphones to listen to the Arkangel audio dramatizations of Shakespeare's plays. I finished Cymbeline yesterday. It would have been a struggle to read because it isn't as engaging a story as the more popular plays. However, having the dramatizations to listen to while reading the text made the experience enjoyable, and having such good quality sound with the headphones on was even more satisfying. I'll start The Merchant of Venice later today.
The headphones also have an in-line microphone in the cord, with a little controller. It can be used with either the Samsung Galaxy or some of the iPhones, none of which I have. I think the controller is for adjusting volume and engaging mute. I'm waiting for one friend to replace his lost/stolen/destroyed (he didn't give details) phone. He breaks phones almost as often as I break eggs. But he has an inquisitive mind and he would enjoy my using him to experiment to see whether or not the Bose would work with my old BlackBerry smart phone. I know the sound works okay on my end because I can check my voice mail messages. I don't know if he will hear me, and how good the sound might be.
More toys are on their way. Having used the Microsoft Surface 3 for a while, I begin to see some possibilities. The computer/tablet lacks a CD/DVD drive, and therefore there is no easy way to load a program from a disk. It's not impossible, but it would require copying all the installation files to an empty thumb drive and then plugging that into the computer's USB port. For small utilities it isn't a problem, but I'm wondering if I should load Norton Antivirus onto it. I go on line a lot, but mostly to read the news. Should I? Maybe? Maybe not?
I ordered an external CD/DVD drive last week, along with a powered USB hub because the Surface has only one USB port. If that is occupied by the CD/DVD drive, there is nowhere to plug in a thumb drive. Ergo, get a hub. And some reviews reported that the power provided by the USB port isn't enough to run the drive. Ego, a "powered" hub.
I Got My Wish
Curious didn't approve my proposal for a lesson set about Sauces. Now I can go forward with my plan to test a series on YouTube. Instead, they asked me to consider another idea they would prefer. It's a good idea, but I can't see how I can stretch it into ten lessons of 10 to 12 minutes each. One 20-minute video would cover everything. However, the idea isn't dead yet.