EdS

I had steel-cut oats this morning for the first time in about a year. They have a nicer texture than rolled oats like Quaker Oats but take longer to cook. I think a half-hour simmer is the minimum and an hour or more is even better. I put mine in the rice cooker last night and set it to Keep Warm (about 160 degrees). I had a nice hot breakfast waiting for me in the morning. You can add dried fruit to the mixture at the beginning too. Steel-cut oats can go rancid pretty quickly. That's why they usually come in a can. So, if you get them in bulk you might want to treat them like brown rice or other whole grains and keep them in the fridge or freezer. Alton Brown did a show on oats. [edited to add link]

I tried keeping a PC in the kitchen. That lasted about a week. I have a Treo but I can't imagine pecking away at it in the kitchen. So, for now, the recipes are in the spherical file on my shoulders.

I am willing to pay a reasonable premium for organic if I know that the item tastes better and/or the item contains materially fewer chemicals that may harm me. On the other hand, I will not pay more solely to support an environmental "cause".

Thanks for your advice, both on what to do and how to maintain these boards. I'm giving them a call on Monday.

I got my Michigan Maple 18"x18"x3.5" cutting board last week and have enjoyed cutting on it much more than the plastic board I had been using. However, I've run into a problem. I put maybe six coats of mineral oil on the board over the course of a couple of days. It seemed to be sucking up oil. I figured I didn't want it to split so I didn't want to take any chances. After maybe its second washing, I wiped the board down to dry and several minutes later I heard a noise in the kitchen. When I went in there to check it out, I noticed these two cracks. I certainly didn't soak the board. I scrubbed it down with soap and water in the sink for maybe 15 seconds and then pulled it out. I was trying not to expose the board to any more water than necessary. I dried the board with a cloth. Could I have actually over-oiled the board, causing this to happen? More importantly, what can I do to fix this? Can I do something to make the wood expand to fill the gaps? Should I fill them in with wood filler and sand? I was in love with this board until this happened!

How dare you question authority?

I saw several flavors of Mitchell's ice cream in the freezer section at the local Draeger's market here in San Mateo this evening. However, at $9+ per half gallon, I didn't bite.

Go to a Japanese market and ask for katakuri-ko (potato starch).

You could try using Lactaid. I actually prefer the taste of soy milk over dairy milk but I cannot imagine cooking with the stuff. Then again, I'm a tofu fiend. Real tofu, that is, not that stuff sold in a plastic tub.

The granny idea is damn good!

Everyone into the hot tub... ...of soup.

Rao's Penne Rigate with a tomato sauce of onion and butter and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano Roasted chicken thighs with EVOO and cracked black pepper It's my first foray into a "premium" dried pasta and I have to say that there is an improvement in flavor, texture, and how the sauce adheres to the pasta compared to the cheap stuff. On the other hand, I used some Italian San Marzano canned whole tomatoes and I can't say that I could tell the difference between that and Trader Joe's canned organic tomatoes. They're both great. Perhaps I need to make a side-by-side comparison. I drained the tomatoes and ran them through my recently-acquired food mill. Get thee a food mill. So useful. I used a white onion instead of yellow. It worked just fine. Here's the sauce simmering. If it looks familiar it's because I got the idea out of Sam's Thanksgiving Week Diary and wondered if such a simple pasta sauce could be good. Yes! Oh yeah, I blame him for the fancy copper pan too. I would have added lemon to the chicken but when I realized I was out of lemons it was too late. I usually don't care for sweets so no dessert. (NOTE FROM MANAGEMENT: This topic is a continuation of Dinner! 2004)

I made a carrot soup the other night using basmati as a thickener and some homemade brown chicken stock. It was my first test of my new Mouli food mill and I was very pleased with the result. Food mills should be more common! I swirled in a little heavy cream (next time is creme fraiche). Heaven! The basmati gave the soup a slight nut flavor that I found to be a nice change from using potatoes.

Marcella Hazan says that attempts to keep fresh pasta soft, such as wrapping in plastic or refrigerating, are not only unnecessary but undermine the quality of the pasta. Marcella Says (heh) that fresh pasta should be dried if not used right away. She suggests that fresh pasta be dried in nests on towels for 24 hours and then stored like any other dried pasta, not in the refrigerator. I have not made fresh pasta but am merely passing along what I've read in her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

Turkey legs? Best consumed mightily while gazing upon a joust.

If you're roasting a chicken or other small fowl, a frying pan or skillet will work as well or better than a roasting pan. Deglazing on the stovetop is easier due to the handle, you can size the pan better to the fowl so the juices don't burn in the oven, and you won't have trouble finding one made of something better than plain stainless steel like the current All-Clad roaster which is a poor choice for the stovetop.

I think the most effective way to make food appeal to the unwashed masses is to add lots of sugar.

Aren't they just castrated? You know, chicken eunuchs?

I bought some thinly-sliced Washington Wagyu at the local Japanese market this evening and experimented with how to cook it. I marinated the beef in a mixture of 2/3 sake and 1/3 shoyu for 30 minutes. Then I heated a skillet to medium-high and seared several batches of the meat, adding no other ingredients. I'm convinced that searing the sliced beef so it's mostly brown but with a bit of red is the way to go. Any char just makes the beef bitter and that tasty fat melts away. It's pointless. The Maillard reaction makes the flavor more interesting in my opinion than leaving the beef raw but I tried a piece that way and I must say it was pretty good. By the way, I don't typically eat red meat. It's not my favorite. But this Wagyu was something else!

Unfortunately, when I left my cooker on overnight and checked the temperature this morning, it had risen to 161F. I don't think the water was hot enough before I began my first test and the Keep Warm setting won't heat the water very quickly.

That does sound good. I think I need to try this!

I'm waiting for someone else to be the guinea pig. I've drifted off to other food projects, as I like to call them, and haven't come around to experimenting with sous vide yet. I read your post and it got me thinking more about what these rice cookers could do so I ran that test. I also tried the slow cook/soup setting hoping it might give me a stable simmer at 190F or so. Unfortunately, the water climbed to a full boil and stayed there. The only advantage that I can see to using this setting over cooking on the burner is that I can set how long I want the liquid to boil. But, a full boil results in cloudy stocks and soups. I don't braise at a full boil either. No application to sous vide that I can see.

I filled my Sanyo ECJ-D55S 5-Cup rice cooker two-thirds full with water and left it on in the Keep Warm mode for two hours. I took the temperature with a Thermapen digital thermometer. I got 137F degrees.

That's sous vide cooking done in a rice cooker. There are potential food safety issues among other things so you might want to browse that thread.

I had no idea that "hispanic" was offensive to anyone.