Entries tagged with food: cooking

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short takes

Words that are often misused #1: "periodic". To be meaningful, this word needs to be accompanied by some indication of the period. "Daily" is "periodic", but probably not what is meant in a recipe's direction to "stir periodically". :-)

Two facts that seem to be at odds with each other: (1) a lot of medieval Islamic recipes call for vinegar; and (2) Islam forbids the consumption of wine.

Our baron (who lives in a castle) shared one way to get your castle past the zoning board. I wonder how that's going to work out for the owners in the end, now that the neighbors have noticed. (Who would have thought you could build a castle on the sly in a populated area?)

Two interesting posts that showed up on my reading list within a few hours of each other, serendipitously: whom do you friend? (from

cahwyguy) and who owns the conversation? (from

jducoeur). Both have lots of comments that I haven't yet digested.

Words that are often misused #2: "rebate". A rebate is a refund of monies paid. If you give money to someone who didn't pay any (or as much as is being given out), the correct word is "gift" (or "grant", if you want to be more governmental about it). Just sayin'.

Query: can anyone reading this point me to a neutral high-level discussion of economics, that I can consume in an hour, that explains how merely pushing small amounts of money into the economy helps fend off a recession? What does the mere act of one-time spending accomplish, and does it matter whether it's splurge-buying or spending you would have done anyway? My knowledge of macro-economics is, as you can tell, a little on the spotty side. I don't care enough to read a tome, but I'd like to read something shorter, particularly if it doesn't come with an agenda. And yes, I realize that the rhetoric and the real reasons behind the stimulus package probably differ; I'm exploring the stated reason here.

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random bits

My congregation recently started selling gift cards for the local grocery chain. You know the deal: you pay face value for the card and they get a cut -- everyone wins. (Well, except the taxpayers who cover the amount the store gets to deduct as a charitable contribution.) I figured the congregation must get 1%, maybe 2% out of this deal. I learned today that they get 5%. I didn't think grocery stores even had 5% margins... Sure, their prices are probably inflated to cover this, the discounts for the affinity card, and the "fuel perks" (10 cents a gallon off one fill-up for each $50 spent; I assume they share that cost with the gas chain), but their prices still don't seem that high compared to other local options. I guess they're gambling on people not getting the affinity cards, not using up the gift cards, and not cashing in the fuel perks.

Locals who rent: where are the good landlords, properties, or listings for Squirrel Hill and Shadyside? I know what shows up in Google, but if you've got recommendations or anti-recommendations, please send 'em along. I'm trying to help out a friend of a friend who'll be moving here soon (for one year), but I've been out of the renting scene for quite a while now.

As long as I'm doing the "dear lazyweb" thing... this one's for me: can you tell me anything interesting about synagogues in Newton Center, MA, within walking distance of Hebrew College? Names, addresses, and affiliations I've got, and some of them have web sites, but reports from people who've actually visited any of them are more interesting.

Cheese update, for those who asked: I took the remaining paneer, sliced it, and fried it in butter. This was quite yummy, and the cheese held up just fine (did not get gooey and melty). The thinnest slice I tried was about a quarter inch; somewhere between that and half an inch seemed to give the best performance.

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food: cooking

fun with cheese!

magid recently linked to this recipe for making paneer, an Indian cheese. I like mattar paneer and generally use soft mozzerella for the cheese, so I decided to try making my own.

( here there be pictures... )

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mmm, lamb chops

Tonight I tried this recipe for rosemary lamb chops (from Cooking for Engineers). The name is a bit misleading; there is rosemary in it, but also orange juice, pineapple juice, onion, thyme, garlic, and pepper. Marinate, then sear, then use some of the (set-aside) marinade to deglaze the pan and make a sauce. Yummy!

One thing I like about Cooking for Engineers is that the author explains things but doesn't talk down to you while doing so. So, for instance, he described how you'd know that the sauce is thick enough, rather than assuming you'd know or saying something vague like "until it thickens".

I went looking for lamb recipes in the first place because my broiler usually sets off the smoke detector. (Dunno why.) Searing the lamb emitted a few chirps too even though I was running the vent fan. Oh well. The meat was not overdone, however.

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food (condiments, fish, fruit soup)

Dani forwarded me this interesting article about mustard and ketchup. It's long, but I found it worth reading. Basic question: why are there entire sections in the grocery store for mustard, but there are still only a few players for ketchup? (I'm not much of a ketchup person myself; I generally find it boring. For french fries or burgers or hot dogs, my condiment of choice is brown mustard. I've also been known to dip fries in barbeque sauce.)

When I last went fish shopping the person at the counter informed me that they no longer carry grouper (a versatile fish that I like to cook with), but that what they label as "basa" (not bass) is the same fish. Google tells me that both names are used for the same fish, so I guess this means they've changed their source and the sources used different labelling. My basa fillets were a little thinner than the grouper fillets I used to get, but otherwise it seems to be indistinguishable.

This was good: take basa fillets, put in a lightly-oiled casserole (I used olive oil) and drizzle oil on top, coat with "Auntie Arwen's fish blend" (assorted herbs, garlic, onion, I think paprika), bake at 425 for about 10 minutes, then add thinly-sliced havarti cheese on top and bake just until melted.

I went surfing for a recipe for cold cherry soup (not being satisfied with the one I know) and found something that mostly worked. (Dani has previously described a cherry soup with sour cream; the key word seems to be "Hungarian".) Boil water, pitted cherries, and sugar for a while until the cherries soften; in a bowl beat cream (if the cherries are sweet) or sour cream (if not) with a little flour, stir in some of the hot mixture, and then pour everything into the pot and simmer (don't boil). Chill well before serving. The flour's job, I presume, is to thicken the broth, but even though I beat it with the cream for a while, I got little globs of flour in the resulting soup. Maybe I used too much flour? (I had non-sour cherries, so I used cream. The recipe didn't specify the type of cream; I used heavy and will probably try light next time.)

Tonight after Shabbat Dani wanted to go to Longhorn, a steak house at the waterfront (don't know if that's a chain or a local instance). They have two non-shellfish fish dishes, both salmon. The grilled salmon was very good, and the steamed broccoli was tasty and not overcooked. The seasoned fries were reasonable, though I failed to procure brown mustard for them and had to settle for yellow. I didn't see anything vegetarian on the menu, but I like salmon so I'd definitely go there again.

But next time we'll sit at a table, not a booth. This isn't the first restaurant I've been to lately where the seats in the booths are really far from the table. In some (like Gullifty's), if I sit all the way back my feet don't touch the floor. So I end up having to sit on the front of the seat, with no back support at all. I'm short, but I don't think I'm farther out than one standard deviation. Are restaurants now planning booth layouts around very large people? (Ironically, the very large people I've had occasion to observe seem to prefer tables with chairs.)

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random bits

My fourth-season Blake's 7 DVDs came last week. In this season they have a new-to-them ship with a computer named Slave. I don't think I had previously noticed that the computer addresses Avon as "master" but the others as "sir". I wonder if Avon threatened it. :-)

Sunday night we joined ralphmelton (birthday boy), lorimelton, and mrpeck at John Harvard's in Monroeville. Dani and I ordered a beer sampler to explore the options; we got the smaller one, which is five five-ounce glasses (your choice of beers). They deliver the sampler on a placemat with a key (so your glasses go on specific places on the mat); I hadn't noticed that the list was ordered from less to more hoppy/bitter until they lined ours up on one side of the sheet. :-)

Tonight's dinner was almost a case of "grandfather's axe": I followed the recipe on the can of coconut milk, except that I used chicken instead of shrimp and broccoli instead of asparagus and onions instead of bell peppers, but it's still the recipe on the side of the can. (Verdict for next time: needs spices; try ginger.)

Dani and I talked about making reservations for an upcoming SCA event (war practice) tonight and we both realized that we're going entirely on inertia. Neither of us is actually drawn to this particular event this year; we're just running on auto-pilot. So we might not do that. Don't know yet. (It was actually Dani who pointed this out; I've become less active in the SCA and am being careful not to influence him in that direction, but he's feeling "eh" about this one on his own. We were just at an event a couple weeks ago, and that seems to have satisfied us both for the nonce.)

At the shabbaton I talked with someone who's currently taking private Hebrew lessons, and she suggested that we share a lesson slot and pair up as partners. I think she's more advanced than I am and I pointed this out, and she said that's fine. We'll probably start this after the ulpan. (Different teacher. She doesn't like the one I'm currently taking classes from and she says her tutor is much better.) This should be quite helpful, and if not, I can drop out and she can go back to what she was doing.

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a few links

I had not heard of the meme of fabricating large-scale implementations of food until a coworker posted his version of Hostess cupcakes.

nancylebov posted two anecdotes about music gone wrong. The first is probably true and the second probably isn't, but I found both to be very funny. And as for the first, well, it couldn't happen to a better genre. :-)

Dani sent me a link to a bad citizen in Java-land. Yeah, don't program like that. :-)

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food: cooking

culinary experiment: Welsh rarebit

Tonight we attended a pot-luck dinner with the theme "I like cooking with wine; sometimes I even put it in the food" (which has to be one of the best themes we've had in a while). The host clarified that any alcohol would do; she was not restricting it to wine. So we decided to make Welsh rarebit. (Or rabbit, as Dani and half the web calls it.) I had never heard of this dish until Dani mentioned it some years ago, and neither of us has made it before -- but the pot-lucks are in part about experimenting with new things, so off we went. I compared about a dozen recipes found via Google and chose one that seemed to be typical of the lot. There was one outlier, a baked dish, but otherwise the consensus is that Welsh rarebit is a cheese sauce, made with spices and either beer or milk, poured over bread (perhaps toasted, perhaps not).

All of those recipes called for a double boiler. I was speculating about combinations of pans we have that might be pressed into service; a double boiler is just a pot full of boiling water holding a smaller pot with your food, after all. I speculated that this style of indirect heat was to keep the cheese from burning. Dani pointed out that the problem with cooking directly over low heat (you'd need low heat to prevent burning) is that the heat is concentrated in the center of the pan -- but we have a pan that's very good at distributing heat, so maybe I could cook directly in that. That seemed like a good idea.

That was the only deviation I made from the recipe. Other than that I followed it meticulously -- more meticulously than I normally would for regular cooking (as opposed to baking), actually. I even measured the spices.

In high-level form, the recipe is: melt butter, mix in flour, stir until it thickens; add spices (dry mustard, cayenne, paprika) and Worchestershire sauce and stir until blended; add beer and stir constantly until thickened; add cheese and stir occasionally until melted; lightly beat eggs and mix in (first adding some of the cheese to the eggs, I assume to prevent quick-scrambling the eggs).

After the cheese had been cooking for a while it was fairly smooth but not exactly liquid; when I scoped out a spoonful, for instance, it formed a lump rather than pourable sauce. After several minutes of it not changing state further, I proceeded with the egg step. It was hard to get a smooth mixture with the eggs and the small bit of sauce; when I then poured all that back into the pan it was even harder to blend. I wasn't sure whether to leave the pan on the heat while trying to blend it, but I did. Eventually I ended up with something that was mostly blended, except there was some clearish liquid separating out. (Butter? Some chemical subset of the cheese? Not egg.)

It tasted pretty good over toasted French bread, but the consistency was a little too far toward the lumpy side. I'm left wondering whether the double boiler plays a role beyond heat distribution or if I did something else wrong. Maybe some day I'll try it with the double boiler and see what happens.

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planning congregational celebrations

Friday night after services I found myself in a conversation with two people who are involved in the planning of some upcoming special events (for the congregation's 60th birthday). They were talking about a recent meeting where people were advocating hiring expensive bands, expensive caterers, etc -- you know, to make it a nice party that people would pay a lot to come to. I said this is why I never go to those sorts of fancy-schmacy events; if I'm being asked to pony up $75 or $100 for dinner, well first, that's a lot of money, and second, if it's a fundraiser I want the vast majority of that money to go to the cause in question, not to the providers of expensive services. (I also grant that I may be in a minority here.)

One of the people said that well, we'll solicit donations to cover some of those costs, and I pointed out that they could be looking for non-monetary donations that would produce a lot of bang for the (proverbial) buck. The conversation went something like this: ( Read more... )

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food: cooking

cookware

When Dani was in Toronto a few weeks ago, his sister was showing off a pan she'd just gotten. It was a non-stick pan that really was non-stick (and no coating); he watched her heat it up, pour in pancake batter, and make pancakes effortlessly. The magic word, apparently, is "titanium".

We have some pans that are getting old and dinged up and, well, less non-stick than they used to be, so we looked into this. We found two brands that are available in the US, ScanPan ("Scan" stands for "Scandinavian", apparently; I had visions of flatbed scanners when I heard the name) and Anolon. (My sister-in-law's pan was called "Magic Pan", which we couldn't find.) After looking the two choices (and their spec sheets) over, we bought one representative of each line to experiment with.

I tried the pancake experiment in the ScanPan and it didn't work, but maybe I didn't have the heat level set right? (I almost never make pancakes.) All further experiments with both pans involved at least trace amounts of fat in the pan, but that's ok -- from what I tasted of the failed pancakes, pancakes without any butter are kind of bland. I probably wouldn't add fat if cooking meat, but I designated both pans as dairy 'cause that's where I had the greater need. Eventually maybe I'll have a report on cooking meat in one of these.

Both pans heated pretty evenly; I benchmarked with grilled cheese sandwiches, fried eggs, and pancakes. The Anolon did a slightly better job of heating all the way to the edges. But both of them did much better than most of my current skillets, which I sometimes have to move around on the burners to cause even heating.

Both pans clean up reasonably easily, at least now when they're new. The Anolon seems to be slightly better in this regard.

Both pans have comfortable, heat-resistant handles. Both claim to be oven-safe, but I haven't tried that experiment.

The Anolon pan is rather heavy -- not cast-iron weight to be sure, but my 10" saute pan weighs over six pounds. This doesn't bother me much, though if I were doing a lot of cooking that involves lifting and shaking the pan I might care more.

Anolon is less expensive than ScanPan by about two-thirds, on average.

For reasons I can't quite identify, I find the Anolon pan to be a little more pleasant to cook in. It has also picked up no scuff marks so far; the ScanPan, on the other hand, has a couple of scratches even though I've only used plastic utensils and safe sponges in it. ScanPan's FAQ says that scratches don't impede performance, but...

So all things considered, it seems clear that Anolon is the winner for us.

By the way, both pans came with the warning to not use non-stick sprays lest we degrade the pan's performance. The implication was that this is a long-term effect, not just that that particular food won't cook as well. I wonder what the issue there is.

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interviewed by shalmestere

( Pittsburgh, SCA persona, religious community, music group, cooking )

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interviewed by sekhmets_song

[Ah, good. My home network connection is happier than it was last night when I tried to post this...]

( daily tasks, cooking, romance, nosy questions, cats )

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interviewed by mrpeck

( Judaism, travel, D&D, life changes, cooking )

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food: cooking

food fun

The Worship Committee decided to hold a congregational Shabbat dinner on December 31 (ending early enough not to interfere with parties). We decided to strike a balance between cost and "luck of the draw" by serving a main course and having people bring sides. (The main course will be fish, to avoid the meat/dairy problems that would otherwise result.) I asked the person at the synagogue who usually arranges for catering to look into this.

(Time passes.)

Her: It's a holiday; we can't find anyone. Do you think you could get a few volunteers from the committee to cook the main dish? (The clear implication was that she feared this would be too much work.)

What I thought: Cook one dish for probably under 100 people? Sure, I can do that myself standing on one foot! (But won't, because kitchen accidents are bad.)

What I said: I think we can arrange that.

SCA feast experience comes to the rescue again. :-)

(I am not actually going to do it myself, because it's good to involve other people in things like this. My co-chair and I will do it together.)

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random bits (TV, fish, work)

That was cute. The TV show Jack and Bobby is (mostly) set in present-day US. Wednesday's episode was set on election night 2004 and included a scene referring to the outcome. Obviously they had two versions of that scene prepared; I assume they were smart enough to have three. I wonder how much lead time they needed. It's network TV, not syndication, so I'm guessing they had until about 30 seconds before that scene aired to choose.

Grouper is quickly becoming my favorite fish to cook with. (But where do they get these names? :-) ) When baking fish there's a fairly small window in which the fish is cooked all the way through but not over-cooked. This window seems to be wider with this particular fish. I don't know why, but I'm not complaining. (It's also a fairly sturdy fish without strong flavor, meaning you can do just about anything to it.)

Tomorrow my company is having its annual retreat, so I won't be online. Usually they have these on some mid-week day; this year it's a Friday and after the time change, so I'll have to leave early due to Shabbat. Fortunately, it's in a location that's not hard to drive to and from. (There's one site we've used in the past for which my reaction would be to not go unless I could ride with someone willing to leave early.)

(Shabbat before 5:00, all of a sudden, feels weird. I'll get used to it, of course; I always do.)

Our company plans to grow pretty substantially over the coming year, so I assume a major theme of the retreat will be growth and change. We've got a lot of good people, so I think we'll mostly come through this growth fine, but there are landmines we have to watch out for, mostly (based on past experience) in the areas of communication, general management, and (avoiding) disenfranchising people.

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election-day quickies

There were a lot of people at the polls this morning, but the folks in charge were running things very efficiently so I was in and out in about 10 minutes. The building where I vote actually serves four voting districts; this was the first time they split them out into multiple rooms, I assume for crowd control. The campaigners outside were reasonably well-behaved too, and down in numbers from the past. Only one person tried to push paper into my hands. There was one person from MoveOn there, but I didn't interact with her so I don't know what she wanted.

Tonight we are going to an election-night party. Not that I think we'll know the results tonight or even tomorrow, but hanging out with friends and eating political food is more fun than staying home. (I'm not sure what constitutes "political food" this year. I failed to look up the recipe for mudslides in time to procure ingredients.)

Sunday lorimelton and ralphmelton fed me a new delicacy. Take Nutter Butter cookies and dip in white chocolate. (They then added two tiny chocolate chips for eyes -- making a ghost.) Yum! I can feel the arteries hardening as I eat them, of course; I guess it's good that they only gave me two to take home, and that I'm probably too lazy to make them myself. But...wow.

A friend sent me this article about Shabbat-compliant kitchen appliances. It's an interesting (quick) read.

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food: cooking

food

To steal a phrase from

mamadeb, I am parallel-processing woman tonight.

Tonight I made:
- honey chicken for tomorrow night
- barbeque chicken for Shabbat
- gefilte fish
- "pineapple" kugel (except I didn't have pineapple so I used mandarins instead), recipe via

cahwyguy
- three honey cakes
- two dozen hard-boiled eggs (don't need 'em until Yom Kippur break-fast, but as long as I was cooking anyway...)
- tonight's dinner (baked fish and roasted corn)

Not bad for two hours' work. (Well, plus baking time at the end, but I didn't have to participate.)

I made stewed veggies Sunday, and I'll make salads at the last minute. I might roast some veggies for Shabbat; today's visit to the farmer's market resulted in some good options there. And I have fruit, of course, including the obligatory apples and honey.

Yup, I think I'm just about ready culinarily.

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food: cooking

broadening my culinary horizons

Tonight the butcher had a sign advertising fresh bison. From a species point of view bison is kosher, but you rarely find it at all, let alone slaughtered according to the laws of kashrut. I've never tasted bison, so I was curious.

I decided to have the bison and some beef concurrently, to more directly compare the tastes. Also, the bison was $14 per pound, I didn't even know if we would like it, and I wanted to hedge. So I bought one bison steak and some beef steak of comparable thickness (so I could cook them together), and we each had half of each.

Verdict: tastes like ch--... no, actually, it's similar to beef, but we both found it to be more tender and more flavorful. It did not have that gamey taste that I vaguely remember venison having back when I ate that. I would definitely enjoy eating this again, though I will shell out $14 per pound only very infrequently. Judging from availability trends, though, that's not a problem. :-)

I don't know how much of the tenderness was due to its bison-ness and how much to the cut. (It was a shoulder steak, for what that's worth. Doesn't mean anything to me.)

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Shabbat, latkes, fund-raising, Sunday dinner

This was a low-key Shabbat for me, because Dani went off to an SCA event on Saturday but I didn't. After the hustle and bustle of travelling last weekend, it was a pleasant change. Didn't get very far on the torah portion I'm learning, but that's ok as there's time yet. (I need to remember to check one bit of weird pronunciation with Dani. I've never seen a kametz on a nun sofit; I assume it behaves the same way as on a chaf or chet.)

The SCA event was originally advertised as an event about children, Christmas, and shopping. The first two I don't do and the last I don't do on Shabbat, so I started off inclined against. And, of course, the event charged the corporate tax, which is a point against. A very deserving friend was being elevated to the peerage, which I wanted to see, but ultimately I decided that the combination of event activities, high price ($15+), and Shabbat complications argued against. (I wasn't willing to miss Shabbat services for a third event this fall, and stuff was happening before we would have gotten there.) I regret missing the elevation but I don't regret missing the event.

This afternoon I helped cook latkes for my synagogue's ("first annual") latke sale. That was fun, though I wasn't paying enough attention to repetitive motion early enough so one wrist is a little sore. I noticed it early enough that things should be fine tomorrow, though. And I learned a useful technique: form the patties by taking a slotted spoon, scooping up potato mixture, and squeezing with your other hand to send the excess moisture out through the slots while forming a spoon-shaped patty. That's much easier than pressing 'em between your hands, which is what I've done in the past.

I asked the coordinator if this fund-raiser was effective, and she said she wasn't sure yet. It replaces, in part, the annual "Jewish Food Festival", which I feel was way too much effort for too little money. And some board members fixated on it too much, and hounded other board members for not volunteering tons of time and effort to make it work. I remember one board meeting where I almost said, "Look, you're planning on tons of work to bring in $X. We have Y members. Here's $10, more than my share. You can keep the change but you have to stop pestering me." But I didn't, and we were finally able to kill it.

So this year we're doing a latke sale that probably won't raise that much money, but it's also not as much work. And they were able to graft a raffle onto it for basically no cost, so that might end up making a difference. We'll see.

There seems to be this mentality that working on fund-raising events is inherently fun and good, so even if they don't produce a lot of money you should do it. I take a more businesslike approach: if you aren't going to make a reasonable amount of money from it, you shouldn't abuse your volunteers, whose time is valuable. I would have been happy to pay an extra $10 a year in dues to never hear from the food festival again. This year I was willing to spend a few hours making latkes, but if I learn that it was basically a wash, I might not be willing to do so next year.

No one explained this aspect of the Jewish community to me, and I find it a little peculiar. When I was a kid involved in various organizations that needed to raise money, we did our best to optimize the payoff:effort ratio. I don't see that happening in my synagogue, and I get the impression it doesn't happen in others either.

Sunday dinner was fun. ralphmelton passed around a new game he picked up, My Life With Master, which looks like it could be neat. It's not a genre I'm generally fond of -- Victorian horror -- but it's almost pure role-playing, which has a lot of appeal. I'm looking forward to reading the rules. (He's written about it in his journal.)

Dessert tonight was a yummy concoction involving gingerbread cake, peaches, cranberries, whipped cream, and probably other stuff. Very pretty to look at (it was in layers in a colorless glass dish) and quite tasty.

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food: cooking

culinary near-miss

I wanted to make banana bread last night using the bread machine. I've never made banana bread before (with or without a machine). I got out the book of recipes only to find that the only banana-bread recipe is for a "quick bread". I've never made quick breads, because the manual contains warnings about them being fragile, about needing to tweak cooking time on the fly, and so forth. That's too much work; I want to dump stuff in the machine and ignore it until it brings forth bread three or four hours later.

So I started comparing quick-bread recipes to regular-bread recipes to figure out the mapping. The big difference, of course, is that quick-breads don't use yeast; they use baking soda instead. There was nothing that existed in both quick and regular forms, but after looking at several recipes I concluded that this was the only major difference. I was concerned that the quick-bread recipe might have too much liquid, but I decided to forge ahead anyway. (I did make one other substitution, water for milk, because I keep my bread machine parve.)

So I used the quick-bread ingredients, without changing quantities, but then instead of the baking soda I used the canonical 2 teaspoons of yeast from the regular recipes. During the first mixing the "dough" looked positively soupy, so I added one more cup of flour and helped the machine stir it in. It still looked soupy, but I decided to leave it alone.

Three hours later the bread looked like bread rather than soggy glop. However, it had overflowed the pan rather thoroughly, creating a mess that I will deal with more thoroughly tonight. Because of this, there was no chance of removing the loaf cleanly from the pan. I ended up using a spatula to carve out the main part. I still didn't know what I would find inside at this point, but I had just given up on presentation.

The interior is bread-like and tastes fine. There was some caked flour in the corners, but otherwise the mix of ingredients seemed to be right. Next time I'll just scale it all down to 75% or so.