There's been a lot of cooking going on around the apartment this week, including a return to my homemade French Onion Soup recipe. It's essentially the Alton Brown/Food Network recipe, excepting that my 4 lbs of thinly sliced onions are mostly Vidalia, then one good sized red and a small sized white, and that I include a half dozen thinly sliced white mushrooms to the mix. I also add more broth - a full 30oz rather than 20oz, to accomodate the mushrooms, and I make sure to deeply brown and caramelize the stuff before I add liquid. Oh, and my bouquet garni is rosemary, thyme and sage. Other than that, all other directions as advertised on the tin.

We recently picked up some vintage recipe cards from the early Sixties, and I've been dying to try my hand at making some of them. I started with a pretty innocuous Corn Casserole with Frankfurters, which is essentially a large diced onion sauteed in butter, then you add three tablespoons of flour, 1.5 cups of milk, about 16 oz of defrosted frozen corn niblets and three beaten eggs - in succession, stirring well between additions - then pop the whole mess in a casserole dish and bake at 350 for thirty minutes. You pop it out to put the frankfurters on top, sprinkle with buttered breadcrumbs, and pop it back in for fifteen more minutes.

It looked like blandsville, to be honest, and way too fatty. I substituted olive oil for three-quarters of the butter, added thyme and sage to the sautee, and browned the roux just this side of black to give it some robustness. I added paprika (not enough, unfortunately) to bring out the sweetness of the corn. Came out quite well, if I may say so myself, plus it's hilarious.



(Oh, and sliced green olives on top as well as the frankfurters. Kate didn't like 'em, I did, so your mileage and all that)

I just posted this on a Foodie forum I frequent, but knowing that we have some kitchen amateurs (and professionals) hanging around, I thought I'd pose the same questions here:
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Over the weekend, I prepared a very nice steak and eggs dinner with herbed potatoes and a side of green beans. The pertaters were excellent, the green beans superb, and the eggs were pretty great for being, you know, fried eggs and pretty darn hard to screw up.

The steak was, however, my usual mix of dry, tough, overcooked even though it was practically hexcode #F00 all the way through and not at all flavorful.

I am tired of abusing my steaks thus. It is time I admit that my steak-fu is weak. I don't know my cuts, I don't know my cooking methods, I may have only thought I knew my prep and seasonings and I'm apparently annihilating the flavor and texture of everything from the chuck to the shank¹.

Thus I ask you, whose Steak-Fu is strong: What is the steak equivalent of "learning to boil water?" Keeping in mind my limitations (The electric range is my primary source of cooking heat), what is a good cut and cooking method for an absolute mangler of an amateur? I need to start from the absolute ground-up (...steak, haha) and learn the techniques starting from the basics.

That so many cows have died only so that I could make unpalatable steak dinners out of them makes me feel sad and uncomfortable.


¹I looked that up.

Also, I almost titled this "Help Me, Kobe Beef Kenobi, You're My Only Hope!" BUT COME ON.

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Although I didn't mention this in the original post, I should point out - as a matter of pride, if not bafflement - that I do not have this problem with any other meat. I do swell with chicken, pork and seafood, and I do gangbusters at prepping eggplant and portabello as though they were steaks, but I'm otherwise helpless...

My apologies for the poor plating, but I didn't expect this to be a recipe worth reporting upon, and didn't think to take the photo until well after we'd been through our respective shares.

Kate's been having something of a tender tummy lately, so for dinner tonight I abandoned the plans for Salmon Parmagianno and decided to poach up a couple of unseasoned chicken breasts (side dishes included paprika-seasoned couscous and cauliflower, steamed in the same parchment paper pouch. The cauliflower ended up being for me, Kate had me steam some green beans for her, which is okay because I'm thumbs up for cauliflower).

I plopped the chicken into a rectangular casserole dish and - wanting to keep the seasonings mild - dashed 'em with salt, fresh-ground black pepper, the juice from about 1/3 a lemon and a spritz of olive oil. THEN. I sliced two Bartlett Pears (somewhat thin, not paper-thin or nothing, but thinner than you'd eat it by hand) and about 1/4 of a white onion and laid them over the chicken breast, then splashed a decent amount of Vermouth into the casserole dish (I probably could have done with less). Cooked at 425 degrees for 30 minutes with aluminum foil covering it, then cooked for another thirty minutes with the foil off, so to boil off some of the vermouth and to get a bit of brown going.

IT. WAS. SO. GOOD. The chicken was naturally moist, even though there was a beautiful golden browning on the edges. I left the fat on the breasts, which then melted with the caramelized fruit sugars into the vermouth and coated the entire durned thing with deliciousness. And the interior? Even though I left 'em in a little too long (internal temperature was 180), the interior of the chicken was white as driven snow and as juicy as a peach. The flavor was incredible, this one's a keeper!

( Short form directions after the cut... )

Last night's dinner was pretty simple but pretty tasty stuff:



These're thin (about a quarter-inch) slices of panko-breaded eggplant, served with a thin slice of softened mozzarella between 'em. There's also shrimp and scallops - lightly sauteed in olive oil with a dash of lemon - and a tomato-and-basil sauce which is pretty much just tomato and basil sauteed in the same pan f'r a minute or two. Very tasty but very simple, that's a lot of disparate elements all cooked in about twenty minutes, in the same pan.

Dessert, unpictured, was oven-roasted peach and banana slices served warm over ice cream and a small slice of angel food cake. Eatin' good in our neighborhood!

Long-time readers of this journal may remember that I occasionally make my own home-made salsa, dubbed "Black Bee" salsa for really no other reason than it's my fallback naming convention. I'll work on it.

In any case, I've been out of the stuff for a good long time and have neglected to make any more simply because it was becoming a rather time- and energy-consuming process. I began to fear that I was, in my enthusiasm, loading so many ingredients, spices and seasonings into the mix that it was losing its distinct flavor for an indistinct, spicy melange. I had in it, as an example, fourteen ingredients and nine spices and seasons. That's how many flavors Dr.Pepper has, and we all know how horrible Dr.Pepper tastes. That's right, utterly, inarguably horrible.

So I made a new batch yesterday (yesterday was, in fact, a big ol' cooking-from-scratch day, as I also made a chicken-and-mushroom stock and, from that, a spinach and potato stew), but pared down to what I considered its essential ingredients; I ended up using only jalapeño and habanero peppers, white onion and the secret ingredient (sort of), roasted braeburn apples. Seasoning was limited to vinegar and salt, and that mostly to keep it from fermenting, inasmuch as it's one sugary mess and I've already had one batch go moonshine on me.

The end result was a simpler, more pure version of the salsa, closer to what I had originally envisioned the flavor to be (i.e. "Spicy Pepper Applesauce"). It also gave me a nicer color and texture, and a good idea of what needn't be included next time around (sweet peppers, tomatoes, paprika, chili powder) and what definitely needs to be in there (garlic, carrot, poblano chiles, rosemary). In the end, I should have a more elegantly flavored salsa, closer to my ideal version, and without some of the pussy-footing around I've had with previous iterations (inasmuch as I can add ingredients in batches, and test quantities and strengths, and what have you). I'll fill yez all in on the final recipe as it's developed, but if you'd like to try this spicy mix, and what I may as well call Green Bee Salsa, then here are your directions:

Roast the following in a 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes, or until well-browned.
1.5 pound jalapeño peppers
6 Braeburn apples, cored
1 large white onion, sliced
6 medium-to-large habanero peppers

Puree, add half-tbsp salt and quarter-cup white OR apple cider vinegar, depending on taste. Serve cool ...



Right now, I'm roasting the peeled cloves from half a head of garlic, and will be adding those to a quarter portion of the batch. I expect it will taste fi-i-i-i-i-ine.


Update: What was I thinking, leaving out the garlic? Oh man, what ever was I thinking? Ten times as good, thumbs up, hooray!

Last night's dinner, which is the first in a long time I felt needed documenting of any sort. Kate always asks, whenever I cook something a little labor-intensive like this, what the special occasion is. Ain't every day with that lady special? I think it is.

Bit by bit, I am getting durn close to that lighting from 1970's Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks. If I find a genie in a lamp, I'm gonna wish for a kitchen with natural light. Or for that matter, a place to live with natural light, this place is like a dungeon ...

Anyway, Pork Loin (center cut) en Croute. I decided to make this about two hours before dinner, so I didn't have time to defrost the phyllo dough in my freezer, and thus I used ... I used Pillsbury Dough Flaky Biscuits. Not my proudest moment, but it works, so who cares?

The pork gets about four minutes on a side over medium high heat, then get wrapped in the dough and into the oven for - and only the most experienced chefs can get a grip on this - as long as the directions on the biscuit tin say so. Maybe a little longer, but you get the idear. A meat thermometer is a good idea, in any case, although I'd generally advise you fine ladies to distrust any man who routinely recommends using a meat thermometer anywhere else but a kitchen environment.

The compote is half a can of peaches and half a can of pears in light syrup, stewed in a sautee pan with about two or three teaspoons of butter for about fifteen minutes or so. The brussel sprouts were pouch-steamed in a 350 degree oven for a good forty minutes, with butter and shallots. This meal shies not away from the butter. Nor the meat thermometer.

Voila! Food!