Monthly Archive for October, 2006

MMM…Muesli

Published
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chrisandcamri
on October 26, 2006
in Food
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The bulk food department at Whole Foods

The bulk food department at Whole Foods

We’d seen “Mueslix” before, but never tried “Muesli” until we went to Ireland for a friend’s wedding. Muesli is German for “dry rolled oats, nuts, and berries.” Actually, to be fair, while Camri was discovering Muesli, I was discovering eggs, thick bacon, and black pudding. While I was purposely not asking what the difference between white and black pudding was, Camri was mixing Muesli with yogurt and enjoying every bite.

When we got back home, we found authentic European style Muesli, but were always a little dismayed at the price. “dry rolled oats, nuts and berries” are subject to some sort of obscure import tax. A few months go by, and we’re in Mexico. Again, Muesli and yogurt are Camri’s breakfast of choice, while I have Machaca and Huevos Rancheros. Just like the Ireland trip, we came back home to re-discover that Muesli is pretty expensive here.

Then it dawns on us, “this is really just rolled oats, nuts and berries, we can make this for cheap.” So we did. We went to the Whole Foods bulk food department, picked out a bunch of oats, nuts, and berries, and mixed it together. We ended up with this recipe. Enjoy.

Camri’s Muesli
The proportions are really to taste, we tried to measure them officially, but decided it was better to make the recipe as a guide. The best part of buying from the bulk food department is you don’t have to buy anything you don’t want. If you don’t like flax seed, don’t put it in there. If you do like flax seed, put a bunch in there. It will always be Muesli as long as you call it that. Again, Muesli is German for “oats and stuff.”

Mix this up in a big Ziploc bag
Rolled Oats
Quick Oats
Raisins
Hazel Nuts
Almonds
Flax Seed

Add some vanilla yogurt right before you eat it, and enjoy. For a kind of weird change up, mix the yogurt and Muesli together the night before. The oats suck a lot of the moisture out of the yogurt, giving you a Greek style yogurt. It’s really good. If you want to make it more “dessert” like, add some honey.

The Whole Foods bulk food section really scared us for a while. It seemed hard to navigate, like we’d buy something that didn’t taste good, or we wouldn’t want. We were also sort of unsure whether or not it was actually worth buying rice in bulk, are you really saving money? We did a really brief price comparison, and it turns out you save about 10% buying bulk. “Bulk” is sort of the wrong way to think of it. The best part about buying bulk is you don’t have to buy in a specific size. If you’re making pesto sauce, why buy a full bag of pine nuts? Just buy what you need from the bulk aisle. Whole Foods also has a free booklet describing all their bulk items and how to cook them. It’s a nice guide. One more note, Whole Foods actually has Muesli in their bulk department. If you want to cheat, go ahead and buy it.

For more background on the origin of Muesli, check out the Wikipedia Article.

Take Care of Your Cast Iron Skillet

Published
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chrisandcamri
on October 19, 2006
in Food
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Our cast iron, after a year's worth of use.

Our cast iron, after a year


Two articles ago we recommended cooking a steak on a cast iron skillet and promised an article on caring for your skillet. So here it is, now that you’ve got a big hunk of iron in your kitchen, how do you take care of it?

Seasoning

The first thing you’ll need to do is season the skillet. Lots of cast iron skillets come “pre-seasoned”. Don’t believe them. Sure, they’re sort of seasoned, but there’s still work to be done. Take a big hunk of shortening and smear it over every inch of the cooking area of the pan. Put it in a very hot oven for a while. The fat will melt (and smoke a little bit). As the pan heats up, teeny tiny pores in the metal will open up and suck up the melted fat. When the pan cools, the pores close up, retaining the fat. The next time you heat the skillet up (like when you’re cooking) the fat is released a little bit at a time, creating a non-stick surface.

After about twenty minutes or so at 400 degrees, take the skillet out and let it cool. When it’s cool enough, clean it out with paper towels. Don’t use any water. No water? Yeah, kind of freaky, stand by.

Cleaning

Modern America is so wrapped up in aluminum and stainless steel that we forget that iron rusts. It totally rusts. Your skillet may very well rust. Mine is a little rusty on the bottom. It’s going to happen, so just get it in your head now. The only area of the skillet that you absolutely can’t have rust on is the cooking area. We all know that water makes rust, and that water cleans skillets, so how do you clean the skillet without water? Here comes the exciting part…SALT. You pour some kosher salt in it and scrub with paper towels.

Whoah. No soap? Somewhere, your Mom is clucking her tongue. She wants you to use soap. So does your Grandma. You know who doesn’t? Your GREAT Grandma. She’s not so wrapped up in purell and anti-bacteria hoo hah that she understands that you don’t need to use soap and water to get an iron skillet clean. We like our pan to be greasy. It’s a good thing. You’re going to get that thing so hot when you cook that it’ll kill all bacteria. Go to Billy Goat’s or one of the dozens of Chicago taco joints and ask them how they clean their giant griddles. I guarantee you they don’t use soap and water. I’d be willing to bet they don’t even use water. They just scrape off the crusty’s and keep it really hot. Your cast iron skillet is the next door neighbor to one of those big iron griddles. Trust Billy Goat’s.

When possible, just wipe it clean with paper towels. If you get some stuck on crap, scrub it off with some dry kosher salt. I’ve been doing this for over a year now. I cook eggs, bacon, sausage, corn bread, pancakes, steak, all kinds of stuff in this skillet and I’ve never gotten sick. Water has never been used to clean it, ever. It works, and it keeps a nice seasoned cooking surface.

What not to Cook

Technically, you can cook just about anything in your skillet. It’s a straight up fry pan. However, for the first couple of weeks avoid acidic stuff, like tomatoes. They’ll eat through your weak seasoning and get at the iron. Hold off on that kind of stuff until you have a really solid seasoning.

Get to it

Cast iron is more of a committment than a regular frying pan. Once you learn to season and clean it, you’re done. Don’t worry too much about it. Seasoning is a lifelong journey of fidgeting with your iron. You’ll start to covet your skillet. You’ll show it off to friends. You’ll brag about never using soap and water to clean it. Cast iron, in my humble opinion, is the winter equivalent of a Weber grill. Both need some TLC from time to time, both have little cooking cults that adore them, and both are totally misunderstood by an average consumer. Quit being an average consumer, start taking care of a piece of cooking history. Your Great Grandmother would be proud.

To get started, pick up one of these Lodge Logic cast iron skillets.

Winter Wine

Published
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chrisandcamri
on October 12, 2006
in Drink
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I’m writing this Wednesday evening, on the train ride home. It’s 47 degrees outside. It’s supposed to get down to 30 tonight, and there’s a strong possiblity of snow tomorrow morning. This is going to be a hard Chicago winter.

Wine and winter go together like peanut butter and jelly. It warms you up, flushes your cheeks, and makes the grey crappy skys not matter so much. It’s like a tanning bed for your guts. Camri and I are red wine fans. No doubt about it.

We wrote this review a few months ago about a new grape variety we’d never tried before called Nero d’ Avola. At the time, we weren’t crazy about it. We thought it was too smoky. That was more than 10 months ago. Since then, we’ve had a bottle or two of that specific wine, and a few with Nero d’ Avola grapes. This is a wild predicition, but I really think we’re going to drink a lot of this stuff this winter. It’s very warm, smoky, with a lot of complicated stuff going on. In general, the combination of “complex”, “warm”, and “smoky” jumps out as being ideal winter red wines. Here’s one more from our teeny tiny review database that fits that bill, Santa Rita.

As for whites, it’s really new territory for us. Living in a German influenced neighborhood, we’ve tried our share of Rieslings. Our favorite, both for taste and awesome black cat bottle design is Zeller Schwarze Katz. Another distinctly winter wine is “ice wine.” We’ve never tried one, so we can’t comment. The theory is, they leave the grapes on the vine during the winter, allow the juice to freeze, and then press them. The ice crystals pull a lot of the moisture out of the grape, so the wine is very thick and sweet. Buying a bottle of real ice wine is on our list of things to try this winter.

To review, here’s the wikipedia pages on each of the varieties we’re recommending for winter…

Updated to add: It’s 9:25 am, Thursday morning. I’m on the 12th floor with a view of the Chicago River. It is snowing like crazy out there.

How to Cook a Steak

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on October 4, 2006
in Food
. 1 Comment
steak on the grill

steak on the grill

Camri and I like red meat, but it’s not a big part of our diet. We like a steak every couple of weeks though. Buying a steak at a restaurant is pretty expensive, especially if you want a really good cut of meat. Most steaks come out really well on the grill. Put a little bit of oil and seasoning on a sub-one -inch piece of beef, cook it for a few minutes over medium high heat on a grill, and you’re good to go. It gets trickier when you want to cook a thick restaurant style filet mignon. A $30 restaurant steak can be had at home for less than $8 per steak. We promise. We’ve done it. After a lot of experimenting, and some guidance from Cooks Illustrated, this is the formula that works best for us:

  1. Pre heat your oven to 450 degrees. Your oven? Yeah, your oven. Don’t fret. It’ll all be clear in a minute.
  2. Heat up a non-teflon pan on your stove top. It absolutely, positively, has to be a non-teflon, sticky metal pan. If possible, it would be great if it’s the sort of pan you can put in an oven without the handle melting off. We got a really nice set of cookware as a wedding present, which included this All-Clad skillet. We’ve used it a bunch of times, and have been really happy with it, until we discovered the joy of cooking with cast iron. Now we use this Lodge Logic cast iron skillet for all our steak cooking needs. It’s also great for eggs, bacon, sausage, corn bread…just about anything. It rules. We’ll write about it soon. Anyway, get your skillet really hot.
  3. Season your meat. Make it really simple, a little olive oil on both sides, then some pepper and salt. Not hard. Don’t overthink it.
  4. When your skillet is really really hot, drop the meat into it. Once it hits, it’s going to sizzle an awful lot. You’ll be scared. You’ll want to move the meat around. Don’t touch it. You have to let the crust form. Don’t move. Don’t. Let it sizzle for two minutes, then flip it over. If possible, grab it by both sides with tongs and pull it straight up. Don’t get a spatula in there to break that yummy crust. Let it sizzle for another two minutes on the other side (four minutes total).
  5. Turn off your burner. Plug a Polder thermometer into your meat. Not just any meat thermometer, get one with a digital readout and a long cord that lets you put your meat in the oven, or on the grill, and monitor the temperature from afar. They’re usually around $30. We’ve had ours for over five years. If you have a oven-worthy skillet, take the whole contraption off the burner and pop it into the oven. Set your thermometer to beep at 145 degrees (medium rare). If you’re not into a little blood, then check out this USDA meat temperature chart. Keep in mind, the meat will continue to cook when you take it out of the oven, so set your alarm five degrees lower than your target temperature.
  6. Drink a beer.
  7. When the temperature is right, take the skillet out of the oven, take the meat off the skillet (leave the thermometer in for now, if you pull it out lots of juices will leak out.) and let the meat rest on a warm plate with foil over top of it. Don’t eat it yet. Let the meat rest for at least five minutes.
  8. While you’re waiting, you can ad a half stick of butter, some rough chopped garlic, some shallots, and a little more olive oil to your hot skillet, and work it over with a metal spatula. Scrape up all those fun little black bits and swirl it around with the melting butter. It’s better than A-1.

    9. Once the meat is rested, plate it up, pour some sauce over the top of each steak, and enjoy. Although there’s a small investment up front ($25 cast iron, $30 thermometer) you make the money back after just two steaks. Plus, you can use both of those things for lots of other stuff.