Thanks for the Crepes

I'd planned to use the charcoal grilled rib eye steak that was leftover from last night for a Philly cheese steak, but as my day progressed, I developed a craving for noodles and decided to take a different track with a beef and veggie stir fried noodle dish. I prepped onion, cabbage, very finely grated carrot, jalapeno, very finely juliennned zucchini and diced Roma tomato. Then I cut my rare beef into thin strips, separating the fat from the leaner pieces. I rendered the fat over low heat while water for angel hair wheat pasta came to a boil. Leaving in the brown and crispy beef cracklings, in went the onions and cabbage. Let that go a few minutes and dropped the angel hair, which only takes about 3 minutes to cook. Now for the jalapeno and after a minute, the tomatoes and carrot. The carrots had been grated in my Mouli which makes snow drifts out of parmesan, so I knew it didn't need much cooking. Just before draining the pasta, I threw the zucchini on top of the stir fry. After draining, I added a little toasted sesame oil to the hot pasta pot, put the noodles back in and stirred it all up. In go the noodles to the stir fry with some crushed red chili and soy sauce. This all got stirred and as soon as it was hot, I added the rare beef and tossed only long enough to get it hot again. I actually preserved some of the rareness of the meat this way and the dish was hot both temp and spicewise.

2" rib eye cooked over charcoal, twice baked potato with cheddar, chives and parsley, blanched green beans, and sauteed cremini mushrooms. Roasted marshmallows for desert and an after dinner drink. More details on the Cook Your Way Though Your Freezer Challenge thread over here.

I hear ya @liuzhou. This is so sad, but all I am going to say at this point, is don't we all just love the globalization that concentrates the wealth in the hands of only a very few and makes slaves out of most our workers. Maybe it elevates some from countries that had many modern day slaves. It has made many of my countrymen, women and children homeless. They were previously prosperous before the super-rich started appropriating their labor for profit offshore. Just eight men own as much wealth as half of the population in the world right now, and it gets worse every day. Does anyone really believe this will not influence our food supply? Now they want extra profits from the mainstream food supply? I was naive, and thought that there's plenty to go around, but I did not account for the already obscenely greedy wealthy component and the political machinery backed by them in place. Fortunately, I'm mortal, and won't live long enough to learn the full extent of the corruption that mankind is capable of getting up to. There is not much hope at this point for responsible small farmers or cheese makers. So, so sad. There will be a reckoning one day, I have to hope.

I had taken a rib eye out to thaw a couple days ago. I intended to cook it yesterday, but when I checked the 2" / 5cm steak last night and found ice crystals, I used it as an excuse to indulge my lazy mood to cook something else that wasn't as labor intensive as a charcoal-fired steak. I had also made up a twice baked potato last night to avoid the last minute rush I experienced last time I was trying to coordinate a charcoal fire with it when I had a baked potato explode in my microwave after baking it in the oven and finding it just a titch underdone. I barely beat the winter sundown and the charcoal burning down on that one. So tonight, I put my prefab potato in the oven, cleaned the ashes from the grill, set my charcoal to light, and went back inside to clean some cremini mushrooms and nice fresh green beans. I set some water to heat for the beans, sliced the mushrooms and melted some butter in a skillet to saute them with only a little salt this time. I cooked the 'shrooms most of the way and left them in the skillet on super low heat. Then I went out to "burn" my steak when the fire was ready. It was in the 50 F/10 C so a pleasant grill with a nice sweatshirt that has sleeves that push up and stay put. I rarely wear long sleeves in the kitchen, but this one works really well. I like my beef Pittsburgh, which is almost impossible to achieve with thin steaks, so I have to buy much larger steaks than I can eat in one sitting. That's not such a terrible hardship, and more on this later.* I like to get the fat on a rib eye crispy, which means a hot fire, dripping fat, lots of smoke, and flames leaping up. I use long-handled BBQ tongs to hold the steak up edgewise to crisp the outer fat cap, and the flames come up up above the steak cooking it on both sides! It doesn't take too long to cook even a thick steak the way I like it on a hot charcoal fire. Close the lid to get the heat up and warm the interior of the meat, but you can't leave or you will incinerate in just seconds! You have to keep moving it around and let the dripped fat fires die down. Lots of sizzling going on, and as usual, it was seasoned only with salt and fresh ground black pepper. That's all I need for good meat. By the time it was done, the water was at a full boil for my lovely green beans, and the mushrooms were cooled off some and a little dehydrated. I added some water to the skillet with the creminis to deglaze and turned the heat way up. I dropped the green beans I'd happily been munching on raw during prep, pulled the twice baked potato out of the oven and plated it. I set the timer for one minute on the beans, because my foggy memory nowadays told me that's what @JoNorvelleWalker does, but let them go maybe 30 seconds longer because I was stirring the mushrooms. I love them raw, and I love them cooked just a bit longer, but I wasn't in love with 90 second green beans. They were not cooked and not raw, very crunchy still, but not what I think is ideal. Maybe I screwed up by stirring the mushrooms, but, I'd prefer them either raw of cooked a bit more. Perhaps Jo will speak to this. The steak rested on its plate on the hot stove top during the bean and mushroom last minute prep. I plated the mushrooms and beans, and when I cut off a portion of steak I knew I could eat, it was juicy and rare, but didn't gush bloody juices like when you cut it too soon. This was a feast! I went back for a small portion of rib eye because it was so tender, and cooked perfectly, at least for me. I had three roasted marshmallows for dessert from the embers after dinner. Later, I found out that strawberries float in a water drink, both sparkling and flat. I feel so fortunate to find an exquisite garnish for a rather lackluster vodka digestif. Why, at my advanced age, did I have no knowledge of this, one may ask? I guess my aversion to spending $18+ for a cocktail under any circumstances keeps me out of fancy bars. Okay now for the coordinating ingredient ... I could have just had Rice, of which I already had some cooked and frozen which would jibe with Rib eye. I really wanted that herby (chives and parsley) , cheesy twice baked potato, though. So I'm going with Beef steak and green Beans. *There's an ultimate Philly cheese steak with my name on it tomorrow with more freshly sauteed creminis, onions and peppers. There's no provolone in the house at the moment, but I don't think whole milk mozzarella will fail me.

TJ's is the only place I've found with not just edible, but actually delicious frozen pizza. I haven't tried the Pizza Greco-Roman, but that's because maybe it's new or it's just not a combination of toppings that I would prefer. I actually like good black olives a lot, but there are many offerings out there, that are horrible. The crust is the foundation of a pizza to me, a critical component. For those who have tried it, how is the crust?

I agree, and I can't remember where I first read about ancient archaeological honey discoveries, but I found a link here. Honey actually has antimicrobial properties. But AgraBusiness doesn't like competition and has enough money to crush competition from small (and usually far better) producers like bugs. There's absolutely no science behind this one AT ALL. It's better in Europe, as I understand it, where they don't allow lobbyists to run roughshod over the food supply.

Yes, this is exactly what happened many moons ago to my grandparent's small dairy business of about 40 head. When the requirements for onsite pasteurization came in, and they couldn't make any money on such a small scale by selling their raw milk to a middleman, they had to sell the herd. I wasn't economically feasible to put in the required equipment. They were still allowed to keep chickens and sell the eggs, which did not require refrigeration because they weren't washed as the commercial ones are. Washing removes the protective coating on the egg. They were just selling products onsite at their farm, but being in Louisiana, even that was verboten. One of my favorite memories is how my grandmother cherished a photograph of me milking one of the cows into a Maxwell House coffee can. I was 3 or 4 years old, and a cute little dickens, if I say so myself. I was bent over some, but probably wouldn't have stood much higher than the cow's hock.

Here's a video and an article on how to make natural blue food coloring out of two commonly available ingredients: red cabbage and baking soda. Might be fun.

I put everything in coolers or the other fridge and freezer, turn off the fridge entirely and put a large pot of boiling water in the icy freezer and shut the door. Replace with another pot of boiling water when the first cools if necessary, and I haven't found a faster way. It's a chore I really don't like, so any tips to speed it up and get it over with would be a blessing. I did use something from the freezer for dinner tonight. Frozen shrimp. I gave it the tempura treatment with the recipe I linked to upthread. Some beautiful green beans, carrot strips, nice and fresh quartered cremini mushrooms, zucchini sticks, white onion rings and broccoli florets joined the tempura party. The batter wasn't quite as lacy as last time, but only because some idiot (who me? ) decided to alter the recipe by replacing some of the corn starch with potato starch. It was still very good, but someday I will learn to leave well enough alone. Someday. ETA - I wracked my brain to come up with another S ingredient, and the best I could come up with was change shrimp to Prawns (they weren't) and use the crushed red Pepper I used in the dipping sauce to qualify. Then I realized, I could use the S in dipping sauce.

I broiled a Pork chop from the freezer along with some leftover canned Pineapple. This was the first time I attempted to broil canned pineapple, though I have both broiled and grilled the fresh variety several times. I don't know what makes it different than the fresh, but this is also the last time I try broiling canned pineapple. I wished I had just left if the way it was before I cooked it. I also had a huge salad of red leaf lettuce and lemon tahini dressing.

Thank you for your kind and thoughtful response, dscheidt. I had to look up EDTA, and I have to say I wasn't impressed at all. Anything that has an LD50 in rats is something that I'd prefer not to have around my food. Of course salt can be lethal too, but it's a nutrient as well in small doses. "Side effects[edit] EDTA exhibits low acute toxicity with LD50 (rat) of 2.0 g/kg to 2.2 g/kg.[6] It has been found to be both cytotoxic and weakly genotoxic in laboratory animals. Oral exposures have been noted to cause reproductive and developmental effects.[12] The same study by Lanigan[12]also found that both dermal exposure to EDTA in most cosmetic formulations and inhalation exposure to EDTA in aerosolized cosmetic formulations would produce exposure levels below those seen to be toxic in oral dosing studies." The citric acid is something I actually cook with, but it's quite expensive at the one place I ever found it. Thank you for confirming my suspicions, and if my dishes get too spotty, I will resign myself to washing and polishing by hand. I practically do that now anyway, but I like the higher temps the dishwasher can achieve.

Malt-O-Meal is wannabe Maltex, and I don't like either one, but if that's what folks want to eat, go for it. Just please don't ask me to join in. When we lived in Vermont, we had care packages of grits shipped by relatives from Louisiana. It was the only way to get them at the time. It's funny to recall Michael and Jane Stern's early writing about their first encounter with grits in the South. They wound up liking them. I thought I was weird by wanting leftover rice many years ago with butter and salt for breakfast, and come to find out that congee or other rice configurations are a very common breakfast, just not in my corner of the world at the time.

So much hate for bell peppers! That's OK though; more for me. I used to watch them blooming, setting and then growing and ripening with such anticipation. Not as much as the tomatoes, of course, but the first maters usually came in earlier anyways. I love all colors too, and the hotter varieties as well. That said, I don't enjoy frozen veggie mixes and don't buy them, vegetables have different cook times to be optimal, which I can control with separate ones, but not with a premix. Also I can customize exactly what I want in that mix. I do buy frozen veggies all the time but not carrots or broccoli because I think the texture suffers. Pepper haters, please avert your eyes, but fellow pepper lovers, you probably know that peppers deliver more Vitamin C than citrus. Good thing the world is large enough and diverse enough to make it interesting and pleasing to us all.

Finish works okay for me too, but not as well as the old school phosphate brands. I have to do a lot more hand scrubbing and polishing to get it to work. I have a box of Dollar General brand that is horrible, and I'm trying to get some use out of. The presoak idea for heavily soiled pots and pans provided by @kayb is very useful. I hate to waste things. Also I don't go to the beach anymore, but for those who do and collect sea shells, automatic dish detergent was very effective at removing barnacles from some intact whelks I found at Atlantic Beach in NC when we debarked from our charter fishing boat and were walking back to our vehicle. Nothing else I tried worked. I don't even use the Jet Dry samples that come with a new dishwasher. I can't wrap my mind around why I should be applying chemicals into the final rinse of my dishes which I'll be eating from shortly. Yes, I know that the municipal water I have no choice but to use contains chlorine and or/ammonia (both poisons, and stinky). Seems like plenty of poisonous chemicals to be ingesting to me. *Shrug* Plus, both chlorine and ammonia are gases, and from my time in the lab, I'd expect them to evaporate completely. It didn't help when I got a recall notice on my particular model of dishwasher for a wiring fire hazard that only applied to people who had used the Jet Dry dispenser. If anyone wishes to enlighten me on why I would want to apply expensive chemicals to my dishes in the final rinse, I'm willing to be enlightened.

I am dredging up this ancient thread, because I was reminded of Maltex. This hot cereal was favorably mentioned on page one by @Chris Amirault, but I have to respectfully agree to disagree. The company that originated had a long history in Burlington, Vermont, where I experienced it living nearby more rurally. Here's some more history on the building. The brand dates back to 1899, but alas, ownership has devolved to ConAgra at present. I found this article from the New York Times from 1978 very interesting. It has been carefully archived complete with typos for our current enjoyment, but is behind a paywall. I don't have a NYT subscription, but have been able to access it multiple times through Google search, so that is why the link is as you see. Unfortunately, on those frozen arisings as a kid in Vermont in the 70's I dreaded the Maltex mornings and only choked it down under threat of dire punishment. It's not possible to articulate how much I abhorred this cereal. I'm glad to find out that at least my suffering supported a local company. Probably just me, because it seems to still be popular, and I also despised Cream of Wheat, and oatmeal until many years later, I found out about steel cut oats through eGullet. Weirdly. I've always adored white stone ground grits when they're cooked right, which is something I know how to do. I like them with butter and salt instead of sugar. My reminder for this ancient memory comes from rereading Stephen King's "Hearts in Atlantis", which has only a very brief reference to it, and most of the links came up when I searched for "who hated Maltex?". Still interesting, though, at least to me.

I learned it in the USA, but only by trial and error, so I wish I'd been reading tips like this at the time. It was pretty quick with butter, because it is less forgiving than oil. I was slower to learn with the oil, but I completely agree with the heat the pan first, then the fat method. If one cooks enough, you figure this out on your own, but you will have to throw out a lot of butter first.

I also purchased this once, and it had a flavor; it was just abysmal! I agree; save your money on this item. Most of my purchase went to the raccoons. Too bad though, because I adore good falafel and it would have been so convenient.

They surely wouldn't like the way I cook my steak over charcoal then. Burnt on the outside and red rare on the inside. Pittsburgh. I also read this years ago about grilled foods and french fries, but that did not alter my course as I happen to love both of these foods. The current science may even be good on this one, but food cooked over wood and fried potatoes are such a long tradition, I tend to put it down to the "Sleeper" syndrome of evil food of the moment.

I started and finished dinner tonight with two old favorites from the Plough, Inc. Cafeteria in Memphis, TN, from my stint there many moons ago in Maybelline cost accounting. The first is a weird sounding salad, that is surprisingly good. I would never have even tried it but for the recommendations of colleagues. It's simply iceberg lettuce topped with canned pineapple, then the juice from the can poured over as a light dressing. Then (and this is the part that threw me) shredded cheddar cheese is scattered on top. The middle course was actually kind of weird too, come to think of it. Has anyone ever heard of chicken tempura? Details over here on the Cook Your Way Through Your Freezer Challenge. The final thing was a sweet potato custard, lightly spiced and sweetened. I told one of the Plough cafeteria lunch ladies one day that the pumpkin pie was the best I'd ever had. She told me that was because it was sweet potato pie. Mine was without the pastry crust but still delicious.

This afternoon, I took my thawed chicken breast out, skinned and boned it and detached the "tenderloin" at the natural muscle separation. Then I took the the breast and laid it out flat on my meat cutting board and cut it into four fingers about the size and shape of the tenderloin. I seasoned the chicken fingers with cayenne pepper, chili powder, cumin, rosemary, black pepper, and MSG. On the MSG, I took a tip from @Kim Shook's recent post in the Dinner thread where she seasoned her fried chicken with Accent. I believe Accent is just MSG, but may be wrong. I thought that was a great way to add back some flavor to rather bland factory farmed chicken. I let the seasoned chicken hang out in the fridge until dinner time. I decided to batter it, but didn't want a heavy batter. I looked through the four recipes I have from books I own for tempura batter, but all of them just use flour and made far too much. I came across this recipe on line, which is similar to the most successful attempt at it way back in high school Home Ec class. That recipe is sadly lost, but I remembered it used cornstarch, and we put ice cubes in the batter to keep it cold. I upped the salt in the linked recipe and decreased the seltzer water by the volume the ice displaced and by 1/4 cup. I would decrease the seltzer even further next time and up the salt more. Otherwise, this recipe is a winner with me. I cut a 3/8 inch crosswise slice from a white onion, separated it into rings, and fried that first. The batter came out super crisp, lacy, and I think, if the batter had been a bit thicker, it would be close to perfect. Then I fried the chicken fingers. The batter wasn't as successful here, probably because of the chicken juices seeping out, but it was still fine. Maybe there is a reason I've never heard of chicken tempura? I can't wait to try the recipe again when I have some mushrooms and other good tempura veggies. I have shrimp in the freezer too, but that will have to wait. I had two of the chicken fingers left, and plenty of other leftovers in the fridge to eat for tomorrow, so the freezer reduction will have to wait. The rest of the dinner is on the Dinner thread because it had no C ingredients, but I did make a Custard.

Okay, I'll take part of the blame too. I love zucchini and can eat a pound of it well fried and blotted of oil all by myself. And you're right. One or two plants can supply all but the largest family in season. After that, you have to start finding "victims" to give it away to.

I have only tried this one from the link provided by chefmd. I can vouch that it is very good. The batter is crispy enough after heating as per instructions that it remains so after application of the sauce. I've never been able to achieve similar results with trying to make it homemade. Also, it's been a while but, IIRC the sauce comes in two separate packets, so you can portion out half the chicken and use one of the sauce packets to feed two. I was impressed at how all but the smallest bits of chicken remained moist and tender in their hard batter shell after heating in the oven. Also, I can't stand anything that's sickly sweet, and this sauce was balanced. Great product, IMO. I gotta get back to Trader Joe's. First, I need to clean out my freezers, which I'm working on thanks to Anna N's thread. My husband ate some of the chocolate peanut butter cups and really seemed to enjoy them, but since I'm not a fan of peanut butter cups, I can't report further.

I pulled out some Pepperoni from the freezer and made a pizza with sliced fresh jalapeno Pepper. The inspiration came from trying to walk to a Subway sandwich shop, but the only safe and legal crossing of a busy street would have put me on the side of the street with no sidewalk. I wouldn't mind walking on a shoulder or grass, but there was no shoulder to speak of, and there are banks that rise steeply in front of the businesses on that side. If I'd been really determined, I could have walked all the way down to the next safe and legal crossing, walked back to the subway (still no sidewalk), walked again out of my way to the intersection, but that would have added over a mile to the journey, and I'm not nearly as quick as I used to be at getting out of the way of traffic. So I trudged back home thinking of ordering a pizza for delivery. I got disgusted with that and just decided to make one instead. I made the crust from this recipe, halved. Besides pepperoni and jalapeno, my pizza also had mushrooms and very thin sliced white onion. I also took an 8 oz. container of Pizza sauce out of the freezer to use here. I had a small piece of muenster and a larger piece of brie that needed using up, so that went on too. I was skeptical about grating the brie, but it actually worked better than the disaster I imagined, and grating the harder muenster last cleaned the softer brie off pretty well. The only problem is, that with only me eating, I put six slices of pizza into the freezer and only took out a small package of pepperoni and the pizza sauce to make the pizza. I'm starting to understand some of @rotuts thoughts on the matter and understand why my freezers got in this overloaded shape to begin with. I pulled out a chicken breast to thaw for tomorrow.

@Kim Shook, please count me among all those who have missed you. I'm so glad you're back! That's a great-looking dinner. I would eat it all including the liver. I like the hearts better, and eat the gizzards. There's lots of nutrition in those organ meats. There's very little Vitamin B12 in chicken muscle meats, I think because they store it all in the organ meats. I have an electric appliance that can be used as a Dutch oven with the domed glass lid or without the lid for a temperature controlled fryer. I enjoy taking it out to the deck for fish and chip fry ups in good weather. I originally bought it to have a way to cook off the generator when the power was out, but have used it more than I thought I would. I hope you enjoy yours as much as I've enjoyed mine.

@Shelby, Jaymes posted a good recipe for salsa made with canned tomatoes here, if you're not deadset on store bought, and would just like to make good salsa in winter. I have made it and like it a lot.