Pink slime and salmonella

You've heard by now about "pink slime", the ammonia-treated meat trimmings that make what goes into a wiener look wholesome. The whole point of treating meat trimmings with ammonia (thereby turning it into a pink slimy substance) was to reduce the bacterial count and thus hopefully reduce the incidence of food poisoning. And it apparently worked -- during the time that hamburger meat was adulterated with this "pink slime", incidents of food poisoning went down by almost half.

But it's wise to remember why we have this problem with food poisoning to begin with. It occurs because meat from dozens of cows is mixed together and ground together, meaning that it takes only a single contaminated bit of cow meat to contaminate thousands of pounds of hamburger meat. Industrial food production, in other words, is responsible for the food poisoning problem.

I'm thinking, now, about a novel new idea. What if entire dressed cows were sent to some place local to you, and when you wanted a cut of beef, or just wanted some less expensive cuts ground into hamburger meat, some guy cut it off the haunch of beef right there in front of you and packaged or ground it right there in front of you? Then you'd be able to inspect the beef to see whether it's clean *before* it gets ground into hamburger meat, and if some other cow is contaminated, well, so what, the cow you're looking at isn't contaminated so that's of no concern to you. What could we call this place and the person who does this strange and innovative thing of, well, cutting meat up in front of you instead of getting it pre-packaged from some industrial facility? Hmm...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Nasty

I haven't eaten pasta in quite some time because it makes me feel bloated. I supposed it was the glutens in it, so when I came across something claiming to be "Gluten Free Spaghetti" made of rice and flax, I was, "eh, let me try it."

And the verdict is... ugh. This is some *nasty* tasting stuff. Didn't taste like spaghetti at all. The only thing that made it even passably edible was the nice marinari-based sauce I put on it, that had garlic and bellpepper and onion and a touch of red pepper aside from the tomato and had some spicy Portuguese sausage in it in little chunks too. Nice sausage. Nice sauce. Nasty spaghetti.

Hmm, I wonder... I can get rice noodles at the local Asian groceries. I have this nice sauce. You think?

Oh yeah, regarding the gluten-free part, seems to have done the trick. Definitely didn't end up feeling bloated after eating this "spaghetti". Hmm...

-- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

Full penguin

Cooked some Cajun-style red beans and rice today. You can't make a *small* batch of these, a pound of red beans makes a *huge* batch.

Came out okay despite the fact that I can't get the right ingredients here. I substituted a small hunk of salt pork for the tasso, and some kielbasa for the andouille, and fiddled with the seasonings to try to get some of the flavors that the andouille and tasso usually add. It sufficed. (Tasso is basically pepper-cured salt pork, andouille is basically a highly spiced kielbasa).

Now I have to figure out what to do with all these beans... do you think I can convince people at work to eat them? Otherwise I'm going to have beans and rice, rice and beans, for the rest of the week...

-- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

The state of the onion...

Is tears.

Just sayin'.

Didn't watch, listen to, or read the State of the Union address or its response. If I want bullshit, I'll head up to one of the local ranches and frolick in their barn.

Instead, I cooked corn tortillas and had Mexican-spicy beans, jalapenos, and salad. Penance for the sinful cookies, I suppose, since all of this was basically no-fat and fairly low in calories. As for the cookies, I took them to work and they didn't last 15 minutes. Like piranhas, I tell ya!

-- Badtux the "What smells?" Penguin

Cookies!

From this recipe:

And on the cooling rack (yes, this is an old refrigerator rack, why do you ask?):

Awefully unhealthy, given that it's two sticks of butter. Oh well, I didn't want to live forever anyhow :).

PS: How did I get those so round? Simple: Ice cream scoop. F*** that "spoon onto cookie sheet" nonsense :).

-- Badtux the Baking Penguin

Trying a new biscuit recipe...

I'm still trying to get rid of that whole wheat flour. It just doesn't act right. If you've dealt with whole wheat flour you know what I mean, it's not as sticky as regular all-purpose flour and it doesn't have the right texture and it's heavier and etc., so I'm trying to substitute it for half of the flour in regular substitutes and it's not turning out right.

So now I'm trying biscuits with half the flour substituted with whole wheat. And it's not acting right, my biscuits ended up a bit heavier than usual, though they're still nicely buttery and flakey enough and certainly *taste* like biscuits are supposed to taste, even if they aren't quite right...

Ah well. I still have a bunch of whole wheat flour to go through, so I'll have to play with this some more. The amount of butter is what made them flaky (though a bit denser than usual), but they're a bit *too* buttery because of the greater density caused by the whole wheat flour. So maybe I'll substitute a couple tablespoons of shortening for a couple tablespoons of butter. Or maybe try the vodka trick that someone mentioned here a while back, for getting a good consistency without activating the glutens (these biscuits aren't tough so the glutens didn't activate, but they definitely are denser than my regular biscuits!).

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

No recipe, because it's not quite right, more experiments are needed.

Guess that eatin' right stuff didn't last

Tonight I steamed some potstickers made of the flesh of the mighty tofu beast, and ate some kimchi'ed Korean vegetables. I followed it up with some yogurt for desert.

All of which is to no avail, because cooling on top of my stove is a pan of fresh-backed chocolate fudge brownies, which I topped with some 60% cacao chocolate chips as decoration.

Sigh. First there was the cheesy crackers (well, sorta-crackers anyhow), now this? I need to start baking things a bit more healthy than this!

Update: Chocolate overdose. OMG. Is it possible to have a mouth orgasm? These things are *soooo* rich and, well, chocolaty...

-- Badtux the Fat Penguin

Cheese crackers

That's what I'm trying right now. Rough recipe:

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup whole milk
2-3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, grated (sorry, I didn't measure, I just grated into the mixing bowl until there was the amount of butter I wanted ;)
1/2 cup (more or less) grated mild chedder cheese or some other mild cheese or cheese mix (I had some "mexican mix" in the 'fridge from making burritos which was pretty smooth)

Mix ingredients (flour, butter, cheese first, then milk until the dough is the right consistency to hold together as a ball but not be sticky), slap it on some floured wax paper and flour the top slightly to help keep it from sticking, slap another piece of wax paper on top, roll it out into a fairly thin sheet. Fold/cut/relocate edges until rectangular. Use pizza cutter to cut the result into crackers. Put on lightly floured cookie sheet, sprinkle top with more grated cheese to give it a nice texture on the top, bake at 350 degrees for around 20+ minutes until golden brown.

We'll have to see how it tastes, but it certainly *smells* good ;).

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

Update: 24 minutes after putting them into the oven, they're cooked, but the texture is wrong. The texture is sort of like a very good pie crust. A *cheesy* pie crust, and a *good* pie crust, but definitely not crispy. Maybe I need to let them cook a little longer... okay, slid back in...

Update #2: 30 minutes they had to come out or become overcooked. Letting them cool but the one I tried again has the consistency of a very good pie crust.

Update #3: I think I know where I went wrong. After I rolled it out the dough needed to rest in the refrigerator for a while to let the gluten relax, it's holding on too tight. I was just impatient.

It appears that this attempt to make crackers failed, though the results are still delicious (as in, most of them are gone within 20 minutes of taking them out of the oven!). I have a good pie crust if I want to make a cheese pie though ;).

Dinner

Chunky chicken noodle soup and fresh-fried bannock soda bread. (At 1/4th the amounts of that recipe!). Yeppers, trying a slightly different bannock recipe this time, one with some oil in it. Also added a teaspoon of sugar for a bit smoother flavor. It seems to have fried up into something that resembles a somewhat-dense biscuit. Tastes fine tho.

As far as I can tell, all the oil does is make the dough a bit easier to work (and no, you don't work it for 12 minutes, you work it as little as possible, maybe 12 *kneads*). 3/2 cup of water doesn't divide easily by four, so I had to sort of guestimate the last bit of water, so for the last bit I just sprinkled a little water in until the last bit of flour could be worked into the dough and the dough held together. Seems to have worked, it turned into a nice little cake.

My original intention was to have crackers with my soup. But no crackers. But had everything needed to whip up a quick soda bread. So I did.

- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

I need to learn how to read Korean

The English translation on the bag of potstickers said "Kimchi potstickers". I assumed they were stuffed with some pickled Korean vegetables. Instead, it's a tasty mix of some sort of meat with tasty Korean vegetables. What kind of meat? I dunno, I can't read the Korean labeling!

So anyhow, that was my supper tonight -- steamed "kimchi potstickers" and tasty Korean veggies. Yum!

-- Badtux the Potstickered Penguin

So much for my diet

Just got back from Costco and dropped the usual $200 on stuff. Going through the food aisles, I ran across the following:

1. A large container of "stuffed grape leaves" (dolmas)
2. A tall bin of pre-cooked falafel balls
3. A large package of pork tamales

That in addition to the other stuff (towels, noodles, and so forth). You'd think I was a stoner or somethin', sigh!

Personally, I blame Gordon. At least for the tamales part :).

-- Badtux the Stuffed Penguin

More trail bread

Last time I mentioned trail bread, it was baked bread -- hardtack or a baked soda bread. Today I tried to fry bread -- bannock -- to see how well that'd turn out. So I took 1 cup of whole wheat flour, one tablespoon baking powder, one tablespoon sugar, 1/8 teaspoon salt, and mixed just enough water into it to make a dough, then patted out two patties, let them rest for a couple of minutes while I got the cast iron fry griddle nice and hot, and then fried away until they were nicely brown on both sides. You tell me what you think:

The texture is typical of a whole wheat soda bread. Whole wheat flour has stuff in it that results in whole wheat breads typically being less "fluffy" than white bread, and that is true here too. Still, the texture is quite acceptable, it is not chewy, just a little denser than you might be accustomed to from looking at yeast-based breads that have more time to rise and shine (baking soda is fast acting so it simply doesn't have time to puff things up a lot before it runs out of poop). *And* this particular kind of bread would fry well over a campfire, just pack the dry mix into a plastic zip-lok bag, add water and flatten out your patties, toss onto lightly-oiled frypan, voila. Of course, I don't suggest going backpacking with a cast-iron griddle even though cast iron is *the* right way to fry things ;). But even an aluminum skillet should work okay as long as you get it hot before you toss the patty into it.

So therein ends my experiment in whether it's possible to fry bread over a campfire with nothing but dry ingredients and water. The answer: Yes. It's a bit denser than yeast-based bread, but it's still quite edible, and will complement your rehydrated bean dish just fine.

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

Cracker-biscuits

Okay, disappointed by my last attempt at some sort of trail bread, I regrouped. I decided it needed some baking powder to give it at least a *little* loft, and since I wasn't going to haul it for more than a week, I didn't need it to be perfect hard-tack dryness, so baking it hard as a rock wasn't necessary, and I could make it a bit thicker. So I patted out a rough square, gave it a single whack with the roller to even up the top, trimmed the edges and turned them into two round biscuits off to the side, scored the resulting loaf with a pizza cutter, replaced the cookie sheet on top of the glass cutting board where I was doing all this, flipped it all over, remove plastic wrap from the top of the resulting loaf and two biscuit patties, let it rest for a few minutes while I cleaned up all the dishes I'd dirtied (the mixing bowl, the measuring cups, etc.), popped it into the oven at around 380 for 20 minutes on side 1 and 15 minutes on side 2, and... success. The resulting biscuits taste fine, they're crunchy on the outside and dense but soft enough to eat on the inside, and hopefully they'll survive being squished into a backpack better than regular bread or biscuits or crackers despite not being hard as a rock.

Oh yeah, the rough recipe:

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups white flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspons baking powder (Clabber Girl brand)
Roughly 1 cup water

Mix to a stiff dry dough, adding water slowly. Pat out to a rough square roughly 1/2 inch thick, a *single* whack with a rolling pin to even out the top, trim the edges and make a biscuit or two out of them to the side, then use a pizza cutter to score the resulting loaf into roughly 12 squares. Let rest, then poke some holes with a fork like a saltine, but not all the way thru. Flip the resulting loaf and biscuits over onto an ungreased non-stick cookie sheet, and poke more holes with a fork. Bake for 20 minutes on one side, then 20 minutes on the other side at around 375-400F. If you're going to eat within a week this should get them hard enough, if you want something for long term storage, then back off the heat to about 285F and bake until dry all the way through.

Next up: Figure out some way to make trail bread actually *on the trail* from its individual components. The problem is that it requires baking. I'm wondering if my grandmother's hot water fry bread might work better, that's corn meal, flour, and baking powder, with hot water added, patted out and then fried in bacon grease or other oil. That'll work for car camping pretty easily, but oil is heavy and in short supply if you're backpacking. I guess corn tortillas could be done even more easily, since they're just masa flour and water rolled flat then cooked on a griddle for 40 seconds per side with no oil or grease required except what's seasoning the griddle, but corn tortillas don't go all that well with many of my favorite trail foods. Oh well, I guess I'll just pre-make trail bread...

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

Working my way up to biscuits

That's my next cooking goal. I want biscuits like my grandmother baked -- heavy stout things that could be used as dwarven battle bread, baked in an iron skillet, not the fluffy tasteless things you get from a can. One of those biscuits, sliced open and butter and sausage put into it like a biscuit sandwich, was a meal all by itself, and you could use it to sop up the runny yoke of your egg too while you were at it. I think I'm on the right track if I add baking powder to the basic dough that I made for the hardtack, along with some bacon grease for flavoring. Hmm, reminds me that I need to buy bacon...

Update: looking at a few biscuit recipes calling for milk, I just remembered granny's secret ingredient: Buttermilk. Urk!

-- Badtux the Baking Penguin

Hardtack

Today I fixed the self-cleaning function of my oven. It was a quite simple fix, actually. Pop two screws off, and the entire front falls off the oven. When that happened I saw the problem immediately -- a shield that covers the front window when the oven is cleaning had jumped its track. I loosened up the track, put the shield back on track, tightened the tracks slightly closer together this time (because of normal wear and tear of a 20 year old oven), lifted the shield again, and it pushed the lever that had prevented the cleaning knob from operating. Put everything back together, figure out how to activate the self-cleaning function of the oven (no manual for a 20 year old oven!), and... success! A couple hours later I wiped ashes off the bottom of the oven. Nice and clean, no noxious chemicals involved (other than the natural gas my utility burned to generate the electricity that powered the self-cleaning cycle, heh!).

Next thing on my list was to attempt to bake hardtack. Getting the consistency of the dough correct is the most important part here, it has to be damp enough to stick together into a ball, but not so damp that it turns into a sticky mess. Yes, I put too much water my first attempt :). So next thing is, you're supposed to roll the ball of dough that you just got nicely damp into a flat square and cut it into squares. Uhm... you do know that if you roll a ball flat, it rolls into a *circle*, right? How are you supposed to cut *that* into squares?! So I plopped it down and tried to sort of shape it into a squareish thing before attacking it with the rolling pin. It ended up looking more like one of those ink blots that the stereotypical psychiatrists use in the jokes. I finally said Fuggit and cut it into squares and, uhm, "other" shapes (heh!) with a pizza cutter.

Anybody got advice for me on how to roll a ball of dough into a square? Oh yeah, the crackers. They're baking in the oven right now. It'll be interesting to see how they turn out.

* UPDATE * They're out of the oven now. The thin pieces overcooked. The thicker pieces taste like very dense saltine crackers, with a nice bready taste to them that the fluffy store-bought crackers don't have. They'll get harder after they finish cooling, at which point the only way to really eat them will be to dunk them in soup. If I can just figure out how to get that #$%@# dough the right consistency and thickness and rolled out consistently so I can slice it well into squares... hmm. Let's see, and if I want a slightly fluffier version, there's this other variant of the recipe that adds baking powder....

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

The price of learned helplessness

Learned helplessness was one of the things we had to fight against as special education teachers. Most of our students were well capable of doing most of the tasks of daily living for themselves. But why should they, if we professionals did everything for them? They swiftly learned how to "work" the special ed teachers to do things for them that they could do for themselves, but didn't feel like doing, and we special ed teachers had to make sure we put a stop to that ASAP when we spotted that it was happening. After all, learned helplessness swiftly becomes real helplessness -- the client forgets how to do stuff that he used to be able to do, because, well, he just hasn't done it in so long because other people have been doing it for him.

Take a look up there at the left. That is a widget called a cheese slicer. You use it by placing the roller on a block of cheese, tilting it upwards until the wire is at the depth you want your slice to be, then dragging it across the block of cheese. Voila, a slice of cheese for your sandwich!

What brings this all to mind is standing in the supermarket and looking at two packages of cheese. Both packages were the same kind of cheese and the same brand name. Both packages were the same weight, 8 ounces. One package was $1.99. The other package was $2.99. The $2.99 package was, of course, the pre-sliced one. The one that, apparently, can sell for more because people have forgotten how to use those things called "cheese slicers".

So now we know the price of learned helplessness: It is $1 per 8 ounces of cheese. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

And so it begins

As you know, all the real Christians got raptured an hour or so ago. So now it's the Time of Tribulations, where all us heathen who didn't float into the sky like balloons are going to experience a time of horror and tribulation. And it's already started for me. Why, I just walked out of Bed Bath And Beyond and found... a flat tire! Yes, a flat tire, with a gigantic screw in its tread! The horror, oh the horror!

I changed the tire, of course. (Click on the photo to make it bigger, the screw is right under the brake light). But it's clear that the time of horror and tribulation has begun! Next up... THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN. The horror, oh the horror!

And so, to console myself that I was not amongst the half-dozen true Christians who were raptured today, I now am eating a large pastrami sandwich. On rye. With pepperjack cheese (fresh sliced off a big hunk of cheese), dill pickle slices, jalapeno slices, and salad. Yum.

-- Badtux the Trembling-in-terror Penguin

Ah, that hit the spot...

Had a pork and vegetables rice plate at the local Vietnamese restaurant for lunch today. One doesn't appreciate a working gut until you had to do without one for a few days...

- Badtux the Satisfied Penguin

Further update: Got that Activia yogurt today. Strawberry variety. The verdict is... bleh. Thus far the most palatable has been the mixed-berry Yoplait, where the various berry flavors helped hid the chalky nasty taste.

People like this stuff?!

So upon advice of medical professionals, I am now on a daily dose of yogurt, the kind with "active and live culture". I have just one question:

People actually like this stuff?!

Chalk. Bleh. Sour chalk with fruit and sugar (I'm doing the Yoplait, which I'm told was the most palatable). Bleh.

-- Badtux the Bleh Penguin

More pizza reviews

This one is the "Freschetta PizzAmore' Hand Tossed Style Crust Pepperoni Duo Pizza".

This is a Schwan pizza brand, and Schwan generally has good crusts, sauce, and pepperoni, but tends to be a bit weak on the cheese. So how does this one turn out?

The pizza slid out of the box in a little black cardboard tray. The directions say to put the tray into the oven with the pizza on it. I usually cook pizzas on a pizza stone nowadays because it provides a much more even temperature, but I was okay with skipping that for the purpose of this exercise. Looking at the pizza, it seemed a bit scant on the pepperoni, but seemed to have plenty of cheese. So I put it in the preheated oven and waited for it to be done.

Upon sliding it out, there was a pool of grease in the middle of the pizza. Apparently I underestimated how much pepperoni was on the pizza, I guess there was some hiding under the cheese. So the first thing I did was sop up some of the grease with paper towels. And the verdict is...

First off, the pepperoni and sauce are typically peppy Schwan. The cheese on this pizza would be rather lackadaisical, except for one thing: Schwan has put some parmesan cheese into the mix. It adds a pep that works well with the pep of the sauce and pepperoni. I think a smoother cheese would have made for a better balanced pizza, but if you like a peppy pizza, you'll like this.

The only real downer is the crust. It's not a *bad* crust, but it doesn't rise up above the pedestrian. The peppy nature of the toppings really call for a bready crust with a hint of sweetness to balance out the peppy toppings. This crust, however, is a fairly neutral crust that keeps the toppings off the bottom of the oven but otherwise doesn't contribute much to the pizza. The only good thing about it is that the texture is better than I expected given the thin cardboard "baking pan" that it was cooked in. Still, it could have been better.

So my final verdict is that this thing is one star short of excellent. I rate it four out of five -- if you see it on sale at your local grocer, get it. But it definitely will not surpass any good home-made pizza with a nicely bready home-made crust - though it's certainly better than the soggy atrocities you get delivered.

-- Badtux the Pizza Penguin