Silicon Valley Redneck

Danger: men cooking

One package boneless, skinless chicken thigh meat.  Hmmm.

OK, so about enough almond flour to coat them (regular flour or corn meal would probably be fine, but Joy can't have grain products).

A generous sprinkling of garlic salt.

A modest sprinkling of onion powder.

A fair bit of smoked sweet paprika.

Mix the powdery things together, then coat the chicken bits with the mixture.

Fry, covered, for a while in a skillet with a shallow layer of avocado oil (or whatever's handy), starting at maybe 350ºF and fiddling downward from time to time because the vegetables are running behind schedule.  Turn sometime during the process.

Came out right tasty.  For future reference, though, getting the veggies started first and then cooking the chicken hotter and not for so long might give a better texture - crispy on the outside and all that.

Leftovers

On my Tuesday-morning grocery run, I bought an unreasonably large steak during the post-Memorial-Day grillables sale.  I took it home and set it soaking in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Trader Joe's Smoke Seasoning, and salt.

Wednesday afternoon, I tossed it on the grill, and consumed about half of it with nuked mixed veggies.

This afternoon, I got seriously ravenous (owing to an early-and-light breakfast and lunch schedule), so 'twas time for an early dinner, in a hurry.  The leftover steak was calling out to me.  How to prepare it?

Hm.  Slice it up nice and thin.  Put a bit of olive oil in a pan, along with the steak juice.  Slice up a few mushrooms.  Fry the mushrooms until they start looking almost-done-ish.  Toss in the meat.  Stir until the meat is well warmed, but not much more cooked than it already was.  Eat.

Yum.  Sometimes the simple way of preparing some leftovers really does turn out well.  And steak-and-mushrooms remains a good combination.

Breakfast muffins

Just the ticket after sleeping in, after pigging out on pizza yesterday afternoon to the extent that breakfast wasn't urgent by 0600.

Let's see, now:

Oven.  Preheat to 375°F.

Largish mixing bowl.

Flour.  About one and a half heapy cups (so, more then 1½, and less than 2).  I used bread flour, as the alternatives were (1) white whole wheat, (2) traditional whole wheat, and (3) a trip to the store.

Baking powder.  A fair dab; tablespoonish, perhaps?

Remove cat.

Salt.  A modest sprinkle.

Sugar.  About ¼ cup; more if you can handle the stuff.

Mix well, and remove cat.

Eggs.  I had four large eggs handy, so I used those.  Had they been extra-large, I would have used three.

Heavy whipping cream.  The dregs of a carton, maybe ½ cup.

Canola oil.  A moderate splosh, to make up for the small amount of cream available.

Milk.  As needed to attain a proper muffin-batter texture.

Remove cat and mix well, adding milk as appropriate.  Don't overdo the stirring, especially if you used bread flour.

Reasonably fresh blueberries, about 6 ounces.  Remove any that have gone squishy.  Stir into the batter.

Muffin pan.  Oil well, and distribute the batter among the cups.

Forget to sprinkle powdered sugar over the tops.  Oh, well.

Bake for about 25 minutes, checking after 20 to see if they look done already.

Allow to cool for a few minutes, then start eating, removing cat as necessary.  Save the leftovers for the next couple of days, to be served rewarmed with eggs and bacon.

Beltfish

Been encountering the things in Asian markets for years, and occasionally been curious, but who wants to buy an entire great long skinny fish just to find out what it is?

Well, a couple of days ago (before coming down with the cold) I stopped by a Korean market, and there were little segments of beltfish packed in modest quantities in styrofoam trays at a "might as well satisfy the curiosity" price.

For lunch today, I tossed a couple of segments (one amidships, one tail) into a pan with a bit of butter and lemon juice, and cooked them until they appeared done.

The result: the abdominal wall has rather a lot of little bones, and the belly is quite fatty for 'murrican tastes, so I spent a fair bit of time disassembling that segment.  The tail segment was trouble-free in the small-bones and fatty-scrap departments.

As far as eating it goes: it's yer basic mild thin-skinned fish.  More or less interchangeable with trout, and, around here, a bunch cheaper.

Overall, quite satisfactory.  I probably won't go buying a whole one (having quite a small freezer), but, should I encounter a tray that's mostly tail segments?  Yup.

Nega-lemon!

Having salmon for dinner, along with some flavored-up rice-with-veggies.

I cut open a lemon that'd been in the refrigerator for a while.

It contained copious juice... but...

Not only did the juice not make things sour, it erased the flavors that had already been there.

Such a bland meal.

Whatever became of...

Kerrygold Garlic & Herb Butter?

I had been finding it at Trader Joe's, and Smart & Final, and just about everywhere else.

Now it's not to be found at TJ's nor S&F, nor for that matter at Safeway.  TJ's has a similar-sounding store-brand product in little tubs, but It's Not The Same.

It's still listed on the official web site.

Someone's peddling the stuff on Amazon, in 10-packs, which might be OK if I had a much larger freezer.

So why's it gone from the local stores?  Not just temporarily out of stock, but no place on the shelf for it to be.  Gone out of fashion locally?

Oh, well: I can still try a couple of other chains, and a non-chain grocery store that's more or less convenient of a Sunday.

Or I could, I suppose, buy regular grass-fed European-style butter and add my own garlic and herbs, but that's rather less convenient.

Update: Sprouts still carries it.

A surfeit of wheat

Breakfast cereal the past couple days has been Trader Joe's maple-frosted shredded wheatlets, or whatever they're called.

Thing about these, as opposed to my usual granola, is this: I don't find them very filling.  So I go back and refill my bowl.  And end up eating an entire pound a day of the stuff.

Especially when there's no bacon.  At the moment, there's no bacon.

This makes my digestive system unhappy.

Back to granola tomorrow.  Or eggs and toast.  Eggs, sausage, and toast.  Egg, bacon, SPAM^®, and sausage.  SPAM^®, egg, sausage and SPAM^®.  Egg, lefse, SPAM^®, and lutefisk: breakfast of Vikings!  After breakfast, off to the axe-catching contest.

On the feline-induced emasculation of muffins

Time to fix breakfast.

Got a couple of seriously overripe bananas.

OK: heat up the oven, and get a mixing bowl out.  Two overripe bananas, eeny-meeny-miney, three eggs, remove Huckleberry, a goodly slosh of milk, a modest slosh of oil, don't forget the sugar, remove Huckleberry, stir in all-purpose whole-grain baking mix to obtain proper batter consistency, remove Huckleberry, put in muffin pan... oops.

See what I left out?  Pecan bits.  Darn cat was being so distracting (while trying ever so hard to be helpful) that I ended up making nutless muffins.

Oh, well.  They're OK.  They'd just be better with the pecans.

Bleah.

Those appealing-looking trays of squid tentacles in the freezer case at the Asian supermarket?  At the appealing price?

Don't bother.

I bought a tray a couple weeks back, and just yesterday got around to moving it from freezer to refrigerator, making this evening Tentacle Time!

First observation: they're from mighty small squids.  Well, that was evident even when they were packed in their tray, and it's no big deal.

Second observation: they're not properly cleaned.  About half the content of that tray is attached innards, which (unless you're the type who eats squid guts, e.g., Opus the penguin) need detaching and discarding.  And, dealing with such tiny squids, that's a Pain.

Third observation: after cleanup, rolling in seasoned flour and frying... they're just not very good.  The texture is off, mostly.  Maybe that species isn't well suited to frying?

Anyway, a disappointing attempt at a light dinner.  Had to fix myself a Racist Sandwich instead.

(What wine with tentacles?  Gotta be absinthe.  Blood of Cthulhu, body of Cthulhu.)

Will it grind?

My latest kitchen gadget is a Blendtec Kitchen Mill (or Millllllll, as the case may be).

Just tried it on some corn.

Initial impressions:

• It's noisy!  The fuzzballs were most alarmed.
• Dumping a cup of dry corn kernels into the hopper doesn't work; they form a jam where they're meant to feed through the little hole into the actual grindy bit.  Instead: start the thing running, and trickle the corn into the hopper.
• It's fast!  Once I coaxed the corn past the bottleneck, it was converted into just under 2 cups of corn flour in nothing flat.  (Well, under a minute, anyway.)
• The coarsest setting is quite fine.  You'll note I mentioned "corn flour" above, not "corn meal."  I was hoping for something a bit finer than the finest setting on the coffee mill that I'd been using for corn meal, but what I got was flour consistency.  Oh, well: it made pretty good cornbread anyway.

Having ground the corn, I went looking for some wheat, but apparently I'd discarded the little bit of wheat that I'd had on the shelf for many years, and I wasn't about to break open the big nitrogen-packed bucket.  So, I used ready-ground flour to add the gluten to the cornbread.

Anyway, I assume it'll work more smoothly with wheat, barley, millet, and so on, all of which are on the Approved List.

Now all I need is an acre of wheat....

(Looks up wheat yield per acre: no, I don't think I really need a ton of wheat per year.  And, pondering wholesale prices, I don't think raising wheat for market at that scale is very useful, either.)

Update: Picked up a couple of pounds of red winter wheat berries at Sprouts on the way home from morning walkies.  The mill quickly turned them into fine flour (on the medium setting, this time).  Now to transform that into pizza dough... which takes some time, what with waiting for the yeast to do its thing.

Update 2: Yum.  Pizza dough made with fresh, finely-ground whole-wheat flour... well, it takes a while to rise (especially in this cool weather), and doesn't have quite the elasticity of dough made with store-boughten refined bread flour... but it has quite adequate mechanical properties overall, and it's darn tasty.

Update 3: Ordered a modest quantity of hard white wheat from Amazon.  Could probably get it cheaper locally, but, well, life's hectic, I'll be wanting to bake some bread this weekend, and any in-person shopping time between now and the weekend had better be spent looking for Xmas presents.

The things you find on a trip through Amazon...

So there I was, on an expedition to Amazon in search of a corn sheller...

Hmmm, yeah.  One of these little guys.  At some point I'll get one of the cast-iron jobbies with a crank, but the current situation is not conducive to either buying or using one.

Anyway, what else should turn up in the search but a Do Not Throw Rotten Core Corn Sheller Thicker Heavier Hammer Establish Efficient Electric Household Bucket with Fan!

And only $500!  Such a deal!  How have I ever managed to live without a Do Not Throw Rotten Core Corn Sheller Thicker Heavier Hammer Establish Efficient Electric Household Bucket with Fan for all these years?

There's no description given.  I guess the name is supposed to be description enough.  And, I suppose, it might be... according as what, exactly, it's supposed to be describing.

"With fan" might, e.g., make sense if it means there's a built-in wind machine to ensure that light fluffy detritus, instead of ending up in the bucket with the kernels, instead gets blown all over your kitchen.

(I spent a goodly chunk of time yesterday evening shelling dry beans, i.e., green beans that I hadn't harvested in time.  Got about halfway through the Big Bag o' Beans before deciding that it wasn't a good thing to be attempting while the fuzzballs were awake.  There don't seem to be cheap household dry-bean shellers on the market, and it's probably not worth my time to try building one at this point.)

Waaaaaah!

My pizza stone is bust!

And I'd only had it about 30 years!

Just these past few weeks I'd started using it again, and cranking the oven up to Volcano Heat (545°F, rather than the wimpy 450°F or thereabouts I'd used in the past), and on this occasion, after depositing the pizza on it, I left the oven door open for a good fraction of a minute while retrieving an errant mushroom (which process didn't do my arm hair a lot of good).  All seemed well, but when I returned a few minutes later to claim the cooked pizza, the stone was as shown here (but still topped with a small pizza, with mushrooms, olives, and prosciutto).

Oh, well.  I've come to regard the pizza stone as Essential Cookware, so it's time to fork over $30 from my already depleted treasury for a bigger, heavier model that gets good reviews on Amazon.  Might use it for various sorts of non-pizza bread, too, if I get inspired.

One of these years, I'll build myself a proper pizza oven.  The wood-fired kind.

So I'm not following the standard recipe...

Every so often, my North Dakotan ancestry manifests itself in ways other than wearing tropical attire in what passes for the dead of winter around here and laughing at the bundled-up Californians.

Being somewhat draggy and uninspired today (seems like I've had a slow-motion case of the flu the past couple of weeks), but figuring I'll be hungry sometime in the afternoon, I developed an inexplicable hankering for hotdish.

Following the origins of the form rather than the stylized modern incarnation: what do I have that looks like hotdish ingredients?

One lunk of leftover steak.  OK, chop it up fine, and in it goes.

Previously cooked brown jasmine rice.  That'll do for starch.

Frozen mixed veggies: corn, peas, green beans, baby carrots.  Good, though diced carrots would be better. I suppose I could thaw 'em and chop 'em up, but... naw.  Dump 'em in as-is.

Sliced mushrooms.  Bought those at Trader Joe's with no specific plan, but thinking pizza at the time.  Toss in a couple handfuls, and I still have some left for pizza another day.

Update: not exactly Authentic Fargo Cuisine, but pretty tasty.

Shredded Mexican cheese blend.  That plus the mushrooms can stand in for Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, right?

Moosh it all together, cover, and set oven to Fahrenheit.  (Any number, but be sure is Fahrenheit.)  300 for a couple hours oughtta do the trick.

Meanwhile... work, or gardening?  Or shall I take a nap?  This slow-motion flu thing is really a drag.

This would seem counterproductive.

Set out to bake a pecan pie.  All ingredients on hand, right?

Well... apart from having just enough actual pecans indoors.  The reserve supply is out in the shed, on the other side of rather a lot of weather.

Anyway: recipe calls for ¼ cup of maple syrup and ¾ cup of corn syrup.  Got plenty maple syrup.  Corn syrup hadn't gotten onto the shopping list because the bottle seemed to have at least one pie worth in the bottom.

Oops.  Bottom of the bottle (Betty Crocker brand, from several years back 'cause I just don't use that much of the stuff) is deceptive.  Not only does it taper, there's a huge dimple in the bottom, making the last half-cup look like a cup or more.

And so I ended up using a bit more'n half maple syrup, because the visual cue from the bottle of corn syrup had been telling me it wasn't time to buy the next bottle yet.

Now, why would a company in the business of selling corn syrup want to package its product in a way that discourages buying the next bottle in a timely fashion?

And, as it turns out, the crud I've had the last few days?  It hasn't gotten better today, and, while the pie was in the oven, I determined that I'd added a bit of a fever to the symptoms.  So, not going anywhere with that pie.

Oh, well.  Spread over a few days, pecan pie makes a fine breakfast.

Rainy morning

Well, the forecast was for rain this morning, and when I went out to fetch the paper the big drops were just starting.

So, I'm feeling rather unmotivated about going for morning walkies, which means there's some time, and a big bucket of cooked pumpkin in the refrigerator.  So:

SVR Pumpkin Muffins!

Heat oven to 375°F.

Get out the mixing bowl.  Let's see, now:

A pound or so of previously-cooked pumpkin.
2-3 eggs.
A goodly drizzle of flax-seed oil.
A slosh of milk.
A moderate scoop of sugar... maybe 1/4 cup.
Ground cloves... about half again as much as seems prudent.
Plenty of cinnamon.
A fair dab of minced ginger.

Mix well.

Add all-purpose baking mix* until a muffin-batter consistency is attained.

Add:
Chopped dates.
Crushed pecans**.

Don't add:
Mushrooms.
Olives.
Anchovies.
Soy sauce.
Pickle relish.
Polonium.

Dispense into a well-lubricated muffin pan by any expedient means, and bake for 25-30 minutes, as needed.

Serve with Bacon!

* 5 pounds white whole wheat flour, 1 cup baking powder, 1/8 cup salt.  Sift together.  Store in a moth-proof bucket.  Optionally toss in flax-seed meal, buckwheat flour, and whatever other ground-up grain-like products are handy.

** Without the shells, please.

Update: Left out the sugar initially.  Also left out the sugar in the actual muffins I made this morning.  I knew they didn't taste quite right!  If you didn't grow super-extra-sweet pumpkins, don't forget the sugar.  On the upside... they do taste OK, and they're probably better for me this way.  Still, I think I'll eat the remaining ones with a bit of honey drizzled on.

An exercise in precise communication

I made a batch of my Seasoned Shredded Chicken.  Joy, initially skeptical of the entire concept, liked it.

Herewith, my formerly secret recipe:

Ingredients: one package boneless chicken thigh meat from the Chinese market, and stuff from the pantry.

Procedure: in the heavy aluminum pot, put some water, a moderate slosh of balsamic vinegar, a sprinkle of red pepper flakes, a fair bit of thyme, plenty of tarragon, and a little salt.  Stir.  Add a goodly slosh of olive oil, and stir some more.  Toss in the chicken meat, and unroll it and swish it around so as to get the herby liquid on all surfaces.  The liquid is almost enough to cover the meat?  Good.

Bring to a boil, reduce to low simmer, cover, and cook for a couple of hours, peeking occasionally.  When the liquid gets kind of low, poke one of the lumps with a fork.  It falls apart, right?  Good.  Tease the lumps apart into shreds, getting the liquid on the newly exposed surfaces.  Cover, and leave on simmer until the aqueous component of the liquid is nearly gone, leaving mostly oil under and around the chicken.

Stir while the last of the water evaporates.  You should now have moderately oily seasoned shredded chicken.  Turn the burner off now.

You can eat the stuff right away, as-is or maybe over rice, but it's really meant to be stuck in the refrigerator for later use in constructing burritos and similar.

So there you have it.  Simple, no?

Market day

I finally got around to checking out the Sunnyvale Farmers' Market.

It's a modest-sized market morning, spread out over a larger area than the Palo Alto one (so, less crowded!) and with a decent amount of nearby parking.

Plenty of fresh fruits & vegetables on offer, as well as baked goods, specialty prepared foods, and hot lunches.

Resisting the vast quantity of blueberries on offer (my bushes are producing now, and I'd just had my first homegrown-blueberry muffins of the season), I escaped with a few nectarines, rather a lot of ripe-smelling strawberries, and a dozen free-range eggs - quite a bit pricier than grocery-store eggs, but, if these are anything like the ones I sometimes get from Deer Hollow Farm, there ees a deeferance!

Anyway: that needs to get added to my weekly shopping routine, now that I've seen where it is and what's on offer.

Update: meh.  These particular farmers'-market free-range eggs are somewhat better than grocery-store eggs, but not that much better.  Back to the much cheaper ones from the store, unless I happen to be passing the farm when eggs are available, in which case I'll get the farm-direct, fresh-this-morning ones.

Sometimes, it's worth trying stupid stuff.

I've finally gotten around to rummaging through my copy of The Lost Art of Real Cooking.

The material on yeast, and the differing strains thereof, set me a-thinkin'.  Catching and taming wild yeasts, as suggested in the book, seemed a bit much work, and I wasn't quite ready to try using probiotic pills as leavening (apparently some of the bacteria in those might be appropriate), but I figured a stop at a brewers' supply store might yield interesting material, both yeast strains and fermentibles.

So, having errands to the north this morning, I swung by More Beer! in Los Altos.

The salesman insisted that beer yeasts are as inappropriate for bread as bread yeasts are for beer, and that I wouldn't like the results.  Still, I bought a couple of packets of different varieties of dry yeast.

Home again, and experiment at making a mini-loaf of Boring White Bread with ale yeast.  (I'd expect to use it in Interesting Mutigrain Bread, but wanted to find out what flavor it would bring.)

So: warm water, bit of sugar, sprinkling of yeast, stir, add white whole wheat flour until it starts getting doughy, spritz canola oil over the top, leave it sitting someplace warm for a while.  OK, seems to be rising a bit.  Add a bit of salt and some more canola oil, stir well, dump into a mini-loaf pan.  Let rise for, I guess, an hour and a half.  Bake.

The top of the loaf collapsed.  Well, I had taken the incredibly-lazy approach; it wasn't even remotely properly kneaded.

Let cool a bit, slice, sniff.  Smells OK, not like white bread, but certainly like a fermented grain product, and not disgusting like beer.  Apply butter and eat.  Yum.

So:

• Ale yeast does in fact work for making bread.
• The resulting bread has more character than the other ingredients would account for.
• It doesn't come out tasting like beer.
• It does come out tasting like unusual, but good, bread.

Maybe tomorrow I'll make a proper loaf of interesting bread.

(Bread: it's like solid beer!)

Footnote: Joy says it smells like beer, and doesn't want to taste it.

Footnote 2: small doses. I don't think all the, er, volatile organic compounds cooked out of this stuff.  "We never eat bread, for they make it with yeast, and one little bite turns a man to a beast.  Oh, can you imagine a sadder disgrace than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face?"

Update: solid beer, yeah.  I dunno what the actual VOC content of that stuff was, but I had a long afternoon nap, then stayed up late, then had a largely sleepless night with my brain whirring randomly.  Not my normal reaction to a small dose of alcohol, and there's no way it was really a large dose, so I suppose there must have been some other post-Thanksgiving metabolic weirdness enhancing the effects.

I think I need to change the process in various ways next time I try that.  Notably: more exposed surface area while baking.

 

I don't think I'll be using...

...the contents of that particular can of tomato paste.

I applied the opener with some trepidation, noting that the lid was somewhat corroded, and, I fancied, just possibly domed.

The cupboard shown is about 4 feet from the point of opening, and the top of the spatter is about 2½ feet above where the can was.  Them's mighty lively tomatoes, worthy of Jim Richardson.

Looking at the bottom of the can, I find that it was about 2 years out of date.

Shows how often I use tomato paste.  Well, I won't be using it this evening, either.  Guess I'll use tomato sauce (whereof there's an ample stock, oft rotated) and let it simmer for a while.

And now for comething completely different

Honey loquat ice cream!

Note: that's loquat, not locust.

Put cream and honey in the blender and blend well.  Add loquats (minus seeds and skins, please!) and blend lightly.  Dump into the Donvier and freeze as normal.  Quantities are rather arbitrary (as in: I didn't bother measuring).

It's... different.  Not really a usual ice cream flavor.

Fairly tasty, though.

Could be a novel dessert to serve at a small party, if you happen to be bringing dessert to a small party during loquat season.

I don't really think I'll bother developing it further (as in: trying again and measuring the ingredients), but it was an interesting experiment.