There is a particular kind of convenience food that most of you have probably seen in your frozen food section. A plastic bag filled with vegetables, pasta (or sometime potatoes), and chunks of meat (usually chicken) and a pouch with a creamy sauce. You are instructed to put the whole mess in a frying pan, and when the sauce packet thaws out it makes a nice tasty coating for the other ingredients. It’s easy to make, fairly tasty, and makes you feel like you’re eating a bit more healthy than some box of over-processed meat. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for category Quick Tips
I discovered brining a while back–my first brine was a roaring success in fact, served up back in 1996 for Thanksgiving turkey I cooked while in Portugal. Brined overnight with fresh limes & oranges in a salt water then cooked with LOTS of butter and olive oil, it was a fairly simple recipe, but it worked very very well. I’ve gotten more sophisticated since then, but I will always remember that first charge into brining–and how well it worked.
There are a few rules that I’ve learned about brining. First off, add the salt last. Brines need lots and lots of salt, but that messes with rule two. So I say add the salt last.
Just what is rule two? If your brine isn’t tasty to start with–throw it out! Seriously. You are about to add that flavor in massive doses to your meat, so if it doesn’t taste good now, cooking it isn’t LIKELY to help. Most likely its just going to make it worse. BUT!!! And this is very, very important: brines need to be salty, and if you taste the brine WITH the salt, you are going to hate it. Get a nice tasty brine, THEN add the necessary salt. You will get a lot better results that way.
So, with those two very simple rules in mind, I’m going to describe the experimental brine I made today. Our protein is chicken, which is nice because it takes on flavors very nicely. I started the brine with about 2 cups of pressed Apple Juice (the kind with pulp, not the clear stuff). This is the kind you like to spice and drink hot. You might see it sold as apple cider, but whatever. Good stuff, and a bit headier than the clear stuff. Also less sugary. But I’m getting off track. To this I added about two tablespoons of honey (yum!), two tablespoons each of lemon and lime juice and six thin slices of fresh ginger (no, I didn’t weigh it or measure it with a spoon, sorry–I’ll do that next time!). All this went into a pot on the stove to get nice an hot, then once I was happy with the flavor (see rule two), I added about four table spoons of salt (see rule one).
So what did I do with this yummy chicken (actually, I’m guessing it wasn’t too yummy until I cooked it, but whatever!)? I took some tortilla chips and grated parmesan, and put that in the food processor until very smooth, poured that into a large bowl. Then I beat four eggs in a different bowl. Once the chicken had brined for about 2 hours (and was completely thawed!), I sliced it into strips, dipped it in the egg once, coated it in the parmesan & chips mixture, then fried it in peanut oil. I’m extremely pleased with the result. My oldest son loved it (he had about 8 of the chicken strips, so that’s a good sign!), as did my wife, so I’m happy. The ginger & the apple flavor both came through very nicely, and the chicken was very moist and tender, just like it should be.
This is experimental chefery at it’s best–a completely untested idea, created and executed on the fly, but with solid basic cooking techniques underpinning it. Now go out and brine something!
Grilling season begins!
Jun 2
That’s right friends and neighbors! It’s open season again. That glorious time of year when flavored smoke wafts about suburb neighborhoods everywhere, whetting appetites, and causing even the manliest of men to wear aprons. The time of year where husbands actually volunteer to run errands, just so they can head out to the home improvement store and lust after the grills on display.
I’ve been hooked on grilling for some time, and I’m quite excited for this years season. I’ve used gas grills exclusively for some time now so top on my to-do list this year is to get a charcoal grill/smoker and start experimenting with that. I’ve wanted to do that for a while now, and needless to say, I have several things planned already (insert eeevil laughter here).
To kick the season off right I wanted to share a couple of quick grilling tips that had a BIG impact on my grilling:
- Use a timer. I don’t know why it took me so long to start using a timer regularly, but it has had a HUGE impact on my cooking. I can’t share many specific times with you as it will vary greatly depending on the dish and on your particular grill, but I can tell you that for a lot of the common grill meat such as burgers, chicken, and steak, the less opening of the grill and the less flipping you do, the better off you’ll be. For example, lets say that with your particular patties and your particular grill, it takes 3 minutes per side to cook a burger. If that’s the case then you want to put them on, set the timer, then NOT TOUCH IT until the timer goes off unless you absolutely have to. Then flip and repeat. If you get the time just right they will come out perfectly cooked. This also allows you go to figure out times for well, medium, and rare so you don’t have to cut your steak in half to see if it’s done.
- Let it rest. I find that with ground meats like burgers, brats, or dogs, this step isn’t very vital, but if you are grilling whole meats like chicken breasts, or steak, then it’s crucial! This is something that practically no one does, but it’s absolutely vital if you want juicy meat. When it’s done cooking, you don’t slap it right on a plate and start eating it, instead you take it off the heat and let it sit for a bit. A big fat steak may need to rest as much as 15 minutes, but usually you can get by with less. The idea here is that meat is made of small cells which is what holds in the moisture. When the meat is heated, the water expands and escapes the cells. Some of that comes dripping off your meat to cause those flare-ups we are oh-so familiar with, and the rest of it will be lurking kind of in between the cells just waiting for a way out. If you stick a knife in it at that stage, all the juice will come running out, BUT if you let it rest, then it will settle back into the cells again instead of running all over your plate. If you find yourself saying “I can never seem to get a juicy steak on my grill” then give this a try!
- Time to brine. The making of a proper brine deserves it’s own post, and I’ll probably write one eventually, but I’ll give you a sneak peak now. Obviously when you grill it’s best to get meat that has never been frozen, but that’s not practical for a lot of us all the time, and if you DO have frozen meat you don’t want to use the microwave to defrost it because some of it will end up partially cooked before you even put it on the grill. So what a lot of people (myself included) end up doing is putting the meat in some warm water for a while to thaw it out. What you may not know is that this is a perfect opportunity to add some additional flavor and moisture to your meat! Instead of just putting the whole darn package into a bowl of water, instead remove the frozen meat from the package, and rather than putting it into plain water, make up a brine! In the hour or two that it takes your meat to thaw out, the salt and the flavors of your brine will infuse into your meat kicking up the flavor big time. I’ll let you do your own googling to find a brine recipe, but basically you want very salty water, plus whatever additional spice and flavors that will work well with the dish you are making. Yum.
Hopefully those three things will kick your grilling up a notch and make you the envy of the neighborhood! I’ll be kicking in more tips as the summer goes on as well as sharing some of the things that I’m making. Stay tuned!
How to save lame salsa
Dec 18
I’m a big fan of salsa. Over the last 20 years or so I’ve put it on everything from chips to peanut butter, and I’ve tried dozens of varieties. My personal favorite is a freshly cut kind using very ripe tomatoes, onions, tons of cilantro, your favorite capsaicin carrier, and a dash of lime. Mmm mmm.
Over the years, however, I’ve come to an important realization about this spicy little delight: I hate BAD salsa. It took me a while to come to terms with this, but the hard reality is that not all salsa is created equal. And try as we might to make our own, or only buy quality kinds, we all will eventually end up with a jar of red sauce in our fridge that has ’salsa’ (or worse yet, ‘picante’) on the label, but that in reality bears little resemblance to that perfect blend of tang and spice that we’ve come to know and love.
This can happen for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it was left behind by someone who brought it to the last party you hosted, or perhaps your significant other bought it without considering your salsa standards. Whatever the reason, it tastes like someone cooked onions in a pressure cooker for three days and dumped them in a pile of tomato sauce. Not exactly what I want to water log my chips in.
But have no fear! There is a solution, and it’s easier than you might think. Just last week I was in this same kind of situation. A jar of non-descript tomato based blandness made it’s way into my fridge and it’s the dead of winter in Wisconsin right now so I don’t exactly have the option of fresh tomatoes.
So let’s start by analyzing the problems with bad salsa:
- Texture. Everything is so over-cooked and over mixed that it’s just mush. Sometimes it’s slightly lumpy mush, but it has no chunk, no crisp, no snap.
- Flavor. The spice (meaning both flavor and heat) is either mostly gone from over cooking, or never present to begin with because of trying to cater to a wide consumer audience by using a shamefully simple flavor profile.
- Heat. Even the hot stuff isn’t. Granted, I know that there are local varieties or specialty brands that do better on this front, but the big names that you always associate with salsas just never bring any kick to the party
- Color. It’s all red. There might be some hints of something green that now just looks wilted and brown, or some transparent bits that are supposed to pass for onions, but salsa should look like a fresh garden, not something a rabbit regurgitated.
Before we begin, first a ground rule: USE FRESH INGREDIENTS FOR THIS! I can’t emphasize this enough. The whole point is to bring life to this dead dish, you’re just not going to pull that off by using dried, powered, or otherwise ruined ingredients. But take note, there is a very big exception to that rule when it comes to tomatoes. I don’t know what it’s like in other parts of the world, but in North America there’s only a few months when you can get a truly get a vine ripe tomato. The rest of the year they are picked green and shipped around to ripen in the truck. The problem is that most of the flavor happens in the final stages of ripening. For sauces like salsa or spaghetti sauce, you can actually get a better flavor using cans than with fresh tomatoes if said tomatoes are that distinct milky pink color instead of ripe red.
So, what’s the action plan? Let’s start at the top. We’re going to add texture back into the mix by adding in some fresh ingrediants again! Just treat what’s in the jar like a tomato sauce that you’re going to turn into salsa. Chop up some yellow onion dump it right in. If you like green or red peppers chop some up and put those in too. And lastly put in some chuncks of tomatoe. Either diced from a can and drained, or a vine ripe chopped. Instant texture. Just give that a little stir and you’re already going to like it better.
Next we want to add to the flavor. What we just put in will help a lot, but your next step is going to put it over the top: fresh cilantro. If you’re not familiar with this beautiful herb, then you should be. I always have some of this in my fridge. I buy it in bundles and put it stems down in a water filled container in my fridge. Keeps pretty well that way. Get a bunch and chop it up fine to add to your salsa mix. I’m not going to give you a measurement (I’ll let you figure that out on your own) but personally, I like copious amounts. Top it off with some freshly ground pepper, a good dash of lemon and/or lime juice, and depending on the sodium level of your salsa base, some kosher salt. Now the flavor is really starting to zing! Pay attention to the balance of acid and salt. You might fine that adding a pinch of sugar (and I mean a pinch, don’t over-do this) could really bring out the flavor if things are out of balance.
Third we need to kick up the heat. You can use just about anything you like to add heat to this, but whatever you do, do NOT use green picked jalapenos from a can! Those monstrosities are worth a whole post, but I’ll digress for now. Remember our ground rules! We only do fresh here. One or two fresh hot peppers finely chopped, and as many seeds as you can stand will work nicely, or something like cayenne powder will work too.
Once that’s completed you’ll be happy to see that our fourth point, color, has already taken care of itself! Step back and revel in the amazing creation you have made. You’d find that not only is it better than anything you’ll ever find in a jar, but it’s close enough to fresh salsa to tide you over for winter. Enjoy!