Tag: Food

I haven’t written about food in this space lately, so here’s a food post! Yay!

:: I’ve owned a steel wok since college, but despite the wok’s status as the single most versatile cooking utensil in the history of the Universe, I’ve never used it a whole lot. So I decided a couple of weeks back to dig it out and make some fried rice, using some instructions from a couple of different cookbooks (both of which are by Martin Yan). I’ve made fried rice before, but it’s been a long time. Basically, though, fried rice is one of those wonderful dishes that exists for no other reason than to simply clear out the fridge. Any cooked meats, seafoods, veggies, whatever are fair game to be tossed into the wok, stirred around at high heat, tossed with some sauce, and served up on a nice big bowl.

For my first go-round, I opted for a seafood fried rice. I already had some cooked shrimp in the freezer, but I wanted something else, so I picked up some frozen scallops and thawed half the package.

Then it was prep time, which is the most important part of making any stir-fry dish. Stir-frying (or “chowing”) is one of the fastest cooking methods, which means that if you realize halfway through that you’ve omitted an ingredient, it simply isn’t feasible to stop the chowing process and prep the missing ingredient. The whole concept of mise en place — everything already diced, chopped, measured and ready to go — is essential to chowing. So here’s everything I was to use:

Yes, I used pre-chopped, frozen stir-fry vegetables. Sue me!

First I heated my wok. Woks are intended to be used on very high heat. I’ve always preferred a gas stove for this, because you can have a better control on the specific amount of heat being kicked out by the burner, but we’re not so lucky at Casa Jaquandor and we’re equipped with electric burners. Thus, to control heating and cooking, I set the burner almost on ‘High’ and then, if I think things are cooking too quickly and I have too much heat in the wok, I don’t adjust the burner. I just pick the wok up off the burner until it cools back down, a matter of seconds.

Next, I added a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil, swirled it around for a couple of seconds making sure to get it on the sloping sides of the wok, and dumped in the scallops.

At this point I’m already getting hungry! It takes a few minutes, nothing more, to cook the scallops (you don’t want to overcook the little devils), at which time I removed them from the pan and set them aside on a plate. It was time for the veggies, and when they were done, the two beaten eggs:

I probably should have got the veggies a little more “done” before I added the egg, but all was fine. At this point the steam is rolling out of the wok most impressively!

Next it was in with the rice, and then scallops and the shrimp. All got tossed around at high heat for two or three minutes. (According to Martin Yan, for best results in fried rice dishes, you’re best off using day-old cooked rice, as opposed to cooking the rice and then immediately using it in fried rice.)

Finally, the resulting dish:

Wonderful stuff! We just added garlic sauce at the table for personal seasoning.

A few days later, I remembered that I’d only used about half the rice I had initially made for the first fried rice, so I make fried rice again, this time with pork instead of seafood.

For the pork, I just cut a boneless pork chop into thin strips and marinated it for an hour or so in a mix of sesame oil, honey, soy sauce, and Chinese five-spice powder. The resulting dish was very different in terms of flavor, despite being almost identical to the first in terms of preparation.

(BTW, I am now a huge fan of Green Giant’s stir-fry vegetable blends. These are awesome. I used some from the same bag for an omelet a week later.)

Now I want to start looking into other wok applications and stir-fry dishes as well.

:: I almost always eat breakfast; I find that if I don’t, by late morning I’m famished to the point of being useless at work, and I don’t typically eat lunch until 1:00 pm at the earliest. (My whole life, starting in high school, I’ve had late lunches. It’s so ingrained in my brain now that I’m not sure if I could ever get hungry for lunch at noon on a regular basis.)

My breakfasts tend to be fairly simple affairs: Orange juice is a must, and then I tend to alternate between a small number of typical selections: toast or an English muffin spread one side with either peanut butter or Nutella, and on the other side with lemon curd; oatmeal with brown sugar and maple syrup; or cold cereal. Now, with cold cereals, I like the sweetened and flavored Cheerios (albeit in The Store’s brand, because paying an extra two bucks for the Cheerios label is just silly), or raisin bran, or a couple others. I tend to go for the high fiber cereals, mostly; my favorite is actually frosted shredded wheat, which I love to top with berries (fresh is great, but frozen’s fine). Here’s my all-time favorite simple breakfast, then:

Yes, I do put milk on the cereal, but not a whole lot, because soggy cereal depresses me. I doubt I’d want to live in a world without blueberries.

:: Finally, it fell to me to cook lunch on Mother’s Day. The Wife still had to go to work — a fact of life in the restaurant business — but since she works the night shift, she at least got to have a lazy morning and lunch with the family. She requested that I make her some Chiavetta’s chicken.

Now, for those who don’t live in Western New York — and that’s just about all of my readership these days — Chiavetta’s is a local outfit that does a lot of catering for special events and fundraisers and the like. One always knows when one is in the vicinity of a Chiavetta’s catering event because they literally pull up in a U-haul sized truck, set up enormous grills outside the venue, and cook immense amounts of chicken on those grills, sending gigantic clouds of barbecuey-chickeny scented smoke wafting through the neighborhood. The scent is instantly mouth-watering. Their sauce is a salty, vinegary, garlicky blend that is one of the signature flavors of WNY. (Another local outfit called BW’s does a very similar barbecue, but Chiavetta’s is the almost universal term used for this kind of thing.)

That’s not the only way to partake of Chiavetta’s barbecue, however; they sell their marinades in the local stores. We always have a bottle of the stuff on hand.

It’s a very simple process, actually: marinade your meat for a while, and then grill or bake and serve. (The bottled instructions say that once grilling is done you’re supposed to put the meat into a pan like a foil baking pan, baste heavily, wrap or cover and then allow to remain on the heat a while longer so the flavors can steam into the food. In truth, I almost always omit this step.) I was going to grill today, but Mother Nature decided that Buffalo needed one last visit from the Winter Gods, so there were actual snowflakes in the air this morning. No accumulation on the ground, but still: snow on Mother’s Day. Yikes! I confess I thought about just layering up — I don’t own all those pairs of overalls for nothing — and grilling anyway, but I decided that reading the Sunday paper over coffee while the oven in the kitchen did the work was the more appealing course of action. (Or, one could say that I wimped out. What can I say.)

When I do Chiavetta’s at home, I like to have leftover chicken. What’s the point otherwise? So even though there are only three of us and one leg quarter apiece would certainly suffice for this one meal, I marinaded and baked five leg quarters and four thighs! It made for an oven full of chicken.

(I preheated the oven to 450, and when it reached that temp, I put the chicken in the oven and turned the heat down to 375. I like the way an initial temperature that’s quite a bit higher than the main baking temperature browns the surface nicely.)

And when all was done, the meal was served. Chicken with baked beans, grapes, and the first fresh strawberries of the year. (No, not local strawberries. I feel no great compunctions about consuming produce trucked in from some far-flung part of the American Empire.)

The important thing, of course, was that The Wife was totally happy with the meal. Huzzah!

And happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. In the immortal words of director Michael Curtiz, “Always a bridesmaid, never a mother.”

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I’ve recently indulged in a couple of my “comfort foods” that aren’t terribly healthy, but my oh my, are they ever comforting!

:: First off, here’s my favorite thing to do with leftover tacos. Here in Buffalo we have a chain called Mighty Taco. It’s typical fast-food tacos, but of general higher quality than, say, Taco Bell. I like to get the Super Mighty Pack when I go there. This is four of their Super Mighty tacos (which I order with medium sauce and sour cream, for anyone wondering such stuff). Since I can only really eat two of the tacos in one sitting, I then bring the other two home and over the next day or two, indulge in this.

First, you take a leftover Mighty Taco Super Mighty and put it in a bowl:

(If you can do this without looking like a wide-eyed mad scientist lunatic, good for you.)

Then, you slather the thing with Nacho Cheese Sauce or Salsa Con Queso from a jar, like so:

Now, put the thing in the microwave and cover. We have a nifty dome-thing for microwave cooking; since we got this, we’ve cut down our “microwave food splatter” by 90 percent, with the other 10 percent mainly coming from when I forget to use the thing or when we nuke something that we don’t realize is going to splatter. Hey, there are some contexts in which I’m all in favor of food being splattered on something, but the inside of my microwave isn’t one of them.

Anyway, I set the nuker for three and a half minutes. As much as I appreciate that I can reheat leftovers quickly in the nuker, I had it when there are cold spots in the middle, so I tend to nuke the living hell out of things.

And then, we wait. And you know what? Waiting three and a half minutes when you’re hungry and you’re nuking something you like to eat is a really long time! So how do I pass the time? Maybe I stretch a little:

Or maybe play the opening drum riff to “Hot For Teacher” on my thighs:

Waiting for the microwave is also a good time to practice one’s Russian step dancing:

Or, just surrendering to the ennui entirely:

But finally, the 210 seconds do elapse, and then, the final dish!

Oh, sweet sweet molten taco-ey leftover goodness!

:: And then, there’s the Chili Dog. Oh, mama.

First, of course, you have to make chili. I like to experiment with chili recipes on occasion, but for the most part, when I make my own chili, this is how I do it. Generally I make a huge pot of it and eat a few bowls of it along with fresh cornbread. And then, to kill off the leftovers, I’ll either eat future servings by pouring reheated chili over a bed of corn chips (this is heavenly!), or I’ll make Chili Dogs.

So: making chili. I start with meat, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, a tablespoon or two of peanut oil, a teaspoon or so of crushed cumin seed, and a pile of chili powder. If I have green pepper on hand, I’ll dice up some of that and throw it in as well. We don’t always have bell peppers around, though. This time, we didn’t.

The meat in this case is Bob Evans Hot Breakfast Sausage, which makes for great chili. Sometimes I’ll use ground pork. I rarely make chili with plain ground beef; I love the flavor the sausage gives, as well as the extra spice. I just pile all of that into a pot and cook it down until the meat is completely cooked.

Here’s the meat when finished:

Once the meat mixture is complete, I transfer it into the waiting crock pot. Next comes the addition of a bunch of ingredients that come in cans, which means a lot of can-opening. And in the scullery here at Casa Jaquandor, can-opening always results in a scene like this:

I’m trying to avoid being tripped by the cat who is winding through my legs, under the assumption that the can being opened contains tuna.

In terms of canned stuff for the chili, I use:

1 large can of crushed tomatoes
1 can of diced tomatoes (unless I happen to have fresh tomatoes on hand, in which case I’ll just dice those up instead of using the canned stuff)
2 cans of beans

I like my chili to be more of a hearty soup than a stew, but if you want your chili thicker than I typically make it, this is where you’d add a can or two of tomato paste. I rarely bother, though.

By way of beans, I used to always use the canned beans that were “chili ready”, meaning they came packed in a spicy sauce that you could dump right into the pot. However, I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount of sodium in my cooking, and canned foods tend to be loaded with salt. I’ve thus cut the beans down to one can of the “chili beans” and one can of regular red kidney beans.

Over the last year or so, I’ve seen “No Salt Added” canned vegetables showing up on the shelves at The Store. This is a major boon. I’ve grown terribly tired of the excessive salt in everything, and as I’ve cut back, I’m noticing overly salty food more and more now. It’s amazing how foods taste once you’ve started to recalibrate your taste buds for a lower-sodium diet; there are foods now that have me sprinting for the water bottle that I didn’t bat an eye at before. (By way of editorializing, I think that maybe we can put the brakes on demonizing smoking for a bit and instead direct some energy at all the unnecessary salt in American food.)

Anyway, I dump all of that into the crock pot, along with the meat mixture. (Doesn’t matter if you put the meat in first and then the canned stuff, or vice versa.) Only two ingredients remain in my typical chili: a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, and a nice-sized helping of hot sauce.

Here at Casa Jaquandor, there is only one hot sauce: Frank’s. I’ve never liked Tabasco; it’s gotta be Frank’s. (Cholula is acceptable. But no Tabasco!)

After a bit of consideration as to just how spicy I want my chili…

I go ahead and pour some in.

Note that I don’t mess with the shaker cap, that allows the dispensing of hot sauce in nice little drips and drops. Nope: I pour it right in!

And I never ever ever EVER actually measure hot sauce. That way, madness lies.

Now all I do is stir the pot a bit to blend everything together, put the lid on, and walk away. If it’s early in the day I’ll start with the pot set on “Low”, but then I’ll put it on “High” at around 5:00 pm (planning on eating sometime between 7:00 and 7:30). So it crocks away, happily filling the apartment with the scent of wonderful chili.

Here’s the finished pot:

As I noted above, Day One is simply bowls of chili with slices of warm buttered cornbread on the side. Day Two might be the same way. However, after that, I change things up a bit with the leftovers: the afore-mentioned chili-over-Fritos, perhaps. If I make an unusually thick chili, I might make a Chili Sandwich by putting reheated chili between two slices of rye toast. (By the way, I never reheat chili in the microwave. I just think it reheats better on the stove. I just scoop a serving into a small saucepan and heat it up on the burner.)

But ultimately, there’s the Chili Dog, which is pretty easily done. It’s a hot dog with chili on it, right? Well, I have some practices here as well:

First, the hot dog must have some flavor to it. My favorite hot dogs are Sahlen’s (a local Buffalo brand), but my favorite national brand is the Angus Beef dogs from Ball Park. These are terrific.

Second, I will only boil a hot dog in one case: The Daughter likes Kraft Mac-and-Cheese with a cut-up hot dog in it, so I’ll boil the dog in the same water I cook the noodles in. As a rule, I don’t like the texture of boiled or steamed hot dogs, and I’ll only accept them if I’m getting a dog from a street vendor in some city or other, and frankly, I can’t even remember the last time I did that. Hot dogs are best cooked on a grill. Failing that, I’ll pan-fry them in a bit of cooking spray until they’ve browned a bit, and then I’ll pour some water into the pan to cut down on the smoking and heat them all the way through.

Third: When making a Chili Dog, I always toast the bun. This is because the bun will soak up a lot of moisture from the chili, and if I don’t toast it, the bun will pretty much dissolve into the chili.

Fourth: When I make Chili Dogs at home, I make no allowances for picking up the dog and eating at as one would normally eat a hot dog. I assume that a fork is needed.

Fifth: Diced onions and shredded Cheddar cheese are a must.

So, here’s the procedure for a Chili Dog at Casa Jaquandor: toast a bun, put a hot dog in the bun, smother the thing in reheated chili, and then top with diced onion and shredded Cheddar cheese. The result?

Happy eating!

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I’ve been waffling over this post of Lynn’s for a few days now. Is pie really better than cake?

Well, geez. I think pie is a lot more versatile. Pie can be savory, and pie can be sweet. Pie can be creamy, and pie can be fruity. Are there savory cakes? Do crab cakes count? I don’t know.

Lynn notes that frosting isn’t her favorite part of the cake. It is mine, although I’ve come to appreciate the cake itself a lot more over the years. Dry, disappointing cake with wonderful frosting is a pretty meh experience; however, moist, delicious cake with meh frosting is still pretty good. Frosting has to be good, though. I’ve had a lot of icky frosting in my day. Give me a nice carrot cake loaded with enormous amounts of cream cheese frosting, I’m a happy guy.

I’m not generally of the view that cake and pie have certain “events” for which each is called for, except for the very obvious: Thanksgiving is a pie day, all the way. But I find the generic vanilla/chocolate/marble cakes that are usually trotted out at various celebratory events that apparently call for cake to be generally disappointing: not enough frosting, and the cake is inevitably cut into pieces of ridiculously small size. When I have cake, I want it to be rich cake, moist cake, with tons of wonderful, wonderful frosting. (Well, sometimes. Some cakes are so good that you don’t need frosting at all. But those are in a class by themselves.)

In terms of dessert, I’m probably in the mood for cake more often than I am for pie, but that doesn’t mean much. Plus there are wonderful things like pot pies; and when you factor pizza into the pie equation, well, that tilts the scales toward pie by quite a lot. In terms of dessert pies, I like cream pies as much as fruit pies, but fruit pies scream out for ice cream. (Sorry, Lynn, but even as I’ve come to love slices of apple with cheddar cheese, putting cheddar cheese on apple pie is just going a wee bit too far for me!) Of course, when it comes to throwing, I suppose it’s gotta be pie…never heard of cake throwing before, although I suppose it could be done.

Pie, cake — ach, who cares. I like ’em both!

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I’ve been doing a greater than normal amount of blogging about food this year, haven’t I? Oh well, it’s all part of my rediscovered love of cooking and whatnot. Here are some recent doings in Food at Casa Jaquandor.

:: I do love a good salad! I tend to keep my salads fairly minimalistic; I don’t pile on numerous kinds of veggies and other things for an enormous explosion of different kinds of flavors. My favorite salad these days consists of lettuce (of a dark green variety) or spinach, a can of tuna, and a dressing. Here’s a non-tuna salad I had last week:

All that’s on this is the lettuce, a tomato that I diced up, and a dressing of extra virgin olive oil and red wine vinegar. A hunk of good bread is a must for sopping up what’s left of the oil and vinegar after I’ve eaten the salad.

:: Waffles are wonderful in all possible ways. I love waffles. I adore waffles. I couldn’t live without waffles.

My favorite way to have waffles is the basic way, with a couple of sausages on the side and covered in beautiful, beautiful maple syrup. The real stuff, that is — a few years ago we bought some real maple syrup for a recipe and used the rest of the bottle on waffles and pancakes, after which we realized that we’d never be able to go back to Mrs. Butterworth’s or Log Cabin or whatever else. Gotta be real maple syrup.

Most times we make normal, classic waffles. We do own a Belgian waffle maker which we dust off once in a while for a change of pace; Belgian waffles are nice from time to time. (They tend to have a lighter batter and have larger squares.) One restaurant we used to go to had an ice cream sundae that consisted of half a Belgian waffle onto which they would plop a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream and then top the whole thing with hot fudge. Ooooooh, now I want one of those.

Waffles rock!

:: We’re huge fans of sausage at Casa Jaquandor; sausage is wonderful stuff. Italian sausage, Polish sausage, pork breakfast sausage, and our favorites, bratwurst! The best way to have brats is to grill them over charcoal, obviously, but pan-frying them is a good way to go in a pinch (or when it’s winter in Buffalo and you just don’t feel like digging the grill out from under the snowpack that covers it).

I prefer to brown them on a medium-high setting on their sides, and then turn the heat down to cook them through all the way. When cooking inside, I’ll put a bit of liquid — water or beer — into the pan to keep the smoking down. These bratwursts are cooked perfectly, I must say.

Don’t turn them too much, just enough to keep them from getting too brown on one side.

When finished, serve in buns. I slather mine with mustard (either brown mustard, like Gulden’s, or horseradish yellow mustard, like Webbers — French’s Yellow Mustard is just wrong for brats). The Wife likes to slather her mustard on both sides of the bun, as opposed to my way (the top of the sausage). Nothing wrong with that practice at all; I just like it this way.

(Let’s not discuss the tater tots, OK? I thought I had a can of Bush’s Baked Beans for the side dish, and it turned out I didn’t. As I didn’t have time to do proper roasted potatoes, it was tater tots for the side dish. My preferred side dish for brats is potato salad, anyway. Oops.)

:: The day after St. Patrick’s Day, The Daughter suddenly exclaimed, “We never had Shamrock Shakes!” Yes, we like the minty green shakes from the shake machine at Mickey Dee’s, but…well, they’re from a machine. And I’m not even sure if Mickey Dee’s even had them this year. Usually they advertise these a little, right? Actually, I have no idea what’s going on at Mickey Dee’s anymore. We’re not much for the fast food scene these days.

And in any event, I have the ability to make my own Shamrock Shakes. You’re finished, Shake Nazi! No more Shakes for you! Next!

OK, where was I? Well, this is very easy to do. It’s ice cream, milk, and flavoring.

Ice cream goes into the blender:

Followed by milk:

Followed then by flavoring, in this case, creme de menthe syrup:

And then, we blend!

(Blending is more fun if you make a mock face of horror as the blender goes to town.)

After blending, we pour!

And finally, we enjoy.

These didn’t turn out as smooth as I wanted, which means that my blender setting wasn’t high enough. They were still mighty fun and tasty, though. Obviously, one can change up the flavor any way one wishes, simply by using a different flavoring — I’ve made maple shakes by putting maple syrup in instead of creme de menthe, for example. And it occurs to me that adult shakes could be made by using rums or some kind of liqueur.

So there you have it — recent food follies at Casa Jaquandor!

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Mary Kunz Goldman wrote a post about Cooking Light that is eerily similar to my post about Cooking Light. Clearly she traveled forward in time, plagiarized my post, went back in time, and posted her post first. Or something like that. Weird!

But seriously, aside from the specific article that she didn’t like (I enjoyed the “Mistakes You’re Making in the Kitchen” article), her criticisms of the magazine are dead-on. A shame about the magazine, really.

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