Archive for the 'Food' Category

Mmm…. Turkey. Yum. See that big dude on the right with the snood hanging down?

That would be our thanksgiving dinner this year. I reserved a turkey with a rather awesome local poultry farmer, Paul Hain, earlier in the season. He raised the turkeys in his walnut orchard. Completely organic.

The turkey needed to be picked up at farm on the weekend before thanksgiving and Paul invited us to come down, tour the farm and participate in the turkey harvest, if we wanted.

Ben and I jumped at the chance. To play a role in the harvest of the turkey — to actually know what happens between “bird eating bugs & grain” to “me eating the bird — is something that we both feel is important knowledge.

Personally, I find it hypocritical to both eat a food and be unwilling to acknowledge how said food is produced.

Enough of the PC BS. If you don’t want to read about animal slaughter, see pictures of blood, or know how a turkey goes from walking around to ready to cook, don’t click through to the full story.

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Christine’s parents are in town and for Christmas Eve, we decided to do a traditional Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes dinner.

My mother-in-law Ann is a fantastic cook who has a wide range of italian delicacies mastered. Christine and Ann put together a rough menu. Ann and I then obtained most of the fishes from the farmer’s market, along with a number of necessary accoutrements.

Click on through for the full menu, in order, with pictures and descriptions.

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As many have tweeted and ‘blogged, there was a bit of Cocoa gathering at Apple this week.

It was mighty cool to hang with so many of the folks that consume our products.

Personally, I was ecstatic to see that so many were embracing garbage collection and finding great success therein.

It is really gratifying to see people run with the tools that we [all of Dev Tech] have pushed out. Damn, you folks are creative!

Anyway, a twitservation (twitter-conversation) — more a half-assed argument– with Wil Shipley combined with the awesomeness of the kitchen led me to cook up 33 lbs of smoked pork for lunch today.

I did it just a bit different this time. Namely, I cooked it slightly longer — 23.5 hours, now that I have looked at the actual wall time — and slightly cooler.

I have moved to using a probe thermometer stuck through the gap between halves of the Big Green Egg to monitor temperature. As well, I’m using a large plate setter that coincidentally raises the cooking grid to 1/4″ below the opening of the BGE.

As a result, whatever temperature I set the Stoker too, it will absolutely be the cooking temperature at the interface between fire and food. As a result, this particular pork was cooked at a lower temperature than I have done in the past in that the gradient between cooking grid and top of dome ran as about a 30 degree downward slope (cooking grid @ 230, dome at 200). Previously, the grid probe was typically 1.5″ above grid and, thus, grid temp was probably a good 20 to 30 degrees higher than I intended.

The end result was that the fat and connective tissue was fully rendered, but the cuts of meat still had a slice to them! You could cut it with a fork easily enough, but it still required cutting.

Personally, I found it to be a more pleasing and versatile product than straight up pulled pork.

As an experiment, I halved some apples and placed the halves in a pan under the pork as it cooked with the open face up. No clue what was going to happen.

The end result was a bowl made of apple skin filled with apple stew where the water had been replaced by rendered pork fat.

Universally accepted as delicious. Next time, I’ll make quite a few more and bake them into a pie with little bits of pork fat strewn throughout.

We had an awesome thanksgiving meal over at a friend’s house. Somehow, we ended up with 7 pies for 10 people.

I made two butternut squash pies. Ben brought two walnut pumpkin pies and two closed top apple pies. Finally, Chris P. brought a sweet potato pie.

All delicious!

And that level of excess was the theme for the rest of the meal. We had green beans with fennel, salad, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, cranberries, and probably a couple of other dishes that I can’t remember.

And, of course, there was Turkey. Delicious oven roasted perfectly cooked juicy turkey. With stuffing.

I also brined and rosemary smoked a 20 pound pork leg. Cooked it to an internal of 145 degrees in about 4.5 hours on the BGE> The end result was just flat out stunning.

While in Missouri, My mom taught me a neat trick for stuffing garlic (or other chunky spices) deep into a piece of meat. We made a roast leg of lamb on Dad’s new Big Green Egg and it was delicious.

Upon my return home, I decided to recreate the magic, so to speak.

Pictured at left is the result. Rare, garlic infused, leg of lamb. Smoked over big chunks of rosemary wood, which is evident by the beautiful red smoky color of the end piece on the far left.

I paired it with a bit of mint jelly (of course!) and some baked aspargus that had been tossed with salt, pepper, and sesame oil.

Delicious. Click on through for pics/instructions on jamming the garlic yumminess into the meat.

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Hershey’s — the chocolate company — appears to be in a world of hurt. Sales are down. And as I learned from Steve Dekorte, Hershey just dumped their board of directors, to be replaced by a new board “focused on restoring sales” (well, duh! what BoD wouldn’t be focused on increasing or, in the case of a beleaguered company, restoring sales?!?!?!).

Possibly, but not probably, coincidental, it seems that Hershey’s is a participant in and major funder of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association.

Now, the CMA lobbied — in conjunction with the Grocery Manufacturers Association — to have the FDA change the definition of “chocolate” from “containing 100% cocoa butter” to allowing the cocoa butter to be substituted with “hydrogenated or chemically-modified vegetable fats”.

Kirk Saville, a Hershey’s spokesman, said:

There are high-quality oils available which are equal to or better than cocoa butter in taste, nutrition, texture and function, and are preferred by consumers.

That reads: “Cocoa Butter Expensive. Corn oil cheap. Cheap is good. Customer won’t notice difference.”

I’m not a huge choco-holic, but even I must call Bullshit on this one. I have had what falls into the marketing category of “chocolate flavored” or “chocolaty” or “artificial chocolate essences added”. yuckYuckYuckYUCK! Lightly flavored sand, in the case of drink mixes and many “chocolate like” bars. Choco-like oily skid marks, in the case of the various “flavorings.

Now, I honestly have no idea if the FDA has changed the definition of “chocolate”. But I am not surprised that a company clearly focused on minimizing manufacturing costs with no regards to quality — even through lobbying to change the very definition of “chocolate” — is spiraling the bowl.

(Thank you to Garret Albright for providing links to the latest info regarding FDA’s potential redefinition of Chocolate.)

I finally returned to the farmer’s market Saturday morning after a many month hiatus. Amongst a number of yummy purchases, I ended up with 30 pounds of assorted grapes (at the obscenely low price of $13). It is good to be recognized by the vendors.

Obviously, I’m making tons of raisins. And freezing some. And keeping some around for noshing upon. The quality of these grapes are just amazing. All seedless. Some as big as plums. Ranging from sugary sweet to slightly tart.

While in Missouri, my Mom taught me how to make her style of pie. Extremely simple to do, very subtle nuances required to do it well.

Hmmm… grape pie? A google search reveals lots of recipes for Conchord Grape Pie, but very few plain old grape pies. OK — time to improvise.

Pictured at right is the result. Completely delicious. A decent product for my second pie ever, but not quite perfect; the bottom crust was just slightly underdone and I had to work the crust too much due to improper tools.

The pie is in the style of my Mom’s Cheatin’ Tart. That is, I made a pie crust that was larger than the pie tin, dropped it in the pie tin, added the filling, and then folded over the excess. It was off-center on purpose. Some people like more crust, some less, and thus having an off-center hole allows one to cut to the tastes of the consumer.

The filling is a combination of about 2 cups of raw grapes and 1.5 medium sized pears. I simmered the grapes and pears for about 30 minutes in 1/3rd of a cup of water, with cinnamon and a touch cayenne pepper (not enough to taste, just enough to draw out flavors — thanks, Ben!), until the grapes were soft but not totally mushy.

The key with making a pie crust — in this case, a dead simple flour/sugar/salt/butter crust (I’ll try Chuck’s vodka crust once I nail this one) — is to ensure that the fat (butter or lard — butter in this case) does not get too hot. Thus, one needs to avoid working it too much, which I failed to do. I was using a cuisinart to mix the crust, but the Cuisinart dough blade sucks. It leaves flour untouched all around the outside edge and requires significant mixing after the fact. My mom has a cool little blender top mixer that does a great job.

While doing my pie engineering, I posted a series of observations on Twitter. Much useful feedback was given. For now, I have ordered an OXO Good Grips Dough Blender with Blades; the good OXO dough blender, not the flimsy one.

I also need new pie tins. According to my Mom, black tins make the best pies I can’t argue with her expertise. I do wonder if a is the way to go. I might try making a pie in one of my many cast iron pans.

Update: Mom wrote in the comments with some hints and tips. I also made a new pie using a marble cutting board + keeping the dough cold. More soon.

Fake Steve Jobs was kind enough to make the trek out to Tommy’s for dinner with a number of us after a reading and book signing in San Francisco.

With FSJ, was Bike Helmet Girl — Tiffany Barbarash — who does modern dance and is the subject of some amazing collaborative art.

Julio Bermejo and the Tommy’s Crew took great care of us. I must figure out how to make Tommy’s pan-fried red snapper. Amazing.

Utterly delightly folk. Enjoyed your company. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Namaste.

On Sunday, we headed down to the Claysville Store in Claysville, Missouri for lunch.

Claysville is an old rivertown that was pretty much defunct until recently. The Missouri river is huge and the “river bottoms” it flows through is even larger — miles wide. While decades ago Claysville was a bustling town where cargo was transferred from river to rail, the river shifted such that it flows almost a mile away from the town now.

Out of the outright stupidity that was the death of the railroads in the United States has come one gem, though, and it is breathing new life into river towns like Claysville.

Specifically, the Rails to Trails program and the creation of the Katy Trail. The Katy trail passes right by Claysville and, like many other river towns, a business or two has sprung up to serve the bikers and hikers that pass along the trail.

In the case of Claysville, it is the Claysville Store. Owned and run by a family in the weekends — in their spare time — it has become quite the hot little lunch spot.

On Sunday, they open at 12:30. We showed up a little before noon and drove around the bottoms for a bit. We returned at 12:10 and a couple of customers had arrived. By 12:30 the parking lot — the lawn in front of the restaurant and the shoulder of the road across road (gravel) — was full.

Reservations only for this particular hole in the wall on the weekends. However, they are happy to fit in a handful of hikers/bikers off the trail.

Upon sitting down, they bring tea, lemonade, water, or soda and a big plate of piping hot fresh cooked biscuits. Delicious amazing biscuits that really need no butter, but are definitely even more delectable with drippy buttery goodness.

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Last Wednesday, Dad and I went out and bought Dad a medium Big Green Egg.

Since then, I have cooked (while teaching Dad how to use the egg):

• Lamb chops — basic chops
• Beer butt chicken — rub on the outside, stuffed with spices under the skin. Juicy and delicious.
• London Broil — Salt, pepper, and oil rub. Took it to an internal temp of about 135 and tented it for 10 minutes. End result was perfect medium rare london broil.
• Salmon — covered it with dill, a touch of dried peppers, and thin slices of orange with the skin side heavily salted. Cooked to an internal temp of 135. Excellent.

Next up? We might try a pie or baking some bread. Dad picked up a plate setter which, when reversed, makes an excellent surface for cooking pizzas, breads, and pies.

Of course, we picked up a probe thermometer to go with the BGE. It appears that Taylor has largely moved to using silicon covered probe wires. Awesome! Not only can the probes handle slightly higher heat — though not flare-ups — but they also don’t fray over time.

Without the Stoker, I’m not sure if I’ll attempt pulled pork. But I might do some ribs.