What's cooking? part 4

Still, its just a mouthful of glop. Its like the lovely japanese bento trays I sometimes get for lunch: they always include a little blob of mashed potato salad in one little cube. I love it.

xxpostsomething

lots of great foods are just mouthfuls of glop, like yogurt

wonder if I can summon LL by saying chobani

Haha! I was just going to check in to say that there are kitchen pics on flickr if anyone wanted to see my new dominion. I've still gotta make a substantial produce and meats grocery run but I predict great things to come.

my crockpot pork carnitas turned out really good! am going to experiment with adding more/different things to the pot for more flavor. this time was just the juice of an orange, onion, garlic, a little chopped jalapeno and rubbed down with cumin, oregano and salt.

That reminds me of my NC bbq crockpot recipe, which I plan to revive as soon as I go grocery shopping! I've had a hankering for weirdo tacos ever since you guys have been talking about meat all the time :)

Coincidentally, I have a 7lb pork shoulder coming today. Going to slow-cook it, obviously, but votes on whether to brown the outside first?? A shocking (to me) number of recipes for carnitas/pulled pork/etc do NOT call for browning, which downright confuses me.

when i've made carnitas i've browned it at the end (once its been pulled apart)

Last few days: Cream of swede and chestnut soup. Variations on crockpot stews. Leftover roast chicken and mushroom risotto. Tomorrow: Lime zest and coconut encrusted blue warehou with crispy spuds and garden salad.

yah i agree w/just sayin--cook it, break it apart, then brown it under the broiler.

I third that.

Something I am starting to really master (and am embarrassed that I have not mastered this previously) is the NO WASTE thing. I'm really using up every bit of leftover, getting produce taken care of (including pickling, if necessary) before it goes off, using the freezer effectively, etc.

Yesterday I realized that the pineapple I picked up was getting overripe--hello pineapple shrub doing its thing with some rosemary and apple cider vinegar! Will be great with tequila when it is ready.

Wow, okay! Is that a beef vs pork difference? I can't imagine not fully browning a piece of beef before slow-cooking, it just doesn't exist.

yeah i wonder if there's some interesting food science thing there. i know that on atk they were making carnitas and experimented with browning first and found that it didn't really add much flavor.

I've never browned pork before slow cooking. Also bonus pts if you tell ppl you made lechón.

la lechónera

tonight i sear-roasted some halibut, made a two-pea saute from my invaluable williams-sonoma vegetable sides cookbook (cost: $3), and made some modified homefries by boiling halved fingerling potatoes and then frying the flat sides in duck fat with a bunch of minced shallot. came together quickly, too.

I just realized that I always hold pans with right hand/do whatever else (stir/flip/whip/etc) with left hand. Does that mean I cook left handed? ( I'm generally left handed btw)

That meal sounds lovely and delicious. I'm almost done restocking after the move and it feels gooooood.

i cook lefthanded and write lefthanded but do sports type things righthanded. i am confused.

I'm right handed and hold the pan with my left, flip/stir with my right

CAD that sounds so good!

i do all significant tasks with left, but cut (with scissors, not knife) with right because those were the only scissors available when i was a kid. there was one pair of green ones, and then there were none. i sometimes bowl with right hand too for fun. i was just wondering if there were any other lefties out there and what sort of cooking tasks were delegated to right and left hands.

I'm a leftie! I think I mostly use left hand for stirring/flipping. but I am kind of randomly ambidextrous for weird things like applying mascara and playing tennis.

that cook's illustrated pork chop technique worked well btw

cooking is a wheel. you think you can cook and then you steam an artichoke for the first time and fail miserably.

next week I'm gonna get it right, goddammit.

For tonight's supper I made the Spinach Provencale recipe from the venerable The Vegetarian Epicure cookbook, circa 1977.

You wash up two large bunches of spinach, saute a chopped onion and some garlic, add all spinach long enough to wilt it, then add a mixture of two beaten eggs and grated parmesan, stir well, then turn it into a baking dish and bake at 375 for about 20-25 minutes.

With that I made a cole slaw and some steamed brussels sprouts, and I served it all with french bread from a local bakery and butter.

That sounds a lot like a quiche? And also delicious.

Unlike quiche it has no crust, consists of about 80% spinach, 15% onion and very little egg. As you suspected, it's delicious.

Oh I make crustless quiches pretty often, after Lechera recommended them a few years ago. The egg balance difference is otm though. I'm going to try that as soon as my oven gets fixed!! (The door hinge is broken or stuck and it won't open now.)

The original recipe (iirc) calls for:

2 lbs. fresh spinach, washed, destemmed
1 onion, chopped
garlic
2 Tbs. olive oil
2 eggs, beaten with:
3/4 cup grated parmesan
salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. I use a heavy-bottomed 8 qt. stock pot to saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil. When onion is transparent, add spinach. Wilt it for three or four minutes, stirring. Remove from heat. Mix in the egg-parmesan. Turn into a buttered baking dish. Bake for 20 minutes at 375.

Bought all the parts to make my own sous vide oven! Weekend project time :)

whoa! details pls.

This thing: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088OTON4/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088OTON4/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and one of these, which I hope will work okay:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I8VE68/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i03?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I've got a medium sized Coleman cooler to modify - drill holes in the lid for the heating element wire and the temperature sensor; install a grill at one end to encompass and stabilize the heater and one at the other to house the pump. Fill with water, turn it on and see how it goes.

And, if that weenie little coil heater doesn't do the job, I've got my eye on this one: http://www.amazon.com/MARSHALLTOWN-Premier-742G-Bucket-Heater/dp/B000BDB4UG/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=38RDX3ZA000BS&coliid=I1IRTZB02SYD9J

whoa

lol @ "designed to continuously heat buckets of water"

About to try fiddleheads for the first time, boiled then sauteed in butter, alongside eggs.

mmmmmm super jeal

I scaled and gutted a fish tonight! It was not planned but when I looked at the fish I'd bought I realised it was going to need preprocessing. A couple of YouTubes later, it wasn't as difficult as I expected. Feel I've acquired a valuable life skill.

nice job!

they'd better have some damn fiddleheads at the store this week

Still finding fish scales all over the kitchen.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/44/Fishscale-Ghostface.jpg/220px-Fishscale-Ghostface.jpg

So I've been eating the carnitas for a couple of days and I fucked it up slightly by taking out too much of the liquid midway through because I was afraid it was going to be inedibly spicy, and now it's bland and flavorless. So I'm willing to try it again. But overall my "barbacoa" beef kills the pork shoulder, I think because of the browning and also because I didn't put any tomatoes or tomato paste in the pork recipe (not called for). Needs more L-glutamate.

have you tried a shitload of salt? i think the stuff served in most restaurants is hella salty -- i just had some last night at our end-of-semester party and was surprised that the dominant flavor was salt. nothing else. just salty meat. it was good because those things are tasty, but the flavor was not distinctively CARNITAS! it was salty pork.

it was actually really good with the asian slaw salad thing i brought!

you could cobble together an asian-style taco, such as served from trucks in LA

that's exactly what we did, only with tostadas!! it was delicious! i brought limes and my squeezer, and some peanuts, and everyone went to town. there was also some strange pink salad with marshmallows in it, bread pudding made by my student's mom, and some other stuff i don't remember.

my salad was
cabbage carrots edamame pea sprouts kale mint cilantro
dressed with
rice vin peanut butter sriracha soy sauce sesame oil + lime

everyone was super into it! i was impressed.