Fat Guy

I wonder, have things progressed to the point where the internet provides better recipes than cookbooks? Clearly, there's a lot of garbage online. But the savvy user has access to quite a lot of excellent sources. There's everything from the professional recipes from the magazine-driven websites (Gourmet, et al.) to hobbyist recipes that are quite rigorous. Cookbooks, on the other hand, seem less reliable to me than they did in the past. With a few exceptions (like the magazine-produced books), cookbooks are the product of a single recipe tester (if the recipes are even tested). I think they're working with less time and money than ever before. The best cookbooks are still great, but very few of them make the cut. It seems like the trend lines are moving. Whether they've crossed, I'm not sure. But if they haven't I think they will.

While not specifically a book about wood-oven cooking, the book "High Heat," by Waldy Malouf, contains quite a lot of excellent recipes. Waldy Malouf's restaurant, Beacon, in New York City uses a brick oven for a lot of dishes and most of the dishes in the book were developed that way. Although they will work fine in a regular oven or on a grill, they work best when cooked as they cook them at the restaurant, in a brick oven with wood in the chamber at about 675 degrees F.

I wonder what the value is of all the food being stored unnecessarily in Americans' homes.

I hate to be a disappointment but that dough was frozen dough I bought at the store. I usually keep some of it on hand for when I'm too lazy to make dough. When I do make dough, I use all-purpose flour and Fleischmann's yeast and I've never had a problem freezing it. I don't have the space or patience to keep multiple kinds of flour around, so I do everything -- bread, cookies, cakes -- with all-purpose flour. I guess that's why they call it all-purpose flour.

I think I need to do this for another week. Coming up on the end of this week, I think the net result of my $18.25 in grocery expenditures is that I have more product on hand than I did at the end of the first week. We ate a lot of food this week that didn't affect our inventory: the Sunday dim-sum event, the Tuesday meat-industry dinner, breakfast and lunch at a conference yesterday, our son getting fed by my mother on two occasions. And we won't use much of what's left before the week is up. Tonight we have a school event that will include food. Tomorrow we have both lunch and dinner at friends' houses (two different friends). Anyway . . . last night we made pizza for a second time, from the remaining ingredients. Also, Ellen baked blondies. I guess neither of those dishes would have been possible without the topping off of ingredients we did on Sunday. Still, it feels like there's an awful long way to go before we accomplish a true spring cleaning of the refrigerator, freezer and pantry here. Breakfast and lunch today will be the last opportunities to consume this week's foodstuffs, but those will be insubstantial meals.

Last night I had a huge dinner out at a beef-industry function. I could probably go the rest of the week without eating. I probably should. But tonight PJ and I made pizza. The dough from the freezer, defrosted overnight in the fridge. Normally I use Pomi tomato puree but I've had part of a jar of Fairway pasta sauce, opened on a day when I was feeling lazy, in the back of the refrigerator forever. After ascertaining that it contained no mold, I decided to use it. The mozzarella was, as I mentioned above, the week's big splurge at the store. I still have enough left to do another pizza-making session if I feel like it later in the week. I've still got enough Parmesan to get by for a while. To minimize mess and make the whole process more kid-friendly we do all the production within the four corners of a half-sheet pan. First cornmeal on the surface. Then several sessions of stretching the dough, with rests in between, so it's easy. Time elapsed was maybe 20 minutes start to finish, about 2 of which were active time. When you do this with a three-year-old you don't necessarily get the most even coverage of sauce and cheese, but I've found there's a lot of leeway in the process. Our oven goes up to 500 degrees F and has a convection setting. I let it preheat for about half an hour so it's pretty hot in there. Tonight it took 11 minutes to achieve the level of doneness I favor.

I have some really well seasoned cast iron and carbon steel skillets and I have to agree with Mr. Kinsey that they're not even close to Teflon when it comes to the ability to release food. Of course, any pan with enough fat in it will become "nonstick" but the whole point of real nonstick cookware is that it has those nonstick properties without the fat. In terms of nonstick surfaces -- real ones -- from a safety standpoint they're all the same. They're all PTFE, aka Teflon, just with different fancy names meant to confuse and misdirect consumers and the media. I think they're all perfectly safe. But if one of them isn't safe, they all aren't.

The book Road Food, by Jane and Michael Stern, is a great resource for mom-and-pop, non-chain restaurant listings. It's organized by region so it's easy to pinpoint the places along your route. Certainly, you will want to include a North Carolina barbecue stop along this route. I don't have a ton of experience with the places right near I-95 -- unfortunately Mitchell's in Wilson is closed and I haven't been to Parker's (though I hear it's good). Somebody with NC expertise will surely chime in, though.

I usually put it in a bowl and run it under the hottest possible tap water for a few minutes. Probably a big waste of energy but it gets the job done quickly.

Paul, sorry I missed your post. I'd have to do side-by-side comparisons to be certain, but my loose impression is that the moderate end of DeBragga's product line is comparable to what you get at Florence (which I think is, in turn, better than Ottomanelli). But DeBragga has a huge range of products and as you climb up that ladder you start getting into stuff that you rarely see outside of restaurants or maybe Lobel's. Last night I went to a tasting that DeBragga put on for its major clients. It was a big meal, hosted by Waldy Malouf at Beacon (Beacon uses Niman Ranch beef purchased through DeBragga), and we got to taste ridiculously large portions of three exceptional, naturally raised products that DeBragga is evangelizing about. Part of the goal was, of course, to get clients to buy these products, but the larger agenda was to introduce the producers (they all came in for the event) and let them explain the steps they take to ensure a better product. When you see the prices of some of this stuff there's definitely a sticker-shock reaction, but when you hear all that goes into this kind of production you start wondering how any of these people even stay in business. It is, simply, more expensive to produce super-premium, natural products than it is to produce industrial, mediocre ones. Much more expensive. As soon as the event was over I ran home to check online and was pleased to see that these products can be ordered online by regular consumers. The first producer we heard from was Denis Drone of Joyce Farms in North Carolina. Joyce Farms produces poultry according to the French Label Rouge protocols (heritage breed, air-chilled, outdoor grown, antibiotic free). He was passionate and had a charming French accent. The chicken (in this preparation, braised) was great. The thing I noticed immediately was a combination of denseness and tenderness that reminded me of dry-aged beef. I'd say that the texture of this product is its number one point of superiority compared to regular chicken. It also tastes better, something that was easily detected in a subtle preparation like this one but might get wiped out by many contemporary chicken recipes with heavy seasoning. One of the things I was thinking is that to make chicken like this worthwhile it's going to be necessary not only to produce it but also for chefs (and consumers) to re-learn how to cook chicken in ways that focus on simplicity and subtlety. We then heard from the folks from Nebraska Imperial Wagyu, an American producer of Kobe-style beef. I was actually at a table with Lawrence Adams, CEO and President, and his wife -- they flew in from Lincoln, Nebraska for this event -- and was very fond of them. I was a little worried, though, because my experiences with American (and Australian) Wagyu have sometimes been disappointing. Not that it's bad, but often it doesn't compare to the real Japanese stuff. But this product, with a marbling score of 9/10, was terrific. Finished 500 days on grain, with the characteristics I expect from real Kobe beef. I was relieved that this was a product well worth supporting. Finally, Jeff Swain, CEO and President of Niman Ranch was there and spoke about their Certified Angus, naturally raised, USDA Prime, dry-aged product. from the Midwest. We "sampled" (I use quotes because the sample portions must have been 12 ounces) dry-aged New York strip, which was as good a piece of strip as I've ever had, maybe better. There were a couple of other speakers as well but I was in and out of the room and missed some stuff, like the guy from Certified Angus Beef. Marc Sarrazin and George Faison of DeBragga and Spitler introduced all the speakers. George Faison gave a particularly impassioned wrap-up speech and argued that if purchasers don't support these products they won't get made and it will take 20 years to recreate the infrastructure necessary to produce naturally-raised chicken and beef of this quality. There was also chocolate cake for dessert, with smoked-vanilla ice cream. And single-malt Scotch. And coffee. And before the meal ther were hors d'oeuvres that alone could have been a whole, excessive meal (steak tartare, Wagyu mini-burgers, dry-aged strip cubes on skewers). On the website here are the products: This is the chicken: http://debragga.com/shopexd.asp?id=26 This is the Nebraska Wagyu: http://debragga.com/shopexd.asp?id=142 I couldn't find a strip in the naturally-raised, dry-aged Certified Angus category. I need to ask about that. But this is the rib from that product line: http://debragga.com/shopexd.asp?id=136

My experience has been very different but who knows? I may just be crazy -- I probably am. I found a box of non-organic, similar but not the same DeCecco product on my shelf. This is the best I could do for a close-up. It appears to me that there's a slightly more rustic surface to the organic, but it's hard to tell without real magnification.

1. I'm paying $2.19 for a pound of spaghetti number 12. The Setaro price I see from Buon Italia is $7.65 a kilo. Is it cheaper if you actually go there? Not that it's a huge price difference anyway, but when combined with the convenience of being able to get my pasta where I normally shop this new organic stuff does the trick for me. 2. The surface texture looks slightly rougher but it's hard to tell, especially since I don't think I have a box of the exact same pasta number here to compare it to. I'll look, though.

I'm a long-time consumer of DeCecco pasta, not because I think it's the world's best pasta (brands like Setaro are markedly better) but because it's the best affordable pasta available at the market where I do my regular shopping. A year or so ago a new species of DeCecco pasta in ugly green boxes started to appear -- an organic line. They make it in very few shapes and the supply, at least where I shop, is inconsistent. But it is so much better than regular DeCecco. To my novice pasta palate, it tastes like the expensive imports that cost $5.99 a bag. I'm guessing the reason it's better is that the flour has not been tampered with by enriching it with niacin and all that (it likely has nothing to do with it being organic, which would probably not affect flavor or texture). Does anybody else have experiences and observations about this product?

There's an amusing post on the Grub Street blog about bacon jumping the shark. Their position is that not only has bacon jumped the shark, but also saying bacon has jumped the shark has jumped the shark!

A quick roundup of some things that have been written about our pantry experiment: The New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times all picked up the story. In addition, we saw mentions on Eater.com and on the Martha Stewart "Dinner Tonight" blog. We've also seen mentions from scores of independent bloggers from around the world -- those are just a few examples. I'll keep you all posted if anything interesting comes along during our overtime week.

Yes, from the Liz Biro archive: "Catch plans 2nd location on Market Street"

Here's what I know: Keith Rhodes doesn't own Deluxe -- he's the chef there, working for someone else. The last time we were down there, there was talk of either renovating Catch, which he does own, or opening a second Catch location with more of a sit-down dinner orientation. I don't believe either has happened yet, but I'm pretty sure I saw something a couple of months ago indicating that they're going with a second location this summer. Incidentally, when doing research on Wilmington-area dining the most reliable news source is Liz Biro, who covers food for the Star News. There's an archive of her columns here.

My favorite restaurant in Wilmington (we vacation almost every year on nearby Oak Island) is Indochine, which is one of the better Southeast Asian restaurants I've been to. I wrote a few pages about it in "Asian Dining Rules" so have spent some time there and have been impressed with the operation on every level. That's out on the Market Street strip, in other words not downtown so you'll need a car. I think probably the best chef in Wilmington is Keith Rhodes. He owns the restaurant Catch, which is a casual seafood lunch spot (though last year they were talking about adding dinner service -- not sure if that happened), and he's also the chef at a place called Deluxe, which is more of a fine-dining spot. Those are downtown. There's a very good kosher Moroccan place (yes, in Wilmington, NC) called Nagila. It's in a residential area not downtown. You indicated that you're looking for the "finer restaurants" but if you're looking for a great diner breakfast then definitely check out Whitey's. Out on Market Street, not downtown.

At the beginning of this challenge, I posted a photo of my freezer: This is what the freezer looks like more than a week later: As you can see there is very little discernible improvement. The lasagna, brisket and chicken are gone, but have been replaced by chili and lentil soup. I barely made a dent in anything else -- an ingredient here or there but no major consumers of space except a pint of stock. The one positive development is that I freed enough wiggle room to allow for further exploration of the freezer, which I'd been afraid to do earlier for fear that I'd never be able to get everything back in. So far I've carefully gone through the drawer compartment and the door. That big main compartment is a project perhaps for tomorrow. I know there's some pizza dough back there, for example. It might actually be easier to make dough than to find the frozen dough, but I think I'll look. Here are a few treasures I found in the freezer today. The big positive development is that I found butter. I was just thinking that I forgot to include butter on my shopping list, and then I found a whole pound of it in the freezer drawer: I can't believe how long butter lasts, because this stuff must be at least a couple of months old and it's not slated to expire -- at refrigerator temperatures -- until June. Amazing. Not only did I find a pound of butter, but also I found 3/4 of a pound of margarine. I totally forgot about it -- I had to buy it for a nursery-school demonstration where we had to do dairy-free cookies. So in a pinch we have the margarine available as shortening as well. I suppose there are other things in the house that can be used as shortening -- vegetable oils, for example, and I'm pretty sure there's a Crisco product somewhere in a cabinet -- but this experiment will not go on long enough for any of that to matter. Now here's something interesting: What is "reduced charoset juice," you ask? Charoset is one of the traditional foods on the Passover seder plate. In most Jewish-American households it tends to be a mixture of apples and nuts, symbolizing the mortar the slaves in Egypt used in construction, but we prefer a Middle Eastern recipe that's more like a dried-fruit compote with nuts. Anyway, when cooking this item, there's an incredible fruit syrup that gets created in the process, which last year we reduced and froze. I have no idea what to do with it, but there it is. This is something that apparently is to be made into French toast. Presumably, a bread product. This was a really nice, unexpected surprise. Definitely usable in something: Just some of the ravioli. There must be 5 more bags in there. Also found enough tortellini for a small meal. Several ice-cream treats (only two shown here but there must be a dozen in the freezer), contents unknown: Peas and corn. There's also spinach and broccoli. More hot dogs than I thought we had: Some goat's milk. I wonder how that got in there. I'm pretty sure this is some leftover red wine, intended for use in cooking: So those are just a few things, without me even tackling that big main compartment. And without considering the main "pantry" cabinet. Or the two shelves in another cabinet where we keep oil,vinegar, seasonings and such. Or the two shelves in another cabinet where we keep the baking essentials, plus honey, mustard and some random stuff: Or the two shelves of pretzels, crisps, cereals, etc. As for today, we still haven't had dinner (PJ had ravioli for dinner) but it will probably be something very light. I had planned meatballs and linguine for dinner but we wound up having that for family sit-down lunch because it was a snow day and PJ was home from school. For breakfast we had eggs over easy with toast.

Are they white or black truffles?

So I topped off my supplies today in the 10% challenge. I'm normally about a $150-per-week shopper so I budgeted $15 but spent closer to $20 because I blew the budget by buying a $5.99 block of mozzarella cheese. It was the one missing ingredient standing between me and pizza -- everything else I can pull together from what's here. So that should happen sometime later in the week. I got two heads of lettuce at $1.89 each, so that will allow for salads all week -- I still have some cucumbers, the radicchio, some beets and maybe some other stuff I can throw into salads. I got a bag of cheapo yellow onions ($2.50) and one nice red onion (about $1). And I got two dozen eggs ($2.49 each). So that's $18.25 worth of provisions and, with those, I should be able to fly through this week. As soon as I bought all that stuff, we headed down to Chinatown for a dim sum event. Along the way we saw just about everything I'd bought uptown for just about half as much money. We've already had chili for dinner tonight, week 2 day 1. For the coming week I'm loosely planning pizza one night, spaghetti and meatballs-from-the-freezer one night, chili one night, lentil soup one night, chicken fried rice one night, and a steak event on Tuesday night hosted by DeBragga & Spitler. So the dinners are pretty much covered, unless we have unexpected guests in which case I'll need to figure something out. Breakfasts and lunches are much easier and flexible, and I hope there will be some baking this week since we have a lot of supplies on hand for that sort of thing.

Oh, totally. This little head of radicchio that is now a couple of weeks old is still going strong. By now I'd have replaced it and discarded the old one. But I'm going to get several more uses out of it. I wouldn't be surprised to see it last a month. I have new-found respect for the humble radicchio. The problem for me is that I've become so efficient now that I seem to be accumulating almost as much in leftovers as I'm using from inventory. It feels like every time I cook something I wind up with many meals worth of stuff, quarts of extra in the freezer, and all these little zipper bags full of the extra scraps of whatever. Were I single I'd seriously consider pushing this challenge out to something like 3 months -- that's when it would get really hard.

So true about wasting ginger. I probably utilize ginger with 50% efficiency when you consider how much I trim away and how much I throw away. With only a slight increase in effort it's surely possible to utilize ginger with closer to 90% efficiency.

I think we've just named it "chili con carrots." The carrots don't seem to harm the chili and perhaps they lend some sweetness or aromatic benefits. I think the first time I added carrots to chili I did it because I read somewhere that a lot of hot sauces have carrots as an ingredient. They certainly don't impart any sort of carroty taste to the dish, though. That would be gross. We just had some of the bowl-of-orange for dinner. As I mentioned before, it really thickens up after a night in the fridge. And here's a bowl of the stuff served over brown rice, garnished with red onion and grated white cheddar, topped with red and green Melinda's hot sauces (carrots are an ingredient in the red, I've just learned).

Wow, almost six pounds. Just that one thing could be a small family's protein for the week! I really like turkey breast just roasted and sliced for sandwiches, especially if the sandwiches include bacon and mayonnaise. You could do that with a pound or two. Actually, were I in your shoes I'd probably start by roasting the whole thing, then I'd harvest the usable meat and spin it off into various dishes. And whatever you do with it, I'd suggest saving a pound or two of meat for turkey hash.