Food, recipes, and techniques
Tonight, my Kitchenaid Classic Plus stand mixer (13 years old, according to the serial number) started to really heck up in some really obnoxious ways, to the extent that I thought I might need to buy a new mixer. But it turns out that there’s just some simple maintenance tasks that need to be performed, and that all of the issues I was having are very common!
Dish Dragon is an interesting site where you tell it one or more ingredients that you have available and it recommends recipes to make with it. Pretty handy if, like me, you tend to accumulate a lot of ingredients with good intention but then never know what to actually cook for dinner. Great for meal planning and so on.
Lately on Facebook I’ve seen a lot of ads for a knife sharpening system, particularly one being advertised as by “Wasabi knives.” I was interested in the product, but not $120 interested… but it turns out that all of them are just rebrands of the one by Ruixin Pro, which is a much more palatable price. I paid around $30 for mine, but the price has further dropped to $20, although it seems to vary a lot over time.
Anyway. After a couple of ordering issues (due to my payment not going through) and then a bit of a wait for shipping direct from China, my sharpener finally arrived.
I’ve sharpened all my knives with it now, and I think it’s pretty good! There’s a few things to watch out for, though.
Another ice cream experiment, inspired by an old comic of mine with interest revitalized by Brian David Gilbert’s ice cream video.
It’s Girl Scouts Cookies season again! Nationwide, the Girl Scouts outsource their cookie production to two different companies, Little Brownie Bakers (LBB) and ABC Bakers.
I live in an LBB region, and LBB is a subsidiary of Keebler; ostensibly, Girl Scouts licenses their recipes to Keebler via LBB for their actual cookie production. Two of their cookies, Thin Mints and Samoas, have supposedly-identical equivalents available from Keebler, namely Grasshoppers and Coconut Dreams, respectively.
Whenever the Girl Scouts aren’t selling cookies, or whenever joyless grownups want to enjoy their cookies without actually funding the Girl Scouts, common knowledge is that you can satisfy your cravings by buying the Keebler equivalents. But is that true?
This is what I made for my Thanksgiving entrée this year, what with having Thanksgiving all on my own. It turned out pretty good.
Ingredients:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a medium-sized bowl, combine the turkey, shallot, egg, sage, thyme, rosemary, bread crumbs, and kale, thoroughly mixing with your fingers if possible. If no prosciutto is being used, also add some salt. And, of course, add pepper to your preference (and maybe some garlic).
Form the turkey mixture into a loaf, and wrap it in the prosciutto (if desired).
Bake until the internal temperature reads at least 155°F, approximately 45-60 minutes. Remove from oven and let rest for at least 10 minutes.
Slice and serve.
There are a lot of recipes for ice cream out there, but a lot of them involve making large amounts of custard creme and therefore large batches of ice cream. But sometimes you just want to make a small amount at a time, especially with a small ice cream maker. And portion control is important, too!
So, here’s a simple way to make a small amount of what’s essentially ice cream, without a lot of fuss or process:
At this point you could also add small chocolate chips or fresh fruit or whatever other mix-ins you want.
Base recipe for 1 liter of root beer: half a tablespoon of root beer extract (I use Zatarain’s) and half a cup of sugar (raw/turbinado sugar is especially nice).
For typical root beer, make half a cup of simple syrup by combining the sugar with half a cup of water and heating until the sugar is dissolved, then add it and the extract to 750mL of sparkling water.
However, for home-brewed root beer, which has a more complex flavor (and a slight amount of alcohol), combine the sugar, extract, 1 liter of water, and 1 teaspoon of yeast (baker’s yeast is fine, champagne yeast is better) into a clean 1-liter plastic bottle. Squeeze the air out and cap, and allow to sit at room temperature until the bottle has expanded and become firm to the touch, and then move it into your refrigerator to chill. This process depends on the temperature, and can be sped up or better controlled using a sous vide circulator set to around 90°F which should make the fermentation take only a few hours.
NOTE: Be absolutely careful not to let this stay out past the time it has gotten firm, or else you run the risk of the bottle exploding and making a mess! And, for that matter, only use a flexible plastic bottle (I use leftover seltzer bottles) and not a firm bottle like a SodaStream or, worse yet, a glass bottle, as those will be very difficult to use safely and are very likely to explode on you.
Anyway, the nice thing about brewed rootbeer is that the flavor will continue to develop over time in the refrigerator, and it won’t easily go flat, as the yeast will continue to ferment and carbonate it even while cold. (This will also increase the alcohol content over time.)
I highly recommend storing the bottle upright, if possible, as the yeast will form a sediment on the bottom of the bottle and this doesn’t have a very good taste or texture. Keeping it upright makes it easier to pour off the root beer without ending up with the yeast slurry.
For a simple piña colada mix, combine two 16-ounce cans of crushed or chunk pineapple (including the juice) and one 12-ounce can of coconut cream and blend until smooth. Then add a few tablespoons of lime juice.
This can be used for a whole bunch of things:
There’s a bunch of things out there about the way of making eggs perfectly over-easy, with fully-cooked whites but nice and runny yolks. Most of them involve either basting the eggs with oil, steaming them with a lid, or flipping them with much trepidation.
But my favorite way: heat the oil to medium-high, crack the eggs, wait for the whites on the bottom to set (1-2 minutes), and then set the remaining whites with a culinary blowtorch (Amazon affiliate link).
Perfectly-cooked whites, perfectly-runny yolks, and no breakage in sight!
There are a lot of ways to make chili. Many of them are valid. Here is the way I make mine.
Every now and then I decide to have a party where I invite people over to have fun and chat while I feed them a bunch of homemade pizza. The format which seems to work best is a “pizza potluck,” where I provide the basics and everyone else brings interesting things to try as toppings. It’s a great party for someone who has a lot of friends but doesn’t have a lot of social energy and likes to make their friends happy and have people meet each other but would rather be a wall flower at their own party. Like me.
I’ve done this a few times now. Here’s some notes for things to do and things to avoid.
A tasty vegan dish I’ve been making a lot lately. Works both as an entree and a side.
An easy-to-prepare soup that’s filling and hearty.
Ingredients:
In a soup pot on medium high, brown the sausage. Add the carrots, and cook until carmelized; add the onion and cook until translucent. Add the celery and cook until translucent, along with the chile if so desired. Deglaze with stock or broth, before adding the rest, along with the lentils, tomatoes, bay leaves, garlic, and oregano. Bring to a gentle boil then reduce to low and cook, covered, for 1 hour or until lentils are tender. Salt and pepper to taste.
Optionally, garnish with sour cream.
I don’t drink booze often but when I do I like it to be nice. Your definition of “nice” may vary.
Ingredients:
Place into cocktail shaker and fill with ice. Shake until the ice gets somewhat crushed. Pour into a glass. Salt rim optional.
Brad Leone recently did an episode on fermented garlic miso, and in it there was an aside of starting up a black garlic experiment. Recently he finished an episode on the black garlic itself, but the initial episode was enough to plant a seed in my mind of doing a bunch of black garlic myself.
His technique involves placing the garlic into a sealed bag and that into a dehydrator at around 130ºF/55ºC. However, my dehydrator tends to be both very loud and high on power consumption, so I decided to try using my sous vide circulator instead.
Combine the above, and then add to 1 liter of sparkling water.
For an extra kick, add some powdered ginger, or replace some (or all) of the agave nectar with ginger syrup. And maybe a pinch or three of cayenne pepper.
