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By Jeeves, posted January 27th, 2012, at 10:00 am
By Jeeves, posted January 21st, 2012, at 10:00 am
By Jeeves, posted January 20th, 2012, at 10:00 am
By Chile Doctor, posted January 19th, 2012, at 11:30 am
This entry is part of a series, F4F 2012» 
Yep, it’s a new year, and time for some fish dishes! Gotta get warmed up, Lent is just around the corner…
We’re in the middle of crab season, and plenty of restaurants are offering tantalizing meals to entice you to spend your smackerels on their, er, mackerel. (Sorry, that slipped in there somehow. The Elves won’t let me remove it, though.) You can make their dishes at home, though, and save on the cost and the hassle of going out into the cold, cold winter to satisfy your shellfish cravings.
Here’s a way to make Devilishly Good Deviled Dungeness:
- 2 pounds fresh Dungeness meat, picked over to remove any last bits of shell and cartilage; refrigerate on ice
- ¼ cup minced yellow onion
- 2 ounces light olive oil or clarified butter
- 4 tablespoons flour
- 1½ cups milk (low-fat will do; skim won’t); more or less as needed to make a nice white sauce
- 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
- 1 teaspoon salt
- A couple dashes each of ground white pepper and cayenne pepper powder
- A few drops of hot sauce (Crystal, Bufalo, Sriracha), to taste
- 2 eggs, beaten in a small bowl
- 2 tablespoons chopped parsley (flat-leaf preferred, though I like the taste of the curly stuff)
- 2 tablespoons melted butter
- 6-8 tablespoons breadcrumbs (Italian work well; Panko are a nice variation)
Heat oven to 350° F (180° C). In a large skillet, sweat the onion in the olive oil over medium heat. Blend in the flour and cook for a couple of minutes to remove the floury taste. Add milk gradually to make a white sauce; cook over medium (or medium-low) heat until thick, stirring constantly. Don’t rush this step or you’ll get onion-flavored glue!
Add the lemon juice, Worcestershire, salt, pepper, cayenne and hot sauce to the beaten egg and stir a bit. Work the egg mixture into the white sauce, stirring constantly over medium-low heat to prevent scrambling the eggs. Add the parsley and crabmeat; blend well. Place the crab mix into small, greased ramekins (4-6 ounce capacity). Blend the butter and breadcrumbs and sprinkle across the top of the deviled crab. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown and delicious.
Depending on how big you make the portions, this can serve as few as six diners or as many as twelve (an early course portion for a nice dinner party). Or you can eat it all yourself and blow your diet completely away…
Enjoy the (Fish 4 Friday Returns) Heat!
By Chile Doctor, posted January 18th, 2012, at 11:30 pm
I’ve got a short cookbook about ready for publication. Not as a paper item, though; for the Amazon Kindle. I’m trying that out first, to learn the ropes and see how it goes. Once I know more about exact publication date, etc., I’ll let you know so you can get a bajillion copies and vault me to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, where I belong. In the meantime, get ready to bake! This one will be the about the world’s easiest baked dessert. That has a funny name. That you’ve probably never heard before.
But one that’s so easy and tasty you’ll fall completely in love with it…
Enjoy the (More Books) Heat!
By Chile Doctor, posted January 17th, 2012, at 10:30 am
This is the time of year when way too many of us are thinking Diet. Unfortunately, too many of us are looking for a quick fix; the gym’s such a drag, and actually eating less is even worse.
Which means, some folks are trying things that are stupid, dangerous or both. Okay, the raw food diet isn’t that bad, and the article says so. However, multiple injections of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) sounds bad, and since the long-term effects of this compound are unknown, it’s potentially dangerous. The master cleanse sounds terrible, both in flavor and outcome. I could do the cabbage soup diet for a day or two; I like cabbage. I’d have to go live out in the doghouse for a few days, even with Beano to help.
The last two ideas sound really dreadful. Ear stapling? There’s no scientific evidence this works. But if you want to mangle your head flappers, go right ahead; you probably don’t even need my permission. You can always talk about it as a piercing that went bad, when the grandkids ask. And the Breatharian Diet? This one’s been known forever; it’s called Hunger Strike…
Some Like (Dieting) Hot!
By Jeeves, posted January 16th, 2012, at 10:00 am
By Chile Doctor, posted January 15th, 2012, at 5:00 am
It’s cold weather, most places. Soups, stews and the like are great, filling fare for those who have to do anything outdoors. Families where everyone goes to work or school can benefit from a cooking method that doesn’t require a lot of watching. Combine these ideas and you naturally turn to the slow cooker, like the Crockpot shown above. Heck, I used to have three of them myself; different sizes for different situations.
They’ve been around for decades now, these crock-lined cooking machines. Yet many folks don’t have a clue how to make a great-tasting meal in one. Or they got scared off when they thought you could only make soups and stews in one. So, to help educate the masses so’s they can live more nutritiously, here are five sites that provide tips and techniques for using a slow cooker. Most also show recipes.
The top ideas I see? How ‘bout this one: To extend cooking times, make the dish up the night before and refrigerate the whole shebang, right in the crock liner. Place the crock in the heater and turn it on low. It’ll take a while to bring everything up to temperature, so your meal won’t finish up in the middle of the afternoon and get too soft by dinnertime. Don’t do this if your crock liner doesn’t come out! You’ll short out the machine with condensed moisture and burn your house down. That’s considered poor slow cooker technique.
Brown your meats first, if you have time. The meal will be good without this step, and better with.
The admonition not to peek is, frankly, a crock. A quick lift of the lid lets out a quart or two of moist air, and doesn’t measurably lower the temperature of the food. The heat capacity of the food, and especially of the liner, will bring the headspace back to temperature in minutes, once the lid’s been put back. Just don’t leave the lid off for a while, okay?(I’ve done the study, thermocouples and all; I’m a thermochemist in another life, and I understand heat capacity.)
As for a slow cooker that pulls a vacuum: Ha! How silly is that? If your pot pulls a vacuum while hot, you’ll never get it open again once it’s cold. In fact, if you inspect the engineering closely, you’ll see that these devices have air holes and other features to specifically prevent sealing and allow steam to escape, slowly. The difficulty you may have opening the crock is likely from moisture from the dish, or sticky sauce that’s worked its way up on the liner’s top ledge. But vacuum? Hardly.
So now you know. Go forth and cook well (and slowly) …
P.S. I know it’s not Friday; but the Elves couldn’t wait! They’re so excited about this new Underground feature. Hope you are too! – The Management
Crank Up the (Crockery Cooking) Heat!
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