Category Archives: Food

Feb 04

Hits the spot

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When Dave Thomas founded Wendy’s, according to his terrific but out-of-print autobiography “Dave’s Way,” he wanted to avoid the practice, common to some other fast food places at the time, of making up sandwiches ahead of time and storing them under a heat lamp so that they could be served quickly. He felt this detracted from the quality of the sandwiches and from the ability to customize them to the customer’s liking.

But Thomas still wanted to be able to serve customers quickly, even during peak hours. The solution he came up with was to have hamburger patties almost always on the griddle, ready to be scooped up and turned into a sandwich on order.

Typical business patterns make it possible to predict about how many patties you need to have standing by at a given time of day, but it’s not an exact science. Sometimes, a patty will be ready but no customer will be at the counter to order it.

Dave’s solution to that problem was a stroke of genius: he added chili as a menu item. Any patties not needed for hamburgers would be crumbled up and set aside for the next batch of chili.

I was going to stop at Sonic on my way to work today, but as I saw Wendy’s sitting there on Madison Street it occurred to me that the perfect lunch for a cold and rainy Saturday would be a big Wendy’s chili and a baked potato. Of course, the Wendy’s chili is even better with a couple of gold packets of that mysterious hot sauce they offer with it. I have, for years, insisted that they ought to sell the stuff by the bottle. I would buy it and put it on a lot of different things.

Anyway, the chili and potato are a perfect antidote to the weather. Well done, Dave.

Jan 21

Morning pies, evening fries

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You would think that, after spending four and a half hours in the kitchen at church this morning (see the bottom of this post for video) I wouldn’t be in the mood to do anything involved in my home kitchen tonight. You would be wrong.

You see, I’d been planning to make french fries tonight.

I’ve wanted for some time to try making real, good french fries. The consensus seems to be that you soak the fries in ice cold water for a good while, then you fry them twice. The first fry, at a lower temperature, cooks the fries through, giving them a nice fluffy interior, but leaves them somewhat limp. Then you take them out of the oil and let them come to room temperature. You crank the oil up to a higher temperature, and put the fries back in, quickly giving them a beautiful golden-brown finish.

WP_000047Most of the french fries you’ve ever eaten have been made with a variation on this approach – the difference being that the first fry takes place at a factory somewhere, after which the french fries are frozen and shipped to your supermarket or to the kitchen of your local restaurant. The restaurant finishes the fries off.

But the idea of freshly-cooked, start-to-finish fries from my own kitchen sounds better.

As I say, I’d wanted to try this for some time, and when I was at the grocery store yesterday I found Yukon Gold potatoes on sale, so now seemed like the time. I looked up a good recipe on line and found this one from Emeril Lagasse.

Meanwhile, I’d also been reading about the new Smashburger franchise in Murfreesboro. I haven’t been there yet, but I understand that one of their specialties is fries tossed in garlic, rosemary and olive oil. That sounded like a great way to enjoy my homemade fries, too, so I tossed them in a little rosemary, fresh garlic and olive oil.

I have to say, they came out pretty well.

According to Dave Thomas’ autobiography “Dave’s Way,” the process of bringing frozen fries to room temp before the final cook is known at Wendy’s as “slacking” them. I don’t know if the term is universal or exclusive to Wendy’s. Dave told the story of visiting a Wendy’s once with the man who succeeded Dave as CEO after Dave retired and concentrated on being the chain’s commercial spokesman. Not surprisingly, the manager rushed to greet them soon after they walked in the door – and before they’d gotten their food. The CEO immediately chided the manager for not slacking the fries. The manager sputtered a denial and said that everything in the kitchen was being done according to company policy. But when the manager returned sheepishly a few minutes later, he had discovered that there was a new hire in the kitchen who – as it turns out – had not been slacking the fries. The manager apologized profusely, but then asked the CEO how he could possibly know what was going on in the kitchen. Did he have an inside source?

The CEO replied that he heard the frozen fries hissing and spattering in the oil as soon as he walked into the restaurant. The room-temperature fries slip into the oil with much less noise. Dave used this story to praise the CEO and make the point that a manager has to be aware of every detail. This CEO was so connected with Wendy’s way of doing things that he even knew how a restaurant was supposed to sound, and a different sound indicated a problem.

Anyway, here’s the video from church this morning:

We made more than 50 quart jars of soup and about 20 apple pies. We’re also selling fudge and chess pies, but those were made by two different individual class members at home.
Dec 29

Please your customers, not your peers

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I was an early fan of Rachael Ray, then went through Rachael Ray burnout, but I have to say I really love the answer she gave to a question in an AV Club interview. Anthony Bourdain, who I really enjoy, used to use Rachael Ray as the personification of the dumbing-down of Food Network (the way I use Guy Fieri). Bourdain eventually shifted most of his wrath to Sandra Lee. Anyway:

AVC: There are people out there like Anthony Bourdain who do criticize that kind of “everyday cook” philosophy that’s on the food networks. But when I talked to Bourdain he said he can’t make fun of you anymore because you sent him a gift basket.

RR: Nah, he’s funny. I didn’t mind a bit either way. He’s also said a few nice things over the years. But you know what? Not everybody is supposed to like everybody on the playground. You gotta be thick-skinned about that. I love Tony Bourdain. I love his books, I love him, I love his attitude. I think he’s fantastic. Whether or not he likes what I’m doing that week in my life, or the food that I’m making at that moment, that’s Tony’s choice. It shouldn’t affect my decision about whether or not I like his work. Otherwise I think I’m being immature and mixing up the two. But regardless, that’s not my job and it’s not who I work for. I work for the people who do want that type of programming or do want to cook my type of food.

[snip]

But I think that people over the years have wasted so much time asking me about Martha [Stewart] or Tony and all this. I’m like, it’s never, ever, ever, ever, ever entered my mind for five seconds if somebody else wasn’t putting it there. 

I mean, those aren’t the people you work for. I am a waitress at heart. I work for the people that I’m there to serve …. I think that anyone who spends their life trying to make other people happy or impress their peers rather than their customers are going to have a very short-lived career.

Not bad advice.

Dec 22

Explaining ramen

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I was getting ready to watch “Christmas At Belmont,” a terrific annual Christmas concert featuring music students from Belmont University in Nashville (including my “It’s A Wonderful Life” co-star Keith Wortham, who said he’s in one of the choirs but doesn’t know if he’ll be visible on TV). The show is aired nationwide on public TV stations from one of my favorite places on the planet, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. (I was there, in a tuxedo, the night it opened.)

Anyway, I turned over to WNPT a few minutes earlier and caught the last 10 minutes or so of “Volunteer Gardener,” a locally-produced show I don’t think I’ve ever watched before. It had the air of local TV programming, but a couple of things caught my eye.

It was a rerun; there were all sorts of references to spring and planting. I’m not a cold-weather person and this made me a little melancholy. I wish it were warm enough that gardeners were concerned about getting their seeds in the ground.

But the thing that really struck me was the cooking segment at the end of the show, featuring a woman from the University of Tennessee Extension in Nashville. As you well know, I love to cook and I love to watch Cooking Channel. So I guess I’m used to cooking shows and segments on TV that make certain minimal assumptions about the audience’s food and cooking knowledge.

This was not one of those segments. The woman was making an Asian-inspired broccoli slaw, with dry ramen noodles as an ingredient (they soak up moisture and soften as the salad sits before serving). The woman apparently felt she had to had to explain what ramen noodles were and how they were packaged, and she treated soy sauce and rice vinegar as if they were strange exotic substances that had just been flown in by space probe from the planet Neptune.

The recipe wasn’t necessarily a bad one (I’m not a big broccoli fan, but that’s just me). Food snobs notwithstanding, there are plenty of cases where it’s a great idea to use a processed food like ramen noodles as an ingredient in a homemade dish. And I don’t guess there was anything wrong with how the segment was presented; it just sounded really strange to me that she would make such low assumptions of the public TV viewer, especially considering some of the great cooking shows that air on Saturdays on public TV.

I’m not sure whose decision it was made to treat things this way. The woman at our local extension office who does food presentations has some great, sophisticated recipes, which I read with great interest when we publish them in the Times-Gazette. So maybe it’s the producers of the TV show who told this woman to assume that her viewers only cook with Bisquick and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup.

Or maybe I’m just being a condescending jerk, which on reflection is the more likely possibility.

Dec 10

A perfect Saturday night bowl of red

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If you enjoy cooking, you really need to get on the mailing list for Penzey’s Spices, a wonderful Wisconsin-based company to which my sister-in-law turned me on years ago. They have wonderful spices, both individual spices and their own custom spice blends. You can order online, but the reason to be on their mailing list is that their catalog, which comes out several times a year, is packed with recipes.

They have terrific gift sets in a broad variety of price ranges.

Anyway, I had ordered something a couple of weeks ago – one particular thing I needed – and I didn’t want to send in the order and pay shipping for just one item, so I bought a jar of “Chili 9000,” a new product and one of six different chili powders they offer.chili9000

The package arrived yesterday, containing not only the two things I’d ordered but a sample of their apple pie seasoning as a “thank you” gift. I may try using that to make something for the Sunday School party tomorrow.

Tonight, though, seemed like an excellent time for a bowl of chili. I’m partial to long-cooking chili recipes — or, in this case, a pressure cooker recipe — that either need coarse ground beef or cubes of beef instead of regular hamburger meat. I went to Kroger and asked for chili grind beef. The boy stocking the meat case told me that I should ask them to grind me some, but the surly fellow who answered the meat department bell told me they haven’t been able to do that for several years. I’m told that H&H Piggly Wiggly in Unionville will do it, but I didn’t want to make that run today. (I will soon.) So I just bought a family pack of stew meat.

I used the basic method and parameters of Alton Brown’s pressure cooker chili recipe, but I used Ro-Tel tomatoes and Ro-Tel tomato sauce (another new product), with fresh onions and garlic instead of the jar of salsa. Instead of cumin plus chili powder I used a healthy dose of the Chili 9000, since it has cumin as one of its ingredients.

I must say, the finished product turned out to be delicious, if decidedly unexpected. The Chili 9000 is a complex mixture of spices, including (copied and pasted from the Penzey’s web site)

Ancho Chili Pepper, Cumin, Garlic, Cilantro, Onion, Paprika, Cayenne Pepper, Lemon Peel, Mexican Oregano, Black Pepper, Cocoa Powder, Citric Acid, Turmeric, Cinnamon, Coriander, Ginger, Natural Smoke Flavoring, Fenugreek, Cloves, Fennel, Nutmeg, White Pepper, Anise Seed, Jalapeño Pepper, Star Anise, Cardamom.

Some of those non-traditional flavors from the second half of the list give this a mysterious undertone, and yet it’s still recognizably chili.

Pressure cookers are great for chili – I like being able to turn out a slow-cooked-style chili in little more time than it would take to whip out some hamburger-based chili in a skillet.

Anyway, I would highly recommend a jar of this Chili 9000 if you like chili. And no, this is not a sponsored post or an affiliate program like my Amazon links. I just like the stuff.

Dec 04

Grease is the word

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I was in the mood to make jerky – but I’ve been trying to watch my expenses. No whole muscle jerky, unless I can find a suitable roast on some sort of deep expiration-day sale. I couldn’t find one today. I went looking for ground beef and found the store-ground meat, made from trimmings, for a cheap price. Unlike most of the ground meat, which tends to be ground off-site, the fat content isn’t labeled for these trimmings.

Fat is necessary for a well-marbled steak or a flavorful burger, but for jerky it’s best avoided. It’s not necessary to jerky’s flavor. More to the point, fat goes rancid long before the muscle, saturated with salt, sugar and other preservatives, would ever go bad. So if you’re making whole muscle jerky, you want a lean piece of meat and you want to trim any fat you can find. If you’re making ground meat jerky, you want the leanest beef you can find – sometimes labeled as “diet” or “extra-lean” ground beef.

But it’s not a complete catastrophe if there’s some fat in your jerky, especially if (like me) you end up consuming and/or sharing the jerky soon rather than setting it aside long-term. When there’s fat in the ground meat, it often beads up on the jerky as it dehydrates, and you can come through with paper towels once or twice during the drying process and blot some of it away. I am making the jerky at the maximum temperature setting on the dehydrator (instead of the next-to-highest, my usual choice) in hopes that will help render some of the fat in this fashion.

With ground meat, for safety reasons I generally use commercial seasonings containing some sort of cure – not as much fun as throwing together a marinade for whole muscle jerky, but perfectly acceptable. I added a little red pepper flake for extra kick.

Nov 27

A grueling regimen

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Several years ago, Alton Brown did a “Good Eats” episode about oatmeal, and extolled the virtues of steel-cut or “pinhead” oats. At the time, I couldn’t find them anywhere in Shelbyville. At one point, a Quaker version of the steel-cut oats appeared in one of our local stores, but then it disappeared. Then, a year ago, I discovered McCann’s, first in a canister and then in a box. Now, perhaps in response to the McCann’s product, the Quaker steel-cut oats are back on the shelves here as well. I bought a canister last week.

I probably need to eat these more often than I do.

Oat grains, in order to be cooked to an edible consistency in a reasonable amount of time, have to be broken down in some way. The Quaker oats of your youth, and the instant oatmeal packets you might enjoy, are made from rolled oats – the oat grains are flattened between metal rollers.

Steel-cut oats, instead of being flattened, are cut up into smaller pieces. The result is similar to traditional oats in flavor but has a much more substantial, chewy texture, as opposed to the mushy texture of rolled oats.

The trouble is that traditional steel-cut oats, like the Quaker product, take longer to cook. McCann’s has a quicker-cooking version. I did find online that the traditional steel-cut oats can be made in a rice cooker, which is convenient if not quick.

Alton has a recipe for cooking steel-cut oats overnight in a slow-cooker, although it does me no good because it makes four servings, and cutting the recipe down probably wouldn’t work right in the slow-cooker.

If you like oatmeal, but you’ve never tried steel-cut oats, you need to. Try the quick-cooking version, or get the traditional version and make it overnight or on the weekend or a day off work.
Oct 30

Out of my gourd

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We had our annual “Trunk or Treat,” chili supper and pumpkin carving tonight at church. As usual, I mooched all the pumpkin seeds I could get from anyone who wasn’t planning on using them.

Each year, I go online looking for tips and recipes, and there are a wide variety – many of which are directly contradictory. I’ve found that low-and-slow cooking methods work better than high heat. I also have discovered that my personal taste is for seeds that are toasted but not too brown. The commercial pumpkin seeds I buy the rest of the year are cooked somehow but aren’t brown at all. And it’s very easy to burn the seeds once you get them to the brown stage.

Part of the problem is that some people (like me) eat the whole seed, hull and all, which is perfectly edible. Others hull them the way you would sunflower seeds. I think some of the high-temp, very-brown recipes are by and for people who eat only the kernels and don’t care if the hulls get overdone.

The past few years, I’ve soaked the seeds overnight in salt water, adding some liquid crab boil, hoping to get some flavor into the seeds. Sprinkled-on seasonings have a tendency to fall off. But I could never get the crab boil flavor to really take, and anyway I didn’t have any on hand tonight.

During tonight’s internet search, I found a comment suggesting that instead of just soaking the seeds in salt water, you actually boil them in salted water before toasting them. I had already put the seeds into soaking water but decided to try this and just dumped the whole mess into a stock pot. I don’t think I boiled the seeds long enough – I tasted one or two of the raw seeds, and they didn’t take on any noticeable amount of salt. But I think boiling the seeds may have been a good idea anyway from a cooking standpoint.

After boiling, I let the seeds dry partially (using my dehydrator to speed up the process). I coated them with canola oil and then tossed them with Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning. Jay Davis had suggested cajun seasoning tonight at church, and as I said I hadn’t been able to soak any flavor into them. I put the seeds in the oven at a low temperature. I think it was about 250 degrees, but the numbers have been scrubbed off the controls to my oven. (Don’t ask.) I had two full pans of the seeds; I stirred each pan and rotated them top-to-bottom every 15 minutes or so for about an hour.

They came out of the oven a few minutes ago; I’ve dumped them into a plastic container, and they’re still warm. They are just toasted enough. I think the boiling actually helped this process.

UPDATE: Here is the re-uploaded Trunk or Treat video:

Oct 27

Pitchin’ in

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When I first saw a promo for the Cooking Channel show “Pitchin’ In,” I nearly went crazy trying to figure out where I’d seen Lynn Crawford before – I was sure it was a Food Network or PBS cooking show, but I couldn’t place her any further than that, and yet she was so familiar I felt like I ought to know who she was.

I finally had to look it up, and then felt like an idiot. She was one of the small pool of rotating chefs in “Restaurant Makeover,” a Canadian import which Food Network used to run a few years ago before they switched to a 24-7 format of Guy Fieri prancing around spouting catch phrases.

“Restaurant Makeover” was a nice show; there have been a few shows since with similar formats, and I haven’t really seen most of them, but I liked “Makeover” and found it non-exploitative, non-voyeuristic and yet still compelling. The premise was that you would start with a struggling little mom-and-pop restaurant. If the owners would agree to put up $15,000 (Canadian) for a remodel, the producers would match it, and would provide a designer to redecorate the restaurant and a top chef to help revamp the menu. The designer and the chef typically pushed the mom-and-pop owners out of their comfort zones. The owners would not be present for the renovation, leading to a big reveal moment when they got to see the results for the first time. Typically, the chef (working with the restaurant’s normal cook to experiment with new menu items) would react with horror at overuse of deep-fried and/or pre-made frozen foods, insisting that such-and-such an item be removed from the menu, only to have the cook insist that the item in question was the favorite of regulars and could not possibly be eliminated.

The show had a short list of designers and a short list of chefs who would turn up over and over in various combinations. Crawford was easily my favorite among the chefs; she insisted on quality but seemed more sincere about it and less condescending than some of the other chefs in the rotation.

The Cooking Channel web site shows “Pitchin’ In” as premiering next week, and yet I’m sitting here watching it tonight. Must be a sneak preview. It seems to be a travelogue show focusing on a single ingredient, sort of a less-cutesy version of “The Secret Life Of…” but with a host-participation element like “Dirty Jobs.” I’ll certainly watch it again.

Oct 10

Ten … isn’t.

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Tonight at Walmart, in the soft drink coolers at the checkout line, I saw a new product: “Dr Pepper Ten.” (Trivia fact: there’s no period in the name of “Dr Pepper”) This is a cross between the full-calorie and diet versions of Dr Pepper, sweetened partly with high-fructose corn syrup and partly with aspartame. The name indicates 10 calories per USDA-determined serving, which actually means 20 calories in a normal-sized plastic bottle.

I’m not surprised at the idea of a sort-of-diet soda, but I am surprised that Dr Pepper would be the one to implement it. To me, Diet Dr Pepper is the best-tasting diet soft drink, the one that most closely matches the taste of its namesake product. I don’t think there’s nearly as much room between Dr Pepper and Diet Dr Pepper as there is between Coke and Diet Coke (or between Coke and Coke Zero), and so I’m not sure who is going to buy DP Ten. If you like diet drinks at all, you’ll be happy with Diet Dr Pepper. If you don’t like them at all, you’ll demand regular Dr Pepper.

I tried a bottle, just for curiosity’s sake. Since I mostly drink diet soda, it tasted a little too sweet to me; I’d be interested in knowing how it tastes to someone who normally drinks regular Dr Pepper.

By the way, I’ve been told, and seen on TV, that the bottling company in Dr Pepper’s Texas home town is the only plant that still makes it with cane sugar instead of HFCS. Given the success of sugar-sweetened products like Jones Soda, Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, I’m surprised Dr Pepper didn’t try that instead – a sugar-sweetened version. I think that might have had more chance of success.