meatballs

I'm in scrounging mode. I do want to clear things out before I go shopping again. This could take awhile. My idea was for meatballs, only meatballs, but then along the way I broke down and boiled some spaghetti. Just a bit -- to round it off. I cooked them perfectly, most unAmerican of me, I stood there and tested, not done, not done, not done, not done, done, removed. Still a little bit hard inside. Now where do you ever get that? Italy! That's where.

I had about a pound of ground beef in a Seal-a-Meal bag, a pre-formed hamburger that had peas and shredded carrots, and four breakfast sausage discs that I wrapped and froze and forgot about. The hamburger patty with peas and the sausage discs had slight freezer damage.

I used a lot of my own sourdough breadcrumbs and a lot of egg, three super duper jumbo eggs. I keep feeling sorry for those chickens. That's gotta hurt. Worcestershire sauce, S/P. I fried diced onions with crushed garlic in olive oil before forming the meatballs because I didn't want them to shrink after being formed. This amount turned out to be a large bowl full. The meatballs were boiled directly heated prepared canned tomatoes, and canned tomato sauce, just enough to mostly cover them. Usually I fry them first but this time I didn't. I wanted them to stay round so I forewent the layered Maillard reaction of frying.

Grated Parmigiano Reggiano and cut parsley added to the meat mixture.

Now I have a whole bunch of sausy meatballs that I will have pastalessly at my leisure.

curried shrimp and grits

It's impressive what I can find when I start scrounging around. In this case shrimp so huge they scare people. Everyone who see them goes, "Are those shrimp?" And I go, "Yup." Naturally, I cut them up into manageable pieces and that rather defeats the whole purpose of getting them big, dunnit, unless you consider the chore of peeling their shells simplified by being large. They're actually too big even for sushi. So there's that.

I have no grits. Alas, for I am gritless. But I do have popcorn and I do have a coffee grinder. So there's that.

I used chicken broth for the liquid in both the grits and the sauce. Butter in the both the grits and the sauce.

Here's how to make the sauce. It's like a gravy. Tablespoon butter into a hot pan. Tablespoon of flour. Brown the flour to develop a brown roux. Don't rush it. What would be the point? You have the grits cooking in another pot. That will determine your timing. Add the flavoring powders, in this case, prepared curry and powdered chipotle. Honestly, it could be anything. Heat the seasonings in the roux. Add garlic chopped finely if you're not using garlic powder, and diced onion. Coat them with the roux. Before the garlic burns, drop in one cup or more of chicken broth. Stir. The roux comes off the garlic/onion and thickens the chicken sauce, no lumps or anything. Add shrimp. Do not cook the shrimp, just heat it and remove immediately. Bang, you're done.

Add grated or chipped cheese, Parmigiano here, to the grits off the heat. Do not cook the cheese (it's a processed food, it could separate). Add chopped parsley or whatever you wish that's fresh, cilantro, basil, pretty much anything.

I'm also near the end of all my prefabricated curries. Which means I can now go out and get MOAR! This is Vindaloo, and it's tremendous. I enhanced it with chipotle powder. The Indians themselves would be pleased with that. They are the worlds greatest consumers of chiles, after all, raw chiles, powders, pastes, sauces, and all things chile-related. They proudly proclaim to have the hottest, why, you'd think they invented them, but that's nonsense. All chiles, ALL CHILES, are New-World fruits, even the so-called Chinese Lantern habanero types, Thai chiles, and Hungarian paprikas, all originated in the Americas. And what was Eastern and Western and African cuisine before the Americas were opened there to find chiles among many other new things? Boring, that's what. The hottest chile are Central American pequins (pea-kins or pay-kenyos) . Pequino for small, they are the African bird's eye chile. The slightest trace of its capsaicinoid on your finger transfers easily to more sensitive bodily areas and can positively ruin your whole evening. I've seen this happen. Although the habaneros are reputed to be the hottest, my own personal experience points to the pequins.

chocolate covered pecans

With gray Brittany sea salt. Gros, crunched down to be less gros with a mortar and pestle although I have no idea which part is the mortar and which part is the pestle. I do know the thing is amazingly heavy.

The chocolate is tempered this time because the coating bloomed on those flat lemon cookies down there ↓. And that is ruinous! Not really, but it's not that nice. Tempering stabilizes the cocoa fat, that is raising the temperature beyond melting, then lowering the temperature until it thickens, raising it again to a working temperature just barely beyond the melting point, or less specifically the melting range of temperatures. That makes the finished product more stable, less susceptible to slight changes in ambient temperature and therefore less likely to blooming, makes it possible to produce an attractive sheen, and to break with a distinctive and desirable snap. The self-proclaimed Chocolate Bible, Christian Teubner, recognizes three acceptable methods for tempering chocolate, I declare a fourth for which I shall become famed, the double bath method, hot water bath, cool water bath, back to hot water bath. I've had a little trouble with this method so I cannot yet recommend it, but I'm working on that. I also have a chocolate tempering machine, but it's much messier than my own simple method. I might give up on my method and revert to the machine if I don't start getting more consistent and reliable results.

See, I have all this couverture chocolate laying around that must be used before it starts picking up undesirable flavors like an odor magnet, and I just discovered the most difficult of all to mess with is the best tasting even much better than the most exclusive and expensive by 100%. So I have learned by having it. Now I'm sort of eager to use it all up and make it go away so I can get some more. And it does make wonderful gifts. And kids do love it equally as well as adults, And it is health food, after all. What's not to like?

Doubt that last thing? Chocolate is comprised of up to 55% fat, 14% protein, 9% starch, 2.6% minerals, 5% water, 14% salt-free essences concentrates high nutritional value into the smallest volume. I read that in a book! So therefore it must be true. What?

I heated the pecans in the microwave. Then heated more when I saw there wasn't enough to use up this batch of chocolate. Heating the nuts excites and activates the oil within them and tends to bring it to the surface. A taste-test before and after confirms the point. The sea salt was just a decadent extravagance and to insist I'm not listening to anybody when it comes to cutting back on salt. I make all my own food here so I'm not subjected to overly salted prepared commercial food that is ruining everybody else's health so disastrously in America. Salt is necessary to body functioning, the nervous system particularly, and I can't get salt unless I add it myself. So there you have it. Those are my opinions and for now I'm sticking with them. *crosses arms.*

Oh wait! Maybe they're ready.

Nom nom nyom nom, nope, nom nom nom, they're not, nyom nom nom, lick, nom nom, crunch, nom nyom nom nom, smack, nyom nom nom ready yet, nom nom nom, Oh my God, nom nom nyom nom, this is, nom nom nom, good. Lick lips. Lick fingers. Suck lips.

New York steak, green salad

I picked these up on sale. They were like half price. How could I refuse? I should have gotten a dozen -- but whatdaya think, I'm crazy? New York steak set out for an hour to bring to room temperature. Salted on both sides with kosher flake salt. This causes the juices to be drawn to the surface then drawn back to the center of the meat dragging the salt with it. The advantage of this, like brining is the juices, the moisture, tends to stay there. Take care not to over salt because that would be gross. This is one of the reasons why kosher salt is so cool. It facilitates control a little better. There is actually nothing inherently kosher about the salt, it's just that it's used in the preparation of a lot of kosher foods.

Simple olive oil/vinegar dressing. As you can see, I used an entire avocado and tomato, which is a meal in itself and which indicates I'm a total undisciplined hog with no sense of portion control.

hash browned potatoes, two fried eggs

Oh, my God, my stomach is bulging out like Santa Clause.

A single Russet potato pealed and shredded in the Cuisinart, rinsed and spun like a salad. Fried in 50%/50% butter/olive oil on medium. Flipped like a pancake. And, Boy, is it ever good.

I have a new thing about frying eggs. Melt butter in a pan. Allow foam to settle. Crack open eggs into a ramekin then gently pour them into the heated buttered pan. Notice how the whites glob more thickly around the yolks? Goof that up while the whites are still wet. Using a knife or a fork, drag some of the thick whites into the area of the thin whites. Open up a space in the albumen immediately next to the yolk so that the pan is exposed through a tiny slot. It seals back with goopy white then cooks evenly. This technique assures slime-free whites while avoiding overcooked yolks.

mussels with white wine

Not shown, butter, quite a lot, almost a stick, say, six ounces. White wine, I forget what kind, the airline type where one cup comes in a bottle, I could look but I can't be arsked. Let's say generic.

Brined the mussels this time. It hardly helped any if at all. Caused the buttered wine to go all salty. Couldn't enjoy the broth like it was mussely soup like last time, and that's a no-good, low-down, dirty rotten wasteful shame that is.

But isn't my bread nice? It's sort of a careless brioche, in that its' fortified with lots of butter, milk, and eggs. I could make that stuff blindfolded. Mind you the kitchen would be a gigantic mess and I'd risk burning down the building, but I could do it. It's 1/4 whole wheat flour I milled myself. The next time I'm going to use a higher percentage of whole wheat since that commercial yeast is so powerful it can easily do the heavy lifting, and include flour more coarsely milled resulting in a denser and more interesting texture, I'm imagining.

huevos casitos

Not precisely a ranchero over here, just a little house.

This is my new way to make scrambled eggs -- similar to a failed sauce, or almost like a custard. I'm aiming for very wet, barely cooked, creamy with miniscule curds. It's cooked on the lowest heat possible. Coriander and cumin and mustard are added to the egg mixture before it's cooked, pre-heated onion and jalapeño mixture is added after it the eggs are cooked.

I made bread just so I could have toast with eggs, but now my eggs are Mexican so they need tortillas. Corn tortillas.

Buy this.

Mix with hot water. keep adding one or the other until a workable consistency is reached. Too wet and you won't be able to peel them from the plastic. Too dry and they'll crack when pressed. Use your intuition.

Spray oil on the plastic, at least for the first one. Not necessary to re-spray for each tortilla.

Smash it with your hand. Fix the edges which tend to crack.

Let 'er rip.

Rotate and press again. Much more gently this time. I like to press each one three times. Hard, light, light. Turning it, thinking of it as a clock. Producing a few failures will show you where you went wrong. Too thin, too thick, too dry, too wet, those sorts of things. Once you get going, you can really whip 'em out.

Peel off the plastic from one side onto your palm, then c-a-r-e-f--l-l-y pull off the plastic from the other side. If you're not careful, the thin and delicate tortilla will rip, and that will ruin everything and everybody dies!

Fry the tortilla on medium heat for no more than a few seconds. It does not have to actually brown. Incidentally, this is the first step of chips. For chips, you can take a stack of COOKED tortillas and cut them all at once. Deep-fry them in batches and salt immediately out of the oil for the best doggone tortilla chips you'll ever have, and I mean it. We make them here for parties. Guests get a kick out of helping, and they're always completely devoured. I urge you to try this sometime. It's fun.

You do not have to oil the pan.

Milk, cream, chicken soup, whatever, some kind of liquid, beat into the egg.

Jalapeños in a tiny tin. These are sliced. The tins can come in diced, sliced into rounds, or whole. These are strips, so another cut on the board turned 'em into diced. Where I live, these can take up an entire grocer's aisle. They can be mild, medium, or hot. They come in all sizes of tins. Get the hot ones, or why bother? You know you're in gringo-land when your only choice is mild. Which is so pathetic it makes me mad.

We're aiming for a thick egg sauce cooked on very low heat. This can be speeded by heating the liquid first then tempering into the eggs. In that case, you're half way there before it gets to the pan. I did not do that.

You'll notice I didn't add cheese. What, do you think I'm insane? I'd have garnished with cilantro if I had it, but alas, for I am presently cilantroless.