Lake Neuron

I made Alton Brown’s macaroni and cheese over the weekend — and I’d done that before. It’s delicious.

What I hadn’t done before, and what I did this evening, was to make the next-day fried mac and cheese, which turned out terrific as well. You cut the refrigerated leftovers into inch-thick slices, dust them in flour, coat them in beaten egg and then roll them in panko bread crumbs (which weren’t available here the first time I made Alton’s mac-and-cheese recipe). Then you deep fry them until done (or until “GBD,” as Alton says: golden brown and delicious). They turned out great.

Food Network recently introduced “Rescue Chef with Danny Boome,” which is, for all intents and purposes, a remake of Tyler Florence’s old show “Food 911.” A viewer writes in with a food-related difficulty, and Boome visits them at home to teach them a new recipe or technique.

It’s a pretty good show — but Boome got it wrong today. He was making a salad with his pupil today and was teaching her to use a salad spinner to dry the greens. “Let the power of gravity work for you,” he said.

BZZZZZT!

As Alton Brown could have told Danny, a salad spinner works by centrifugal force, NOT by gravity. Gravity comes into place when you drain something in a colander, for example, but gravity wouldn’t work on salad greens because there are so many surfaces for the water to cling to and hide in. The reason you need a salad spinner is because gravity doesn’t work in this particular situation.

I am making Alton Brown’s beef stew recipe, which is delicious. I don’t know whether I’ll try to finish it tonight and eat a late supper or whether I’ll hold the short ribs in the fridge overnight and finish the stew tomorrow (which is what I did the first time around).

I may not be able to wait.

I got an about-to-expire discount (which I don’t mind at all, especially for a dish like this) on the short ribs.

When Alton Brown first did an episode of “Good Eats” about oatmeal, I couldn’t find the kind that he recommends — steel-cut or “pinhead” oats — in our local stores. But I saw them here a week or two ago and tried them. They’re good; they do have a meatier, chewier texture than regular rolled oats. But they take a while to cook, and I don’t have time to cook on weekday mornings, especially since the acting editor’s job requires me to be at the office by 6 a.m. The two times I’ve made them before now were on weekends.

So tonight I’m trying one of Alton’s recipes from that episode: overnight oatmeal, which cooks in the Crock Pot overnight. Instead of the dried cranberries and figs Alton calls for, I’m trying dried blueberries. (I love blueberries.)

Tomorrow morning, I can scoop out one serving of the stuff and take it to work with me. The recipe makes more than I need for one breakfast, but if it turns out well I may be able to refrigerate the excess. We’ll try it and see.

Well, I got to the Celebration tonight and poked my head up into the radio booth, which is directly above the part of the press box where the print reporters sit.

Rusty Reed of WLIJ/WZNG immediately asked me how the stew had turned out. I knew from previous conversations that Rusty reads the blog here.

As I told Rusty, the stew turned out terrific. I had a bowl for dinner tonight and will take some to work tomorrow — I may take the whole container and see if someone else wants some, because I’m proud of how it turned out. It is time-consuming, but as Alton often says — and Cheryl quoted in the comments of my earlier post — “Your patience will be rewarded.”

I saw Alton Brown make this beef stew recipe last night on Food Network and I was dying to try it. I’m braising the beef all evening tonight and will finish the stew tomorrow.

Alton’s recipe calls for cooking beef short ribs, with seasonings and a small amount of water, in an aluminum foil pouch, with the pouch resting in a metal pan. But when I checked my oven just now, my pouch — which I hadn’t crimped well enough — had started to leak. At first, I thought I could pour a little of the leaked broth back into the pouch and reseal it, but as I moved the pouch I poured more and more liquid into the pan.

I finally gave up and put everything — meat and rescued broth — into a round casserole with a heavy glass lid, where it will spend the last hour of its cooking time. I can only hope Alton will understand.