fifi

I make chicken and beef stocks regularly and I have for years. I also have been reducing them to glace and find that a magical ingredient for oh so many uses. I have never made veal stock. Veal anything is just too expensive and it is not all that popular here so I would have to haunt butcher shops to get enough of anything to make stock even if I thought it was worth the money. And there lies the stupid question. What is it about veal stock that would make me want to do that instead of beef? I know I have had it in restaurant preparations but you could fool me on that one, too. Do I need to bite the bullet and go out seeking veal parts so I can join the circle of the enlightened?

Best food gift ever... A friend from the PNW brought one of those soft sided coolers. It was stuffed with vacuum packed smoked fish of all kinds. The halibut was my favorite. I still mail order from these guys. And the cooler is one of the handiest ones I have. Oooo... I may have to place an order.

What logic?

OK... I will jump in. For cooking rice, I just put the measured amounts in my fuzzy logic rice cooker, add the water to "the line" and all is well with the world. Before that, I had my designated rice pot with a predetermined ratio, if you lift the lid you die, and all was well. However, for jambalaya, that is a different thing. There is more liquid than I would use with just rice. I have always used long grain white rice like my gumbo goddess taught me. For her and for me, Mahatma brand was what was in the pantry and that is what we used. In jambalaya the rice is typically "overcooked" in that the rice splits. There is also typically more liquid than what is in a perfect pot of rice. Jambalaya is a different thing. I am not sure that boutique rice makes a big difference here. The other flavors should be strong enough to overpower the flavor of the rice. The rice adds the bulk and the texture. Jambalaya is all about using what you have to make a delicious dinner when what you have isn't a lot. Using "fancy" rice seems to fly in the face of that tradition.

Hmmm... A kolache a glass of wine and thou? I don't know. I am thinking that with a developing olive and wine industry, we need something that fits and is uniquely Texan. We have the Mexican bollilos (sp?) that are really of French derivation. When I try to put together olives and bread in a tradition in the US, the only thing I can come up with is the muffaletta that is of New Orleans origin, where a great bread of Italian tradition is melded with a great olive salad. Wouldn't it be great if we could hitch this Texas olive thing to a local star like the muffaletta is for New Orleans? Olive salsa kolaches?

Oh yes... the ice cream. I forget the brand that we used to buy at Dorignac's but the ice cream was a divine treat. Oddly, it was not very sweet. That was the attraction for me. Does anyone remember what the dominant brand was 25 years ago?

woodburner... I am interested to see this "constructed" roast. Richard... I do NOT think I will be doing the 55 gallon drum reconstruction. I am glad that you have reconfirmed my suspicions that I should not push it and just go for "batches". I have done smoked turkey and chicken stock for years. You may want to put a little bit of skin but don't add too much. I usually just go with whatever skin gets left from the picking. This stock makes a great soup or, even better, chicken and dumplings. That is another use for the smoked chicken meat. Thanks for reminding me of that. After many years of trying to duplicate my great aunt's dumplings, my sister figured out the secret. Aunt Minnie's dumplings were sinkers. Not those fluffy things that turn to mush on the first reheating. The secret was getting some cheap grocery store brand biscuits, flatten them out on a well floured board, working some extra flour into them, cut them up and throw them into the bubbling broth. Perfect dumplings. Now, we know that Great Aunt Minnie never used cheap grocery store biscuits, but we don't have her recipe and this at least gives us the final result. Also use the stock for rice, a base for tortilla soup, Whatever. The possibilities are endless. Let us not forget that smoked meats have by-products. One of my favorite recipes is this posole that uses BBQ as an ingredient.

Now that is exciting! I would think that there would be varieties of olive trees that would be adaptable to the climate and soils south of San Antonio. I wonder if Texas A&M is doing any work on this? Wouldn't that be great to have our own olive industry? The wine industry is beginning to improve. Now all we need is a local bread baking tradition that isn't corn bread. Some of you bakers out there need to invent something.

Wow! That was fast. Mudbug, that third recipe from the cheese maker at Dorignac's is the one I will be trying. My MIL and FIL always shopped there and that is where they got their cream cheese. That was about 25 years ago so it may not be the same but that is the direction I am going to go anyway. Many thanks all. If you have not tried this rare treat, you owe it to yourself. I forgot about pouring the half and half over it. Yes indeedy that is what we did.

I have not had Creole Cream Cheese in forever. I really doubt that it can be found in any reasonable quality in Houston. I am thinking that it can be made at home. After all, we do make creme fraiche. Is this doable? Does anyone do it? I am contemplating a breakfast of lightly sugared Creole Cream Cheese and saltine crackers that have been warmed in the oven. That was a favorite of my late FIL. Then there is the ice cream. HELP ME! PLEASE!

I need a reality check here. Sometime in May, I will be doing a marathon chicken smoking routine on my WSM. I would like some comments on my strategy. Here is the deal... To benefit the scholarship fund for the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, you can purchase a "pen" of chickens from a Chicken Committee member for $50. A "pen" is six chickens, 4 to 4 1/2 lbs each. Like an idiot, I purchased two pens. (All I have at the present time is a crappy apartment refrigerator with the freezer on top.) A friend and my sister are in a similar situation except that my sister has a big chest freezer that will be the "chicken way station". That being said, smoked chicken meat in the freezer is like pantry gold so we are going to smoke some of said chickens and process into neat little packages of smoked chicken meat. So, one fine weekend in May, we will have a chicken smoking party. First we will cut up the chickens. We will only smoke the thighs, legs, and breasts. The rest will go into a couple of big stock pots. Chicken pieces will be brined for about 3 hours before going on the smoker. With the WSM cranking along at about 250F, top vent temperature, we are ready to go. (I can keep that temp for about 12 hours easy with no fuss. I can add more charcoal and wood and go much longer.) Load the top and bottom racks with pieces with the Maverick remote thermometer in a chicken piece. Thigh or breast? I dunno. When that reads 160F, pull off that batch and put on another. From what I have read, that may take about 3 hours. So, it looks like we can brine the first batch, put them on, put the second batch in the brine, when the first batch comes off, the second batch has been in the brine about the right time, and so it goes. I am thinking that we might divvie it up so that one batch is all breasts, another thighs, and another legs. That might give us better control over temperature. I haven't found a whole lot of guidance on how long the various pieces need to cook. I am also thinking that we might just smoke thighs and breasts and bag up the legs for a big pan fried drumstick fest later since the legs may take up more room in the smoker than they are worth for the meat yield. Remember, we are going for smoked meat production here. (Well, we might nosh on the odd piece to temper the beer consumption.) Does anyone have any idea what to do with that gorgeous mahogany chicken skin? From experience, I can say that you don't want it put away with your smoked meat. Over time, it gets too strong. Perhaps we save it and freeze it for making smoked cracklin's when we do the leg fry? I have never done that but it sounds like it would work. Then the bones from the picked chicken pieces go into another stock pot for a batch of smoked chicken stock. (Waste not, want not.) Another question... Looking at the "grill extenders" here, I am toying with the idea. But I do wonder if putting that much meat would overload the heat capacity? Probably not, but I don't have any experience putting that much meat in a WSM. Logically, the link does describe that it will take longer to get to temperature after adding the meat and will take more fuel. I don't think that will affect the quality of the final product but I just don't know. Does anyone have any experience with these? Any other ideas out there on this "production line" project? You don't have to buy "pens" of chickens to do this. When those chicken pieces go on sale at a ridiculous price, some of you may want to consider having a chicken smoking party for the same reason. That smoked chicken meat is dynamite in salads, quesadillas, sandwiches, you name it. If you have packets of it in the freezer, you have a quick meal.

It is times like those that make you think it is all worth it, britcook. Here is one of mine. When son and daughter were about 11 and 14, I had a business trip to Honolulu. (Hey... Somebody had to do it.) When I told the kids, they immediately said that we were scrapping the New England trip and they were coming along. Fine... But company policy required that I fly first class and I couldn't afford to fly them first class. No problem. The said they didn't care if they went in a doggy crate. My son was really into traveling and food and my daughter suggested that I switch seats with him for dinner service. No problem. When I asked the flight attendant about this arrangement, she said, that was fine but looked pretty dubious. A little while later the attendant came back to where I was sitting in coach and was just dumbfounded. She complimented me on his manners and couldn't get over a kid that age that said please, thank you, yes m'am, no m'am AND knew what the food was all about, asking interesting questions. They were so charmed that they told the captain about this amazing kid and he got to go into the cockpit and sit for a while in the co-pilot seat! He was in heaven. (And he admitted to me later that he was now a believer in the power of good manners and thanked me for nagging him when he was "little".) Well... This proud mama didn't need that 747 to fly the rest of the way to Honolulu.

Bravo to you both. Keep it up and along about 10 years old it will start to pay off. I raised my two with just about the same rules. The result was two delightful young folks that were a joy to dine with, in or out, and a good time is had by all. Some of their friends were not so lucky and were really uncomfortable in a lot of social situations.

This is one of the issues that finally drove me to digital photography. As I have said, I did a lot of macro photography, mostly nature type stuff. Macro presents some dicey problems. I tend to think of food photography as a sub-species of macro. Trying to get the lighting right to capture the juiciness of that steak is pretty much like trying to get the dew on that liverwort just right. With digital, the cost issues went away. When I think of what I have spent over the years on Kodachrome it makes me shudder. Then there is the Photoshop factor.

Old 35mm SLR schlepper here. About 3 years ago I dove into the digital world. One thing that I noticed is that I didn't like the really tiny cameras. I couldn't really get the same "hold" on them. I used to do a lot of macro work and that was important to me. So, from an ergonomic point of view, a normal size camera was important to me. Next consideration was the memory medium. Memory sticks are expensive and that made me tied down to unloading to the computer, which was a locked down corporate system (at the time), and on and on. Then I found the Sony Mavica CD. I didn't get the most expensive one for my first time out so this one is 2.1 mps. But I LOVE it. It records the files to a small CD that can be read on anyones' computer. This comes in really handy if I am taking pictures at someone's house and want to leave them with the disc. One disc (about 25 cents) stores about 150 high resolution pictures and the accompanying e-mail size copies. It has a decent macro mode and the other settings do anything I need to. One of these days I will probably get a more serious digital camera but I really would hate to give up the little CDs. As far as I know, Sony is the only one that has this option.

All of those silly little jars is why I never got a "yogurt maker". I just used those glasses with the lids that I referred to up-thread because they were convenient. I have also just done it in quart Mason jars. With the individual glasses, I would dump some of them into my draining contraption to produce "yogurt cheese". Then the glasses would go back to their original duty of containing various cocktails. Using whole milk (4% fat?) and adding the dried milk supplement makes a much richer product. This especially shows up if you drain off the whey to make "yogurt cheese". I like my butter fat and I will swear that the yogurt product was a legitimate subsitute for sour cream. balmagowry... I used to add the whey to my beloved basset hound's dry kibbles. She seemed to enjoy it. I never got beyond that. But you ask a good question.

I don't know for sure but maybe this is the problem. If you look up-thread to my "gospel of yogurt according to mother" she did all of this manic whisking. When stirring in the starter culture, that has a lot to do with separating the little buggles so that they can "romp free and propogate". The fact that you had this goop on the bottom indicates to me that your culture was not well dispersed. But the 48 hours baffles me. I am beginning to think that your culture was really weak. In my food microbiologist days, I have studied the population curves in various fermented foods, like yogurt, and what you saw is not normal. Temperature control, viability of the starter and dispersion are the key parameters.

I did the Russ Parsons method tonight "by the book" (well, I used a little less water). In the LC pot, I sauteed a medium yellow onion and three garlic cloves in a little olive oil, added the beans and 1 1/2 quarts of water with about a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt. Brought that to a simmer and put it in a 250F oven with the lid on. Ninety minutes later I had loverly beans. I added a little more salt to my taste, about a quarter cup of my "Zarella's magic ancho paste" and a 7 oz. can of chopped green chiles and allowed them to percolate for about another half hour. I am in bean heaven and it smells wonderful in here. I waited to add the chile paste and chiles since I think they may be rather acid.

Geen beans are a rare variety of bean grown only in the rain forests of the PNW, fertilized with banana slug poop and tended by elves. (fixed the typo)

If you are a fan of Emeril's NNOC, check out Louisiana Real and Rustic. He has three recipes for grits in that one, Andouille Cheese, Baked Cheese, and Veal Sausage with Creamy Grits. I have done the Andouille Cheese and it is to die for. Now I have to get me some of those mail order grits.

First, I want to state that IMHO, caramelized onions are a different beast than onion confit. And what is the difference you ask? I think it is one of uniformity. The confit is more evenly "processed" whereas traditionally caramelized onions have more variations like darker edges and less cooked bits. I may be totally wrong here but that is my opinion and I'm sticking to it. I have made onion soup with confit and it is quite good, but I prefer to caramelize my onions in the bottom of my LC pot for doing onion soup. I also caramelize onions in bacon fat for my green beans. No other method does as well for this and other "southern style" smoothered veggies. I do have to admit that I have never caramelized a batch just for uses as described above. I will have to change my ways.

The horror! um... No. As I think about it, though, it might work ok. The sugar carmelizes and the milk solids toast. The fat component doesn't change. There might be some textural differences but it should work. I say give it a try.

That sourdough bacon cheeseburger is actually pretty good. I got one not long ago and requested it "off the broiler". Not bad at all.

I have a peeps coup. I actually saw The Peeps Bus this evening. Is this a great country or what?

Inexplicably, I ran into the black olives in a rice dish in Coatzacoalcos (on the Gulf coast, south of Veracruz). It was served as a side dish to this incredible seafood platter that served eight of us. That just struck me as weird. I have read that there was once an effort by the Spanish to establish olives in the region. That makes no sense to me because the climate is not like the Mediterranean. You have to go the the Pacific coast to get that. I also read that the Spanish ended up destroying the olive groves because they competed with imported olive oil and olives from Spain. I am sure I am leaving a lot out here. Maybe theabroma can keep us honest. I also remember getting black olives on a chalupa many years ago in Taos NM.