Cooking With Gutz

'Twas the Week Before.....

2005-12-19T10:00:00.000-06:00

A brief entry on preparations for holiday cooking.
Between now and Christmas Eve, I intend to post entries on Holiday dishes.....among them, stuffing, cranberry salad.....perhaps even a bit more on the bird itself.

In the meantime, start your bread drying for stuffing.......and get that bird out of the deep freeze and into the refrigerator for thawing......Now!

I use a whole loaf of bread. I generally use a 1 1/2 lb loaf of whole grain bread.
You can use any kind of bread you want to.
In years past, when I made batches of stuffing that used two and four loaves of bread, I added cinnamon bread, cinnamon raisin bread, even a cinnamom apple flavored bread. The point being that you can use any sort of bread your heart desires.
What is most important is that the bread be not merely stale but bone dry......so as to thoroughly absorb the broth and fat and flavorings and seasonings that you will add to it.
We will talk about those things later in the week, in a timely way.......in the meantime, here is a photo of my bread drying to give you an idea.

Layer the bread in a bowl or basket and put somewhere the mice won't get it.
Shuffle the bread around from day to day to expose all the surfaces to the air.

Get that Turkey out of the freezer and into the fridge......you're going to have to make an overnight place for it after you've cleaned it and seasoned it, so you might as well make room for it now......besides which, it's going to take at least 5 days to defrost to the point that you can work with it.

Bye for now.
Thus endeth the lesson...........

The Captain and the Cookie Monster........

2005-12-15T08:08:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I've been away for a while...........now that we've adequately dealt and dispensed with that issue, let's get back to the kitchen!

Much of what I set out to do and have done so far, is to debunk food myths, de-mystify the process of cooking and offer some simple basics to those who just don't cook......for whatever reason. Perhaps you don't have a very well supplied or equipped kitchen, or the time or inclination. Perhaps you feel that you lack the skills or talent or whatever magic (white thumb)that Mom or Grandma seemed to be born with. Maybe you don't know where to start or become dismayed by the waste that seems to be a part of cooking for one or two........when everything seems to be packaged for families of four or more. There haven't been, at this point, so many entries posted here that a bit of a review would constitute a particularly onerous task.........and that might be helpful as a way to sort of pick up the momentum with me as we launch into the swing of things once again.

If you read my sidebar message, you know how I got started cooking. Simple, really, if you are given, at an early age, the opportunity to learn how to cook, you will cook. Kids are naturals, they are enthused about learning, they adore their parents and grandparents and want to be a part of everything they do. They'd rather help you with the dishes than sit and play with their "leap pads" or watch Sesame Street.....and in the end they will have learned more if you exercise the patience to accomodate that enthusiasm.

The secondary issue I'd like to address here is: Where are the recipes?

I happened to catch an episode of "Friends" wherein the Phoebe character brought in some delicious chocolate chip cookies made from a "secret" family recipe and then, somehow, wound up losing the recipe. The whole episode centered around trying to figure what the ingredients of this recipe might be............the joke at the end being, of course, that it was the recipe from the back of the Nestle Chocolate Chip package. The other day, my brother came by and said something about getting Mom's recipe for pumpkin pie.............I told him it was the recipe from the back of the Libby Pumpkin can. The only thing she did differently was to substitute Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk for the Carnation condensed milk that the recipe calls for. In that same vein, my son wanted to get a recipe for pumpkin rolls........if you tear the label from the pumpkin can, it is on the inside.
So many of the comfort foods that we remember from our childhood are like that and thus it is with the cookies that I am going to make today.

Without further ado..........Oatmeal Raisin Cookies......straight from inside the lid of a box of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats.

.....and introducing my assistant in the kitchen, my "guest chef" if you will.............
my grand-daughter, Cheyenne.

Once a month, each child in her kindergarten class is responsible for bringing a snack for all the kids to share. At the beginning of the school year, I suggested to Cheyenne that we make home made cookies together for her to take.......she thought that was a great idea. So far we have made ginger snaps and snicker-doodles.

You've all heard the old joke about the guy who asks the plumber how much he will charge for his services and how long does he think the job will take. The plumber replies; "Thirty bucks an hour.....should be able to do it in about 2 hours." To which the guy responds; "Wow, that's pretty steep. How about if I help you?" The plumber thinks for a second and says; "Well, in that case, it'll be 50 bucks an hour and you better figure on about 4 hours."

If you are going to let a child help you in the kitchen, it's going to take longer.....allot the time. Give it a chance to be fun. Don't let yourself get so frustrated that you start taking jobs out of their hands, don't sweat the small stuff, and for god's sake don't give a hint to them that it would be easier to do it yourself.

The Recipe

1 cup (two sticks)margarine or butter, softened....[important note: do not use the low-fat spreads, like Country Crock, They are about 30% water and are not suitable for use as a substitute in recipes that call for butter or margarine.]
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
3 cups Oats, uncooked
1 cup raisins

preheat your oven to 350 degrees

Here Cheyenne measures the sugars, and adds them to the bowl with the butter.

The next step is to cream the sugars and butter together. Cheyenne knows that she can't handle the mixer by herself yet......but it is her job to turn it on and off......(and don't you dare get in a hurry and forget it!!!)

She can, however, help with scraping the mixture from the sides of the bowl and holding the bowl. I'm not sure if I've expounded upon the addition of an assortment of stainless steel bowls to your kitchen. They can be heavy and pricey if you go to a "foo foo" cooking shoppe to purchase them........but the Walmart, Target type of bowl is inexpensive, easy to keep clean and extremely valuable as a kitchen tool. A couple of large ones and a couple of medium sized ones will handle a variety of jobs, rinse clean easily in between jobs and give you plenty of elbow room for mixing ingredients that might overwhelm and spill over the sides of the largest mixing bowl in a typical set and make a mess.

Here, Cheyenne adds the eggs and vanilla extract.........She does a good job of cracking the eggs.......every once in a while we have to go diving for a bit of shell and from time to time we miss a bit............Don't sweat the small stuff...she's five. I know people my age that can't heat the water to boil an egg without it sticking. Likewise with the measuring, if she has the dexterity to fill the measure I let her do it.....in the case of a liquid, she holds the measure while I pour the ingredient. I encourage her to handle raw meats and eggs (under my supervision) so that I can inculcate the habit of habitually cleaning hands, tools and surfaces to avoid contamination. In a complete aside...........she is starting to learn fractions and how to work with fractions without even knowing it! How's that for a bonus?

When I am working with spices and seasonings around Cheyenne, I like to let her smell them, get familiar with them, so that she will be able, in time, to sort of picture what the addition of these things will do to what she is preparing. She will be more likely to experiment, tweak recipes and make them unique to herself.....more able to work "from scratch" and put something together out of leftovers and the foodstuffs she has on hand in her pantry. Thereby saving herself a ton of money, sparing the earth some of the packaging and debris that accompany pre-packaged foods and choke our landfills, not to mention cutting down on irresponsible, gluttonous waste in the face of pockets of deprivation, want, and outright starvation that still plague whole populations across the globe.
Frugal, green, tasty, healthy, easy to prepare, educational, esteem building, conscientious.......show me a down-side to this, Folks.

Climbing down off the soap-box...........we once again employ the mixer to incorporate the eggs and vanilla into the sugar and butter mixture.

We now measure and mix in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt and mix it together well.

Things get a little stiff at this point, the small hand mixer is not up to the final stages of dough making. So, unless you've got one of those nifty .. and pricey.. and space eating stand mixers, you're doing the rest of this by hand. Your junior assistant will want to help with this............it won't hurt a bit to let them try it for a while to see for themselves that this is a job that will have to wait until they are a bit bigger.....like handling the mixer on their own.

Cheyenne can, however measure the oats and add them to the bowl......we mix them in.

Here we give the same treatment to the raisins.
Cheyenne and I both like raisins..........you may not. If that is the case, leave them out and proceed to make just plain ol' oatmeal cookies, or add some other dried fruit, or mixture of dried fruits, or chunked nuts of whatever sort you desire, or chocolate morsels, or chocolate chunks.......milk, dark or white, or even butterscotch. Make your cookies your own.

We drop our soon to be cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet. There is a bit of guess work involved here in gauging just how much dough it takes to make a cookie. I never get as many cookies out of a recipe as it says I should........you just have to make a call and kind of stick to it and learn as you go. I think it is important that the "assistant" get a big hand in this......at some point or another in cooking, you're going to have to get messy, in it up to the elbows sometimes...........it helps to get the idea when it's still fun to get messy.

Bake the cookies for 10 to 12 minutes until golden brown, cool on the sheet for about a minute and transfer to a rack to finish cooling. I'm in my daughter's kitchen here and she didn't have a set of cooling racks....so I borrowed the lower rack from the oven. Since then I've acquired four wire cooling racks from the local Dollar Store for 50 cents apiece........you can pay more for heavier duty racks, but the ones I found are fine for a starter kitchen. They don't take up much in the way of storage space and they come in handy for a variety of applications. I like to use them when roasting meats like chicken breasts or chops to keep the meat up out of its own fat, and they make handy trivets for hot pans on the counter tops.

All that's left is a bit of clean up and to enjoy a cookie snack.........so far the kids that Cheyenne shares these with at school have enjoyed them and she takes a great deal of pride in having made them herself.

Like I say........Home-made cookies....where's the down side?

Enjoy......

Thus endeth the lesson..........

And now a brief word from our sponsors.........

2004-12-16T16:57:00.000-06:00

I have recently lost access to the internet at home.........

I do have books to read and I have continued to cook and take pictures........

I have public access to the internet, but the tool I use to download pictures is not available to me..........

Which makes it a bit difficult to post entries in here......

I had hoped to publish an entry on cooking for Christmas based on my Thanksgiving cooking..........I may yet be able to figure out a way to do just that.

In the meantime, if you are going to make stuffing........start drying your bread.

Take your turkey out of the deep freeze and store it in the fridge to defrost.

If all attempts to get back in here before the holidays fail in their fruition.......

Have a Merry Christmas ......and may everyone get what they deserve in the coming year.

Thus endeth the entry........

Ol' Tom comes to Dinner..........

2004-11-13T19:12:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I made a turkey salad.........which went over pretty well at my get together, by the way.
What I really had my taste buds set for though, was a turkey dinner with all (or most anyway) of the trimmings.
If you'll recall, I tore off a pretty man-sized chunk of the breast I cooked and reserved it for just that purpose..........and now it's time to prepare it.

Remember that pile of skin and fat I stuck in the Fridge? Well, its about to become the star of this show. You really didn't think I was going to go out and buy a jar of Heinz Turkey Gravy did you?
I've talked a bit about fat and flavor in various of the entries I've posted in here.
I don't like greasy food of any kind.......but I have no problem with fat as a flavoring, incorporated into my diet on my own terms.
Homemade gravy tastes as good as you remember because it has this in common with almost all sauces.......from the humblest to the haute-est........it takes its flavor from meat fat.

To get started, cut up the pieces of skin and meat and fat into thumb sized pieces and toss them into an unlined skillet or saute pan over a medium high heat.
I'm specifying an unlined pan here, because cooking over higher heats is really not a very kind thing to do to your expensive coated cookware. If all you've got is coated cookware, by all means use it.
I like the hard anodized aluminum cookware sold by Meyer...........when I do a post on cookware, I will link to some internet sources for these pans, and recommend some sizes. For every day use, the 10' omelette style is really handy.

You'll want to cook those pieces of skin and fat until they are crispy and have rendered up all their fat...........

pieces o bird in pan

fry to a crisp

While the skin is giving up its fat, cut a nice big potato into about 1 1/2 inch pieces, put it into a small sauce pan covered with water and put it on a high burner to boil.
This will take about 15 minutes.
Lately I've taken to making mashed potatoes, when I have them, with the skin on.........suit your own taste. You can peel the potato before you cut it if you prefer.

At the same time, put about 2 inches of water into your steamer, put it over a high heat, and put a green veggie of your choice, either fresh or frozen into the steamer insert. This will also take about 15 minutes.
As a side note here, if you are using "organic" veggies, or veggies from your garden, increase your steamer time to at least 20 minutes after the water starts to boil. As with any of the low acid foods, grown without benefit of modern agricultural or packaging technologies, there is a danger of toxin producing bacteria such as botulism and E-coli........My granny knew this (if you are a 20 something, your great-granny), and cooked accordingly.

cut up potato

boil potato

steaming broccoli

In the meantime, your skin and fat should be nearly done........you will, of course, have been reaching over to stir them around a bit and turn them over from time to time...

Spoon the crunchy pieces out of the fat with a slotted spoon and drain a bit on a paper towel. Chop up into little bits and return them to your fry pan. Reduce the heat to medium.

chop up crunchy pieces

return to pan

While you are doing this, if either your potatoes or greens get done, simply turn off heat and cover.........they will stay hot until you're ready for them.

cover potatoes

Now, boys and girls, for the big, bug-a-boo.........making gravy.
I don't know why people think it is so hard or so mysterious, but I've had so many people just be amazed at what, to me is the simplest and most basic of my cooking "skills". It is so easy and so basic, in fact, that I am honestly embarrassed to refer to it as a "skill".

If you can remember two things, you can make gravy.
Use equal amounts of fat and flour.........
One quarter cup of flour will thicken 2 cups of liquid.

Nothing else matters............you can make gravy out of 1/4 cup shortening, 1/4 cup flour, and 2 cups of water. It won't taste like much........(in fact it would probably taste like hell) but it's gravy.

You can use any kind of fat.......that will be the flavor base of the gravy.
You can use any kind of liquid......this will, to some degree contribute to the creaminess of the finished gravy.
Want a lovely, sinful sauce for veggies? Use 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour, and 2 cups of heavy cream.

It's just that easy...........someday, soon, I'll go into more detail about fats and gravies, but for now, we have about 1/4 cup of turkey fat, with crunchy bits of turkey skin swimming around in it, in a skillet over a medium heat. I know that it's about 1/4 cup of fat, because I've done this a few times and I'm passing it on to you. If you are ever in doubt, measure the fat........and if it falls short, extend it with some butter or a full fatted margarine to make up 1/4 cup.

Add 1/4 cup flour and stir it around to soak up all the flour.

Cook, stirring the flour/fat mixture, for about 3 minutes to cook out the flour taste.

add flour

soak up fat with flour and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes

........and then add 2 cups of liquid. You can use Turkey broth,(either a canned broth, a broth you made out of boullian cubes, or the broth you were ambitious and frugal enough to make the other night when we cooked the turkey).

You can use any kind of milk........
You can use half and half or heavy cream.........
The choice is yours........
I used 2% milk.

add liquid

You can turn up the heat a bit now, but keep on whisking the mixture to break up any lumps until the liquid in the pan is homogenous and smooth.......keep on whisking to prevent sticking.

whisk

Season to taste with pepper and salt or anything else you like or desire......

season..pepper

salt

Cook until thickened .........until it looks like the shots of molten lava bubbling, like on shows like Nova or National Geographic

cook until thickened

When that is done, drain your potatoes, transfer them to a mixing bowl and break out the electric hand mixer.

drain potatoes

Now.........we can use a little imagination here. Throw in some butter and some sour cream if you like. Throw in some garlic or some onions or scallions that you have softened in butter over a low to medium heat........butter and all.

Add enough liquid (milk or cream or broth) to make the mashed potatoes the desired texture...........
While I did this I re-heated my sliced chunk of turkey breast in the micro-wave.

All that is left is to load all this on to a plate and eat...........

Dinner is served...............

Dee-larimous...........!!!

We're on a roll now, guys.........check back soon for more fun and hearty eats in the Captain's Galley.

Until then.........enjoy your life, and be kind to yourself.

Thus endeth the lesson.............

God, Country, and Mom's Apple Pie.........

2004-11-11T21:32:00.000-06:00

Nearly everybody's Mother made (or makes) the world's best apple pie...........at least that's how it was when I was growing up.......my Mom was no exception.
She followed the recipe in The Better Homes and Garden Cookbook to the letter, but still there was something special about Mom's pie.
When I went away to Marine Corps boot camp, I wrote home often and in the course of that correspondence I told her that I wanted an apple pie when I got home on boot camp leave.

Sure enough, the day I got home I was greeted by the cinnamon smell of apple pie drifting through the house......and I can only say that it was indeed heavenly after 3 months of government issue chow. We pretty much demolished the pie after dinner, and I went out to find old buddies to get into trouble with.........I drifted back to the house in the wee hours with a pretty fair load on and went to sleep.

When I woke up I could still smell that cinnamon smell and when I stumbled out to the kitchen, Lo and behold, there was another pie cooling on the kitchen table.

You can probably guess where this is going, can't you?

Yep..............in the three months I was gone, Mom had assembled and frozen 20 apple pies. She had peeled, cored, and sliced 30 pounds of apples.
Mixed the dough for forty crusts.
..........and each day I was home she pulled out a new pie and baked it!
........ and ,By God, I ate it.
I never had the heart to tell her how sick I was of apple pie after about the 3rd day..........and I never had the heart to tell her that freezing the pies had changed the texture of them and made them taste like canned pie filling.
I dove into those pies each day like they were redheaded teenaged twins with no pubic hair...........I gained nearly 15 pounds before I got back to San Diego and swore I'd be a little more circumspect the next time I asked my Mom for something special to eat when I came home on leave.
I only messed up in that regard one other time after that.........remind me to tell you the fruitcake story someday.

Gotta love Moms............

In time my mother more or less retired from cooking and, for holiday dinners, I more or less took over.

When I looked at and tasted the first two pies I made, I knew there was something missing..........something not quite right. I followed the same recipe, but they were different somehow.........not as big as I remembered them and not as cinnamon-y.

Of course, I'd grown up in the mean time and had trashed my taste buds with beer and cigarettes for 15 years or so. So,as is my wont...., I started tweaking the recipe.
If the mountain won't come to Muhammad........we'll just haul ol' Muhammad to the mountain.

So, the pies I make now are huge.........they have double the apples in them that Mom used ( three pounds per pie), they are 10 inch pies instead of the 8 inch pies that she made, and have twice the sugar and 4 times the spices that her pies did.

Before I get started, I want to turn you on to one of the niftiest little tools in the whole wide world................and say a word or two about pie crust.

Peeling the apples is the most tedious task involved in making an apple pie. If you've got the time, it's a good ol' sittin' on the front porch, chillin' out and whittlin' apples, Andy and Opie, sort of thing to do...........country zen, you might say.

If you've got willing helpers..........it takes no time for two or three people to peel 6 pounds of apples, makes them feel like part of the process and frees you to make the dough.......thereby cutting in half the time it takes to get the pies into the oven. It also turns the whole procedure into a team effort. This a task that can be turned over to the guys.......it won't interfere with the football game and involves razor sharp knives which is a manly thing.. It also allows you to concentrate your efforts in getting the crusts ready, which can be pretty tricky and frustrating if you are not practiced at it.
.........but, if you can't count on your helpers not to pare off half the apple in the process of getting the skin off, or to make the uniformly thin slices that this "enlarged" recipe calls for, or your helpers are your kids and you want them to feel involved with the process, or introduce them to the kitchen in a fun and productive and safe way (no razor sharp knives), then the apple peeler, corer, slicer is the way to go.

A heavy duty, suction base model is available on line for about $25.00 and a clamp base model is available for $19.00.

I have the clamp based model and though it is a bit tricky to find a good place to clamp it sometimes, mine works like a charm and I wouldn't want to be without it.
Given that the suction base had a powerful suction, I would recommend it, except that I have no experience with it.........it's your call.

Either model has the same features with the difference solely residing in how they are fixed to your work surface...........and with it, I can peel, core, and perfectly slice 6 pounds of apples in less than 10 minutes start to finish.

You might argue that $25.00 is a lot of money to sink into a tool that you will use once or twice a year. To which I would counter: A) if the process of prepping apples were made easy and quick, you might make more apple pies.....(and other apple goodies), B)this is a heavy duty tool that will last you practically forever and be there whenever the spirit moves you, thereby saving you time and effort, increase your productivity and prove a wise investment in the long term.

In regards to pie crusts, this is the tricky part of pie making........a pie crust can be a bitch to handle from the rolling surface to the pan.

You can buy a ready made 9 inch crust from the grocery store (for about three bucks a pie).........but that is a lot of money to spend on something you can make yourself for about 50 cents, and a 9 inch crust is not big enough for the monsters I make........again, your call.
I say.........learn how to handle a pie crust........

Here are a few tips.

The right recipe can make all the difference in the world.........here's a good one:

4 cups flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups shortening

1/2 cup cold water
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 egg

Mix the dry ingredients together
cut in shortening
whisk liquid ingredients together and work into the dough until it will form into a non-sticky ball (don't overwork dough)
let dough rest in refrigerator until you are ready to work it into crusts.....it works better if it is chilled

when mixing dough.......flour your hands a bit to keep dough from sticking to hands
after a while it will stick to itself and unstick from your hands

This recipe was given to my Mom by my Aunt Ruth, who spent over 30 years as a professional cook specializing in pastries and pies, and declared it the best recipe she'd ever found.
For those of you who like science, something about the vinegar and the gluten in the wheat flour works to make the dough produced a little more "handle-able" and forgiving.

This recipe will make crusts for two double crust 9" pies, which pretty easily and with practice can be stretched to cover the 10" monsters I make..........
I increase the recipe by one half (takes a bit of math......and no I don't try to measure half an egg........I just throw in another egg and kind of sneak in extra flour to compensate a little at a time)........which gives me a bit of extra dough to work with. If you want to be real frugal with the left-over dough, you can make little shells (bake them for 6 to 10 minutes) and freeze them.........Nuke them when you want to use them and fill them with pudding or a fruit compote for individual deserts.

Let's get to work...........

You will need:

6 pounds of apples
a big tub or bowl of water and lemon juice concentrate (or vinegar)
4 heaping cups of sugar
8 teaspoons of cinnamon
8 dashes of nutmeg
1/2 cup flour
a couple sticks of butter (or some of that yellow shit that tastes like butter)
a couple of egg whites.......

Before I forget....these are big, fucking pies! Get full, 10 inch deep dish pie pans.

Fill a plastic tub or large bowl part way with water and pour in some lemon juice concentrate or vinegar........this will recieve the peeled apples and the juice (or vinegar) will keep them from turning brown)

water and lemon juice

and set up the peeler

Da peeler

Behold and be amazed...........be very amazed!!

peeler in action

after peeling

Rendering the peeled, cored apple into slices is a simple matter of cutting the apple in half.......dont worry about the wee bit of peel left on the apple by the peeler, no peeler I've ever used will get it all. The remaining bit here will not be noticeable in your pie.

cut into slices

slices

bowl of slices

Voila.........easy as..........well, pie!....and it only took about 9 minutes.

Whether you go out and get a peeler or not, you will save a truck load of time if you hand select large, unblemished apples ( I use a Granny Smith, by the way) rather than buying two, three pound bags of apples.
I know this may contradict my advocacy of the frugal approach.......but time and effort, to me, are parts of the equation when considering what is frugal.

A three pound bag of apples will contain about 9 to 11 or 12 medium apples.....the more apples you have to peel, the longer it will take to peel them.

Three pounds of large apples is about 5 or 6 apples........ fewer apples, less time, more flesh, less waste all around!
Apples in a bag are more likely to have bruises and bad spots that you cant see, meaning more waste of good apple flesh........
The difference in price........might be about one or two dollars. It's worth it.

We'll leave our bowl of apple slices alone for a while and make the dough and prepare the bottom crusts to recieve the filling.........

Measure your dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl and stir around a bit to mix the salt and sugar into the flour

the dry ingredients

Measure the shortening into the dry ingredients and use a dough cutter to "cut" the shortening into the dry ingredients..........

shortening

Using a dough cutter, you want to mix the shortening into the flour until you have a bowl full of pebble sized "crumblies".........
if you don't have a dough cutter, just throw your liquid ingredients in at this point and dig in with both hands.........it's a little messier, but hey....kinda fun......and it gets the job done all the same.

cut in shortening

ready for liquid ingredients

Now to measure the liquid ingredients and whisk them together........
Start with cold water and measure the vinegar into it and add the egg.

add vinegar

and egg

Whisk this around a bit to make a homogenous mixture and pour it into your flour and shortening and start mixing it all together with your hands......you can flour your hands after a bit to help release the sticky dough from your hands as the dough forms.

incorporate liquid into flour and shortening

Once youve formed a ball of dough, you can transfer it to a bit smaller bowl, drape a dampened towel over it and set it in the 'fridge for a while to rest and chill.......and you can grease and flour your pie pans and take a beer/smoke/pee/whatever break .......sex is permissible,with or without a partner, but make it a quickie eh?

put in fridge

Spread a liberal coating of shortening in your pie pans making sure to cover the entire inner surface.........(I really didn't have to specify "the inner surface" did I?

grease pans

Now,dump a gob of flour into the pie pan and twist it and turn it around to cling to all the shortening and coat all the surfaces.........when you are done with the first, tap it into the second and tap what's left in the second onto your rolling surface.

flour pans

Be liberal with the flour you put on your rolling surface........I use a marble pastry board and rolling pin. They were pretty inexpensive, can usually be found in places like target, and they are more than mere decorative affectations. Marble has the quality of remaining about 11 degrees cooler than its ambient surroundings and helps keep the dough workable.........its also why they use marble for benches in a steam bath, to keep you from blistering your goodies when you sit down.

flour board

You may notice the edges of newspaper in some of the following pictures. It is a given that some of the flour is going to work its way off the rolling surface. Newspaper will facilitate the clean up process.

A wooden pastry board, or a large wooden or plastic cutting board (18" X 18") will do as nicely........just don't use it for cutting......the scratches and grooves made by your knives will make dough stick to it no matter how much flour you use.

There are pastry mats and pastry cloths that you can roll out dough on......they may work well for you. In the absence of any of these things, the counter top or table top will do nicely.

I mentioned that one of the things that may give the beginner fits is lifting the finished crust off the board and transferring it to the pie pan. I still have to exercise care, but,as I said, this dough is comparatively easy to work with in that regard........just use lots of flour so it won't stick to the rolling surface.
My Mom rolled her crusts out on good ol' cheap wax paper and used that to transfer the crusts to the pan..........hey, whatever works for you, do that.

You are going to make two bottom crusts and two top crusts.......you have a nice uniform ball of dough in the fridge. Cut it into four pieces and shape the piece you are going to work with into a "pattie". Dredge this on both sides in the flour on the surface......respread the flour on the surface and lay your dough patty on the board.

dough on board

Spread some flour on your rolling pin and working from the center to the outside with a gentle pressure roll your dough into a rough circle. When you've flattened it out and about doubled the circumference of the patty you started out with, lift it up, spread some flour under it and turn it over.........smooth some flour on the top of the dough and roll it out some more...........

roll dough

When you've rolled your dough out to a uniform thickness about 2 or 3 inches bigger around than the pan you're going to use, you are ready to position it in the pie pan.
This is the point where most aspiring pie makers throw in the towel.........but if you are careful and patient and have followed instructions, (or use one of the "tricks") it shouldnt throw you.
My method is to gently detach the top edge of the crust from the board and roll it up loosely. Place the pan on the surface where the crust was, and gently lift the roll of dough, position it and roll it back out into the pan. You are going to seal the inner surface of your pie with egg white.........if you get a tear in your crust, just make a little "patch" with some of the overhang and glue it in place with egg white............(this is the bottom crust, who is going to see it??)

roll up

I use the same kind of brush as a pastry brush that I use for basting when barbequeing.....a 99 cent 1 1/4 inch natural bristle brush I bought at the hardware store. That is, unless you want to spend $2.50 on the same brush with the words "pastry brush" stamped on it. If you don't have a brush, use your fingers. Separate the whites from a couple of eggs into a small dish and spread over all the inner surfaces of the pie.

seal dough with egg white

Alrighty then.............the hard part is over, it's all down hill from here.
Preheat your oven at this point to 400 degrees.

We are going to thoroughly drain the apples and transfer them into a large mixing bowl. I have two large, inexpensive tin bowls that are invaluable for stuff like this..........plenty of room to work in and slop stuff around in, and easy to rinse out and keep ready to use.

This isn't hard, but you want to work rather quickly. The sugar will really draw the moisture from the apples and you want to get the filling into the crusts before the juice that is drawn out by the sugar gets to be problematical. The point being, dont get the idea that you can cut a step by mixing the filling up before hand. Now.........if you have a partner, he or she can make the filling while you are sealing the crusts, and transfer it into the pies while you are making the top crusts.
However you do it, you want to mix the filling and immediately put it into the shells..............and don't forget to allow time for the oven to preheat!!!

As a side note or two here;

I saw on a cooking show that putting a flat (not the kind with sides) cookie sheet under the pies while they bake will make for a flakier bottom crust........hey, worth a shot, can't hurt.

No matter how carefully you seal your pies, one or the other or both is going to leak sugary liquid into the inside of your oven. Put some foil under them........that liquid is going to carmelize and become as hard as a diamond, and stick to the floor of your oven like the dates on a tombstone.

The pies can't go onto two different levels unless you plan to switch them around and add a little time to the total they are in the oven........you want them side by side, not touching either each other or the sides or back of the oven. The rack you put them on will be in the middle position.

These pies are really thick....they'll be in there for 15 or twenty minutes longer than the recipe calls for and at 400 degrees the whole time. You'll want to take strips of foil and loosely cover the crimped edges of the pie until the last 20 minutes or so of cooking..........this is also why the thickness of the slices is so critical.
If you don't allow a little extra cooking time, the apples will be a little too "al dente" and a little too uncooked tasting.

O.K. where were we............oh yeah, making the filling.

Add the sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg to the drained apples, mix all up and divide in equal measure into the shells..........there will be a good bit of liquid in the bottom of the bowl........scrape it into your measure and divide it equally into the shells.

add sugar to apples

add flour

cinnamon

nutmeg

mix well

I use a stick of real butter per pie cut into pats and dotted around the filling.
Excessive???.........of course it is, but have you ever heard of a health food pie.
I repeat, this is not a health food blog.......I am a pagan and a hedonist.
This is pure indulgence, folks. So unless your heart is already on the verge of exploding from too many cocktails, or cigarettes, or cheeseburgers, or deep fat fried chunks of processed soy bean derivatives or melted cheese cassaroles..........use the butter.
If you insist on using margarine, use one that has the same fat content as butter (check the label). The low fat spreads replace the fat they remove with water and aren't very good substitutes for either butter or a full fatted margarine in recipes.

dot with butter

Now all that remains is to repeat the process of crust making to get a couple of tops on these pies and get them in the oven.
Run another bead of egg white around the rim of each pie before you set the top crust on it..........position the top crust and trim it to the edge of the pie pan.

trim crust

Crimping the edges is a simple matter of placing two fingers of one hand on the edge of the crust separated by the width of a finger. Take the index finger of the other hand and pull up on the crust to create a fluted effect.
Either that or go around the crust with a fork and press it down gently to create a seal, leaving the impression of the tines of the fork on the edge of the crust.
The point is to seal the top to the bottom and (ideally) prevent the juice of the filling from boiling out onto the bottom of your oven. You want to keep all that good stuff in the pie.

crimp edges

We are now going to brush the entire tops of the pies with milk and sprinkle sugar on them to glaze them..........

brush with milk

sprinkle with sugar

.........and cut vents in them. This is important.......if you are going to get a boil over, you don't mind if it happens onto the crust.

cut vents

Now to pop them into the pre-heated oven........arranging them on the middle rack as we discussed earlier.

The pies will be in there for about an hour and 15 minutes. We'll do a little clean up.........remember the newspaper?

clean up

Aren't I clever.........?

Judging when to take the pies out of the oven is a bit of a zen, "use the force Luke" sort of a deal....... or you can take a fork and reach into one of the vents and fish a bit of filling out. Careful though.....this stuff is sticky and hot enough to cause 4th degree burns.

In any event, when the pies have been in for about 50 minutes, remove the foil you used to shield the edges so the tops can brown nicely for about 15 or 20 minutes.

These babies will never win first prize in a beauty contest, or be featured in one of those magazines you read in a dentist's office, but they're as pretty as you thought the girl you married was on your wedding night and right up there with sex in terms of the sensual delight you will derive from the caramelly sweet apple flavor and cinnamon aroma.
One 10 inch pie is thick enough and dense enough with fruit to give up eight pieces that will stuff you pretty good ........especially if you serve it with a premium, high butter fat vanilla ice cream like Haagen-Dazs.........(go ahead, treat yourself after all that work, why not???)

So, what are you waiting for...........?

Go make a pie! Share it with people you care for.

Enjoy..........

Thus endeth the lesson

Turkey............not just for Thanksgiving anymore!

2004-11-09T20:59:00.000-06:00

Time was, (long ago in a galaxy far, far, away.......) people ate Turkey once a year.
They anticipated it, salivated for it, had strange little dreams about it that you didn't tell to anyone except your priest.....(I'm not a catholic, but on the sliding scale of dreams, I would imagine it to be no more than a two Hail Mary dream, not a big enough deal to trot out the short-handled cat-o-nine-tails and the Our Fathers).
At any rate, we ate turkey dinner, reheated turkey dinner, ate turkey cassarole, turkey ala king, and at last turkey salad...........

This was all before cholesterol became the dietary bug-a-booo of the baby boomers, ......and some brilliant snake oil salesman got the idea of selling turkey as the health food that was going to save us all from hamburgers and hot dogs and Kentucky Fried chicken.
Of course, the reality is that dark turkey meat has as much saturated fat in it as cheap bacon and that is what is generally sold as ground turkey meat.........
and turkey breast, infused with butter fat (you do know that is what self-basting means don't you?),and cooked with the skin on, is on the order of roast beef when you start counting calories from fat.
By the same token, tofu rolled in breading, deep fried in pig fat and packaged for the microwave is right up there with Big Macs and fries........

I said from the outset, that this wasn't a health food blog.......nor is it a politically correct one, nor is it exclusively about cooking.........it's about attitude, about food and life and fun and flavor. I am not a health food advocate because, for the most part I think it is a dishonest, corporate hype, a waste of resource and money milked out of those who can least afford it and a waste of time. In many cases it's down right dangerous. If it is not done just right, it can lead to protein shortages that cause the body to start eating its own protein.......at best a less healthy ratio of fat to muscle and at worst, anorexia. Do you really believe the sallow skinned, skeletal looking vegan is healthier than the well fed, rosy cheeked, energetic omnivore that humans have evolved to be.
......but for the most part, it has no balls, it has no juice, it's no god-damned fun, it's too fucking prissy.I believe in celebrating appetite, and pursuing pleasure,.........but I also believe in eating healthy foods and not commiting slow suicide with a dinner fork.
So, eat and enjoy, dont worry about it........but don't be a damned fool about it. I am not advocating gluttony.
Drink..........but don't drink so much that it is so much more than your liver can do to process the excess alcohol that it can't handle it's primary job of processing fat and cholesterol.
Eat bread.........and not that tasteless white shit .......real bread, made out of real grains........eat legumes (fucking beans people), and root veggies and green leafy stuff and fruits and nuts.
Give up the gatorade and the Sunny-D and the other over-priced Adult Kool-Ades and drink real juice..............
And get off your rapidly spreading ass and excercise..........walk, run, play, and sweat.
......but I digress.
So now we can eat turkey all year long.........and what's even better, you can find whole breasts and pieces of parts for as little as $.99 a pound all year long. Which makes it inexpensive, tasty, easy to prepare and present in a savory fashion, as the centerpiece of a nice dinner, or the ingredient in a tasty sandwich, salad or cassarole..............you haven't heard the last of ol' Tom Turkey with this entry...........no-siree-bob.

I like to roast meats, I really don't think you can do much to help the flavor of good meat...........you can mask the flavor of bad meat, but ........why? You can't remoisten or re-flavor meat you've over-cooked by boiling the piss out of it. I enjoy a fire seasoned meat and cook over hickory coals as much as possible......you may prefer mesquite or a fruit wood.........but the oven is just as good.

I don't want to keep repeating myself as to the set up of a Weber Kettle........go back to the rib entry.........or use an oven.

If you haven't guessed by now, boys and girls, we're going to cook a turkey breast.

Every summer, my Dad's side of the family gets together for a good old fashioned pot-luck gathering...........and I normally bring a roast turkey breast, torn into sandwich type shreds......

This year, I decided to make it into a turkey salad.........loosely based on a chicken salad that I had at one of the area's "trendy" restaurants...(read: one meal for the price of two, presented like some half assed edible floral arrangement, in a joint already turning back into a truck-stop diner by the time you find out it is trendy.......the glitterati having moved on rather than rub elbows with the lumpen proletariate).
I beefed up the recipe a bit......served it in satisfying portions with a nutritious and tasty bread product..........and adopted it as my own.

It all starts out with the good ol' $.99 a pound turkey breast.........properly defrosted and properly rinsed........remember food safety, dear readers......rinse the meat, wash the hands and tools and surfaces and go through the towels!

Now, we're going to take our trusty kitchen shears......or our nice sharp paring or boning knife.........and trim off all the nice, fatty, loose dangly, flappy bits of skin.
We're going to save this for now (that is another entry)......but trust kindly ol' Uncle Cecil on this one dears and put it in a little tupperware box or a ziplock baggie and stick this pile of fat and skin in the fridge.......we'll get back to it in a day or so.
Trim the skin around the neck, and the wing joints and around the cavity.....get all you can.

We're going to be minimalist here in our seasoning.........but this is my way. I am going to rub this down, inside and out with worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper.
You can use whatever floats your boat.........rubbed sage, garlic, olive oil, hot sauce, Lawrey's Seasoned Salt..........whatever.
We are going to put it on a roast rack and pop it into the weber, set up for indirect heat.
If you are using your oven, preheat it to 350 degrees (why, in the name of fuck, don't they have a degree sign on a computer keyboard somewhere?)
We have inserted an meat thermometer so that the point comes to rest in the thickest part of the meat, away from the bone, and situated so that it can be easily read.
It will be done in about an hour and a half or so.........

If you don't have a roast rack, get one.........or get a couple of cake cooling racks and set them up over a cake pan.......anything so that your roast does not wind up swimming in the fat that will render off of it in the cooking process.
Jerry rig some skewers or a couple of chop sticks to get it up off the bottom of the pan...........
Of course,in a weber or other cooker you can just put it on the grill........but a rack will really come in handy when handling this and other meats on and off the grill or out of the oven. They are not expensive, practically indestrucible and will come in so handy that they are worth having as a piece of basic kitchen equipment.

The idea that birds have to be cooked to an internal temperature of 180 degrees has attained "Ten Commandment" status.........carved in stone by the finger of Almighty God...........and that is why most of us remember turkey as a dry and nearly tasteless meat (except as leftovers).........
It is also why there are about ten thousand different ways to cook a turkey, mostly designed to keep them moist........all of them to some degree or another doomed to failure by the fact that they are overcooked at 180 degrees no matter how you cook them.
I would almost believe that it was a myth started deliberately by the people that sell that gelatinous canned cranberry crap.........I like a good cranberry salad.....I regard the aforementioned substance as only a barely palateable means of helping to choke down a terminally dry mouthful of turkey.

Your turkey is going to keep on cooking for a while even after it is removed from the heat............at 180 degrees it is already overcooked.
Take it out of the heat when it hits about 155 degrees (or 160 degrees if you are really paranoid).......in about 15 minutes of "resting", the breast will have attained a temperature of about 165 degrees, which is "just done".
With pork, chicken and turkey, especially the leaner portions of these two meats, "just done" is moist and tender and flavorful.
Add one or two easy to read meat thermometers and an "instant read" thermometer......they are a must have item.
You can use the "pop up" timers.........but they are generally set for 180 degrees, and will result in dry overcooked meat..........I would rely on judgement before I counted on a pop up.

I prepared this at the end of July. With the holidays now just around the corner, you can easily convert this to a whole bird. Stick the thermometer into the thigh at its thickest point, being careful not to let the point come to rest against bone.
Cook a whole bird Upside down, Unstuffed, and Uncovered.
Adjust your cooking times up according to the package directions, with allowances for the fact that you are going to take it off the fire at 155 to 160 degrees. Don't worry too much about the bird getting cold on you........it can rest up to about 30 minutes while you prepare other things and still be hot when you carve it.
If you want to loosely stuff the cavity........use chunks of onion and celery top....or apples and oranges cut into wedges. Turn the bird breast side up for about the last half hour of cooking to brown the breast.
If you want that "cooked in the bird" flavor in your stuffing, cook the stuffing in a crock pot and use the drippings (after you've saved some back for your gravy) that you have caught in a pan under the rack and sucked up with a baster.
Just pour the drippings over the stuffing in the crock pot as it cooks.........safer, makes a better turkey, and the stuffing tastes like it was cooked in the bird.
It also makes the stuffing easier to serve and the bird easier to carve and handle.
Tricky, eh? (I'm practicing my Canadian........*winks*.)

So, now the bird is resting.........if you were to carve off a little bite in about 15 minutes or so, you would find it to be moist and succulent, with a lovely creamy texture you never thought possible in turkey white meat, and just bursting with "don't need nothing else" flavor.

Like ol' Justin Wilson used to say, "I guar-on-tee it!"

Alrighty, then........we've let that turkey rest and cool off enough to handle.............first,I ripped off a big enough chunk of the breast to save back for a turkey dinner for myself at a later time......but that is another entry.
Then I proceeded to tear the rest of the meat from the carcass.
I exposed and cut out the wishbone, which you can clean the meat from and let dry a bit to pull apart with your roomie, spouse, significant other or one of your kids.......and if you get the big half, you can make a wish! (hint.....just hold on and let them do the pulling, most of the time it will break on their side)

After I'd torn all the meat from the bone, I then diced it into about a 3/8 inch dice or a little bigger.......your choice. For you guys (assuming some average sizes) that's the size of the end of your pinky........Ladies, the end of your ring finger. That would describe the smallest you'd want to cut this.........we are going for chunky here.

If you are really ambitious and frugal, you can cover the stripped carcass with water in a pan, throw in a couple of onions and some celery tops, and simmer it for about an hour and a half to make a nice broth. Strain the broth and bag up in 2 cup portions and freeze them on a cookie sheet........and stack them like little flat bricks in your freezer to defrost and use as soup stock or for gravy.

Of course, if you are a couple or a small family, you can sit down to a nice turkey dinner at this point...(once you make the taters and gravy) and turn the leftovers into a salad like this.

tear up turkey

wishbone

3/8 " dice

Now I'm going to process the veggies........
I'm going to dice up and add celery, red onion, and green pepper.
I've used three pics of the process of chopping the green pepper to show you an easy way to accomplish this.

Cut the ends off the pepper and pop out the stem. Lift out the seeds and discard Cut the "barrel" three times along the membrane inside and trim the membrane and discard. Then chop or dice or chunk the remaining pieces into the size you desire.........this is an easy way to get the sort of pieces you need to create a julienne for a salad.

I would normally add raisins or other dried fruit to this, because that is what I like..........this time I added seedless grapes cut in half. You can add chunks of apple or pear or any other fresh fruit you prefer, but I would recommend fruits that are firm in texture.

I then added pecans roughly chopped into chunks..........you can use any kind of nut you like, or leave them out altogether.

A word about buying nut meats.........look for them on sale all year round. Don't wait until the holidays when they are $7.00 a pound. This is a safe stock up item, you know you will use them in cookies and things of that nature.........and if you have them on hand you will use them as a healthful snack. Nuts are high in fat, but it's the good fat. The kind of fat that keeps the hair glossy and supple, the skin smooth and elastic, and the joints and organ muscles lubricated. It's the kind of fat that doesn't pile up in the arteries and doesn't make the liver work overtime processing. It is the kind of fat that helps the liver and your body keep the bad stuff under control..........throw some in your cereal, throw them in your salads, mix them with dried and fresh fruits, if you own a bread machine (more on that later), throw a handful in with your next batch of bread when you put the mix in the machine.

celery

onion

green pepper

green pepper 2

green pepper3

grapes

pecans

chop pecans

I then folded in the Miracle Whip.............

stir in m whip

Use plenty of Miracle Whip to coat all the ingredients. You can use mayonaise if you prefer it, but if you are going to offer this at a picnic or buffet style supper, I would recommend Miracle Whip.......the higher vinegar content will make the salad safer if it is going to be sitting out of the refrigerator for any length of time, especially in the summertime.

The idea in making this salad, is not to wind up with a mushy conglomeration that you don't have to chew, but to have a meaty sandwich that is crunchy and has texture and sweetness and is hearty, and chewy enough to feel like you are actually consuming a meal. It also incorporates a variety of fresh veggies and fruits and nuts to constitute something healthful and nutritious.

I serve it in a pita pocket, which can be found in a variety in almost any grocery store. I like the whole wheat pockets, but there are onion flavored pockets, garlic flavored ones..........you name it.
The flour used in making even the plain white pita pockets is less processed than in the typical Wonder bread type white bread or that mushy brown stuff that is passed off as wheat bread to those who want to pretend that they are eating healthy foods.

Warming the pockets a few seconds in the 'wave will make them more pliable, less brittle and less likely to fall apart on you once you load them with salad.

turkey salad in a pita pocket served with an ice cold beer.........

The result is a meal in a sandwich, with little surprising bursts of sweetnesses and textures.......served with a bowl of tomato soup or cream soup of your choice, it makes for not only a colorful, different and fun, but healthy and hearty lunch for the manliest of men, the most delicate of ladies and the pickiest of children.

Enjoy..............

The next time we gather in the Captains Galley, we will make the monster apple pies that I also took to the get together..........another item just in time for the holidays.

In the days to come, we will revisit that chunk of turkey I reserved and those mysterious bits of skin and fat...........and rethink mashed potatoes for the big person (and the lazy person).

The summer had also to render a last session at the grill for chicken wings ala Captain so keep on reading............the Captain is back in the kitchen, and you are invited.

Thus endeth the lesson............

Here's to swimmin' with bowlegged wimmen..........

2004-07-25T04:51:00.000-05:00

There be seafood here..............!!!

Some of the nicest meals a person can prepare, are the simplest and quickest. An excellant example of this is seafood of almost all kinds. If you enjoy the flavor of fish, shrimp, scallops, lobster etc...., then you know that there really is very little you have to do to season or prepare it. Seafoods can, generally, be grilled, baked, poached, sauteed, fried, boiled...........you name it. It is almost impossible to fuck up seafood, unless of course you under or over cook it..........it is a pretty forgiving foodstuff for the beginning or inexperienced cook.

A few weeks ago, I spotted some 10-12 count shrimp (10 to 12 per pound......about the size of small lobsters!) and some 10-12 count scallops on sale for around $7.00 per pound at Krogers. If you are familiar with prices, then you'll know that these items, at this size normally sell for $10.00 to $12.00 per pound.

I snagged a couple of pounds of each. At home, I took them out of the store packaging, laid them out on wax paper on a cookie sheet, and stuck them in the freezer until they were just frozen. I was then able to bag them up loose in a half-gallon zip-lock bag............when I was ready to make a meal out of them I could take out the number I wanted to prepare without defrosting the whole mess just to get them apart. Works like a charm for a lot of foods sold in packages too big for a single person or a couple to consume at one sitting. Foods repackaged in this way will go 3 or 4 months or better in the freezer without any discernible loss in quality. This also allows the single person, couple or small family to take advantage of sales on large packages, or whole cuts of meat that often mean a savings of nearly half what you would spend on a smaller package. It also allows having a stock of a variety of meats, available in any quantity the occasion calls for, should you find yourself cooking for guests.

So tonight I'm going to fix myself a quick, easy, nice supper.............

I defrosted 6 each of the shrimp and scallops...........I took them out of the freezer and stuck them in the fridge two days ahead. Sticking them in a baggie and putting them in a bowl of water will defrost them in a few hours.

I decided to have frozen asparagus spears (little late in the season for the fresh stuff), simmered to a bright green "al dente" state in a skillet, over a medium heat, in a half stick of butter. For my starch, I decided on a steamed Yam (a sweet potato would have made for a nice color contrast, but the selection at the store was pretty poor).

I have this cheap enamel pot with a pasta insert and a steamer bowl. I can't remember when I bought it, but I'm reasonably certain it was over 25 years ago...........and I use the shit out of it. Put that on your list of really handy things to have in a kitchen...............

I put about two inches of water in it and put in on a back burner over a medium high heat.

I peeled and cubed the Yam, put the basket in the pot, and covered it..........the yam will be done in about 15 or 20 minutes.

In the meantime, I put a half stick of butter in one 10" sautee pan (for the asparagus) and a whole stick of butter in another 10' sautee pan (for the meat) and put them on a medium heat. You have to be careful here not to scorch the butter by heating it too fast.

I put a spoonful of minced garlic in the pan that the shrimp and scallops were going in to..............

The shrimp had been deveined already, so all I had to do was peel off the shell, toss them in the pan with the scallops and season them with salt and pepper and the juice of a whole lemon (well almost a whole lemon, I saved a couple of chunks to squeeze over the food at the table).

Just before I put the meat in the pan, I turned up the heat..........putting the food in when things began to sizzle a bit.........(again, not scorching the butter).
I didn't really sautee the seafood so much as I poached it.

At the same time, I put the asparagus in its pan.............

While all this was going on, the yam cooked through. (I tested it by sticking a fork in it.) I turned the flame off under it..........the hot water kept it hot until I was ready to serve it.

I cooked the meat for about 7 or 8 minutes and turned each piece over to cook about the same amount of time on the other side. I shuffled the asparagus around from time to time to keep it from actually frying.........it was done a bit before the shrimp and scallops, so I simply turned the flame off and left it in the pan.

When the seafood was done, I transferred it to a plate. What was left in the pan was a buttery, garlicky, lemony liquid.........I splashed in a bit of the wine I was going to drink with my meal, and let it reduce while I finshed loading my plate.

Most of the cooks I've read or seen on television say to forget about so-called cooking wine. Use what you drink.............if it's not good enough to drink, then its not good enough to cook with.

I picked up a $6.00 bottle of Beringer White Merlot and chilled it...........I like merlot, but I'd never tried a white merlot. It turned out to be fruity and sweet. It had enough body to stand up to the butter and garlic, a bit of spice and a nice soft finish. A refreshing and cleansing beverage that didn't walk all over the meal the way a red might have, nor did it tuck its head between its legs and hide the way a chardonnay might have...........I was thinking a spicy gewurtztraminer might have been ok, but this was nice.

I spooned a bit of the sauce from the pan over the shrimp and scallops,and melted some butter over the yam and sprinkled on some brown sugar....

At last the taste test............

Good stuff Maynard.........

Cheers...!!!

All in all, this meal cost about 3 bucks more than a King-sized #8 combo with cheese.........and if put on a scale, probably amounted to about a half pound more food. I didn't count the calories up...........but I'll bet, butter and all, it consisted of considerably fewer than would have been in the nasty ol' booger 'n flies. In terms of time and convenience..............'bout the same. The dishes were minimal.........three pans, a plate, a glass and assorted utensils and tools.

Be kind to yourselves people...........all them sons of bitches that civility demands a show of niceness and consideration towards all day long most likely don't deserve it half as much as you do.

I'm going to a family get-together this weekend, and I'm taking a chunky turkey salad with some surprising ingredients.........and two monster apple pies.

Guess what we'll be cooking next time kiddies.........it's not as hard as you think.

Bon appetit............

Thus endeth the lesson...........

A Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough....a Flask of Wine, a Bowl of Stew, and Thou......

2004-07-19T11:01:00.000-05:00

Before we dive into the nitty gritty, I'd like to discuss a thing or two.

If you type the word "recipes" into google, you get twenty nine fucking million one hundred thousand entries!!!

I use recipes, sometimes............but mostly I just cook. Over the years I've acquired a certain familiarity with how things work food-wise. I've made some inedible mistakes from time to time, but that is part of learning.

One of the things I'd like to do here is take some of the mystery out of the preparation of simple foods.

So, in that light...............what is a stew?......or a chowder, for that matter.

It is broth, with or with out meat, with other shit in it............an olio.

olio

\O"li*o\, n. [Sp. olla a round earthen pot, a dish of boiled or stewed meat, fr. L. olla a pot, dish. Cf. Olla, Olla-podrida.] 1. A dish of stewed meat of different kinds. [Obs.]

Besides a good olio, the dishes were trifling. --Evelyn.

2. A mixture; a medley. --Dryden.

3. (Mus.) A collection of miscellaneous pieces.

Pretty simple, eh?

I've never used barley in a soup or stew before.............but a friend of mine asked for a beef and barley concoction, so I undertook to accommodate her.
After all, it's just another ingredient in the "olio".

However, it does help to understand something about barley.

While not the kind of fanatic purist that would insist on using barley grown only in certified virgin elf shit and hand hulled, one kernel at a time, as a act of penance by reformed whalers and seal pup hunters, I do like whole grains and try to use the most wholesome I can find.

The most common form of barley available in the average large grocery store, is pearled barley. Sometimes they will offer different levels of pearling...........that is, from less refined to more refined. I would choose the least refined barley I could find; I would not drive all over hell and gone looking for pot barley or hulled barley...................but if they happened to be on the shelf next to the pearled barley, I would certainly use them. I would not buy or use "quick cooking" barley. Good things are worth the time and trouble.
Barley, unlike most other grains, has fiber all through the kernel and not just in the bran, or endosperm (giggle............he said sperm), so when you consider all the other things we are going to put in our stew, you really aren't gaining much by being a nut about it.

One thing you do need to know about barley, or rice, or oats or anything else you are going to add to a stew, is how much liquid it is going to suck up...........and barley sucks up a lot. One cup of barley will absorb 3 cups of liquid.........so you have to compensate.

Each of the stews I prepared filled up a 5 quart dutch oven. I used one cup of barley and it really made the stews thick with barley. It took up so much room that I didn't have room to add the 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes in juice that I normally add to my stew.............but now that I've eaten a bowl of each, I can always add the tomatoes before I heat them up again. If you've got a 6 quart or larger dutch oven or a 6 qt crock pot, I would suggest using that.

So,let's get started...........where's the beef???

You can use any kind or cut of beef you like..........what ever is cheap. Do not go out and buy so called "stew beef". Stew beef is the biggest rip off in the supermarket..............it is cheap beef scraps cubed up and sold for about twice as much as the cut that it came off of. Buy a thick two pound chunk of roast or round steak or what ever is on sale for $1.49 a pound or less.

I happened to have a nearly 4 lb. round steak in the freezer that I bought the last time it was on sale.

I rinsed it and patted it dry with a tea towel..........(paper towels cost money, dish towels wash).........of course that contaminated the towel, so I chucked it in the hamper after I used it.

As I said, I am making two versions of this stew...........one with smaller pieces and one that is really chunky..........a knife and fork version that I call "big stew".

So, I cut my round steak in half and cubed one half to 3/4" pieces and the other to about 1 1/2" chunks............

I pulled out my 5 qt. cast iron kettles poured 4 cups (two cans) of beef broth in each and turned a low flame under them. (I normally use two cups of beef broth, but remember, we're compensating for the juice the barley will absorb) I pre-heated the oven to 300 degrees (most of the cooking is going to be in the oven, it keeps things from sticking) and started preheating a skillet to brown the meat.

YOU MUST BROWN THE MEAT!!! If you've ever noticed the make-your-mouth-water, knock-you-to-your-knees aroma wafting about a steak house, (I've known veggies come to the edge of converting when they smelled that smell) then you know what effect the Maillard Reaction has on the flavor and aroma of meat. If you don't brown meat, you'll wind up with tasteless, grey chunks of boiled animal protein floating around in an otherwise perfectly good stew. The link I provided is very informative as to why and how...............take a minute or two and check it out. Then you'll know something about cooking that you can apply to dozens of other dishes.......and that's the whole idea.

So, where were we.............?

Ahh, yes..........kettles and browning and such-like.........

broth in kettle 4 cups

preheating skillet

Brown the meat in batches and throw in kettle.......

Now, deglaze the skillet...........all that brown stuff on the bottom of the skillet is just chuck to the nuts with good ol' "maillard" flavor. Deglazing is covered in that link I gave you above, but it is nothing more than pouring liquid into the hot pan, and scraping the bits off the bottom while the liquid boils. It only takes a minute or two, and saves you a hell of a scrubbing job later. If deglazing is done right, the pan is nearly clean when you pour the liquid out of it.

What to do with the liquid, you ask??? Why pour it in the pan.......it is concentrated flavor. You can use water, wine, broth.......whatever.

deglaze the pan while still sizzling hot....

Season with garlic, worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper to taste.........use your imagination here...........you can put any kind of seasoning in that your little heart desires. I use pre-chopped garlic because I think it is just as aromatic and flavorful as freshly chopped cloves and I don't wind up throwing any away. Also, the little jars are great for storing little odd screws and things in a garage or workshop.

I diced up a couple of medium onions for the small stew and peeled four onions and chucked them in the big stew whole..........

I then rinsed and cut some celery...........small pieces for the small stew and big chunks for the big stew...........

With those ingredients added and starting to simmer in the broth, I moved the kettles (covered) into the oven.

I had some time on my hands here, so I went ahead and chunked up the carrots........I used those cute little baby carrots for the small stew, but you don't have to.

The batteries on my camera started to fizzle out on me at this point, but I have made sure I had spares on hand since a set shot craps on me the night my grand-daughter was born last August.
When a set of high-dollar camera batteries will no longer support the "live-view" function of a digital camera, they still have tons of juice in them for things like remote controls...........and ladies, they've got enough juice left in them to rock your world a time or two even if you use one of those industrial sized vibes............
just stick them in the little box the new batteries came out of and mark it with an X or something (so you'll know they are partly spent) with the indelible laundry marker you keep in the junk drawer to mark plastic freezer bags with............which of course you have, don't you?

So, here's a gratuitous test shot of Uncle Cecil's pantry with the new batteries.......

I let that simmer for about an hour in the oven........I checked it from time to time, (if it gets to boiling, turn the oven down a bit......you just want it to simmer)

After an hour, I put in the hard veggies, carrots and potatoes..........and started the barley cooking.............

I used those little red potatoes, but you can use anything you like. I left them whole for the big stew and cut them in half for the little stew.........

Back in the oven while the barley cooks.........

I measured out 2 cups of barley, and opened two cans (four cups) of beef broth.
IF YOU WANT A THICK BROTH FOR YOUR FINISHED STEW, RESERVE ONE CUP OF BROTH AT THIS POINT. If you want a thinner broth for your stew, go ahead and throw both cans in the pan.
This is about half the liquid that the barley needs to cook...........I'm going to cook it on a very low heat until it has just absorbed almost all the broth. This will take about 45 mins, give or take.

While the barley is cooking, I cut up my mushrooms, I'm going to add them next.
I used button mushrooms for the small stew and portobello caps for the big stew.
I cut the big buttons in thirds, the medium sized ones in half, and the little ones I left whole................it goes with out saying, that you can use any kind of 'roons you like (or leave them out altogether). I cut the portobellos into half inch think slices.

When the potatoes and carrots had been cooking for about half hour, I chucked in the mushrooms...........

It doesn't take very long for the mushrooms to start to cook, so when the barley had absorbed all the liquid I gave it, I divided it between the pans and folded it in.

You want to let that simmer for a while, (in the oven)and your oven temp may be down around 225 to 250 by now.............it's kind of a kentucky windage thing. You'll want to gently stir it around from time to time, and if the barley is sucking up too much of the broth, don't be afraid to add a little water.

We are going to add three more things to our stew............

a bit of broth thickened with cornstarch.....(remember the broth we reserved???)

some fresh green beans to both pots,

and some chunks of ear corn to the big stew.

So, we can take a break for about 20 minutes or so, and then start getting those things ready.

Shuck, rinse, and trim off tip and ends of corn cobs and cut into about 2 inch long chunks.

We've got about a cup of broth in our measure. Put four tablespoons of cornstarch in it and mix it up really good with a fork...........this can be done with any liquid, but it has to be no warmer than room temperature..........otherwise it will get lumpy.

Pinch the stem ends of the beans. You can use frozen green beans here, and you can also use the little frozen corn cobs if these things are not in season. They don't take very long to cook. Mostly, they sort of sit on top of everything and steam. It takes about 15 or twenty minutes.

Divide the cornstarch mixture into the two kettles and stir in, put the cobs in and lay the beans across the top..........

Chuck 'em back in the oven for about 20 minutes................turn off the oven. The oven will stay plenty hot, and the stew itself is hot enough to cook the corn and beans. During this time you can set your table, and tidy up a bit.........Remember?........I like to clean as I go, it makes for a more leisurely post-prandial experience whether you are dining alone or with company

I bought a bottle of Lindeman's Bin 45 Cab Sav for this meal. I really don't know fuck-shit about wine, but I read labels, I know what flavors and qualities I like, I don't buy expensive wines, and I'm not afraid to try new things. A really fine wine would be lost on my smoke blasted palate anyway. I've had good luck with Lindeman wines in the past........and, at $6.99 (on sale at Kroger) the price was right.

So, if you have a nice, robust bottle of red wine at hand, this is the time to open it and let it breathe a bit.

There is nothing particularly depressing about being alone, but the most deliberately unfettered soul has the occasional bout of loneliness. Nothing emphasizes loneliness more than getting in the habit of poking some dog-shit food-like substance in your face right out of the can or package. It makes just as much sense to get in the habit of making even a solo dinner a nice occasion. What are a couple extra dishes, an extra few minutes of preparation, or an extra few bucks? In a few days, you'll leave your house or apartment, lock the door behind you and go somewhere on a whim, without so much as a by your leave......or you'll meet someone interesting or nice and say: "Hey, why don't you come over for a beer, or a movie, or a snack?".....or you will curl up on your couch with that novel you've been wanting to read, without somebody deciding to choose that time to turn into a complete moron with no place else to go and nothing better to do than take their emotional instabilities out on you............as if there weren't big rocks laying around every-fucking-where for people like that to hurt themselves on instead of beating up on you...............and you'll remember why you decided to stay single for a while.

But I digress...........

The stew is done..........

I bought a crusty loaf of foccacia bread from the Kroger bakery.........wrapped it in a cloth napkin and put it in the oven (its been off for 20 mins, remember?) to warm.....

and poured a bit of extra-virgin olive oil in a small dish to dip the bread in, intead of using butter..........buy a nice olive oil just for that purpose, it should say on the label...

The small stew..........

The big stew...........

And, of course the obligatory gustatory scenes........

cheers....the wine paired well with the stew

When serving the "big stew", people are going to look at it and wonder..... "how in the fuck are we supposed to eat this?" Be a good host and show them it is ok to use their fingers...........

All in all, the stews came out quite good. It's been a while since I've had occasion to use my cast iron kettles, one advantage of which (for women especially), is that it adds iron to your food. When my son left for the service, the era of cooking big vats of things pretty much came to an end in my family except at holidays...........thus I had forgotten that I sometimes had a tendency to overfill my 5 qt pans. This is why I didn't add the tomatoes...........which I really rather regret, as I do like tomatoes floating around in my stew. This is also why I bought an 8 qt cast iron kettle and a 6 qt crock pot.

The point being, that you can add or subtract from this basic formula all you like........cut it in half, reduce the amount of barley.........whatever.

It's meat, broth and stuff............seasoned any way you damn well please. Instead of barley, you can add rice, or pasta, or dumplings, or dried beans.....or nothing.
Just remember to compensate for the liquid they absorb and brown-the-fucking-meat-because-now-you-know-why-and-you-don't-have-any-excuse.

Bon Appetite, kids..............by way of apoligizing to poor ol' Omar Khayyam for what I did to him in the title of this piece, the least I can do is get him right in closing..........

"And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted-"Open then the Door!

You know how little while we have to stay,

And, once departed, may return no more.""

......from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Be kind to yourselves, feed yourselves.......enjoy the flavor of life!

Thus endeth the lesson...........

And on the seventh day, God discovered something else ribs were good for...............

2004-07-09T16:05:00.000-05:00

"And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it, and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh."
Daniel.......chapter 7, verse 5

Let's talk about ribs for a bit.

I use pork spare ribs. True, they have a lot of fat in them, but its the fat that makes meat tasty in and of itself. If you want "heart-healthy" you're only going to find a handful of entries here that you can use......sorry. You can pony up for baby-backs, or danish ribs, or country style ribs, or beef ribs. The principle of cooking is the same.

I am not a "rib snob". Fucking ribs are ribs people. In the ante-bellum south,they were one of the parts of the pig/cow that white people didn't want, like tripe.
When they discovered what the black folks were turning them into, they raised the price of them and made the black folks cook them up at the big house. I'm sorry if that offends my southern readers, but, hey, it's your history.

I buy my ribs at the whatever local store has them on sale. Ninety Nine cents a pound is about right, but mostly they sell for around two bucks a pound.

I buy them whole in the cryo-pack. This is a heavy duty hermitically sealed package that will allow you to buy the living shit out of ribs when they are on sale and stick them in the freezer for 6 months to a year without freezer burn or damage. (raw ribs only...........ribs that have been pre-cooked in the presence of "smoke" should be used in less than 6 months.........it's an enzyme thing)

I do not buy ribs that have been cut into serving portions and rewrapped. I can eat a half slab of ribs, the leftovers are good for about 5 or 6 days............and they freeze pretty well.

So, buy a slab for every two people you plan to have at your shindig, if they are all male. Buy a slab for every 3 people you plan to have if it is a couples thing. Buy a slab for every 4 people if you are entertaining all girls.

OK, let's get started.

Fire is fire, but we are not grilling these ribs (that is over direct flame) we are bar-be-queing them (in indirect heat).
I use a Weber Charcoal Kettle, they are plenty roomy, come with lots of nifty accessories and replacement parts, and are virtually indestructible. They cost around $70.00 new, but if you live in or near a medium sized city, you can probably find one in the want ads or at a garage sale for ten or fifteen bucks.

Here is a picture of my weber set up for indirect heat.......

I've used about 18 briquets to a side..........you will need to add 6 or 8 more briquets each hour or hour and a quarter. If you need to know how to light the briquets, read the directions on the starter fluid. If you are paranoid about the use of starter fluid, you can buy a device that allows you to light the coals without fluid. In fact, in the time (about 20 minutes) it takes the coals to be ready for cooking, the fluid you've used is burned away............and, dayum people........why sweat the small shit?........isn't life tough enough without finding new shit to worry about?

What I'm about to describe now is a very simple marinade. I just brush it on, rub in some salt and pepper and put the ribs on the grill. At this point, it would be helpful to have a small plastic wash tub and a big steel bowl. The bowl to work over (in) and the tub to carry the ribs out to the grill. Also, a "basting brush". Now you can buy a basting brush at a kitchen supply store for 2 or 3 bucks............or you can go to the paint department of a hardware store and buy a cheap bristle brush for 99 cents. You are not going to paint your living room with it.............it will last forever. Just be sure that you get a natural bristle brush. Don't bother with a "mop" unless you plan to cook about 15 slabs of ribs........it'll soak up about a cup of your liquid............but if you must have a mop, buy one of those cotton "glass washers"........same thing only smaller. It'll only absorb about 3 tablespoons of your liquid.

Let's take a moment to talk about kitchen safety (tip of the hat to Norm Abrams)..........when you are handling raw meat, wash your fucking hands....a lot. Wash off anything you touch (this includes the bottles and the salt and pepper shakers. Put the towel you wiped your hands on in the hamper and get a clean one. Wash the knives and cutting board ,and anything else that touched the meat, with hot, soapy water.................you do not want your lady friend dashing out of bed 6 hrs. later with a case of lower intestinal tract "discomfort"........know whut I mean, Verne? (talk about coitus interruptus!)..........nor do you want to sicken children or old people to the point of hospitalization. These things tend to get you talked about and not invited to pot luck suppers.

My marinade is half and half cider vinegar and worcestershire sauce. (one cup of each for four slabs.....extrapolate!) Now, you can use anything acidic.....lime or lemon juice, or beer or whatever. You can leave out the worcestershire and add apple juice or other fruit juices. Cruise the internet......use your imagination. My way will render a tasty rib that you can be proud of, but it's not locked in stone. There are literally hundreds of marinades and rubs and bastes and sauces............not to mention the ones that you will invent and add to the list. These are just the basics........feel free to tweak to your hearts content.

So,........

Brush on the marinate

Add a little salt.............

A little pepper..............

and rub it in...................

By this time your coals have developed a nice coat of white ash that tells you that they are ready........(and that all those nasty ol' hydrocarbons are burned away....fuckin' spare me)

The coals are ready...........

If you are only cooking one rib, you can just lay it on the grill. For two slabs, you can lean them against each other....(really!). You can buy a Weber Rib Rack, which will support, upright, up to 6 slabs of ribs. I've got a couple of them, but I was hung over and running late that morning, so I just grabbed a roast rack and turned it upside down..........worked great.(see what I mean about using your imagination?)

Mr. Meat.............meet Mr. Fire.......

Arrange the meat in your rack.

Put the lid on the kettle, and dampen the fire. Any cooker will have some way to adjust the amount of air going into the fire chamber, lower it way the fuck down......you want a slow fire. Ideally, the average temperature to which the ribs will be exposed will be between 180 and 220 degrees. (take note if you are going to use an oven) You will have the cover off about every 20 to 30 minutes during the 3 to 4 hours it takes to cook 4 slabs of ribs. (if you are only cooking one or two slabs the time goes down, but you have to mess with them more often and watch that they don't get too hot and overcook). On a Weber kettle, there are either three round devices on the bottom (and one on the lid) that adjust the air-flow or there is a lever that adjust all three at once (the Weber One-Touch.

Dampen the fire......

Now, you've got about a half hour before you have to mess with the kettle again, so relax and enjoy your party............

Take time to play with the munchkins

I do something to the ribs about every half hour or so. Each time I shuffle the meat around (inside slabs to the outside and outside slabs to the inside) so that they cook evenly. Here, I am brushing on another application of marinade. According to the Boze theory of marinade, the marinade serves to break down (or denature) the surface of the meat, and helps the volatile oils in the coals(whether it be hickory or mesquite or cherry or apple) to penetrate the flesh...........carrying the flavor into and through the meat as the principle seasoning. Too long a period of marination before cooking, and you'll wind up with meat that tastes like whatever acidic substance you used as a marinade. Sometimes this is a good thing.........sometimes it is necessary (like with Tartare or Ceviche) but I like seasoned meat flavors to come through. Good meat doesn't need a lot of help.

Marinade again and shuffle the meat........

I've brushed on two applications of marinate and the meat is starting to seal itself and render some of its' fat to the flames. The next step is to brush on some fat (baste). I have about a cup of the marinade left.........I'm going to put it into a sauce pan and throw in a stick of butter (real fucking butter, people, fat is good, so use a tasty fat) and melt it slowly. Don't let it boil or burn.

Add butter to marinade to create baste.......heat slowly

You've got about half an hour to kill, so...........

Have a beer............

Baste the ribs twice about one half hour apart, reshuffling the meat each time. Remember, if you are only doing one or two slabs, it won't take as long to cook, so shorten the times in between applications. Also remember to treat both sides of the slab.

Basting...........starting to look purty!

OK..............now we're going to make a glaze. Glazes are nothing more than sugar solutions. I use honey, blackstrap molasses and brown sugar. I add these things to what is left of the marinade/baste liquid and simmer it a bit to dissolve the sugars.

Making the glaze............

Glazing is also done twice..........one half hour after the last baste and one half hour between each application.

Glazing

Now we are going to make a finishing sauce. You can use whatever your pea-pickin' little heart desires. (If you like it spicy, here is where to add some pepper sauce). I once took a bunch of tomatoes, cut them into pieces and plopped them into a cast iron dutch oven. I cooked them down and ran them through a Foley food mill to remove the seeds and skin. I simmered the juice to the consistency of catsup and added the things I like in a bar-be-que sauce..........after all the freakin' work, what I made tasted just like K.C Masterpiece. Now, I do know that there are regional preferences............I won't even get into that debate, as there is some revisionist speculation that this is what really started the civil war.......and, further, that the real reason the South lost was because they couldn't agree on what constituted a proper bar-be-que dressing among themselves.
I am from the midwest and I eat beans in my chilli and prefer a sweet red sauce.......so there!

If you are a no sauce type, regionally speaking, you can skip the finishing...........just leave the ribs in untill they are done, shuffling the meat from time to time and basting or glazing some more.........(you may have to make a little more basting liquid).

I was under some time constraints to pull the ribs after 3 hrs. They were good, but another hour would've deepened the penetration of smoke seasoning and made the meat more tender.

OK...........making the finishing sauce. I emptied a bottle of K.C. Masterpiece into what was left of the marinade/baste/glaze, and heated it up being careful not to burn the sugars. How simple is that?

One half hour after the last glaze...............I brushed on the finishing sauce, reshuffled and opened the dampers to raise the temperature inside the kettle. You want the sugars in the sauce to carmelize (get gooey) on the meat. I put on another application about 20 minutes later and reshuffled the meat again..........
I took the ribs off about 30 minutes after that.

Ready for the sauce

Done

The warm marinade/baste/glaze/finishing sauce, is put in a nice bowl and put on the table as a table sauce. What is leftover after the meal, is put in an airtight tupperware-like container and stuck in the fridge. The next time you cook ribs (up to a year later.......really, the stuff has so much vinegar in it that it wont go bad) pour this into your marinade/baste/glaze compound to make the finish sauce. After a few years of this (every once in a while you have to dump in another bottle of K.C. Masterpiece (or whatever) this stuff gets kind of unique...........and no-one will be able to duplicate it. (I do something similiar with crock pot roasts........but that is another entry)

Now, the ribs are ready to carve...........

..........is that pretty or what?

I plan to discuss knives in another entry..........for now, it is sufficient to say that you should have at least an 8" chef's knife..... a sharp one. Don't be cheap when you buy knives.........but don't be a putz or a knife snob either. I use Chicago Cutlery knives. They are relatively inexpensive, easy to care for and keep sharp, look nice, and will last a life time. (I've had mine for over 20 years, have used the shit out of them, and don't plan on replacing them.........ever!) What's more, if you shop around, you can get real bargains on them as they go on sale a lot.

Back to carving.

In the last picture, the brisket bone is at the lower right of the slab. It runs lengthwise and slants up from left to right in the picture. This is the only lengthwise cut you will make. You can hack your way through this bone, but chances are you'll slip, cut something off, wind up in the emergency room and miss a great meal. You've come this far, don't fuck it up now.

Carving the brisket bone

Now carve in between the ribs in one, two, three and four bone pieces.

Carve into serving pieces...

It is nice to have a big ol' platter. I've got one at home, but I was at my Son's house and they just had small platters, so we put the carved pieces into one of those speckled roasters and set it in the middle of the table.

The feast is laid

If you click on the next pic, and use the little blow up dealie in the lower right corner, you can see how the smoke has penetrated the meat........(the redness)........in another hour it would have been even more pronounced.........

A meal fit for a gourmand

No demonstration of the sort I've practiced here would be complete without a picture like this..........

What its all about!!!

In closing, there are tons of books on barbecueing, grilling, and discussing sauces, rubs and the like...............so many that you can get lost in the welter. I found this one, some years ago. I believe its one of the better ones out there.

I hope you've enjoyed this, I hope you try this.........I look forward to seeing you again.

Thus endeth the lesson.............

The Quest for Fire

2004-07-08T02:31:00.000-05:00

"What a piece of work is man. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals."

It is generally accepted as truth, that the thing that separates man from the lower orders, puts him at the top of the food chain as it were, is his ability to use tools. I'll not argue that as an assumption, but will question the monolithic nature of it as a stand alone dogma.

I believe it is equally important to consider the food chain itself. Simply put, more profoundly than any other creature, Man is an omnivore.

Man survived and migrated and adapted to whatever foodstuff he could digest...........and thrived. From the cat, the lowest form of mammalian life, (face it, a cat is a reptile with fur....just one evolutionary step up from laying eggs) to the highest order of primates, when the peculiar environment that provides their sustenance is diminished, they start to die.

Thus we come to the question of fire..........

Fire is a naturally occuring thing. It probably didn't take an australopithecine Einstein to see that it provided warmth and light, and scared the lions and tigers away. These uses of fire make perfect sense. Why, though, would our dim-witted, barely human, distant forbears (omnivores, remember) put a hard won and perfectly acceptable-as-it-is ration of food into a fire?

They had no concept of infection. They had no way to associate sickness or disease with something they had ingested days earlier. Wherefore,then, cooking?

If allowed to speculate, (who's to stop me?.....aren't blogs lovely like that?)I would have to imagine that, one night, the tribe came across the toothsome remains of some large animal abandoned by its sated predators. The meat not consumed by other scavengers was torn off the carcass and divided among themselves. Some clumsy sub-human putz copped a stumble near the fire and his precious share of protein went flying into the flames. Just barely possessed of enough reason to understand that it was a choice of retrieve it or starve, he managed to paw aside the burning sticks and snag the charred lump of flesh out of the red hot embers. (I'm also betting that this was the guy who invented the oven mitt too..........but that is another entry.)
He may have paused a bit as he looked at what had become of his supper, but eat he must, so he closed his eyes and took a bite.

Can you imagine what must have gone through that primitive brain as the succulent juices of the worlds first fire seasoned steak burst upon his taste buds? It had to have been a moment very much like that scene in the movie "2001", when the monkey men found the big slab, listened to Also Sprach Zarathustra, and suddenly got the brilliant idea to beat the fuck out of each other with sticks.

This,dear readers, was truly the birth of civilization.....not religion, not war, not prostitution.....cooking. In the absence of any other reason or compulsion to commit food to flame, the cooking of food, as practice by the primitive, was purely and only a consequence of, and a reaction to, sensual pleasure.

Not even sex is as purely motivated. We are hard wired to crave sex as a part of our reptilian instinct to procreate. Sex rearranges the brain chemistry and provides a temporary relief of clinical depression in some people. Some people do it because they feel they have to, or to kill time, or because they just can't say no. Some people feel like they are going to die if they don't and then feel like shit about themselves because they did. Some people don't do it at all, or even want to............but every human on earth reacts with salivary lust to the aromas and flavors of a well cooked meal. Even poor misguided ascetics and vegans twist themselves in culinary knots in the attempt to make their pitiful fistfulls of fruits and nuts taste like something resembling food. Even the man who would rather drink than fuck is brought to a near swoon when he passes through the delicious miasma of scents that surround a steak house.

Thus we enter into the world of Cooking with Gutz........

We'll grill and roast and fry savory meats of every stripe.
We'll bake pies.
We'll saute buttery, garlicky shrimp and scallops.
We'll make salads and sandwiches and soups.
We'll stock your pantry and equip your kitchen.
We'll deal with the leftovers and never waste another bite of food.
We'll dine like nobility on a pauper's purse.

So bring your ingenuity, your creativity, your sense of fun, your imagination..........above all, bring your healthy appetite,

and come on into the kitchen.