cellio | Entries tagged with food: cooking

One of the cats is apparently taunting Dani.

A few months ago, Baldur started going off early in the morning (6ish), meowing in the bedroom. I've been chasing him out and, if it happens a second time, throwing him out and closing the door. This has been happening on a regular basis -- not necessarily every day, but most of them.

Dani left for Origins (gaming con) on Wednesday and returned Sunday. Baldur did not do this even once during those four days. This morning, he was back to normal.

Heh. Baldur is yanking Dani's chain, it appears. I wonder why.

Sunday dinner last night was just three of us; Dani had spent the last several days around a convention full of people, so he bowed out, and the other regulars were busy with various things. So Ralph, Lori, and I sat around chatting about various things, including a fair bit of D&D geeking. (We've decided what to do about polymorph and templates.) Ralph made wonderful steaks on the grill. I've never learned the art of cooking steaks -- I can do good things with roasts, with birds, with stews and soups and chili, but steaks elude me. Ralph has the knack.

Dani did not come home from Origins with many bags of games this year. It was apparently a slow shopping year. :-) He did play some interesting games, but didn't find them for sale.

I spent some of Saturday studying the Torah portion I'm chanting next month. It's a longer portion than I would have bitten off on my own initiative, but it's managable. So far it's going fairly well, and I've internalized a couple more of the trope symbols.

Today while studying with my rabbi we came to the justification in the talmud for all of the Torah and all of the oral law having been given to Moshe at Sinai. (I actually anticipated where the argument was going, and I think my rabbi was pleased that I saw it before we got there.) I had not realized before that according to this argument all of scripture, not just all of torah, was given at Sinai. In other words, that collection includes prophets and writings. That's an idea I'm having trouble with. (Berachot 5a, for those who care.)

Last year I visited my friends Yaakov and Rivka for Purim, and one of their guests brought "vam", a very convincing fake ham made from veal. I would like to make this to spring on some friends, but the person who brought the dish won't share the recipe.

In asking around among people who know much more about cooking than I do, I gather that the solution involves soaking a hunk of meat in brine for a while. I bought a veal roast and cut it into smaller pieces to experiment with. (At $7 or so per pound, I want to keep the trial pieces small enough to be dinner for two.)

We had the first experimental version early last week, and I was disappointed. I'm trying to figure out how to tweak it for experiment number two, which I'd like to try this week.

For the first run, I made a brine out of the following (these amounts are from the recipe; I scaled down): 1C kosher salt, 1/2C brown sugar, 1 gallon stock (I actually used chicken bouillon here), 1T peppercorns, 1/2T allspice berries, 1/2T candied ginger, 1 gallon water. (Recipe attributed to Alton Brown.) I soaked the meat in this for 24 hours in a glass pot (turning a few times), then put it in a casserole, dumped some canned pineapple over it for effect, and baked it (first covered, then uncovered). It had a hint of the saltiness you expect from ham, and it turned slightly pinkish, but I know that much better is possible.

The recipe called for vegetable stock; I didn't have any, hence the bouillon. I can't use bouillon for the real run, though, because all bouillon contains MSG and one of my intended guests is allergic. So I guess I'll have to make a vegetable stock.

The meat came from a kosher butcher (I don't buy non-kosher meat), so it had already been soaked and salted before I began this process.

For the next run, I'm thinking that I should greatly increase the density of the non-water items and/or let it soak for longer. I don't have good instincts here.

Someone suggested using a mix of cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and pepper in the brine. Maybe the cinnamon and cloves would impart the sweetness that was missing from my first trial. (I assume she meant cassia, what's sold as cinnamon in stores.) The person who suggested this mix said that she accidentally brined chicken for too long and it turned pink and tasted like ham, but she didn't record quantities.

Other ideas would be very welcome.

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

My congregation is having a pot-luck dinner tonight after earlier-than-usual Shabbat services. The arrangements are clearly family-oriented, not single-person-oriented, but that's ok. But I just realized that I misread the announcement in one important way: I parsed it as "bring a main dish for your family, and also a side dish to share". A more careful reading implies that they meant "bring both to share". (It's too late to call and ask.) Which means the salmon filet sitting at home isn't going to cut it.

So I ran out to the store near where I work. They don't have salmon today, so I picked up different fish (orange roughy) and will improvise something -- probably broiling it with Italian spices of various sorts and then cutting it up into small pieces and making a sort of stew with it and tomato sauce. I think that'll work, and will also survive being not exactly hot by the time I carry it 20 minutes through the cold and get it onto the table. (Aside: I can avoid more potential kashrut problems with other people's dishes by being parve/dairy instead of meat tonight. The pasta salad I made last night is parve, so so far I'm both meat-free and dairy-free.)

And did you notice the part about dinner after Shabbat services? No way this is still going to be warm. Salmon works cold; I don't know how well this will work.

Now when I walk in I'm sure someone will offer to take my dish and heat it up. That happened last time. Note that this will be after Shabbat has started, so I will decline. I'm not sure yet if I'll cooperate if someone else at my table decides to take it away and heat it up. I'll probably permit that on the theory that it's not my Shabbat violation.

The typical person coming to this dinner will cook something at home, drive it over to the synagogue right away (around 6pm), and then heat it up in the oven right before we eat. Sometimes it's hard to be observant in a mostly-non-observant congregation.

Next time I'll probably punt on the dinner.

Thursday when we were at my parents' house they showed us their new George Foreman grill. It looks like it would be really handy! It's sloped so the grease automatically rolls out the front (they provide a drip pan), and it's double-sided (like a waffle iron) so the food cooks from both sides at the same time. They said it cooks chicken breasts (on the bone) in 5-7 minutes. Five to seven minutes! I could do a lot with that. I don't often get tool envy, but I think I've got it this time.

Since I wasn't home for the first two nights of Chanukah, the latkes had to wait until last night. Dani walked into the kitchen while I was grating potatoes and said "You know, latkes are not biblically mandated". Yeah, sure, whatever; I like latkes, and once a year I try to make them. This was my best batch so far, and Dani even complimented me on them.

"Andromeda" has been very spotty this season. About this weekend's show I can say only this: stupid, stupid plot (don't they have security protocols in the far future?), but very pretty incidental music. It sounded similar to some of the music in "Earth: Final Conflict"; I wonder if it's the same musicians. (It's the same studio, so it could be.)

Tomorrow night we are getting together for "D&D Smackdown" -- no role-playing, no consequences, just combat. It's a way of helping both the players and the GM explore options in a safe environment. It should be fun. (Ralph did this once before, but Dani and I couldn't make it.)

According to the nutrition information printed on the sides of most food packages, a generic person should consume 2000 calories, 50 grams of protein, 60 grams of fat, and 320 grams of carbs per day. I wonder if those are actually reasonable target proportions; I don't really know anything about stuff like this. (Lately I seem to be coming in a little high on protein, somewhat low on carbs (but not anything like Atkins levels), and more or less right on fat.)

I never had a functional broiler until we bought our current house, so I'm weak on technique there. (We must have had one when I was growing up, but if so it's something I never learned about from my mother.) A few nights ago I decided to broil some fish. I like fish and have always baked it, but I like the taste of broiled when I've had it elsewhere so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I had a package of frozen fillets (just fish -- not breaded or otherwise augmented). I thawed it and followed the instructions on the package, which recommended broiling for 10-15 minutes. At 10 minutes it was nowhere near done; at 15 minutes it was still nowhere near done (I couldn't cut the piece in half with a spatula). At about 22 minutes I took it out; the edges were thoroughly done and the inside bottom was close to raw.

I wonder what I did wrong. I used the high setting and put the rack at the highest position that doesn't cause meat to set off the smoke detector (which is the second-highest setting available). The broiler itself works just fine for meat. Maybe I should have used the higher setting; it's probably the fat in meat that causes the smoke problem.

Oh well. Baked fish is tasty too.

Among the plastic utensils in my kitchen, black ones are for meat and white ones are for milk.

Mattar paneer is made with cheese (hence milk). It is also made with tumeric.

That spatula has now been through several scrubbings and a dishwasher run. It's still bright yellow. I wonder what I did wrong; this is not the first time I've made mattar paneer since kashering the kitchen, but it's the first time the stain wouldn't wash out.

I'm not upset about the spatula (which I'll probably replace); I'm just a little befuddled by the whole experience.

I frequently hear the advice that when baking, you need to follow directions exactly. While ordinary cooking does fine with the "handful of that, pile of that, a little of this" approach, baking is different. Or so I'm told by people who probably know what they're talking about.

So why does every cookie recipe contain a phrase such as "drop on cookie sheets 2 inches apart"? 2 inches on center, or 2 inches edge to edge? Dammit, it matters.

There, I feel better now.

(I always interpret it as edge to edge, and then usually end up spending more time baking than I needed to because I can fit fewer cookies on a sheet.)

I tried a new recipe for "vegetable paella" tonight. (We will set aside the question of whether that is an oxymoron.) It was pretty yummy; I think it's a keeper. Ralph, it's in that vegetarian cookbook you gave me, in care you're curious. Next time I will decrease the salt.

The rice did not get as yellow as I would have liked. I used enough saffron and I bled the color out of it appropriately; I think there was just too much other liquid in there, or something. I'll have to think about how to modify it.

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Screams of the Vegetables (I just had to, after that dinner)

Monica

short takes

culinary quest

family visit

bah.

short takes

culinary disappointment

fun with spices

precision

paella

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