Porthos

I don't serve an authentic Elizabethan feast. What I do do is avoid glaring anachronisms. No tomatoes, no peppers, no corn. Some years ago the faire that I am currently cooking at made a specific decision that this faire was no longer about period-correct reenactment, but was now about entertainment. We still try to loosely give the feeling of being in Elizabethan England but people walking around with their beer in plastic glasses kind of blunts that.

I had to shoot these photos on the fly. I am doing other things while grilling the meat. Here is the meat after getting a light dry rub. Don't ask me what was in it, it changes every day and yesterday was a long time ago. I try to get the rub on the meat about an hour before it hits the grill. Probably 2010 my DW gave me this event grill from Sam's Club for our anniversary. 8 Burners, a little over 1000 sq inches of grilling surface. It is a nice toy. This is what the meat looks like just after putting it on the grill. Most of the way through the cooking. Here are a couple of the strips showing the approximate size of pieces I prefer. Someone else did most of the cutting since I was on to grilling about 8 pounds of chicken leg meat. This is about 20 percent of the meat cut up. And finally a rotten photo of a sparsely-filled meat platter. Grilled beef, grilled chicken, sauteed kielbasa, ham chunks, and little smokies glazed with BBQ sauce. We heat up and sauce a 6 pound bag of meat balls but they go into a bowl and are served that way. So that's the tri-tip from this weekend.

One of the blessings of living in southern California is have the Stater Bros market chain. They are my favorite source of meat. Small wonder. Meat is what they are known for. When they run sales on meat it is generally without limit. Tonight I was perusing the food ads online looking for the best prices on soda this week. My DW is to Diet Coke to what truck drivers are to coffee. When I looked at the Stater Bros ad what I quickly and happily noticed is that they have trimmed tri-tip on sale for $2.99/pound. Now I already had the beef I was planning on serving this weekend for our ren faire guild feast sitting in the freezer; top sirloin steaks I had purchased from Stater Bros last week for $2.99/pound. I was able to serve top sirloin the previous 2 weekends also. Well, the top sirloin will have to wait a week. Having an unfettered evening I made my way (all 2 blocks away) to Stater Bros and picked up 22 pounds of tri-tip and processed it into the size that I like to grill. A quick reminder: we do not serve "portions" to guild members, we serve bites, which typically are cut to be two bites worth. This piece illustrates my favorite proportion to grill because after cooking it can be cut into 5 or 6 bites quickly. I do not go for even, equal cuts because the various pieces will cook up between medium rare to medium well, with me trying to have more medium rare than anything else. Now it's time for a beer and to bed.

It's a race ... will my new blade or Christmas arrive first. Not taking any bets ...

Part of this has to be, "location, location, location." I am in the (very) greater Los Angeles area and I had no clue that produce elsewhere was unavailable or way more expensive than typical. For my daughter's ren faire kitchen I buy a variety of fresh veggies and fruits as listed below and hadn't seen any real price differences. I feel for you but can offer no help. A typical weekend includes: Carrots Celery Onions Potatoes Edemame Cucumbers Jicama (of which I will never understand the appeal thereof) Zucchini Broccoli Green Beans (frozen) Asparagus Brussels Sprouts Mushrooms Oranges Pineapples Strawberries Grapes Watermelon For my Canadian friends I have a sourcing question. We get a lot of produce from Mexico and Chile as well as what is grown here. Do you get produce from Mexico or Chile?

Right now I would kill for the time to join back in. I am lucky if I can find the time to cook one meal a week at home. Balancing my ren faire involvement with what I need to do in support of my ill FIL has me running ragged. This is the first time in weeks I have even been able to sit and really read egullet entries. Last Wednesday would be the closest I've come recently. Poached some chicken breasts in broth, then cut them up. Cooked some TJs 3-cheese tortellini, covered the tortellini with some Barilla Alfredo sauce and added the chicken. Not exactly the kind of cooking I wish to do. My Sous Vide rig is put away for now.

I'm going to take the position that aircraft engineering takes, which is that every pound of weight takes energy both to take off from earth and to maintain airspeed. Even if the road you were on were perfectly flat you still have to expend energy to combat air drag. Add in even minor changes in elevation as you travel and that adds to fuel consumption. It does add to the fuel costs to carry extra weight in vehicles. I, however, will admit to at times not removing weight that I could. I know better.

This won't help but I couldn't help thinking of it. I turned it into a poster and put it up in my ren faire kitchen.

Oh my, Nacy. You've taken me on a way-back trip. I lived in Santa Maria as a young adult. I can smell the tri-tip just looking at that photo ...

Disk-bottom, same as the 3 qt Vollrath pan I have and the pan I was looking at online.

After getting Hazan's book on classic Italian cooking and reading her preference for beef stock I contacted a friend who is both an excellent cook and married into an Italian family to get his take. He has tried beef stock but risotto with chicken stock is the preference. His MIL, whom I dearly love, wouldn't hold back at all if she thought he should be using beef broth instead of chicken.

My 3 qt saucier is too big for some jobs, particularly when I have several pots on the stove. I looked at a 2 qt online but didn't want to spend the bucks for something I only want rather than need. Since I am a hardcore thrift shopper I decided to keep an eye out, even though I don't recall seeing any in the past. Today I hit pay dirt with this 2 qt made-by-Calphalon saucier for $4.49. Not pictured is an 8 qt pasta pot/steamer for $7.18 for my faire kitchen. While my daughter is now the head of the Southern faire kitchen I'm still the source of the equipment, happily so.

Found this Wilton RWP platter, approx 16" x 12", for $3.14 after discounts. It will be the new platter for raw veggies and fruit for my ren faire head table . Head table eats off of metal, common folk eat from wooden bowls and platters.

A sirloin steak seasoned with Garlic Festival Mesquite grill, 132.5 F for 4 1/2 hours, then patted dry, salted and seared in a CI Pan. I've used this seasoning this way before but today it just didn't work. Fortunately I made risotto so there was something tasty on the plate.

Some years ago my DW gave me a mandolin. I never had much luck with it so it mostly just sat in its box. A few years ago she asked it she could use it in the tea kitchen at faire to slice cucumbers, a great use for it, so I gave it to her - along with a Kevlar glove. She is very faithful about using that glove.

@chefmd I'm glad I saw your post with the asparagus. I had forgotten that my Dw had asked for apsaragus tonight. Trimmed and ready to steam. Meatloaf, creamy mashed potatoes and steamed asparagus. My DW prefers mashes potatoes with some bit of chunk to it and I normally do that. Tonight I did it they way I like. Instead of one large loaf pan I used a mini-loaves pan. A small loaf my my Dw and I, another for my DD and SIL, and a third to go into the freezer for a quick-to-put-together weekend dinner.

So today I began working on the edge. There are so many nicks in the edge it will likely take me 1 1/2- 2 hours, using my 220 stone - the coarsest stone I have, to remove enough metal to get to a clean edge. The appearance of the nicks are as if someone took this knife and kept striking its edge against the edge of another knife, like a poorly-fought duel.

Do you all know just how jealous I am of you all finding corned beef on sale already. If things continue the way they have the last couple of years here in SoCal it will be on sale for 2 days with a limit of 2. Fortunately for my I know how the game the system so that I can acquire more than 2. (Pay cash, go to stores without the "loyalty" cards, etc.)

Dinner tonight is posted in The Freezer Challenge.

Agreed. Probably around a decade ago we bought a set of Vollrath PRO-HG non-stick cookware with a 25 year guarantee. There were two factors that decided the purchase. 1) They are NSF-rated. 2) The non-stick coating they using can take the high heat I like to use. It hasn't held up perfectly but it has outlasted, by far, the other non-stick pans we have. This set is showing its age and I believe if I tried to get warranty replacements they would ask if I cleaned them in a dishwasher or some such thing. No matter. Outside of replacing non-stick skillets that I use all of the time I haven't bought any new non-stick cookware in years. Since I am a serious thrift shopper I can tell you I find the skillets from this set all the time, and the non-stick coating is generally severely damaged.

Pulled out the last 2 large chicken breasts from a package. Sweated down some micro-diced onion and a bit of garlic, added white wine, water, bullion, salt, marjoram and parsley. SVed the breasts in the liquid for 2 /14 hours at 147 F, made a sauce from the bag juices and added sour cream. Cut the chicken into small bites (DW's standing request) and put those in the sauce. Served the chicken in white wine and sour cream sauce over fettuccine with steamed carrots on the side. I went to take a picture and realized that it was pretty boring to look at.

That is why I stopped trying to sell, on ebay, the cast iron pans I had been restoring. When I first started using ebay to acquire used hotel pans, CAMBRO stuff and other such there was (to me) an unscrupulous seller that placed everything starting at $0.99. Because of the way I was bidding I factored shipping into my maximum bid. I never once bid on this seller's stuff because the shipping charges bore no resemblance to the costs of shipping and handling back then.

I live in the greater Los Angeles area and have many choices of where to shop. I don't have a clue what it is like to have a need to do on-line shopping for most of what I want and need. That being said I went to webstaurantstore.com looking for a small inexpensive "saucieer" pan. I have a 3 qt Vollrath that I am quite happy with. There are times when I don't need that capacity and I have several pans crowded on the stove so I thought a smaller pan for occasional use would be handy. I found this no-name http://www.webstaurantstore.com/1-25-qt-non-stick-aluminum-saucier/922SF7S.html (that looks suspiciously like a Volllrath) for $10 bucks I was happy. I was not so happy when I saw that they wanted $15 bucks to ship it. Is this an average charge with me just being my typical cheapskate self? Inquiring minds want to know ...

Nuked Marie Callendar's Lasagna classed up by having a glass of Sobon Estate Zinfandel with it (maybe 2 before all is said and done).

The older I get the more I appreciate solitude. That may be part of why I don't particularly miss being an annual passholder at Disneyland any more. I only miss spending unhurried time with friends there, but they, like us, have been priced out of being passholders. I have always preferred to be in the mountains more than anywhere else. I look forward to my "prince camping" when my DW is able to retire.