Next week is the eighth anniversary of my engagement to the Now Spousal Unit. I like to celebrate the date with her, because our birthdays, wedding anniversary, and anniversary of our first date all fall in August and September, so it’s nice to have an occasion on the opposite side of the calendar. The actual anniversary will be busy for us, and today was a beautiful warm day, so I picked up some thick New York strip steaks, cut to order, from Froehlich’s and warmed up the grill.
I played around with an extension tube for macro photography. This was taken on a tripod at f/22, the smallest aperture available on the A28. The window screen has about 7 squares per centimeter, which means this was at about 1.5x magnification.
Oh, I made hot dogs.
Related: Grid illusion
This is one of my favorite weeknight recipes lately. It gets nice acidity from the tomatoes, balanced by creaminess from the goat cheese. The best part is that you don’t pre-cook the sauce. Just throw it all together.
For more about our 4-H lamb, Parker, see the first installment of Eating Parker.
For an early Valentine’s Day dinner, I made an Irish stew, using a 3.5-pound lamb shoulder. I followed this recipe from PBS, adding one head’s worth of whole peeled garlic cloves to the pot with the liquid. I used a bottle of Yuengling Black & Tan for the beer. The stew turned out really well, with tender, flavorful meat and a nice broth. There were ample leftovers, some of which we’ll eat tomorrow, and the rest we’ll freeze.
The wine was 1986 Ridge York Creek cabernet sauvignon. Based on CellarTracker notes, we should have opened it five years ago. Unfortunately, I only bought it 6 months ago.
There’s a been a blogospherical discussion about the level of recent technological progress in home cooking. Krugman and Cowen have written on the topic, but I found Megan McArdle’s contribution to be most interesting thus far, perhaps because she’s an avid home cook. Most of her post rings true to me, especially this:
Yesterday I added an adorable 2.5-quart yellow dutch oven to my batterie de cuisine. The pot, produced in China by the minions of Martha Stewart Collection (a subsidiary of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia), appears to be of good quality. However, the accompanying instructions are… conflicted:
For more about our 4-H lamb, Parker, see the first installment of Eating Parker.
This is a quick one… no pictures or anything.
I was home for a night between Thanksgiving travel and work travel, so there wasn’t a lot to eat in the house. I decided to thaw a brick of ground Parker, and make some pita sandwiches. Brown the meat with onions, cinnamon, cumin, serve with some tzatziki and tomatoes. Basically a gyro with ground meat instead of gyro meat.
Giant Eagle had no pitas, so I bought some Pacifico’s pizza shells instead. Seriously, that was the closest thing I could come up with. Also, the only plain yogurt I could find for the tzatziki was nonfat, which is a far cry from Greek full-fat yogurt. I cooked the seasoned meat and onions. Then I put a little mozzarella cheese on a pizza shell so that the meat would stick, and added the meat/onion mixture and some feta. Baked until done, and topped with tzatziki and tomatoes. Not bad.
Tzatziki was the nonfat plain yogurt (bleh) with half a cucumber, diced, a splash of red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper. Side was a second baked pizza shell with COTS hummus.
Paired with 2005 Novelty Hill Syrah:
Dark blood red. Sweet, appealing nose of chocolate, wet stones, mixed berries, mint, blood. More austere on the palate, with sour cherry, mocha, iodine, talcum powder. (90 points)
For more about our 4-H lamb, Parker, see the first installment of Eating Parker.
Tonight I made use of our first package of ground lamb, to make grilled lamburgers with integral feta cheese. Into a pound of ground lamb, I incorporated some red wine vinegar, dried oregano, cinnamon, cumin, hot red pepper flakes, salt, pepper, and feta cheese.
Colman Andrews, in a dialog with Ruth Reichl on her blog, said:
I do think it’s interesting, though, that people (“our” people, the serious food folk) tend to think that they should be able to—that they have the right to be able to—reproduce the most elaborate and labor-intensive of restaurant dishes, when they would never think themselves capable of playing serious music or painting museum-quality art or imagine themselves capable of leaping into Scorcese or Coppola territory with their Flips.
I realized that, to some extent, I do have that belief, and I’d never thought about why.
It was time for the annual question: What should I cook* for my birthday? I had a bottle of a birth-year wine, a 1976 Burgess Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon that I wanted to drink this year, figuring that it wouldn’t get any better at this point, so I needed something that would pair with the wine.
Epicurious.com, the website associated with Bon Appetit and the late Gourmet magazines, has a recipe—a kitchen note, really—for Salted Water for Boiling. The recipe reads in its entirety:
When salting water for cooking, use 1 tablespoon of salt for every 4 quarts of water.
This recipe has been reviewed 862 times, as of this writing. 78% of reviewers would make Salted Water for Boiling again, and it has earned a score of 3.5 forks, on a scale of 4. Among those who side with majority is “A Cook from AZ” who writes:
How perfect! My in-laws are very picky eaters. At last, I've found a dish with ingredients that won't offend them. This will become a staple in our house!
Others offer helpful hints:
This is a great make ahead recipe. It will keep up to 3 days, covered, in the refrigerator. Just bring to a boil and serve.
For salt-sensitive readers requesting a substitute for the salt. I bloat up tremendously when I consume even the most miniscule amount of salt and therefore I used flour instead. This glutinous stew was just the ticket!
I had difficulty slicing it at first, until I put it into the freezer for a while. To get it to slice properly I then had to heat the knife somewhat, but in the end, it was worth the effort.
But not every recipe can be to everyone’s taste:
I found this to be way too salty - I couldn't even serve it to our guests (I should probably have experimented with it ahead of time. I found a much better recipe for salted water on recipesource.com. which I will use in the future.
