Dum de Dum... tick tock

So far today (1600) – highest gust recorded by the trusty weather station; think we got lucky so far…

(56 mph at 9:36 am)

Back to Life (as we know it)

You know the feeling you (I) have when going to the doctor you sit in the reception area for maybe 20 minutes past your appointment time?  Just kind of marking time sitting and waiting for someone to call you?  Then finally sesame opens and a nurse bellows out “WILLIAM MOODY” and you’re ushered to the exam room and after the stock questions are answered, she leaves with a cheery “He’ll be right in”.  then ensues another 15 minutes (on a good day) before doc appears.  Meanwhile you sit in a state of suspended animation, alone with your thoughts and apprehensions (you are, after all, in a medical facility).

Well, I see parallels between that and the “virus” lifestyle.  You sit, sort of waiting for “something” to happen (or not). But it’s hard to get on with life or interest in any endeavor, like reading for instance.  So you sit waiting for time to pass for…..  anyway, that’s me.  Hopefully you are not similarly afflicted. 

Side dishes

The closing of restaurants appears to be causing devastating consequences for those whose only/largest source of income came from serving, washing, on up through cooking.  So called “relief checks” while helpful, will not make

them whole.  And if this condition drags on much longer, there may not be place to return to.  Take out proceeds will not replace a sit down dinner.

Restaurateur (note: no “n”) Gerard Craft* puts it thus on the cover of “Sauce" a magazine that follows the food trail in St. Louis

*Gerard Craft last year became the first St. Louis-based chef to win the James Beard award for Best Chef: Midwest. His cadre of St Louis venues is large: niche, brasserie, taste, pastaria, porano pasta; all of which receive many accolades for their food.

Another more local instance is the pretty well confirmed rumors that “Smokey Joe’s on the Town” in Leonardtown will go permanently dark, pushed over the brink by the recent COVID-19 shut downs.  The owner (Denise Canter) has been a leader in serving up BBQ around here forever. Used to be in that little place on 235 across from the Immaculate Heart church.  Now a car staging area.  Tough way to make a living, thank goodness there are those that choose to..

We got the meats!

Since housebound, have been messing around with cooking beef (in the Ninja Foodii)  Turns out there is a learning process involved which I have not yet mastered.  I figure if you’re stuck in the house, eating well is the best revenge (as FOJTE is fond of saying – and he does).

Experiments so far have included a strip steak, from a local source of local beef (along with all the essentials of a good cook)

And pre-grilled a bit for me by the source.  Turned out pretty well.  Am having trouble getting a nice sear on the outside and still rare/medium rare on the inside.  As usual, got involved with consumption and forgot to document results.

Another attempt was with a filet obtained from Double R ranch, a partner of Snake River Farms.  Decided to try a technique from Thomas Keller’s Master Class.  He used a rib eye, but figured the filet would be worth a try.. SO, the day before we figured to eat it, I unpackaged it, salted both sides, ties a string around to hold shape, and stuck it in the refrigerator for overnight “dry aging”

When I took it out the next day, it had darkened considerably (it started out rosy pink)

I made some compound butter for it

and got it ready for the "device"

Results much better, I think the aging tightened it up a bit, and only took it out of the refrigerator an hour before cooking, so maybe that helped keeping it rare.  Once again it was plated and consumed without pictures..

So latest (aren’t you glad?) was last night with a locally raised and butchered cow resulting in a nice “(boneless) prime rib”

Well while browsing around the web I found a recipe called “Chef John’s Perfect Prime Rib” (“This is a specific formula for achieving a perfectly pink prime rib cooked somewhere a shade under medium rare”)

What I found intriguing was that it called for being coated with another compound butter recipe (Herbes de Provence – which I had to substitute for) and then put into the oven at 500 ͦ for a specified time, turn off oven, keep the door closed and leave it for 2(!) hours. That meant that cocktail hour was unsullied!

So, I cobbled together the butter mixture

Slathered it on the meat

And stuck in into the 500-degree oven for 11 minutes (weight times five) and at the end of the 11 minutes, it looked like this

Turned the oven off, closed the door and proceeded to cocktails

After two hours, I sliced into it and by golly! Much to my surprise (and relief) was a nice rosy pink

It was plated and served with MFO’s twice baked potatoes, and a glass of Hanna Cab. Happy Easter!

And, it appears that we are (hopefully) out of the woods on the weather..

Be safe, be isolated, protected, observe social distancing, and I guess

DFTV

Kitchen Confidential and a la Cart

Ha! Gotcha Mr. Foodie know it all!  Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of the food service circus knows that it is “à la cartE” Well, read on, oh high and mighty expert!  In this instance it IS spelled correctly!

One of the things that I can more or less manage is cook.  However, since our counter tops are fairly high, it is sometimes (always) hard for me to dice, slice, and prep ingredients from my transfer chair.  Well, as usual MFO to the rescue.   She consulted Carl Taylor at Beautiful Kitchens and Baths, and we communally came up with at design for a carT (no “E”!)  HA!  It is not only functional, but also a very nice piece of furniture.

The container in the upper right is a removable bowl into which the detritus of “stuff” that is generated can be scraped.  The shelves are “roll out” easily opened with one hand. 

The top is top of the line Boos Block (which is tops!), which is kept smooth and nice looking with application of their “Mystery Oil”

After a bit of use (and experience) we are in the process of implementing “Mod One”, which will bring electric to the cart for food processing, blending, using the knife sharpener, etc.  I was envisioning a clunky power strip, but no, the technology is ahead.  There’s this nifty little “pop up” power thingy designed especially for counter tops

And looky that!  USB ports.  Amazing.

Also getting drawer pulls to mount on the ends.  The down side is that it is quite heavy to horse around, so something to hang on to would help, plus they will double as a towel rack.

Sooo, no excuse not to use it.  Our first foray was to try to cook a full size pizza.  So got some dough mix from the web, and assembled stuff

We got some pork sausage from WAG (Willie A Guy) farm in Leonardtown as the only “local” ingredient.  MFO rolled out the dough and sauced it

And sprinkled the (cooked) sausage over it.

All was going well at this point, the (world’s most expensive) Pizza stone was in the oven and things looked good.   The pizza was on the (world’s cheapest) peel, and then things started to go down hill.  In rolling out the dough, it kind of stuck to the (well corn mealed) cart top so a couple of holes appeared.  Easily fixed.  But, when it came time to put the pie on the stone in the oven, it more or less refused to budge from the peel.  So with some tools, braving the 500 degree oven, we managed to coax it onto the stone.   Didn’t do anything for the shape, kind of went amoeba-like.  After ten or so minutes, it looked very nice and bubbly melty, crust appeared quite brown.   Time to extract it from the oven.  

You know those shots you see of some chef sliding a peel effortlessly under a perfectly cooked pizza?  Oh no, not here.  Again with the heat searing the eyebrows, we found the pie pretty much welded to the stone despite what I thought was correct preparation measures.  It laughed at the peel so I basically had to use a spatula like a chisel to pry it from the stone back onto the peel.  By this time, it resembled an amorphous blob covered in sausage; bearing little resemblance to what one would consider a classic pizza shape..  The GOOD NEWS if any, was that it tasted very good.

Take Two, A bit better..

Having some sausage (which was very good, by the way) left over from the Pizza wars, undaunted I thought: Hey!  I could make my own sausage McMuffin for breakfast!   So trotted out the ingredients

Formed the sausage into patties and began to cook them in the (alleged) non-stick pan

I have finally trained myself to not poke and peek at something in a fry pan, so left them alone to caramelize..well, it isn’t my week for “non-stick”; finally, with the aid of a spatula, I flipped them to find they were a tad overdone.

I put them in another (covered) pan with some Boar's Head cheese like material (probably faithful to Mickey Dee’s) and to melt, which it did pretty well

Meanwhile, I toasted the Muffin, and fried the egg in the same pan used for the sausage

And, although kind of out of scale I assembled my “Muffin”.

It was kind of messy and quite thick, but I managed, and it wasn’t bad.  I think a thinner sausage patty next time

So, that’s what a self-quarantined blogger does.  Riveting reading, eh?  But the cart is very nice.

Does this seem familiar??

And there’s not much reason these days to

DFD

One remembers flavor more than dates and times in the memory portion of the brain

Jeff Smith  

Backing the Blog

“Back”  is the operative word..

Been a weird week here on Desperanza Circle; Monday night I was awakened by a sharp pain down in my right leg.  My friendly Advil seemed to calm it down.  Fast forward to the next night.  I couldn’t stand or sit without searing pain, so after a gruesome night…..MFO dialed up 911 (first time ever!).  fairly quickly, the LPVRS folks arrived, and they made me walk down the (7) stairs and out the front door (2 more steps) to the gurney.  Thought these people were highly trained in helping people.  Not at all pleasant.   Anyway, the large vehicle with flashing lights (no siren for you!) got to MedStar and I was installed in a bed.   Lots of “does this hurt?”, poking and prodding followed, along with a CT scan, x-rays, blood work, the whole gamut.  Good news was there were no clots, blockages, stones, swellings, knots, etc., so for lack of a better choice, (thank goodness) they latched on to Sciatica.  Sounded reasonable.  So finally after most of the day we left with a fist full of paper, reference material, prescriptions, exercises, with advice to follow up with our “primary care physician”.   Basically, “good luck pal”.

Never had anything like this before, but I have to admit with the 600mg of Ibuprofen cranking away, I’m doing better.  So much fun.  So efforts on the Blog have been “backed up”

Quick Ninja Review

I was going to post a few pictures with this, but just quickly I have used the Ninja on pork chops, oysters, hamburgers, and it is definitely a learning experience.  Hard to get a nice sear on the chops, oysters just kind of got dried out, burgers needed to be thicker (were well, well, done using instructions).  Was fairly enthused, figuring I could iron out those “kinks” with experience.  So feeling kind of frisky, I thawed a WAG T-Bone as a hopeful test.  The instructions called to use Grill” and set the temp to high (not max).  let it come up to temp and put the steaks on the “grill”.   Well, the first thing that was apparent is that the thing is NOT smokeless, as smoke roiled from the unit (mercifully did not set off the alarms) and MFO opened the door to the garage.  The steak never did brown and although nicely pink in the middle, was a tepid gray on the outside.  In retrospect I find I didn’t coat them with oil as called for in the recipe.  Maybe next time that will help.  So the journey continues!

Random Gallery

Wolf Moon over the Solomons

 

Thar’s gold in them there feeders

I hate these wet days, can’t do a thing with my hair!

Bird of another feather

So I find a way to sit comfortably, and probably won’t

DFD

There’s a place in Seattle that serves wine in Jelly Jars…  Humph

Quote of the day:

The angels in Paradise eat nothing but vermicelli al pomidoro

- Duke of Bovino

HNY and Oyster Battles

Well, the drumbeat for 2020 commences.  In the books is the 2019 holidays sort of symbolically  ended by the traditional good-bye wave of the FOJTE’s. 

They were able to squeeze in a visit during his winter break from school.  This was more of a “working” rather than celebratory Christmas.   They were of immense help, upstairs, downstairs, and outside. 

Upstairs:

The big project was the removal of the carpeting on the loft which was very hard for me to negotiate with my office chair.  Doyle’s was “kind” enough to schedule the work while the “kids” were here (to help replace heavy stuff). So we had Christmas eve day punctuated by a compressor and air gun (“Bam, Bam Bam! what did you say??”) as well as the day after Christmas.  But, it turned out well and now my “upstairs” office is much more accessible. With the help of FOJTE doing much of the carrying

Downstairs:

 he and Ms. FOJTE entered all my wines into Cellar Tracker.  If you’re willing to put in the effort, it’s a great tool for knowing what bottles you have and where they are located…

We did our best to lessen the work load

MFO is quite fond of Viognier, and this bottle from Calera was especially good.

Veteran oenophiles know that usually the back label is full of “wine speak” as in “this lovely wine has hints of pineapple and overlaid with waves of citrus and burnt orange” or some such crap.  Not so, the good folk at Calera… everything you wanted to know and more

Outside:

they replaced some pansies that had formed a salad for deer, unearthing the plants and nibbling them to the nub.

This time we enclosed the “new” ones with Cloches and sprayed with DeerAway

Damn deer!

Anyway, a huge thanks to them for caring for their aging parents.

Back to the foodie stuff

Oyster Wars

After the Civil War, the oyster harvesting industry exploded. In the 1880's, the Chesapeake Bay supplied almost half of the world's supply of oysters. New England fishermen encroached on the Bay after their local oyster beds had been exhausted, which prompted violent clashes with competitors from Maryland and Virginia. Watermen from different counties likewise clashed.

BUT! that’s not the war I’m talking about (thank goodness) although it does involve oysters.  My war is much more local.  It is the war between preparing fried oysters via two separate techniques the “traditional” and the “new wave” opportunity

Traditional technique:

heat oil to 350°

Prepare a batter of your choice (I am still trying to duplicate Cow and Fish) with egg, flour, and in this case (forgive me) Old Bay, bread crumbs and a finishing dusting of Southwest Seasoning

I clean the oysters removing the foot and the stringy parts

And then put them in the hot oil flipping if necessary to get crispy and turn them out onto a plate (and dust with the Southwest Seasoning).

Pluses:  nicely formed, crispy all over, creamy inside

Minuses:  Dealing with the oil, and detritus from the frying, wife complaining about oil on her counter.

The newfangled “air fryer” technique

First, get out the device

For this go round (there were predecessors) I wanted to try two different preparations for the oysters, the C&F version and one from the internet using a pre-made coating from that bastion of southern cooking

I prepped the oysters again, and laid out the two preparations: Cow on the left, and Zatarain’s on the right

Oddly (enough) C&F said only flour coating (no eggs), panko bread crumbs, old bay (in the flour) and a post cooking dusting of Southwest Seasoning (which I ground up in the spice grinder).  Other side was egg wash, coat the oysters with the “Fish Fri”, and go at it.

Previous attempts at using the air technique resulted in too long cooking and so this time I reduced the heat to 350 and set it for 4 minutes.

Dredged the Zatarain’s side

Coated the C&F with flour and made the panko adhere as much as possible

And loaded all into the air fryer

After roughly three minutes we had:

5462

The C&F side (left) looked awful but the Zat side looked better

Tasting revealed the C&F to be less than flavorful still, and the Zat versions were quite “zesty”.

Current evaluation:  To date I think overall the boil in oil technique has supplied the better product. Test kitchen experimentation will continue, however.

Wow, this got long, sorry, thanks for hanging in!

And what the hell, I’ll throw in one of many growing list of rants that I have recently made notes on:

I know this time of year is when resolutions are made to lose weight, get healthy, eat right, and so on.  Strike while the iron is hot.

Peloton blasts you with commercials (please forgive me) featuring ladies who obviously are fit and trim, dressed in tight fitting yoga pants, and many shots taken to seemingly (is it me?) feature the posterior of them.  Never have I seen one showing anybody who is obviously overweight, and really might benefit from an exercise machine.. 

Okay, enough getting back on track, more to come

DFD