Norm Matthews

This is the first time I have used it and the only time any pieces fell on the floor was when made them too short. The original rods had stops at both ends but the ones I made were open on the end and when they were dry, they just slid off into a plastic bag I held under them.

I saw a pasta drying rack on the internet that used a spiral of arms and thought the bottom few of those would be too close to the table to be useful. I remembered seeing a clothes drying rack at an antique store recently which was missing some arms and the rest were falling off and so I got it and took it apart and replaced most of the arms with new dowel rods and today used it to dry some egg noodles. It worked pretty well and I doubt I will ever make enough pasta to use more than four of five of the arms. When not in use it folds up.

We had ribeye cap steaks again. Those things are going to spoil us for any other steak, I am afraid. We had them with potato pancakes and carrots.

This was listed as a Bacon Cheeseburger meat loaf. It is intended to be eaten as a sandwich on the first day instead of as a leftovers sandwich the next day. They said to have it on a hamburger bun with lettuce and ranch dressing. As a hamburger it was good but we couldn't taste the cheese. As a meatloaf, it was just another meatloaf.

Charlie had friends over again and asked me to smoke ribs and grill hamburgers and hot dogs again. I added beer brats, chislik, corn, slaw, potato salad, bbq beans, fruit salad and garlic bread.

Is anyone here a pepperoni "expert"? I never noticed this before but both Charlie and I were disappointed in the taste of the Hormel Pepperoni I used on the pizza today. Is there a change in the ingredients or another brand that is more like what we get from restaurants? We found this new taste in pepperoni on our pizza to be very disappointing.

I made 2 pizzas with sourdough dough. One was thick crusted and the other one was a little thinner. Charlie likes pepperoni so half is for him and the other half has sausage, mushrooms and black olives. I used quesadilla cheese which I think is similar to mozzarella but I think it tastes a little better.

I made a recipe that put a cheesesteak filling inside a bread dough and baked. The Korean restaurant we always go to has had corn topped with melted mozzarella and since there was a lot of filling leftover and some corn in the refrigerator, I tried baking the two together to see how it would turn out. It was OK but not would have been better as a side for a dish that didn't have the same ingredients.

Charlie asked for ribs again this weekend, possibly because the ones last week went so quickly due to company. It was pretty much a repeat of last weekend without the pulled pork. I did two slabs of ribs, milk bread yeast rolls and a fruit salad.

We like a mussels with wine dish at an Italian restaurant we have gone to a few times so I thought I'd try a recipe that cooked mussels with wine and had a sauce that was largely wine. It was not the same but there were no leftovers.

The ingredients for this recipe for Japanese Beef Tataki came from A Moveable Feast recipe but the preparation differed somewhat in that I did not make it with rare beef and did not slice it as thin as the original and did not use garnishes. We had it with steamed rice and cucumber kimchi.The picture came out somewhat dark. I tried to lighten it as much as I could.

I almost forgot to take pictures. We are expecting a few people over any time now. I have been using the smoker since early this morning. We are having pulled pork and ribs. Charlie is grilling some hamburgers and i made a fruit salad. Everything else was store bought.

A friend who is a professional baker and is from a defunct cooking site and occasional visitor to a small group of people who used to be there, posted a King Arthur recipe called Japanese Milk Bread rolls. I tried it today and chose a chicken in a packet recipe to go with it. The bread was good but I plan to make some small changes next time.

I'd never seen a ribeye cap steak for sale before so I grabbed it up and we had them for dinner tonight. They say it is the best part of the steak. We both thought it was delicious. We had them with smashed potatoes and roasted carrots.

We have been having a lot of take-out lately but tonight I made some smothered pork chops, a recipe called carrot fries and a coleslaw made with Ranch Dressing.

Charlie had a specific request for dinner tonight: Martini Chicken with egg noodles and Alfredo sauce, so that is what we had.

When we order them at restaurants, they bring out scissors for us to cut the meat away. When I met my wife and her family.. and we had a restaurant shortly afterward, it was 35 to 40 years ago and short ribs were always bought cut between the bones and the meat was cut by the cook according like so there was a long strip of meat with the bone at the end. It was not until my son was about 10 or 12 when I first saw it cut through the bones like it is now. Of course that was in the middle of Kansas and it was probably seen on the coasts sooner but when in the Asian market, and it is cut like that, it is called LA cut.

Actually, that style originated in Los Angeles. Koreans call short ribs presented like that 'LA cut'. .

The lead-in to this recipe from Night+Market cookbook was " Korean Short Ribs as Made by Thais Who Have Never Been to Korea" Charlie said it was very good.

I discovered that the nearby Mexican meat market has lamb year round so we had Chislic again.

It might have been an email from Fine Cooking where I saw a list of new cookbooks, but I don't remember for sure. I picked out several and let Charlie narrow it down to two. We have tried two from a Thai cookbook called Night + Market. We didn't care for the first one we tried. This one was pretty good. It was chicken thigh nuggets fried with tempura batter and tossed in a sweet/sour orange sauce. Charlie went to a Korean store today and brought home some cucumber kimchi and kimbob and we had that along with rice with the chicken.

I don't remember if I have mentioned Don before but I first had chislic around 45 years ago in North-central Kansas where I was a teacher and a he was a fellow teacher who served it at a party he threw. Wikipedia says it is a red meat dish mainly localized in South Dakota. Don was from South Dakota and he said it was a popular bar food. To see more about it, you can go to the blogspot listed at the bottom of this post. He has always made it with skewered lamb. This is the first time I have tried it . Charlie said it was delicious and tasted just like Don's. We had it with corn and snow peas. Over the years, Don built a 'castle' on an island in the middle of a pond on land he owned and had his chislic parties there. Several people gave him additions for the castle. I made some gargoyles, a moat monster, a bridge troll and a plaque that said Schloss Insel.

Dinner tonight was pork chops with a sauce made with red wine vinegar and cream. Charlie contributed the mac N cheese.

Yes, with technology as it is now, you can get every recipe on line and Jaques Pepin is a great teacher. My first cookbook was The James Beard Cookbook in paperback. I used it until it started falling apart and then got another one in hard cover. By the time I lost it in a house fire, it was out of print and there were no computers with online selling, so the next two were James Beard's American Cookery and Jaques Pepin's la Technique. I think the early James Beard cookbook is somewhat dated now in that some of the peripheral information is no longer relevant. PS When my son left home and moved to Seattle in the '90's, I gave him How To Cook Everything, a Henkel chef and paring knife set and some measuring cups and spoons.

Charlie came to me yesterday with a request for dinner someday soon. He asked for small Swedish Meatballs with egg noodles. Someday soon was today.