Tag Recipes

Saving SPAM

Michael 3 Comments

Some time ago in the not too terribly distant past but distant enough that a gentle reminder wouldn’t be out of the question, I posted an entry that began with a one-sided discussion about spam e-mail although that wasn’t the focus of the post. Likewise, this one will start with spam – emails and others.

At least once a day I check the spam email folder and more days than not I find an email in there that is definitely not spam. I often wonder how they determine what can and can’t be let through when I also, and usually on the same days, wonder how they determined an email that got to my inbox was let through. What was it about my mechanic’s email reminding me to bring my car in for service that made it suspicious enough to be shuttled into the Junk folder yet the one to me from me declaring I could “lose 61 pounds in 4 weeks” seemed perfectly normal and allowed admittance to the safety of the Inbox? (And why 61 pounds? Did 60 sound too unbelievable?) But I didn’t start this to discuss what got into the Junk folder. But while I’m here . . .

2021-06-23Is it just the email clients I use, and there are 4 of them (the laptop, desktop, tablet, and phone all use different applications to access my email), or does everybody have multiple junk and spam folders to hold undesirable dispatches? Mine has Junk, Junk, Spam, sometimes Spambox, and sometimes Junk Mail, and always at least three of them. How do they decide? And who are they anyway?

Speaking of They, who are they who decides what gets to be called a virus. My anti-virus program pops up at least once a day to remind me of additional services it can provide – for an additional fee. If it was a phone call it would be routed to the “Silenced” folder as a possible spam call by the phone’s version of a Junk folder. (And speaking of viruses, even though we weren’t really, why is virus bad when you’re talking about computers but viral is good? Who makes this stuff up?) Naturally the same thing happens with the phone’s spam filter as the email. Perfectly innocent calls like the automated reminder from the doctor’s office gets tagged as possible spam and silenced while three different people expressing their concern that my car warranty has expired are let through. At least the phone and email “blockers” don’t cost me an annual fee to be wrong.

SpamBut do you want to know what really annoys me about all this? Spam. It’s rendered SPAM as an undesirable. SPAM as in Special Processed American Meat by the Hormel Corporation. Since 1937, SPAM has had its haters too but more lovers for sure. By the way, SPAM does not stand for Special Processed American Meat. That was a sobriquet given it during WWII by non-American troops treated to the canned delicacy. SPAM is actually a portmanteau of Spiced Ham although it is available in a variety of flavors, even (ugh) pumpkin spice.

There have been a billion recipes written for SPAM and a million cookbooks to hold them. (Too hyperbolic? Well, there are a lot!) There is even an annual SPAM cooking competition. At least there was until the pandemic forced its cancellation last year. The point is SPAM is an unexpectedly wonderful American treasure. Naturally we should confuse it with spam, a expectedly awful pile of junk.

Canned ChickenIt’s a good thing there aren’t any filters in the canned meat section of the supermarket. If there were, we’d be reduced to eating . . .

. . . canned whole chicken?

Now that’s some spam!

Beware the Raptor! (And the Garlic)

Michael 3 Comments

Happy National Garlic Day. The National sort of suggests USA origins but if you call one of the other countries that populate our planet home, feel free to celebrate the stinking rose along with us.

I’m not sure why somebody picked the middle of April to celebrate garlic. Apparently neither do the organizers of the many garlic themed festivals, picking instead mid-summer for the every July Gilroy Garlic festival in Gilroy California where 140% of the world’s garlic crop is grown and smells like it, or mid-winter for the every February Delray Beach Garlic Fest in Delray Beach Florida where little garlic is grown outside of backyard gardens and it smells sort of like Florida.

While the uncertainty of when to celebrate garlic may lead to some organizational questions, at least garlic is something real. You can see it, taste it and smell it (sometimes far longer than you expected), and it is a part of modern life. Unlike, say, the velociraptor.

Yesterday was National Velociraptor Awareness Day. Again, there’s that “National” designation suggesting not all Americans are consumed with political-oriented lunacy and can go out on limbs of their own making. I guess anybody can celebrate anything, but do we really need to be “aware” of an animal that hasn’t taken a breath for roughly 70,000,000 years? (Spelled out that would be seventy million years.) If one felt the prehistoric bird has been slighted in film and fiction, maybe a Velociraptor Appreciation Day is called for. But awareness? I don’t think I need to be as aware of what a velociraptor might do to me or my environs as perhaps I should be of a cavalier attitude to continuing masking and social distancing. Now that’s something to be aware of. But I digress.

If you have an inordinate amount of free time (like I clearly do), you can search National Velociraptor Day and find no end of information about the apparently feathery dinosaur including its average height, weight, wingspan, stance, fight speed, running speed, habitat, and diet. There is a huge number of “facts” about this thing that disappeared over 69.5 million years before man showed up. But then the world is also gaga over the paleodiet and I don’t think anybody was writing cookbooks back then and that was a lot more recently than velociraptors flew over the earth. (Personally, given that the world was so waterlogged then, I think the typical paleodiet was likely lizards, snails, and little amphibians (perhaps as something akin to frog legs) and more likely resembled a high end (aka snooty) French restaurant.) But boy do I digress.

Although none of the National Velociraptor Awareness Day sites mention how its predator enjoyed this early bird at mealtime, there are several that note the velociraptor du jour did not resemble the flying dinosaur depicted in most movies featuring return to life prehistoric creatures, instead they more likely looked like big chickens. So go out on your own limb and celebrate both National Velociraptor Day (a day late) and National Garlic Day (right on time) with a robust chicken dinner smothered in garlic, perhaps the famous Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic recipe. Stick that in your search engine and you’ll come up with about 2-1/4 million results which is only about 250,000 less than if you searched for velociraptors. Sigh.

garlic

More is Less

Michael 2 Comments

It is said everybody has a number. That might be a number of dollars to commit an otherwise distasteful physical act, or a number of times the car stalls before you break down and finance a new one, or perhaps the number of proposals before you finally say yes. For me it was the number of ways to prepare avocado. And the number is 73.

Seventy-three ways to use an avocado was the subject line on the email. A trusted food magazine’s daily email with a new recipe, a reasonably thought out kitchen hack, and some cutesy new way to do something you’d not previously considered like perhaps how to juice concord grapes at home, had with that one subject crossed the line into click bait. And I wasn’t biting.

It was one thing to occasionally sneak in 5 ways to use a watermelon or six flavors to make your coffee. I’d gladly scroll my way through a half dozen ways to spice up my morning caffeine dose. But everybody knows there are only three things you can do with an avocado – chunk into a summer salad, spread onto a wrap, or turn into guacamole. Anything else is a pathetic attempt to create relevance or justify buying a Tesla. See avocado oil.

CensoredWhile we’re talking about Facebook (I did say click bait), did you hear about the spat going on between Dutch tourism and the harbinger of all things questionable? Apparently the Visit Flanders tourist bureau would like to advertise their museums on the site but because the video they prepared includes shots of paintings by Rubens, the site usually not known for decorum refuses to allow the video to post because Rubens painted, er, nude models. It seems the number for Facebook is 1/4, as in the number of inches wide the shoestring covering the nipple of a spring breaker frolicking on the beach must be to make the post “decent.”

Another number that seems to be is 29. As in dollars spent to be free. Once Wayfair was the only site that blatantly barked “the shipping is free” in their ads but it wasn’t unless you spent a minimum amount, theirs being $50. Not to be outdone, etailer after etailer is including free shipping as one of the perks of shopping with them. It just doesn’t happen to be completely free. Shipping charges still show up at checkout sometimes with a little note saying how much more you have to buy in order to qualify for free shipping. Usually that number is 29 less whatever you have already committed to your purchase. Completely free. At least they tell you how much free costs, unlike the infomercial people who will double your order for free. Just pay a separate fee.

So, what’s your number?

Why We Eat

Michael 8 Comments

It’s the time of year that posts are flying all over the Internet with main dish recipes and cookie recipes and appetizers that don’t require cooking recipes and make ahead dessert recipes and the world’s best ever side dishes recipes. I gain weight every day just opening my tablet.

Seriously, I am gaining weight every day. I know because I weigh myself every day. There might be a little vanity in there. After years of avoiding scales because my weight was approaching numbers usually reserved for poor credit scores it’s refreshing to step on a scale and see a number more closely associated with IQ test scores. (Not my IQ but I’m ok with that. The world needs average people too.) Anyway, I get on the scale every morning and I see a number just a little higher than the day before. Over the last week I’d say a couple of pounds higher.* And I know why.

It’s not because of all the cookie pictures Facebook. Although they certainly aren’t helping. I would go through this unexplained weight gain when I was working, specifically anytime I was about to go out on a business trip.

Regular readers with good memories and occasional readers who visited just the right posts know that back in a different day when I was working I worked for a national health care company. An extra duty as assigned was visiting other facilities to do operational reviews. Unlike McDonald’s or Wendy’s which have the same food from coast to coast, our hospitals did not share that familiarity. There were some pretty bad cafeterias in those places. So I think subconsciously when I knew I was going away I’d eat a lot. Why ever it was, I knew that whenever I was going somewhere I was going at least two pounds heavier than the week before.

So, if we are to believe that a) there are no coincidences, b) the past is a harbinger of the future, and c) I historically always use three examples, I am gaining that weight for a reason and it has nothing to do with water weight gain and/or Christmas cookies in the kitchen. I’m going on a trip! Now since I haven’t planned anything on my own and since neither my bank balance nor my credit score is sufficient to finance a trip much farther than 12 to 15 miles down the road**, somebody is giving me a vacation for Christmas!***

Boy I hope it’s somewhere where sun block is recommended.

*For those of you of the metric persuasion that “couple of pounds” would be about a kilogram if you subscribe that a pound is 2.2kg or 1kg=0.454lb. I used to know why the abbreviation for pound is “lb.” but I don’t remember right now and it’s not all that important anyway. Probably more important is if you are somewhere that requires me clarifying the relationship between pounds and kilograms, do you also require clarification of the American credit score (or debt score as some would insist)? If you do, well, there is no reasonable explanation but the lowest FICO score possible is 300. In the VantageScore system the lowest score is 501. See. No sense at all. Just like the lowest SAT score is 400 but the lowest PSAT is 320. Oh. What’s SAT? This is going to take another post. My weight approached the lowest FICO score, not the VantageScore.

**19 to 24 kilometers (We really need to universalize weights and measures.)

***Holiday (We really need to universalize English too.)

Strike Up the Grill

Michael 8 Comments

I saw an article on one of my magazines’ weekly emails that there are only 3 weeks left to grilling season. Obviously that’s a bit of marketing hype for this month’s hard copy edition’s cover story. Three weeks from now is just a week into September and for here, and I would think most of the U. S. except perhaps some ZIP codes in Maine and Alaska, there’s a lot of good grilling weeks well beyond that. For some parts, it never stops being grilling time. (Sometimes I think this country is just too big for its own good which messes with magazine headline writers’ best intentions.) Now as far as I’m concerned, and being just north of the 40th parallel and having a covered patio, I’ll grill pretty deep into winter as long as the grill isn’t frozen shut. When we get those deep freezes and harsh winds that facilitate snow accumulating under the patio cover, I’ll put away the grill spatula.

WintergrillI think the point they wanted to make with that 3 week warning is that Labor Day is only 3 weeks away. Pools will close, fall decorations will come out of garages, wardrobes will be swapped for darker colors, and pumpkin spice everything will greet us at the entrance to every store, even Pep Boys.

I think the point that they are actually making is that just like the stores that already have their pumpkin spice everythings starting to sneak close to the entrances, the magaziners enjoy rushing the seasons. If they didn’t publish their fall cooking guides, turning leaf travel guides, or autumn splendor festivals guides by July they think some other magaziner (or horrors! an e-ziner) will beat them to it and there will go their credibility with the masses. With that there goes their summer advertising revenue projections hopefully earned from the ads for fall fashions and vacations by the sellers certain that you’ll book you flight home for Thanksgiving weekend with somebody who advertised cheap winter holiday fares in June. Arrrggghhh!!!

What I was hoping I’d find in my inbox would be a recipe on how to use up all those summer vegetables perhaps in a grilled medley since we apparently have 3 weeks of grilling season left. Unfortunately, all I found were some interesting ways to use those soon to be ripe pumpkins. I guess all the zucchini recipes were in the April editions.

 

Half-Baked

Michael 2 Comments

I baked cookies yesterday. Hold your applause. They were just oatmeal cookies. Oatmeal cookies are like the Blue Apron of the baking world. No thought required. The most difficult step is finding the measuring cups.

You all already know I enjoy my time in the kitchen but it’s almost always cooking. Baking is a whole different animal. It requires measuring stuff, preheating the oven, using the timer even. As a person who spent his whole career in a regimented, scientific occupation you’d think the most comfortable thing I could do in the kitchen is fall into the baking regimen. Nope, I prefer the loosey-goosey world of cooking.

Maybe that’s because I enjoy the freedom of modifying the dish I’m working on based on what’s fresh, what’s handy, what’s tasting good. Maybe it’s because most of the dishes I started out cooking were family recipes which changed as the family moved from Italy to America and ingredients changed based on what was available. Or maybe it was because some of those recipes were written in a combination of Italian and English and we weren’t always sure what was supposed to go into that pot so we improvised.

Or maybe that’s because it’s just the way I’m wired.

While I was deciding if I wanted to weigh or measure my dry ingredients I did some thinking about just that. Does our personality reflect our cooking style – and shouldn’t it also compare to our chosen lifestyle? Here’s what I came up with.  . . .  Maybe.

Take me for the first example. Even though I decided on keeping the wolves from my door in the highly regulated, policed, and exacting world of health care I tend to keep most of the rest of my life in the “let’s see what’s up” end of the spectrum. Back in the day when I actually made plans my idea of making plans (unless it involved non-refundable air fare), was “hey I heard about blah-blah-blah on the radio this morning, let’s go!” Thus my life in the kitchen is more a matter of “hmm, I wonder what’s in the refrigerator that hasn’t changed color yet, let’s eat!” And 9,999 times out of 10,000 it will be good.

Consider the ex. I’ll not be bad-mouthing anybody here. I’m just using her as an example. Her idea of spontaneous was using only two sources of information for research on a place, restaurant, movie, or wall-covering. But boy could she bake. Pies, cakes, breads, cookies. If it involved a rolling pin (no, I won’t go there), she had it mastered.

Now, let’s look at the daughter. The mix of the aforementioned Thing One and Thing Two. On one hand she’s creative enough to have selected one of the most imaginative fields you can imagine to make a living at and is making a living at it. On the other, she’s making a living at it by working for herself and manages to handle all the requirements of self-employment successfully enough to still make a living at it. Her style in the kitchen? She can bake a mall-worthy cinnamon roll in the morning and finesse her way through a dinner for four with whatever might be in the pantry after not shopping for two weeks in the evening.  Living at both poles and baking and cooking with aplomb.

I guess that’s make her sort of a hybrid.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Pump(kin) Up Those Leftovers

Michael Leave a comment

Welcome to a special edition of the RRSB.

If you did it right you should be sitting on oodles of leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner. Some say that the leftovers are the best part of the meal. But there’s no reason to repeat exactly the same dinner over and over this weekend.  Here are two ways to add some spice – pumpkin pie spice – to your leftovers.

Nothing is better than a turkey sandwich Friday afternoon. Hot turkey with stuffing and gravy between two spongy pieces of store bought white bread. That’s lunch! But you can make a satisfying lunch with a cold turkey sandwich also. Add some pumpkin soup. You can make this soup literally in the time it would take you to make a hot turkey sandwich.

Chopped up a small onion and cook it in butter, vegetable, or olive oil until just translucent in a 2 or 3 quart saucepan. Add enough flour to make a roux (1 to 1 flour to fat) and let it cook out for about 5 minutes. Whisk in 3 cups of chicken stock and bring to a boil. Add one can of pureed pumpkin and bring the whole thing back to a simmer and keep it there for 10 minutes. Ladle into bowls, top with a fresh grating of nutmeg, and serve with that cold turkey sandwich that you made while the soup was simmering. You just made a warm and comfy lunch, perfect for taking a break from putting up the Christmas decorations.

For dinner you have the turkey and you have the veggies (nobody ever finishes all of the green bean casserole) left over from the main meal but the potatoes were long gone. Here’s a way to turn that leftover bird into something airworthy – pumpkin risotto.

This isn’t going to be a fifteen minute preparation like the soup was. Risotto takes time, but it’s worth it. Figure on using about the same amount of pumpkin as you will Arborio rice. For 4 side servings use 1/2 cup of rice and 1/2 cup of finely chopped fresh pumpkin. Two cups rice or enough to feed most of the neighborhood needs two cups pumpkin. You get the idea. If you don’t have a fresh pumpkin leftover from Thanksgiving’s tablescape you can use canned pumpkin. Change the directions below to add it to the mix after with the first addition of stock.

In your pan, heat olive oil until shimmering, add a medium onion, finely chopped, and the finely chopped pumpkin. Cook until the onion is tender. In another pot, bring 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock to just below a simmer. Measure the rice into the pan and allow to cook for a minute or two. Add a cup of dry white wine and stir until the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. Then begin your additions of the hot stock, stirring after each addition until all of the liquid is absorbed and continue until the risotto is silky and creamy and just right. You’ll know. Top with nutmeg and allspice before serving.

It’s work making risotto but it’s worth it to see their faces when the tuck into it after a day of Black Friday shopping (which the way stores are plugging it means you can make this dish anytime over the next week or two).

There you have them, to ways to pump up the pumpkin in your leftovers. Take the day off, enjoy those leftovers for as long as you can before you have to start baking the Christmas cookies.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

(Don’t forget, tomorrow is Small Saturday. Patronize small business because all businesses started as small businesses.)

Chilled Out

Michael Leave a comment

I had a hard time deciding what to write for this post.  There were too many choices – Halloween, changing the clock weekend, the Breeders’ Cup, Trick or Treating, first frost, fall festivals.  I couldn’t decide. So I did what I always do when I’m stumped. I turned to food.

I don’t normally share recipes. It’s not because I hoard those magical formulae for myself. I even shared my pizza dough in this very blog. No, I rarely share recipes because I rarely know exactly what it is I toss into those pots and bowls when I’m slaving over a hot chopping board. My daughter would say it’s the Italian in me. I say it’s because I can never lay my hand on a measuring spoon when I need one. For whatever reason, she is the reason that I actually can convey an entire recipe and know that is actually what I did to make that dinner.

Let me start closer to the beginning. My daughter will come over for dinner at least once a week every week whether we need it or not. Last week’s offering was to be chili. But not a heavy beef based version. I was going to create something a bit lighter but still warm and flavorful and just right for a fall evening – a chicken chili.

Unfortunately, the morning got away from me. Because of a couple of appointments I was running behind. No way was I going to be able to cook a chicken, create a base, mix the spices, and do the requisite chopping and hopping along with the slicing and dicing a chili would require. But I still wanted it! So I turned to the pantry.

I pulled out two cans of white kidney beans, a carton of chicken stock, a small can of sliced green chilies, and a jar of prepared salsa. I checked the hanging baskets and found a slightly larger than medium yellow onion. I pulled smoked paprika and adobo powder from the spice drawer. I had everything I needed for a quick chili, just open and dump. Everything except the chicken. Fortunately the supermarket was only a 5 minute drive away where the rotisserie chickens are right by the front door.

So the beans were chucked into a big pot, a cup and a half of stock followed. Then in went the chilies, salsa, and the onion diced into decent sized chunks. The bird was skinned then separated meat from bones and joined the party. The jumble simmered over medium heat for about a half hour then dinner was served. Shredded cheese, sour cream, and tortilla chips made guest appearances and a quick slaw of shredded iceberg, carrots, radishes, olive oil mayo and celery seed completed the meal. All done with everything just laying around (save the pre-cooked poultry) and all done in less time than it would take brown the beef in a traditional chili.

Every now and then, haste doesn’t make waste. This time it made leftovers.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Comfortably Complicated

Michael Leave a comment

I got a new cookbook. I love reading cookbooks, especially those with stories. This particular one is filled with things a real person in a real kitchen can cook for a real family. From scrambled eggs to roasted chicken to perfect hamburgers to seared scallops, there isn’t a bad recipe in the bunch.

I noticed something while I flipped through the pages and glanced at techniques and tools and anecdotes. The ones I stopped at first, the ones that caught my eye and I had to read from title to end, were those mysterious favorites – comfort foods. It was the stews and roasts, the turkey and mac and cheese that called to me. And not because they were my favorites.

A simple grilled salmon with a warm mustard sauce is probably the best thing I make and the most satisfying thing I eat. Yet the salmon recipe and all the other fish recipes waited for a later perusal. I’ve been known to work chicken into an entire week of meals. Chicken enchiladas, fried chicken, chicken salad all were passed by. What is a summer weekend without hamburgers on the grill? And there I think I figured out why the secrets behind the best burger stayed hidden.

It is the season for comfort. If I was reading this book for the first time in spring I might be reading of the versatile veggies. Summertime reading would lean toward that aforementioned hamburger and salmon. The dead of winter will be a good time to explore the bread and pizza recipes. But now, when the first frosts coat the world outside your window and the high temperatures are lower than the daily low temperatures of just a month ago, now is the time we look to warmth and comfort in our dinners. As the days grow shorter and the leaves turn and fall we seek out the meals that fill our homes with delightful scents and delectable platefuls.

They will be plenty of time to try out the new versions of grilled shrimp. This week I’ll work on some butternut squash soup.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

You Are What You Eat

Michael Leave a comment

I am an omnivore. I don’t say that with any particular reason other than as a preface to this post. I will eat just about anything you put in front of me. Anything traditionally considered food. I’m not ready for nor desirous of a guest role on Fear Factor, I don’t want to eat anything that would be featured on any of cable TV’s various weird food shows, and I do not test my manliness by eating peppers hot enough to substitute as rocket fuel when pureed to a diesel like consistency. But I will at least try just about any meat, vegetable, seafood, or dairy product – umm, except liver. And sometimes all in the same dish – think pizza with pepperoni, sausage, onion, mushroom, peppers, anchovies, and 2 or 3 cheeses. Add a beer and you have the basic food groups covered in full.

The thing about people like me who have somewhat indiscriminate pallets is that when it comes time to eat we just eat. I bring this up because the other day I realized I had prepared a fish for dinner for almost an entire week. I go through binges every now and then (see “Soup’s On”, May 14, 2015 and “It’s Taco Thursday,” August 6, 10215), but a fish binge got me dangerously close to declaring myself a pescatarian. The thing is I like fish. I could do that. And that’s scary.

I thought about this. Salmon alone could cover a week’s dinners. Salmon in mustard sauce, salmon salad, grilled jerked salmon, salmon and Thai chilies, salmon burgers, blackened salmon, and the classic cedar plank salmon. Those are just the preparations I’ve done. There are probably 3 or 4 million others. Add to that the few thousand other fish recipes, seafood pastas, sandwiches and tacos, and sushi rolls and there are enough fish dishes to not double up for an average life span.

It could be done. But would I really want to do it. I don’t know. A lifetime without bacon? No leftover turkey from Thanksgiving dinner? No hotdog to go with baseball and apple pie? A picnic without cold fried chicken? Nope. It sounds tempting, and very healthy, but there are just too many good things in the world to eat not to at least try them all. Variety may not be the spice of life but it certainly makes a respectable entrée.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?