Beginning the low-salt journey

A week ago my car­di­ol­o­gist put me on a low salt and restrict­ed liq­uids diet. Yes­ter­day was my first trip to the gro­cery store since this life-chang­ing event, and I have to say I’m both depressed and frus­trat­ed by the lim­it­ed options avail­able to me and the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans like me who need to reduce…

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Gravy — the real Mother (and Father) sauce

Clas­si­cal­ly trained chefs, please stop read­ing this col­umn now. OK, you’ve been warned. In clas­sic French cook­ing there are five moth­er sauces, as first set forth by Marie-Antoine Carême and lat­er revised by Auguste Escoffi­er: Béchamel, Velouté, Espag­nol, Toma­to and Hol­landaise. These are called moth­er sauces because they’re the start­ing point for hun­dreds of sauces. James…

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Uncle George and the (Pepper) Dragon

A Christ­mas tra­di­tion in my wife’s fam­i­ly is to serve oys­ter stew on Christ­mas Eve, with the men doing the cook­ing. For years, this task fell to my wife’s Uncle George. One year he was hum­ming along, the oys­ters had been but­ter poached, the milk was near­ly hot enough, and he reached for the ground…

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Published:December 7, 2016 View Post

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The Butter Did it–The Art of Reading Cookbooks

Most peo­ple have a few authors or gen­res that they pre­fer to read, often read­ing the same book many times. I’m fond of the nov­els of Tom Clan­cy and Jean Auel’s Earth­’s Chil­dren series, for exam­ple, as well as the Emma Lath­en mys­ter­ies series and the works of Ayn Rand. But I’m also fond of reading…

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My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 4

It’s day 4, the last day of Choco­late Boot Camp. (Most Choco­late Acad­e­my cours­es are three days long, but this is a four-day course, because there’s so much mate­r­i­al to cov­er. Click here to read the report on Day 1 and Days 2 and 3.) Today we need to fin­ish every­thing, and there’s a lot…

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My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Days 2 and 3

Day 2 of Choco­late Boot Camp start­ed out pret­ty much where day 1 left off, tem­per­ing dark choco­late. (Here’s Part 1 of this series.) On the table in the morn­ing, using the seed method in the after­noon. I fig­ured out what I did wrong with my seed method batch on Mon­day, I mis­read the scale, so I…

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My Week at Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 1

Choco­late is some­thing I’ve dab­bled with over the years, cov­er­ing home made can­dy (espe­cial­ly sponge can­dy) with milk choco­late, for exam­ple, but I real­ly did­n’t know any­thing about work­ing with choco­late, much less mak­ing items that would look pro­fes­sion­al­ly made. Well, to cor­rect that, I recent­ly attend­ed the course called ‘Choco­late 1.0 — Dis­cov­er­ing Choco­late’ at…

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Cooking an Eye of Round Roast

If you do a search on how to cook eye of round, one of the most com­mon­ly sug­gest­ed meth­ods is to pre­heat the oven to 500, salt and pep­per the roast, drop the temp to 475 and cook it for 7 minutes/pound, then turn the heat off and let it coast for 2 1⁄2 hours…

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Published:August 24, 2016 View Post

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The Cutting Edge or How Sharp is your Knife?

Take your best knife out and look at it close­ly. How sharp is it? Prob­a­bly not as sharp as you think it is. Here’s one of my favorite knives, a 7 1⁄2 inch Chi­nese cleaver: Looks pret­ty sharp, eh? Let’s look at it a bit clos­er, at about 3X pow­er: Still look pret­ty sharp? Let’s try it at 150X power:…

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Published:July 16, 2016 View Post

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Delicious Liasons — the Science and Art of Thickening

Lia­son. The very word con­jures up images of entan­gle­ments, and well it should, since it comes from the French verb lier, to bind. In cook­ing, a lia­son is some­thing added to a liq­uid, like a sauce or a soup, to bind or thick­en it. There are two basic kinds of liasons–starches, like flour, and pro­teins, like egg. Both…

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Vinagrettes — Traditional and not-so-traditional

The text­book def­i­n­i­tion of a vina­grette is a sus­pen­sion of an oil and vine­gar, an acid, pos­si­bly with oth­er sea­son­ings in it. Some­times, depend­ing on what you add, it becomes an emul­sion rather than a sus­pen­sion. (A sus­pen­sion usu­al­ly sep­a­rates, requir­ing it to be stirred or shak­en again, an emul­sion does­n’t, because there’s an emulsifier…

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Published:June 13, 2016 View Post

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No Garlic, Please!

“Hel­lo, my name is Jeff, I’ll be your serv­er today.” “Hi, Jeff. My wife has an aller­gy to gar­lic, can you tell me what’s safe for her to eat?” “Gee, I’ll have to check with the kitchen, what are you inter­est­ed in?” “Can you check on today’s soup, on the fish, on the chick­en and on today’s spe­cial?” A…

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