Category Archives: Cooking and Recipes

Christmas Pasta

Christmas Pasta from Cost PlusFor Christmas Eve dinner, I like a dish which combines simple rustic flavors with little prep and cleanup. The big meal after all will be Christmas dinner. For the last couple of years, we’ve got some Christmas Pasta from Cost Plus, and whipped up some of Rachel Ray’s Christmas Pasta sauce. Takes one pan and about twenty minutes of prep, makes a big pile of sauce. Combine that with some fresh homemade bread (or good bakery style Italian loafs if you aren’t so inclined) and you’ll have a meal that will warm your heart and fill your belly.

Pot Roast Recipe, Sounds Yummy.

Stepping back from podcasting and intellectual property for a minute, I noticed that Lisa Williams posted a link to her husband’s pot roast recipe.

Pot roast is another one of these recipes that has gotten short-changed in recent years, mainly because people don’t do a very good job of it, despite the fact that it’s pretty easy. The keys:

  • Use the right cut of meat. I like chuck for potroast. It has a fair amount of connective tissue in it (more on that later) and lots of really beefy flavor.
  • Brown the meat really well. As Evan’s recipe says, don’t pepper the meat prior to this treatment. The pepper will just burn on the outside if you are browning it at the “freakin’ hot” temperature it really needs. I do put kosher salt on the outside of my meat before browning. It helps draw some of the moisture out of the surface of the meat and give it a really good brown.
  • Cook it for a long time over low heat. A really long time. A really really long time. The temperature of the meat has to come up to around 190 or so to melt all the connective tissue. That’s when pot roast becomes tender. If your pot roast is tough, chances are it is undercooked rather than overcooked.
  • Season it well. I like cumin, thyme and black pepper. Some Worchester sauce isn’t bad either. Carrots and onions will add some sweetness to the dish, which can be nice.

Damn, I’m making myself hungry. I’ll have to put one of these on this week.

Chicken and Dumplings, ala Brainwagon

It’s cold (or what passes for cold in California) and rainy today, so it’s time to cook up something healthy and delicious. Here’s my recipe (such as it is) for home-made Chicken and Dumplings, inspired by a similar recipe that I saw on Rachel Ray’s 30 minute meals. Nothing about this meal is cast in stone, substitute whatever you like.

  • Begin by putting your largest pot onto the stove and heat it to medium high. Dice a largish onion or two smaller ones, and cook those in a tablespoon of olive oil until they are translucent. Or until you get the rest of the veggies chopped.
  • The rest of the veggies are a couple stalks of celery and two carrots. Dice them up, and add them to the onions. Add a pinch or two of kosher salt. Cook until bored.
  • Chop up some boneless chicken into inch size chunks. Dump into the pot. Stir occasionally. Brown until bored.
  • Open a big can of lowfat/low sodium chicken broth. Add it in, and then turn up the heat until it begins to bubble.
  • Peel and chop two russet potatoes. Dump ’em in.
  • Let cook at a strong simmer for 15 minutes.
  • Take two cups of Bisquick, 3/4 cup of milk, and some chopped sage. Mix into a biscuit batter, which you drop by spoonfuls into the boiling pot of chickeny goodness. Dump some sage into the broth too.
  • Wait 15 or 20 minutes. Serve in big bowls with some fresh ground black pepper.

Each batch I make turns out a bit different. My wife loves this stuff. Guaranteed to make you feel warm inside. Chicken thighs actually make for a better tasting stew, but a little higher in fat. You can also add bayleaf or oregano or thyme or rosemary, whatever you like. This dish goes back to my basic philosophy of food: start with good ingredients, don’t screw with ’em too much and you’ll make something tasty.

Addendum: Cooking is a great geek hobby, with obvious benefits. Plenty of gadgets and books to buy, a modicum of science and lots of hands on work.

Burger King Corporation Threatens Those Who Return Sponge Bob

It seems that large inflatable SpongeBob Squarepants figures have been hot items in the world of petty theft. People are apparently stealing them from rooftops in significant numbers. Perhaps sending the wrong message, Burger King Corporation has been threatening those responsible for their return with a years supply of Whoppers.

A Whopper of course is about 700 calories, 370 of which come from fat. You can trim about 160 of that off by leaving off mayonaise, but you can leave 700 off by driving past, and then use that 700 to at something which is much better for you (or at least tastes better).

I shudder to think back of the day when I’d pound two of those back with fries and a large shake for lunch.

Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!

Where your host rambles and meanders through the topics that seem appropriate on a Saturday. Links from the show:

  • I use lots of command-line tools to process and convert video files. Some of the more important ones are mplayer, transcode and ffmpeg. All three are useful and powerful, but have steep learning curves. Still, for mass conversion and ripping of video files, they annoy me much less than other alternatives, and they are all open-source.
  • Mark Tilden is the inventor of BEAM robotics and also the Robosapien, a cute remote controlled robot toy with surprisingly long battery life. You can look for other Robosapien hacks here.
  • Dave Slusher uses blosxom as his blogging software: a good choice. I use WordPress, and have recently begun testing the newest version at a mirror of my text weblog. Verdict: nice, but generates illegal RSS for enclosures (multiple enclosures per item).
  • Get ready for the holidays! Try these recipes from the web:

Essence of Brainwa…err.. Emeril

Today is kind of a rainy, wet day, and I am stuck at home. My son is off doing something, and my wife is in class all day. A perfect time to cook! I was watching food porn this morning on the Food Network, and caught Emeril’s Orange Pumpkin Soup which sounded just like the thing to warm me up, so a quick trip to the market for ingredients, and the vegetables are roasting in the oven as we speak. It’s beginning to smell pretty damned good.

I’ll let you all know how it turns out.

What I Cooked For Dinner…

I can’t really believe that I’ve been blogging for over two years, and I haven’t gotten around to posting about one of my passions in life: cooking (well, eating is the passion, cooking is the skill). The inspiration for tonight’s dinner was Ming Tsai’s Ginger Fuji-Apple Chutney. I first heard about the recipe while watching my usual dose of food porn on the Food Network, and it seemed just too intriguing to pass up.

I pretty much took the idea he presented and just improvised my own version. I also made about half the amount he did. I began by sweating a diced white onion in a tiny bit of canola oil, and then added two large Fuji apples, diced and a couple of tablespoons of fresh peeled and grated ginger. A pinch of kosher salt and a couple of grinds of black pepper, and I let them warm together, then added 1 cup of cider vinegar (his recipe called for rice wine vinegar, but I didn’t have enough, so I used cider vinegar) and a cup of apple juice, and let that bubble down for 45 minutes, until all the flavors are melded. Taste it, it’s good stuff, with a great bright flavor.

Ming has great sounding potsticker recipe that mixes this chutney with ground pork and soy to make the filling for some of my favorite dumplings, but tonight I decided to use them as a topping for some thick pork chops that I had on hand. I brined them for 4 hours in a mixture of 4 cups water, 1/2 cup kosher salt and 1/2 cup sugar, and them dusted them with flour and browned them 5 minutes on a side over medium high heat. My chops were pretty thick, so they were still a bit underdone, so I put them in a 350 degree oven for 10 more minutes to finish. In the mean time I took 1 cup of water to deglaze the pan, and then mixed in 1 cup of the chutney. Ming used white wine to deglaze, but I normally don’t keep it on hand (I’m no longer much of a drinker). Ming served his with mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup, which would have been good, but I served them with fresh corn on the cob and a side salad. Drop your yummy chop on the plate and cover it with the chutney mix. It was very good. I’m writing this recipe down into my list of culinary successes.

It’s not a mystery why it is good: apples and pork are two tastes that go terrific together, and with the hint of ginger and onion, the mix is just really delicious. Eating delicious food is a good cure to having to count your calories.