I made risotto for dinner tonight, with sun-dried tomatoes and some Kraft olive-and-pimento spread (it comes in a little jelly jar, like the Old English spread). Yum. I’ve got extra for lunch tomorrow.

Risotto is trouble, but it is so completely worth it.

I had to edit some storm video today for the newspaper, but for some reason when I got home tonight with the fixings for banana chips, I couldn’t resist the chance to play with video on my own time:

This is an extremely flavorful mustard-and-scotch-bonnet hot sauce, but I have a hard time believing the Scoville rating of only 350 at the Mo Hotta Mo Betta web site.

Anyway, accurate or not, order a bottle of this stuff right away. I had it on some roast chicken tonight and it was lip-smacking good. You can thank me later.

I was in Kroger today picking up a few things — I hope you’re satisfied, Deb; I couldn’t resist buying a flat iron steak.

Anyway, they had a grocery cart full of a discontinued line of trail mix and related snacks, four bags for a dollar, and I bought some banana chips.

It has been too long since I’ve made banana chips myself in the dehydrator. Homemade banana chips are a healthy snack. The ones I bought today aren’t.
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Herb greenhouse

Originally uploaded by jicarney.

I was at the Co-op today taking photos for an advertising supplement, and while waiting for the person I needed to deal with, I saw these little herb greenhouses. I couldn’t decide between basil / chives / curly parsley and basil / oregano / flat parsley, so I bought both.

Since the kits included full envelopes of seeds, and only told you to put 4-6 seeds in each pot, I had plenty of extra. In fact, I planted all flat leaf parsley (I want it for cooking, not garnish) and didn’t even open the curly-leaf parsley. And I got all of my basil seeds from one envelope, with plenty to spare. (On closer inspection, I now see that one envelope was for “sweet” basil and the other for “genovese” basil. I used the “sweet” basil.) I may see if my parents want any extra seeds.

I am not known for my green thumb, so we’ll see if we can keep this going long enough to get any usable herbs.

Anthony Bourdain will be on Letterman tonight.

That is all.

bagback

Originally uploaded by jicarney.

Read these directions carefully (click on the image if you need it in a larger size). I was delighted to read that I was, in fact, allowed to take the cover off while turning the potatoes. Otherwise, I would have had to use my telekinetic powers to turn them, and that always ruins my appetite.

My sister-in-law sent me this wonderful LA Times story, and I think I gained five pounds just reading about the steaks:

Finally, the big moment arrives. Those monumental steaks, which have been sitting on the counter for five hours, have warmed nearly to room temperature. “You have to get the cold out of the meat for the fibers to relax,” Cecchini says. Ideally, he’d have given them 12 hours.

Without seasoning or oiling the steaks, Cecchini lays them on the grill, and they sizzle happily. Five minutes on one side, then five minutes on the other. The fire is hot enough that it sears a nice crust on the outside but moderate enough to allow the thick steaks to cook through without burning.

If you have the DVD of “Ratatouille” — and if you don’t, turn off the computer and go get it immediately — don’t miss the little featurette featuring director Brad Bird and the film’s culinary advisor, Thomas Keller. I just watched it for the first time, and it’s great — 15 minutes well-spent. The packaging makes it seem like Bird and Keller are going to be conversing, but that’s not the case at all. Each one is interviewed separately about his craft, and the two interviews are skillfully intercut, with supporting footage, to draw comparisons between what Bird does in the suites of Pixar and what Keller does in the kitchen. Common themes include the importance of having a mentor, the importance of being a mentor, collaboration and what have you. Really nice, and inspirational without being ham-handed.

Of course, I think Brad Bird is a genius anyway, so I guess I’m predisposed to like it.

Laura at Fixin’ Supper had a link to this really useful recipe.

I am watching the latest episode of “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations”, which I think premiered last week.

It’s a lot of fun — but completely atypical. Instead of the normal travelogue format, in this episode Bourdain goes home. You see, he hasn’t worked regularly as a chef in several years, since he became an author, TV host and president of the Rachael Ray Fan Club (that last item may have been just a wee bit sarcastic). But tonight, as premise for an episode, he goes back and works his old shift at Les Halles, a New York restaurant. It’s a wonderful, revealing episode about what makes a restaurant kitchen work and how that peculiar chemistry can be altered by the introduction of a new element — say, an older and out-of-practice chef trailing a TV crew.

Here, by the way, is Bourdain’s blog entry about the experience.

Ellie Krieger on the Food Network was extolling the nutritional virtues of crab meat this morning, and when I stopped by Food Lion for some groceries after work, darned if crabmeat wasn’t on sale. I mixed it with mayonnaise (there goes the healthy aspect; sorry, Ellie), horseradish and some seasonings and am enjoying some of it on toast, topped with slices of avocado. As it happens, Ellie had also paired her crab with avocado this morning, and I had an avocado in my cart even before I noticed the sale crab meat.

Pretty yummy, if I do say so myself.

Well, I posted a couple of weeks ago about Fizzies, an updated version of an effervescent fruit drink that was all the rage during my childhood. (One correction to that earlier post — I said that the last revival of Fizzies was five years ago; it was actually longer than that, with the company stopping production about 2000 or 2001.)

The latest company to produce the product does not sell retail quantities on-line, but they do refer you to retailers or online merchants. A friend of mine who runs a gift shop in Monteagle is looking at carrying the product, and I’ll certainly buy some from her if she does, but I couldn’t wait and ended up ordering some from Old Time Candy. This company, which I’d seen profiled on Food Network in the past, is a mail order house specializing in candy with nostalgia appeal — candies which might have been all the rage when you were a child, and which are still in production somewhere, but which are hard to find wherever you are these days. They can put together nostalgia-related gift packs and party favor bags, and have appropriate nostalgia booklets for various decades.

It’s a fun site just to noodle around — I had completely forgotten about Zotz, for example.

If you’re a fan of Mario Batali — and even if you aren’t, but enjoy cooking — you will want to go here and download a free, 32-page cookbook from the makers of Barilla pasta, with Mario as one of the editors. You have to give them your name and e-mail, and they encourage you to sign up for their promotional e-mail list, but for every cookbook downloaded Barilla will donate $1 to Second Harvest Food Bank, a worthy cause if there ever was one.

I like the fact that they have two different PDF versions available and that they give you tips for saving ink if you don’t need glorious full-color photography. For cookbooks, however, I kind of like glorious full-color photography. And my new Kodak printer is ink-stingy anyway, so I may go for it.

Hat tip to Claudia at Music City Bloggers.

Speaking of Mario, this Village Voice article lifts the veil of “Iron Chef America” and shows that the actual competition differs somewhat from what you see on TV. Some of this was old news to me, going back to the original Japanese version of the show, but some of it wasn’t, or at least went even further (if the Voice writer is to be believed) that I had heard. Don’t read it if you don’t want the illusion spoiled.

Hat tip to Edible TV.

I had three chicken wings and some leftover homemade chicken stock left over from last weekend’s two batches of Buffalo wings. I boiled the wings in the stock, took the wings out, and then cooked some egg noodles in the stock. This cold has me feeling miserable, but some hot, homemade chicken noodle soup is a wonderful tonic.