GeezerGourmet.com seeks to foster a renewed interest
in home culinary arts among experienced home cooks
The GeezerGourmet (brief bio) caters to
clientele who have life-long experiences in home cooking and now, as empty
nesters and retirees, have the time to renew their love of good food and
its preparation. The Geezer Gourmet assumes
that you routinely cook for one or two people; eat out quite often;
still like to entertain and are experienced at it; have adequately equipped
kitchens; and enjoy life and good health.
If you have some of the above attributes but are not a geezer nor even
approaching pre-geezerhood, thank God for that, press on regardless, and
welcome.
This is not a Website for food phobics or wellness hypochondriacs
Recipes
I've cleaned up and better organized the Food Page Recipes. There
are over a hundred now and it was getting cumbersome. Have
a look.
American Bison Meets Moroccan Tagine
Remember, the
tagine is essentially a Dutch oven for two. Here we have a bison chuck
roast with a 'veggie dump' from the fridge. Potatoes, carrots, onions,
peppers and a couple old mushrooms. Over high heat and in a cast
iron tagine base, sauté the veggies in EVOO to brown them a little,
remove the veggies and then brown the chuck roast, which has been generously
seasoned with S/P. Put the veggies back in, add a tablespoon plus
of herbes de Provence, top off with beef broth, BTB, put the lid on and
simmer for two hours. The bison was fall-apart tender and delicious.
The veggies were well done and steeped in braising liquid and herbes.
A traditional braised dish save for the geography of it all.
Last Night's Repast: Potatoes
Ashley with Ham and Cranberry Sauce
Sautéed Duck Breast with Green
Pepper Sauce and Wild Rice Pilaf
Boneless duck
breast halves are available in high-end markets. They are easy to
prepare and they make a grand occasion whenever served. One side is lean
meat and the other is skin and heavy with fat, so you start with that!
Score the skin and fat in a cross hatch pattern with a sharp knife but
don't cut so deep as to score the duck meat. Salt and pepper both sides
of the duck and set aside.
When all else to be served with the duck is ready, fire a heavy skillet
to medium hot and pop in the duck, skin side down. The fat will begin
to render quickly but there is a lot of it so it will take about five minutes
before it really starts to melt off. Then adjust the heat downward
and simmer for another five minutes. Then lift up the breast and
take a peek. The cross hatch cuts should be getting shallow and the
skin should be turning brown. Continue to simmer and peek another
five to ten minutes until the skin is golden brown and crispy with only
a little fat under it. (Control the heat so it doesn't burn in the process.)
Remove the duck from the pan and carefully pour off the hot oil leaving
enough to cover the bottom of the pan (2 or 3 tablespoons). Refire the
pan to medium. Return the duck to the pan, meat side down, and sauté
until its medium rare (125F). This may take anywhere from two to five minutes
depending how far through the meat cooked on the first go. Remove the duck
to the warm place and let rest before slicing and serving on heated plates.
From start to finish, you have sautéed duck breast in 25 minutes.
Wild Rice Pilaf with Mint, Orange
Zest and Walnuts
As a Minnesota
youth with a dad that hunted, a platter of roasted teal ducks was autumn
fare. It was usually served with wild rice--also a product of Minnesota.
Wild rice comes from a marsh grass and is much harder than rice and therefore
takes far more boiling time. Prepared properly, it's fluffy, nutty
and chewy; undercooked, it's tough and unpleasant; overcooked it falls
apart and is mushy. Start by simmering for 35 minutes. The grains
should start to open by then but still be tooth tough. Go from there
about 7 minutes at a time until the grains are open and plump, yet el dente.
As good as it is, wild rice is too intense and too chewy to eat straight
(it's also too expensive). So it needs some help while holding its
own as the predominant taste. Here is a wild rice pilaf that I have
favored for years, though I can't say it came from Mom. It
has a recipe within it, which I try to avoid, but it's a great dish and
worth the effort.
Yield: About 8 servings
See abbreviations, if needed
• 5 scallions
or spring onions, diced
• 1 carrot,
finely and precisely diced (brunoise)
• ½ stalk
celery, sliced large (it will be discarded)
• 1.5C wild rice
• 4C chicken broth
• 2C water
• ½T RWV
• 2T light EVOO
• ¼C chopped fresh parsley
• ¼C chopped fresh mint leaves
• 2 oranges
zest
• ½C chopped walnuts or
pecans
• S/P
• ½C basmati rice (or other long
grain rice) prepared as basmati rice pilaf
1. Place wild rice in a large fine strainer and wash under cold
running water until
water is clear
2. BTB broth and water, RWV, wild rice, scallions, carrot, celery
and pepper. Simmer covered until
rice is plump, intact and tender, about 40-50
minutes, Taste as you go the last ten minutes
3. Prepare Basmati rice pilaf and set aside
4. Drain wild rice and remove celery parts.
5. Combine the rices in a bowl w/ EVOO and add the remaining
ingredients. Taste.
Add salt, toss and adjust seasoning
6. Serve warm or ambient.
Family Dinner
Simple: Breaded catfish
in peanut oil, TLW's zucchini medley and chips.
New Smoker: Update
We're cooking for the Pleasant Grove Church May Festival again this
year. Nothing fancy just hot dogs, hamburgers and BBQ. Hardly
worth wearing a chef's jacket for this event, but we've done it for about
15 years, so . . .
I decided that I would liven things up by smoking a pork shoulder for
the event. Further down on this page are the results of our first effort
with the Weber Bullet: a pork shoulder that looked great but was
really fat. I paid $1.95 a pound at the supermarket for a 6 pound shoulder
that yielded less than 2 pounds of barely edible meat. It was awful.
TLW always says that Mr. Arbuckle was right: "you get what you
pay for." My experience is otherwise with most food products described
as organic. The only exception, to date, is meat. So this time I
bought a well husbanded boneless pork shoulder from our local Organic Butcher.
This shoulder, from a farm in Pennsylvania, came in at 8.5 pounds and went
for $6.00 a pound!
I brought the hunk home and vacuum-marinated it overnight in Scott's
Barbecue Sauce, as before. I then got up early the next morning and
started the smoke at 0730. 13.5 hours later, the shoulder's temp
hit 200F as I took it off to cool. It shredded effortlessly and has
great color and a nice smoke ring. Above all, the meat is as lean,
moist and tasty as this cut can get. Yield? 4.2 pounds. I threw
away at most a half pound as too fat-ladened.
Bargain pull pork sandwiches coming up this Saturday. Meat and
charcoal: $65. . . .yet sandwiches will go for $2.50 each.
Maybe Mr. Arbuckle will show up.
Update: Go they went! We sold out the pulled pork half way
through the event.
Notes:
The Organic Butcher has an informative Web site at: theorganicbutcher.com.
The Weber Bullet, at least at our deck, needs to be more mobile. So
a trip to the hardware store and we have . . .
Authentic and Convenient
I recall posting
earlier about Indian dishes in bags, but Costco had them again and this
time in lots of flavors. Reps from the ADF Food Company were setting up
a display and I grabbed a whole box of them but was stopped by the rep
who said, "wait there is only one flavor in each box. you need to
select from the four flavors we offer, today." So I did that, grabbing
two of each. Some guy next to me said, "I don't know if I even want
one of these and you're grabbing two of each. Are they any good?
What do you do with them? Are you a vegetarian?"
I replied that: they are very good, that I am an untroubled carnivore
and that I most often use them as a sauce under grilled chicken or pork
tenderloin, or in the tagine or for lunch
over toasted artisan bread. The flavors include veggies with chickpeas
in tomato sauce (shown in photo with pork medallions), veggies with tomato,
lentils in butter sauce, with spinach curry and cheese and with potatoes
and peas--all well seasoned. Look for them, they're quick and yummy.
They have a Web site: ADF-foods.com.
A Surprise James Beard Nominated
Book
I was surprised
to see this book on the JB Cookbook award nom's for this year. There
are a lot of Weber-based grill books out there. This one is by Jamie
Purviance and is published by Sunset Books, both good names. At first
glance, it looks like a good basic grilling 101 book. It has great
photos and layout, as one would expect from Sunset editors. It does
not have much on the Weber Bullet but what is has is good. It has
so many rubs, marinades and sauce recipes that it might be worth the price
just for those.
I read through this book and found it more substantive than at first
appearance. Yes, it covers basic grilling for meats, fish and veggies.
But along the way, Purviance presents the reader with culinary how-to tutorials
that border on the comprehensive. This ain't Jacques Pepin's La
Technique, but thorough enough that the editors made a index
of techniques--there must be 400 of them, most with very useful photos!
Not just how to truss a boneless roast, but how to puree
garlic and how to spatchcock a chicken.
Recipes too go beyond the basics--his bacon wrapped turkey breasts almost
makes me want to buy the tasteless things and give them another go.
Sauces = 48; rubs = 20 and marinades = 27. Wow.
If your grill book is a third your age, toss it and start anew with
this one, where you will learn a thing or two and have recipes that are
politically correct with lower salt and fat content. This book is a must
gift to your son in law who char burns most everything and for the
grandchild who aspires to conquer the great American cook-out.
New Smoker
TLW
got me a birthday present that has been on the wish list for years.
A smoker. I chose Weber's Smokey Mountain Cooker (aka The Weber Bullet)
because it's only a smoker (I don't need two grills), it's a Weber product,
it's fairly compact and it's tried and true with a big following of Internet
devotees.
Finally found the time to try out the The Weber smoker. I got a pork
blade shoulder from Safeway, marinated it with Scott's
Barbecue Sauce (red hot vinegar-based) in a vacuum bag for a day and
started up the bullet for a ten hour smoke. Lighting the charcoal
and placing in some hickory wood and adjusting the resultant heat to 225F
and keeping it was there was straightforward. We brushed the roast with
a tomato-based barbecue sauce at the start and again mid-way through.
So here we have:

A 7 pound pork butt yielded only 2.25 pounds of shredded pork
ready for tacos or pulled pork sandwiches. But I have a problem with
this meat. It's fat. I didn't pull the roast apart until the
following morning when the meat was cold, so the fat was more clearly apparent
than if the roast was pulled hot and served a
la minute.
I am beginning to gain insight as to why every smoker chef to publish
a cookbook and put his picture on it appears, shall we say, well rounded.
First, one needs fortification during the arduous ten hour smoking process--perhaps
a beer an hour. Second, the product has a high fat content.
Frankly, we're not sure we're going to eat this stuff . . .
FireWire--Flexible Skewer
While
shopping for a smoker, we came across some grilling skewers made of
3/32" stainless steel pre-formed cable. They have a loop on one end and
a fixed probe on the other. With meat and veggies strung on the cable,
the loaded cable can be dangled, loop-side-down, and formed to fit onto
the grill any which way that works best, straight out, serpentine or circled--with
the probe end extended over the edge of the grill grate, if you wish. Since
stainless steel is non-reactive, raw product, skewer and all, can be marinated
if you are using only one marinade for both veggies and meat (not to my
liking). They are really long--30 inches! Sufficient to load enough food
for two on each skewer. Manufactured by Inno-Labs (firewiregrilling.com),
the FireWire won a kitchen accessory award last year. Big Green Egg vendors
have them and others too. Preformed cable is expensive--the skewers are
$20 the pair. But neato!
Chef's Privilege
I've spent a week deciding if I should get into Sous Vide. Sous
Vide cooking involves vacuum sealing food
in
airtight pouches, then submerging them in a water bath at precisely controlled
temperatures well below the boiling point for a relatively long period
of time--30 minutes (fish) to 72 hours (tough meats). This "under vacuum"
water oven technique has been evolving in labs and professional kitchens
since the mid 70's. Its advantages are that the heat is low and precise
and precludes overcooking; the pouches are packed with food and spices
to produce a finished product; textures are impressive as meats and
veggies are cooked uniformly and to perfection; food in pouches are
stable, can be prepared hours or days ahead and then served a
la minute. Sous vide products are finding there way into stores
everywhere as pouched sauces, prepared veggies and meats. Costco,
for example, carries an excellent lamb shank, a veal osso buco and a line
of Indian vegetarian sauces that I wrote about earlier. Fine dinning restaurants
are using sous vide prepared off and on site to the chef's specifications.
Culinary literature abounds with name chef cookbooks touting the technique
and their skilled use of it.
Now, a compact home water oven is on the market called the SousVide
Supreme. It goes for $450. Also needed is a vacuum sealer,
like the one I've used for many years, which runs another $150 to $250,
plus the pouch material at 50 cents a running foot. It would be fun to
have this thing and prep a stack of steaks to a perfect 125F ready to be
grill marked and served; to buy veggies in large quantities and sous
vide them and then freeze 'em; to toss in a seasoned Boston Butt
and forget it for a couple of days and have it emerge as ready to serve
pulled pork.
On the other hand, sous vide is essentially a slow cooker. A smart
crock pot with water in it. For us geezers who no longer leave home
for work at 0700 to return 10 hours later, planned and slow cooking methods
have lost their time saving attractiveness. (We haven't used our crock
pot or an oven timer in years.) Which only leaves the culinary value of
sous vide, which is substantial and attractive enough to the seasoned home
cook that I'm writing about it. Sur la Table carries the SousVide Supreme
and reportedly sold out their initial buy of a thousand units in two months.
I'm going to pass.
In this Momofuku Era, Kimchi is Flying
Off the Market Shelves
David
Chang, chef/author of the best selling cookbook, Momofuku
(see below), likes kimchi, and so too his readers. Well . . ., the
Koreans have been serving it most meals since the 16th century. Kimchi
is combination of cabbage, other veggies and bold seasonings pickled in
vinegar and then fermented to produce a pungent spicy hot condiment.
It serves well also as the supporting ingredient to wok-prepared or stir
fried meat and fish dishes. It likes rice. Recipes for the stuff
abound: "winter" kimchi is hot, "summer" kimchi is more fresh and
light. In the West, it comes in glass jars and is often make with
napa cabbage and spicy but not flaming hot peppers, ginger and garlic.
It keeps forever in the fridge.
So, while reading and thoroughly enjoying Momofuku, TLW
found a kimchi and pork recipe there and also in the latest issue of Fine
Cooking, (they read the book too). "Let's have a couple over and
make this in the wok fired on the Blue Star," said she. Here we have
the results inspired by the book and magazine recipes. This dish
is best prepared a la minute with guests watching
the show. Have courage! Do it. It takes about five minutes, if you
have your mise en place.
Wok Stirred Pork and Kimchi
For four
(See abbreviations, if needed)
1 pork tenderloin,
cut in quarter inch slices and then into half inch strips
2 T soy
sauce
4 T grapeseed oil or peanut oil
8 oz fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed
and hand-brokened into quarters
8 scallions cut
in 1.5 inch lengths, white and green
16 broccoli, small flowerettes
(not shown in photo--after thought)
1 T garlic,
pureed
3.5 C kimchi, drained and coarsely chopped
4 T mirin (sweetened sake) or white
wine and some sugar
1/2 t sesame oil (for aoma--not taste)
1/4 C beef or chicken broth
2 T white and black sesame seeds,
toasted
1. Prep pork, toss with a tablespoon of soy sauce and set aside
2. Prep mushrooms and veggies and have them lined up ready to
pop into the wok
3. Add 2 T of oil to the wok, heat gently and swirl carefully
up the sides
4. Heat the oil to shiny hot and then add the marinated pork
(don't splash)
5. When pork strips break free of the bottom, stir or toss until
pork is whitened but still rare
6. Scoop out the pork and hold in a clean container (not the
one used to marinate)
7. Add 2 more tablespoons of oil and when very hot, add the scallions,
mushroom, garlic and broccoli,
in that order--about three minutes for this
step
8. Add the kimchi, another tablespoon of soy sauce, a few drops
of sesame oil and toss or stir
9. At this point, if the whole mess looks too dry (no sauce for
the rice), add some broth and BTB
10. Serve immediately in heated bowls over rice with maybe a
side of
Asian Cucumbers
11. Garnish with the toasted sesame seeds
How to Peel a Pineapple and Not Waste
so Much of it

Pineapples are usually peeled by slicing off the skin with a deep cut
that removes the skin and all the eyes. OK, its quick but a layer
of edible pineapple is tossed out with the skin. A better method
is to slice off the skin with a shallow cut, leaving most of the eyes.

Notice that the eyes have a pattern to them that can be lined up to
cut out, 3 or 4 at a time, with a sharp paring knife making v-shaped trench
cuts.
This method leaves more pineapple on the pineapple.

Then quarter the fruit, trim off the hard part, dice and place in containers
to cool. A $4.75 pineapple yields two nice containers of chunks that
go for $4.50 each at the market.
Waste not, want not . . .
How to Puree Garlic with your Chef's
Knife (revisited)
One of the more popular pages on this Web site, year after year, concerns
pureeing garlic with your knife. It was posted quite sometime ago
without photos, so I've added some to make the process more understandable--hopefully.
Read the whole thing here
A Brief Salad Amusement
For a Christmas
Day dinner salad we wanted something light and amusing, since the entree
was Osso Buco Milanaise with Butternut
Squash Soup and mashed potatoes and parsnips--all pretty heavy
stuff. So here we have fresh tender watercress simply dressed with
sugared rice wine vinegar. On top of that is one small just-sauteedcrab
cake, piped with a spicy hot raspberry wasabi mustard dressing.
Nice contrasts here: bitter watercress, sweet rice vinegar, seasoned
crab cake and spicy hot creamy dressing.
I always use ring molds to shape crab cakes. You will find 80mm
and 60mm stainless steel rings molds in good kitchen supply stores.
Both sizes too big for our purposes here. So at the hardware store,
buy a length of PVC pipe with an ID of 40mm. Take it home and cut
it into rings about an inch high. One pound of crab meat prepared
as crab cakes yields four 80's or six 60's or twelve 40's.
Tilapia Stuffed With Crabmeat
We
had a little canned crabmeat left over from Thanksgiving and an unfinished
container of tabbouleh, both of which we got at Costco. Though vacuum
sealed, the crabmeat had to be used soon. Tabbouleh is a tasty low
fat Middle Eastern spread made with bulgur wheat and finely diced tomato,
onion, cilantro, mint and lemon in EVOO. It goes great at room temperature
on taco chips, crackers or bread points. So what to do?
Make a fish dish.
Tilapia is a major food fish, farm raised. It is fine textured and low
fat, a bit more so than flounder. Cheaper too. So we seasoned the
crabmeat with a few ingredients from our crab
cake recipe and layered it onto one tilapia fillet and topped it with
another and tied them off, as shown. The fillets were seasoned with S/P
and EVOO. I then dumped the tabbouleh into a buttered dish, plopped
the tied fish fillets on top and baked the whole mess in a 400F oven for
about 30 minutes. The fillets were 3 inches thick stuffed and
tied. So, using the ten minutes an inch rule, 30 minutes was right
on.
How'd it come out? The tabbouleh got a little too crispy in the
baking process and lost the individual tastes present when served uncooked.
But it was OK. The crabmeat did not come through, as distinct from the
talapia, as I had hoped. Recipes abound for crab stuffed sole with
the crabmeat usually fattened up with cream or mayo, which I didn't do.
Since the cost of the lump crabmeat is greater than fish, there are better
uses for it. Why not do crab cakes one day and fillet of tender sweet fish
the next?
But we're talking leftovers here. We agreed that it was a nice
dish and an interesting use of tabbouleh, but we would not brag about it
at the bazaar in Marrakash.
This is a Cook's Cookbook
Would
you believe that over 3200 cookbooks will be published this year, up from
2800 last year? If there is any hidden meaning in that, it escapes
me (recession, home vs restaurant, etc...., bah). One of these cookbooks--forthcoming--looks
promising.
A young fellow named David Chang is a "hot chef" these days according
to the foodie media. An early review of his forthcoming cookbook caught
my attention because a) he's grounded in French technique, b) combines
Asian with American, c) likes pork, d) hasn't dumbed down his recipes for
a book contract and e) is a restaurant chef versed in that world's grueling
work and not a TV star where line cooks do the mise off camera.
(His penchant for profanity might save him from TV fame.)
He's cooked in Japan and in NYC where he opened his first restaurant,
Momofuku Noodle Bar. Since, Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Momofuku Ko both
high end restaurants have opened, with rave reviews. Chang and his
cookbook, of course named Momofuku, got a nice
enough review in the Wall Street Journal to prompt me to order it.
It's due out next week.
So wait, there's more...
------------------------------------------
Got the book today, here's the photo (new camera: Canon G-11). At second
glance: well edited, good photography on coffee table grade paper,
heavy on commentary regarding the art of cooking and the trauma of making
it pay, with recipes at the margin--all very well written and nicely presented.
Awful introduction. Contents are organized by Chang's restaurants:
Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar and Ko.
This is a French Laundry type cookbook that takes the reader into the
head of another innovative chef and his crew. In the book at
least, these concepts drive Chang:
-
"Serve food with integrity at an affordable price. That is, undersell,
over deliver.
-
...do not subscribe to the idea that there's one set of blueprints that
everyone should follow.
-
. . . you take it, cook it, make it delicious . . . elevate it, honor it,
lavish it with care and attention.
-
when you start to cook on autopilot, when you stop paying attention to
details--not to mention big things like seasoning--no amount of press will
make up for it. What is the point of cooking at all if you're not gonna
do it right?"
More than enough recipes here, and a lot of them have recipes inside of
recipes or demand a commitment to Asian ingredients. As I read, I have
a habit of pencil-checking recipes in cookbooks that are of interest to
me, in theory or practice. Quite a few got a check--simple things, innovative
ideas or old war horses cooked differently: ginger scallion sauce
and scallion infused oil, the whole section on pickling, maple syrup and
yogurt, his fried chicken and pan-roasted rib eye, his bánh mì
sandwich, fingerling potato chips and shaved frozen foie gras.
This cookbook is an important addition to the literature and it's a
fun read.
PS: A reader asked where "Momofuku" came from? Chang says
that one of the most important events in the history of food was the invention
of instant ramen by "Momofuku Ando." Best read the book for the origins
of Ssäm and Ko.
A New Cookie Paradigm?
When is a cookie done?
In school we were instructed to look
for a trace of browning around the edge of the cookie. Corriher
says the same thing. Reichl says 'until
golden.' I'm now convinced that waiting for evidence of browning
results in an over baked cookie: one that dries when cooled and gets
hard when stored. The 'until golden' works better for white sugar
than brown sugar'd cookies. The conundrum is compounded in a convection
oven, which shortens baking time by 20%, for sure, and maybe more.
Which also means that the time to take out the cookies comes sooner and
passes faster.
So . . .
I just baked a batch of Pantry
Cookies and a batch of my new Nut, Coconut
and Health Bar Cookies. I took them out when they appeared
set. That is, when they were fully shaped, with a dry surface
top and with edges sharply defined and not clinging to the silicone pad.
No evidence of browning. The result: moist, chewy cookies!
This is heavy...but a change is required
on all my cookie recipes. Got to do it.
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