Category: cooking

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.

July 19, 2022 – Covid Activities Finally Completed

July 19, 2022 /

Back in March 2020, I ordered a root beer extract bottle. I was thinking as a family we would make root beer for something to do while we were in quarantine. It was one of those things that we never quite got around to. I think it came shortly before Sergio was to leave, after that my work on the apartment was going to get hot and heavy.

At some point, I do have some interest in making real root beer, not out of an extract bottle. I have done some investigation into this but I thought this was a good starting point. The way this works is that you add dry ice to the liquid for carbonation. That has been the long lag on actually doing this project.

My son that is half vegan and half vegetarian orders food from Thrive. They send dry ice with the frozen or liquids requiring refrigeration. So, I seized the opportunity when the order came yesterday. My son and I quickly mixed up the root beer.

You need to have some volume available in the pitcher because this gets violent when the dry ice hits the liquid. After the dry ice was gone, it was ready. It tasted good, a little too sweet for me, so maybe back off on the sugar next time. It was also a little flat unless you took a big gulp.

Finally, if you are not going to drink this all in one setting, you may want to add more dry ice when you pour again (like the next day). But, the good news of dry ice is that it doesn’t dilute or effect the volume because the temperature is too warm to keep it liquid.

Recipe:

  1. 2 1/2 cups Sugar
  2. 2 tbs root beer extract
  3. 3 qts water
  4. 3/4 pound dry ice

End Your Programming Routine: After sampling, we made root beer floats for desert. It was kind a fun thing to do and we will probably do this once a month until the extract is gone. It is something really easy to do with young kids and it is definitely unique.

May 10, 2022 – Tapped the Keg

May 10, 2022 /

My Cinco de Mayo debut turned more into a Mother’s Day dinner. I had to travel for work on Sunday. And because of Mother’s Day, we did our trap shooting on Saturday. That didn’t leave a lot of time to honor mom and have a fancy dinner party. Even though I don’t consider tacos fancy, the prep work can be extensive.

The meat I chose for tacos was beef. This was not just any cut, this was a challenge. It is cheek meat. I had a 10 pound block of beef cheeks. These are filleted of the head. You can imaging how many head it takes to make 10 pounds. A lot of those pieces are pretty tough and gristly. To make matters worse, the trimming was mostly done, but there were bits of bone, the inside of cows mouth, globs of blood and membrane still remaining. Sound good yet?

I personally don’t care for the meat. Mostly, I have had it when we prepare the whole beef head. I am not real interested in tough and greasy tacos. I can’t say the same for my wife. The fact of the matter is, this was meat that my father-in-law purchased and he liked it too. When we cleaned out his freezer last year, this was one of the items we packed away in the freezer.

I had plans to put some smoke on it, but I plum ran out of time. I made salsa and guacamole and the ensalada (the fixings) for the tacos. The plan was to pair it with the beer. What did I learn about the keg?

I did quite a bit of farting around with the carbonation. I had visions of simply applying CO2 and it would be ready to go. My first go was flat. Then I switched the inlet and outlet fittings to for the gas down the draw tube at higher pressure. I pressurized the keg four or five different days as it was not holding 20 psi. It is holding something less than that but not the full amount.

So, my fittings are leaking slightly somewhere and I didn’t feel like I got the carbonation that I wanted. Everyone else said that it was good, so maybe it was alright. It just wasn’t quite what I had in mind. That being said, I think it is probably worth pursuing some more experimenting and probably some new o-rings

End Your Programming Routine: Believe it or not, I am somewhat of a risk taker. Throwing a dinner with things that you have never done before is risky, especially if you won’t know the final results until you are serving. The tacos tasted great and the beer was a good compliment. I didn’t have the time to make the sides that I wanted, but we had plenty of taco fodder. I think it came out fine, even though I wanted things to be different. And, I will never quit pushing my limits. I find that motivating, inspiring and exciting.

April 5, 2022 – Keg Testing

April 5, 2022 /

My beer is ready for kegging. It has been lagering for four weeks. However, I don’t even know if this system works or leaks for that matter. The last thing I want to do is transfer my time and money into something that is not going to work.

This last weekend, I got my CO2 cylinder filled and I also learned something. Cylinders are pressure tested every five years. A refill is $18 but a pressure test is another $20. My cylinder was last tested in 2017, so of course it was expired. It wasn’t quite the deal that I was hoping for, since the homebrewing store charges $36 for a cylinder but hopefully this will be the last time in the next five years that I have to recertify.

I disassembled everything and checked the cleanliness, at least that was good. I connected the regulator to the cylinder and that was leak free. The Cornelius keg held pressure. I filled it up with water and pushed it through the system. Everything checks out. I have some monkeying to do with the pressure coming out of the regulator but I don’t want to do that until I do it with the beer.

Before I connect the beer, I want to replace the tubing to the tap. There is some residue dried inside. I went to the store to buy replacement tubing, but I didn’t find an exact match. The current tubing is 3/16 inner diameter (ID) and 7/16 outer diameter (OD). This is pretty thick stuff. So, I thought I would order it.

Looking at the replacement connections, they are 1/4″ hose barbs. This means that the nipple sticking out is sized for 1/4″ ID tubing, not 3/16″. This is doable, generally you can force a smaller tube onto a larger connection, but why? So, I am going to purchase the proper sized tubing which will make maintenance much easier in the future.

Looks like the original tubing is rated at 75psi. I am going to go with the larger diameter tubing because the regulator is pushing out 12 psi in this case. Pressure is a measure of a given mass of material in a set volume. It is the regulators job to allow a certain amount of gas to pass until the set pressure is reached. If I were to have multiple kegs attached, it would take more mass (of gas) to pressure two kegs, but it would still regulate at 12psi. It just might take more time.

End Your Programming Routine: Looks like things are perking up for the Cinco de Mayo inauguration. Let’s hope that the beer stands up to the hype and effort. I tasted it this weekend and I was not as happy as the first tasting. I do feel like it was too cold because it tasted like flat beer. So, I will be messing with temperature and CO2 as well as getting the menu ready.

March 22, 2022- Making Coffees

March 22, 2022 /

There are probably some people reading this that don’t remember this skit or were not even born when this aired (Jan 1991). I was only sixteen and I barely remember it myself. It was a big thing in school to emulate the name rhyming when you ran into a friend. But, this was just a cute intro to what I am talking about today.

It is probably no secret that I like making fine food. I enjoy the complexity of Pinot Noir with food and generally like quality of food and drink. My wife thought that my next step should be coffee (and tea). For Christmas, she gave me an expensive drip coffee maker along with an electric kettle.

My relationship with coffee is a little complicated. When I was working at my previous job, I was drinking tons of it. I think it was a way to get out of my chair and avoid working. On the weekends, I could easily drink a 12 cup pot. My wife asked me to switch to tea which I now drink during the week. I only make coffee on the weekend.

To unlock the world of home coffee making, you need to be able to grind your own beans. When we buy coffee at Costco, nine out of ten choices are whole bean. At the grocery store it is more like fifty-fifty. Whole bean is preferred because oxygen degrades the bean, so when it is ground, it occurs much quicker because there is so much more surface area.

Truthfully, I am not a snob. The first pot we made with the new coffee maker was Folgers and I have to say that I liked it. This maker has an insulated carafe rather than a glass one. So, it doesn’t continue to cook after it is poured through. I think that makes a huge difference in quality.

I didn’t have a grinder (officially). The last one that bought has become a spice grinder. It was a mini blender kind of device. It was small and messy. It was a hassle to use so I gave up on grinding 20 years ago. Doing some research lately, I found that there was a whole new world (and the internet) of videos and reviews and comparisons between different models. I made my choice, the Baratza Encore.

In the reviews that I watched, this model consistently produced the most consistent grind. I have come to understand that this will yield the best results when making coffee. I have also learned that different types of coffee making require different types of grinds. So, not only are whole beans fresher, but likely the grind can be controlled for better results.

I am still playing around with it since I have only used it twice at this point. In the picture above, the grind is significantly more coarse than I have been using with pre-ground. This was supposedly the optimum setting for drip. I think it needs to be a little finer personally because the overall coffee was weak. But, I will keep working at it.

End Your Programming Routine: There are many ways to make coffee. It would seem as though the grinder is more important than the way of making it. I guess that is why the prices range from $20 – $10,000 for grinders. I will probably do a more formal review after I get some time with it in a few months.