Norm Matthews

Maybe better than liquid smoke, try hickory smoked salt dissolved in your solution instead of regular salt.

There is a difference between curing and brining. Injecting ingredients which will flavor the meat is not going to give it a hammy taste. A cure will do that but it takes time-days. If your injections don't have any curing agent and you do it just before you smoke, there won't be and concern that it will come out tasting 'hammy'

Here is a picture of dinner. Fettucini with alfredo sauce. parsley and peas, and for the chicken I cut up the breast into boneless, skinless strips and the rest skin on and bone-in, marinated all of it in water with salt, thyme and brown sugar, then in buttermilk, finally breaded the strips with panko, garlic powder, salt and pepper and a tiny bit of curry and fried them. I breaded the rest with flour and corn starch plus thyme and garlic powder.

I cut up a chicken and made boneless, brined it with salt, thyme and brown sugar, then in buttermilk and an egg then took the skinless strips with the breasts and breaded them with panko seasoned with garlic powder and curry and fried them The rest of the chicken got breaded with half flour and half corn starch with thyme, garlic powder and salt and pepper and fried. I also am making fettucini with Alfredo sauce.

One restaurant here has two menus for the customer. One is the same all the time, the other features seasonal items.

If you like it on hamburgers, try seasoning a patty with seasoned salt, worcestershire sauce and cooking it in butter and oil.

Commercial hoods vent all the way out the roof. Most domestic hoods just vent to in between the walls. Having one installed is not cheap.

Lunch today was clean out the refrigerator soup. I know, I know. It's hot. Who wants soup? but I was watching Jaques Pepin and and he did a soup so I got inspired, besides I needed to use up the last of the chicken stock I made last week. I cut up some eggplant, carrots, celery and onions and sauteed them in butter and olive oil for about 5 minutes, l then added the chicken stock, and cut up tortilla strips. I tasted it and added some cooked green beans, salt, little bit of Goya Sazon seasoning and adobo and boiled for 7-10 minutes. Today is son's birthday so we will probably go out for dinner.

Shelby you made me smile. Thank you.

The word recipe originally was spelled receipt because the lady who was more or less illiterate would go to the grocer and tell him what she needed. He wrote it down and gave her the items and the receipt. It was just a list of ingredients. ladies passed on recipes with amounts like butter the size of an egg, a pinch of salt or a handful of flour. Over time measures were standardized so that one knew that a tablespoon was half an ounce and that a wineglassfull was a couple of ounces. As time went on and up to the modern day, ways of communicating and measuring have become more sophisticated and precise. It is too bad that some recipes don't work any more because the manufacturer changed the formula for pudding and then changed the amount in a package. Those of us who like to cook have to make do with best guesses sometimes but accuracy is always preferred.

I was given a cookbook for my birthday and made a recipe from it called Malaysian Spiced Beef. The rice is medium grain in a rice cooker with a packet of Sazon Goya Con Azafran. The beef is braised with onions and a mixture of paprika, curry powder, red pepper and coconut milk. Recipe at http://normmatthews.blogspot.com/

I have a white porcelain sink and I have to use Soft Scrub on it every day to get rid of the staining and there is nothing to do about the black dots that appear with it gets chipped. There are white resin sinks that look like enameled porcelain. I'd suggest you take a look at those for your next kitchen.

My ex and I owned a Korean restaurant for about 9 years and all the food was cooked from scratch. But food was chopped, ahead of time- up to a hour ahead. The "sous chef" ( me often times) would keep the various vegetable trays filled so the chef (MIL) could just get what she needed for the dish and add the meat, fowl or fish which was also prepared ahead of time, weighed and portioned and refrigerated earlier that same day or frozen as was the case with the egg rolls, squid, etc. I would not say it was harder, just different, fresher and efficient. I know and am friends with a few Chinese restaurant owners and have been in their kitchens. The chef can make a big difference in how one dish or the next tastes and one thing that they have that you don't find in any other restaurants is a special stove for woks that put out a tremendous amount of BTUs. I think that is one of the things that make authentic Chinese food taste the way is does. BTW there is a Chinese restaurant in town that has a lot of Chinese exchange students coming from the next town over to order "real Chinese food" and it is nothing like you see in Chinese restaurants that cater mostly to non Chinese patrons. Up until a few years ago I think most locally owned, ethnic restaurants worked pretty much like that but recently I have seen huge refrigerated trucks delivering pre made Chinese food to one of the buffet places near-by. So with that development, some of them may become a lot like the truck stops along the highway where a chicken fried steak tastes the same no matter where you go.

The best service/food (and it was consistently great) was at the Kona Kai in Kansas City. It isn't there any more though. The best Mahi Mahi was at a restaurant on the pier close by Pike's Market in Seattle. The best Cioppino was at a restaurant in Pismo on the beach. The scenery may have been part of that though. We had a corner table by the window and watched the sunset over the Pacific and I was dining with Joanie Sommers.

In my opinion, weighing ingredients only assures relative consistency. It doe not assure that the recipe will be reliable or turn out better than if you measure by volume. It only assures that you will get the same results the next time as you did this time. edited to correct typo

The thing I was trying to get across is that perhaps they are vague on purpose. Cooks have measured by instinct and approximation since forever. Maybe a few fractions of an inch or a mm or two doesn't really matter.

OMG I am so embarrassed. I am 67 years old and never ONCE got out a ruler and measured my matchstick cuts. I must have been doing it wrong for decades. Shame on me for being so sloppy.

I made Italian sausage with the trimmings from the spare ribs and added it to other ingredients to make lasagna today.

Smoked BBQ Spare Ribs I got some spare ribs and trimmed them St. Louis. St. Louis isn't a special kind of rib or recipe, it means that regular spare ribs have been trimmer of the flap, the boneless part at the top of the ribs and the membrane plus have had the last couple of small ribs removed and extra fat trimmed away. I had almost three pounds of trimmings which I ground up and will use part of it in a lasagna in the next few days and froze the rest, possibly to end up in a meatloaf at some future date. I liberally rubbed the cut ribs with The Squeal Hog Rub from Oklahoma Joe's in Kansas City. After marinating them in the rub wrapped in plastic and foil in the refrigerator over night, I fired up the smoker. It has seen better days but never was much compared to ones I've had before. I am looking forward to having a decent one again. I use charcoal and hickory chunks, not chips. I do not soak the wood in water because I want it to smoke, not steam. Blue smoke is good. If you can't see smoke but smell it, that is OK too. You don't want billowing gray smoke. That means the wood is burning, not smoking. That is not good tasting or good for you. White smoke isn't smoke. It is steam and while steam is going to keep your meat moist, it also makes it difficult to control the heat in the smoke chamber and it does not add very much smoke flavor. You get white smoke from water evaporating from water soaked wood chips. After 4 1/2 hours in the smoker, part of the time in foil, and then basted with a sauce over direct heat for a few minutes while the sauce cooked in.

The foam is coagulated gunky bits of protein. If you don't skim it, your are likely to have cloudy stock as the clumps of foam break up into tiny particles dispersed throughout the liquid. I have a tiny (about 2-inch diameter), flat strainer on a long handle that is great for skimming -- I can gently push the solid stuff out of the way and scoop out the crud. (It looks like a miniature version of a strainer for cleaning out a deep-fryer.) Before I got that, I used a very fine small strainer; the only problem with it was having to keep my hand directly over the steaming liquid to dip it in. I don't put parsley or other small particles of stuff in the stock (or salt) until after I have skimmed the foam. I use a fat separator to scoop up the foam then pour the broth back in the pot and discard the foam. Then I add the other "floaty" ingredients and seasonings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/19/AR2005071900347.html Unripened tomatoes continue to ripen off the vine if not held at temperatures below 50 degrees. Fully ripened tomatoes don't suffer from chilling injury as much and it does no harm to them unless held for more than a few days, then the texture can turn mealy. In the meantime, it is perfectly OK to refrigerate tomatoes to slow the over ripening process. Also cut tomatoes should be refrigerated. They stop maturing too and keep longer as well. Green tomatoes picked to prevent frost damage will continue to ripen slowly at cool, not cold temperatures. They should be kept out of sunlight but warmer storage speeds the ripening.

Its true that once a tomato is refrigerated, it stops ripening but a ripe tomato will last longer in the refrigerator than one left out after it has reached its peak and I can't tell any difference between a perfectly ripe cold tomato and a perfectly ripe room temp. tomato except that one is cold.

I meant for this thread to be taken lightly and I am glad to see some are responding in that spirit, but at the same time it seems some chain restaurants must think that the elderly are inferior or at least seem to treat them that way. I once was in a chain place and ordered a BLT. It was more than I cared to eat but who is going to ask for a take out bag for the remnants of a soggy sandwich? So next time I ordered the same sandwich from the senior menu. What arrived was less bread, less bacon, the tomato was nearly non-existant and i could swear the bread had been toasted a couple days ago. There were no sides and the price was only a dollar less. Of course higher end places don't offer discounts. What elderly person who wants or needs to save money would even think about going to Chez Coyteux and expect to get a couple dollars off?

The first time I got one, the girl gave it to me and I had not asked for it- I didn't think I was old enough. I asked how old do you have to be? She shrugged and said "I don't know, you just look old" LOL I was always carded in bars long after I was plenty old enough so I thought I'd have to start showing my ID again to prove i was old enough. I have noticed some places have a seniors menu section with skimpy meals that are over priced for the value and sometimes are made like my taste buds are as gone as my memory. Other places have only one or two regular items discounted for seniors. The best ones give an across the board discount if you are old enough and ask for it. I suspect most of you are not that old yet. Just letting you know what to expect in the future.

A cookbook was given me for my birthday and son gave me some recipes from on line to try so I picked two from the cookbook and one from son and went shopping for meals for this week. i got some beef, pork ribs and chicken. The chicken is one my son wanted me to make called Fricase de Pollo. I also made a cheese sauce and steamed asparagus. We had it for lunch. The recipe is at http://normmatthews.blogspot.com/ I made a broth with the skin, bones and back and used it for the cooking liquid instead of the water from the can of peas in the recipe. I used frozen peas. Son thinks I should have made it with whole chicken pieces on the bone with skin and served it over rice. He may be right but I knew Cassie does not like meat in the bone and I though rice and potatoes would be a bit much. Cassie said her dad made something like this with left overs and they had it wrapped in tortillas.