Try not to eat TOO much.
And don’t waste that turkey carcass! Instead, make stock:
After carving the turkey, add the carcass (all bones, scraps, skin, etc. — even the gibliets and neck!) to the largest stock pot you’ve got (at least 8 qt) with about 4 carrots cut up, and four ribs of celery (including the green leafy parts), as well as any herbs you’ve got laying around. Add about 2 tsp of whole black peppercorns and a tablespoon of poultry stuffing seasoning, and then fill the pot with water, leaving about 2″ of headroom. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer (covered) for about 3-4 hours. Allow the stock to cool somewhat, then strain it into a container (save the solids — you’re not done with those yet) and put it in the bottom of the fridge to cool more completely (overnight). In the morning, the fat will have risen to the top and solidified. Scrape this off the top. You can discard it, or you can freeze it for use in a roux, salad dressing or the Gravy of Tomorrow. The stock may be gelatinous — that’s a good thing.
What can you do with the stock? Well, you can make a turkey noodle soup (many recipes available on-line), or you can freeze it and save it for recipes that call for chicken stock. I like to pre-measure it into 1/2 cup, 1 cup, and 2 cup quantities and freeze these, so I’ve got ready-to-use amounts available quickly. (Tip: Once the pre-measured amounts have frozen solid, remove them from their containers and put them into a zip-top freezer bag, to save on freezer space.)
About those solids: If you’re willing to do a little dirty work, go through the scraps and pick out all the bones. You’re done with these. What’s left will be a mass of carrots, celery, herbs, and turkey scraps — which happen to make a good food for Fido. If you used onions in your stock, you’ll want to pick those out, too, as those can be toxic to dogs — I find it easier to skip the onions. But once the bones and any onions have been removed, put the remaining mess into a blender or food processor and puree it, adding a little water if necessary to make the job easier. This will get rid of chunks, and also chop up any small bones you may have missed. Refrigerate this for up to a week, or freeze some. It’s a great treat for the dog(s), although I wouldn’t replace more than about a third of their daily intake with this, just to make sure they’re getting good balance.
Enjoy the holiday!
November 22nd, 2007
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Holiday, Food & Cooking |
4 comments
UPDATE: I found it. Behold the power of Google.
Are you eating your lard? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it may just be a healthy alternative:
But now that New York’s restaurant owners are being encouraged to face health facts and stop using hydrogenated oils, what oil should they use instead?
This is where Corby Kummer jumped in with a suggestion: lard.
Mr. Kummer, a senior editor at US magazine The Atlantic Monthly, penned a recent New York Times op-ed piece in which he sang the praises of lard (rendered and clarified pig fat). And if that sounds less than appetising, Mr. Kummer points out that every baker knows that there is no oil that produces a flakier or tastier pie crust. Lard also produces delicious fried chicken and fish.
Obviously, a healthy diet would not include large amounts of pies and fried foods, but lard can be used in any number of ways. And for those who think that “pure lard” means “pure danger,” Mr. Kummer offers this breakdown of lard’s fat profile:
- Lard is 40 percent saturated fat (compared to coconut oil’s 85 percent and palm kernel oil’s 80 percent)
- Lard contains “a very respectable” 45 percent monounsaturated fat (for more on the benefits of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) see the e-alert “Change your diet to avoid Parkinson’s disease” – 21/7/05)
Now, in spite of the MUFA content of lard, the medical mainstream might swoon at the thought of 40 percent saturated fat. After all, saturated fats will kill you, right? They’ll clog your arteries and stop your heart, correct?
Answers: No and No.
In a review of saturated fat studies that appeared last year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the authors (from the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California) noted that many mainstream researchers have narrowly focused on the hypothesis that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol and the risk of coronary artery disease (CAD).
The UC authors write: “The evidence is not strong, and, overall, dietary intervention by lowering saturated fat intake does not lower the incidence of nonfatal CAD; nor does such dietary intervention lower coronary disease or total mortality.”
Elsewhere in their review they state: “The conclusion of an analysis of the history and politics behind the diet-heart hypothesis was that after 50 years of research, there was no evidence that a diet low in saturated fat prolongs life.”
And similar observations have been voiced many times by US physician Dr William Campbell Douglass II. Late last year Dr. Douglass wrote: “Countless studies show that the MORE animal fats people eat, the better their heart health. Need some proof from the real world? The African Masai, North American Eskimos, Japanese, Greeks, Okinawans, and our good friends the French all consume diets that are extremely high (by mainstream American standards) in saturated animal fats. Yet these people enjoy astonishingly low rates of heart disease, hypertension, and coronary events.”
So don’t fear the lard. Or - as Dr. Douglass puts it in his typically direct style: “Eat your animal fats!”
Of course, this shouldn’t be viewed as an invitation to eat lardsicles with a side order of lard at every meal. And as to the last part, the plural of anecdote is not data. But as I’ve been cooking with lard lately (Mexican mole cannot be made properly without it), you can bet your bottom I’ll be passing this along to my soon-to-be-dietitian wife. Anecdotally, at least, I’ve noticed that because animal fats (e.g., lard, butter, and God’s gift to mankind, bacon grease) are more flavorful, I tend to use considerably less of them when cooking than if I were using, say, vegetable oil.
Important note: If you’re going to use lard, as I do, you’re going to have to make it yourself. The stuff you can buy in a tub almost always contains hydrogenated lard, which is Very Bad for you. Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to make. Just ask your butcher or supermarket meat department for their unsmoked, uncured pork scraps — bacon’s no good here — and then put them in a 325 degree oven for about an hour. You’ll get liquid love, and some cracklins, to boot!
August 27th, 2007
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Health, Food & Cooking |
5 comments
Broccoli is even more good for you than your Mom thought:
A compound found in broccoli and related vegetables may have more health-boosting tricks up its sleeves, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
Veggie fans can already point to some cancer-fighting properties of 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM), a chemical produced from the compound indole-3-carbinol when Brassica vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage and kale are chewed and digested. Animal studies have shown that DIM can actually stop the growth of certain cancer cells.
This new study in mice, published online today (Monday, Aug. 20) in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, shows that DIM may help boost the immune system as well.
“We provide clear evidence that DIM is effective in augmenting the immune response for the mice in the study, and we know that the immune system is important in defending the body against infections of many kinds and cancer,” said Leonard Bjeldanes, UC Berkeley professor of toxicology and principal investigator of the study. “This finding bodes well for DIM as a protective agent against major human maladies.”
August 21st, 2007
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Health, Food & Cooking |
one comment
You will need:
- One supermarket rotisserie chicken
- Two stalks of celery, finely chopped
- Two hard-cooked eggs
- One cup mayo (homemade is best, but Hellman’s works in a pinch)
- One lemon (for juice)
- Dry poultry stuffing seasoning (I highly recommend this)
- Ground cayenne pepper (optional)
- Salt and fresh ground pepper
Here’s what you do:
- Separate the drumsticks and wings from the chicken, and set them to the side.
- Take the meat from the breasts and thighs, and set them aside, being careful to remove any bones.
- Remove most, but not all, of the skin from the breast and thigh meat. I’d say leave 1/4 of it, and set the other 3/4 aside.
- Coarsely chop the breast and thigh meat, and measure it into a large mixing bowl. You should wind up with about 3 cups of chopped chicken. If more or less, you’ll need to adjust the other ingredients accordingly.
- By now, you’ve probably worked up quite an appetite. Eat the drumsticks and wings. And if you’re that kind of guy (like I am), eat the skin that you set aside. (Yum! Artery-clogging goodness!) Rinse the bones from the wings and drumsticks, and package them up with the rest of the chicken carcass. Freeze that for making stock at a later date.
- Stir the chopped celery into the bowl with the chicken, along with 1 Tbsp of Poultry seasoning and eight or ten fresh grinds of black pepper.
- Squeeze the juice out of 1/2 of the lemon, and strain out any seeds. Stir the juice into the bowl.
- If you like a little bit of heat, now’s the time to add 1/8 to 1/4 tsp of ground cayenne pepper to the bowl, and stir to combine.
- Now, the “secret ingredient” comes in: Peel the two hard-cooked eggs, and cut them into halves. Salt and eat one of the halves, and finely chop the other three. Stir the chopped egg into the bowl.
- Stir in the mayo, starting with 1/2 cup, and then gradually adding a spoonful at a time until the chicken salad reaches the desired consistency (all a matter of taste — I like a lot of mayo, some people like it drier).
- When the desired consistency is reached, taste for seasoning, and adjust as needed. You’ll probably want to add a pinch or two of salt and a few more grinds of pepper, depending on what you like. You may also decide to add more poultry seasoning if you want a richer flavor.
- Refrigerate overnight to let the flavors meld, and then it’s Sammitch Time!
That’s really all there is to it. If you’re super lazy, you can drain canned chunk chicken and use that instead of the rotisserie stuff, but the salad will be saltier, drier, and not nearly as good.
Oh, and as a side note, I understand that some people like chopped almonds in their chicken salad. I don’t agree with this, but if that’s your thing, go for it. You’d probably want about 1/2 cup for the above recipe. However, there’s never a good reason to put grapes in chicken salad, so don’t do this! Ever!
Enjoy!
June 25th, 2007
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Food & Cooking |
3 comments
1. Add a direct link to your post below the name of the person who tagged you. Include the city/state and country you’re in.
Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Todd (Louisville, Kentucky, United States)
miss kendra (los angeles, california, u.s.a)
Jiggs Casey (Berkeley, CA, USA! USA! USA!)
Tits McGee (New England, USA)
Joe (NE Tennessee, USA)
10K Monkeys (Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA)
Big Stupid Tommy (Athens, Tennessee, USA)
Newscoma (Weakley County, Tennessee, USA)
Russ McBee (Knoxville, Tennessee, USA)
R. Neal/KnoxViews (Blount Co., Tennessee)
SayUncle (Blount Co., Tennessee)
Lean Left (tgirsch) (Memphis, TN, USA)
2. List out your top 5 favorite places to eat at your location. (Not including my house; like Uncle, I cook a lot.)
- Three Little Pigs BBQ: For my money, the best pulled pork in Memphis, and possibly on Earth.
- Tacqueria La Guadalupana: Authentic tacos (no flour or crispy corn tortillas here), the best chips & salsa, and the Pechuga a la Plancha is a personal favorite. You’re not going for atmosphere, though; you’re going for the food.
- The Half Shell: Good, fresh seafood, reasonably priced, including oysters on the half shell for $9 a dozen. Can’t beat it.
- Cafe Toscana: I’ve never had a bad meal there, but the Parmesan-encrusted Tilapia is stellar, and I can’t get past it.
- It’s cliché, but Corky’s: I love their dry ribs, and I can’t find anyone else’s that I like better. Rendezvous sucks, by the way.
3. Tag five others.
Jeff springs to mind, but otherwise, if you feel like it, do it, and if you don’t, dont.
UPDATE: Bond, Another Memphian (albeit a new one) takes the bait.
May 25th, 2007
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I do too have a life, Bloggin, Food & Cooking |
5 comments
The New York Times Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.
April 6th, 2007
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General, Politics, School, Economics, Environment, Writing, Culture, Science, Health, Education, Media, Food & Cooking, Technology, News & Current Events, Math |
5 comments
At the risk of sounding like Gallagher, why do you sauté stuff in a fry pan, and fry stuff in a sauté pan? I’m no professional, but if I need to sauté something, I’m grabbing the “fry pan,” and if I’m pan-frying something, I’m virtually always grabbing the “sauté pan.” And I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.
January 30th, 2007
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Food & Cooking |
7 comments
On Sunday, I prepared an elk roast that my father-in-law had from a hunting trip. It was a big hit, so I figured I’d share the technique (much of it plagiarized shamelessly from Good Eats).
It’s not exactly difficult, but it does require some work, and there are quite a few steps. I’d suggest reading all the way through before trying it, just so you have a feel for what needs to be done. It’s going to sound like a lot more work than it actually is. I’d still rather do this than, say, make a pie from scratch.
You need:
- A roast (which can be any red meat, including elk, but also beef, venison, etc.).
- Aromatic Vegetables (at least celery, onions, and carrots, but I also use green onions, garlic, and shallots)
- Bay leaves (optional)
- Salt (preferably kosher), pepper, and garlic powder
- Flour (for slurry)
- Red wine (1/2 cup to 1 cup)
- Beef stock (2 cups to 1 qt) — the stuff that comes in a cardboard box works great
- Canola or vegetable oil
- A skillet or saute pan large enough for the roast
- A roasting pan large enough for the roast
- A probe thermometer (optional, but exceptionally helpful)
December 26th, 2006
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Food & Cooking |
one comment
I love the “Inspector Montalbano” mystery novels, set in Sicily, by Andrea Camilleri. They’re police procedurals, Italian-style (very little procedure and an unusal emphasis on how to cook seafood), but written in a charming and literary style, even in translation. I just started the latest, Rounding the Mark (written in 2003, but only translated this year), and was struck by the experience one always has in confronting the difference between European and American sensibilities.
The books are fictional, of course, but written by a Sicilian. And keep in mind that this is Italy, where corruption and government instability are a way of life, and Sicily, no less, home of the Mafia. And on the first page of the latest book, Camilleri’s police inspector faces a crisis:
Stinking, treacherous night. Thrashing and turning, twisting and drifting off one minute, jolting awake and then lying back down - and it wasn’t from having scarfed down too much octopus a strascinasali or sardines a beccafico the evening before. . . . It had all started when dark thoughts assailed him after he’d seen a story on the national evening news. When it rains it pours - all’ annigatu, petri di ‘ncoddru - or, “rocks on a drowned man’s back”, as Sicilians call an unrelenting string of bad breaks that drag a poor stiff down. . . . [T]hat news had been like a big rock thrown right at him, at his head, in fact, knocking him out . . . .
Wow. And what could cause so much anguish?
With an air of utter indifference, the anchorwoman had announced, in reference to the police raid of the Diaz School during the G8 meetings in Genoa, that the public procecutor’s office of that city concluded that the two Molotov cocktails found inside the school had been planted there by the policemen themselves, to justify the raid. This finding, continued the anchorwoman, came after the discovery that an officer who claimed to have been the victim of an attempted stabbing by an antiglobalist during the same raid had, in fact, been lying. . . . After hearing this news, Montalbano had sat there in his armchair for a good half-hour, unable to think, shaking with rage and shame, drenched in sweat. . . .
The truth of the matter was that Montalbano’s malaise had set in a while back, when the television had first shown the prime minister strolling up and down the narrow streets of Genoa . . . while his interior minister was adopting security measures more suited for an imminent civil war than for a meeting of heads of state: setting up wire fences . . . soldering shut manholes, sealing the country’s borders, closing certain railroad stations . . . . This was such an excessive display of defense, thought the inspector, that it became a kind of provocation. Then what happened, happened: one of the demonstrators got killed, of course, but perhaps the worst of it was that certain police units had thought it best to fire tear gas at the most peaceable demonstrators . . . . Then came the ugly episode at the Diaz School, which resembled not so much a police operation as a wicked and violent abuse of power with the sole purpose of venting a repressed lust for revenge.
How’s that? One out-of-control dissent-squelching police raid, one incident of planted evidence, and one perjured cop - and this guy’s ready to resign? After that record, on the New York force, all the rest of the cops would have been disciplined for not trying hard enough.
He’s complaining about behavior that is almost negligible beside the standard tactics of US authorities. Welding sewer covers closed is standard procedure wherever the President travels. Snipers on rooftops, machine-pistol-toting guards, dogs, crowd barriers, blockades, warrantless searches, helicopters, and special-weapons units are everyday occurrences whenever anything out of the ordinary goes down anywhere in the country - ordinary to the point that no one notices they’re the very substance of a police state.
Beyond this, there is widespread domestic surveillance, an openly-discussed, deliberate trend toward systematic tactics and infrastructure aimed at prohibiting dissent, and repressive tactics at public events, including confining peaceful citizens to police-barricaded pens, use of horses and other intimidation tactics, and blockading VIP neighborhoods to protect the privileged and squelch protest, such as at the 2003 anti-war demonstrations in New York, and the 2004 political conventions. And these are just the legal tactics.
Planted evidence, perjured testimony, and baseless assaults on dissenters are also standard practice:
Seven months after the mass arrests of over 1,800 protesters at the Republican Convention in New York City last summer, 91 percent of the nearly 1,700 cases that have been concluded have resulted in acquittals or the dismissal of charges. Four hundred cases were dismissed after video recordings made by volunteer observers and others showed that there was no reason for the arrests, the New York Times reported last week. Some of the videos also exposed false testimony by the police.
In the case of Dennis Kyne, arrested on the steps of the New York Public Library last August, police officer Matthew Wohl testified at trial last December that “we picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed. I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”
Wohl’s colorful description was apparently made up. Kyne’s attorney showed the court a videotape showing his client walking down the steps of the library, not being carried and not kicking. The tape in addition showed that Wohl, who also signed complaints against four other protesters arrested at the time, was not present during any of the arrests. The charges against Kyne were immediately dropped. Four months later, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office now says it is reviewing Wohl’s account, but the cop is not expected to face any penalty for his false testimony, which in all likelihood is part of the police department’s modus operandi in cases of mass arrests. . . .
New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) president Donna Lieberman said that videotape evidence had led to the dropping of charges against 227 people arrested at an August 31 demonstration at the World Trade Center site. “The camera is a powerful tool that has enabled us not just to exonerate individuals, but hold police accountable and document serious wrongdoings,” said Lieberman. . . .
As far as New York City’s billionaire Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly are concerned, however, the latest revelations are no cause for embarrassment. Bloomberg told the press that the police “did a spectacular job…We had seven or eight hundred thousand people marching and only a few hundred got arrested.”
In the Italian Diaz School incident mentioned in the book, independent reporters gathering evidence were beaten by the police and then falsely charged with crimes - but this was just one among many more such incidents, mostly in the US. The use of police infiltrators and provocateurs is also commonplace.
And almost nothing gets said about this. It was perfectly OK with the public for the police to arrest thousands of people for no reason at all during the anti-war and anti-GOP convention rallies, refuse to process them for trial as required by law, and then simply release them when they felt like it. It is perfectly OK for citizens to be barricaded into pens they cannot leave - on the public streets! - for hours at a time if the police feel like doing so. And nothing is ever done about the continual harassment, perjury, and railroading that goes on on a daily basis. The police even have names for their own corruption: “blue wall of silence”, referring to the refusal of police to report misbehavior by other police, and “testilying”, meaning extensively perjured testimony to secure a false conviction - and these are openly held up by the police as virtues for other cops to emulate. These things cut at the foundation of our civilization - they are what a decent nation cannot allow itself to abide - but they go unremarked.
And now we are told - fictionally, perhaps - that a police inspector in Italy would resign in protest at finding his fellow officers had submitted false evidence in one or two cases during a political rally. The New York City police committed over a thousand cases of perjury and false evidence during a rally, were caught on videotape, forced to openly admit they had done it, and nothing whatseover was said about it; the officers were caught were never disciplined - you can bet none of them resigned out of shame. When Frank Serpico - an Italian-American cop in New York - testified to the extensive, organized system of payoffs and shakedowns that pervaded the entire NYPD up through the 1970s, the brass ignored him and his life was threatened by other officers. We’re supposed to believe an Italian cop in Italy would object to the same thing (or, at least, that his creator thought he could put that into a contemporary book and get away with it)?
I hope and suspect he would. However bad things are elsewhere, I hope and suspect they’re not this bad. But then why do Americans seem so complacent about behavior that would be shocking elsewhere? How have we come to believe that rampant corruption, falsehood, and oppression are the ordinary way of things while citizens of less self-congratulatory countries refuse to put up with them, or at least still have the clarity to perceive them as wrong? How can one incident of corruption - in a country not unfamiliar with corruption - be shocking, and the daily encroachments we are subject to here be unnoticeable?
Living in a country whose government could not hope to aspire to the level of honesty, rectitude, and transparency of . . . Italy, seems kind of embarrassing. How did we get this way?
September 27th, 2006
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General, Politics, Legal Issues, Culture, Privacy, Books, Food & Cooking |
no comments
For some reason, after getting off to a great start, some of my squash plants are wilting and dying for no apparent reason. Here’s a picture I took today:
(Click for larger image)
Any idea what gives, what I can do to fix it, or failing that, what I can do to prevent it from happening to the other plants? Watering doesn’t seem to help, and I don’t see any obvious signs of pest infestation. Any ideas?
TIA.
June 12th, 2006
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I do too have a life, Food & Cooking |
4 comments
Is it just me or have the Top Chef challenges just gotten more and more ridiculous? They have had to create restaurants in the space of a twenty-four hours, invent desserts for the rubber fetish set, and this week they were given sixteen hours to plan, create and serve a wedding reception for one hundred guests (as an aside, who the hell puts their wedding reception in the hands of people desperate enough to go on a reality show? Though the snippets of the ceremony they showed were lovely.) in sixteen hours with no access to the kinds of specialty shops that such events normally depend upon.
I fully expect their last challenge to be something along the lines of “President Bush is going to host a state dinner for the President of Russia. You need to design and cook a twelve course meal ft for the White House table. The dinner is in six hours. Since we are in San Francisco, and Washington D.C. is a five hour flight, you will have to use only the food that you can find in the kitchen of your Southwest Airlines flight and be prepared to serve the food the moment you step off the plane. the winner will be Top Chef. the loser will go to Guantanamo Bay.”
Just to add insult to injury, the judges sat around and complained that the menu — decided upon before the time parameters were known — was too ambitious and that the people who had to work sixteen straight hours without proper ingredients or supplies didn’t produce the same quality food as they professional caterer. This show seems designed more to create bitchy television than run an actual competition.
April 26th, 2006
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I do too have a life, Culture, Food & Cooking |
3 comments
From the BBC: “Experts Make Flatulence-Free Bean”
A method of creating super-nutritious but flatulence-free beans has been developed by scientists.
But . . . why?!
April 26th, 2006
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General, Culture, Health, Terrorism, Humor, Food & Cooking |
3 comments
Jeanne points us to a good cause:
Bloggers cooking.
No, wait. Don’t leave.
I’ll admit, I’m not much of a cook, and there are two contributions from me in there. But the two things you can count on from my recipes is that they’re easy (as in, any idiot can do that), and picky kids like them.
If you’re in to fancier stuff, there’s plenty of that too.
Personally, I’m buying the book just to find out what Sliced Tomatoes à la Michelle Malkin are. I may not actually make them, mind you, but I’d like to know what they are.
Most importantly, the profits go to one of my favorite charities — Doctors Without Borders.
Doctors Without borders are true heros. They go almost anywhere and help the people in most desperate need of help regardless of the level of risk. You can buy the book here. Please do so. If enough people do, maybe there will be a sequel and we can convince Tgirsch to contribute some of his odder recipes. Like “squash-like muffins”. And even if there is no sequel, you will be helping a wonderful ogranization.
March 30th, 2006
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Books, Food & Cooking |
5 comments
Uncle reminded me about something that’s been bothering me: Why is it that we have the technology to make a device small enough to fit in my pocket that is a phone, organizer, e-mail device, and camera; can successfully deploy a probe into space to collect material samples from a comet and recover said probe; can put a friggin’ man on the moon and return him home safely; but we still lack the technology to grow a decent fucking tomato year-round?
Just asking…
January 18th, 2006
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Food & Cooking |
5 comments
Colbert has been plugging BLTs all week, and I just couldn’t take it any more. BLTs were for dinner tonight. And whether he’s kidding or not, the BLT is a wonderful sandwich that doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Tomorrow’s cardiologists will be thanking me for today’s dinner — I’m helping to pay your bills.
January 18th, 2006
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I do too have a life, Humor, Food & Cooking |
9 comments
I’m going to be visiting my brother and his family in Fort Worth, Texas this weekend. On Saturday night, we’re thinking about leaving the kids with a sitter and going to dinner. My brother’s schedule and budget don’t allow him to get out much, so I was hoping to go someplace nice, even if casual (we’ll probably have jeans and collared shirts and that’s about it).
Any suggestions?
If it helps, he actually lives in Burleson — home of American Idol Kelly Clarkson, hooray. 
January 11th, 2006
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Travel, Food & Cooking |
4 comments
For Christmas, I received two copy’s of Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here For The Food. Given that I only really need one copy, I went to the bookstore to return it, thinking I would exchange it for I’m Just Here For More Food. But on the way there, I started thinking that I’m not much of a baker, and the latter book involves baking, so maybe I should get something else.
And since I love Mexican food but have no knowledge of Mexican cooking, that made me think of one guy: Rick Bayless. I’ve seen him a few times on the food network, and always was intrigued by his passion for the true culture of Mexico (food and beyond), and decided to check out one of his books. After digging around, I settled on Mexico: One Plate At A Time. And wow, am I glad I did.
First impressions are that this book simply rocks. Far more than just a cookbook, it gives you background information, variations, troubleshooting tips, and Q&A sessions. The book has eight pages on guacamole: two pages of background information, four pages of recipes (two) and detailed instructions, and two pages of Q&A. A ton of information is covered, from types of avocados, to minor adjustments based on availability and freshness, to the reasons why certain techniques are used. He also often gives more than one way of reckoning quantities, so that you can adjust for natural size differences. For example, “3 medium-large ripe avocados” are listed as “about 1-1/4 pounds total.”
Tonight, I made the “classic” guacamole described in the book, following the instructions almost to the letter. It was by far and away the best guacamole I’ve ever made (and I’ve made some good ones). My wife concurs. The weight measurement mentioned above was handy, because for me, it only took two avocados to reach that weight. Following the “3 avocado” recommendation would have let to a weak guac.
Without divulging the recipe, which I’m certain would be copyright infringement (even if you can find it here on book page 4), I can give you the tips that I found the most helpful:
January 10th, 2006
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Food & Cooking |
one comment
