Kitchen Hygiene & Food Safety Temperatures

March 26th, 2012 by admin | Posted in Food Safety | Comments Off

Kitchen Hygiene

You should learn and practice good kitchen hygiene:  separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables, cleaning cutting boards which have touched raw meats with boiling water or a weak bleach and water solution, and taking care to clean your knives and hands after working with raw meat and before turning right to the salad. E. coli or Salmonella can be unpleasant in the young and healthy, and deadly with the elderly, the very young, and people with compromised immune systems. You should establish habits in the kitchen that will minimize accidental contamination and prevent the movement of bacteria from meats and eggs to vegetables.

Food Safety Temperatures and Times

Years ago, a doctor friend told me that there was basically no such thing as what we commonly call the ‘stomach’ flu:  it’s food poisoning.

To prevent this, many cookbooks and cooking authorities encourage the overcooking of food: sacrificing texture and flavor to err on the side of safety. If you take care with your food and your kitchen safety habits are in place, overcooking food in this way is unnecessary.

The old rule of thumb is that cooking food until the core temperature is 167 °F / 75 °C (or above) will ensure that harmful bacteria are destroyed.

But, the temperature at which harmful bacteria are destroyed can be lower, provided the core temperature is maintained for a specified period of time. Read the rest of this entry »

A Smoking Thanksgiving Feast

March 26th, 2012 by admin | Posted in Cooking Techniques, Smoking | Comments Off

Smoking Ducks, Turkey & Fresh Kielbasa

Thanksgiving this year was quite temperate here in southern Vermont. I took advantage of the milder than usual temperatures to fire up the smoker and prepare meats for our Thanksgiving table, as well as for a gumbo we were planning for later in the fall.

Smoking takes much of a day, so if I’m going to spend six or seven hours tending a small fire every twenty minutes or so, I’ve taken to filling the smoker with meats. I also tend to keep a guitar and a good book close by.

In the time it would take to smoke just 18 lb. turkey, I prepared two ducks and a couple pounds of fresh kielbasa, knowing I’d freeze most of what came off the smoker for future meals. Read the rest of this entry »

Pistachio & Wasabi Encrusted Tuna

June 13th, 2010 by admin | Posted in fish, meals | Comments Off

June 13, 2010:  A dinner for two

Seared Pistachio & Wasabi Encrusted Tuna

Garlic Scapes, Snow Peas and Baby Spinach

Pan fried Ziti with Feta and Kalamata Olives

This meal began as I was making room in our freezer for nearly twenty pounds of fresh pick-you-own strawberries. Something had to go.

Pulling out a couple of flash frozen tuna steaks, eyeing the bowl of pistachios on the counter, and knowing that, if we’re going to get garlic out of the garden, we’ll have to keep it from going to seed, and that we had snow peas ready for picking…these thing all conspired to determine the menu. With the pan fried ziti (a planned leftover from the fridge), the easiest and final piece of the puzzle fell into place. Read the rest of this entry »

Shrimp & Grits

February 3rd, 2010 by admin | Posted in fish, meals | No Comments »

Scott’s Smoked Jalapeno Shrimp & Grits

Many of my meals begin with an ingredient.

This Christmas a 24 oz. jar of “Smokin’ Dave’s All Natural Smoked Jalapenos” turned up under the tree. The thought of opening a 24 oz. jar of these babies and having them sit around in the fridge for months gave me pause. But, seizing the, um – jalapeno – by the horns, I opened the jar this week.

Amazingly rich and smoky, these jalapenos packed in vinegar were really HOT.

So, having returned from Charleston and the low country of South Carolina with a bag of stone ground yellow corn grits and a couple of cases of Blenheim’s Hot Ginger Ale, I decided to work up a version of the classic southern Shrimp and Grits. Read the rest of this entry »

Ceviche

July 21st, 2009 by admin | Posted in Cooking Techniques, fish | No Comments »

The process of ‘cooking’ fish or shrimp in a citrus marinade is ancient and still common in Central and South American coastal communities. Lime, lemon, grapefruit and bitter orange juices are employed to denature the proteins in fresh halibut, mahi mahi, sea bass, flounder, shrimp, octopus, squid, tuna and mackerel.

Traditional flavorings vary by region and can include salt, onion, chiles, avocado, coriander, parsley, cilantro, hot and sweet peppers.

This citrus pickling of fresh seafood can take from a few minutes to several hours, depending on the fish chosen and the thickness of the cut. More delicate fish like flounder or other white fish may be served after a brief period of marinating, while octopus and squid may take as long as 3-8 hours, depending on how they are cut and prepared. Read the rest of this entry »

Bert’s Coffee Cake

December 22nd, 2008 by admin | Posted in bread | No Comments »

Every year Barb makes these coffee cakes from a recipe she got from her sister-in-law, Sally Boscaljon.   Every year people ask her for the recipe, which she gladly shares.   The thing is,  it’s hard to explain in just words how to put this together, so here’s an illustrated recipe!  (The extra set of hands belong to Barb’s son Jesse who was part of the first-ever Bert’s Coffee Cake Ring! Read the rest of this entry »

Gabe’s Cooking Audition

October 6th, 2008 by admin | Posted in meals | No Comments »

This comes from my youngest son, Gabriel….

Gabe’s Cooking Audition

On Tuesday August 19, 2008, I was scheduled for a cooking audition between 3:00 pm and 6:00 pm at Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery, a local establishment in Chapel Hill, NC. I had no idea what ingredients I might face when I walked through the door.

My instructions were as follows: prepare two servings of one appetizer, one salad, and one entree. And in the three dishes I had to use the ingredients I was given at least once throughout the courses. My ingredients were:

1. Salmon
2. Bratwurst
3. Strip loin (the vein-y end that no one wants to work with)
4. Shrimp
5. Red Onion
6. Poblano Peppers
7. Artichokes
8. Chopped Precooked Bacon
9. Butternut Squash

I played with several ideas for each of the dishes. The salad was the first one that was set in stone, while the other two flipped around a bit. I settled down and set to work. Read the rest of this entry »

Cod with salsa, Brussels sprouts, black beans and tortillas

July 4th, 2008 by admin | Posted in fish, meals | No Comments »

A delicious meal prepared by our guest chef Eric Goodenough:

Cod with a topping of sautéed onions, red bell pepper, chipotle*, garlic, olive oil, freshly toasted and ground cumin, sea salt, fresh cilantro, one diced ripe tomato and juice of one lime.

Served with Brussels sprouts, sliced in half, cooked flat edge down in a pan with butter, rice, black beans and handmade corn tortillas from a latino market in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The black beans were cooked with minced onion, toasted and ground cumin and ground cinnamon and cured lemons.

*A chipotle is a dried smoked jalapeño. Put it in a dry pan and heat it up. This softens it and allows you to get the seeds out. For more heat, you can leave the seeds in.

Dried Mexican Chiles

July 4th, 2008 by admin | Posted in cool ingredients | No Comments »

Cooking with Dried Mexican Chiles

For a long time, afraid of the heat, I was shy about cooking with Mexican chiles. Then I learned that if something is too spicy hot, one can calm it down – not with yoghurt, or potatoes, or cream, but – with sweetness. Experience teaches us that you can dilute all you want and all you’ll wind up with is a LOT more of something that’s too spicy. Sugar is your safety valve when it comes to playing with fire.

Whether it’s dried cranberries or apricots, raisins, sugar, you can tame a dish that has gotten away from you, if you’ll just allow yourself to partake of one (or some) of the sweeter things in life. (Consider striking a blow against your Calvinist upbringing; you know who you are.)

Science: The Scoville Scale

Chile peppers are hot (or more accurately, piquant) to the extent that they contain ‘capsaicin,’ a chemical compound that stimulates chemical-neuro receptors in the skin and more especially mucous membranes of the body.

Wilbur Scoville’s original (1912) method for rating chile peppers was to dilute a solution of the pepper extract with sugar water until the “heat” is no longer detectable on the tongues of a panel of (usually five) tasters. The degree of dilution determines a chile’s score on the Scoville scale. Higher the dilution necessary, the hotter the pepper. Read the rest of this entry »

Chipotle-Bourbon Pork Chops near Retsoff, NY

May 20th, 2008 by admin | Posted in Road Food | No Comments »

One Sunday evening in early May, while preparing to perform in the schools of this Rochester, NY region, I literally stumbled upon the chock full parking lot of the Yard of Ale restaurant.

A full parking lot out in the middle of nowhere is a fine recommendation for a restaurant. I pulled into the lot and joined the other patrons inside. The dishes I walked past looked hand made, interesting, well-proportioned.

The special that caught my eye that evening was a Chipotle-Bourbon Pork Chop with crispy onions, garlic mashed potatoes, beans and summer squash.

I started the meal with a local beer and an optional caesar salad (a real caesar salad, by the way: anchovies obvious in the dressing and optional on the salad itself…the best caesar salad I’ve had in years). Read the rest of this entry »