and now for something completely different

I very rarely cook with beef. I do a lot of cooking with chicken, I cook fish regularly, and I do some vegetarian cooking. But beef hardly ever. Not that I am opposed to beef. Anyone who knows me well knows that one of my weaknesses is a Double Double from In-n-Out. And if I’m in a rush I will even stoop to driving through McD’s and getting a quarter pounder with cheese.

I do have higher aspirations, and I appreciate and value the ideal of vegetarianism, but, as my blog friend the Boston Pobble once commented on one of my blog posts, “I have said for a couple years now that I am morally, ethically, and emotionally a vegetarian ~ but my taste buds are complete carnivore.” That captures it.

The folks over at the Yahoo! group Pressure Cooker Recipes have no vegetarian pretensions and love their beef and pork. One recipe that gets periodic mention is 3 Envelope Pot Roast, developed by Ray, the list owner. The recipe got considerable mention last week and I thought maybe it was time to try it. It involves one envelope each of Ranch, Italian, and Beef Gravy mix (Yes, I know! Don’t talk to me about the sodium), red wine, and water. Being that yesterday was Mother’s Day and we didn’t want to go out for dinner, given that we were getting tired of chicken, and given that we both had a mother or grandmother who made post roast that we loved when we were growing up, we decided to try it.

So we went to Rocca’s Market on Saturday and got a nice 3-pound roast and potatoes for mashed potatoes.

I made one bonehead mistake and forgot to press Start after entering the time, which  cost us a half hour. Aside from that, the result was great. I thickened the juice for gravy and we had a good, old-fashioned meat and potatoes dinner on the china that belonged to Terry’s Granny. Terry’s initial reaction: “Mmmm! Mmmm! Mercy!”

A fitting Mother’s Day tribute to our mothers and grandmothers.

Thank you, Ray.

kitchen appliances I haven’t bought

Since I’m discussing kitchen-related matters this week, here’s one more item on that topic.

I love our kitchen and I enjoy using our kitchen appliances. What I find interesting is the appliances I haven’t bought.

I haven’t bought a food processor. I’ve thought about it, but I just don’t really need one. A lot of the food processor functions our VitaMix can handle. And if it’s just a matter of chopping vegetables, I’m happy to pull out the cutting board and a knife and do the work by hand. Though tempted sometimes, I can’t really justify spending the money.

Another thing I haven’t bought is an immersion blender. Again, the VitaMix can handle many of those duties. Still, it’s very tempting to have a tool where I can mix the ingredients while cooking on the stove top. Of course the question I would have there would be: do I get a small, dainty immersion blender, or do I get one of those big, honkin’ industrial kitchen sized ones? Or more likely something in between?

Yes, the immersion blender is tempting. I’m looking as I write this at a 20% off any single item coupon from Bed Bath & Beyond. And there’s that money from the sale of my camera equipment. Hmmm…

Any suggestions on immersion blenders?

new in the kitchen

It’s been a while since we’ve bought a new kitchen appliance just for the pleasure of having and using it. We’ve had to replace our dishwasher and microwave, but those were both a matter of necessity, not an indulgence. In fact the last time I bought a new kitchen appliance for the fun of it was in October 2010 when I bought a digital electric pressure cooker, a great addition that still gets lots of use.

Last week my blog and Facebook friend, the Tahoe Mom, published a blog entry in which she shared a number of events of her week. One was about the new juicer she got. That got my attention and I asked her for more detail. She graciously obliged with an entire blog post on the juicer.

Unlike Tahoe Mom (whose blog, by the way, was responsible for my pressure cooker purchase), I have had a citrus juicer for a very long time. The Cuisinart juicer I’ve been using we’ve had since shortly after we moved into this house, which was 1997. Nor is it the first juicer I’ve owned. But the reality is that I have spent most of that time fighting with it. It would twist beneath me, drip on the counter, and I would have to clean out the pulp half way through when squeezing orange juice. As much as I love fresh-squeezed orange juice, I would groan just a bit when Terry asked for it.

So Tahoe Mom’s discovery looked like just what I needed, and I promptly ordered my Black and Decker Model CJ630 from Amazon.

I’m delighted. It is solid. It doesn’t fight me and twist beneath my hand. It has blades to sweep up the pulp so I can squeeze two glasses of orange juice without stopping to clean it. It has its own container so it doesn’t drip on the counter. And it has a lever so you can specify how much pulp you want. When it comes to lemons, it is not a huge pain to clean out the lemon seeds as it was with the Cuisinart.

I’m pleased. I’ll be squeezing a lot more fresh orange juice on Saturdays, I think.

Quite a deal for $17.99

gee I’m disappointed

Make that: GE, I’m disappointed.

When we did our kitchen remodel in the summer of 2007 we had to make a decision on appliances. We certainly wanted quality, but weren’t necessarily prepared to pay for Wolf or Sub-Zero type quality. We decided to go with high-end GE. We bought a refrigerator (a brand new model), stove top and convection oven, and microwave. Our KitchenAid dish washer was in good shape so we didn’t need to replace it. (Except that our contractor failed to properly anchor it when reinstalling it, so we had to replace it later anyway. But I digress.)

What we thought was quality was not. Earlier this year we noticed the microwave had paint peeling inside. Obviously we had to replace it. Then, two weeks ago, the compressor went out on the fridge and had to be replaced. You can imagine the inconvenience and loss of food involved with that. Fortunately we had a service contract so our cost was limited to that food loss.

The range has been great and I love it. But one out of three isn’t good.

GE, I’m really disappointed.

improvising

I’ve always been a big fan of improvisation. When I was in college I was regularly in attendance at the performances of Karma Pie, the Claremont Colleges improv group of the era.

On the old TV show Smooth Jazz Television, host Cameron Smith’s signoff was “Life is a lot like jazz…it’s best when you improvise.”

That’s how I am in the kitchen. You may remember a few years ago I bought a netbook computer (remember those pre-tablet things?) and expended a great deal of effort to digitize all of my recipes and put them into Living Cookbook on the netbook. But really, I am not a recipe kind of person. I’m like the improv performer who takes a word suggested by the audience and runs with it.

Saturday I wanted to do something different for dinner, so I pulled out the netbook. I went to the chicken section and saw Basque Chicken. I noted that the main seasoning was smoked paprika. I ignored the rest of the recipe and shut down the computer. I then put together a chicken dish of my own making that used smoked paprika. But it worked. Terry loved it.

I’m not an actor or a jazz musician, but in the kitchen I improvise much more than I follow the script or the score.

getting organized

Terry and I use a lot of spices in our cooking. We love our spices, so when we did our kitchen remodel one of the items on the top of the list was a built-in spice rack. It came out exactly the way we wanted, and it gets lots of regular use, as you can imagine.

Yet for all those spices in our built-in rack, we still have a lot of overflow in the kitchen cabinet. A lot of that is small jars, thanks in large part to the samples we get with virtually every order from Penzeys Spices. The lack of organization has been mildly annoying ever since our kitchen remodel, and last weekend I decided to do something about it.

I thought I would just get a lazy Susan, but Terry told me that there was a spice rack that had pull-out drawers which looked like it would organize things very nicely. We looked it up on the Bed Bath & Beyond Web site and it was right there: the Spice Stack. I went over to our local BBY (as we call it) and they had them in stock. In comparing it with the other spice racks in the store, it looked to me like the right item for the job. I brought it home and in no time I had made order out of chaos.

I love it when a simple solution provides so much benefit.

recipe ennui

I was going to call this entry "cooking ennui," but it really isn't that. I still love getting into the kitchen, putting on the apron, and rolling up my sleeves. If I think of something to cook, or Terry asks for something, or an improvisation pops into my mind, I'm totally there.

What I can't get into is pulling out the netbook and finding a recipe to follow. Or getting all those backlogged recipes into the netbook. My backlog is actually worse than it was in January.

I'm not going to stress about it. Perhaps the great food on our Alaska trip will get me back into the recipe thing.

always something to learn

I've been baking bread for a while now. I thought I was doing well at it. One habit I had was that if I was in a time crunch I would often give short shrift to the first rising. A few weeks ago, though, I mixed the ingredients and Terry and I went out to have lunch. It ended up, therefore, that the bread had an unusually long first rising. It came out much lighter than anything I'd done in a while.

I'm sure any experienced baker would look at me and say, "Well, duh!"

Just reminds me that there's always something new to be learned.

fish

Terry and I enjoy having fish as a regular part of our diet. Getting good fish, though, is tough since we lost Poppy's last June. The fish in our local grocery stores is less then stellar. I thought Safeway frozen fish might be an option, but our recent experience with that is that is has an "old" taste to it.

We were delighted when Whole Foods opened a store in south San Jose, very much on our way home when we're up in that area. But results there are mixed. We got some sea bass that had an old taste to it, though the last halibut we got was quite good. Up in Los Altos there's Andronico's, which always has good fish. That's very close to Terry's health care professionals and is on her way home when seeing her San Mateo County and North Bay customers.

On Saturday we went over to Capitola to pick up Terry's custom pendant (turned out wonderful!), so we buzzed down to Moss Landing and the famous Phil's fish market. We got scallops and shrimp (which Terry turned into a marvelous dinner) and halibut which I sealed up and froze for, probably, next Saturday.

So there's options. But getting good seafood just isn't as easy as when we had Poppy's around.

getting things done

I thought I got a lot done during the holiday shutdown. I did, really. And I spent time relaxing and recharging as well. But somehow, getting recipes from our magazines to our kitchen netbook didn't happen. What once was caught up is now a big backlog. sigh Oh, well. We'll get there. (And let's not even mention all that vinyl I've intended to digitize.)