Norm Matthews

In remembrance of Anthony Bourdain, we had fried hot dogs for a late lunch. I don't know if the kind he had were done differently. I just deep fried some to see what they would be like. Despite Frank Fritz of American Pickers assessment of people who have chili on their hot dogs are people who don't like hot dogs, I had chili on one with cheese and onions and only hot dog relish on the other. Charlie had one extra from the microwave and assured me that fried hot dogs do taste better BTW.

It's rare when Charlie makes a request for dinner but he did today. He asked for steak and bok choy. I also made corn on the cob and twice baked potatoes. This is his plate. He didn't want the croissant roll but I had one.

@rotuts @Toliver is correct. If you click the link at the bottom of my post, either here or at the meatloaf post, it will take you to the recipe. I don't think I can post it here because it is from the NYTimes.

I tried a different recipe for meatloaf that came in my email today. It was tricky to keep from falling apart because I had to pick it up, put it in a skillet to brown on one side, turn over, brown on the other side, take out and deglaze the skillet with wine, then put it back in and bake. Charlie said it was a keeper and not to top it with bacon like I usually do. It is very different from the old recipe I have used in the past.

My favorite diet soft drinks are Diet Dr. Pepper, Diet Squirt, Diet Canada Dry Ginger ale, Coke zero and Cherry Coke Zero.

Thanks for the link. I had no idea that moss was a food. I had known about lacto-fermentation for a while, I just didn't know what it was called until I tried to look up fermanlactol tablets. I have made some of those Chinese fermentation jars on the potters wheel. They have that reservoir at the top for water so the bowl used as a lid can allow gasses to escape while keeping air out. I have also made some Japanese and Chinese pickles in the past but I have not had much success at making kimchi.

My mom's Watkins cookbook is too fragile to lend itself to browsing through it but I found that there are several copies available on eBay and I got one for $6.00. I was looking through it and started at the back and was reading some recipes with a mixture of fascination and revulsion until I got to the chapter heading for those pages. It was FOOD FOR INVALIDS. The first one that caught my attention was Irish Moss Jelly. I thought Irish Moss was a brand name but it is made with actual moss blended with water, milk and sweetened to taste. I discovered that it's a commercial product that can be purchased for eating or medicinal uses or planted and grown for ground cover. It is also known as Pearl Moss. Another recipe was for Fermanlactol Milk in which a crushed fermanlactol tablet was added to 12 hour old milk and allowed to stand in a warm place for 12 to 24 hours. I don't think the tablets are made anymore but that lead me to read up on lacto-fermentation which is a centuries old method of preserving fruit and vegetables. Kimchi and sauerkraut are (or are when homemade) made that way and whey can be used instead of salt for preserving fruit. The chapter had a recipe for making whey. There is a recipe for Sherry Eggnog Or Brandy Or Whiskey, for Gruel, Milk Lemonade, Beef Juice, Beef Tea and Albumen Water.

Yeah, I was thinking about either an outdoor pizza oven or flat grill. Maybe both.

Charlie asked me to get some brats while I was at the store. I got beer brats and then thought, if I cook these in the smoker, I should put something else in to take up the rest of the room, so I got a slab of baby back ribs. We had the ribs for dinner. The brats will become sandwiches sometime later in the week.

@Anna N You are surely a treasure to those who know you. Your post was so much fun to read. It got me to thinking about the few times I attended meetings for retired teacher union members and lunch was usually always served by school cafeteria staff or prepared in similar type kitchens. After hearing various comments about the food being good at them, I imagine most of those retirees, when they go to elder care places won't notice any differences in the food. They are apparently already used to it.

Well to bring the conversation down to more mundane food, we had chicken wings. The smoker did double duty, smoking them for half an hour with apple wood before moving them over to the hot side to crisp up. I used Zarda poultry rub and basted them with Zarda Apple Harvest BBQ sauce. Zarda's is a KC BBQ restaurant. A girl I went to high school with married one of the Zarda brothers. We had potato salad and coleslaw with them.

This is the oldest cookbook I have. It was my mom's. It is dated 1945, the year after I was born. I don't remember her ever having any other cookbook but I remember this one being about twice as thick as it is now because it was stuffed full of recipes that she had cut out of other publications or had written down. One of the handwritten recipes by her was one for Povitica bread. We lived in an apartment on Strawberry Hill in Kansas City. It was a Croatian neighborhood and Povitica bread was a holiday bread that everyone made. Mom asked the neighbor downstairs for the recipe and she said it was in her head and she was welcome to sit in her kitchen when she made it and write down how she made it. Wow the memories are flooding back. Watkins is still in business but back then they sold herbs and spices door-to-door. Mom always had a bottle of Watkins Vanilla Extract in the pantry.

I went to the store to get some ingredients for a recipe I wanted to try and to look for something for dinner. The recipe looked good but I make cake so seldom that I can't tell a good recipe from a gimmicky one apparently. The cake was Cherry Dr. Pepper Chocolate cake with icing made with butter and powdered sugar. I didn't care for it and neither did Charlie. But they had some meaty ham shanks and I cooked those with navy beans, carrots and baby bok choy. Charlie had thirds on that. I always forget to make corn bread with it.

Charlie and I went to Costco last week and because the weather had been so nice I got a brisket for the smoker and Charlie washed his car. It was cold and rainy for the next 5 days but today was perfect for running the smoker. I cut the point off the brisket and just smoked that part. The flat is in the freezer until another time. The brisket took 10 hours to reach 200 degrees, and came out wonderful. The only thing I am not completely happy with is I could not tell where the grain ran after it came out and I sliced it with the grain instead of against it. Except for the corn, all the other sides were store bought. The corn was cooked on the grill before being cut off the cob and reheated at serving time with salt, pepper, honey, butter and a little evaporated milk. The carrots were pickled with dill.

@chileheadmike Happy to see some Kansas City BBQ sauce in Kentucky. Good looking meal. Our dinner tonight was Cuban Beef Picadillo. The recipe said it was also good the next day with fried eggs. I am going to try that one too. My son is not a fan of capers so I substituted some chopped dill pickle, and when I reheated if for dinner, I added a little red wine to loosen it up a little.

Made a chuck pot roast in the Instant Pot for dinner tonight. The picture shows a small amount of the whole roast.

I made a pork chop and some sourdough bread for dinner tonight.

A friend posted a recipe on facebook and I wanted to try it. Problem is the recipe is in Italian. A video came with it so it was not hard to figure out. I mostly had to convert metric amounts and round off. It is mashed potatoes wrapped around a hamburger mixture, then fried, topped with Emmenthal cheese and baked. I took a series of pictures which I won't post here because there are a lot of them but you can see them by going to the http listed at the bottom of my post. Here is the finished dish. I put the potato croquette on some left over filling and just incase I felt it needed to be more fattening, I made up a bit of béchamel to serve on the side

Thai grilled chicken. I have been looking all around for Tamarind paste and finally ordered it on line but it didn't get here yet so I used a tamarind glaze which had other ingredients.

@rotuts Glad to share. Here is the information. Discovering Korean Cuisine: Recipes from the Best Korean Restaurants in Los Angeles. Printed in South Korea, 2007. Dream Character, Inc.

I got a pork roast yesterday and gave Charlie a choice: Carnitas, smoked, or pork bulgogi. He chose bulgogi and picked out which recipe he wanted me to use too. It is a lot different from the one I have used since he was little but it is from a Korean cook book that he uses a lot. It only had hot pepper paste, sugar, garlic and sesame oil. I turned the smoker into a grill for this. I also made a salad that was in the same cook book and some marinated beans sprouts.

I was re-reading an account from about 15 years ago when I went to visit my son in Seattle then headed south to meet some friends in California where we had a window seat in a seaside restaurant. I had some cioppino while watching the sun set on the Pacific Ocean. I got hungry for a fish stew and made one for an early dinner tonight. I didn't want to spend as much as it would take to make cioppino but this was good. The view out the window was Kansas though, no water, not even a birdbath.

At a small group cooking site someone posted a recipe from an old Italian restaurant in New Orleans. It included a tomato sauce that had little in it besides tomatoes and salt and pepper but it was cooked for 6 hours. Someone else said that she didn't bother cooking tomato sauce anymore since Paul Newman's was so good. Someone else said Trader Joe's Organic tomato sauce was the best. Jimmy is an Italian and he said that they put raw meatballs in the sauce and cook them that way. I decided to get some Paul Newman's sauce and some Trader Joes and see which one I liked best. I have not tried Paul Newmans yet but I did cook raw meat balls in Trader Joe's Organic Spaghetti sauce. They cooked for a little under two hours. I added some water to the sauce at the start so it would not cook out too thick at the end. Charlie has not had much of an appetite lately but he had two full helpings. The Spaghetti absorbed much of the sauce.

A friend took Charlies' recipe for Bahn Mi pickled vegetables and our recipe for bulgogi and combined them with some shredded cabbage and tortillas to make what she called Korean Bahn Mi Tacos. I liked the idea and gave it a try but added some chopped apple to the shredded cabbage and made four of them with shrimp tempura left-over from yesterday. The bulgogi taco ingredients are on the stove. The shrimp in the roll-ups were briefly reheated in the microwave

@heidih Not too much at a time is right. It all gets stuck together if you put to much in at once and the oil cools down too much as well. We still have fondue once in a blue moon too. If I recall, last time we used boiling broth instead of oil for the meat.