Month: September 2019

I am a lamb lover from way back, and I’ll eat pretty much any cut and in any preparation, which is a good thing, because lamb can be quite pricey. Racks of lamb or rib chops are usually among the most expensive cuts of meat in any butcher shop this side of sheep country, and even ground lamb is more than some of the fancy beef grinds I see occasionally.

And to make matters more complicated, it can be a challenging meat to cook, because it seems as though though the fat requires higher temperatures than beef or pork to render or soften into something delicious and rich instead of hard and greasy.

So for this evening’s boneless leg of lamb, I am going to try low and slow for awhile, then a quick shot of high heat to crisp it up.

Why yes, it’s going on the grill, because grilled lamb is the best lamb!

And if you can get cheap cuts, or if you are really lucky some mutton, give it a shot. If anything the shoulder chops are easier to cook and just as good, and mutton is divine, but I think an acquired taste.

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This article is a chaotic mess of leftist memes and flaccid logic, but it does bring up an interesting point about how restaurants are managed, and how their employees are motivated.
Why It’s So Hard for Restaurants to Go Tip-Free

The pay equality gap always bothered Barcito owner Andrea Borgen. The 2016 Eater Young Gun winner opened her Los Angeles business in 2015 and noticed the front of the house earned two and a half to four times as much as the kitchen staff. To address this, Borgen very publicly converted to a no-tipping model in 2016, and on July 2 she brought tipping back. Borgen views this recent shift as a sustainable way to build equity between Barcito’s front-and back-of-house staff.

I went to a well-regarded NYC restaurant a few months ago, and had a very nice meal. But the service (which was included) simply didn’t compare to my last meal there, before they shifted to a no-tipping policy. I think there is something to be said for a direct relationship between one’s work and one’s compensation, and tipping is exactly that.
I am torn between revulsion and interest… The Tide-Pod

It ain’t the best drink, but it’s good for making fun of Tide-Pod munching, f*cktard millennials. To make one, grab yourself a 1.5 oz cordial glass similar to what I’ve got here. Or don’t, make it in a shot glass if you like. Make it in a red solo cup or in a tube sock, I really don’t care, it’s your drink. But to make it look cool like this, start by pouring 1/2 ounce of Blue Curaçao into a cordial glass. Next, combine 1/4 ounce of Bailey’s Irish Cream with 1/4 of half-n-half (one of those individual creamers is perfect). Drizzle that over a barspoon down the side of the glass to form the middle layer. To finish, take 1/2 oz UV Orange Vodka and drizzle it over the spoon to form your top layer. It kinda tastes like a creamsicle, if you are an alcoholic and use your imagination.

Courtesy of Bitter Clinger.

Yeah…I love this stuff. Salt cod is a weird ingredient, but damn, it is spectacular when done right.

Salt Cod Fritters

There is a French dish called “Brandade de Morue” that is essentially salt cod and whipped potatoes. it is ridiculously good. But the reconstitutiong of the cod just takes too long. It’s not difficult, but it does take planning.

State Fair of Texas Adds Even More Ridiculous Fried Foods to This Year’s Line-Up

I’m not sure I agree with “ridiculous. It’s more like, “Oh my God! That sounds decadent!”

Shanah Tovah!

Food and cooking tips, Castelvetrano olives with a sprinkle of chili flakes, young wild pigs, crisp bacon (although I am moving toward less crisp), thick and fluffy pita, and good tomatoes that aren’t square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit. And yes, shaking a Manhattan is blasphemy…it’s in the Bible!

I have been eating a lot of bacon recently, both for the undeniable pleasure of those delectable, fatty morsels of porcine wonder, direct from a pig that gave his all for me, and for the convenient bonus that it really fills me up in the morning. Toss in an egg or two (my current obsession is with hard-boiling them), and you have yourself a fine and tasty meal. I play around with the condiments I use on the eggs, and have settled for a bit (okay, a dab. well, a large dab on each bite) of mayonnaise, but a spoonful of spicy chili crisp hits the spot too.

Back to bacon! Why is it so good? Well, it has pretty much everything pleasing about food. The fat provides wonderful mouth feel and a succulent texture, the salt gives us a pop of pleasure, the smoky meat has just enough flavor and texture to please, and to top it off, it comes in a convenient shape…just perfect for munching neatly or folding into one’s mouth in a frantic orgy of gluttony and pleasure.

Commenter “Boswell’ recently had an interesting thought…

Kale is the only thing that could actually ruin bacon.

But I stand here before you in all of my reactionary glory and say, “Even kale goes well with bacon!” I recently had a meal, courtesy of a cousin, which included a great kale and bacon and blue cheese salad. Great stuff!

So…bacon may be the perfect food. It compliments everything and ruins nothing. And don’t throw ice cream at me. I have had ice cream with bacon sprinkles and it is a fine, fine thing.

I bought a quart of milk to make a Béchamel, and for whatever reason I never needed it. So I tucked the milk into the corner of the refrigerator, where I know the temperature is slightly below freezing. I hadn’t opened the container, and since it was pasteurized (like 99.9% of milk in America), it was essentially sterile. Fast forward six months (yes, you read that correctly), and all of a sudden I needed a Béchamel, and I didn’t feel like going out for a fresh quart of milk.

So what does a cheap bastard do? Use the damned milk of course. It was fine. The container wasn’t inflated, the milk wasn’t discolored, it smelled like…um…milk, and aside from a bit of separation (which I fixed with a vigorous shake), it was indistinguishable from fresh(er) milk.

My wife was disgusted, and refused to eat the spectacular Cauliflower à la Bluebell that I made with six-month old milk and heels of old cheese, from which I trimmed the mold and desiccated bits.
GAO report examines how date label confusion contributes to food waste
I’m not suggesting that everyone use six-month old stuff, but we do fixate on the various sell by/good until/best before messages that we see on our food. For instance, if a can of peas has an expiration date one year out, then unless the can has a structural failure, I can’t imagine that the peas wouldn’t be safe two years or three years out. Sure, eventually the metal on the outside and the coating on the inside will decay enough for something bad to happen, but I doubt very much that the eight-year-old can of peas in the back of your pantry will kill you.

It is not concern for the starving in the world that motivated me to post this link, because after all, the world produces plenty of food. it is geopolitical issues that prevent us from feeding the world. Hell, if America wanted to, we could take farming seriously, spend the subsidies intelligently and probably feed the world on our own!

No, it was a very conservative sense that we shouldn’t waste. Could I have afforded the $2.25 for another quart of milk? And the $1 for gas and wear and tear to get to the store? Sure. But why waste something that is perfectly okay?

It’s nothing like a classic burger, although it certainly sounds interesting as a peek into the food of bygone years. But the gushing hagiographic tone of the writer is off-putting. I doubt very much that he knows much about Hemingway, who, while one of my favorite authors, was also a prick to most of the people in his life, including all of his wives and all of his children.
How to Make Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger
One of Hemingway’s many conceits was his arrogant assumption that the way he did things was the best way. And this recipe doesn’t disabuse me of that impression.

I might give some version of it a shot, although i am reminded of what a foodie friend said to me when I mentioned that i was going to adulterate a burger with some innocuous ingredient (chopped onion I think). “That’s meatloaf!”

[Hat Tip: Misanthropic Humanitarian]

Gordon Ramsay can cook, and he can run restaurants. I have eaten in a few, and everything worked the way it was supposed to, and that is a rare and impressive thing in an industry known for flakiness and stupidity and venality. But he has a reputation as a bit of a dick. Well, maybe more than a bit, but here he is in a different setting. Gordon Ramsay on “Hot Ones” which is a hoot! He seems like an actual human being, with a sense of humor and a brain!
[Did I post this awhile ago? Hell, I have no idea, but it’s worth a watch]

Back before Mexico turned into a war zone, I used to go occasionally, and I would bring back bottles of mezcal that I would buy from mom-and-pop stores. The stuff was probably homemade in less-than-sanitary or safe conditions, and I would filter it when I got back to civilization…through a coffee filter! I chose to ignore the risk of heavy metals or other crap, because I was young and stupid.
Burros, Stones, and Machetes: Here’s How Mezcal Is Distilled
But there has been a renaissance in the mezcal world, and some of the stuff I have tasted recently has been quite good.

[Hat Tip: redc1c4 ]

Oh great. Now I have to start using dried chickpeas instead of canned, and make my easy and rather good hummus recipe into a PITA (see what I did there?). How To make Hummus Oh, the guy’s enthusiasm is infectious! Seriously, dried chickpeas seem like the way to go, and there are other longcuts in this video that make a lot of sense.

And here is Chris Kimball’s new venture, called “Milk Street,” with a similar version of How To make Hummus

Speaking of cool ways to open wine bottles…

Food and cooking tips, Castelvetrano olives with a sprinkle of chili flakes, young wild pigs, crisp bacon (although I am moving toward less crisp), thick and fluffy pita, and good tomatoes that aren’t square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit. And yes, shaking a Manhattan is blasphemy…it’s in the Bible!

Corks are great, and have worked reasonably well for a very, very long time. But there is nothing magical about them, in spite of being “natural.” They don’t really breathe, so the idea that corks allow wine to age gracefully is mostly a fiction. And besides, the amount of air that can pass through the cork and then permeate the wine is vanishingly small. What really ages the wine is time, which allows the wine’s components (sugars and acids and all sorts of aromatic compounds) to play together and hopefully improve.

And there are big downsides to cork: it is a natural product and can vary tremendously, and it is also associated with the tainting of wine with a chemical called TCA (trichloroanisole), which can impart an unpleasant taste and aroma that I perceive as wet cardboard. That’s not a flavor I vigorously pursue in my booze, and I doubt many people enjoy it much.

So why use cork at all? Tradition and snobbery is pretty much the only answer I can come up with. The cost of metal closures is on par with cork, and they don’t impart any flavors at all.

When I go shopping for wine, in particular everyday drinking wine, I give bonus points to wines with screw-tops. It’s more convenient, the bottles fit in the refrigerator more easily, and even ignoring the risk of TCA contamination, there is much less risk of failure. Everyone has seen crumbly corks and corks that broke off halfway out of the bottle, and that just doesn’t happen with screw-tops.

The Aussies use screw-tops a lot, and I am seeing it more and more on American wines, and even Froggy and Spanish wines! I haven’t seen any on Portuguese wines, mostly because I rarely drink them and have very little experience. But Portugal’s greatest wines are Ports, and it can be a huge problem pulling the corks on old bottles. I wonder whether they will finally figure out that screw-tops are the way to go? I doubt it will happen any time soon, because Port drinkers love the ritual and pomp and circumstance of opening a 50 or 60-year-old bottle, and the breathless anticipation of whether the cork is total crap adds to the experience.

Personally I think that is dumb, because the bottles are expensive and rare, and why risk anything when the whole point is the pleasure of drinking what’s inside?

By the way, the bottle on the left is a five-year-old Aussie Shiraz, and it was quite good. The bottle on the right is 29-years-old, and waiting patiently for a crisp autumn weekend and a meal of braised short ribs. I just hope the cork has survived!

Anyone like rabbit? I sure do, especially grilled with a mustard glaze. I wonder whether the rabbits that live in my yard are tasty?

Don’t worry, I probably won’t trap one and grill it.

Probably.

My local poultry farm also carries rabbit, so I will try them before I resort to suburban trapping. As I have mentioned before, the only rabbit I ever saw when I was a kid was stuff from a biological products company called “Pel Freez.” Yeah, rabbits figured prominently in their manufacturing, but I really, really hope that the food rabbits and the bio rabbits were separate.

[Hat Tip JT, who asks whether this could be Bluebell in retirement in 30 or 40 years…]

This is market economics in action. An invasive species that government can’t eradicate, but the market has an instant solution. Eat the damned things!

Aaron Franklin is a bit of a loon, but he is exactly the kind of nut-job who makes the world a better place. These three videos will take you through the entire process of smoking brisket, and you will be a better person after you watch them. Cooking shouldn’t be mystical and special and reserved for the elites….And this guy is happy to share his secrets with you.

The Brisket

The Cook

The Payoff

Fun stuff, and his other videos are great as well.

I wonder whether he will approve of my plans to sous vide a brisket?

This looks good. Breakfast Casserole In The 18th Century? – Egg And Bacon Pie

Wow. An appliance designed to cook food. Who would have thought that it was appropriate to use to..you know…cook food? I replaced my oven with a waffle maker, and you should too. Okay, but can you branch out a bit and suggest things that aren’t waffles? Because I can imagine cooking a bunch of other foods without any problems. I’ll start with chicken pounded thin and dredged in a light batter. Crunch the waffle maker down hard, and the texture will be fun.
[Hat Tips: Curmudgeon]

There are too many food and cooking sites, because far too many of them produce dreck like this. besides listing all of the bagels in the world, they don’t actually rank them, they just blather on about how good each flavor is. Besides, cinnamon-raisin is not a real bagel flavor. That’s a sop to wimps who can’t handle real bagels.

What’s next…pumpkin-spice bagels?

All the Best Bagel Flavors, Ranked

I keep telling you people; any food can be improved with the addition of fat. If you don’t like chickpeas but seem to think that you should eat them because they are healthful or some other virtue-signalling crap, then fry ’em up and serve them as a side. Or just fry them up and serve them on the side because they taste good when they are crispy.

crisped chickpeas with herbs and garlic yogurt

I might hold the yogurt and use sour cream or creme fraiche instead. Or even better…use the chickpeas as a garnish for grilled pork chops. Or toss them into a stir-fry.

Speaking of fat. Fried crab and avocado can’t possibly be bad. Avocado Crab Bomb sounds like something I would absolutely order in a restaurant, but maybe not ever try to make it at home. It seems like too much work, when the deconstructed dish would probably be even better. Crab on an avocado with some crispy fries? That sounds good to me.

But if you want to make this and invite me over, I will happily come, and bring booze too.

[Hat Tip: artisanal’ette]

Food and cooking tips, Castelvetrano olives with a sprinkle of chili flakes, young wild pigs, crisp bacon (although I am moving toward less crisp), thick and fluffy pita, and good tomatoes that aren’t square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit. And yes, shaking a Manhattan is blasphemy…it’s in the Bible!

This is why my house occasionally smells like it is on fire…I love, love, love to fire roast or toast or, let’s face it, burn peppers over my biggest burner before I cook with them. It’s easy, it’s fun, you get to burn things inside the house, and it rarely requires professional assistance from your neighborhood fire brigade. Although…my wife got stuck behind an FDNY truck a few days ago and asked whether one of the prerequisites for the job was to be handsome…so maybe for some of you that is a bonus.

Anyway, the technique is self evident, and the flavor boost is huge. Even if you peel the blistered skin you are left with the toasty, smoky flavor of the pepper, and that is a grand and glorious thing. I pop them in a paper bag to steam after I toast them on the stove when I am planning to peel them. That allows the peppers to soften a bit and it seems to loosen the skin.

When I make salsa I overload it with peppers, and it doesn’t really matter what kind, as long as I toast them first. The flecks of charred skin in the sauce are a lovely addition. Oh, you can do the tomatoes the same way, and even in the depths of winter the charring makes them palatable. Sort of.

Random Notes From The Vast Kitchens Of Chez Dildo

The pickling experiment continues, with the sensational addition of thinly sliced red onion and sliced jalapenos. Not together! I pulled some of the veins and seeds out of the jalapenos because I didn’t want them to be too hot. I was looking for a nice bit of heat and a vinegary tang, and I got it! A few of the pickled jalapeno rings on top of a burger but under the cheese is a damned fine way to build a cheeseburger.

Yes, I am lazy, so the four racks of pork ribs I made a few weeks ago went onto the grill, not into the smoker. Fine, take my man card and make me wear a frilly apron (or in Garrett’s case, a lovely gingham one), but we had 20 people for dinner, so I was interested in easy over authentic. But I got smart and used two temperature probes, and discovered something most of you knew already; the temperature gradient in a gas grill is huge, particularly if you have only one of the burners going (the one under the smoke box). About 210° on the far side, and about 385° over the smoke box.

Grilling asparagus is much easier if you put them on the grill at right angles to the grates. Just sayin’.

Meatballs were on the menu, and there was much rejoicing, and much cleaning too. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any shortcuts, so making the meatballs was a careful and gentle and long process, ending with frying them a bit, which is messy. But gently formed meatballs that are browned in fat then simmered in good tomatoes is a fine thing. And plopping a couple or five of them on top of my almost-world-famous ratatouille is a different and most excellent combination. And a dollop of ricotta doesn’t hurt.

My grandmother also made spectacular chopped liver, but the idea that one uses beef liver borders on heretical. It’s nonsense. Offensive nonsense. Arrantly offensive nonsense. Patently ridiculous, arrantly offensive nonsense.
A Love Letter to Chopped Liver
There are lots of versions of chopped liver, from the simple concoctions of Ashkenazim (broadly, Jews from Eastern Europe) to the labor-intensive deliciousness of a fine pâté or rilletes. But I have never had a bad one, and I have never had one made from beef livers.

QED.

So, these people are vegans, so that means they are loons. But they are funny loons, and for some reason they don’t come across as preachy as much as just foul-mouthed and funny.
Grilled Romaine Salad
That being said, this recipe would be damned good with a Caesar dressing (raw egg!) and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese.

Just sayin’.

Anybody ever seen or used one of these things? Because it sounds like an elegant method, although an auto feed for the fuel would make it close to perfect. Anyway, here’s the website, which is worth poking around if any of you are sort of geeky about cooking. Or just geeky. Or like barbecue. KBQ

I did not know that there was such a thing as Tupelo Honey. I mean, I knew about this Tupalo Honey, because everybody knows Van Morrison. But it’s also a real honey? And, apparently, a rather good one.

This is French cooking at its best. Oh, I guess the haute cuisine of Paris and Lyon are better known, but getting out of the cities (or eating at a good bistro in one fo the big cities) will reveal the kind of food that many Frenchmen eat, and it is good stuff! Normandy-style pork and cider casserole reminds me of the stews my mother used to make. Well, not all of them. The ones with tripe or brains or, strangely, the veal stew, made me gag.

Food and cooking tips, Castelvetrano olives with a sprinkle of chili flakes, young wild pigs, crisp bacon (although I am moving toward less crisp), thick and fluffy pita, and good tomatoes that aren’t square, pale pink and covered with Mestizo E.coli: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com. Any advocacy of French Toast with syrup will result in disciplinary action up to and including being nuked from orbit. And yes, shaking a Manhattan is blasphemy…it’s in the Bible!

Here is a pdf of my Lemon Cheesecake recipe.