Time To Start Growing Your Own Garlic...

On the left, garlic I planted last fall from some everyday store-bought stuff. On the right, the everyday store-bought stuff. The stuff I planted was *not* elephant garlic, it was just the plain old white kind you see everywhere. The stuff on the right is about average sized; not the biggest I've seen from store-bought, but not the smallest, and these were the biggest I could find out of the package (ready-peeled stuff from the local Asian-mart). Not all of the garlic I planted came out as big as those on the left, but even the smallest ones were larger than the largest ones I could find from the store-bought stuff. What's more, I even let this particular plant go to flower, which I'm told you shouldn't do so the garlic can concentrate all the nutrients on the garlic itself, not divide it up between the bulb and the flower. But I wanted photos...

Growing your own garlic has the added benefit of fresh garlic scapes, which I'm told are fabulous (I've heard garlic scape pesto is amazing). I'm going to find out soon enough myself.





The flower of the home-grown garlic:

I love my new job.

So still getting settled in here in town, but I was lucky enough to land a job at the Two Twenty Two, located inside the Country Music Hall of Fame, within two weeks of arriving in Nashville. Check out their menu, and especially their catering menu, and you'll see why I love my job. There really is nowhere else in town I'd rather work.

Another reason I love my job is because of some of the equipment we use, such as this steamer-



That's right, it's a Cleveland Steamer.



(Still got a few more weeks of transitioning to do, then we've got some new stuff in the works. Stay tuned.)

Road Trip/Moving/New Stuff

Going to be busy for a bit while I move...






But then I got some tasty new stuff coming- Thai Sticky Rice, a cool Hummus variation, Muhammara, and a Buffalo Chicken Quesadilla; maybe some video versions of stuff like The Tacos (they're way, way quicker and easier to make than the post might lead you to believe).

Going to have a blogging partner too, so she'll probably have some cool recipes to share as well.

Good Times.

My new favorite cooking show

Epic Meal Time.



"Ain't no cookin' show exists like we exist."


Better than 99.9% of anything I've seen on Food Network.

Filler Material

Looks like Robert Irvine is a big fat liar! (Well, maybe not fat, but he's definitely big.) If you've ever watched the Food Network at all, you likely know who Robert Irvine is (or thought you did, hehe...) but just in case you don't know about him, he has a show on there called "Dinner: Impossible", where he "travels the world on culinary assignments" and must produce an entire meal under seemingly impossible, or at least very tough, conditions. It's mildly interesting, I guess. My brother likes it a lot; I'm not a fan. Anyway, apparently he made up a lot of the stuff in his bio, like in his book and elsewhere when he claimed to have worked on the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Princess Diana-

"It was an English fruitcake that weighed over 360 pounds," he told the Toronto Sun. "I worked on these elaborate side panels, which told the history of the royal Windsor and Spencer families in icing!"

True?

"I was at the school when that was happening," he said. "They made the cake at the school where I was."

Did he help make it?

"Picking fruit and things like that."

Mmm-hm.

Anyway, I first read about it here. There's another article here. And this is what he looks like.

V.A.W.

What does V.A.W. stand for?



Vegetarian. Assault. Weapon!


Here we have the V.A.W. pictured with three average-sized tomatoes...



Ok, so the average-sized tomatoes are really just average-sized cherry tomatoes. But that's still one big-ass carrot!


Here is a normal carrot...





And here is a normal carrot pictured beside the V.A.W....







I found it at work the other day. Was going to make some soup with it, but then realized it's potential for fending off intruders, so I brought it home instead.

Damn thing weighs over a pound and a half.

Hmmm...

*Note* - although I think the photo qualifies as SFW (no nudity), I know some people who would argue that any image of Rachael Ray would be definitely NSFW.


I find this to be disturbing and exciting at the same time. Disturbing because somehow it just doesn't seem right; exciting because somehow it also does... (She did 5 pics. Links to them can be found here. If you're into that sort of thing, I mean; which I highly doubt, but you never know.) I tell you what, though- if I ever hear Alton Brown is posing in Cosmo or some other such magazine, I think I'm going to have to deny ever having liked both him and the Food Network.


(FYI- FHM = For Him Magazine)

(And what's going on with her teeth in that photo, anyway...?)

Slow and Low, that is the Tempo...

Ok, so... I want to pretty this place up a little bit with some pics, but being about 7 years behind the times on the technology front, I still use a film camera (and what a fine one it is. Definitely way more camera than I can handle. But it is still a film camera). So I have to buy the film, take between 24-36 shots, get it developed, then cry because all my photos suck, then repeat, hopefully with better results. All of this takes time. Actually, buying the film takes the longest. I don't get out much. I actually just ordered 10 rolls from Adorama because I figured it'd be faster than me going to the store to buy it. True fact. So things might be a little slow around here until it comes in and I can get some photos taken. But I have some good stuff planned for when it does: gumbo, peanut sauce, pozolé, butternut squash soup, and a few other things. And maybe some totally random reviews of kitchen products that I use too.



Also, we both know you want those chips. I just need an address to send them to. Doesn't have to be yours, but it probably should be that of someone who doesn't like spicy food. Otherwise there might not be any left when you go to get them. Seriously. I can't even make them at home anymore when my brother is around. I swear he's one of those Transformers, except he turns into a vacuum cleaner. His hand, looking like a backhoe, scoops up more chips than seems possible, and then into the Hoover Black Hole they go. It really is a sight.
(It is safe to use your own address, though; I promise to send chips and not spam.)

The Olive Garden

"The McDonald's of Italian food."


That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

It burns! It burns us!

Yesterday at work I was chopping jalapenos for our chili; two pounds, to be exact, which is about 30 or so peppers. Maybe I was just being lazy, or maybe my memory is just worse than I thought, but I broke my cardinal rule of jalapeno-chopping, which is always, always, ALWAYS!! wear gloves whenever you chop more than about 3 of them. Four or five, tops. The reason that is my cardinal rule is not because I forgot one time and rubbed my eyes or used the bathroom aftewards; I'm not that absent-minded. But because I've done this before and found out the hard way that handling lots of chopped hot peppers will really irritate your skin. Yes, even your hands. Except that it's not as immediate as rubbing your eyes afterwards. It can take up to an hour, or even more, to start. Which is what happened with me. I didn't even really have much contact with the peppers- just lightly holding down a pile of them, pushing them towards the knife. That's it. I think in this case it was about a half-hour later that my left hand started burning. Really burning. I think I could have lit peoples' cigarettes with my fingertips. It was bad. It got to where I couldn't go 30 seconds without sticking my hand in cold water. 30 seconds of ice water, 30 seconds of air. Then repeat. Again and again. And again. I knew from past experience that this was going to go on for a really long time. Not really practical, y'know? Anyway, there is a point to all this. Most of the guys I work with are Mexican and whenever they get a burn, they always put mustard on it. I vaguely remember trying it once a long time ago and not noticing much of a difference, but I figured I didn't have anything to lose this time. So I grabbed the jar and covered my hand with it completely. Mmm, tasty, yellow mustard-coverd hand! I guess a mustard-covered hand probably isn't much more practical than sticking it in ice-water every 30 seconds, but y'know what? It actually worked. It still burned some, but it was bearable. Not like before where it felt like I had coated my hand with super-industrial-strength IcyHot. I suspect it's actually the vinegar in the mustard that does it, but I'm not sure why. (Time to watch Fight Club again, I guess.) One of the guys told me that lemon juice and tomato juice work too. Again, with the acids. And I'm sure they do work as well, but mustard has the advantage of actually staying put. Which means you can also play jokes on people with it (assuming it was your hand that you burned); like say, offer to shake their hand. Or slap them on the back. Or just talk about how weird it is that only your hand has jaundice. Or whatever.

Anyway, learn from my pain. Always wear gloves when chopping more than a few hot peppers.

A word on salt...

Seeing as how salt is used in almost everything we cook, I thought I'd offer up my thoughts on it here.

A few years ago when I first started noticing sea salt coming into the mainstream, I totally scoffed. I chalked it up to just a marketing gimmick-

"Our potato chips are better because they're made with Sea Salt."

Yeah, right. "Sea salt & vinegar" potato chips are only different from "regular" salt & vinegar chips in that they cost more. Or at least, that's what I thought. Then I started reading some BBQ books by Steven Raichlen. He recommended using Kosher Salt as opposed to table salt. Said it didn't burn your tongue the way table salt would (in addition to being easier to sift through your fingers due to the larger size crystals). That got me re-thinking about sea salt, so I went home and did a simple taste test with sea and table salt-
First, I just tasted a pinch of sea salt- didn't notice anything unusual; tasted like salt. Then I tasted a pinch of regular table salt. What a difference! The table salt had a harsh, burning taste to it, not "clean" at all like the sea salt. Later on, I went out and tried some sea salt & vinegar potato chips. (I like salt & vinegar chips anyway, so it was some tasty research.) Big difference there, too. Although tasty, if you eat regular salt & vinegar chips, you'll notice that after awhile your mouth will burn and sting from the salt; not so with the sea salt variety. Marketing gimmick or not, it really is better. (Not to mention that if you throw it in a pot of cooking water, like for pasta or something, it will foam up a little, like ocean foam : )

All salt is not "just salt". I'll never use table salt again. Maybe the harsh taste of it just comes from the added iodide and un-iodized salt won't have that harshness. I don't know; I haven't tasted the un-iodized kind. Maybe that makes me a food snob. Maybe I don't care. I'll continue to use both Kosher and Sea salts. Sea is a little more expensive, but you can get it fairly cheap nowadays, and find it almost anywhere. Hain and Morton both market a commercial variety that you can find in almost any grocery store, and if you have a co-op or natural foods store nearby, you can usually find it in bulk for less. When I need a large amount of salt for a recipe (like the sour pickles I'll be writing about before too long) I tend to use Kosher. For smaller amounts, or for sprinkling on food, I go with Sea.

You can read a little more about the differences between the three at Food Network.

No, you can't have the recipe... because there isn't one.

So, I like to cook. Sometimes I even think I'm pretty good at it. It used to be that when I told someone I liked to cook, and they asked me if I was any good, I'd say "Well, I'm good at following a recipe!" But I've come to realize that that's just not true. I actually am a good cook, and I really suck at following a recipe. The only time I can really stick to them is when I'm mixing baking stuff, like flour, and baking powder, that sort of thing- because that stuff doesn't really taste very good on its own, so you really can't judge by taste whether you need more or not. Other than that, whenever I actually try and follow a recipe, my head starts to hurt, I get dizzy, have to hold on to something so I don't fall... ok, maybe that's a little much, but I do get that "far-off" look in my eyes, like I'm trying to make sense of one of those Magic Eye pictures. That actually does happen. Not to say that I never use recipes; I do use them, all the time- I just can't stick to them. I look at them as more like using one of those multi-state maps to find your way from Point A to Point B- you've got a general idea of what direction you're going to go, but as far as which streets to take, you'll just have to figure that out along the way. Which I think is a lot more fun anyway. If you don't have a set path to follow, there's no way you can go off course. If you don't have a set recipe to follow, there's no way you can make it wrong. As long as it tastes right, it is right, and it can be slightly different every time (and probably will be) and still be great. And sometimes you might just end up with something totally new and different that you can share with your friends.
Recipes? We don't need no stinkin' recipes!