To Thine Own Self, Be Food

It's possible today's post will offend and nauseate animal-loving vegetarians.  And while I am sorry about that, I can hardly apologize for stating that Cows are amazing things. Mostly we love cows because they are tasty between two pieces of bread or covered with a nice chasseur sauce.  Cows are also considered cute and invoke feelings of nostalgia (i.e. a return to a simpler, more pastoral life that involved really exciting county fairs). But beef is so much more than that. These are beef bones, which are filled with a savory, fatty substance called marrow . It's a good spread on toast, with pickles or cheese.  As you can imagine, though, it's not a terribly popular snack item.  I mean, it is a little out there.  This picture below might provide the less weirder way to utilize beef bones. This is a beef stock I made this last weekend.  See the lovely roasted bones bobbing alongside the carrots, celery, onion?  After simmering for a bunch of hours, I g

I love carrots.  I always have... oooh, wait.  Raw carrots.  I have always loved raw carrots.  From birth, practically.  Even now, almost forty years later, I rarely pass up the carrot sticks on a relish tray in my vicinity.  I love the vibrancy, the color, and the health value (something I was unaware in my early, early years, alas). Cooked carrots, though, I feel very differently about.  I have young-person memories of pot roast with potatoes and carrots, and I distinctly remember eating with a 1:2 carrot-potato ratio mindest.  One carrot piece for every potato piece.  It helped me cope with what I felt was a great loss in taste and texture during the cooking process.. While I'm confessing my neuroses, I'm the exact same way about cooked green peppers, peas, and green beans.  Raw, definitely...cooked, uh, only if I have to. To present day. I have an excess of carrots these days around Chez Nelson.  And there are only so many sticks I can chop up for snacking, so I tu

The sun will be going down here in a few hours on the fourth day of the No-Restaurant Challenge.  While one member of Nelson tribe found the news of the deprivation a little hard to take, the other four have bore up rather well. Although... Brent and I decided to modify the rules a little.  We don't often have a concurrent lunch hour together, so when we do, we've decided then it's okay to eat out if there's no other plan for dining.  In other, complicated pastoral words, what's good for the goslings is mostly good for the gander and goose, but sometimes being the gander and goose has its benefits.  And going out for lunch is one of them. However, I have other plans cooking as well (har har), including a batch of chicken noodle soup and carrot soup to carry us through the lunch hour. But today, let's discuss carbonara.  It's a rich pasta dish that comes from Italy (shocker, yes?), and mostly includes eggs, cheese, and bacon (or pancetta or similar). 

Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Mark Bittman, Alice Waters, Deborah Madison...ET AL...would be so so so disappointed in me these days. You know, if they knew me and hung out with me regularly to survey my recent eating and drinking habits.  Which I know they don't, won't, and never will.  And I know *you* won't tell them, but that doesn't mean I don't feel like I've let them down. As of the last month... ...we have dined out entirely too much ...we have imbibed entirely too much craft beer ...we have not practiced sensible portion control ...we have not exercised regularly Consequently, I have let me, you readers, and my role models down (I don't care if they'll never know!).  It's obviously time for a refocus, reprioritizing, and reestablishing of goals. And if it were as easy as that, I'd of course be doing it.  But see...it's really not.  For example, I have the ingredients for Alice Waters's Winter Minestrone Soup from her

It's a new year and a good time to cull the unnecessary items from our lives.  Habits, possessions, etc. And when I wake up at 5:00 a.m. for no earthly apparent reason, it is this particular task I feel inspired to do.  Especially cookbooks. I really am of two minds about my cookbooks.  With nearly every imaginable recipe available on the Internet, cookbooks seem to be a thing of the past.  Why limit yourself to a few dozen in one book when a hundred dozen are readily available in a few clicks?  And sometimes, websites can give you search and filter capabilities that just aren't possible in a book.  Consumer habits are also contributing to a decline in cookbook/recipe quality (no empirical evidence here, just a hunch...I never said I was a scientist).  People want cookbooks with their favorite Food Network personality's recipes RIGHT NOW, that sometimes I wonder how much testing can really be done for a quality finished product. It would be seem so so so simple to thr

Braising is one of my favorite techniques.  And it didn't always used to be.  In fact, I spent a great portion of my life not really knowing what it was...and if a recipe I was using called for doing it, I was more likely to change 'braise' to 'roast'. And up until a couple of years ago, I was able to get away with it, because I didn't know what I was missing out on.  In the end, I surmised, I got a cooked, edible piece of meat...end game achieved.  I was a fool back then, folks.  A plain and simple-minded fool. It has occurred to me, though, that doing things in the slow-cooker is sort of a form of braising.  You take a foodstuff and cook it at low heat for a few hours, letting it stew in its own yummy juices.  Yeah, braising is a lot like that.  Maybe I was more familiar with the technique than I thought... For these shredded chicken sandwiches, I turned to the condiments in my fridge (high Chinese influence). From right to left I've presented

January 1st is a great time to thoroughly examine the contents of your refrigerator and pantry and play the culinary version of Tetris.  This ingredient fits into that slot, you flip this item on its side and wedge it between two other pieces... ...okay, really, the Tetris thing is not quite the right metaphor in this case, but my brain seems stuck on it right now, so... In my freezer, I discovered some fairly well-wrapped beef tenderloins...and the date on the package? March 28, 2014.  Yep, these guys were nine months old.  Thank goodness they smelled fine, albeit their color was a little darker than I'm used to seeing, but we'll call that aging, okay? Also in my freezer was a random, lone sheet of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry.  Probably left over from some cream puff-type project earlier in the year.  Puff pastry is like a little fussy old lady, very particular and must be handled carefully.  Frankly, I don't like messing with it very often. Beef tenderloin + puff