What's cooking? part 4

Ah yes that makes sense. I love how one substitute suggestion is macadamia nuts, those are expensive as well!

As one of my father's "hey we are living in UTAH let's do crazy UTAH stuff" activities, we drove a few days into the desert, shook a pinion tree to get the pine nuts out, gathered them in black plastic garbage bags, and drove them home.

Next came many experiments as to the best way to extract them from their shells.

Running over them with dad's blue amc gremlin won the day.

omg i just got off work feeling more ravenous than i have in recent memory. hands literally shaking with hunger (my metabolism is kind of a thing). got home walked in the door and my gf had made soooo much paella.

it was a religious moment.

i bet u were all "pah-YAY-UH!!!!"

I wish for the day I come home from work, and someone has made dinner. It has, basically, never happened to me :(

Maybe, like once or twice. EVER.

FML.

Was thinking of having broccoli tonight...

i found this very similar thing to shakshouka but didn't try it http://english.turkishcookbook.com/2012/06/tomato-with-eggs.html

- firing up the grill today for the houseguest
- lamb chops, half just w/ black pepper and salt, the other half with cumin and cumin seeds
-burgers from scratch, gonna put in feta cheese, soy/worcestershire, maybe some horseradish?
- grilled corn

speaking of, grilling hte corn in the husk - soak or not to soak beforehand?

I want my lamb chops to look like this http://i.imgur.com/1neYi.jpg

xpost - we always soak our corn

good lookin out I soaked the corn

what should i do with eight very ripe mangoes?

advice on corn: the sugar from corn turns to starch immediately when it is removed from the stalk. ideally, there should be no more than 4-6 hours between harvesting and consuming the corn. anything that increases that time leads to diminished flavor; grilling husk-off helps to caramelize the sugar that remains in the kernels for a sweeter (and 'fresher') taste. soaking unhusked corn in sweet brine may help to replace some of the sugars: the salt will carry the sugar through the pericarp to the endosperm, and replace some of the turned starch due to some magical chemical osmosis. emphasis on 'may.'

(sincerely, remy bean, grandson of roadside corn farmers and agricultural engineers)

I have a really deep revulsion at the sound of corn being shucked, and that's been the shitty thing about living on my own. I bought a few yummy ears forgetting I could never peel them open.

remy, is it true that each individual strand of corn silk leads to its own little kernel life pod?

I found a nyt article from 1999 that said people in the south soak their corn in brine before grilling. now I know why!

as i understand it: yes, but they've got to be pollinated. my grandpa used to tell me that if you ate a lot of corn silk accidentally it would make you, and I'm quoting here, "pee like a demon." i assume that means "pee a lot" because that's the only thing that makes sense. it's possible he could have meant that eating corn silk makes your pee boil or turn blood-red or flow against gravity, but WebMD just says it's a mild diuretic, so I guess my first guess is correct.

my mom boils corn silk in water and drinks the corn silk water, says it lowers her blood pressure. she has a blood pressure machine and takes prescription blood pressure medicine so I believe her.

i think that's pretty common in asia? it can't hurt, and it probably tastes pretty good.

idk, my grandpa had minor health issues (some notional) and did every old wives' tale possible to treat them. the fact that she has prescription blood pressure medicine makes me think that, yeah, something in her life is definitely lowering her blood pressure so drinking that must not ~raise it~

well she doesn't drink it every day, so presumably on the days she does drink it it must make her blood pressure lower as measured

afaict there have been no studies done either way on it either

~shrug~

Abbott just play like KMFDM or something loud like that and shuck them to the beat so you don't notice

Also I'm picturing your version of hell as a giant foam party where they shuck corn over the PA instead of djing

ha just add tickling and that's my personal Room 101

And republicans

naw I can deal with Repubs

Cooking: I've added another staple to my "don't heat the house up" summertime menu, which is chorizo and eggs. I love how sweet the eggs seem next to the chorizo. It's very, very cheap to make, too. One dozen eggs and one tube of chorizo and one little bag of corn tortillas is like $5 and I can get six meals out of that. Plus all I really want my food to be lately is a hot sauce delivery device.

Do you just scramble 12 eggs at once? Or do you hard boil them?

Or do you just cook the chorizo and eggs together??

Squeeze out 2 oz of chorizo, fry it up in a pan until it's all loose and a little crispy, drain off some of the fat, pour in two beaten eggs, stir it together, cook until the eggs are set but still moist. NB it is not a beautiful food but I cover it in Tapatio so I can't really tell. Eat w/warm tortillas!

^^^that is enough for one hungry person

oh I also add salt & pepper to the beaten eggs
you can also cook up some diced onion with it but I'm too lazy and I don't like recipes that only use part of an onion, which I know is silly

Omg want/need

sup

Chorizo + eggs is so good, adding avocado is pretty nice as well. I'm a Cholula man, personally.

In the last week I've suddenly felt sort of invigorated by cooking again, which is nice as over the last dozen plus years it often just becomes something that I have to do every day and don't think about too much. Maybe it's because the farmer's market is starting to really kick in.

Things I've made in the past seven days:

- butterflied leg of lamb, spread with yogurt/garlic/ginger/Indian spices and roasted on the grill, with mint and tamarind chutneys, chickpea and potato chaat, and the Cook's Illustrated naan recipe from a couple months ago that is A+

- chicken wings cooked super crispy and tossed in sriracha / lime / garlic / fish sauce / cilantro, with a thin sliced cabbage salad with peanuts / mint / garlic / lime / chile and sticky rice

- sauteed cod over roast fingerling potatoes and asparagus with some lemon basil puree

- white bean, parsley, and tuna salad (using really good canned tuna in oil) with garlic and lemon, along with roasted kale

- seared tuna, cut in cubes with avocado, tossed with indonesian soy sauce, sriracha, green onion, cilantro, and lime, eaten with the terribly greasy and awesome local tortilla chips

- beef chuck cooked in frozen leftover mole from sometime last winter, with refried black beans, avocado, tortillas, and arugula salad

I could probably go the rest of my life eating just stuff based on Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Italian food.

that all sounds delish!

In the last week I've suddenly felt sort of invigorated by cooking again

i'm the feeling the total opposite of this. the heat makes my day job 10x more exhausting, my commute has lengthened and become more exhausting in the last month, and i'm so fucking tired when i get home, i can't stand the thought of cooking.

i think i'm getting closer and closer to purchasing a big freezer, so i can have a good backstock of home-cooked meals and not feel bad about refusing to cook for a week (or two).

My job hours get easier in the summer and the farmer's markets make it easier to make simple things which is helping to make cooking feel more fun lately.

And a big freezer is a great thing - not just for ready made meals or leftovers, but for giving you lots of room to keep stuff like cooked legumes, complicated sauces, caramelized onions, stock, and other shortcuts around.

I *have* a decent sized freezer now (one of those upside down fridge dealies) and I never think to precook things like just lentils, or rice, or sauces and then freeze them, let alone full meals. I'm always making all my meals from scratch every night and wondering why I never get anything else done and the kitchen is always chaos and I'm tired.

– just made my first batch of yogurt by placing 180° F milk and live yogurt cultures outside in a saran-wrapped glass bowl for eight hours. came out really, really tasty but thin - like kefir. I'm going to use this batch as starter for another batch tomorrow, and stir in a little agar agar to thicken when I bring it in from the heat.

– awesome smoothie today: half cup of my homemade yogurt, one mango pureed, couple of inches of microplaned ginger, a scoop of protein powder, and a little tap water.

- speaking of which, I just made ginger ale: dechlorinated water, yeast, cup of caster sugar, juice of one lemon, two tablespoons fresh grated ginger. lots of fizz so far. anybody have any luck at this?

The yogurt recipes I've seen say to bring the milk up to 180, but then cool it back down to, uh, 115 or so? before adding the cultures.

yeah when we've made yogurt we've followed this: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/cheese/yogurt_making/yogurt2000.htm

what was your starter culture, remy?

my dream is to get a yogurt starter from northern china - there's this amazing yogurt they have everywhere in the city, so good. the one we made from dannon was very middling, tbh.

I know v little abt yogurt but I've been put under the impression that it's usually v thin if you don't either strain it or add thickeners

well, i tried making yogurt twice.

attempt #1: i brought half a gallon of milk to 185° and then lowered it to 115° and stirred in half a cup of fage plain yogurt innoculated w/ 1/2 c of the warm milk and 1/2 c of nonfat dried milk powder. i poured this into the slow cooker, which i kept on warm for about 14 hours, since it didn't thicken. sometime between 13 and 14 hours, it turned brown and kind of rancid and the surface turned to milk plastic

attempt #2: i brought a quart of milk to 185° and then lowered it to 115° and stirred in about half a cup of fage plain yogurt (live, active cultures) and 1/2 cup of nonfat milk powder. i used an immersion blender to break up the yogurt, then poured the whole sloppy kit-&-caboodle into a tupperware floating in a cooler filled with warm water. i put the cooler in the sun, put the cover on it, and checked back in eight hours. yogurt tasted amazing, but was only kefir-y in texture.

our yogurt came out pretty thick!

we spooned it into jars, then submerged the jars in water at w/e temp that's good for inoculation , kept the whole thing in a big picnic thermos

I only heat the milk up to around 120 F, mix in the yogurt (greek gods) and do the dayo treatment to keep it warm. I do use whole milk, don't know if that makes it thicker or not.

what to cook when your kitchen is a thousand degrees? i hate grocery shopping when the weather is like this, i'm a hardy winter meals sorta guy.

Look here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/dining/18mini.html?_r=1&ref=theminimalist

i eat a lot of stovetop grilled vegetables and cheese and bread
also things that stir fry quickly like greens and peppers and zucchini and whatnot
also anything that can be baked quickly in the toaster oven (fish with some mint chutney on it -- yes, mint chutney from a jar)
stuff like that is what i'm eating
and salads + bread

when all else fails, cheese + crackers + spinach salad because i always have those things hanging around

What to Eat when It's so Hot out you can't think straight?

Cold asparagus dipped in peanut sauce
vietnamese summer rolls
beer popsicles