St. Patrick’s Day falling midweek this year didn’t really allow enough time to make a nice lamb stew, but I still wanted lamb. I picked up a couple of lamb steaks from the nearest butcher, where it turned out to be ridiculously cheap. I simply pan-seared them, then made a quick pan sauce with échalions and Guinness, reduced a bit and then enriched with a little butter. To accompany, I made colcannon, an Irish dish which in my world usually consists of mashed potatoes with blanched cabbage and leeks stirred in.
The Lenten meat-free Fridays continue. This week, I took advantage of a recent friend’s delivery of Tillamook cheddar, and made a spinach and cheddar quiche. A thin layer of caramelized leeks in the bottom really brought it all together. Simple and satisfying.
And after a whole season of getting apples every week, I finally made an all-American apple pie!
As the title of this post states, what can I do with leftover parma ham?
I decided to saute it together with potatoes & onions!
Then I browned the potato chips with the onion slices
Finally I add in those extra slices of parma ham to add that lovely bacon taste to the fries.
Pretty yummy for a side dish that I cooked up randomly. Making fries is always delicious but the onion gives it additional sweetness and the parma ham renders some saltiness onto it. I don’t know if I offended anyone by cooking parma ham this way but I don’t care!
In modern times, it was not surprised that silicone, which is used to learn to be a component of microchips and breast implants, now a common material for cookware. A silicone cooking utensil can have a competitive price with tools kitchen metal and nylon. There are a number of kitchen utensils that the use of silicone. A common structure for a silicone cookware is that a wooden handle. This is particularlyapply to spatulas, spoons and others.
There are also many bake ware that are made of silicone. These silicone bake ware takes on a solid surface, if you want the cake or a square or rectangular, it was decided to keep it inside
Why a silicone cooking utensil?
Kitchen items will be suspended as a rule, constant heat and cold. This is one of the main reasons why a silicone cookware is great for the job. Silicone resists heat, more possibleoven at medium temperature or the temperature of the oven. Does not lose its shape when exposed to heat or cold, and no silicone to maintain, the smells and colors of food before, has been suspended. A silicone cookware is also robust when it is cleaned and washed a.
Utensils Silicone also the distinct advantage of not irritating to normal substances pr common kitchen. E 'also does not corrode or react negatively to the exposureHot and cold, or vice versa. This means that the silicon is likely to last longer than the cooking utensils, kitchen utensils, providing the right care and attention.
One advantage of using a silicone cookware is its sweetness, when it comes to dealing with non-stick surfaces. Silicone is softer than wood and can not scratch or damage the surface of nonstick pots and pans. Bake ware suspended from Teflon material is less risk of damageand scratches when the baker uses cooking utensils made of silicone. Some people may not realize, but scratched and damaged non-stick cookware should, as a result of exposure to drugs may be scratched the surface of cancer and other serious illnesses are discarded.
These are just some of the benefits of silicone kitchen utensils. The price for a silicone cooking utensils may seem high, but sitting on product durability and robustness ofworth.
“Our greatest failure is not one of politics but of imagination. We need to imagine a world at peace and work backwards from there.” ~ Marianne Williamson in The Age of Miracles
You know how it is when someone says something that you “get” intellectually; you’ve heard it before, and its not a new concept, but suddenly, you hear it and get it viscerally. It has meaning at a cellular level. I was driving home from Robby’s soccer game this afternoon, having been gone with Charlotte most of the day, and I was stuck in traffic.
Listening, again, to the audio version of Marianne Williamson’s book, which I have found uplifting and inspiring (not bad when one is stuck in a traffic jam), I heard the above sentence and the light went on. Not in my head, but deep inside, I felt and saw what she was talking about.
I imagined going home and making dinner for my family, pouring the love I have for them into the meal. My kids have always said that when I make them sandwiches, they taste better. I have always replied that its because there’s a secret ingredient. I have sent them off to school and on adventures with sandwiches full of organic and locally grown produce for years, but the secret ingredient is love. Growing up, I was the default cook in my family, and it became one of my first creative mediums. To this day, people say to me, what is your recipe? I am often unable to answer, but even when I do, they will often claim that it didn’t taste the same when they made it. I know that’s true. When I cook “out of” love, the food simply tastes better. It holds that love. Nothing is ever scorched or over seasoned. Nothing is bland. When I cook in a hurry or in resentment, the results are different. I lose the magic.
Taking off from Marianne’s quote, I thought about how this simple gesture, making dinner, when done with love and the intention to nourish the people I love, a gesture repeated across the globe every day, is, in one small way, a step in working backward from a vision of a peaceful world. Ghandi’s quote, that we read on bumper stickers and billboards,
“Be the change you want to see in the world”,
suddenly crystalized as well. A teacher I’ve learned a great deal from says,
“Its not what you do, but how you do it.”
Another quote from Marianne Williamson reads,
“Everything we do is infused with the energy with which we do it. If we’re frantic, life will be frantic. If we’re peaceful, life will be peaceful. And so our goal in any situation becomes inner peace.”
All of these coalesced in my mind (including the one by Goethe from last night) into one big thought form as I sat in traffic near Husky Stadium. I pushed the back arrow on my cd player and listened again to Marianne. The third time, I had found a scrap of paper and a pen and was ready to record as she got to the words I was waiting for. The image I had in my mind was of going through my day, whatever it brings, in a blissed out state.
Now, that made me laugh! Nice idea, but not realistic. Un-wadding the stinky socks that my 17 year old son played soccer in a week ago and then threw in his bag to fester before finally sending them to the laundry room, while blissed out in a state of love for humanity and the earth is not something I can easily envision for myself at any time in the near future. But rather than get upset that its just not something I will ever do with grace, I can be more gentle with myself and not upset my own equilibrium, thus working backward from the image of a world at peace. I imagine that there will always be those who simply can’t enjoy the stinky socks they are washing out of love, but laughing about it while feeling the love and the inner peace it brings, might just dispel any negativity that the fact of that dislike might engender.
When I first sat down here to write tonight with the first quote in my hand, I had in mind writing something about stay-at-home moms being a force for imagining a world at peace. I was thinking about all the women, like my young friend Sarah, (my kids old babysitter who quoted my blog in hers), who are making the choice to stay home and raise their children, and how important it is for the whole world that they, as well as I, learn to value what we do as coming from a place of being rather than doing.
Its been noted in many places, by writers and thinkers, that hope for the future of our world lies in the hands of women. I believe this to be true. Perhaps, however, this has nothing to do with politics. Could it be that the leadership of our nations changes in a way that that we don’t usually think of? What if a groundswell of peacefulness beginning in the hearts of women around the world simply overwhelms the old patterns that have dictated world politics for decades. Perhaps its only from within our society, within the hearts of our families, that we have any hope of transforming this world into a world of peace. And only by being the peace within our families that we can initiate that ripple outward which joins with others, increasing in magnitude from the centers of homes across the globe. Maybe it doesn’t matter who the leaders of our countries are right now, or what congress is doing, if we all get on the “Peace Train” and simply do whatever it takes to teach ourselves, within our own hearts, how to be at peace.
A note on today’s photograph. The above is not actually my imagination, but a jellyfish I photographed at the Seattle Aquarium today while visiting with my daughter. We were being tourists in Seattle. It was a great way to spend the day with her being home literally as a visitor. We even had lunch on the waterfront before heading off to watch Robby play soccer.
Nick’s birthday was a few weeks ago, and as it fell on a Saturday when the horses were running at Vincennes, he wanted to get some people together for hot dogs and beer before heading out to the races. Since it was a special occasion, I wanted to do a little something extra, and I remembered that I read a post a while back about corn dogs, which I don’t even like, historically, but something about being in France makes me want fried things I don’t normally eat when I’m at home in the States.
Anyway, it was Nick’s special day, and he loved the idea. So corn dogs it was. I used Alton Brown’s recipe, with a couple of changes. I left out the jalapeño, and seeing as creamed corn doesn’t exist in France, I substituted regular canned corn, buzzed with the immersion blender.
I bought a huge pack of cheap wooden chopsticks at an Asian restaurant supply store to use as sticks, but since French hot dogs (aka Knacks) are so much thinner than their American counterparts (maybe because they don’t go frying themselves in corn batter?) I used only one stick per dog, instead of the recommended two.
I was actually surprised at how well this recipe worked. I don’t know why. But let me tell you, it was seriously awesome to pull real live corndogs out of the bubbling oil in the Dutch oven. And do you know what was even more awesome?
We had French’s yellow mustard to dunk them in. (Ah, irony.)
But I had some leftover batter, even after frying up 10 of those puppies. I thought it would be fun to go all classy with it – fold in some whipped egg whites and call it soufflé. Come to think of it, some Dijon mustard probably would have been pretty good in there, too.
1. corn ramekin before, 2. corn ramekin after
Despite my greasing the ramekin (and the loaf pan – you’ll see in a minute), the soufflés didn’t rise all that much. Oh, well, it still tasted good – like cornbread, but lighter and moister.
In fact, one person to whom I served it immediately called it spoonbread. Maybe not the ultra-classy French dish I had in mind, but still a delicious side to roast chicken. Or curry potpie, if it happens to be a clean-out-the-fridge kind of dinner.
On this day in 2008: Mac N Cheese: A Classic French Dish
Rattlesnake meat is a delicacy southwest. If you have not ever eaten rattlesnake, you are a real treat. No, it does not taste like chicken! It has a flavor much Garnier – more reminiscent of pheasant, frog legs, alligator, or even elk.
There are two ways to cook meat rattlesnake: De-boned, or with bones intact. If you cook with the bones intact, you have to deal with them while he eats. This is not a big deal really, and in fact many "just a snake" typeRecipes (baked snake, the snake southern fire, etc.) call the snake cut into pieces and cooked with the bones.
Use of snake meat in Chile or other dishes where the meat is mixed into the dish calls for the removal of bone. This can be done by the snake carcass simmer for one hour in a pan of water with a little lemon juice and maybe some spices. While the meat comes off bones easily. Be sure to taste it before mixing with other ingredients!
Hereis an easy to make recipe for Rattlesnake Chili:
1 large onion, chopped
3 large cloves garlic, minced
1 red pepper, chopped
3 jalapeno peppers, chopped
1 28 oz diced tomatoes
1 15 oz can tomato paste
1 28 oz can chili beans
1 / 4 cup chili powder
2 v. Tea. cumin
1 tsp Tea. salt
1 tsp Tea. black pepper
2 pounds beef Rattlesnake
juice of 1 / 2 lemon
Simmer rattlesnake in water and lemon juice for 1 hour, remove andSeparate meat from bones.
Combine boneless meat with remaining ingredients in a crock pot and cook slowly for 6-8 hours, or bring to a boil in a large pot and simmer for 2 hours.
If it is not already obvious, one of my favorite hobbies is cooking. Recently, as I was toiling away on a seafood risotto, I had a realization: cooking is a form of coding. People might enjoy cooking for many of the same reasons people enjoy coding. If you think about it, the similarities between these two activities are striking:
Fundamentally Creative. When you cook, you are engaged in a fundamentally creative task. You are using your hands and your skills to build something. This is no different than when you sit down to code; you are the master of your food (or program’s) destiny.
Scientific Basis. Cooking is not a realm of mysterious alchemy. It is based upon rigorous principles of chemistry and physics. To create a delicious meal, you need to obey those scientific principles. When you write code, you similarly ought to understand the computer science and mathematics that underlies your work.
Real-Time Debugging. Coders love to constantly test and debug in real-time. They like to quickly write a function, test it out, and revise it as needed. The same is true in cooking. Debugging consists of sticking your spoon in and having a taste. Then you adjust your ingredients or technique as necessary.
Open-Source Documentation. Within both cooking and coding, there is a beautiful culture of sharing knowledge. Cookbooks, of course, are a form of open documentation. More importantly, ask most anyone for a recipe of something they’ve made, and they oblige. Both cooks and hackers take a pride in their creations and love to share their code/recipes.
Black-Box Abstraction. Meals can be modularized into constituent parts. For example, a pie consists of a crust and filling. To make a pie more easily, you can use an off-the-shelf crust, even if you don’t know how it was made. This black-box abstraction resonates well with a programmer’s instinct to reduce complexity through modularization.
Instant Gratification. This might be the most important attribute. In many fields of engineering, you have to wait a long time to see the results of your work (e.g., building a bridge). The fact that coders can quickly play with their creations is what attracted many of them to computer science in the first place. Cooks get to enjoy this exact same kind of instant gratification. A chef’s code is edible!
Given the vibrant similarities between cooking and coding, I would love to see software engineers have a stronger influence on the discipline of cooking. Beyond the gizmos of molecular gastronomy, here are a few more cultural ways engineers could improve cuisine:
More science-based culinary training. With the exception of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, very few (cook)books teach much about the science of food. As a result, very few people really understand the science behind cooking. This inhibits their creativity in the kitchen. Instead, it’d be wonderful to see more cooking texts that teach science– from the physiology of taste, to the chemistry of ingredients, the thermodynamics of heat transfer.
More innovative recipe templates. The canonical recipe template (e.g., opening notes, ingredient list, prep instructions) is out of date. There is a lot of room to innovate on how we articulate recipes. There are, for example, better ways of visualizing parallel activities, or incorporating video demonstrations of standard techniques. Recipes need to come into the 21st century.
More knowledge of reverse-engineering. Whenever coders come across a new piece of technology, they try to figure out how it works. They are masters of reverse-engineering. People are often the same way when they enjoy new dishes at restaurants. By devising better a more rigorous methodology for reverse-engineering meals, people could greatly enhance their cooking technique.
Can you think of other ways the culture of computer science can enhance the culinary world? Given that software engineers revel in both the artistic and technical demands of the creative process, I think that geeks are bound to make fantastic contributions to the culinary arts.
