Category: cooking

May 4, 2021- Libraries as a Resource

May 4, 2021 /

I grew up in and around the library. My earliest memory was the ‘Bookmobile’ arriving in the neighborhood and going inside the and seeing all of the books. It looked something like this.

Later we moved into the country and away from the typical services of the day like cable TV. But free entertainment was always in order so weekly, we would go to the library to check out books and participate in the periodic reading programs. Our closest library was integrated into the middle school and so I could check out books while at school. I would say that I probably averaged a book a week for years.

As I got more busy in life, reading changed a little for me. I don’t spend hours on the weekend reading. I switched my tactics from checking out books to buying books so that I wasn’t constrained by a due date and the urgency to finish. In the last five years of so, the library has crept back in to my life.

My kids were taking karate for a few years and the library was right across the street. I would go in and kill an hour by scanning through the periodicals of interest. After they lost interest in karate, I started sneaking in to get free seeds and I found the annual reading challenge. I started reading for pleasure again.

I suppose the question is why the Library? First of all, Benjamin Franklin established one of the first libraries in this country. Of course, I want to be like him. But more seriously, there are a couple of benefits that I will mention that I use.

  1. We are already paying for it with our taxes, be it county or city or region.
  2. It is eco friendly. I try to ask myself ‘Will I ever use this again once I read it’? The answer is almost always no. I also try to buy used whenever possible as well because the last person probably only read it once as well.
  3. I like to scan through magazines that if I bought, I would feel more obligated to read. At the library, I have no commitment.
  4. On magazines, there are a lot of titles that I enjoy, but it doesn’t make sense to have 20 subscriptions.
  5. They have movies and music on disk. Titles that are ten years old are in the sweet spot of hard to find streaming.
  6. I can get a whole garden’s worth of seeds (free). I can also get seeds when they are gone from the stores. Starting my fall garden, I can get things that I didnt plan for in the spring.
  7. Friends of the Library sell used books for a dollar. I have picked up cookbooks that I am interested in, like Rick Bayless for cheap.
  8. They have great summer programs for kids, especially the real young ones like 2-4 year range.
  9. If you are willing to wait, the internetwork of libraries have a lot more titles available then what is in the local libraries and will ship to your local library for pickup.
  10. Internet access, printing and copying are available.

I think I could come up with at least five more, but I will leave it at that. I suppose the best reason to do it is that I enjoy it and that is the best reason of them all.

Change Your Programming Routine: In a world with so many choices of entertainment and knowledge, the Library may seem passé. Sometimes you can get to the information faster than waiting for shipping or more in depth than an internet article. Don’t overlook the library as a resource.

April 27, 2021- Beer Can Science

April 27, 2021 /

Today we have some science you can get in to. My wife recently purchased the Brumate can cooler. The nice thing about this product is that it can hold either a 12oz or 16oz can. She already had the Yeti and we know that it works pretty well.

My problem is that I never have a drink that sits around long enough to get warm, but that is OK because we are doing this for science. How did they work? The initial check was straight out of the refrigerator.

Immediately, the uninsulated can was 45 degrees while the other two were 43 degrees F. After thirty minutes, the temperature was measured again.

This time, the uninsulated can was 49, the Yeti was still 43 and the Brumate was 46 degreed F. Clearly the Yeti was the winner of this quick test.

There are a few discussion points with my ‘science’. The first being why was the uninsulated can warmer than the other two? Could it be that it initially started out warmer and that not everything was in equilibrium in the refrigerator? That was a point that was not controlled or measured.

Second, what makes the Yeti better? I am not totally sure, but in order to allow the Brumate to hold both 12oz and 16oz cans there is a spacer that is inserted into the vessel. The spacer is filled with water and during this test the spacer was at room temperature. Therefore, there is a warmer mass inside the vessel potentially causing the can to warm faster. To be fair, I read on the website this morning that spacer can be frozen, which may make it perform the same or better over a longer duration.

The science is not settled, but the results were enjoyable. A Prost!

November 20, 2020 – French Toast, from garbage to delicious

November 20, 2020 /

This is one of those recipes that I don’t make often. The biggest reason that I make it is usually to use up old bread before it becomes inedible. How many of you bake bread? My observation is that a whole loaf can last several days if the crust stays intact. Once the loaf is cut in any way it will start to become stale overnight.

This time I had half a loaf of the pumpkin bread left and half a loaf of gluten free bread that has been sitting for two weeks. Another nice thing about this recipe is that is prepared ahead of time so it can all you have to do is pop it in the oven in the morning. As long as you have an hour to wait, you don’t have to do any work to make it.

  • 2 tablespoons Butter
  • 1/2 cup Brown Sugar
  • 4 slices of Bread
  • 2 Eggs
  • 1/4 cup Cream
  • 1/2 teaspoon Vanilla
  • 1/2 teaspoon Nutmeg
  • 2 Apples or Pears

I cook a lot by ‘feel’. Meaning I am dynamically sizing and scaling ingredients as I go. For instance, I may add more or less egg depending on the initial moistness of the bread and the size of the pan. Pumpkin bread was pretty moist to begin with so it shouldn’t need a lot of egg. Unfortunately in this case, I had eight pieces of bread to begin with of which the dog ate four while my back was turned and I was melting the butter and scrambling the eggs. So all that is to say my pictures don’t really match what I should have done.

Start by melting the butter and spread across your baking pan. Then, add the brown sugar on top of the butter in an even layer. Put the bread on top of the sugar/butter layer. Next, mix eggs, cream, vanilla and nutmeg. Pour over bread. Finally, slice apples and put on top. Cover the dish in foil and put in the refrigerator overnight.

When ready to cook, start the oven at 350 deg F. Leave the foil on the dish and bake for 45 minutes. Take the foil off for ten minutes and it is done. Serve with maple syrup or whip cream or we usually eat it alone and enjoy.

Enjoy some french toast and enjoy the weekend.

November 18, 2020 – Updates to the Virtual Book Club today

November 18, 2020 /

Yesterday, the thinking about 1984 by George Orwell left me partially excited to go into that book again and partially disgusted to think about what has happened on my watch. I am going to save the stronger editorials to another time to get to a happier place today.

I spent this morning backdating the progress of the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Book Club. With the impending second lockdown and the weather really getting wet, it is a good time to read and cook. I have created separate pages, by year on where we have been as a club in case someone was interested in where we have covered. Those links are on the left hand margin.

I am strongly thinking in the future that I will repurpose the ‘Approachable Wine’ page and change that into a ‘Resources’ page for people interested in the things that I am such as freedom, gear, skills and books. That page was really intended for a different purpose. I was wanting to build an app and tie all of this together, but I didn’t get started and probably wont.

So, we have bunkered up into our ‘two week freeze’. Our Thanksgiving shopping is done and the menu is largely set. There definitely won’t be more than six people at our table. As Thanksgiving signals the end of the harvest season, it is time to appreciate the year behind and look forward to the year ahead. Do some reading in your free time.

November 13, 2020 – Persimmon Pumpkin Bread

November 14, 2020 /

On a whim, I bought a couple persimmon fruit at the local grocery store. I always enjoy the challenge of finding something to do with unusual ingredients. I don’t usually see them in the stores and haven’t worked with them since I lived in South Carolina. So that has been over fifteen years.

Persimmon is an Asian fruit. To me it has a little melon flavor and texture. When I was looking up what to do with them, the majority of the suggestions were to bake with them. Apparently, it can be used to swap in with pumpkin on a 1:1 basis. Note: this is a double recipe, so it makes two 5×9 loaves.

  • 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground clove
  • 1/2 teaspoon ginger
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
  • 4 eggs, room temperature
  • 1 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 3 cups pumpkin puree/persimmon
  • 1 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup walnuts

We also had some leftover pumpkin so I mixed the two of them together. I used the immersion blender to unify the pumpkin and persimmon. Pre-heat the oven 350 degF while you are assembling and mixing all of the ingredients together.

Combine all of the dry ingredients together. Combine all the wet ingredients together. Once both are thoroughly mixed separately, combine the wet and dry ingredients together.

Once everything is mixed together, pour into two loaf pans and bake for an hour or so. Don’t forget to grease the pan before hand.

I paired this bread with some Vietnamese rice porridge. I kind of made up the recipe after looking at a bunch of different variations. Regardless, it was well received. I think it would pair well with any kind of soup. I also believe this would make good French toast as well.

October 28, 2020 – The best pumpkin seeds preparation, bar none

October 28, 2020 /

This recipe has been a family tradition of mine probably nearly forty years. Original credit goes back to a printing in the Albany Democrat Herald long since lost in the annals of time. It makes a great snack for parties or after the pumpkins are carved.

  • 4 cups – pumpkin seeds
  • 1/4 cup – soy sauce
  • 1/4 cup – butter
  • 2 tablespoons – Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 teaspoons – lemon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon – garlic powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon – celery salt
  • salt
  • Optional – dash of cayenne or chili powder

Clean your pumpkin seeds that you removed from your pumpkin. They don’t have to be perfect, in fact a little pumpkin give some sweetness to the seeds that are delicious.

Begin heating the oven at 450 degrees F. Melt the butter with Worcestershire and soy sauce, then whisk into the melted butter. Add the remainder of the dry ingredients.

Put the seeds in a bowl and mix them to coat. Once thoroughly coated, pour out onto a sheet pan to put in the heated oven.

Bake ten minutes and then stir up the seeds to expose mostly un-caramelized seeds. Bake for another five minutes. Take the pan out of the oven and sprinkle salt on the seeds. Wait another 10 minutes for the pan to cool and enjoy.

Now that the important stuff is done, I can tell a story. Don’t you hate those recipes that you have scroll through a bunch of stuff to get to what you want? According to my very limited research on SEO, you want to get right to the content. So there you go, I think I just invented a better way to present blog recipes.

My mom was always a recipe clipper. This one as I have said, came up in the newspaper and was clipped out for the ‘try’ pile of recipes. I seem to recall that it had a few more spices in it that I used, but I think this is the flavor profile I have been using for the last ten years or so.

When my mom made these, my brother and my flavor profile was completely blown. To us, this was exotic. So many spices that were not routinely used in our house. It actually started us trying spices on everything, particularly lemon pepper. We found that we really liked lemon pepper on popcorn. I haven’t done it in a while since it is usually microwaved these days, but it is really good.

Over the years, I have halfheartedly tried to look for the recipe but never finding it. The original was likely thrown out which lead me to making my own out of memory. Here are a few other tips.

  • Seeds store well in the refrigerator. If you can’t get to them right after carving your pumpkin, you can store them for later. They can also be stored in the freezer for longer term if necessary.
  • I seem to remember the original recipe having cumin in it. I think curry powder, ginger or five spice powder would also work well for a deeper exotic modification
  • They are best eaten shortly after preparation. They tend to get soggy overnight like popcorn does.
  • Not all ‘pumpkins’ are created equal. It seems like most of them these days are specifically for carving and not eating (I am not sure they are actually pumpkins). Seeds can vary from very thin and melon like to very tough. The seed is actually inside the white shell. If it looks tough, it probably is. I am not saying not to try it but the best seeds are from medium sized pumpkins.

I hope that I am not too late for you to try this year. I think that it would be great to hear other suggestions as well. So let me know what you did. Enjoy!

October 13, 2020 – What to do with liver?

October 13, 2020 /

I am definitely not pretending to know the answer. I don’t know how many people have ever seen a beef liver, but I would estimate the size to be around 10 pounds. That is a lot of meat that many people probably don’t think they like.

When I get one, I try to pre-process it a bit. I cut it into chunks, de-skin it and make it generally more easy to cook straight out of the freezer. The question still remains what to do with it. Maybe it will help if I talk about what I do and what I have tried.

There are at least a few tips that I use pretty routinely.

  1. Soak the liver in milk overnight. I suppose you can use milk, cream, half and half or buttermilk. I usually try to use was seems to be on the verge of expiring and cut with the balance of milk. This technique seems to remove some of the minerally taste that is usually part of the turn-off for liver.
  2. Cook liver rare (or medium). One of the things that turns it into shoe leather is over cooking. It also seems like overcooking also brings out the stronger flavors and the rarer it is, the more mild it is.
  3. Prepare only what you think you will eat for the meal. Reheating results in over-cooking.

Here are some things I have tried over the years with liver

  1. By far and away, it seems like the most successful preparation is liver and onions. I think one reason is that you can avoid over cooking.
  2. Boudin – a cajun sausage that is made with pork, rice, and spices. My result was OK, the problem was that it was too dry and needed more fat. I am going to try this again someday.
  3. Chili – I thought that maybe I could spice my way out of liver, but it still ended up being pretty livery, so not recommended.
  4. Fake foie gras or pate – I have tried grinding cooked liver with butter and spices but I didn’t find it terribly appetizing on a cracker.
  5. Hash – This one has some promise. Fry with potatoes, onion, pepper, bacon, and serve with eggs.

Traditionally, liver is a fresh meat. It has been one of the first cuts and eaten immediately after butchering. The lore is that organ meat provided a source of essential nutrient when choices are limited.

I think that it is also worth observing that organ meat is the first thing animals eat when eating other animals. So, there is something to this, I am still looking for the right combinations of recipe and technique. Until then, I would be interested in other people’s ideas because I still have a lot of liver in the freezer.

October 1, 2020 – Review: My Life in France

October 1, 2020 /

“My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme was the August book club selection for the Left Coast Cellars Culinary Food and Wine Book Club. That’s right I said August and I just finished reading it last night. I think I have been upfront with how busy I have been so now I am at least one month behind.

This is a biography written in first person style (by Alex). He did all of the interviews and arranging of the narrative directly from and with the consent of Julia. The book chronicles her life through her formidable years as an writer and TV personality. It is weighted pretty heavily toward her pre-cookbook days and the amount of content and details thin out as book goes on.

As a relatively young member to this culinary club, this was another personality in the food world that I have little exposure to. Not being around when the ‘Frenchiphile’ food craze dominated that scene, it all seems so integrated and second hand to me. But, of course she was instrumental in painting the landscape of today’s food scene. I have enjoyed learning the history and perspective of these early media pioneers. There is also a movie, I haven’t seen it yet, but I am going to watch it with my wife this month.

The most interesting aspect of this book to me was just what a labor of love and effort ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ was. I took years to develop and was a huge tome, over seven hundred pages. This was all largely done manually and over international correspondence. I have observed that many times in life it is not the final outcome that designates success but the process in which that task is done. Julia discovered a fervent delight in testing and perfecting recipes and techniques that could be achieved in the United States using imperial measurements, different tools and a culture that was more aligned with TV dinners than centuries of tradition.

It wasn’t always an easy read for me, as evident on how long it took me. The story lines were filled with names of people that breezed in and out. As seems to be customary to that generation, many of them got nicknames which added more names and I got kind of lost at times. The other criticism I had was there were a lot of French phrases in the book which made me tune out at times because I didn’t understand what I was reading.

All that being said, it definitely made me appreciate what she had accomplished in her life. I can certainly understand the technical challenges and appreciate people’s passion. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the August dinner, so I am not totally sure what the menu was. From skimming through the menu it was beef burgionon, garlic mashed potatoes, formage blanc (fresh cheese) and gougeres (pastry). There are some vague descriptions of preparations in the book, but definitely no recipes.

As for wine, there is mention of many French varietals, none that I really recognized other than Dom Perignon which champagne seemed to be very common. Pop a cork, I would recommend Pinot Noir unless you have access to a good French burgundy and build your culinary history foundation.

September 21, 2020 – Kiss my grits

September 21, 2020 /

Remember when that was a saying? I seem to remember that I was real young, so I looked it up and it came from a TV show called ‘Alice’ which ran from 1974 to 1985. I didn’t watch a lot of TV growing up, especially at that age but I would have been in grade school during some of that time but I sure remember that saying.

Anyway, that is not what I wanted to talk about today. But, I did want to talk about grits. If you have only had them at Cracker Barrel or never lived in the south, then I would wager that you probably don’t like them. Grits are ground corn, more coarse than cornmeal and very similar to Polenta. It is prepared as a porridge consistency, like cream of wheat and is typically eaten at breakfast time, although they can be a side for any meal.

My wife and I have been watching a show on TV about creative chefs and their restaurants. One of the dishes made is grits and liver. That really caught my eye because I have a lot of liver in the freezer and I am always looking for ways to use it. So, I put grits on the shopping list and my wife wanted some for breakfast. That is what I made today.

What makes these grits so much better? Well first of all it is all about the recipe. You can just boil the grits in water and a little salt but to do it up right, you need to do a more.

Start by bringing grits (3/4 cup), water (2 cups), salt (1/2 teaspoon) and a bay leaf to a boil and once it is there, set the pot aside for fifteen minutes.

After the grits have hydrated, bring the pot back to the stove and add butter (4 tablespoons) and cream (1/2 cup), I used half and half because I am trying to use it up before it goes bad. Keep the contents at a low simmer to reduce some of the liquid and grate some parmesan cheese (1/8 cup or 1 oz) into grits. That’s it, but so much richer than boiled in water.

I fried up some sausage links to put on the top. But you could also add eggs, like over easy, or some extra cheddar cheese, bacon and onion as other suggestions. When my wife worked for the state of South Carolina, they would have fundraisers in the morning where you would buy a bowl of grits and then add your own toppings to the bowl.

If you don’t live in the south, this is a simple and different breakfast idea. Give it a try if you are wanting something different than oatmeal in the morning.

September 15, 2020 – What does bear meat taste like?

September 15, 2020 /

We just got back from an smoke escape to Washington. The air quality was quite a bit better, still not great. It was a good excuse to visit my sister and her family which we only see a couple times a year because of distance.

Before all of this wildfire madness began, my neighbors game me a little bear to try. It was my first time that I can remember. So, I wanted to cook it in a way that I could taste it, without a lot of sauce or covering spice. Steven Rinella has been said that pioneers moving west would eat deer and elk because they were plentiful, but they really preferred bear.

One other thing to note, bear is a carrier of trichinosis, the same parasite the can strike in undercooked pork. I don’t know how prevalent it is, but I do think that it is something you don’t want to have. Make sure that your meat is cooked to at least 150 deg F or more to eliminate the risk.

I decided to make some buttermilk biscuits, use up some left over gravy, fry up the bear meat with salt and pepper and some fried apples for breakfast. Even though I put the gravy on the biscuits, I put the meat to the side as to keep it separate.

My best description is that it tastes like part beef, part pork. There is an irony tint like you get from liver, but it was very faint and mild. No where near what liver is like. These cuts seemed to be a bit tougher, I am not sure what part of the animal they were, but I would liken them to tri-tip or sirloin in consistency.

I thanked my neighbor and told them about my experience. He gave me a pound of ground bear and ground venison as a result. I want to save that for something special.