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kitchengrl

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Everything posted by kitchengrl

  1. I'm surprised at how many people willfully miss this point. In fact, some guy got into a snit with me today over the rinse/don't rinse issue, which ended in a tirade about using "Kangan water" (some sort of ionized water) to rinse all the pathogens right off the meat. He also called me an idiot. Regarding the potato question, potatoes are vehicles for food poisoning because, like many protein-containing foods, they provide a suitable medium for staphylococcal bacteria. It's not really about the dirt on the surface of the potato. Although the conventional wisdom on potato salad used to be that the mayonnaise was the culprit, we now know that mayonnaise is acidic enough (with a pH below 4) to retard pathogenic growth. Also, B. cereus tends to grow in potato (and rice), and is responsible for a pretty nasty form of food poisoning.
  2. Not exactly, but I'm going to go halfway. We're flying to LA (cross-country, in other words) for Thanksgiving with my brother, and I'm cooking. I'm doing five courses, people are bringing desserts. I plan to make the first couple of courses with food I already have on hand, freeze it (or refrigerate it), and take it out with me, or just bring the raw materials I have on hand and do it up out there. * First course is celeriac soup - I'm going to use up the two celeriac in the fridge, with the onions and leeks and the chicken stock in the freezer * Second course is a braised pork belly, with roasted apples and turnips - I have about six pounds of belly in the freezer already trimmed so I'm bringing that out, with the braising stock, demiglace, and some turnips. * Third course is a salad, a take on the green bean casserole. Green beans I'll get out there but the salad dressing is based on a soubise so I'll make that from onions and milk on hand. Also, the giant white beans I'm bringing from home. * Fourth and fifth courses are based on turkey that my brother will have on hand for me. Fourth is sousvide breast on butternut squash puree, brown butter, fried sage, cranberry gelee. The gelee I will make the base in advance from cranberries I have on hand; squash puree I already have the raw materials in the pantry, same setup as the celeriac soup, more or less. Maybe I'll do some brussels sprouts and potato puree family style for the table. Fifth course is a milk-braised turkey thigh with mozzarella, served as panino. So that's how it's going down - I'd say about 60% of the meal will be advance prep out of the pantry/freezer.
  3. I also am participating, but out of pure serendipity - I didn't know about the challenge until I stumbled upon it this morning. I had bought a leg of lamb on Friday during my last shop, and it formed the basis for two meals - Sunday and Tuesday. The basis for Monday's meal was straight out of the freezer. I'll post what I've done so far to catch up to today and then will update. Sunday night I roasted the leg of lamb. Originally I was going to serve it with some giant beans I brought back from Spain this summer but I had given a cooking lesson on Saturday on knife skills and had an enormous amount of leftover cauliflower in the refrigerator from the lesson. So I decided to do a duo of cauliflower to go with the lamb. I posted to this on my blog under the title "Sunday Roast." Here's the bad boy before his trip into the oven. I slit the meat using a vegetable knife and worked a paste of garlic confit, salt, and herbs all over the meat and into the slits. Here's the leg after a 75 minute roast. I served the lamb with a purée of cauliflower enriched with housemade crème fraîche and roasted cauliflower, and a syrah pan sauce mounted with butter. We also had a salad - frisée and a sherry vinaigrette with walnuts and maytag blue out of the cheese drawer in the refrigerator. Monday night, I reached into the freezer and pulled out a Taiwanese braised beef soup base that I made the week before when, roaming the meat department in the local Korean supermarket, I found a perfectly rectangular brisket that weighed exactly 2.00 pounds and was compelled to buy it for reasons of pure mathematics and geometry. I know that's weird. Once I got it home I had to cook it, so that's what I did. I posted the recipe here but everything up to the point of cooking the noodles I had done the week before. I brought the frozen chunk back to a simmer and heated it all the way through. Cooked some Chinese la mian wheat noodles, blanched off some gai lan that were in the refrigerator from the weekend, and found a can of preserved mustard green in the pantry. Here we go: Tuesday, it was "recycle the lamb" day. In fact, my blog post that day was called Recycling is Good." I turned about half the leftover lamb into a ragù. First browned it off with a soffritto and some pancetta, added some wine, and then simmered it off with San Marzano tomatoes from the pantry and chicken stock from the freezer. I finished the ragù with grated pecorino off a block in the cheese drawer, and some mint and parsley from the garden (we haven't had a first frost yet). After the ragù, we had an arugula dressed in olive oil, then drizzled with balsamico tradizionale and some shavings off a block of Parmigiano-Reggiano from the cheese drawer. Last night I went out to do a wine buy and shop for a catering event for this weekend so we had pho out at a great place in suburban Virginia. But tonight it's back to the fridge! So that's it so far! Breakfast is always housemade yoghurt with preserves from the summer stirred in for my husband, and an egg on an english muffin for me and lunch has been leftovers. Will update as the week goes by.
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