Recipes

So, here are a few quickies!

Strawberry Balsamic Jam - the procedure here is to cook the strawberries on low heat until they've given up a good bit of their liquid, then add 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar for every cup of strawberries, and simmer it slowly for a few more minutes. *OPTIONAL* Strain the berries before adding the balsamic, the juice they give up is amazing.

Strawberry Lemon Mint vinaigrette - whisk together strawberry juice and white wine vinegar, then add in some chiffonade mint (very thin strips, minced works as well), and whisk into a vinaigrette using lemon oil. If lemon oil is unavailable, use regular olive oil and a small squeeze of lemon juice.

Salad - using our vinaigrette, we can do a mixed green salad with toasted coconut, macademia sesame brittle, and an assortment of leafy greens. Preferably no radicchio.

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Testing

So, due to an all time low in computer availability, I'm testing out an app for posting by phone. Cross your fingers and hope for posts!

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Equipment

So this post is a tad inspired. By shiny stuff. I recently received a birthday gift, and being a cook, most of the gifts I receive are kitchen related. Well, this gift wasn't just kitchen related. This gift was a chef's knife. A knife is to a chef what a gun is to a soldier (or at least that's what the movies tell me). Some chefs are more than happy to inflict bodily harm on anyone who touches their knife.

Well, the knife I received is a Shun Bob Kramer Meiji Chef's Knife (http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/shun-bob-kramer-meiji-chefs-knife/) and it is the greatest knife I have ever held. It is also the sharpest. I have cut myself without noticing several times already, and I've only had it for a week. That's how sharp it is. And that's what inspired the post today!

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR TOOLS

I could probably walk into every home in the USA and find dull knives in 90% of them. Most of the time, this is because the knife has never been honed. Everybody knows about sharpening knives, but how many people know about honing them? You know that metal rod you always see chefs running their knife on real fast? That's a steel. They're honing their knife. Your knife's edge doesn't degrade rapidly enough to require sharpening on a regular basis - the most minor of imperfections on the blade can all be straightened by honing your knife. Almost everyone owns a steel. Just run your knife along the steel towards  the handle at your preferred angle. The Japanese prefer a very sharp edge at around 10-11 degrees, whereas the French and Germans prefer 18-20 degrees. Do both sides, and don't try to imitate the chefs on TV. We all laugh because they're ruining the edge doing it that fast.

That's all!

Back In The Blog!

So, over the past few weeks my hardware has been giving me some issues. This is officially no longer a problem! Unfortunately, I have to post this about 8 minutes before I leave for work so the next full post won't be up until later tonight. So in the mean time, here is a little bit of advice for creative cookers.

Always experiment with your recipes. Just because chefs do this all the time, that doesn't mean we get things perfect the first time around. A lot of recipes go through a dozen or more adjustments before we are satisfied with the final product. For example, I took it upon myself one day to make a recipe for Maple Bacon Cinnamon Rolls. It took me 7 batches before I was satisfied with the cinnamon/maple/bacon flavor balance, and that involved a lot of different methods of conveying flavor, from maple syrup in the dough to bacon fat slathered on the dough just before rolling and cutting.

Be patient - test recipes 50 times if you have to, if you aren't entirely satisfied with your end product. Now get out there and cook damnit!

Shenaningans

Unfortunately, my computer recently decided to do some undeclared shenanigans and the blog had to be put on hold for a few days. My main computer for the blog should be back working by tomorrow, when the recipes will start flowing like water (or if you're from here, beer) again.

Sorry for the hold up, these things happen :(

In the mean time, bacon shenanigans! Simple stuff today - Laquered Bacon. Set your oven to around 300 degrees, get a sheetpan, a wire rack, bacon, and sweet soy sauce ready. put the wire rack on the sheet pan, but the bacon on the rack, and put it in your oven. Every 10 minutes, pull the bacon from the oven, brush it with sweet soy, and put it back in the oven. after 40 minutes, flip the bacon over and start brushing the other side.

After about 80-90 minutes, voila! Laquered Bacon. It's pretty awesome.

KISS

KISS is one of our favorite acronyms in the kitchen. It answers pretty much everything, and solves most problems. Keep It Simple Stupid. Somehow, it is also one of the hardest things to do. This is how a lot of dishes can become unbearable to make, or even just to think about making.

Good food can be simple food. Simple food can be good food. We have a dessert on our menu that has a grand total of 7 ingredients. Dark chocolate, eggs, black cap raspberries, white chocolate, cream, sugar, pinot noir. There are 4 different components to this dessert too.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Diet

Another break from the kitchen today. This time, it's to talk about diet, nutrition, and my personal opinions on a few parts of the health culture. Personally, I think almost everything we know about "proper nutrition" is wrong, for the sole reason that there is too much contradicting evidence.

Look at the movie Super Size Me - Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McD's for 30 days and gained a ton of weight, and became quite unhealthy by the end of it. Now look at a similar movie, Fat Head. In Fat Head, Tom Naughton eats nothing but McDonalds for 30 days and he loses weight, lowers his bad cholesterol, and raises his good cholesterol. That's right, he gets healthier. How? He doesn't overeat. Simple as that.

A lot of people think that eating meat is what makes you fat and unhealthy, because of the lipid hypothesis. The lipid hypothesis states that Saturated Fat raises your Cholesterol, and high Cholesterol causes Heart Disease, therefore Saturated Fat causes Heart Disease. The study that supports this theory compared the saturated fat intake of 6 countries with their rate of heart disease, and sure enough the data supports the theory. Japan had a very low saturated fat intake and a low rate of heart disease, while the UK and the USA had high amounts of both. However, there were 16 other countries in that study that did not support the theory, such as Norway and Denmark, where the saturated fat intake was higher than that of the US and UK, but heart disease rates that were similar to that of Japan. Study doesn't look so good when you include those data points.

Here's a fun quote for you. It's paraphrased, but it says the same thing - You have a little over a teaspoon of sugar in your blood, when you have normal blood sugar levels. The FDA recommends eating 300 grams of carbs each day - that converts to a cup and a half of sugar in your blood

Personally, I don't think it matters what your diet is, provided you eat everything in moderation. When it comes right down to it, no matter what you're eating, we're all consuming the same important things - minerals, vitamins, carbs, protein, fat, and water. So eat whatever you want - just not too much of it.

Cheers!