Tag: food

A fantastic story: how Andrew Hyde Hosted 138 Dinners in a Year

I love this. Andrew Hyde made a decision. He decided

to cook dinner for people. A year later I’ve hosted 138 dinners. The average dinner had 14 guests which means I’ve made 1932 dinners for friends and strangers.

I highly recommend this post of his describing it:  Dinner At My House (How I Hosted 138 Dinners in a Year) by Andrew Hyde. It makes me want to try and do something similar.

Thoughts on bread making, technical (tips for new bakers from a new baker)

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I’ve been planning on making bread for…well, years. I made it decades ago, but for various reasons, I never got back into the habit of making it. The last time I tried was after I picked up the book “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day” and hoped to jump on the no knead bandwagon. But the boule I made wasn’t very good and the book and my bread making went back on the shelf.

Two things happened to me recently to give it another go. First, I found a new copy of “The All New Purity Cook Book”. This book is the one I grew up with, and it is heavily oriented towards bread making. An old cook book, but a great one. Second, I wandered into a store and found a Black and Decker refurbished bread maker for a $29. I decided it was time to try making some bread again. You can see my results above. (And yes, the shapes are off, but hey, I am learning, just like you will be!)

Veteran bread makers won’t learn much from my notes below, but new bread makers might. Things I learned:

  1. Of the three approaches, the bread machine is the easiest. Not surprising. What I also learned is that the no knead and the traditional way are also not so hard. But the bread machine is still simplest. If you are feeling a bit courageous, skip buying the machine and try the other methods.
  2. I had fresh flour and fresh yeast: both are cheap, and if you aren’t sure how fresh yours are, I suggest you get some new stuff. Stale yeast and flour that is old and off will make it hard if not impossible to make good bread.
  3. I used to fret over water temperature and air temperature when I used to make bread, but this time I relaxed and just made sure the water was not hot and not cool, and didn’t worry if the temperature was 110F or some exact measure. It still worked. Likewise, for a warm place, I just stuck the bread in the microwave to rise. It was fine. I didn’t have to worry: the house wasn’t drafty or cool, but the microwave works well if it is drafty or cool in your place (or you have excessive AC, maybe?) Of course, don’t turn on the microwave while the dough is in there.
  4. My bread maker made a lot of noise at first and moved around a fair bit on the counter. Be careful not to have it too near the edge, and if all bread makers are as noisy as my refurb, don’t put it on before you go to bed.
  5. There’s not much to making bread maker bread, but follow the instructions. I made an exception for seasonings they wanted to add to the bread. I skipped those. But when it comes to water, oil, sugar and salt, flour and yeast, stick to the recipe.
  6. It didn’t call for it, but I brushed some butter on the bread after I took it out of the oven. It looks better in my opinion.
  7. As far a the five minute artisan bread, I messed it up the first time I tried it today. I tried it again, though. First, I halved the ingredients in the book for the master recipe. This was fine. Second, the trick to blending the flour into the water is to measure out the flour and slowly add it before you add more. The first time I more or less dumped it in and the dough was very difficult to work with. Also, the water ratio they use seems to be a bit slight. There’s always more flour then I can blend. I ran luke warm water, wet my hands, then mixed the loose flour in. It took me a few goes at this before I managed to incorporate all the loose flower into the dough. Without that extra water from my hands, I couldn’t get all the flour blended.
  8. The other benefit of halving the ingredients is that you have less bread in your fridge. It takes very little to mix up a new batch and my fridge is small and I don’t have room for all the dough they make with their recipe. If you are the same situation, chop the recipe quantities in half.
  9. The authors of the no knead bread recipe stress kosher salt: I used plain old table salt and it worked fine.
  10. Other than the things I mentioned, the no knead approach works great and the bagette I made was delicious: slightly chewy on the outside and nice a tender on the inside. I like the bread maker, but if you wanted easy bread, I highly recommend that book.
  11. Finally, I did the traditional approach and made the challah bread. There’s a few more steps, but it’s still really easy, right up to the part where you braid it. The braiding is not easy but the recipe itself is easy: you just need time.
  12. Rather than type in the recipe I used, I recommend this recipe because of the highly detailed description of how to braid the bread.  My recipe had all the same ingredients and steps. Two exception: 1) in my recipe, after the dough has risen for 1.5 hours, I punched it down to deflate it and then formed six equal sized dough balls. And then I covered them and let them rest for 10 minutes. Then I started to braid. When the braid was formed, I brushed it with vegetable oil. 2)  It also has more sugar than the recipe I made: mine only used 4 teaspoons of sugar for the whole recipe: this one uses more and the result should be a sweeter bread.
  13. This recipe will result in a whiter challah bread than others I have had. I suspect those recipes have more egg yolk added to the bread. It’s still delicious white.

Good luck making the bread. I am sure you will make nicer looking bread for sure.

En papillote: six simple seafood dishes (and a bonus dish, too)


Over at Kitchen Daily, they had a feature the use of en papillote (whether that is using parchment, foil, or some other material). Of the recipes there, these are the ones I look forward to trying soon, especially the first one.

  1. Sea Bass En Papillote with Tangerine and Grapefruit – The Culinary Chase.
  2. Simple Elegant Fish with Cauliflower Potato Mash – Savory Nothings
  3. Tilapia en Papillote |Billy Parisi.
  4. Soy and Ginger Shrimp Packets – The Culinary Chase.
  5. Sole in a Bag with Zucchini & Black Olives
  6. Recipe: Asian Salmon en Papillote for Two | Verily.

Bonus: this sweet potato recipe not only sounds good, but I love the source for it.

The Bacon Eating Jewish Vegetarian: Big Sweet Easy (Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Sumac).

The image is from the last recipe from Verily. If you are new to this way of cooking, go to that recipe: it outlines the simple technique using parchment.

Everyone should have a good minestrone soup recipe

And this one from Food52 could be yours. Once you get in the habit of making minestrone, you can really adopt any set of vegetables and beans you have to make the soup you want. Don’t like cabbage? Don’t use it. Out of chickpeas (garbanzo beans)? Use something else. It may not strickly be minestrone if you do, but who cares: it will still be delicious. Needless to say, this is a great way to use up bits and pieces of vegetables in your crisper.

 

First bookstores, now restaurants being driven out of Manhattan

This Village Voice article has a run down of a number of great restaurants being forced to close due to the price of rent in Manhattan. Restaurants are following bookstores,  which are also suffering from the cost of doing business in this part of NYC.

I suspect low margin businesses like this will move to the other parts of NYC and away from the big rent/big money sections. It will be interesting to see the migration both of the businesses and the people. Compared to the way Manhattan used to be in the later part of the 20th century, this is a better problem for them to have.

For more on the bookstores closing, see this piece in the New York Times.

Bon Appetit teams up with IBM’s Watson for some great summer recipes, like these ribs



The story of IBM and Bon Appetit is really interesting to me, since I love food and I am proud of the work IBM is doing with Watson. Anyone interested in the topic of innovation in IT or food should find it worth a read.

For people who aren’t interested in the high tech aspect of it, check out the recipes. In particular, these ribs with a range of flavours from bourbon to oyster sauce look fantastic.

Radical Bread Making for people who don’t make bread

The general belief with regards to making bread is that it is hard work, it requires alot of skills, and it demands alot of your time. These two posts here are out to challenge that assumption:

  1. No Knead Bread: so easy a 4-yr old can make it! | Steamy Kitchen Recipes
  2. How To Make Bread in the Slow Cooker Cooking Lessons from The Kitchn | The Kitchn

The first recipe shows you how to prepare the loaf up until the point you need to bake it. The second recipe shows how you can use a slow cooker to do it. I haven’t tried this yet, but I think it would be fascinating to try.

It isn’t it going to be as good as something an experienced baker makes, but it will be much better than most anything that comes from a grocery store (unless you are paying alot of money). And in the summertime you can still make bread without having to turn on the oven, if you follow the slow cooker recipe.

P.S. The Kitchn web site has quite a few posts on breadmaking, including this: Recipe: No-Time Bread | The Kitchn.

 

Robot Fast Food workers, automats, and food trucks: food of the future

Are low-wage workers going to replaced by robots? There are cases to be made for that happening, both here: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker from FiveThirtyEight and from the recent book, The Second Machine age (pictured above). Indeed, some have argued that fast food restaurants are a form of manufacturing, and this makes the notion of replacing works with machines more plausible to me.

It is important not just to look at the future, but also the past, in particular, the history of the automat.

The automat was once the future too, and there are still vestiges of them around, but mainly they have died off. There were a number of reasons for this (see Automat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), but inflexibility was one of them. Right now fast food establishments thrive on inflexibility and low cost.That is also the way to compete with them.  I can see how people can compete with that and win, and the way to do that is portable food (e.g., food trucks, food stalls). Barring bureaucratic costs, portable food is cheaper to deliver than traditional bricks and mortar establishments (even fast food ones). And portable food vendors can be much more flexible than fast food places can ever be.

The other way to compete with them is by being human and offering better service. No robot in the next century will be able to do that.

For more on the book, check out: Amazon.com: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (9780393239355): Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee: Books

 

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4 p.m. recipe: pan-fried chicken thighs by Michael Ruhlman (@ruhlman)

I am a fan of Michael Ruhlman in general, so I am happy to recommend this recipe of his: Pan-Fried Chicken Thighs. Three comments:

  1. This recipe is dead simple, but it delivers alot of flavour
  2. It smartly replaces boneless chicken breasts, which are overpriced and underflavoured, with chicken thighs, which are just the opposite. (BTW, you could easily replace chicken thighs with turkey thighs if they are on sale. Just make sure you flatten them to roughly the same thickness as you see here.)
  3. It replaces buttermilk (which often just goes to waste and takes up room in my fridge) for a more common yet better set of ingredients.

Ruhlman keeps it simple here, but you could easily add dry flavourings (i.e. herbs and spices) to the flour, or wet flavouring (e.g., hot sauces) to the dairy mix. Once you start doing that, you can vary this recipe in all kinds of ways.

Robot Fast Food workers, automats, and food trucks: food of the future (some notes)

Are low-wage workers going to replaced by robots? There are cases being made for that happening, both here: The Shift From Low-Wage Worker to Robot Worker from FiveThirtyEight and from the recent book, The Second Machine age (pictured above). As well, some bloggers like Matt Yglesias have argued that fast food restaurants are a form of manufacturing, and this makes the notion of replacing fast food workers with machines more plausible to me.

However, in considering this, it is important to look not just to the future, but also to look to the past. In particular, the past that contained the automat.

The automat was once the future too. There are still vestiges of them around, but mainly they have died off. They collapsed for a number of reasons (see Automat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), but the chief reason was inflexibility.

Today’s fast food establishments thrive on inflexibility and low cost. One way people can compete with that and win is with portable food (e.g., food trucks, food stalls). Barring bureaucratic costs, portable food is cheaper to deliver than when it is delivered by traditional bricks and mortar establishments (even fast food ones) and portable food vendors can be much more flexible than fast food places can ever be.  There might still be robots delivering portable food, just like there are vending machines that provide food. But they won’t have flexibility of humans, and they won’t be as cheap.  Additionally, humans can offer human interaction: no robot in the near future will be able to imitate that.

I believe eating is a social act and a human act, and buying and selling food should be a social and human activity.  We humans need to think about it in ways to provide it that doesn’t dehumanize ourselves.

For more on the book, check out: Amazon.com: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (9780393239355): Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee: Books. It’s really great.

 

4 p.m. recipe: roasted red pepper and tomato soup

Some days you just want a simple meal for dinner. This soup with some bread, cheese and a salad could be just the thing. Make it even easier by picking up some roasted peppers and using them instead of roasting your own. You can deepen the flavour with some garlic or make it hotter with pepper sauce or even sriracha added in. Lots of ways to change this up and still make it delicious.

You can find the recipe here: Roasted red pepper and tomato soup recipe, from the good folks at Style At Home

10 Dishes to Cook Without a Recipe This Winter

Over at Food52, there’s a nice rundown of dishes you should consider making without following recipes. You may want to refer to some memory aid, but if you like these dishes, chances are you can make them pretty much without the need of a cookbook (or a web site).

They have recipes from Vegetarian or Vegan Chili to Quinoa Salad to Marinara Sauce to Risotto and more.
Risotto from Food52

Well worth a look.

How to: in 1 shopping trip, buying just 10 ingredients, make 5 meals (by Mark Bittman, no less)

I think this article should be printed and referred to by anyone who needs to simplify their lives but still needs to grocery shop and prepare meals for the week. And just what are these ingredients?

Chicken breasts (4 boneless)
Bacon (1/2 pound)
Shrimp (1 pound)
Spinach (1 pound)
Tomatoes (6)
Ginger
Onions
Asparagus (2 pounds)
Button mushrooms (1 pound)
Loaf of good country bread

Sound good? Go to The 10-Ingredient Shopping Trip – NYTimes.com and get the details.

7 Million ways to Make Lentil Soup (in a slow cooker)

The great Mark Bittman has 7 Ways to Make Lentil Soup, and if you want to start out with making any of these, I think you will have a delicious meal when you are done.

An even easier version is this. Take this list of ingredients

  1. 1 cup of green lentils, rinced
  2. 1 can (28 oz) of stewed tomatoes
  3. 2 potatoes, peeled and chopped
  4. 2 carrots, peeled and sliced
  5. 1 onion, chopped
  6. 1 rib of celery, chopped
  7. 3 garlic cloves, minced
  8. 3 bay leaves
  9. 1 tsp freshly ground pepper
  10. 3 Tbps curry powder
  11. 1 tsp cumin
  12. 1 tsp coriander
  13. 4 cups of chicken or vegetable stock

Add them all to a slow cooker (4 quart / 4 litre) size or bigger, stir, then  cook on low (8-10 hours) or high (4-5 hours). Remove bay leaves before serving. That’s it! Easy.

Now I say seven million ways to make lentil soup because you really can substitute greatly for very different soups. For example:

  • this version has 4 cups of stock and 28 oz of tomatoes, compared to Bittman’s with 6 cups of stock. I think you can play around with the types of tomatoes (diced, plum) and the ratio of stock to tomatoes (only have a 14 oz can of tomatoes? Use it and go with 5 cups of stock)
  • You can use most any root vegetable instead of the potatoes or carrots. Try turnips, parsnips, or yams. Replace the celery with celeriac. I don’t think red beets will work, but white beets might.
  • Replace the onion with shallots or pearl onions.
  • I didn’t have spices 10, 11 and 12, but I did have an Indian spice mix, so I used 3 Tbsp of that instead.
  • Add some sriracha to make it spicy. Or dice up some jalapeno with the onion and toss it in. Red pepper flakes or some hot pepper sauce would also work.
  • If you don’t need it vegetarian, try the different meats that Bittman suggests. Leftover or rotisserie chicken would also be good. Or take some out and put it in a pot with fish and poach the fish until it is cooked.
  • Toss in some cooked pasta or cooked beans to make it more of a stew.
  • Towards the end stir in some chopped greens like spinach or kale or other greens that will wilt in a warm liquid.
  • At the end, add some wine vinegar to give it a bit of bite.
  • Garnish with herbs, or a drop of pesto or salsa verde. Or stir in some tomato based salsa. (Again, do it to your own taste.)

The lentils and the stock make up the foundation of the soup. The rest is seasoning and vegetables (and possibly non vegetables). Feel free to experiment and make the soup your own (and use up the left overs in your fridge or pantry).

The McRib as a method of arbitrage. The awl has the goods.


The Awl has a fascinating analysis of the McRib that includes some speculation on why McDonald’s introduces it when it does. The above graph, from the article, plots two lines,

The blue line is the price of hogs in America over the last decade, and the black lines represent approximate times when McDonald’s has reintroduced the McRib

It goes into details on why McDonald’s might introduce the McRib when it does and why. It has other things to say about the sandwich, not all that I agree with, but overall the article is thought provoking and well worth a read.

I would also add that besides price, Marketing cycles have something to do with it. McDonald’s is constantly turning over promotions, and the McRib would likely have to be tied into that campaign cycle as well.

A brilliant dessert: pan-baked lemon almond tart by Mark Bittman

Why brilliant? Because it is simple, easy, and delicious. And looks great!  Mark Bittman always has good ideas, and I think this is one of his better ones. See: The Minimalist – Cake, Tart, Frittata – Call It the New Baking – NYTimes.com. Better yet, pick up the ingredients and make this dessert.

(Photo by Evan Sung for the Nytimes.com)

Why not buy flowers…

On the weekend I was in Dufflet on Yonge in Toronto having a delicious brownie. This particular Dufflet also has a flower shop in it with gorgeous flowers for sale. While I was enjoying my brownie, a woman walked by with a gorgeous bouquet. As she exited, she exclaimed “I am buying them to cheer me up”.

It may seem extravagant to some to buy flowers. You can’t do much with them. But we pay for movies and attend musicals and watch TV shows on cable TV. If anything, flowers last longer and cost less than these diversions. Even my brownie is not something I have to eat. I enjoy it for much more than the calories it provides (and it does provide alot of those!) It’s a small extravagance.

No, flowers are no more extravagant than any of those. If you want to make yourself better, you could do worse than buy flowers. Even one small one, in a tiny vase. Go ahead!