Cooking thread, anyone?

[DuaeGuttae]

That's quick thinking, looks delicious. It sounds like you could use a solar oven.

I looked into solar ovens during our first or second summer here, I think, and decided against one. I’m sure I could learn to use one, but instead we’ve opted to try to cook using minimum energy indoors (bread maker, electric skillet, pressure cooker, crock pot). When something really needs oven-type heat, we have a gas grill outside that we can use. When it’s super-hot outside, though, I like to minimize how many times we open the doors during the late afternoon when the heat is most intense. Last I checked it was 102 outside. Ugh.

 

[fbelec]

102 yikes and it's only june

 

[EbS-P]

Did salmon on the grill. Half smoked, half indirect grilled.
Grill Temp was about 300 degrees. Cooked to 145 internal.

Dry brined. 2:1 brown sugar to salt for 2 hours.

Was not a great piece of fish but came out amazing. Added a Chile rub as it was going on tacos. Yes salmon tacos. Really quite good. More fishy than a traditional fish taco but it held up better to hot sauce smoke, Chiles and sweet coleslaw.

No pics sorry.

 

[begreen]

102 yikes and it's only june

Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Dallas, are all setting records this weekend.

 

[fbelec]

nice here thank god. mid to upper 70's. it's nice we can keep the windows open both i and the wife are dealing with covid for the first time

 

[DuaeGuttae]

nice here thank god. mid to upper 70's. it's nice we can keep the windows open both i and the wife are dealing with covid for the first time

I’m sorry to hear about the COVID, fbelec. I wish you and your wife both speedy recoveries with no lingering symptoms. I’m glad your weather is nice. We’ve broken all sorts of records down here near San Antonio this May and June. I’m really rooting for record rain and cool, but that doesn’t seem to be in the forecast.

We’ve been having light, fairly cool meals like peach lassi (a yogurt drink) and popcorn or salad and popcorn because it’s been so hot. I‘m defrosting some trout this afternoon, and we’ll pan cook that up tonight to eat with some leftover okra masala and rice.

 

[fbelec]

thank you. todays weather is really nice, low eighties and drying out. i don't wish the heat on anyone. if it's cool you put on a layer. if it's hot there is nothing to do but sweat.

you will be eating good in my book i love trout.

 

[EbS-P]

Cherry grilled/smoked fish trio and shrimp. Still cooking I will let you know how it turns out.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Cherry grilled/smoked fish trio and shrimp. Still cooking I will let you know how it turns out.

View attachment 296385

How did it turn out?

 

[DuaeGuttae]

My husband and I did a lot of outside work yesterday in the heat, and we had plans for a pretty simple dinner. My oldest wanted something fancier than grilled chicken thighs, and I told her to find me some recipes or come up with ideas. She suggested a butter chicken sauce, and I actually had some leftover in the freezer from some previous cooking. She also wanted grilled vegetables, but I didn’t have anything on hand that would suit. My next door neighbor, however, grows lots of peppers each summer and has a freezer full that she was recently offering me. Most are pretty hot, but she did have some poblanos, which still have heat, but less than the habaneros, serranos, and jalapeños which she also has in abundance. She let my daughter take home a whole bag of peppers, which my two daughters worked together to seed and stuff with a mixture of chicken and rice mixed with my butter chicken sauce. She then had my husband grill them a bit with some onions. They turned out really well, though some were pretty hot. We had to do some trading at the table to accommodate palates and bring out the milk in addition to the iced hibiscus tea.

 

[EbS-P]

How did it turn out?

I dry brined snapper cod and tilapia. All about. 4-5 hours. 2:1 brown sugar to kosher salt. Tilapia was almost inedible as it was way to salty. Cod was salty. And the snapper was really quite good maybe a tad to salty. Shrimp got a lemon garlic olive oil marinades.

Lesson learned- short,1 hour max, dry brine time for thin fish fillets.

Shrimp were really quite good. Ribs were better.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Yum. I love shrimp but don’t get to eat it much since two of my kids have a shellfish allergy.

I had to be out of the house today for several hours this morning—watering the garden during drought, helping the neighbors with something, running an older child to the library, picking up milk. When I came home my nine year old had finished making cookie dough. My husband had advised her to replace “shortening” in the recipe with butter since she had no idea what “shortening” was. Other than that she did it on her own.



After the dough had chilled, she rolled all the balls. I helped her a little with placement on two stoneware pans, and I took those in and out of the oven for her since her arms are a bit short for that yet. She then rolled the cookies in powdered sugar.

She was very proud of herself, and I was very proud of her.

We have plans to have a taco party tomorrow, having our two music lesson instructors over for dinner. My music students helped me make tortillas today. The nine year old made the corn tortillas (with a bit of help). The twelve year old made the flour dough, but I rolled the tortillas for him. The nine year old also cooked just about all of the tortillas for me. Tortillas are a lot of work, but teamwork helps.

 

[begreen]

Getting kids involved early in cooking is a great life skill for them. Bonding over baking is a wonderful way to do this.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Getting kids involved early in cooking is a great life skill for them. Bonding over baking is a wonderful way to do this.

I like getting them to help with cooking. I’m less of a baker than I am a cook, and we try to avoid using the oven much during the high heat, but I figure it’s good for kids to learn their way around the kitchen at a pretty early age.

The nine year old was grumpy Friday afternoon, so I got her engaged in helping me make guacamole. She peeled the onions and the garlic for the food processor and pitted and scooped the flesh out of the avocados. We used the recipe from her cookbook. The recipes in it are good food with mostly real ingredients (not lots of processed shortcuts). I recommend it (and the sequel) for little cooks. (We originally found the second at the local library but liked it so well that we put both books on her Christmas list.)

Amazon product

 

[DuaeGuttae]

We had a yummy dinner of marinated grilled chicken tenders for dinner tonight along with grilled eggplant and zucchini and steamed rice. I used this recipe for inspiration for the marinade, but I doubled it in order to have enough for the vegetables as well. I replaced the Italian seasoning with fresh basil and oregano an added some extra garlic. I was very pleased when my teenager asked what we had done to the chicken because we had taken it to the “next level.”

Grilled Chicken Tenders

These grilled chicken tenders are marinated in lemon, garlic, herbs and olive oil, then grilled to golden brown perfection. The ultimate easy main course for summer time! Chicken tenders are inexpensive, quick cooking and are perfect to toss on the grill.

www.dinneratthezoo.com

 

[Poindexter]

@EbS-P in particular and everyone in general, what I have found brining salmon is salt penetrates faster and further then sugar.

If you have a brine, regardless of proportion and time, that works for the people you feed regularly, stick with it.

Depends on your schedule too. I often brine salmon (overnight) in 4 parts sugar to one part salt, rinse in the morning and lay out on drying racks while I am at the office, and then smoke them when I get home.

With four kids and the wife home I came up with a sugar/salt balance and time that worked for everyone I was cooking for back in the day. There are probably as many brine recipes as there are Alaskans to write them. I have tried many. My conclusion is, if the underlying sugar/salt balance is good, you don't need juniper berries or eye of newt or any of the rest of it, but if the sugar/ salt balance is wrong, no amount of nutmeg or lemon or dill weed is going to save it.

I have no experience brining other fin fish, that is expert level kitchen magic right there.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

My nine year old was again inspired by her cookbook, and today she wanted to make polenta. The recipe called for instant polenta, however, and we weren’t even sure what that was. She pulled out the adult cookbook, therefore, and found a recipe that used simple cornmeal and cooked that. I made a meat sauce with veggies and herbs from the garden, and it made for quite a hearty lunch.

 

[Poindexter]

@DuaeGuttae , you might take a look at this one next time you are in a big book store like a B-N or a Borders. My mom gave me a copy, I have given copies to both my nieces and three of my cousins. Between the (counts on fingers) seven of us, we have never made a recipe from here that was bad. We do often tweak the herbs a little bit the second time through, but that is artistic license.

I cannot know the reading level of your children. When they are ready for this one, let them have free reign. When they have worked their way through this with all the why, why, why to go with the few recipes in it they will be ready for Julia Child and Thomas Keller. Be advised, similar to Joy of Cooking, there is a first (butter) edition and a later (hydrogenated soy margarine) version. The butter version is readily available on Amazon.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

@DuaeGuttae , you might take a look at this one next time you are in a big book store like a B-N or a Borders. My mom gave me a copy, I have given copies to both my nieces and three of my cousins. Between the (counts on fingers) seven of us, we have never made a recipe from here that was bad. We do often tweak the herbs a little bit the second time through, but that is artistic license.

I cannot know the reading level of your children. When they are ready for this one, let them have free reign. When they have worked their way through this with all the why, why, why to go with the few recipes in it they will be ready for Julia Child and Thomas Keller. Be advised, similar to Joy of Cooking, there is a first (butter) edition and a later (hydrogenated soy margarine) version. The butter version is readily available on Amazon.

View attachment 296822

Thanks, Poindexter. We check that cookbook out of the local library periodically, though I’ve been the one to use it rather than my children for the most part. I also check our local used book store for it from time to time. (We don’t really visit new bookstores.) I haven’t found it yet but did get a copy of The Quick Recipe cookbook that’s in the same vein. I hadn’t realized that there were two different versions with butter vs. hydrogenated oils, so I’m really glad that you pointed that out to me. I think our library must have the butter edition, so it never occurred to me that there would be a different one.

I know that some people don’t appreciate the “why, why, why” as you put it, but that’s precisely what I love about the cookbook. I think I’ll try to make a point to get it at the library again when I next make a trip. My nine year old can certainly handle the reading, and she’s the one looking through cookbooks these days.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

When I went to town last week to pick up our milk at the farm co-op, I went by the library and got out two books from the cooking section, The New Best Recipe cookbook that @Poindexter suggested earlier, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. I haven’t looked at it too closely, but my daughter has been reading it a lot. She’s sitting on the couch right now reading about (the author’s not so) “scientific terms for browning stages of sugar.” She’s really enjoying it. I might have to see if I can do some reading in it, too.

It’s 10:30 in the morning and already up to 98 degrees. My daughter wanted to bake cookies today, but I’ve said that we should really avoid the oven. We did put a loaf of bread in the breadmaker, and we’ll have sandwiches for lunch. We’re thinking of making ice cream or popsicles instead of cookies.

 

[Poindexter]

A cousin of mine really likes salt, fat, acid heat. He is a much better cook that I. Have fun.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

This week has been pizza week at our house. I made six crusts on Wednesday. We had two for dinner that night, three for dinner last night when we had a guest, and one for lunch today. The only photo I got was before they went in the oven last night.

These all had tomato/eggplant sauce, bacon, mozzarella, mushrooms, and onions. The only difference was the peppers. The top had a ripe jalapeño, the bottom left shishitos, and the bottom right a sweet banana pepper.


Today’s lunch pie had some leftover pesto for the sauce instead of tomatoes. It was a big hit, too, though I didn’t taste it myself.

 

[Poindexter]

Why are you canning potatoes?

This question was asked in the garden thread, but the answer is actually a recipe. Imagine you got a heat wave coming, so you move some of your canned stuff from the cellar to the fridge.

After a long hot day you are very hungry, you don't want garbage food and you don't want to cook anything to heat up the kitchen either. Remove from the fridge a half pint jar of canned fish, sockeye salmon in these pictures, and a pint of hot packed white potato in half inch dice.

Pour all the fish into a mixing bowl, break it up with a fork into pieces about the size of canned tuna. Or whatever size. Drain the liquid off the potato, add the potato cubes to the mixing bowl.

Tonight I diced up about a golf ball sized piece of dill pickle, seven green olives, about two tablespoons of caper and about a tablespoon of pickled jalapeno, all from open jars in the fridge. About a third cup of mayo, also from the fridge, a little black pepper, maybe a pinch or two of dill. I do go back and spatula out all the goodness from the wall of the fish jar once I have the mayo into the mixing bowl.

I threw in a handful of shelled pistachio not long ago, I liked it. Hardboiled eggs can be refrigerated. Sky is the limit, pine nuts, green onion, whatever you like. I just want it cold and nutritious.

Mix it up. Eat.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Ok, so it’s precooking. I had never heard of somebody canning potatoes before.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Ok, so it’s precooking. I had never heard of somebody canning potatoes before.

My mother always grew lots of potatoes. She had a whole section of the basement devoted to Irish potatoes and another one for sweet potatoes. We ate them all fall, winter, and spring, and she used them as seed potatoes for the next year.

She did, however, always can some of the potatoes. She didn’t dice large potatoes. Those she kept on the basement shelves in the dark. The smaller potatoes that hadn’t matured by the time she harvested, though, she canned whole in jars. She would then add them to peas or beans or stew or sometimes fry them up whole in a cast iron skillet with her homemade butter. I don’t know why, but I remember calling those “starchy potatoes” and I just loved them. I think part of my motivation for learning to pressure can was just to be able to can those smaller potatoes as she did.

I’ll have to check with her about it, but I think the little potatoes don’t keep as well in root cellar conditions. Perhaps it’s the surface area to volume ratio, but I think they dry out faster than the large ones. Because she grew such large crops of potatoes, she did have a bunch of small ones in her harvest. This was a good way to preserve them for longer.