Smithy

"Help!" I yelped to a friend who knows much more about cooking game and about sous vide cookery than I do. "How should I cook this? Sous vide time and temperature???" It was still frozen in its package as I typed. I'm trying to work my way down through treasures in the freezer. In this case it involved a smallish roast provided by my DIL. I thought it was labeled "back roast" but today realized it was labeled "buck roast". I thought it looked a looked like a tri-tip roast, but really didn't know the precise cut. I should add, by way of background, that my husband distrusts deer meat in almost any form. That doesn't stop his daughter (to whom I refer as my DIL although that technically isn't correct) from donating some to us. I think she does it mostly because she knows I like it. Perhaps annoying him is a side benefit. While I waited for an answer from my friend, I threw the frozen bag into a 120F bath. It sat there for several hours, thawing and beginning to cook. In the meantime, I heard from my friend, who apologized for not having answered more quickly (she does has a life!) and who pointed me to Hank Shaw. He said, in essence, that sous vide isn't generally a good choice for venison. There are exceptions, but my cut wasn't one. Well, heck. By that time I was committed, both in terms of timing and scheduling. I stuck with the plan, and let that roast bathe for several hours at 120F. Then I emptied its bag of the ozmasome and added a prepackaged marinade. Other dinner preparations involved cleaning and slicing or chopping a red bell pepper, two jalapenos, half an onion, a nice bunch of garlic scapes, and assorted salad greens. When it came time to cook I oiled the peppers and onions and cooked them over a barbecue wok, and seared the deer steak on a high-heat grill to develop a crust. After I pulled the meat from the grill, I sliced and cut it for our salads. Below is the (quite unappetizing, no wonder my friend has a separate life) picture of the still-frozen roast, then what happened after it had been sous-vided, marinated and grilled. The funny thing about this salad was that I got the fisheye from my DH at the very thought of venison, but he liked this. On the other hand I wasn't crazy about the spices in the marinade -- and a decade ago he wouldn't have liked them either! Nonetheless it was an overall success. The times, temperatures and materials are reproducible, but I can freewheel on the meat and marinade without fear of a dud. 120F in the water bath for about 4 hours, then idling as the water cools down, then a sear on the grill when the time comes. The meat is tender, not mealy, not tough. Yes, I know there's some redundancy in these collages. I hope you enjoy the images anyway.

They're here!!! I got a spur-of-the-moment note on the NextDoor app that a local farmer had strawberries available. The local farmers' market had decided to cancel because of storms, but he'd already picked quarts and quarts of strawberries. They are perfuming the house now...and the refrigerator. When I asked, I learned that he also had eggs. I usually buy them elsewhere, but I took the opportunity. While I was waiting for all the, his partner came in with garlic scapes! Yay! The eggs aren't in the photo. Some of those scapes went into tonight's dinner. Some of those strawberries will be tomorrow's breakfast. I'm in heaven.

If you've been hankering for some All-Clad cookware, now is a good time to check out their factory seconds. This sale ends in just over a day. I've gotten all my beloved All-Clad through sales like this. In fact, if I could possibly justify it I'd be all over this set of 3 hard-anodized skillets whose only fault is damaged packaging. Perfect shape to my eyes, not so for my DH...and I already have what I need.

I didn't think about that! I have pasta bowls on order, because most of mine (from Pier One) have broken. Maybe I'll go add Tonino tuna to the order.

Thank you so much for sharing your visit to Rodney Strong's! It sounds fabulous...and Mr. Kim's review is delightful!

I bought several varieties of packaged marinades a couple of years ago at a Middle Eastern market in Tucson. Last night I decided to try the chermoula: Since I hadn't been able to decide between chicken and fish earlier in the day, I decided on both: chicken thighs, and a steelhead trout filet I'd bought on sale. I put cherry smoking chips in a small bowl on the grill and began heating it up. I used about half the pouch's contents as chicken marinade, and saved the rest for basting both the chicken and the fish. The trout I cooked on the upper grate; the chicken started on the lower grate and finished on the upper. Not bad! We both thought the chermoula a bit too salty. The saltiness was tamed where it had cooked and crusted on the meat, but what little uncooked marinade was left over was too salty to be a good dip. We thought another of their marinades had been too salty also, so it may be a characteristic of that brand. I think the moral is that it's better to make our own although the convenience of the package is lovely. The chicken didn't survive the night. The leftover trout is now part of a trout salad: mayo, hard-boiled egg, lemon and pickle juice, and capers. Delicious with cream cheese on toast...but that's today's breakfast, not last night's dinner.

My charger has a different model number: KHB3581CA0, but you can look at the photo and see whether the charging indicator is in the same spot. It's a little circle on the lid release button. When it was charging, the light would travel slowly around the circle, like the "wait" sign we see on so many web browsers as a page loads. When the battery was fully charged, the entire circle would be steadily illuminated.

@liamsaunt, your description of the food at Winslow's Tavern this time around makes it sound as though the food is going downhill as well as the service. That said, it seems as though you've been regular and enthusiastic customers there over the years. Have you considered talking to the manager about your treatment regarding the outside tables? Voting with one's feet, without explaining why, isn't much help to a business.

What @kayb said. But truly, the food looks delicious! What was it about the bruschetta that fell flat for you? It looks appealing in your photo.

Oh, come now! Can you really leave us hanging like this?

The entrance to Azurea set the stage for the dinner splendidly, didn't it? What a delightful dinner! I'm with you and the others that the fried calamari sounds wrong. I wonder whether they intended it to provide crunch / texture contrast, but it didn't come out right? No matter. I'm amazed at the flavor combinations and delighted that you're showing them to us. Your hosts' brunch offering looks pretty darned good too!

LOL I blame @Dave the Cook for my purchase of one of these! It arrived a few weeks ago. Works quite well. My justification, if I needed one, is that it will be useful in our trailer when we don't have electrical power. It makes quick work of cheese, and doesn't have the bloody-knuckles potential of my box grater. Is it as quick as the food processor? Of course not. But it's lighter and more compact. I'm glad @weinoo and Dave started the old trend.

Welcome! The bit about hand carving 300 pound blocks of ice caught my eye. Was that strictly for decoration, or did you somehow use the ice sculptures to affect / process the drinks? (I'm imaging some exotic channel through which the liquid flows, to ensure it's at the exact temperature. That's probably a silly image.)

Those of you who are long-time members, or who have read The Daily Gullet, may remember one of our earlier members, @Maggie the Cat. It has come to my attention that she is celebrating a milestone birthday in July. (No, I don't know which milestone.) Her daughter has set up a web page asking for short videos that she can put into a video montage for Maggie's birthday. Here's an excerpt from the Birthday Tribute web page: If you'd like to participate, please go to the Birthday Tribute web page here. Deadline for submissions is July 5, 2022.

Your explanation of the provenance, and comments about adjustments to the original (copycat) recipe, make it sound like this sauce is right up my alley. Many thanks!

I could make (a) wild guesses and (b) a fool of myself, or just ask: Have you described / given a recipe for TBQ sauce? I'm with you on BBQ sauce. I finally have found a few I like, and I've worked out why I don't like most of them. I look forward to learning about your preference and invention.

That sounds wonderful!

There's no question in my mind that the breed, the way the animal was raised and slaughtered, and then the way handled afterward are all important factors. My darling, although he is my darling, doesn't believe it - or at least, doesn't want to. He looks at price. Old grad school budget habits die hard for some folks. @weinoo, I admit it seems absurd to compare a pork shoulder steak to a beef ribeye of the same thickness. That is one reason I've been amazed at his insistence that he wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The muscles are completely different, and by rights should require different treatment. Yet the marbling of these two cuts of meat, when we've been shopping carefully, is fairly similar. I kept the pork bone to my plate in order to hide that clue. 😁 Unfortunately, neither piece really was cooked to best advantage last night. (I mishandled the sous vide.) He still came away thinking he prefers the base flavor of pork, to the degree he can tell the difference. So it goes.

Side-by-side taste test of ribeye steak and pork shoulder steak, both grilled. I should explain by way of background that pork is probably my husband's favorite protein. I like it well enough, but think there are other delicious proteins (beef! chicken! fish! shellfish!) that should not go neglected. Some months ago when he was holding forth about the relative costs of beef and pork, he asserted that the flavors were equivalent and he doubted he'd be able to tell the difference, whereas the prices right now are VERY different. I decided to call his bluff. From the freezer I pulled a package containing a single pork shoulder steak and another package containing a single beef ribeye steak. They've been awaiting this test for a while. I used a circulating hot water bath at 115F to thaw them, then brought it up to 135F to get the interior cooked, with the idea of barely needing to sear them on the outside when dinner time came. We went back to chores until it was time to heat the grill. The money-shot photo doesn't do much more than prove that we actually had asparagus with dinner. His plate also had toast. I kept the bony part of the pork steak to myself to eliminate that particular clue for him. The upshot? Yes, he could tell there was a difference. No, he couldn't tell which was which although he said later he preferred the pork. The kicker was that neither cut came out as well as we usually do them. I think the mid-afternoon decision to do this test, with the hustle-along of the sous vide bath, didn't help. But I don't think it will be worth repeating the test.

Country-style ribs that we bought with a spice rub, grilled over high heat with 1 flip, set to lower-temperature area until the internal temperature was roughly 145. The whole process took under 10 minutes. Country-style ribs have been a fraught topic for us because he used to pack (and I mean pack) them into a slow cooker, douse them with barbecue sauce, and cook on low for roughly 8 hours. He loved it that way. Then at some point, that treatment began to turn out badly overcooked meat. Was it the time? the different slow cooker? Different meat or pig breed? Since then we've tried oven cooking (low and slow, high and fast) and shorter slow-cooker times and different slow-cookers, to no avail. There's a very good discussion here, going on for 8 or 9 posts, about the two variants of country-style ribs we find in this country: are they from the pork shoulder, or the pork loin? That discussion asserts that the meat is very different and needs different treatment. Last night's ribs I'm pretty sure were from the shoulder, based on the meat structure and the bones. I especially found this post by @robirdstx to be useful. At any rate (I told you that story to tell you this one) last night's high-heat quick grilling for the country-style bone-in ribs was the best we've had in a long time. Maybe ever. They might have been slightly chewier than he'd like. I would have preferred a different rub. We used the barbecue sauces of our choice, and that was very helpful. (I'm not a big fan of meat slathered with BBQ sauce, and he is, and our tastes in sauce are different.) Next up: we'll get a package of this style rib, without the rub, and a package of boneless country-style ribs and give them the same quick high-heat grilling treatment, to see how they compare. At some point I'll try sous vide to give it all a head start, too. DH is skeptical about sous vide, but I've found it to be a help sometimes. The discussion I linked to above is actually in the sous vide topic.

Ah, I found the sherbet recipe, not on these forums: No-churn Hibiscus Sherbet, from Kitchn.com. I bet I could use the CREAMi on it. Whaddaya think?

@Kerry Beal and @Anna N often quote the adage that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well. Thanks to this topic I have semifreddo on the brain, and somewhere recently (not in these forums) I've seen a no-churn red (rhubarb? berry?) fruit ice cream or sherbet that looks really good. Naturally I want to use the CREAMi to make it. is that counterproductive?* BTW I really like the plastic bag idea @blue_dolphin mentions above. Since I now have 5 pint jars I probably won't need to resort to it, but it's a good one to tuck away for future reference. I'll have to make more freezer space, though! *It probably IS counterproductive. I ask you: does this make sense in a CREAMi? Or this? But they sure look good! And I want to play with the CREAMi!

I loved their semifreddo instructions and ideas. Their article on How to make semifreddo had several recipes and enough information that I was able to freewheel an excellent semifreddo the year I acquired some excellent apricots. Thanks for the reminder that this window is about to close. I have some recipes saved (there's a great Thai eggplant salad in there somewhere) and need to be sure to download them. Edited to add: I logged in and discovered far more saved than I'd remembered. Here's the Southeast Asian Grilled Eggplant Salad recipe (not necessarily Thai as I'd written). And how could I have forgotten the Citrus-Marinated Roasted Chicken? That still gets cooked once or twice a year. Oh, I will miss Fine Cooking.

The article I read said they're sticking with the blue, apparently because that's such an identifier. What surprised me was that they're sticking also with the "iconic" macaroni smile (an elbow turned curve down, with a sauce drop, like a smile). I was surprised because I'd never noticed it before! Then again, I can't remember when (if ever) I last bought the stuff.

I'd go for something green / light /raw. If salad doesn't appeal, what about a veg plate with dipping sauces (aioli, pesto, hummus, tzadziki) or an antipasto salad / plate? Either of those ideas could be served as a first course or on the side at the same time.