Category: Cooking Misadventures

A meat, a starch, a veg…

Posted on by John R

…and not a single thing in need of a recipe…

Sometimes you just need a simple meal, and with a sous vide setup steak is very, very simple.

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Black vinegar and beer marinade

Author: John R Courses:

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a zip-top bag. Add meat of choice. Remove as much air as possible and close the bag. Place in the refrigerator for 8 hours (or overnight).

This recipe1 was inspired by a post on Grillax. I used my version of the marinade in order to flavor three New York steaks (they were strip steaks, but they were not labeled as New York Strips. Don’t start ME lying). I put the steaks in the marinade and let them soak overnight, then patted the steaks dry and put them into a fresh freezer bag in the water bath with the immersion circulator set to 136.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

The beauty of sous vide is that it’s not realistically possible to overcook2 something3 in the time frame of a day. I put them in the water back before starting work, then pulled it out after work. I heated up my cast-iron griddle rocket hot and cooked each of the steaks for about 45 seconds on each side, turning once in order to get the cross-hatched grill marks.

The asparagus was simple as well. I cut about an inch off each of the spears, then sprayed the griddle with olive oil and cooked until they were slightly charred. I topped the spears with a little bit of lemon juice, and it was delicious.

The starch…well, it was supposed to be risotto. It was cooked like risotto, with beer in place of the traditional white wine. However, it was just…off. The texture wasn’t right…and it finally dawned on me what was wrong:

I had used Calrose rice. Traditional risotto is made with Arborio or Carnaroli rice. Calrose, Carnaroli…po-tay-to, po-tah-to…

pinit
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Collected Recipes

Mexican rice (sopa seca)

Author: John R Cuisine: Courses: Recipe Keys: R rice

Description

From the thirteenth edition of the Fredricksburg Home Kitchen Cook Book, published by the Fredricksburg Parent-Teacher Association’s Cook Book Committee in 1996. Recipe is attributed to the first edition of the book (1916) and to Mrs. Herm. Goldschmidt. 

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Place lard in a pan and heat to the smoking point. Add rice (dry) and stir until it browns gently. Add tomatoes and other ingredients and stir until tomatoes soften, then cover with enough water to swell rice and cook until soft on a slow fire. 

Note

Serve with chili and beans, or fried sausage.

Since I didn’t really give you a starch recipe, I dug into my archives and found an interesting one. Michelle and I were in Fredricksburg, TX in the second week of October 20174 for a quick vacation. We stopped at an antique store and found a copy of this cookbook, which I just had to have as a souvenir of this trip. I pulled this off my bookshelf because it looked interesting, but little did I know that the recipes in this book were provided with the original edition they were printed in. The recipes aren’t indexed by ingredient, but as far as I can tell this is one of only a couple rice recipes, so it seemed appropriate to include this one5.

Thoughts:

1) I thought it was pretty good, though I wasn’t particularly happy with the “risotto”.

2) My tasting panel compatriots disagreed, however. They thought it was quite good.

3) I did not tag the marinade as “gluten-friendly” because of the beer, and I would not have tagged the “risotto” recipe either, but the member of the tasting panel with gluten sensitivities did not have any issues with it.

Verdict:

Taste: 8/10. It’s REALLY hard to mess up this steak preparation, and the asparagus came out well. I’m probably being too hard on myself regarding the starch.
Availability: 7/10. I don’t keep strip steaks and asparagus in the fridge on the regular, but they’re not hard to find at the store.
Story: 8.5/10. Save my brain fart confusing Calrose rice and Carnaroli rice, there wasn’t much of a story to be had. Finding the Mexican rice recipe from 1916 was amazing though.

Administrivia:

Still behind on blogging. I’ll try to get one more meal posted today, and then I’ll only be two behind. One of those two will be something that isn’t complicated enough to get a recipe, so I’ll just need to find something with the key ingredients in one of my pile of cookbooks.

  1. https://grillax.com/ultimate-beer-marinade/ ↩︎
  2. In before someone from the peanut gallery says that I overcooked the steaks by taking them to that temperature. ↩︎
  3. Of course Serious Eats would have something to say about that. See https://www.seriouseats.com/food-lab-complete-guide-to-sous-vide-steak ↩︎
  4. Bonus points if anyone can guess why I know for SURE that’s when we were there on vacation. ↩︎
  5. This is one recipe I feel compelled to convert to the rice cooker and try out. ↩︎

No, no, Elder Cunningham…

Posted on by John R

…but there ain’t no fuckin’ way we’re sticking to the “approved dialogue”.

This recipe experiment brought to you by the absence of unnecessary Crisco.

Yes, seriously.

I had planned on cooking one thing, but as of 5:30pm, one ingredient I thought I needed hadn’t arrived from Amazon – Crisco1.

At that point my brain went into overdrive — what can I cook from what I already have? I went looking through the fridge, and I found some of the leftover Mojo pork from the other night. I had gotten some boxes of coconut milk on my most recent trip to the grocery store, so my mind snapped to some sort of ad-hoc pork and coconut milk curry.

I had also purchased some okra to make a Caribbean coo coo to use as the base of something, and the fresh okra wouldn’t hang around forever. It wouldn’t be traditional, but coo coo often is made with coconut milk instead of water or stock…it could work.

pinit
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Collected Recipes

Spinach-stuffed squash

Author: John R Cooking Method: , , Cuisine: Courses:
Difficulty: Beginner Cook Time 45 mins
Servings: 6

Description

From the cookbook “Louisiana Entertains: A Complete Menu Cookbook”, compiled by the Rapides Symphony Orchestra of Alexandria, LA in 1978.

Ingredients

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Trim ends off squash, then boil whole until barely tender, about 10 minutes. Halve lengthwise and scoop out centers. Chop up the centers with the spinach.

  2. In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter. Sauté green onions until wilted, then whisk in flour to make a roux. Whisk milk in slowly, stirring continually, then cook until thickened.

  3. Add spices to thickened sauce, then mix in the spinach/squash mixture. Spoon mixture into the squash shells on a baking sheet, then top with cheese and bacon. Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Do not adjust your monitor – this is not a mistake recipe2.

Ordinarily this is when I’d post the recipe references, but when a recipe goes THIS wrong, I’m making the executive decision that the recipe sites don’t want to be associated with what I did3.

I started with about 1 1/4 pounds of leftover pork. I put it in a saucepot with two quarts of coconut milk, half-a-dozen makrut lime leaves, and 3 bay leaves to simmer while I focused on the coo coo.

In my research I had found a few coo coo recipes, and a few Instant Pot polenta recipes, but no Instant Pot coo coo recipes. That shouldn’t be a big deal – coo coo is just polenta with some other stuff sautéed and cooked with it. I set the Instant Pot to sauté, then cooked the onions, okra, and poblano peppers (I can’t leave well enough alone with anything).

Looking at the Instant Pot polenta recipe, it mentioned two ways to cook it: one that is the “normal” way, and an alternative way to get around the “burn” error.

Dear reader, I had purchased the Instant Pot in December. Surely a brand-new Instant Pot wouldn’t be susceptible to that sort of error.

I confidently put the uncooked coarse cornmeal into the Instant Pot along with the cooking liquid, locked the lid in place, turned it on to high pressure for 11 minutes and waited for the preheating to finish.

beep, beep

“Burn” error. I removed the lid, stirred things around, reset the lid, and put it back to cook on high pressure.

beep, beep

FUCK!!!

I grabbed the pot out of the Instant Pot and poured it into a Dutch oven on the stovetop. The bottom was coated with stuck cornmeal that I wasn’t able to get out with a simple scrape of my wooden spatula.

By this time I was overly frazzled. I was loosely following a recipe for the curry, but I forgot some important ingredients. I also forgot to make a slurry with the cornstarch, so all I got were lumps. Meanwhile, the coo coo never cooked out all of its liquid, so it was more like porridge than polenta.

Thoughts:

1) Making things up didn’t turn out as well for me as they did for Arnold.

2) The tasting panel tried to cheer me up, saying that the pork curry was good. There was no salvaging the coo coo though.

3) Five minutes really CAN make a huge difference4.

Verdict:

Taste: 2.5/10. I didn’t make anyone sick. The pork was OK on its own, but the entire dish together was barely edible.
Availability: 8/10. I could see the curry working with any chunks of leftover meat, and a trip to the local Asian market can get you a variety of pantry staples that work for this. The only difficult part for me was the okra in the coo coo.
Story: 9.5/10. If nothing else, I needed to prove I’d post when my cooking adventures left a LOT to be desired.

Administrivia:

I have the two recipes that were the basis for this bookmarked. I will try them again at some point to give them a fair shake.

  1. I’ve never cooked with Crisco. I’ve never thought I needed it for anything. Now that I realize that I don’t need it for that one purpose, I’m not sure that I’ll ever use it. ↩︎
  2. This is, in fact, a recipe I’ve cooked several times before — one of a handful that are in cookbooks that I remember enough to be able to find instantaneously. It just has nothing to do with the dish I was attempting to make. ↩︎
  3. I was planning to post a photo of what I cooked. Evidently I forgot, which is bad for storytelling but good for preventing scarring reminisces. ↩︎
  4. I went downstairs to start menu planning at 5:30. I had come up with the basic idea and headed back to my office upstairs to start looking for actual pork and coconut milk curry recipes by 5:35pm. When I got back upstairs and checked my email, I had a notification that the Amazon package had been delivered. ↩︎