Norm Matthews

My son is having friends over tomorrow. His birthday was yesterday but friends are coming tomorrow. I smoked a brisket today, at least i started it and will finish it tomorrow along with some ribs and hamburgers. The brisket flat was smoked to 195 and needs finishing tomorrow. The point went to 204 and was done nicely. I cut it off and will finish it as burnt ends. The strangest thing happened with my thermometer. After three hours, it read 193. There was no way that could be accurate. I switched probes and it still read 193. I switched to another thermometer and it read 130. I figured it was time to toss the first one and get a new one but when I took it inside and tested it again, it worked just fine. Both thermometers are in the picture. The faulty one is the round one.The pictures are of the brisket about half way through. I forgot to take one of it later. I cut some of the flat for our dinner tonight and it needs some more time in the smoker. I will put it back in tomorrow with the ribs.

My biggest hesitation is: will a cloned Scotch taste like a generic scotch or will it taste like my preferred brand of single malt?

This recipe for lasagne in a bundt pan looked like fun to make. It wasn't all that much fun. They put the lasagne noodles in the bundt pan and they went in so nice but when I tried it, the noodles were not long enough to go up one side and hang over on the outside. Even if they had been long enough they were too limp to stand up on the inside of the bundt pan. I finally wrapped an extra piece of pasta around the tube and hoped it would work. The bundt pan was non stick and pretty well greased but when it was done it didn't want to come out. One piece of noodle didn't come out and I covered it up as best as I could. It cooked for 45 minutes but after about ten minutes I worried that it might get too browned on top so I checked and it was getting really brown so I covered it with foil but the top (bottom) was crusty enough that we didn't eat very much of that part. Charlie had seconds so I guess it was not a total loss. I don't have any desire to do it again though. The picture with the recipe showed a bowl of red sauce in the middle but I put it in a gravy boat and made some bechamel with cheese as well. Neither of us ate any of them though... well i ate some from the one I put sauce on for the picture.

A few years ago I saw some packages in the meat cooler marked "the other white meat" and it sure looked white alright. When looked closer, it was pure pork fat.

My son has been searching in restaurants and looking for recipes that might replicate the chicken fried steak he had at the high school cafeteria. A friend of mine gave me one to try. I doubt it will be like the one he remembers but it sounds really good. It is seasoned with Creole seasoning, used buttermilk instead of egg in the coating and is fried in bacon fat. Here is the dish but we have not tried it. I will re-warm it as soon as Charlie gets off work.

We had chicken and fish in a beer batter and "chips".

I was thinking they must make different sizes. Thanks for the lead.

I just made empanadas for dinner later . Since I have not been able to locate frozen discos, I have to make them from scratch, so when I saw the tools shown I thought they would be a lot faster to make them. I should be old and wise enough to realize that there is always a catch, but I am just older. The catch is that the press makes the pieces so small that i had to made a lot more and it takes a lot longer. A lot longer. Making one was easy but in order to use up the dough, I had to make close to 60 instead of a little over a dozen. The press seems to be intended more for dim sum sized dumplings instead of Puerto Rican ones.

They were about three inches thick and hard to cook through evenly. I plan to do as you did and SV them next time. I have one left over and plan to re-tie it on both ends and cut it in half so there will be two thinner steaks.

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.