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In the NuWave Oven, of course!

Boneless pork loin is a very healthy cut of meat, due to the fact that it has very little fat.  The problem with is is that for one thing, it can taste bland, and for another, it can easy dry out while cooking.

This can be very easily avoided with the NuWave Oven.  I promise you, as long as you follow the instructions, you will end up with the most succulent, flavorful boneless pork loin ever!

Here, I used a spice rub to *marinate* the loin for several hours.  This can be any spice blend you like.  I used Emeril’s *Rib Rub* here, as it has a robust flavor and adds a lot to the otherwise bland pork meat.  Another good choice would be Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Meat Magic Seasoning Blend.  Both the Emeril and Chef Paul spices can be found in most decent supermarkets.  Or just use your own favorite seasoning mix, either store-bought or homemade.

Pat the roast dry.  Then rub on as much or as little of your selected seasoning as you’d like.  I don’t measure, I just sprinkle it out of the container.  Rub it in really well, on all sides.  Then wrap it in aluminum foil, put in the fridge, and let marinate for about 3 hours, or more.

When it is time to cook, unwrap the pork roast and place it on the 1-inch rack in the NuWave, fat side up.  If your roast is 3 pounds or more, cook it on HIGH for 25 minutes per pound.  If it is a smaller roast, such as the 2-pound one that I had, cook for just 20 minutes per pound.  This is for roasts that are completely thawed.

Halfway into the cooking, remove the dome from the NuWave and turn the roast over.  This enables it to brown well on all sides.  Put the dome back on and resume cooking.

The internal temp should be 160° F.   It’s okay of it only measures at 140° when the time is up, because it will continue to cook as it rests.  All roasted meats need a resting time of 5-10 minutes before slicing.  Tent it with some foil, on a cutting board, to keep warm.

When sliced, the meat comes out with a very slight pinkness inside, not medium-rare, but not overcooked, either.  Remember that trichinosis has been bred out of today’s pork, so cooking it until it is tough and chewy is no longer necessary.  A very slight pinkness inside is perfectly safe.  Also, you cannot catch swine flu from eating pork…amazing how many people still believe that!

What’s next for the NuWave?  Maybe burgers.  A while back, I bought Hubert Keller’s Burger Bar cookbook.  Keller owns several restaurants, some that are in Las Vegas hotels, including Burger Bar, in the Mandalay Bay hotel, which is the subject of the book.  He has a TV show on PBS called Hubert Keller’s Secrets of A Chef, which I enjoy.  He demonstrates one of his yummie burgers at the end of each show, and the book gives even more detailed informations.

I bet burgers would cook up well in the NuWave.  We shall see!

Those two words alone are a good reason why you need a NuWave Oven.  Yes, I know it is a product mostly sold via infomercials, and a lot of infomercial stuff is crap, but this is something that really works just as advertised!

Last night, I cooked a whole chicken in this thing.  I decided to use a recipe in the Steven Raichlen book that I talked about in my last post.  Not that you really need a recipe for roast chicken, but the caramelized onion sauce that went with it sounded tasty.

The recipe called for cooking the chicken in an indoor rotisserie…Steven uses the Showtime, another infomercial product.  I actually have the George Foreman rotisserie, and the recipe would have worked just as well in that.  But I wanted to see how it would turn out in the NuWave.

Steven’s recipe called for seasoning the bird with herbes de Provence.  But I was running low on the premade variety, Shaw’s didn’t have any more, and I didn’t want to spend money on a whole jar of lavender that I’d never use up.  So I gave Mike a choice in seasoning:  Italian seasoning, original Emeril’s Essence, or Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic.  All of which I already had on hand at home.

He chose the Paul Prudhomme one.  Good choice!  But you can season your chicken with anything you like and have on hand.  Okay, maybe something like vanilla extract might be nasty, but you know what I mean!

All you have to do to cook a perfect roast chicken in the NuWave is to READ THE DIRECTIONS THAT CAME WITH THE APPLIANCE!  I swear, it never ceases to amaze me as to how many people complain that something doesn’t work as advertised, when they didn’t read the directions before using it.

Our chicken was 5 1/2 pounds, fresh, not frozen.  So in the NuWave, according to the instructions, it cooks for 15 minutes per pound, which comes to about an hour and 22 1/2 minutes, if you’re being exact about such things.

Basically, you season the chicken with salt, pepper, and whatever other seasonings you are using, in both the neck and main cavities.  Then lay the bird, breast side DOWN, on the 1 inch rack in the NuWave.  I like to spray the rack lightly with Pam first, just in case it might stick.  Brush the side that is facing up with some olive oil, season with salt, pepper, etc.  Since I was using the Chef Paul seasoning, which already contains salt, and Mike shouldn’t be having so much salt, I omitted the additional salt and just added additional pepper.  Cover the oven, set it to whatever is half of the total cooking time for the weight of the bird, and let it cook.

When the machine beeps, turn the bird over so that it’s breast side up.  I used heavy paper toweling to protect my hands while doing this.  Brush this side with olive oil, season with whatever you are seasoning it with, cover, set for the other half of the cooking time, and let it cook.

Once it’s done, remove the bird, tent with foil to keep warm, and let rest for 5-10 minutes before carving.  I used this time to cook some asparagus on the 4 inch rack.  Simple…one pound asparagus, trimmed, tossed in a little bit of olive oil and seasoned with garlic powder and lemon pepper.  Salt if your doctor won’t beat you for having it.  Arrange on NuWave rack, and cook on HIGH for 5 minutes.

The sauce is something you do on the stovetop.  Chop a medium onion, and cook it in 2 tablespoons melted butter until golden, adding 2 minced garlic gloves after about 3 minutes.  Add 1/2 cup white wine, let it cook down until there are only a couple of tablespoons of liquid left.  Add 1 1/2 cups chicken broth, raise the heat to high, and let it boil down to about 1 cup.  Add 1/2 cup heavy cream, bring to a simmer (lower the heat, or else the cream will boil over and make a huge mess!).  Simmer until slightly thickened.  Season with salt & pepper to taste.  This whole sauce-making process should take about 15 minutes.  You can do it while the chicken is still NuWaving, it can easily be reheated if done ahead.

The chicken?  Perfection.  I admit that I was a bit skeptical as to whether the skin would turn out crispy and all, but it did.  The dark meat was completely done, without drying out the breast meat.  Even Mike, who thinks that all infomercial stuff is crap, is sold on this appliance now.  He can’t stop raving about this chicken!

It’s been said many times that the test of a good cook is how they do a roast chicken.  With a NuWave Oven, you can do this, and be the envy of your family and friends!

Sheesh, it’s been a while since I’ve posted any cooking stuff here, hasn’t it?  But it’s because Mike was sick, and then in the hospital, for so long, that I simply haven’t been doing any cooking.

The last recorded cooking incident is described in this post about the NuWave Oven.  And that was almost a month ago!

While Mike was in the hospital, I didn’t have time to shop and cook for myself, because I was busy getting back and forth to see him.  I lived pretty much on food from the hospital cafeteria and hot dog stands in assorted MBTA stations that I had to go through.  However, I did treat myself to a nice meal at Jasper White’s Summer Shack, the one near the Alewife T station.  I made the time for it, I so needed a treat.

While Mike was in the hospital, I made a stop at the Borders bookstore near the State Street station.  He was complaining about running out of stuff to read.  This is a really huge Borders store, with tons of magazines that you can’t find in most other places around here.  The newsstand at the hospital left a lot to be desired…they had mostly celebrity gossip rags, and women’s magazines that contained advice about how to find the best acne pill.

At Borders, I found a few railroad magazines that I knew he didn’t already have, so I bought those.  Also, on the bargain rack for $4.99, I found the book pictured above – Steven Raichlen’s Indoor! Grilling.  I’m a fan of Raichlen’s PBS cooking shows (both Barbeque University and Primal Grill are currently airing locally).  But I’m unable to grill outdoors at this time, so I’ve managed to convert many of his recipes for indoor grilling.  But in this book, Steven has taken all the guesswork out of it for you, and includes instructions for the various types of indoor grills, rotisseries, and stovetop smokers.  I was thrilled to see that he’d written such a book, and at $4.99, I had to grab it.

Tonight I’m actually doing his whole roast chicken recipe in the NuWave oven.  What’s not done on a grill or rotisserie at all is the creamy caramelized onion sauce that goes with it, that has to be done in a pan on the stove.  So if I adjust the cooking time for the chicken according to the instructions that came with the NuWave, it should come out just fine, and in less time.

I’m also going to try another recipe of his – “Wild Boar”.  It’s designed to be cooked on a George Foreman grill, or other indoor grills.  I have one of the newer George grills and I love it.

No, I didn’t go hunting, nor do they sell wild boar meat at Shaw’s.  It’s simply boneless pork medallions marinated in red wine, red wine vinegar, and juniper berries, and grilled.  Steven says that he was taught this little technique in culinary school, to make farm-raised supermarket meat taste more full-flavored, like game meat.

I’ve not been able to find juniper berries at Shaw’s, and we didn’t feel like driving all over to look for them.  But that’s okay, Steven knows that we can’t all be able to get them, so he says to substitute some gin for the berries.  After all, gin is made from juniper berries!  So we stopped at Kappy’s and I got a couple of those little airline bottles of gin…I don’t need a whole big bottle, and I’ll never drink it.  Of course, if we fall in love with this recipe, a larger bottle may be a good investment.  But we shall see.

So there you have it for now…recipe reviews coming soon!

I haven’t blogged much about soaps in a while, mostly because I haven’t had much time to watch them.  Mike hates them, so we watched other stuff when he was in the hospital, and now at home.  Hopefully he will be going back to work soon, and I’ll be able to get back to watching.

Anyhoo, I keep up with what’s going on over at a site called SoapCentral.com.  The big news over at the Young & the Restless is that Melody Thomas Scott, who has played leading lady Nikki Newman for 30 years, is leaving the show.  Apparently, Ms. Scott could not come to an agreement with the show, who asked her to take a pay cut.

Dan J. Kroll, the founder of SoapCenral.com, wrote a piece about this in his In The Bubble blog.  Fans are invited to leave comments.

Some said that Ms. Scott was right to leave, that she should be paid what she is worth.  Some argued that it looked as if the show was only asking FEMALE stars to take pay cuts…Jess Walton, who plays Jill Abbott, alsmot walked, but in the end decided to take the pay cut, saying that “a job is a job”.

But if they asked top male stars, such as Eric Braeden (Victor Newman) or Peter Bergman (Jack Abbott) to take pay cuts, we haven’t heard about it.  I’d like to hope that the show was fair, asked the guys, too, and maybe they just took it with no dramatics.  But we don’t really know.

Other fans who posted on Dan’s blog said that Ms. Scott should just suck it up and take the pay cut, as Ms. Walton did.  Many soap fans have lots of time to watch now, live, not recording them, because they are out of work.  It sort of rubs you the wrong way when you see someone who has a job , probably a very highly-paid job, not accept a pay cut in order to keep said job.

Soaps are getting to be a dying genre on TV.  There have been so many budget cuts, and sadly, it often shows in the finished episodes.  They hire a lot of young kids who will work for cheap, and don’t give stories to beloved veteran characters because it would involve paying them too much money.

You see it in the sets, too.  Over on As The World Turns, half the characters live in the Lakeview Hotel, because the show can’t afford sets for each major character’s home.  For a time, the other half of the town lived on Emma Snyder’s farm.  Thank goodness they finally made a new set for Lily & Holden’s house, so they all moved off of the farm.  But still, Holden and Lily are of only a small handful of Oakdale residents who have their own homes.  The others are Brad and Katie Snyder, Paul Ryan, and Tom & Margo Hughes.  Luke and Noah were supposed to get their own place, have they shown it yet?  As I said, I haven’t watched in a while.  They lived on Emma’s farm for a while, but then moved into Holden & Lily’s house when they finally made a set for that.

But I digress.  The fact is, anyone who still has a job working on a soap should be grateful for it.  As you may know, the longest-running soap ever, Guiding Light, has been canceled due to low ratings and budget cuts.  Some of their actors will be lucky to land gigs on other shows, but there is not room for all of them.  Some of the minor players may have to  go back to waiting tables, or go on an admin job search. In these tough economic times, we all gotta do what we gotta do in order to keep rooves over our heads and food on the table, yanno?

Perhaps Melody Thomas Scott could get signed by another soap.  But honestly, she’s been Nikki for so long, will fans accept her as any other character?  And would another soap offer her the same salary she was getting from Y&R?

I doubt it.  NOBODY in the soap opera industry has tons of money to spend these days.  Right now they are struggling to maintain a budget and somehow not get canceled, as GL was.

I know…it’s been a while since I’ve been here.  But as you may know, Mike was in the hospital, and my blogging time has been kind of limited.  So, no, I haven’t gotten lost playing XBox games or anything like that!

Anyhoo, he’s out now, and things are going well so far.  And I’ve finally noticed that I’ll be running out of my current BareMinerals Essential Brow Kit, so I thought I’d talk about it a bit here.

$32 for this kit may look steep at first, but trust me…it lasts for MONTHS.  It’s still not as cheap as drugstore eyebrow pencils, but it is still a lot less expensive than high-end department store brow pencils.  And it looks a LOT better.

So many brow pencils that I’ve tried, even higher-end ones, make you look like a drag queen, no matter how carefully you apply them.  But use the little brush that comes with this kit, to apply the pure mineral *powder*, and it actually looks like real hair, and not pencil strokes.  It is the best brow product I have ever used, and I refuse to ever be without it.

See, I have this problem, where I have a big scar on my left eyebrow, where the hair no longer grows.  When I was a little kid, my younger brother threw a plastic container at me, it hit my eyebrow and split it open.  Dr. Goliger had to make a house call (this was in the late 1960′s…yes, I am that old…LOL!) and he put stitches in it.  But the scar made the brow hair not grow back, and it looks really weird if I don’t use some kind of brow makeup on it.

The third item in the kit is the Brow Finishing Gel.  This not only helps hold the color in place, but it tames your brow hairs.  I don’t like the pencil-tin, overly-plucked look, I tend to go more for the full-browed Brooke Shields look.  So the gel comes in very useful for me.  The gel is colorless.

The brow color comes in five different shades.  I personally use the dark blonde/medium brown color.  The best thing to do, if possible, is to visit a store that sells BE makeup, where you can try before you buy, and choose the correct shade.

The best store to go to for this is a Bare Escentuals Boutique, if you are lucky enough to have one in your area.  BE is all they sell, and the women who work there are very nice and helpful, they will answer all questions and help you try out products.

If there is no BE Boutique near you, perhaps there is Sephora, which is a good second choice.  Sephora carries most BE products, has test samples and staff to help you.  That’s where I used to go, until they opened up the BE Boutique in the same mall.

They also sell BE in high-end department stores, such as Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s.  I can’t speak for those because I never shopped at any of these stores.  But the one place I think you should stay away from is Ulta.  There’s one not far from me, and I checked it out once.  Not only is the selection of BE cosmetics very limited (they did not have ANY brow kits the last time I was in there), but the staff is also rude.  They tend to follow you around, just waiting for you to steal something.  Maybe it’s just this particular location, maybe not.  But when I am made to feel like a criminal when I’m just looking, I tend to not want to return to their store.  It makes me feel insulted…I have the money to buy the products, and no way would I want to risk going to jail for stealing, anyway.

The BE Boutique is more fun, anyway.  They actually hire people who use the product and care about it, and that makes it much more fun to visit.

Once you discover the world of BE, trust me, you WILL understand!