slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Just use the bacon fat you've been saving in the freezer. You have been saving your bacon fat in the freezer, haven't you?
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Lactase supplements and I = Bad News. I tried some a while back and had severe cramping for a couple of days. Not again. I'm not as intolerant as someone like Jason for example; more like mild intolerance (i.e., no milk -- but cheese is acceptable.)
That is indicative of an actual lactose problem as opposed to a casein allergy or other milk-related allergy. People who can tolerate cheese but not milk are the ones who are really and truly lactose intolerant. I say this because most cheeses contain little or no lactose (>95% of the lactose is washed away with the whey, and the tiny amount remaining is consumed by the bacteria that ferment the cheese). Cramping associated with the consumption of lactose is caused by bacteria in the gut which eat the unreduced lactose and produce gas as a fermentation byproduct. Lactase pills should not, in and of themselves, cause cramping. However, in someone with extreme lactase deficiency, it is possible that no reasonable dosage would suffice.
As for alcohol dehydrogenase and/or mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase pills to help you metabolize alcohol properly... it's something you might consider talking to your doctor about. Obviously you don't want something to help you go out to the bars every night. But something that might help you have the occasional glass and a half of wine with a big dinner sounds entirely reasonable and not outside the realm of possibility.
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I can't drink wine, not because I don't like it, but because I have a genetic inability to properly metabolize alcohol.
Soba, this is a little OT, but I assume this is due to the fact that your body doesn't produce sufficient alcohol dehydrogenase (an important enzyme the body uses to break down alcohol)?
Given the fact that this genetic disposition is quite common among the huge worldwide population of Asian descent, I wonder if there is some kind of alcohol dehydrogenase pill one can buy. After all, it's fairly easy to find lactase pills, and the worldwide population of people with alcohol dehydrogenase deficiency has got to be much larger than the (actually quite small) number with serious lactase deficiency.
Have you ever heard of anything like this?
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Quick question regarding the layer of oil that separates from the sauce.
Do you skim this off and discard it like you would for a stock - or is it an integral part of the sauce that is stirred back in before it is served.
My opinion: no on one and yes on two.
Family traditions will differ, however.
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This doesn't sound like Italian cooking... it sounds like old-fashioned Italian-American cooking, which can be great. What you describe is a fairly typical "Sunday Gravy."
(snip)
this post made me want to attempt sauce from scratch this weekend in my crockpot.
and could you give me some measurment guidelines for the ingredients? (more specifically the tomato products - the spicing i can do by smell)
It depends on the size of your Crock Pot. I would suggest something like this as a general outline:
1 large Spanish onion, medium dice
10 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 pound beef (or pork) stew meat
1 pound Italian-style mild fennel sausage
5 cans tomato paste
2 large cans whole tomato, lightly crushed
EVOO
Plenty of dry thyme, oregano and basil
1. Soften vegetables in copious amounts of evoo and place in crock pot.
2. Brown all meats and place in crock pot
3. Add tomato products and dried herbs to crock pot and add water to thin it out (around 3 quarts)
4. Fire up the crock pot on low and cook at least 12 hours, preferably 24. You will know it has cooked long enough when the sugars caramelize, the sauce takes on a brick red-brown color and the fat has begun to separate into a thick layer on the top.
5. An hour or so before you intend to eat, make a batch of your favorite Italian-American meatball recipe (pork, veal, beef, bread crumbs, softened garlic, softened onion, parsley and parmigiano go in mine) and perhaps a braciole or two. Brown these meats and simmer together with the sauce extra low for the last 45 minutes or so (you may have to do this in a larger vessel on the stove).
6. For service, remove all meats from the sauce and serve separately (some small pieces of the original sausage and stew meat will remain floating in the sauce.)
Depending on your tastes and traditions, you can add celery or green peppers to the initial sauteed vegetables (I like celery but am not fond of the flavor green pepper gives a long cooked sauce), or perhaps some crushed red pepper. If you want an extra garlic-ey flavor, throw in a clove of finely minced garlic for the last 30 minutes.
Many Italian-American families would forego the garlic and onions entirely and use powdered/granulated garlic and onion, although I am sure this is less true today than it was >20 years ago. But, if it doesn't taste quite like grandma's, this would be the first modification I'd try.
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I have a reasonable amount of the freshly dried seeds. It also occured to me to use them to infuse a fish broth, but what I really want to do is make some pork sausages!
Now, that would be really cool.
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What kind of storage space do you have? If I didn't live in a Manhattan apartment with no storage space and already packed to the gills I would make a gigantic recipe of basic sauce on a quarterly or semiannual basis and put it up in quart Mason jars for future use.
Soon enough, a big basement plus an additional freezer (and probably fridge, too) will be added down there.
So storage room isn't a problem. (Though someone else--read: SO--might have something to say on this!
)Dude, you should definitely invest in some canning supplies, then. Think about how easy (and cool) it would be if, every time you wanted to have some sauce you could just nip downstairs and bring up a jar of your own basic sauce! It's much easier to do that kind of cooking on a daily basis when you only cook up two gigantic batches of sauce a year. I suggest this because, in my house at least, 4-5 quarts of tomato sauce doesn't last a very long time -- hardly long enough to be worth the trouble of freezing part of it.
Also... you could do as most Italian families do and jar a zillion fresh tomatoes in the fall.
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But it's not really the neutral base that Matthew's looking for, I think.
Yes, I'm looking for a neutral base that I can make 4 quarts or so of & then freeze.
What kind of storage space do you have? If I didn't live in a Manhattan apartment with no storage space and already packed to the gills I would make a gigantic recipe of basic sauce on a quarterly or semiannual basis and put it up in quart Mason jars for future use.
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Sam, if I recall correctly, your recipe is almost identical to Batali's basic tomato sauce. I use his recipe most of the time.
Yea? I watched his show a lot when it first came out and have generally been influenced by his cooking. I'd already been making more-or-less that same sauce for a number of years, but it's very possible that the thyme comes from him.
Actually... I just checked the TVFN site and the two recipes really are very similar -- even down to the quantities. That's funny, because when I posted I tried to put in whatever quantities sounded general and all-purpose (i.e., 4 cloves garlic) rather than a longer explanation of what I actually do. I might just as often put in only one clove of garlic, or sometimes six -- sometimes sliced thin, sometimes whole. I do the variations I gave at least as often as the "reference" recipe. Subconsciously, though, I must have been putting in "general purpose" quantities and techniques that I had seen on his show.
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Perhaps a better question for me to ask is: Should I go back & look at Hazan (or someone similar) for a standard tomato sauce recipe? (I.e., a thinner sauce that doesn't utilize pre-crushed tomatoes.)
Sure, you can do that. But it's not really rocket science, as I am sure you know. I use something like this.
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 medium onions, small dice
1 medium carrot, grated
2-3 teaspoons dried thyme
2 large cans whole San Marzano tomatoes
Good EVOO
Salt
1. Sweat garlic and onion in plenty of evoo until soft, but not colored
2. While vegetables are softening, open cans of tomato, pour into bowl and crush lightly with hands (can omit this step)
3. Add carrot and cook until soft
4. Add tomatoes (including liquid) and thyme. If you have skipped step 2 above, break up the tomatoes slightly with a spoon while they're cooking.
5. Simmer on low heat for 30 minutes.
6. Pass the sauce through a food mill fitted with the disk appropriate to the smoothness of texture you desire, or leave as-is for a more rustic chunky sauce. Season with salt to taste.
I have found this to be a relatively neutral sauce that is good all on its own, but also works well as a "mother sauce" on which to base future "small sauces." Some common variations in my house include using butter as the lipid instead of evoo (the difference in taste is huge), leaving out the garlic (I do this often when using butter), adding small dice of celery or some celery seeds crushed with a pestle, and adding a pinch of crushed red pepper. Any one of these variations seems to work well all by its self, or as the basis of a later variation (although I would not use the butter variations for sauces that would later include seafood).
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Several things:
1. Keep the sauce relatively thin as you are simmering it, then reduce at the end. Most of the splattering comes from large bubbles of thick, viscous liquid breaking. Keeping the sauce thin reduces this problem quite a bit. You can reduce the sauce at the very end of your simmering period if you like. I think it makes a more versatile sauce to keep it relatively thin and then reduce the amount you are going to use to the consistency you want when you are actually reheating the sauce for use -- hopefully to be tossed with the not-quite-cooked pasta for the last minute or two in a saute pan. One of the great things about a very basic tomato sauce is that you can make a thousand "small sauces" out of it by adding herbs, meats, mushrooms, whatever. A thinner sauce also means less stirring is required.
2. Don't use pre-crushed (i.e., milled) tomatoes -- use whole tomatoes lightly crushed with your hands. Whole canned tomatoes are generally better quality anyway, IMO. Then, what you have for most of the simmering process is a relatively thin liquid with chunks of tomato floating in it. Since the bubbling part of the liquid is thinner, there is less chance of splattering. Once you have cooked the sauce most of the way, you can run the whole thing through a food mill to achieve the texture of your choice (most food mills come with 3 disks).
3. Make sure there is plenty of room between the surface of the sauce and the top of the pot. This way, the splatters have to travel a long way to get out of the pot.
4. Don't simmer the sauce all that long. The longer the sauce is simmered the greater the "blort" factor will be. Unless you're making ragu Bolognese or an Italian-American "Sunday Gravy" style sauce, there is rarely anything to be gained by simmering more than 30 minutes.
5. Cook the sauce under the simmer. No bubbling = no splattering. There is nothing special about 212 degrees that 190 degrees won't do just as well in this instance.
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Balphie, the intent of my post was not to demonstrate that you were wrong. Rather, it was intended to reveal the source of Adam's misunderstanding. I would suggest that "small, unsexed chicken" conveys less information to one unfamiliar with chicken hudbandry than "very small young chicken." I am quite familiar with what a poussin is, and yet I had no knowledge of the age at which secondary sexual characteristics emerge in chickens, nor whether or not it is particularly relevant.
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Poussin is, in fact, a French word describing a very young, small chicken (see here and here).
Are you saying Bux is wrong?
I don't think Bux ever represented himself as an expert on chicken husbandry. To wit: "Poussin, to the best of my knowledge, is a little chicken--bred that way rather than just young" (emphasis is mine). As it turns out, he is partially mistaken because poussin are not, to the best of my knowledge, bred to be small (I think the ones bred to be small are "rock cornish hens").
The salient point of my post, I thought, was that a pissing contest about who knows the meaning which words and what such knowledge has to say about a person's level of high-end culinary fluency is unproductive. One would hope that we can avoid such a devolution of the discussion here and its concomitant counterstrikes, deletions, etc.
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Similarly, even if my dinner review wasn't expert (Poussain is a sexless chicken? How weird!) it was genuine.
Poussain is a sexless chicken? Weird thought indeed. I'm a poor speller myself and understand why greater minds have trouble with little things like spelling, but it hinders communication sometimes. Poussain is likely a last name in France, or maybe Cajun country. Poussin, to the best of my knowledge, is a little chicken--bred that way rather than just young. Capon is a desexed (castrated?) rooster. The confusion here doesn't speak well about the depth of your interest in food.
I think Adam's misconception came from here:
Poussin is a small, unsexed chicken.Poussin is, in fact, a French word describing a very young, small chicken (see here and here).
Regardless, I don't know that it's constructive to dwell on whether he knows the French word for baby chicken, and while it may be indicative of an overall lack of exposure to a certain kind of French high dining, I am not sure it is a litmus test of food knowledge any more than knowledge of a word like "faraona."
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Beans, I was writing to Bux. We have our little go-arounds from time to time and this is one of them. I'll stand by what I wrote and if Bux disagrees (or agrees) maybe I'll write back. You're riding a pretty high horse for bein' a bartender.
If I may step in here and offer a few words of moderation, I am not sure it is productive to impugn another's profession in making one's points. One would also hope that any "go-arounds" would stick to the topic under discussion and avoid such pejoratives as "disgraceful" and "obnoxious" when referring to another's points of debate or writing style.
All of which is to suggest that we all confine our remarks to the subject at hand and leave any name calling aside.
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The department store Target is correctly pronounced
Tar-jay
The funny thing for me is that the first Target store I ever saw was in Geneva, Switzerland -- so I thought this really was the correct pronunciation. Alas, it is not so. From Target's web site:
Back in 1961, Dayton's department store identified a demand for a store that sold less expensive goods in a quick, convenient format. Target was born.In 1962, the first Target store opened in Roseville, Minnesota.
Needless to say, it's highly unlikely Dayton's was opening a store in Minnesota during the 60s that was supposed to have a Francophone pronunciation.
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Yep. That's exactly what I would say. Given the huge volume of oil and the fact that you are basically heating up a liquid (the turkey "floats" in the oil) there is no reason to worry about thermal properties. Whatever thermal properties the cooking vessel might have are insignificant compared to the thermal properties of the oil itself. IMO, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever what the pot is made of, so long as it doesn't melt due to the heat from the burner.
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The recipe we use ... came in the form of an advertisement clipped from New Yorker Magazine for Four Roses Bourbon.
Can you scan this? I think this one of those rare cases where it might be public domain and ok for us to put up.
I'll have to talk with my parents about that. The original is somewhere in the Kinsey Family archives in Houston.
I like the sound of the one with the cognac, dark rum and applejack. And I even have a good stash of all of those. Just dont have the peach brandy. Is peach schnapps the same?I don't think it's quite the same thing, but you could probably get away with using schnapps instead.
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My family recipe for egg nog -- a very old and very traditional one -- is made with bourbon, not rum.
I've heard thats a fairly well known Southern variant, yeah.
I don't know that I'd call it a "Southern" variant per se... The recipe we use was passed down to my mother from her father. It came in the form of an advertisement clipped from New Yorker Magazine for Four Roses Bourbon. On the reverse side of the clipping is another advertisement "introducing the new 1938 Ford." It goes a little something like this:
- Separate 6 eggs
- Add 1/2 cup sugar to yolks and beat to dissolve sugar
- Beat whites stiff and add 1/4 cup sugar
- Mix whites and yolks
- Stir in 1 pint rich cream and 1 pint milk (we use 1 quart half-and-half)
- Stir in 1 pint bourbon and one ounce Planter's Punch rum
- Serve cold with grated nutmeg
- Makes 5 pints egg nog
Also in our "historical archive of eggnog recipes" is a formula calling for rye whisky, brandy and rum, and one interesting one calling for cognac, dark rum, peach brandy and applejack.
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If I am going to get some rum to add to egg nog, how good quality does it need to be? I assume a super premium would be wasted in egg nog, anyone got any ideas for some cheap rum to add? Also, any other hard liquors that are traditionally added to egg nog?
My family recipe for egg nog -- a very old and very traditional one -- is made with bourbon, not rum.
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I am curious as to where you laid your hands on this treasure. Did you hand pick it? Does anyone know the range of where it grows in the US?
According to Joe they were picked in Salaparuta. Salaparuta is in Sicilia, South of Palermo near Partanna. Since he was recently in Sicilia, I figure he got them there.
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Ruth, Unless she's cooking for alot of people, and she's serious about true
Mexican cooking, with great flavor, I would only do them by hand. No 2 tortillas
are alike, like snowflakes. I make mine, and would be happy to share the
recipe and technique! Maybe we should do a cooking demonstration! I'll look up
a recipe for you and post it in the next few days. My husband is Mexican, and his
mom's cooking is unparalled.
Jat, this is something that would generate a fair amount of interest, I think. Perhaps you might consider taking a bunch of pictures and writing something up for an eGCI class?
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The wild fennel is the key to the magnificent dish from Palermo called "Pasta con le sarde" (pasta with sardines).
Excuse me while I drool. This is one of the best dishes ever.
I got ya covered Sam.
Woo-hoo!
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"Aberlour Glenlivet" is actually "Aberlour Vintage." I don't know why it says "Glenlivet" on the bottle. According to their materials it is a "specially selected cask of one particular vintage." There is no indication of year, but given the price one assumes it is younger than 15 years.
D'oh! I meant to say "there is no indication of the age." There is an indication of the year. In fact, that's the whole gimmick.
Hmmm... must now pick up bottle of Aberlour sherry matured.
Storing Duck Fat
in Cooking
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Wait... doesn't everyone collect rendered animal fat in the freezer?
I encourage all confit-ers to use whole ducks. The way I got all my duck fat was by going down to Chinatown and buying 4 cheapo whole ducks (including heads and feet, I might add). I trimmed off all the external fat, took the skin and fat off the breasts, and rendered it all down. That gave me more than enough fact to confit all of the duck meat once I packed everything tightly into an enameled cast iron casserole. An easy way to fill in the empty spaces is to cut the breasts in half and use them to fill in the gaps. Duck breast confit isn't too terribly interesting all by itself, but its great to have some in hand every time you feel like making duck ragu, duck gumbo, etc. You can also roast up the bones and make a killer duck stock with the four carcasses.
BTW, don't discount the idea of drying out your belly button lint in the freezer. You wouldn't believe how much money we save on Bacon Bits.