Thursday, August 28, 2014

Three cooks is perfect

W toasted the English muffins, J shepherded the poached eggs and Canadian bacon, and I made the hollandaise.

I'd found a recipe online from a Name cook because I didn't want to rely on my usual winging-it proportions. This had to be Perfect for this summer brunch we were concocting for three adults and two children. Unsalted butter, more egg yolks than I usually use, and less lemon. I'll remember it because the proportions were perfect. W thought it needed more lemon, being used to my flight-by-seat-of-pants versions so I'll keep that in mind too, but J and I were happy with it as is. I also broke all eight eggs for poaching into a dish and dumped the entire collection into the poaching water without breaking a single yolk -- pat pat.

This all started with J wanting to know how to save a curdled hollandaise, which became the excuse to treat ourselves to Eggs Benedict. Of course, there being about a tenth of a degree of difference between Hot Enough to Thicken and Hot Enough to Curdle, it DID curdle, and I did have to scramble to save it, beating it madly while adding cream, but the point was demonstrated and we had velvety smooth thick hollandaise in the end.

That was fun. I think Collaborative Eggs Benedict will probably become a tradition for End of Summer brunch, rotating roles each time.

The reason all this is particularly a big deal for me is that before I had my hip replacement I couldn't stand at the stove long enough to make hollandaise sauce.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Good Green Beef

I seem to be on a Foodie thing. Was recently remembering how, many many years ago, I went into a small neighborhood grocery store in the upscale part of town looking for a good steak from their butcher counter. It had to be a special occasion but I don't remember what. The butcher recommended a piece of steak in the display case that looked...green! Well, faintly greenish at least.

I expressed consternation.

He told me they are best that way and I'd never find one as good in the supermarket because people don't know about the finer points of aged beef and will only buy them when they are red. Hm. Well, I thought to myself, maybe he's right and why would he want to sell me something bad? This IS a really good part of town and wealthy people come in here all the time and see the meat in the case, so ... he's got to be right.

Long story short: I bought it, I cooked it, I ate it and it was the best steak I've ever had. Tender, juicy, tasty meat, seared on the outside, pink on the inside. I've always remembered that experience every time I've bought red steaks at the supermarket. But I never went looking for greenish steaks in spite of the fond memory of that one.

Fast forward some, oh, forty-five years or so. Thinking about it again recently reminded me that a friend had gone through a phase as a butcher many years ago, so I decided to tell him the story of my experience with the greenish steak and ask him what he thought. Well, there went a pleasant memory. He reminded me of all the training he'd gone through learning how to "break down" a carcass of beef (meaning divide it into all the familiar cuts), how to age the meat, how you have to use the best grade of meat to do it right, how his butcher shop had customers who would buy the whole animal and let the shop age it properly for them. They hang it at 33 degrees for a few weeks, sometimes wrapping it in linen cheesecloth. You have to remember, he said, that it's rotting, that's what aging is. Well, that kind of takes the glamor out of it right there. It does make for tender tasty beef though, he added.

BUT, he said, NO, you do not want green meat, that means it's gone bad, that's not just aging, that's bacteria. That butcher obviously just wanted to sell a bad piece of meat and I'm lucky I didn't get sick from it.

Oh dear. Well, I know he knows what he's talking about BUT. That steak was SO good I can't bring myself to believe him entirely. It spoiled a nice memory though and I probably won't ever have a greenish steak again.

Ripe Fruit

I usually shop at Smith's, a habit that started when I was working in the neighborhood, and now find it hard to break just because learning the aisles of a new store is more than my lazy self wants to take on. Well, there is a bit more to it than that. Smith's has the biggest collection of electric carts for the handicapped of any store in town and I need it because of arthritic hips and knees. I can still push a basket, basically using it as a prop, but I can't really do a big shopping trip that way so I do appreciate having a cart. But of course all the people in town who need a cart go to Smith's for that reason, so if you don't get there early enough all the carts will be in service already, and all the handicap parking spaces will be gone too. I hardly ever get a handicap parking space though I do usually snag a cart. A few times I've had to wait for one.

Walmart has put many of the other local stores out of business, even the chain stores. Maybe that's a bad thing but I'm not entirely sure. Safeway went a couple years ago, before that Scolari's, Albertson's was replaced by Sak N Save. I'm not sure why Smith's has held on because they really aren't that good a store. Produce especially is low quality.

Despite having to push a basket at Walmart, and the fact that the store is ten times the size of Smith's, I'm usually glad for the occasional trip there just because their produce is GOOD. High turnover is the reason, they say, but honestly, if Smith's made the effort to have good produce they'd soon have the high turnover. I remember about five years ago when they happened to have a wonderful stock of ripe peaches. Wonderfully perfectly ripe, you could smell them from aisles away. The produce section was mobbed with people getting them in huge bags, and I was one of the mob. If they kept getting good produce they'd keep getting the mobs, I don't know why they don't know that. Good ripe peaches are a luxury around here. Too many stores, not just Smith's, get them too green and they just rot instead of ripening. But a ripe peach, yum! It will last a few days in the fridge and it's such a treat.

Because my car wouldn't start a few days ago I got a ride to Wal-Mart with someone who was going there, one of those rare trips, and again I was reminded that they have good produce and again I think how I should make the effort to go there more often, knowing I don't because it's too much of a hassle. But for that occasion I was happy. Yes, even peaches, not fully ripe yet but you could tell they were going to ripen instead of rotting because they were yellow, not green, in the stem well, and they SMELLED like ripe peaches. Oh joy. Then the strawberries -- red on the top of the container and red on the bottom too! They are often as much as 50% yellow or white at Smith's. But today no rotting ones either, smelled like... ripe strawberries! Oh joy and a half! Oh and then the asparagus! Smith's doesn't even get much asparagus any more and when they do nobody wants to buy it. And big fat red tomatoes! And ripe mangoes!

Why am I writing this? Maybe it's that small pleasures can make up for big bad moods. At least I can dare to eat a peach. As long as my fruit fly trap is working as well, this is Sheer Happiness.

Smarter Than the Average Fruit Fly

Every summer the little pests invade my kitchen.  All it takes is an apple core in the trash or maybe even a lone piece of peel left in the sink.  Or maybe they are misnamed and the asparagus ends, the avocado pit and the potato and carrot peelings are just as enticing to them.  The summer heat does the rest and I soon have a cloud of them writhing over the sink. 

You can off a few of them by clapping your wet hands in the middle of the cloud, but that's a pretty inefficient method.  So every year I consult the wisdom of the internet for advice on how to get rid of them.  I'm never very convinced of the advice -- vinegar? -- so my attempts to apply it are rather halfhearted and I don't stick it out very long.  I usually end up just taking out the trash and subjecting the kitchen sink, garbage can and garbage disposal to extreme sterilization, which eventually works.

But this year I decided to give the internet advisors a better trial, and ended up combining a few of the suggestions into one. Burning incense and sucking them up into a hair dryer or a vacuum are methods of extermination mentioned but I decided to go with the baited trap instead.  Rotting fruit and apple cider vinegar are the main lures suggested on the web but also wine and beer.   So I started with a small bowl of water with a splash of apple cider vinegar in it, absurd though the idea of catching flies with vinegar strikes me.   Not really believing it would work I added a pinch of sugar and a tiny piece of apple and felt more optimistic about it as a lure.  It's not clear if the flies are to drown in the liquid or be killed by its toxicity or what, but I started with water assuming maybe the former and not wanting to waste my cider vinegar.  The advisors also tell you that dish soap will kill them, and that they can't detect it, so I added a drop of that too.  One suggests cutting off the corner of a plastic bag and rubber-banding it to a glass of your chosen lure, the idea being that the flies will be drawn down into the hole, attracted by their sense of smell, and not be able to find their way out, not being terribly bright.  My adaptation of that advice was to cut a small hole, about a third of an inch or so, in the middle of a piece of clear clingy plastic wrap and stretch it tight over the rim of my little bowl.  Left it on the counter near the sink.

Nothing happened the first day.  The second day I had about four flies dead in the liquid.  A couple days later there were a dozen, a few days after that over twenty and now after a couple of weeks the count is in the forties. 

The method works. 

What I'd like to know now is which elements of the method work.  Does the vinegar really lure them?  Could I dispense with the sugar and the apple piece?  I'm pretty sure of the dish soap and I'd rather poison them than have them drown, perhaps a misguided mercy.  Is the plastic wrap necessary or would they dive right into the lethal mix without it?

Later: It's now about a week after my last report and the liquid is so cloudy I can't see the flies at the bottom of the bowl.  But one thing for sure is that they aren't writhing over the sink any more.  I guess I could throw out the cloudy water and start over but why mess with a good thing?  I think I'll wait to see if the kitchen remains free of them before making any changes.  Not being up to conducting the scientific experiments necessary to finding out if there is a simplest most streamlined trap, since I know this combo works I'm going to keep this recipe for now.