Monthly Archives: September 2012

09.18.12
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BALLS TO THE GRILL

And off the grill

Just walk out the door…

Enamored as I am with the ability to walk out onto my terrace and grill, I want to grill EVERYTHING.
I’ve been thinking about meatballs, but that seems like a cool weather thing — not August in the high desert — but loving meatballs as I do, I got some ground beef at the Saturday Farmer’s Market.

Why not do meatballs on the grill? My swell grill pan should make that possible, at least on the no-stick front.

My recipe files produced only one recipe suitable — Marlena Spieler’s Big Meatballs, but those are kind of boring. The others are braised, rather than fried or broiled. Better to adapt something from meatloaf. I spied two major candidates:
K-Paul Cajun Meatloaf and Sam Sifton’s Fancy Meatloaf (NYT) that he made for Nora Ephron.

The very next day the RGJ (Reno Gazette Journal, a pretty good local rag) published “Make It Easy: Meatloaf burgers look ahead to Labor Day”. How’s that for timing? The recipe is eerily similar to K-Paul meatloaf, using cooked onion and green bell peppers, lots of good spices and ketchup. I decided to go with the RGJ version; see what it’s like.

And since I still have some caul fat in the freezer, I’ll just make some of the burgers as crepinettes. I’m using grass fed Angus ground beef from Hole-in-One Ranch and that is very lean, so I substituted 1/4 pound of ground pork for that amount of beef.

Here it is, mixed up and ready to be wrapped.

The meatloaf mixture is a bit loose and moist, but certainly formable. I wrapped 4 burgers and made two plain patties, put them in the refrigerator overnight to rest and get their act together.

The next day, I got the grill going, unwrapped two crepinettes and two plain meatloaf burgers.

Ready for grilling…

I used my grill pan for its non stick qualities. Once the grill was pre-heated, I turned off the center burner and turned the outside burner to medium. They took about 15 minutes to cook to 135°F. Continue reading →

09.12.12
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"D’oh!" Fork the Noodles

I’ve been cooking a long time, and yet, just last week I learned to Fork the Noodles. “D’oh!” I said, slapping my head just as Homer Simpson does.

Those bundles of noodles, a fork, those noodles in boiling water.

For lunch — usually — I’ll cook up a bundle of noodles to go with a can of soup or a leftover this or that. The Chinese kind that cook in three minutes.

Throw a bundle in a pot of boiling water, break up the bundle so the noodles are loose in the water before you start your timer, so you don’t get clumps. Trouble is, you’re working with boiling water and those bundles of noodles don’t want to break up… they’ll slosh around under your wooden spoon, boiling water sloshes out of the pot and puts out your fire. Bad.

Those noodles and a cheap cooking fork.

One day, I grabbed a cheap cooking fork and speared the noodles with that… holds them in place while I break that bundle with my wooden spoon. “D’oh!” That’s great! What took me so long?

These particular noodles will go with a sliced leftover meatball and a can of Amy’s Tomato Bisque soup. Yum.

09.06.12
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Anatomy of an Asian Fête

Chinese Fete

When I offered to make a birthday dinner of any dish and/or cuisine, the request was for a chinese dumpling dinner for a family gathering over Labor Day weekend. Not content to roll a bunch of dumplings, boil them up, and call it good, I used the occasion as an excuse to pull together many different asian recipes that I’ve been cooking recently, or wanting to cook, and introduce the family to my obsession with trying to grok all asian cuisines after visiting China in 2009.

The thunderbolt that hit me in China was exposure to several *different* cuisines within China — saying “Chinese cooking” is just like saying “American cooking” — it depends on who is cooking, where they are cooking, and what their cultural background is. Since then I’ve studied more about the many different Asian takes on food preparations and ingredients (from India to Japan) to try to understand the things they share, as well as what made them different.

The birthday dinner audience consisted of adults and children, many of whom had traveled and eaten around the world (including the children) but may NOT have focused their attention on Chinese or asian cuisine. Also, for family gatherings, they were accustomed to straight-forward dinner menus consisting of a big plate of meat, one or two side veggies and/or starch, and a big salad for dinner.

As I indicate in the title here with the French word “Fête” this was NOT intended to be an authentic meal by any stretch. Along with the odd mish-mash of cuisines and ignorance of proper banquet service I sought to use familiar and local ingredients where ever possible: smoked salmon, instead of ham; lobster instead of crab, etc. The intention was to create a tasty meal that exposed some of the diners to new flavors and/or textures but was not completely unfamiliar, as much as to just create a tasty meal that included dumplings. I hope that I succeeded.
Continue reading →