The Occasional Chef

Hopefully more than a few of my readers have been asking this question and haven't abandoned my blog for good, as it might have appeared I did.  At the beginning of summer, on top of all the other stuff that was happening, there was a death in my family.  Then, my fridge slowly stopped working.  Then, my work scheduled turned upside down.  Then... then... then... well, fill in the blanks, and it probably could sound like anybody else you know.   Everyone's life seems to be affected by some extraordinary situation, and priorities shift and change.  Unfortunately, I left this blog with one awful quick-and-dirty post just to get some material up.  When I came back to the blog and saw that somewhat embarrassing photo, I cringed enough to remove the post.  As I had alluded to in the blog description, my meals aren't always beautiful and photo-worthy.  I should have listened to myself and skipped the illustrations, though, what is a good post ...

I love fresh vegetables.  It's one of the adult things I look forward to in the summertime.  Sadly school days are long past, and Summer no longer holds its magical status as an untouchable time where I could drink in as much vacation as I wanted.  Now I have alcohol... which is not what this post is about!   The drinking kind anyway.   OK, sticklers, I am patently aware of the use of lactic fermentation in brewing. Brewing discussions will come.  B ut this is about food preservation.   Ooh, pretty As usual, I have more things to do than I imagine.  Will I take vegetables when offered?  Of course I will!  Of course I can use them!  And believe me, I have every good intention to do so, but the reality is that I cannot realistically eat 8 pounds of fresh tomatoes and peppers and more in the time that it will take them to naturally ripen, over-ripen, and begin to ferment.   No problem, I can use them for stuff!...

I had heard them all.  All the discouraging but well-meant things about making bread at home, having to wait and let dough rise, flour everywhere, needing a dough hook and a stand mixer, and getting better than a good workout. "Baking is difficult."  "Baking is tricky."  "Ooh, baking bread, you really gotta know what you're doing!" This kept me away, which is unusual.  The more esoteric a process and its arcane methods, the better by me.  At some point in the last couple years, I REALLY got tired of paying too much for a loaf of decent bread.  Stores sell a lot of good-looking breads, and especially so, in their store bakeries.  How many times have you been all amped-up for a gorgeous sandwich you made at home on one of these breads?  You're thinking, "I don't need to go to a restaurant.  I could be a chef!  Just look at this thing!"  The lettuce is bright green and offset by gleaming orange cheese and a blistering red tomato sl...

I knew it.  When I was at the store the other day, I said to myself that I'd get flour when I make my "real " grocery trip... certainly not now.  I was only picking up a few things.  So finally I got around to making my next loaf, and sure enough, I only had just over a cup of flour.  So much for efficiency.  My internal dialog of justifications is such a pain in the butt sometimes.  As Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."   I need bread.  I'm tired of eating potatoes and rice for my starch component.  I can't make a ham sandwich on crackers or potato slabs (I mean, I could). I have been experimenting with my bread recipe, tweaking it for lean times such as these.  Do I really need 4 cups of flour?  Can I make up for a reduction in diastatic power with something else or get by without it? Well, I had gotten some mixed sorghum-rice-millet flour a while back to cut into my...

Part I.  Living in the Midsouth, I've seen a billboard ad of a local lawn care company featuring a scowling, stern-looking man holding a clump of dead weeds, with the tagline, "Lemme kill your weeds!"  Each year, home and business owners spend significant time and money battling weeds and undesirable vegetation in their lawns.  I've read articles discussing how growing an ideal, beautiful, 'monoculture' green lawn impacts the surrounding environment for the amounts of herbicide, fertilizer, elimination of diverse cultivation, reduction in food for bees, etc.  If I may... let me EAT your weeds!  Yes, I'm serious.  Well, I'll eat what's on my lawn.  I don't use any chemical herbicides or fertilizers, nor have I done so for a number of years.  As a Boy Scout, I had read further into the scout manual, and having been interested in "survival" type books, I have known about the edibility of certain plants that we would ordinarily overlook a...

Eggs & peppers with fried potato, garnished with chive heads

Strong. Wild. Distinctive.  These are some of the more objective words to describe that particular quality of undomesticated game meat. As a matter of preference, it comes as little surprise to me that some people actually seek out this aspect of flavor as something desirable; I am not one of those people!  Gamey flavor reminds me of the things that went wrong in food prep. It makes me fixate on one overpowering flavor and things other than what I should be focused on -- enjoying distinct, sometimes nuanced flavors, aromas, textures, and their combinations and contributions in a meal.   The cause of gamey flavors, without delving too deeply into the science of taste and aromatics, indicates alignments on a matrix of butchering techniques, time, animal diet, food preparation, animal age, time of harvest, and bacterial action, in no particular order.  In any case it does not always indicate meat spoilage .  In fact, spoilage in my experience (thankf...

I have a freezer full of venison.  Because it's frozen and thus requires additional prep time, I usually don't use venison in my recipes.  The other reason is that I really haven't found any preparation that I really like other than cooking in a water smoker.  Venison is a super-lean meat that requires a slow cook; otherwise what's usually left is a tough, stringy meat, and sometimes a gamey flavor.  I have ways to deal with the gamey flavor; and that brings up another facet of my reluctance to use venison -- the "marinading."  Not so much of a flavor-adding marinade as it is to remove the gamey flavor, I usually let the meat soak overnight in the fridge. However, I mentioned that I have a LOT of deer meat, and some of it's getting older than I would like.  With this most recent deer, I made 40# of Italian and Sundried Tomato-Parmesan sausages using the trimmings from butchering the roasts.  They came out excellent , so now I think I have a pla...