Category: cooking

December 13, 2022 – Better Late Than Never

December 13, 2022 /

I know Thanksgiving is over by a long way but Christmas is coming up and this strategy works no matter whether it is a holiday or not. I am talking about repurposing leftovers.

I find it particularly troublesome when there is leftover stuffing/dressing but the turkey is all gone. So, we need a way to get everything over with at the same time. Here is what I did.

Day Zero: After boning out all of the carcass, it went back into the stock pot. This was really just a waste elimination maneuver. I made turkey stock that a portion became Tortilla soup. But ultimately, it can be used interchangeably with chicken stock throughout the year so the balance went into the freezer.

Day One: It was Thanksgiving dinner again for lunch, we had the Tortilla Soup for dinner.

Day Two: Leftover rolls, cranberry sauce, turkey, stuffing, etc were turned into Thanksgiving sliders. This was a big day for college football so the sliders accompanied a litany of dips and other appetizers. A key note as well, this wasn’t just a reassembly of Thanksgiving but other flavors were added like mustard mixed into the cranberry sauce and a glaze over the whole thing. I chose not to add cheese but something like Havarti would have been appropriate as well.

Day Four: Cleaning up the rest of things, we were out of Turkey so I made a casserole. I bought a rotisserie chicken at the store, used some frozen green beans and mixed some mushroom soup with the beans and chicken. The whole thing was topped with the remaining stuffing and we were done with leftovers.

For Christmas, we are planning a prime rib. Meat is the easiest thing to reuse because as long as it isn’t overly sauced or seasoned, it can simply be thrown into casserole or sandwich or tacos etc. Who knows how much if any leftover we will have, I will try to be more timely if I have as large of a stack as I did with Thanksgiving.

If you are really stuck on things, I find that you can do an internet search like ‘what to do with…’ or ‘recipe ideas using…’ often times use some sort of stimulating results. You may not want to make the suggestions but from the search you can start getting ideas about where you may want to go instead.

End Your Programming Routine: I heard on the radio that Thanksgiving officially expired on Monday after the holiday. I find this to be bunk to be honest. How old is that turkey really? Use your eyes, nose and common sense here but re-cooking things also extend the shelf life. Of course, you could also just pre-portion meals and freeze for later just like you own hungry man.

November 15, 2022 – Plum Wine… Liquid Fire or Liquid Gold?

November 15, 2022 /

It is finally bottling day. The wine has been in the secondary over a year. I think that it has been ready to bottle for six months or so but I have been consumed with other activities.

My first challenge was bottles. I hate dealing with bottle preparation. To top it off, I really didn’t have enough wine bottles as five gallons need two cases of bottles. I had 2/3 of a case (or eight) bottles open. Instead of spending $50 on bottles, I decided to put them in 22oz beer bottles. So this meant cleaning them.

This is a task that I don’t mind doing as much in the summer time, but now the temperature is near freezing. Soaking these bottles in sanitizer and scrubbing them with a bottle brush is drag and it is pretty cold too. I found three bottles that needed some extra attention, so much so that I actually abandoned them and found other bottles to use. They took days of soaking, scrubbing, pouring boiling water and other cleaning chemicals to try and get these clean.

I have two bottle brushes. One does not fit into my bottles and the other does not fan out properly at the bottom. I need to be in the market for a third brush so that this task is not so difficult. The real, real lesson is to not leave bottles dirty. I could have avoided all of this by rinsing them properly before putting them away.

The bottling process is not too bad. It involves a spring-loaded plunger and a gravity syphon. Essentially, while there is pressure on the tip of the plunger, liquid will feed from above until you release the pressure. I try to fill the bottle as full as I can get it because once the bottle dispenser is removed, that volume is replace with air (or headspace). Beer will utilize that oxygen to do it’s bottle carbonation. Wine really doesn’t benefit from any extra oxygen and should be avoided.

Once all the bottles are filled, they can be corked or capped. I write the page number of my brew log on the cap for identification. You can see the color, kind of a reddish-orangish color. Very nice.

When I was originally brewing this, I was planning that this recipe would make three gallons. It turned out to make five. I suspect that because I froze the fruit, most of it remained in the brew, adding volume. Had this actually been three gallons, I think it would have been way out of proportion. I didn’t actually weigh the fruit, I estimated it. To do this again, I would make some modifications, likely less added sugar.

I brewed this on a whim. A mysterious box of plums showed up on my deck one day. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a starting sugar, so I don’t know what the actual alcohol content is. But it is kind of rocket fuel. It has a distinctly plum taste to it but it is not sweet like the Asian wines. I probably need to cold crash it so it stays a little sweet and is not quite so strong. Otherwise, this is an Altf4.co success; found fruit brewed into future enjoyment. This is exactly what I wanted to do with this site.

End Your Programming Routine: Now that this is done, it is time to start turning into brewing beer again. I have four kits and two empty kegs sitting and waiting. I also want to make a decision on apple cider. I am strongly thinking that I will brew that as well. I guess now that the weather has changed, it is a good time to be working in the kitchen.

November 9, 2022 – Will It Juice 2?

November 9, 2022 /

I have long had a fantasy that I would grow apples and juice them when it is time. The apple tree on the property has been in the ground many years before we moved into the house. I had plans to build an apple press, but still never did. So, I made as much applesauce as I could.

I really don’t think this tree yields as much as it should. A typical year is about five, five gallon buckets worth of apples. They have scab and 99% of them have worms. Last year, I didn’t get a single apple. I think my pruning job was too severe. This year, the yard people only pruned 5% of the tree.

I feel like I should get three times that much based on the size of the tree. Nevertheless, the quasi neglected apple tree keeps producing. This year, I got six buckets worth. Not only did we get a good yield, but I also picked up a cider setup. But, you already know that because I used it for grapes already.

Normal cider operation would be a volume production. Not in this house, I have an order to only use the good stuff. This means a lot of extra work. I have to inspect every apple and trim out all the imperfections. Admittedly, partially rotten apples don’t seem very appealing but if I only had a worm in one in five, I probably wouldn’t do things this way.

For this reason, it took me about eight hours to do all of this work. This is a lot. For my efforts I got four gallons of cider. It tastes pretty good too. I haven’t fully decided what I am going to do with this yet. Of course, I want to make some hard cider, but we drank one gallon already. I may chalk this year up to an experiment and just keep the cider in the fridge.

Now that the cider is pressed, you are not done. The juice must be pasteurized or it will start fermenting without any extra help. So, that was another evening. Fortunately, I could watch Monday Night Football and clean up the shop while the operation was happening.

This fits right into my goals. I have always wanted to scavenge apples from some abandoned or forgotten trees and turn it into liquid gold. My second day of doing this I got into a better rhythm of how many apples fill the press. Press while prepping the next batch and wholesale rejecting of apples rather than investing a lot for a little return.

In the future, I will need to split at least or augment my harvest to also make apple sauce. Ideally, I would have seven or eight gallons of juice with some to ferment and some to leave au natural. Plus, I would like to put up 12 quarts of applesauce as well. So, I probably need triple the amount of apples to make this work.

End Your Programming Routine: At the time of writing this, I still have a few, orange tomatoes on the vines. This really marks the end of harvest season. The rains have come and we could have freezing weather at any point forward. If I stumble on a deal for apples, I could be persuaded to run another batch but I am tired now. I would say that it works, now I know how much work it is.

November 2, 2022 – Has Anyone Noticed a Siracha Shortage?

November 2, 2022 /

This feels like an investigative report. In our house, we have a ridiculous number of hot sauces in the refrigerator. Let me list them 1) Cholula 2) Valentina 3) Gochujang 4) Frank’s Red Hot 5) Siracha. We also have in the pantry 1) El Tapatio 2) habanero sauce from Mexico 3) more Cholula.

I first noticed a few months ago while I was re-stocking the pantry that there were only the small bottles at the grocery store. So, I bought two instead of the one bigger bottle. Since the summer, I started noticing that there was none on the shelves at times. It would be gone and then the small bottles would be back. Now, I look every time I go to any store and it is not in stock anywhere.

Apparently, it is true; there is a Siracha shortage. If you search the web, you will see the same news bulletin that said they stopped taking orders in June because of a global pepper shortage. They were not expecting to resume taking orders until September. Being that this is November, I imagine that it is going to take time to refill the supply chain. I would expect this shortage to last for some time.

When looking to find a replacement at a local grocery store, I found two new ones Tabasco brand and Sky Valley siracha sauce. We bought the latter. Sky Valley is a brand from the makers of Litehouse salad dressings. If it were strictly me, I would have bought the Tabasco brand but I think that my wife was afraid it would be too spicy.

I can respect a company the puts off profits at the expense of quality. However what may be the case is that this market is permanently cracked open for other players. We liked the Sky Valley. It seemed more balanced and complex, not just the in your face Siracha taste. I mean this is the purpose of hot sauce, to add another dimension to the overall profile. But, I could see this brand having more than a niche usage.

Apparently, the peppers for siracha come from Northern Mexico. The claim was that climate change was the reason the harvest was not as expected. I am not sure whether I am happy or sad that this Asian oriented ingredient is using Mexican ingredients. It may be that they happen to grow well in Mexico and the supply chain is simpler. I don’t know.

I really don’t like single use ingredients. I would really prefer something more versatile. The problem is no person can agree on Mexican/Asian/Cajun. Simply put, we have these different sauces because everyone wants something different, not just inventory simplicity. And, I am guilty of buying something like Gochujang because when I make something for the first time, I want to taste how it was intended to be made. Dont get me wrong, I don’t dislike Gochujang it is just that the flavor profile is not right for many things.

End Your Programming Routine: What I take away from this is that the global supply chain is perilous. Really, this is becoming all, too routine. This has to be a huge financial hit for Huy Fong Foods. Whether this leads to second sourcing or some way of cheapening the overall recipe, it is hard to tell. It has definitely opened the door for us to try the alternatives out there.

November 1, 2022 – Paella, You Can Do It

November 1, 2022 /

On our trip to Spain this year, we had Paella at least three different times. I was disappointed three times. To me, it was too fishy and in my book that is a sign of low quality ingredients. In the last two books we read, there was recipes for paella. So, for our monthly dinner, I decided that I wanted to fix my fishy thoughts.

I think what initially turns people off is that you are supposed to use a specific pan. That is the root of paella which means pan. I really don’t think it is required, but part of the dish is the layer of crusty rice on the bottom. The more that can be spread out, the more of it there is. We happen to know someone that had one we could borrow.

Most of the complications of making it comes from the number of ingredients and having your mis en place. A strict Valencian paella would be seafood only but there is a surprising number of variations that can be done. The keys are the rice and not stirring it in the pan. Here was my version (or really Aran Goyoga).

  1. chicken thighs
  2. onion
  3. garlic
  4. chicken broth
  5. saffron
  6. Arborio rice
  7. Spanish chorizo
  8. tomato
  9. green beans
  10. shrimp
  11. mussels
  12. clams
  13. lemon
  14. parsley

Start by browning the chicken, then the onion and garlic. Meanwhile, heat up the broth with saffron. Mix the chicken back in and add the green beans and chorizo. Then add the chicken back in and brown the rice. Pour the broth on top of all that and don’t touch.

Once the rice is mostly cooked, add the seafood and cover the pan with foil. Finally, garnish with lemon and parsley.

Now, this was something to look forward to.

End Your Programming Routine: It’s hard to really compare. It just may be that my taste are not acclimated to the same spectrum as Spanish people. I often find that the American interpretation is more to my liking than the original. For instance, I found pasta bland in Italy. It could also be that restaurants are almost always worse than when someone makes it. My point being, don’t be intimidated. You can do it.

October 25, 2022 – I Don’t Think Your Ready For This _____ ?

October 25, 2022 /

Did you fill in the blank as soon as you read the headline? And if you did, did you hear the song in your head? I did of course that is why I wrote it in the first place.

Making Jelly/Jam is a gateway into preserving. It is easy and it takes very little raw material to do so. When I was a kid, my mom used to plan for about a jar a week. A jar is subject to what you are using, but somewhere between half pint an pint is about the right size I think. Plus, we like variety so preferably, we would make more, smaller containers for rotation.

There is a difference between Jam and Jelly. Jam contains fruit, not just fruit juice. So, we usually make jam but with some items like grapes, it is juice not grapes you want. So, I made grape jelly. With other fruits, you would want to strain the pulp and bits out for essentially a clear juice if you are making jelly.

The nice thing is that the instructions to do so is in every package of pectin. Pectin is an apple starch that helps the liquid setup to solid. Some fruits like apples and stone fruits contain there own pectin but read the instructions for details. Weirdly, some people even make pepper jelly or mint jelly. To me those are specialty applications, not to be put on a peanut butter sandwich, so I skip that kind of stuff.

Preservation occurs by super concentrating the sugar. As long as you don’t get mold or something in the jelly, I think it will literally last forever. My mom used to poor liquid paraffin on the top of the jelly and that was the seal. That is not a recommended technique anymore. But, the truth is that we never got sick and I wouldn’t hesitate to eat it. So, I water bath can my jars.

Processing time is pretty short compared to peaches, it is 4 mins in a rolling boil. I made this batch of jelly in about two hours. That was after dinner was cleaned up an before bed and I was done with the whole thing.

Despite the fact that we probably ate one jar a week, in my current life there is only so much jelly one can eat. I sometimes will use it to supplement barbecue sauce or compote. But, that is less about needing it in the recipe and taking the opportunity to empty things out of the refrigerator.

To be honest, grape is the least preferable choice in my house. My favorite is actually blackberry. I made this for a couple reasons 1) we are almost out of jam and that would mean buying it to make it through the season 2) I had a few pounds of grapes that I needed to find something to do with 3) I wanted to see if the apple press would press grapes. Check, check and check.

End Your Programming Routine: My wife has said many times that she should carry a container of homemade spread when we go to a restaurant. I skip the industrial jelly altogether because I usually order rye toast and eat only with butter. So, it has been a long time since I have had something other than what I have made. But, give it a try. You will learn something and get a lot more confident with preserving.

October 18, 2022 – Will it Juice?

October 18, 2022 /

For a while, there was an schtick about ‘Will it Blend?‘. It was a marketing campaign for Blendtec, blending all kinds of things in there product. Some of it was pretty impressive. I set out to find out if my new to me apple press would press grapes to make grape juice.

I do have a device that is marketed as a ‘juicer’ and it does work. However, with grapes that have skins on them, this device plugs quickly and hard. The last time I made grape juice, I spent several hours cleaning it. I also had to disassemble frequently just to keep it going. I know traditionally, grape juice could be made by stepping on the grapes, I don’t see why an apple press wont do the same thing. So this is what I set out to do, plus, I want to use it.

Because I have been both lazy and busy, I haven’t done as much preserving as I should. Admittedly, a lot of blueberries and raspberries went to waste while I was focused on the siding repair. We are nearly out of jam as we haven’t done any in several years, this year I think I will make grape. I do know that this is one of the least popular choices in my house but we have it, so lets use it.

It’s hard to compare yields and efficiencies because I don’t have a lot of baseline to compare but I got about a quart of juice from roughly 3 gallons of grapes. Looking at the jelly recipe, only 2 3/4 cup of juice is required to make a batch, which is 7 cups yield. I will probably at least double it.

As coincidence would have it, the guy I bought the press from stopped by the day I was trying this. He said absolutely they have used it for juicing. Now, I had no fears, I just needed to figure out how it worked.

The truth is, it was a lot of work for a little yield. That being said, I am happy that my grapes didn’t go to waste. I got enough juice to make some jelly so that is something. I am planning to get going with apple pressing soon. I am running out of time to do this as well.

End Your Programming Routine: It has been a long held dream to have an apple press. Now, I need to get some use out of it. This may not be the best ‘production model’, but just like I keep talking about, I cant get caught up in the ‘toolbox fallacy’. Let me get some use out of it and figure out what I like and don’t like, then I can upgrade.

September 27, 2022 – Tortilla de Patata

September 27, 2022 /

Our exchange student was gaga over this dish. I had never heard of it before and unfortunately, he had no real cooking skills. So, we didn’t really try this until we went to Spain last summer. It is very simple, comfort food that I made following the recipe in Canelle et Vanille for our September meeting of the Left Coast Culinary Book Club.

Eggs, potatoes, onion, salt and oil, it cant get much simpler than that. First peel and fry the potatoes and onions. The recipe called for three medium Yukon Gold potatoes. I used four shriveling, nearly rotten ones cooked in 3/4 cup of olive oil. In the mean time, scramble 6 eggs, I used 8 medium eggs.

I don’t know if this is the key or not, but after the potatoes are fried, you put them into the raw eggs and then dump the whole mixture back into the skillet. The key to the whole thing is that you need to flip the tortilla once. This is where our exchange student went wrong the couple of times that he attempted it as he never flipped it.

Aran said that you need to use a good, quality non-stick pan. Well, I dont have a good one and the truth is, I really don’t have a ‘non-stick’ (teflon coated) pan, so I used my cast iron skillet. And it worked perfectly fine.

Finding something to flip the tortilla onto was also a challenge. If I were to hazard a guess, I think this recipe would work better in a 10 inch pan rather that a 12 inch pan. My feelings are that the the over all product was too thin, but it worked just fine. I think the texture came out a little to rustic compared to the pictures I have seen (as well as real life) because of the ratio of potatoes to egg and the overall size.

We frequently make eggs and potatoes for breakfast. This combination is nothing new. I guess what is that every time I have mixed raw eggs and cooked potatoes is that the eggs seem to coat the potatoes and disappear. So, taking them out and mixing with the eggs before cooking seemed to be a better way of doing it.

End Your Programming Routine: As soon as we arrived to the dinner, the tortilla was served and nearly eaten. I would say that it was a success. Like I said, a little tweaking of the recipe could make this an easy stand-out. I say, not bad for the first time.

September 14, 2022 – Gluten Free, Dairy Free and Vegan

September 14, 2022 /

Seriously? Well when you start messing around with gluten free, it takes a lot of different ‘products’ to replace flour. It is not quite as bad as it seems as the products are different milled grains and nuts. This particular recipe uses rice flour, almond flour and tapioca powder. I had to buy the rice flour, the other two we already had. For reference, we also have coconut flour and banana flour. It also appears that I need sorghum flour for some of the other recipes.

Part of my motivation for doing this is that I am annoyed by having all of these things around that no one is going to use. So, my hope is that I either use all of this stuff or find that it is likeable and we keep going. Either way, all of these things are not sitting around taking up space.

I am not sure if I have mentioned this or not, but I am really big on keeping a streamlined inventory of ingredients (or anything with a shelf life for that matter). Whenever we end up with odd ingredients hanging around, I make it a mission to find some recipe to ‘finish it off’. It could be sauces, jellies, vegetables, grains, whatever. If we find that we are not eating something, I am going to do my darnd-est to make sure that it doesn’t go to waste and that we clear it out of future view.

Now, for the other two parts. If you don’t count eggs, dairy is not that common. I used a stick of my son’s vegan, butter substitute. Didn’t that used to be called margarine? I think that there are plenty of recipes using shortening as a fat as well. I guess so far so good.

I did use my son’s egg substitute for this. This is the one thing that I am a little iffy on. It pretty much comes out like putty when mixed following the directions. Clearly, it is not like the liquid egg substitutes. Maybe this is what is used in pancake mixes and such? Maybe we have been eating it and we just didn’t know it?

Mix this like any other cookie recipe. Wet with wet and dry with dry, then combine them all together. The one trick with this is that Aran recommends 2 hours to overnight chill before baking. This is allegedly for ingredient hydration. I don’t know about you, but when I want cookies, I want them now and not tomorrow. Nevertheless, I sat them in the refrigerator for two hours before baking.

Well, they look like cookies, taste like cookies, must be cookies. All in all, not bad. My wife thought that they were too salty, there is coarse salt sprinkled on the top before baking. I really didn’t think so, But, I also didn’t really taste the salt anyway. I lightened up after the first batch because of her comments.

End Your Programming Routine: This was a good start. I intentionally picked this recipe to try because I suspected that it would be a success. It’s not too far out there and the process is relatively simple. I still have more of these flour substitutes, so look out, I am going to keep going.

August 2, 2022 – Pasta Sauce From A Jar?

August 2, 2022 /

I know, this is one of those convenience things. Real sauce takes some time. But I will give a secret, I almost always doctor sauce from a jar in this way as well. So, I really don’t have anything to gain from using jarred sauce.

First, lets talk about jarred sauce. I find it to be lifeless and bland lacking the zest of herbs, the sweetness of vine ripened tomatoes, the tang of garlic, that is a surface issue. To go deeper, we will look at the ingredient list, why is corn syrup part of the recipe? Then we have the alphabet soup of preservatives. The only thing redeeming is the price point, hence we get what we pay for.

What is the purpose of sugar with tomatoes? This technique helps mellow the acidity of the tomato which balances the overall flavor profile. I typically use a teaspoon to a half tablespoon of brown sugar for an entire batch of sauce, say enough for four people.

Have you ever bought the ‘garden’ variety of sauce? I think there are a dozen mushroom slices and green peppers in the jar. I certainly taste no difference. I like a generous amount of onion, half a green pepper, four mushrooms, three cloves of garlic and probably a tablespoon of basil and salt to taste. With this proportion, I would add one or two cans of plain tomato sauce. This is a good place to throw in leftover pizza sliced or taco diced tomatoes as well (I used hamburger sliced tomatoes from my sons birthday in the picture above).

That is just as fast as doctoring jarred sauce. Instead of sauce, you could start with crushed, diced or even whole tomatoes. When using those types of ingredients, start with reducing the tomatoes first and add the vegetables to the sauce rather than the other way around.

End Your Programming Routine: I don’t always add this many vegetables. In fact, we do not eat that much pasta, I don’t care for it much. But, I promised my son that I would make vegan spaghetti and we would use his plant based meatballs. By the way, those things are disgusting, also not real food. Despite that, I remain open minded and inclusive of his choice. So, skip the prepared sauce and do it yourself. It can literally be done while the water is heating up to boil the pasta.