What I learned today (Take Two)

Good grief, I've never heard of that before. I have cooked a lot of fish on cedar planks on the outside grill. For family and guests, never gave it a thought. Scary!

[Jenise]

Thanks, Larry. I've used cedar planks many times in the past with no problem and am not a particularly cautious person. But welts like that after such brief contact? Never experienced anything like that in my life so can't just laugh it off.

I would imagine the cedar plank affects only the skin, which I presume you don't eat.

You and I now know about welts--with your cedar and my Eliquis.

Many years ago I took an anti-depressant called imipramine. And soon after I started having oddly-shaped, puffy red, itchy welts showing up on my arms. Eventually, I figured out that the shapes came from leaning my arms on the table. So, I tried writing on my arm with my fingernail and sure enough... itchy puffy red writing appeared!

Fast forward... many years later I read that the drug was not to blame... it was the dye used in the coating!

So, Jenise, have you changed meds lately?

[Jenise]

Nope!

[Jenise]

Yesterday I learned that British jam/jelly brand Mackay makes a lemon/orange/grapefruit combo marmalade like the one from Toronto I fell in love with only to realize that I had bought what could have been the last jar in Canada (Smuckers bought the brand, then snuffed it). Today I learned that it's very very good. In flavor and texture seems very close to the Toronto brand, delivering the complex suite of bitter flavors I so liked about the other.

Last night, I learned that it is actually possible to bring a bag of potato chips to a potluck that has such a nasty flavor that most of the bag will be left at the end of the potluck. I never would have thought this possible, but someone brought a bag of Torres Tapas fried egg flavored potato chips to our block party. Torres makes high end potato chips in other flavors such as smoked paprika, truffle, and caviar. Those all sound good or at least potentially good. The fried egg ones......not so much. There must have been at least 50 people at the party and around 3/4 of the bag was left at the end of the night.

Jenise - that marmalade sounds very nice.

[Jenise]

Mike, I love the Torres plain Olive Oil ones but the others I've tried, like the Jamon and Truffle versions, tasted too artificial.

My friend and I each once bought bags of street-corn-flavored tortilla chips (might have been Tostitos). The first bite tasted okay and incredibly corny, but with additional bites we both overdosed on super-duper doses of artificially flavored CORN! Neither of us could finish our bags. I crushed the leftovers and fed the birds. And I can still remember the overpowering taste. A word to the wise.

I learned sometimes even farmers don't know what they have. At market Betsy bought some green garlic, told me not to use thinking baby leeks. Last night's plan was steamed lobster with a side of pasta with green puttanesca. Went to make, discovered the green garlic was in fact baby leeks (she confirmed she had confirmed at the stand).It was ok, we used regular garlic (option in recipe)
A great favorite recipe we've made dozens of times, we just double or triple the spinach (and do half the pasta).

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/101 ... puttanesca

[Jenise]

Isn't it annoying when produce people don't know their product? This week I pointed out to a produce guy that what they called pickling cucumbers (a bin, loose ones) were actually Persians. No, they're pickling, he said. THOSE, he pointed to some in bags but otherwise identical, THOSE are Persian (because it said so on the bag). Wrong I said, a pickling cucumber is typically a variety called Kirby and they're thicker skinned. Have you ever made pickles, I asked? No, he shook his head.

Then take my word for it, I said, pointing to both piles) these are both Persians, thin skinned like baby English Cucumbers.

NO, he said, they can't be, these are pickling cukes because we order pickling cukes and this is what they send us!

That recipe looks great, Dale, and a bit frustrating as we've had green garlic at our Sunday market for the last several weeks. Unfortunately, I'm out of town this weekend and I'm betting that by the time the next market rolls around, the green garlic will be gone.

[Jenise]

I spent the last couple days down on the Columbia River Gorge, one of the most interesting wine growing regions in the world. I mean, where else can you go from wet, cool climate (pinots, chardonnay) to dry, warm climate (syrah, nebbiolo), and from lush green forest to golden scrub, without changing elevation and in less than 50 miles? It's an astonishing place. And quite beautiful. I wish it were easier to post photos here. Anyway, while there we had Mexican food in a town with a strong hispanic population and I had a very unusual chile relleno. The friend I was travelling with has run into this, but I had not: instead of the foamy egg white batter we're used to (and I still prefer), the chile was wrapped in a very thin blanket of egg yolk batter. And I do mean thin, maybe 1/16th of an inch. It was no less delicious though I have to admit I'd prefer the other.

Is it my computer, or has this subject not been posted on since June?

[Jenise]

The latter, apparently!

[Jenise]

Fun read (on Substack) from Jeremiah Tower about the origins of the famed Stars burger. But never mind the burger, the photo of the fries had me drooling.

https://jeremiahtower.substack.com/p/th ... irect=true

This past week, I learned that applying baking soda to shrimp along with salt and sugar and then letting it sit in the fridge for a while may result in plumper, juicier grilled shrimp. I was following a Kenji Lopez-Alt recipe on the Serous Eats site in which he has you prep the shrimp in this manner prior to grilling them. You double-skewer the shrimp before sprinkling them with the dry stuff and then give them at least a half hour in the fridge (I gave them more like two hours). After that, you brush them with garlic-infused olive oil, grill them, and then give them a good dip in garlic-lemon-olive oil. The ones I did came out beautifully. They were plump, juicy, flavorful, and pretty much the consensus stars of a very good meal. I didn't run a control batch without the baking soda, so I can't say for sure that it improved things, but I'll never do grilled shrimp any other way in the future.

Interesting, Mike! I've heard of using corn starch to improve fried foods, of course, but not grilled ones. I'll have to go read up.

I fried up a nice ham steak, slathered with Koon Chun Plum Sauce on both sides. I love plum sauce on ham, and I imagine it would make a good BBQ sauce for pork ribs.

[Jenise]

Speaking of ham (Larry just did), today I learned to trust not just my memory but my instincts. It's probably been three years since I last made a Jamon Persille, but I remember that it was the best I've ever made and my idea of perfect. I was fairly sure that I wrote it up and saved it to future use, but couldn't find it. I also remember that I used a Florence Fabricant recipe as a baseline but deviated from it enough to make it wholly my own. I remember no other details than that the wine group I took it to LOVED it.

So I downloaded a FF recipe from the NYT. The ingredients looked mostly right, HOWEVER, it calls for baking the finished terrine which I'm sure I have never done with a Jamon Persille. It also only called for 2 packets gelatine to 2 cups liquid, and my experience with gelatine based terrines is that a stronger bond is better--I literally always use more. Moreover, if you bake, heating will exude some liquid from the meats + shallots diluting the gelatine-to-meat ratio which would make the 2:1 ratio even weaker. BUT I thought, I *do* remember loving it...so I obeyed.

And put it into chill, and came upstairs looking for something else and went, Wait, did I look here? for that recipe?

And there it was. And? No bake. And 2.5 packets gelatine to two cups liquid. Everything my instincts said was right. I'm now terrified that the result is going to disappoint. Don't look, Karen, but F word F word F word!

Larry is a ham? I kinda always thought so.

Larry is a ham? I kinda always thought so.

Yep. Back in my young days, KN3NTV, when I used Morse code.

[Jenise]

Last Thursday I stopped at an Asian market on my way home from Bill's. And me who never eats sweets fell for something called Butter Pastry Bread. It looked like pound cake, but was two perfect 4" squares of the most incredible texture I may have ever put in my mouth. It was similar to angel food cake but much much finer in crumb--no air holes at all--and it ate dangerously light--not dense at all, and was just as moist on Day three as it had been the day I opened the package. And yes it tasted of butter, and only barely sweet.



I must never buy this again!