Cooking
gregladen | December 23, 2008I like to cook, and I am good at it and know something about it. So I therefore am somewhat attracted to certain information streams including, for instance, Lynne Rossetto Kasper's "The Splendid Table" on National Public Radio. (Although this show comes out of the Twin Cities, Kasper and I have only crossed paths a couple of times, and very uneventfully. Some day I'd love to actually talk to her. I have some questions about garlic.)
But I have some issues related to cooking and elitism. Gourmet cooking is an elitist activity, and a large share of the cooking enterprise in general in the…
sporte | November 27, 2008Thanksgiving is a holiday (in the U.S. at least) when we're all reminded about the things we're thankful for. At our house, we're thankful for the opportunity to cook all day and share a meal with friends and young adults.
And, even though I haven't given my turkey an IP address, this is still a meal that deserves some documentation.
Here's the turkey soaking in brine. That large pink tongue belongs to our dog.
Don't worry, we stopped her before she had a chance to stick her tongue in the brine, but she is a master of making the best of an opportunity.
Here's the turkey, out of the…
sporte | November 27, 2008Our household is very excited about Thanksgiving.
That's because this Thanksgiving, my husband is cooking a turkey in an egg. A big green egg.
Check back later today, about 5:30 pm, Pacific Standard Time, to see a picture of the turkey. In the meantime, here are some other items that were cooked in the egg.
We've had:
Ribs
Fish
Zucchini
Pizza
If you can cook it in an egg, he will try it.
I used to be the primary cook in our house, but that's all changed since we got the egg. Now, my husband cooks everything, just to see how it will work.
But, now I've learned from Make…
gregladen | November 23, 2008... a culinary repost.
You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple.
You are going to need the following:
A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour. You can use special fancy dancy flour if you want, but that is not necessary.
Several cups of a…
gregladen | November 10, 2008You have time but time can go by very quickly and suddenly Thanksgiving is upon you. This repost from one year ago may help you plan your turkey-day meal.
My daughter, Julia, is named after two people. One of them is Julia Child. I happen to think Julia Child has had more influence on American society than most other people, by helping to make varied and interesting cuisine part of American culture.
One day when Julia was a very young child (my Julia, not Julia Child), I was out walking her in her carriage. I turned the corner around the Van Serg Building on the Harvard Campus and…
greengabbro | September 1, 2008 It might be Labor Day, but summer isn't really over until the blackberries are gone. Since it's harvest season and I'm still on leave from the workforce, I've been spending my time figuring out clever things to do with the bountiful produce of my neighborhood's back alleys. (Tonight: lemon verbena drops and blackberry meringue pie.)
Hoping to bring a little more order to the proceedings after a failed blackberry fish sauce, I cracked open Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, written by one of the gurus of high tech haute cuisine, Hervé This.
This explains with charming prose…
gregladen | February 16, 2008
The Best Possible Hot Sauce
I believe that the hottest hot sauce you can get without a permit is Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce. It is also one of the best tasting.
That is an unsolicited product endorsement. If you think differently, fine, but you have not tried it so don't be so sure!!!
Why do I mention this?
Because every now and then I eat some (very carefully) and am reminded that everyone else must know about it. A few hints:
Don't handle this sauce directly. Do not let children near it. Shake well before opening. Shake a small amount into a container, and mix that with some…
gregladen | February 13, 2008Can you believe this guy? Check it out:
The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once proposed that humanity began with cooking. [a Twin Cities anthropologist] says love may have begun with cooking, as well.
...
The earliest human ancestors, some kind of chimp-like apes, were living off raw plant foods and probably doing a bit of hunting like chimpanzees do now.
And then, somebody discovers the ability to control fire. Everybody argues about when this happened. We're saying it happened about 2 million years ago. Suddenly, all this food that was previously poisonous or indigestible…
sporte | December 4, 2007How do you use science outside of the lab?
People say that transferring knowledge and skills from one subject to another represents one of the highest levels of learning. They also say that it hardly ever happens. Perhaps this explains some of the more astounding things that we hear from Nobel Prize winners, like when Francis Crick proposed that Earth was settled by sperm from outer space, or when Watson, well, we'll leave that subject alone for now.
I admit, I don't always think to apply my scientific training to things that happen outside of the lab. When those moments do happen, I relish…
gregladen | November 19, 2007You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple.
You are going to need the following:
A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour. You can use special cooking flour if you want, but that is not necessary.
Several cups of a liquid such as stock.
Some…
gregladen | November 13, 2007My daughter, Julia, is named after two people. One of them is Julia Child. I happen to think Julia Child has had more influence on American society than most other people, by helping to make varied and interesting cuisine part of American culture.
One day when Julia was a very young child (my Julia, not Julia Child), I was out walking her in her carriage. I turned the corner around the Van Serg Building on the Harvard Campus and practically ran into Julia Child, who was walking in the other direction on her daily constitutional.
"Oh, what a cute child," she said. (And she was a cute…
gregladen | November 12, 2007I find it absolutely fascinating that scientists often bother to estimate the effects of diet by feeding controlled quantities of food, especially plant food, to rats to see what happens.
For example, there is a common substance in cooked food that, if fed in even modest quantity to rats, causes the rats to get cancer and die in no time. This raises concerns for humans because, well, the rats died. So the substance must be "bad for you."
But this approach to nutritional science, and the reasoning that goes with it, is deeply flawed.
Now, you may wish to jump in and say, "No, wait,…
retrospectacle | April 7, 2007I've become a bit more interested in cooking lately, I suppose because of its similarity to performing an experiment. You have reagents (ingredients), follow a protocol (recipe), and have have both positive and negative outcomes (hopefully delicious!). The recent discovery of Cooking for Engineers has also peaked my interest since it often frames cooking in chemical or mechanistic terms, replete with how-to and pictures for the visually-inclined.
This week I've gone out on a limb and made a couple of my favorite, yet kinda weird, dishes. These include Tom Yum soup (Thai coconut lemongrass…