Norm Matthews

We had glazed grilled (Broiled) pork, Korean Spinach (Sigeumchi Namul), oven fried yams, but they were not too good, so we had rice too.

Salmon cooked SV and finished in a hot skillet with butter and olive oil was dinner tonight. The asparagus was leftovers from the other night.

Son posted a picture and recipe on face book called Slow Cooker Creamy Tortellini Soup. It has Italian sausage and spinach in it too. It sounded good to me so that was our dinner tonight.

We had SV strip steaks tonight. They turned out better than dinner last night but it was too cold to get a good char on them with the gas grill outside. PS the baked potatoes were not on the table yet.

First attempt at Sous Vide and huuuge cookie fail. I am usually the last one on the block to try new technology stuff, especially in the kitchen. When I do, I wonder why I waited so long. Black Friday online sales made this Anova thing too good to pass. This was SV Chicken Fried Steak. It was perfectly cooked. Maybe TOO perfect. It felt strange to bite into a piece of meat that was exactly the same texture through and through. And then the breading fell off while it was browning in the skillet. I am sure there is a learning curve and I have learned some things already to make the next one better, but the first attempt was not impressive. Then there was a tape on line on how to make leg lamp cookies. It used store bought cookie dough and store bought icing. It looked easy. It wasn't. The cookies went in the oven all nicely leg shaped and came out as a bunch of blobs. I re-cut a few and tried to ice them. Total fail with the icing too. Maybe I got the wrong kind. It globed up and didn't spread and the yellow icing didn't cover like it was supposed to.

In addition, Plowboy is a newer brand that has gotten some good reviews. Oklahoma Joe,the man, not the restaurant had one of my favorite sauces but he sold his interest in the BBQ smoker business and the sauce with it to Char Broil and the sauce is no longer available. Oklahoma Joe's brother revived the BBQ smoker business in Oklahoma and sells Joe's sauce-or one very close to it. The smoker line and the BBQ sauce are sold now under the name of Horizon.

I would speculate that Night of the Living Dead from Joe's Kansas City Barbecue (formerly Oklahoma Joe's) is one of the most popular BBQ restaurants and sauce in Kansas City now days.

I just posted a bunch of BBQ sauces and rubs on my blog site which is listed below. About 30 years ago the Kansas City Star conducted a tasting of all the commercial BBQ sauces that were widely distributed at the time. They concluded that the best one was Gates & sons which is one of the oldest BBQ restaurants in Kansas City. Arthur Bryant's sauce came as one of the next highest ratings. About 15 or 20 years ago Ollie Gates provided the recipe for that sauce on a Martha Stewart show. That recipe is provided on the site I mentioned earlier. This sauce is not what most people call Kansas City style. The thing about" KC BBQ sauce" is that most people base it on KC Masterpiece which is a tomatoey molasses sauce. Most Kansas City BBQers are not all that big of fans of that sauce. Actually many competition BBQers do not sauce their meats. Texan BBQers say they don't serve sauce on their meat or on the side because they don't have anything to hide. I have attempted to copy Arthur Bryant's original sauce and people tell me it's close. His sauce didn't have any tomatoes. I think it does now that it has passed out of his family's control. But most people think meat isn't really BBQ if it does not come with BBQ sauce and my preference generally tends to kinds that taste a lot like steak sauce rather than sweet and sticky.

@Jacksoup Thanks. I recently got those placemats at Bed, Bath,& etc.

We had chili today while watching the Chiefs. After I took the picture, we discovered the saltines were stale and so Charlie got out the corn chips, sour cream and salsa con queso.

I am a fan of Knob Creek.

Dinner tonight was gumbo with rice and a salad. The picture of the gumbo is still in the dutch oven before the filé was added to thicken it. Gumbo had crab claw meat, cod, shrimp and smoked sausage.

I made two preps today, Ina's Shrimp Salad and John Madden Beef Stew.

Thanks @blue_dolphin. That is very informative. I'd like to add that the Beaujolais Cru wines are a step above the regular Beaujolais which may last as long as Cru level wines if properly stored, and I speculate that the Morgon Gamay may be a couple steps below Beaujolais Cru wines. Edit PS an unflitered wine is capable of being quite clear. It isn't always cloudy just by definition.

I have not had unfiltered wine, or I should say I have not had wine that said that on the bottle. My impression is that it is fairly new product,possibley a passing fancy, but I wouldn't know because I am not much of a wine drinker anymore. Organic suggest to me that it is free of sulphites and that alone can contribute to wine tasting off because wild yeast is unpredictable in how wine turn out and un filtered can just mean the wine is allowed to settle and is siphoned off into bottles without disturbing the sediment. No problem there that I can see. In my wine making days, that is how I bottled my home made wine all the time.

My impression of the piece is that it is a New Yorker picking restaurants he knows as examples of how food was received throughout the history of America. Here in Kansas City, my 72 years of growing up left different ideas of restaurants which educated how we thought of food. There was the lunch counter at local department stores. Katz was the one I remember the most. Dad worked for the railroad and some of the fanciest food I experienced was on board the train dining cars and Harvey's at the Union Station. Campus Hideaway in Lawrence was the pre-curser to Pizza Hut. Winesteads on the Plaza was where I had my first cheesecake though it was a hamburger joint before McD's was ever imagined, the Tamale stand guy that came around the block once in a while in the evening and the couple who served the first tacos I had out of their upstairs apartment in the Argentine district. I had my first loose meat hamburger at a drive-in restaurant. Mom grew up in Arkansas during the Depression and her food was pretty close to what people call soul food today. Oh yeah, there was the tavern across the street that on Meatless Fridays served New Orleans style peel your own shrimp.

Beaujolais is made with gamay grapes and Morgon is in the Beaujolais region. That wine is meant to be drunk young. Beaujolais nouveau is a very popular wine that is fermented for just a few weeks; released immediately and drank as soon as possible. It is just about all gone within two months after release. I think 3 years is the longest regular Beaujolais is normally kept. I guess your wine was not labeled as Beaujolais because being organic and unfiltered, it did not meet the legal standards to be called by that appellation.

I have never heard of organic, unfiltered French wine but from the way you described its color and taste, It sounds to me to have been a problem because it was improperly handled and stored rather than having been bad right off the bat. Most red wine is ready to drink in about 3 years, some less. Only some really tannic wines benefit from a lot of age so being too old would have added to the problems you describe. If it wasn't a vintage wine, though, it might be hard to tell how old it was. PS was this wine a specific grape or was it a blend?

I buy the premise of the magazine but the lead-in to some of the articles are misleading or lack a fully rounded presentation of the information.

I have the issue and have been reading it all the way through, little by little. I am almost done. I have tried three or four of the recipes. The very first one was good but needs some tweeking, Imo. The others were not "Keepers". All through the magazine I keep thinking about two quotes. One by Johnny Carson " You buy the premise, you buy the bit" and the other by Ernest Hemingway, about a "crap detector" in his head, something related to faulty logic principles. Kind of the same thing with Cooks Country, et al.

Son requested lasagne for dinner tonight. He usually leaves it up to me to decide but he does ask for this about once a year. Also included is the last of some sourdough French bread made a couple days ago.

I wanted to try the pork tenderloin tapa recipe in the new Milk Street issue. I have never been to a tapas bar and only have a vague idea of what it's all about. I had no intention of trying to create an authentic menu but did want to round out the meal with other bite size offerings. I had shrimp scampi, stuffed mushrooms, three kinds of Spanish cheeses, hard cooked eggs, Italian salami, rice, cherry peppers, and olives. We thought the pork tapa was good but it might have been better if I had cut the pork in smaller pieces, then refrigerated and marinated in the dry rub over night.

The weather put me in the mood for corn chowder but I made it a little heartier by adding some ham and mushrooms.

I made East Coast Grill's cornbread for the first time a couple weeks ago. We both liked it a lot.

A co-worker with my son gave him some ground deer meat and I made some meatloaf with part of it. I started with a recipe for deer meat loaf from 1949 called Meta Givens Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking and updated it with a few additions which included some onion and carrot and topped with brown sugar and tomato and a bacon weave.