A friend from New Zealand celebrated her first 4th of July as a new US Citizen by throwing a big "white trash" themed 4th of July barbecue. Having completed 10 years of US residence in January, I’d been considering throwing a red, white and blue stars-and-stripes overkill party, but events had conspired against it. So when the invite to the barbecue arrived, we said "Hell yeah!" Continue reading »
You will need:
Directions:
Place eggs and milk in blender. Add Bisquick. Blend until smooth.
Wet the pan and place it on the stove, turn the heat up to medium. When the water all evaporates, you know that the pan is heated, and you can add the oil.
I don’t measure the oil. I’m guessing a teaspoon or so. Once it’s on the pan, you use the brush or paper towel to put a thin coating of oil across the entire surface of the pan. I try to use as little oil as possible. French people use significantly more.
Give the oil a few seconds to heat up, then pour on the batter. I don’t measure this either, and it’ll depend on the size of your pan anyway. Put in just enough to put the thinnest possible layer of batter over the surface of the pan.
It takes about a minute to cook the first side, which should end up an even brown color if your pan is good. The crêpe should come off of the pan with no trouble. An expert will flip it using just the pan; me, I cheat and use a spatula to assist the flipping, I don’t think it makes any difference to the taste.
The other side will take about the same amount of time, perhaps a little less. It’ll end up pockmarked with brown rather than evenly colored. If you try to get your crêpe evenly brown on both sides, it will solidify into an unbendable sheet, which tends to make it less fun to eat.
Move cooked crêpe to plate. Sprinkle on sugar to taste, then lemon juice. Roll up your crêpe and eat it. Obviously you can do other things with the crêpe, like put Nutella on it, but I’m a traditionalist.
Repeat until you run out of batter. I got about 5 crêpes out of the mix, but again this will depend on your pan size and the resulting crêpe size.
Making the transition to stainless steel cookware has required re-learning most of my cooking skills. Not that I had that many to start with, but they were based on having used Teflon-coated cookware my entire life. In case anyone else is thinking about making a similar transition, here are the things I have discovered.
The first is that there is an enormous price variation in stainless steel cookware. A set of 7 pans can cost from $99 to $600 or more. I subscribe to Consumer Reports, so I took a look at their reviews, and settled on KitchenAid–affordable, but almost the best for even heating and nonstick properties in CR’s testing.
The second thing I discovered is that you have to start the cooking process differently. It’s really important to pre-heat the pan. Only once the pan is moderately hot should you add the oil. My guess is that this allows the oil to float over the irregularities in the surface, rather than oozing into them. After a pause for the oil to heat up, it’s time to add the food. You’ll know you did it wrong if everything sticks to the pan.
The third important thing is choice of oil. Light virgin olive oil is OK for many things, but for pancakes (for example) you’re better off using canola. The subject of cooking oil choice could be an article in itself; I selected canola and olive as the two best general purpose oils based on info from CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter. You’ll need to use more oil than with Teflon, so it’s wise to get the healthiest.
Item four: once you start cooking, if you let the pan cool down for whatever reason, that’s it–game over. Unlike with Teflon, you can’t just heat the pan up again and continue. So, you need to think ahead a little more when coordinating multiple dishes. If you do try to restart cooking, you’ll probably find (as I did) that everything is suddenly sticking to the pan and scorching. The only way to restart cooking on stainless steel is to clean everything off the pan, heat it up again, add oil, and then put the food back, just like when you started cooking.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the results from the new pans are noticably better than from our old pans. And the old ones were Circulon, a pretty good brand. So even if you’re a casual cook, I’d say that a good set of stainless steel pans can make a significant difference.
Also good is that you don’t need to be concerned about scratching stainless. Want to use a fork to stir something? Go ahead!
However, inevitably you’ll be faced with the problem of cleaning, and that can be tough. To make life more interesting, we’re also trying to reduce the toxic chemicals in the house, again primarily for the budgie’s benefit. So soon after getting the new pans, I was faced with finding a way to clean burned chocolate chip pancakes off of stainless steel.
The solution: baking soda and a non-scratch scrubbing sponge, then white vinegar and more non-scratch scrubbing sponge action. That and elbow grease got the pan sparkling and good as new.
…the local CVS drugstore has jars of mole sauce.
(No prescription required.)
From CQ Politics:
Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.
The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.
OK, I confess: I have purchased and eaten falafels on several occasions. I’ll come quietly.
H-E-B advertises its food as being made ‘for Texas tastes’. I’m starting to understand what that means.
First off, spicy is good, whether it’s Mexican or Tex-Mex or Indian or Thai or whatever. I agree with this, though there are limits. For example, the new Doritos Fiery Habanero flavor exceeded my limits for snack food. Where’s the fun if you can only eat two or three before your mouth and throat start burning and you have to drink a glass of milk? That and they gave me a dose of the Brad Fitz. We eventually threw out half a bag.
On the plus side, I’ve also decided that HEB’s own brand tortilla chips are the best, much nicer than Tostitos.
Next, pecans can be added to almost everything, sweet or savory. According to the Austin Chronicle, the name comes from the Algonquin for “nut too hard to crack by hand”. However, with so many of the trees around, you can take them to a store to be shelled by machine. I like ‘em.
Also approaching ubiquity in Texas food is chipotle—or smoked jalapeno pepper. I agree that chipotle is the best option with migas, but I’m not yet convinced that chipotle hummus is appropriate. That said, I ate most of it.
Finally, dead steer. This is where I depart from Texas tastes entirely.
After several days of enthusiastic rain, the weather finally let up this afternoon. We had gone to the Spider House Café, and I’d done a good chunk of work, so when the sun came out we decided to go and see the new Zilker Park Waterfall. It seems that the Colorado river is rather beefier than usual, and is flowing over the dam in a great brown stinky torrent.
Since we were downtown and hungry, we decided to go to Z’ Tejas. We’d almost gone there once before, but had made a hasty retreat when faced with a sign saying ‘Valet Parking’. Where I’m from, valet parking means you need a personal loan to afford the appetizers.
However, it turns out that that’s not the case for Z’ Tejas. I guess you could view it as expensive by Austin standards, in that you can easily spend $30 each if you go for an appetizer and dessert. Anyhow, the food was excellent—we had enchiladas that were packed with more mushrooms than Timothy Leary and drenched in mole. Dessert was the ancho chile fudge pie, declared the second best food treat in Austin in a magazine this month. I can believe it. Who knew that adding chile to chocolate fudge would work and bring out the chocolate flavor?
Incidentally, working in small coffee houses is very feasible here. Everywhere has free wi-fi. In Austin, even Hooters has free wi-fi, I keep meaning to take a photo of the big orange banner they’ve put up to tell everyone.
I got a slow cooker. The idea is pretty simple:
In Minnesota, this is called hotdish. They have hotdish evenings, a form of potluck supper where everyone brings a crock-pot of something or other to share. That’s why our slow cooker came with a wipe-clean insulated carrying case…
In our case, the idea is less about suburban social events and more to do with a desire to eat less stuff that comes out of boxes. The problem with cooking is that when you get home, you don’t want to spend an hour or two doing it, and most recipes require fairly intense involvement. Slow cooking has plenty of recipes which require practically no involvement, and you can do the prep the previous night after you’ve eaten and rested.
People tend to assume I’m vegetarian because of some deeply-held radical belief that meat is murder. I’ve even had some friends ask if it’s OK for them to eat meat in my presence. Well, I like mammals, and I don’t think they should be mistreated, and I don’t personally feel I should eat them; but the fact of the matter is, I’m vegetarian primarily for a much more mundane reason.
I don’t like the taste of meat.
I never have done. As a child I found chicken and turkey palatable, so long as there were no bones involved. Beef was OK as long as it was flavored with something and minced up so you couldn’t tell what it was. Every other kind of meat I disliked to a significant degree, and I loathed pig meat of every variety, from tough salty unpleasant pork chops to greasy fatty salty bacon.
(You there at the back, stop drooling.)
The worst part of all was the fat, which made any kind of meat-on-the-bone sheer torture. The texture of white fat on my tongue provokes my gag reflex. My mother, of course, thought it was a ploy and that I just wanted to eat candy or cookies or something instead. Well, frankly I wanted to eat anything instead; I’d have gladly eaten sawdust to get out of having to finish those pork chops. Same goes for liver and the other disgusting animal organs that people used to eat in England in the 1970s.
My mother dealt with my reluctance to eat meat in the time-honored way of mothers everywhere: she laid a massive guilt trip on me.
There were poor families who would have been delighted to get a piece of liver like that. There were children starving in Africa who would find a feast in the scraps of meat carelessly left on that pork bone. There was no way I would be allowed to leave the table until I had eaten everything, every last scrap, and I was clearly a horrible child for even daring to think otherwise.
And so it was that I was programmed to be unable to leave food on the plate. Not even the smallest scrap. And the same programming rendered me unable to tolerate the wastefulness of an unscraped yogurt carton or a ketchup bottle being thrown out while there was still a good tablespoon of ketchup in it.
There’s a sting in the tale, though. It turned out that the behavior my mother carefully instilled in me drove my dad nuts. The sound of cutlery on plate was like fingernails on a blackboard to him, and the sight of me licking a yogurt carton lid would make the red mist descend before his eyes.
After six years in America and a lot of effort, I am beginning to deprogram myself, because an inability to leave food uneaten in America is a dangerous health hazard. A couple of weeks ago I left some food uneaten at a restaurant because I had sated my hunger. Today I turned down a portion of french fries and let someone simply throw them away. OK, I still lick the yogurt carton lids, but it’s one step at a time, you know?
On a more trivial note, a press release about French’s Mustard states:
Recently there has been some confusion as to the origin of French’s mustard. For the record, French’s would like to say, there is nothing more American than French’s mustard.
Well, I’m sure they’d like to say it. However, “New Jersey-based Reckitt Benckiser” is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Reckitt & Colman plc, a British company. Before that, it was owned by Benckiser NV, a Dutch company. I can’t help thinking that there must surely be a great many things which are more American than a British mustard manufacturer.