Norm Matthews

My sister has been giving me an Omaha Steaks package at Christmas for the last few years. I used the last package for dinner tonight-- Italian beef meatballs. I have a friend who says his wife cooks raw meatballs by putting them in with the sauce and cooking them together. I tried it. I put the frozen meatballs and some sauce together and cooked them on low for a couple of hours. They turned out OK. I made some garlic bread from a hamburger bun that was starting to dry out a little.

I am coming to this discussion late for the electric coil discussion but as a potter I am skeptical that an electric coil stove would be OK for a clay pot. I have experienced clay and old time Pyrex breakage on electric coil stoves. I presume that they don't work on an electric coil stove because the coil heats the bottom most directly and thermal expansion of that one area is what causes it to break. I have not had that problem with Gas and flat top electric stoves.

We had ribeye cap steaks again. It is hard to cook such a thick steak well. So far the way that turned out best, to my taste, is to start it on the stove top and finish it in the oven. I tried it sous vide a couple of times , finished it on the stove, and don't really get excited about a steak that is "perfectly cooked". The first was took over 20 minutes, the second way took over a couple of hours. This time I cut the string holding it together, unrolled it, trimed it and cooking it in under ten minutes. I'll try it this way again but trim it a little more next time. Part of the reason it tastes so good is because it is so well marbled but there are some parts that are too chewy to enjoy and I'll try to trim that part away. I am going to keep the meat scraps and grind them up for hamburger when I get enough. (If I ever cook enough of these to get that much to grind)

Our dinner tonight was rack of lamb, potatoes gratin, and roasted Brussel's sprouts

I thought this recipe for beer battered chicken might be good with catfish but first tried it as written. The amount of chicken I got left me with a couple extra thighs, so used another recipe for them They were baked. You can see a piece of one of those under the fried chicken. I took it out about 5 minutes early and it was almost overcooked by then. I didn't have any milk for the mac and cheese, but just happened to have the exact amount of cream so used that. Charlie said everything was good and really liked new variation for cheese and mac. The baked chicken thighs were deboned, dry marinated, then baked flat in the toaster oven on non-stick foil. Being flat is probably why they cooked quicker.

A friend of mine braised chuck in a way that I have tried and it is quite good: 1 packet of powdered Ranch dressing, 1 packet of powdered Italian dressing and 1 packet of brown gravy sprinkled over the top, add 1/2 cup water and any vegetables you want or hold off on the vegetables until later if you don't want them cooked as long. Cover and braise for until tender. We went to my nephew's for Super Bowl and he had that whisky. I took a sip. It wasn't bad. Check liquid level and add more if it starts to dry out, but it probably won't.

Edit, Actually you could drink in bars in Kansas at age 18 but the only beverage a bar could serve (To anyone) was 3.2 beer. If you wanted a mixed drink, you had to be 21, go to a liquor store, get what you needed, then go home and make it yourself. I am so glad the good ole days are dead and gone.

Bringing back memories. I think the first time I heard of a Mai Tai was when I was in college. I probably read about it in Playboy. Back then the recipe was a secret and the only place that served them was at Trader Vic's. There were no trader Vic's in Kansas. I think there were only a couple and they were on the west coast. I wasn't 21 in any case and that was the legal drinking age back then. Trader Vic's Pacific Island Cookbook (1968) had a chapter on mixed drinks and Mai Tai was not included. Then I got drafted and stationed for Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Lewis. On my 22nd birthday I got a pass to go into Seattle and the first place I went was Trader Vic's and the only thing I ordered was a Mai Tai. Then I went to see a Spaghetti Western with Clint Eastwood.

Yes, all corn chips. Tostitos Cantina thin and crispy Fritos original and Fritos chili cheese. The saltines are there in case the chili needs thickening. It didn't.

That is a jarred & store bought pickled onion added as a garnish.

I thought I'd try a new recipe for chili tonight but ended up adding a lot of the ingredients from my old recipe so I am not sure I can call this one 'new", just a little different.

I was going through the freezer and found some leftover, uncooked Korean spicy pork and kalbi and that was dinner tonight.

Charlie always wants Mac &Cheese with steak. The steaks were in the freezer waiting for an event that didn't happen. We also had squash stuffed with rice, onion, corn, poblano pepper and cheese.

Pan fried bulgogi mandu with rice and kim che. The mandu was in the freezer and I could cook it without taking too much attention away from the football game.

I got some ribeye steaks and invited my sister over for her birthday and she was going to get back to me about time, but she didn't so I cooked them tonight for the two of us. They were really thick so I cooked them sous vide first. We also had potato pancakes and buttered steamed asparagus. At the last minute, Charlie asked for Mac&Cheese so the steak got put in the oven to keep warm and sat there for ten minutes longer than I planned. I should know by now that he will always want that when we have steak. I will remember next time.

Yes.

I saw this Hot Fudge, Brownie, Cheesecake on the internet yesterday and made it. It was breakfast this morning!

We had take out fried chicken for NYE dinner. New Years Day is usually traditional Southern dinner that includes ham hocks but the two stores that I used to rely on for big, meaty hocks now has pork hocks. That is what the call them anyway. They are not cured ham and barely have any pork. They are mostly bone, fat and skin. You could say it has a couple bites of pork if you take small bites. I may find better hocks somewhere else, but this year, I made a ham, sausage and bean soup with collards added in. Charlie is not a fan of black eyed peas but once when I made a dip with them, he liked it so I did that in order to include all the traditional foods that we usually have. We also had cornbread.

Tomorrow is a pot luck dinner at my sister's house with turkey and ham. Today Charlie and I had Christmas eve dinner with a rib roast, potato pancakes, coleslaw and mac & cheese.

Forgive me if this has been addressed here before. I didn't read all of the previous 19 years of posts. I was reading a Fine Cooking recipe for latkes today and have a question. It says to soak the grated potatoes in a bowl of water to save the starch and let it settle to the bottom. After removing the potatoes and drying them, the recipe says "Transfer the potatoes to a medium bowl and using your hands, mix in the onion, egg, 1 tsp. salt, and 1/4 tsp. pepper. Carefully pour off the reserved potato soaking water to get to the white gluey starch on the bottom of the bowl. Transfer the starch to the potato mixture and mix it in with your hands." My question is: Why go to the effort of removing the starch and then putting it back? Why not dry the potatoes without removing the starch, or if there is a good reason for soaking, why not just use potato flour instead of using the wet starch at the bottom of a bowl of water?

@heidih That's the same brand I ended up getting. I also got one of marzipan while I was there. It was in the baking aisle.

@Smithy click on the link at the bottom of this post and it will take you to the recipe.

@jedovaty Well it was either find the almond paste or find "finely ground blanched almond meal" and if I found that, I'd still have to make the paste. The recipe also provided an alternative filling of butter, cinnamon and sugar and I almost used that. I am glad that I found the paste though because it tasted a lot better than the marzipan that Charlie's ex used on her cakes.

The black one has been stored in the basement since I got the other one a little while ago. I got it out today to make cookies while the bread was rising in the other bowl. It has a smaller bowl and is pretty noisy compared to the red one.

I grew up in a Croatian neighborhood in Kansas City (Strawberry Hill) and they have the same holiday bread but call it povitica. PS I once lived in a rental house that had black walnut trees and I decided to make some povitica since the nuts were "free". It took months for those black walnut husks to dry out enough. They have to be removed before you can crack open the shells and that is a messy messy chore. I put them in a gunny sack and whacked then up side the tree and ran over them with my car. Just trying to do it by hand will turn your skin walnut brown until it decides to wear off. I finally got enough nuts meat to make the bread and ugh. I found out I didn't like black walnuts. They have quite a different taste than English walnuts. Another time, my uncle gave me a big bag of pecans and I made some povitica with those and that was wonderful.