Afterburner

Well, as it turns out, the temperature gauge on my smoker lied. The gauge itself may have been affected by the sub-freezing temps, but the pork loin got cooked through and through. In fact, it got overcooked, since I left it in longer than I thought necessary before checking because I assumed that the temperature gauge was accurately reflecting what was going on inside the smoker. When I checked it after six hours of smoking, the internal meat temperature was 178F. Oof. It wasn't horrid, especially given that I've been overcooking my meat for years (if you know what I mean, and I think you do). But I was aiming for a less-done hunk of pork. We live and learn.

Up until I decided to REALLY learn how to cook a couple months ago (as opposed to occasionally slapping a couple of boneless, skinless chicken breasts in a skillet, dousing them with store-bought marinade, and cooking 'em to death), junk food (from fast food joints, pre-prepared microwaved items, and pre-mixed convenience food) featured prominently in my diet. My guilt levels were low, except for two items: The Steak, Egg, and Cheese Bagel from McD's, and Hostess Ho-Hos (or Little Debbie Swiss Rolls, which are identical). Even in the darkest days of my culinary wasteland, when I was regularly (and quite happily) eating $2.00 vending machine sandwiches at work, I still felt pangs of guilt whenever I'd chow down on a super-greasy-but-oh-so-delicious Steak, Egg, and Cheese Bagel (and I upped the grease factor by having 'em put it on a McMuffin instead of a McBagel). Every time I order breakfast at McDonald's, I order two. Because one simply isn't enough. Unfortunately, two is, as it happens, too much, so I'm usually bloated and miserable after the 2nd. As for Ho-Hos, they sometimes show up in the vending machine at work. And I quickly empty them out. Little three-packs of god knows what sort of chemicals holding the thing together, which I can wolf down in about 90 seconds. As I learn to cook, and learn to eat less crap, my junk food habit will continue to fall by the wayside (as it already has, in the main -- I've eaten a home-cooked dinner at the table every night now for the past 10 days in a row). But they can pry my Ho-Hos and my Steak, Egg, and Cheese McMuffins from my cold, dead hands...

Will non-heavy aluminum foil work? For that is all that I have. And what would be the recommended temperature and length of cook time?

It looks like I may have to do this. I'm smoking a 2-3lb pork loin. It's been in the smoker for 5 hours or so, but the temperature gauge on the smoker reads "warm" instead of "ideal." Which leads me to suspect that the sub-freezing temperatures outside are taking their toll. I've never had to finish a smoked pork loin (or, for that matter, anything else) in the oven before. Anyone have suggestions on the best way to go about this to preserve flavor, juicyness, etc?

This was more "brunch" than breakfast, given that I ate it around 10:30 or so. Reading How to Cook Everything and, especially the bits where he extolled the virtues of slow-cooked scrambled eggs, gave me a hankering to try it. I whisked some parmesan, some whole milk, some salt, and some cracked red pepper into a few eggs, and cooked 'em slowly over low heat. They were fab. Also cooked up a buncha bacon.

Inspired by the "What's for Dinner?" and "Breakfast -- The most important meal of the day" threads in the "Cooking" forum, I ask you... What are you cooking for dessert for yourself? I just pulled a strawberry/blackberry crisp out of the oven. Cinnamon, brown sugar, and St. Brendan's Irish Creme was mixed in with the fruit. The crisp topping contains a buncha butter, brown sugar, toasted coconut flakes, flour, and rolled oats. Smells amazing. I'm about to go try it now that's it's cooled down a bit.

Tonight was a simple chicken and rice dish. The chicken was bits of white and dark meat left over from my chicken deboning experiment of earlier this week. I diced 'em and threw 'em in a skillet with some toasted walnut oil, some garlic, and some Sriracha chili sauce. The rice was whole-grain black rice, labelled "Forbidden Rice" (which always makes me think of Homer Simpson). Cooked in salted water, and with a bit of butter. When these items were done, I mixed the former with the latter, turning the chicken meat a lovely purple. Seriously, this dish looked like something out of a Friday the 13th movie. Tasted pretty good, though. A few leaves of escarole, butter lettuce, and dandelion gave their lives in order to make a shredded greens salad. Currently cooling down after being removed from the oven is a Strawberry/Blackberry Crisp, made as a variant of the Apple Crisp recipe from How To Cook Everything. It smells amazing.

For all you folks who have and use a Kershaw Shun, what's their durability like? I am going to be upgrading my knife collection (current model: 13-piece Farberware knife set, complete with rust spots (they came later, though), which cost around $100, that my wife and I got as a wedding present), and, well, given the choice of several like items of approximately equal quality and price, the deciding factor usually ends up being "whichever one looks the coolest." And I have to say, I really like the look of the Shun knives (though I need to find someplace local that carries 'em so I can see how they feel in my hand). But one of my friends cautions me that the current enthusiasm for Japanese knives is just a "fad," and that Japanese knives, being lighter and thinner, are much more "delicate" than the heavier, thicker European knives, and thus need to be kept far away from such things as, for instance, chicken bones, lest they get all nicked up. Does his assessment in any way reflect reality? Or is he just being his usual curmudgeonly self? Can you use a Kershaw Shun Chef's Knife as vigorously as you could use, say, an F. Dick Chef's Knife, lopping off the ends of chicken leg bones and chicken wings and so on?

For all you folks who have and use a Kershaw Shun, what's their durability like? I am going to be upgrading my knife collection (current model: 13-piece Farberware knife set, complete with rust spots (they came later, though), which cost around $100, that my wife and I got as a wedding present), and, well, given the choice of several like items of approximately equal quality and price, the deciding factor usually ends up being "whichever one looks the coolest." And I have to say, I really like the look of the Shun knives (though I need to find someplace local that carries 'em so I can see how they feel in my hand). But one of my friends cautions me that the current enthusiasm for Japanese knives is just a "fad," and that Japanese knives, being lighter and thinner, are much more "delicate" than the heavier, thicker European knives, and thus need to be kept far away from such things as, for instance, chicken bones, lest they get all nicked up. Does his assessment in any way reflect reality? Or is he just being his usual curmudgeonly self? Can you use a Kershaw Shun Chef's Knife as vigorously as you could use, say, an F. Dick Chef's Knife, lopping off the ends of chicken leg bones and chicken wings and so on?

So I made my wholly unorthodox and unauthentic Beef Burgundy last night, and it was fab. Not as good as the stuff we had at the wedding reception a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't expecting it to be. Mistakes were made, as it happens. The recipe called for "chopped" onions and carrots. And my brain said "Chopped! Ah-hah! That's what the food processor is for!" So what I actually ended up with was "minced" onions and carrots. Which wouldn't have been a problem until the step where I had to remove the carrots and the onions from the marinade... So I strained the marinade into a seperate bowl, leaving me with a bowl of marinade and a bowl of purple meat covered with minced carrots and onions. Then I took out each individual piece of meat and swished it around the marinade to clean off all the carroty and oniony bits. This took Some Time, as you might imagine. Anyhow, aside from that little snafu, it went wonderfully well. I was extremely pleased with the results.

"Dishonest?" That's an interesting choice of value judgements. "Unorthodox?" Sure. "Cavalier?" You betcha. But "dishonest?" That implies a level of willful deception which, given the circumstances (me cooking dinner for me and my wife), seems a little overwrought.

So, continuing down my path towards actually cooking real food for dinner every night instead of microwaving Hot Pockets for dinner every night, tonight I mangled...er...deboned a whole chicken. Skinless, boneless chicken breasts: $3.99/lb Whole chicken (which, after a suitable amount of work, contains, in addition to other stuff, 2 skinless, boneless chicken breasts): $0.89/lb (it was on sale) The economic argument here is compelling. But I digress. Anyhow, since I was cutting this chicken up for the express purpose of having two (2) skinless, boneless chicken breasts, I removed the skin. And then...had no clue what to do with it. I had asked my foodie friend if skin was good for stock, and he said "Not really. It adds more fat than it adds flavor, and you're just gonna hafta skim that out anyways." And I can't throw it into the trashcan because I have a dog who will gladly dig it out. And I'm a little hesitant to throw it down the disposal. So what can I do with this stuff?

Well, honestly, to the extent that I bother calling it anything when I plate it up and serve it to my wife, I'll almost certainly refer to it simply as "Dinner. Here ya go." But, for the sake of our mutual edification and amusement, consider: I am using the Boeuf Bourguignonne recipe as written in The Joy of Cooking (the new, updated 1997 edition). In every aspect of the recipe save one, I will be faithfully following the recipe as written. The technique will be the same as described in TJoC. The ingredients, save one, will be the same as described in the TJoC. In fact, the only part of this recipe that will be varied at all will be the wine -- I will be using, as mentioned, the burgundy/orange juice/lemonade mixture (and that only because my wife made buckets of the stuff and I need to get rid of it somehow, so I can make room in the freezer for more stock). What else should I call it, if not Beef Burgundy?

Really? Why? Even if it turns out to taste nothing like traditional beef burgundy (and, really, I don't expect it to), it will: A) Still probably taste pretty good. B) Will taste a lot better (and probably be healthier for me) than the alternative, which would be Hot Pockets or some other microwave dish. C) Let me make a dent in the copious amount of frozen cheap burgundy/lemonade/orange juice mixture currently cluttering up my deep freeze. My first attempt at making stock used the carcass of a smoked chicken breast, three packets of different types of old lunchmeat that were in danger of going "off," some roasted beef marrow bones, some roasted baby carrots, and some roasted dried fruit (prunes, dates, cherries, figs, and a pineapple ring) that my wife's grandmother had sent her for Christmas. And it turned out fantastic. BEHOLD MY CAVALIER DISREGARD OF TRADITION!

We had boeuf bourguignonne (under it's more pedestrian name of "Beef Burgundy") last week at a friend's wedding. It tasted awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I'm going to attempt to make it myself this week. The recipe we'll be using will be the one in the new 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking. The burgundy we'll be using is some cheap stuff, though. We bought a gallon of it to make some wine slush type things for a friend's party, and we have a lot left over. And it's mixed with lemonade and orange juice. Should be interesting...

Yep, I got this book as well. (I signed up for the Good Cook Book-of-the-Month club. On Food and Cooking was one of my first four selections.) It's pretty nifty. Yep, so far he has provided some key tidbits of info, such as "salt stuff before cooking" and "let the dough rest for a minute to let the gluten relax." His anatomy of a frying french fry was also interesting.

Dear Food Network: Just because someone is a restaurant industry professional does not mean they're qualified in any way to review food. Love, AB

Well, it's not so much the recipes as the...erm... Hrm. Before I started down this path to madness, I would go to the grocery store and wander up and down the aisles and not really understand what I was seeing. I mean, I knew there were spices and meats and vegetables and so forth. But I had no clue what to do with them. And following recipes doesn't provide any insight or understanding into what to do with them except in a very limited fashion. Example: I started baking cookies regularly starting back in August (read more about my cookie baking adventures in this thread), and I can cook a pretty mean chocolate chip cookie. But all that baking of cookies gave me no insight into the nature of dough. The Joy of Cooking (and yes, this is the recently revised 1997 edition -- the one without the squirrel recipes) gave me that understanding in a small way. I've got a lot more to learn, obviously, but going to the produce section of Whole Foods after reading the vegetable and salad chapters of TJoC was quite an education. If you were to remove all of the recipes from TJoC and just leave behind the expository text describing techniques, processes, ingredients, and so on, I would still find it an invaluable book for the rank beginner (though, perhaps, less useful for advanced cooks, which is why they probably include the recipes in the first place). The same thing is true (but less so) for How to Cook Everything. HtCE tells you how to make stock. TCoJ gives you an understanding of what stock is, why bones in the stock contribute body, and so forth. HtCE tells you about fish, and what types of fish can be substituted for other types. TCoJ gives you a fish-by-fish breakdown. Nope, that was me. I made shepherd's pie with twice the amount of stock and the flavor was noticably improved. (Also added some 3-year-old aged gouda to the taters.)

As some of you know, having doubtless hung upon my EVERY WORD with breathless excitement since my arrival here (), I am a total novice when it comes to cooking. It has only been within the past 45 days that I have moved past the "can boil water without being a danger to himself or to others" stage and on to actually making full meals. (For those of you who haven't seen my other posts, back in early December, I decided that I was going to try to teach myself to cook homecooked meals, in order to save money, and in order to provide my newborn son with homecooked food when he gets old enough to eat it.) In pursuing my education, I purchased (or received as a gift) the following books: Cooking for Dummies by Bryan Miller and Marie Rama I'm Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown The All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker I'm Just Here for More Food by Alton Brown How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman And since I am completely new to this whole cooking thing, and since you more experienced foodies probably get a lot of friends pestering you about which is the best cookbook they should buy if they want to get into cooking, I figured I'd share my thoughts. Cooking for Dummies -- Skip this one. Seriously. Technique-wise and ingredient-wise, there is absolutely nothing in this book that you can't learn from The Joy of Cooking, and there's a lot of info in TJoC that isn't in CFD. And TJoC only costs $15 more, and provides a vatload more info and recipes. (On the other hand, the first meal I made when I started down the path to being a home cook and foodie was the Shepherd's Pie recipe from this book. And it was pretty darned tasty once I doubled the amount of stock called for in the recipe. But, on the gripping hand, the Shepherd's Pie recipe in TJoC isn't significantly different from the one in Cooking for Dummies, so...) I'm Just Here for the Food -- I got this one because I'm a geek, and Alton Brown is a geek, and I figured there'd be interesting tidbits and info contained within its pages. And I was right -- there's a lot of good info in this book. However, it's info of a trivial nature, telling you things about molecules and heat transfer and things of that nature. And while this is useful information to enhance your technique, as a novice cook I was looking more for "Here's how to debone a chicken" or "Here's how to cook vegetables." It's a good book, and I'm glad I bought it, but it would have been mostly useless to me without some other book to give me the broad foundation I needed to really get the best use out of what Alton was telling me. The All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking -- And, speaking of foundations, here it is. My mom got me this book for Christmas, and I read it cover to cover (only skipping the chapter on Candy, which just wasn't all that interesting to me). As far as "bang for my buck," TJoC has provided more info, both about ingredients and technique, than any other cookbook I've read. It has illustrations for many of the various types of greens, as well as mushrooms, pasta, chiles, fish, and cuts of meat. It explains cooking techniques in detail. It talks about meat and poultry in detail, and discusses how beef, pork, and chicken these days are a lot leaner than they were even 10 years ago, thus requiring changes in cooking technique. Additionally, it also contains interesting bits of food history, such as the likely origin of nachos, how sauces evolved, the competing accounts of how the reuben sandwich was invented, and so forth. It showcases all this information in a wonderful array of recipes, including a bunch of classic recipes from around the world, recipes for food that was considered "fine dining" in days gone by, and recipes for good, solid "blue collar" classics like the Hot Brown sandwich, the Muffaletta, and Brunswick stew. I'm Just Here for More Food -- This is Alton Brown's baking book, and generally provides the same sort of info about baking that I'm Just Here for the Food provides about savory cooking, and the same remarks made for that book can also be made for this one. However, this book has already been useful to me for one tip: If the dough doesn't wanna roll out, let it sit a few minutes so the gluten can relax. The homemade "leftover" pizza I made last night ended up putting this particular bit of knowledge to good use. How to Cook Everything -- I'm about halfway through this book. The blurb on the cover touts it as "a more hip version of The Joy of Cooking." While the tone of the writing is more modern, I would (so far, at least) tend to classify the book as "a lite version of The Joy of Cooking." The book does indeed provide useful info on technique and ingredients, but it seems overall less detailed than TJoC. The breadth of info is almost the same as TJoC, but the depth isn't. Also, as a matter of purely personal preference, I find the recipes in HtCE a bit...uninspiring. HtCE doesn't feature a lot of classic recipes, instead focusing on a more modern style of cooking. So the recipes all have names like "Chicken with thyme and pesto" or "Chicken with rice and mushrooms" or "Chicken with wine sauce and shallots," etc. These are names which just don't send my imagination soaring like, for example, "boeuf borguignonne" does. However, HtCE serves as a fantastic complement to TJoC. My personal preferences on naming conventions aside, the emphasis on modern cuisine serves as a nice counterpoint to TJoC's more traditional approach. HtCE also acknowledges the fact that people these days buy food from supermarkets, and says "That's okay if you gotta." (TJoC's attitude to buying anything less than the best, freshest possible ingredients is a little more rigid.) HtCE also has a spiffy section on kitchen equipment, and what gear you will find most useful, a feature lacking in TJoC. Based on my experiences in learning how to cook from books, if one of my friends asked me "I'd like to start learning how to cook. What books do you recommend?", I would say "Buy The Joy of Cooking and How to Cook Everything. Read the 'Equipment' section of HtCE first, then read TJoC cover-to-cover, then go back and read the rest of HtCE." That would, IMHO, provide a good start for anyone who wants to head down the road to becoming a foodie.

Tonight, we did the Sandra Lee "semi-homemade" thing. (Yeah yeah, I know. But I just got into this cooking thing, and I still have a lot of ready-made items from the store that I have to work through.) Two nights ago, rubia (my wife) made a lovely pot roast with carrots, onions, and sun-dried tomatoes. And then she made a pureé sauce out of the juices and veggies in the pan. Tonight, I decided I was gonna make a pizza outta the leftovers. I told rubia that I needed to get some yeast and stuff to make the pizza dough, but she pointed out that we had a can of Pillsbury pizza dough in the fridge. It was old and manky, and did not unroll as the can's instructions said it would. So I tried to roll it out with my rolling pin. Unfortunately, I had a severe attack of the stupids, and tried rolling it out on the back of a baking sheet on top of the pre-heated oven. It went...poorly. Round 2 featured me cleaning off a huge swath of countertop space and rolling out a can of Pillsbury Grand Biscuits. Wadded 'em into a ball, floured the countertop, floured the biscuit ball, floured my hands, floured the rolling pin, floured my shirt, floured my shorts, floured most of the horizontal surface areas in my kitchen, and floured a few in the living room as well. But perserverance paid off, and eventually, after a great deal of rolling and resting and rolling some more and resting some more, etc, I got the biscuit dough stretched to the size of the baking sheet. Baked it for a few minutes, then added rubia's sun-dried tomato/carrot/onion/roast juice pureé as the sauce, then added the leftover roast on top of that, then sprinkled with cheese, then baked some more. It was pretty good. Not a bad use of leftovers, and I gained a few Experience Points in the Baking skill.

I did indeed. They're in the freezer next to the baggie of frozen lobster tail shells, for when I make lobster stock...

Tonight, for dinner, I tried to get creative and worked without a net (read: without a cookbook). Such a feat may be routine for the rest of you, but it's new territory for me. I decided we'd have chicken fajitas for dinner. The only chicken meat we have in the house (aside from pre-breaded microwave stuff) was some frozen split chicken breasts. So they needed to be deboned. Have I mentioned that I've never deboned anything in my life? I asked my foodie friend "Got any tips for deboning a chicken?" His response: "Cut out the hard bits." With that in mind, I thawed the chicken and set to work with a freshly honed paring knife (the smallest sharp knife I own). And...it wasn't too bad. I got most of the meat off the bone without too much in the way of mangling it, and since I was gonna slice it up anyways for fajita meat, that wasn't an issue in any case. Once I had the meat sliced, I marinated it in meyer lemon juice. I marinated it for Quite Some Time. It occurred to me eventually that what I really had, in fact, was the beginning stages of Chicken Ceviche. So I quickly dumped the chicken into a skillet along with some onions, and sauteéd 'em until the onions were loose and lightly browned and the chicken meat was done. The chicken had a VERY strong lemon flavor. Note to self: Next time, just add the lemon juice in small quantities near the end of the sauteé. But enough picanté sauce will cover up just about anything, so dinner was alright eventually. We live and learn.

Having soylent green for dinner, are we?

Tonight's wacky chocolate chip cookie flour: Stone Ground Whole Wheat It's a good thing I'd read The Joy of Cooking. (Or was it Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food?) I'd bought a bag of stone ground whole wheat flour last week to make some beer/cheese bread, and had I not read about how whole wheat flour needs to be refrigerated to keep the oils in the wheat from going rancid, I woulda just put it up in the cabinet with the other flours. Nothing on the package indicated that it needed refrigeration. The buckwheat cookies had disappeared earlier this week, so it was time for a new batch. And I figured I'd take the stone ground whole wheat for a test drive. Yowza. This flour produced the thickest, gummiest dough yet out of all the flours I've tried. It was dense. It was lumpy. It had visible bits in it. Really, it looked like what oatmeal would look like if it had grown up in reform school. The flavor was nutty and the texture was predictably mealy, but not in an off-putting way. The resulting cookies were impressive. VERY good. Excellent flavor, with hints of caramel and molasses. The cookies were large, spread well, and had some heft to them. They looked very rustic and earthy. Like, if Abe Lincoln's log cabin could make chocolate chip cookies, this is what they'd look like. Stone ground whole wheat flour is now tied with oat flour as my fave alternative flour with which to make chocolate chip cookies. If you've read this thread so far and have felt a slight tug on your creative impulses, urging you to experiment with unusual flours, THIS is the flour to start off with to get your feet wet.

Just happened to be the rum I had on hand. I use 151 in my vapor lock when I brew beer, to help things stay extra sanitary.