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Everyday Food: Kicked Up A Notch!

Have you seen the latest issue of Everyday Food magazine?  Here is a picture of it, with Martha and Emeril on the cover.  Emeril will now be doing a regular feature for the magazine, called, what else, “Kick It Up!”

This issue is all about grilling and other summer cooking.  What’s really nice is that you can get a lot of the recipes on the website, on the Table of Contents page for the current issue.  Here is the Table of Contents for the July/August issue.

Most of the names of the recipes are clickable, and these are available for free download.  The ones that aren’t…sorry, you will just have to buy the magazine!

You should first try the recipes online…and if you like them, you will probably want to subscribe to this magazine.  This is a magazine designed for regular people…no fancy, hard-to-find ingredients, and most recipes are quick and easy to prepare.

There is also an Everyday Food TV show on PBS…check your local listings to see if it airs in your area.  And new this year is a spinoff of the Everyday Food show, called Everyday Baking.  Check ‘em out!

Lidia’s Family Table

This is one of the books that I want to get.  The PBS show of the same name is currently airing on CreateTV, and I really want to make a lot of the recipes in it.  But they are not all available on Lidia’s website, so I need to buy the book if I want them.

If I buy directly from PBS, it costs the full list of $35.00.  But at Buy.com, it’s only $22.63, with free shipping if I order more than $25.  I’m sure I can find something else I want from there, I always do.  So Buy.com wins.

Anyhoo, if you get CreateTV where you are, check out this show.  Lidia is a great cook, a great teacher.  The “set” is not a set, it’s her own personal home kitchen.  Oh, woudl I kill to have a kitchen like that.  And often her family members join her on the show…daughter Tanya, son Joe (who is also a partner with Mario Batali in a restaurant venture), her mother, and various grandkids.

Lidia has had several cooking shows on PBS over the years.  She is one of the longest-running cooking show hosts on TV; I think only Mary Ann Esposito has been on longer.

Oh, and I see that Buy.com has her new book, at a greatly discounted price, as well.  Gotta add that to my shopping cart.  Now I get two great books for not much more than I would have paid elsewhere for one.  And I will get my free shipping, too!

Mangia!

Best Fried Chicken - EVER!

If it’s quick weight loss you’re looking for, this probably isn’t a post you should read. But if you are interested in some damned good fried chicken, read on…

One of our favorite restaurants is Jasper White’s Summer Shack. That’s why I was so excited to see that Jasper has finally put out a cookbook, which contains many of the recipes he uses at the restaurants.

Many people are hesitant to cook seafood at home, or to attempt deep frying. This book contains simple, step-by-step instructions which will make it all a snap. Many of the instructions are fully illustrated to make them even easier to follow. You’ll learn not only how to cook a lobster, but how to eat it, as well. There’s also a whole section called “Fry Cook 101″ which takes all of the mystery out of successful deep frying at home.

When Mike and I go to the Summer Shack, we always go for the seafood. But Jasper’s fried chicken is one of the best in the Boston area, and the recipe is in this book. Last night, I decided to try it at home.

If you have one of those deep frying appliances, you could certainly use it, as long as you have a way to monitor the temperature. But you really don’t need a special appliance; I don’t have one. Jasper recommends a good old fashioned 12″ cast-iron skillet and a deep fry thermometer. Cast iron is excellent because it holds the heat very well; if you have to fry the chicken in batches, as I did, the oil gets back up to temperature very quickly.

Oil temperature is VERY important. Too hot, and your food burns and overcooks. Not hot enough, the food will soak up too much oil and be all nasty and greasy. You can buy a decent deep fry thermometer for about ten bucks or so; do not deep fry without one! The one I have has a clippy thing on it, so I can set it in the pan of oil and not have the dial part fall in.

There are two *mixes* you need to make in order to make this recipe. The first one is a “seasoned salt for chicken”…

1/4 cup salt
1/4 cup lemon pepper
1 tablespoon granulated garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons Old Bay seasoning
3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
3/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

Mix it all together. Store in a tightly sealed container in the fridge, or freezer, if you don’t plan to use it right away. Can be made in advance; this is more than needed for the chicken recipe.

You’ll also need to make the “New England Style Fry Mix”. This is the same breading the Jasper uses on most of his fried seafood dishes, as well.

2 cups corn flour or masa harina (look for this in the Spanish food section of the store)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Mix it all together, and store, covered, in the fridge until ready to use. I found that this made a lot more than I needed for the chicken, but it will keep!

In addition to the pan and thermometer mentioned above, you’ll also need a pair of tongs, and a sheet pan lined with paper towels, and a large wire cooling rack to put over that. The one fault I found with Jasper’s instructions was that he has you putting the raw, just dipped and breaded chicken onto this rack, and then putting the cooked chicken on the same rack setup. This isn’t a good idea, because you don’t want raw chicken juices touching food that’s already been cooked. What I did here was just put the chicken, as it cooked, on a large plate lined with paper towels, and when the last batch of chicken was frying, washed the rack and placed the cooked chicken to rest on it. Or just use a second rack if you have one. If you don’t have a rack, just use paper towels.

Read the rest…

Review: Simply Ming

One of the best cooking shows on TV these days is Simply Ming.  Ming Tsai is well-known in the Boston area as the owner of Blue Ginger in Wellesley. MA.  He has since reached a nationwide audience with his PBS show, which has been airing for several years now.

The premise of the show, as well as the cuisine at Blue Ginger, is a combination of “East Meets West”.  His parents, who frequently appear on the show, ran a Chinese restaurant in Ohio.  Ming went on later to study culinary arts in France.  He learned how to combine traditional Asian ingredients with those of Western countries, with excellent results.

The first few seasons of the show were based on “master recipes”.  Ming would start out the show by making some kind of marinade, sauce, salsa, etc, and then go on to use that in a series of dishes, all of which are quick and easy to make.  The book shown here has all of the recipes from the first season.

Later seasons dropped the “master recipe” thing, and just concentrated on using certain combinations of ingredients, one Eastern and one Western.  For example, a recent program had him using lemongrass and extra virgin olive oil as the ingredients.  He doesn’t make a master sauce, he just uses the ingredients in each dish.

The recipes are still easy and require very little fuss.  A downside for some people may be the inability to get some of the Asian ingredients.  For instance, I’ve never seen lemongrass at a regular supermarket.  But if you live someplace where there’s a Chinatown, or just an Asian market, you should be able to find all of this stuff.

I’ve made quite a few recipes, with excellent results.  It’s an easy way to learn to cook Asian foods, while using some more familiar ingredients, as well.

Check your local listings to see if/when the show airs in your area.  And check out the Simply Ming website for recipes and more!

Cookbook: “Christina Cooks”

Christina Cooks by Christina Pirello

This isn’t a complete review of this book, mainly because I have yet to try any of the recipes. I just got it yesterday and spent a good deal of time looking through it, and I do like what I’ve seen.

If you’ve seen Christina’s TV show on PBS, “Christina Cooks”, you know what to expect from this book. She follows a vegan diet, which means that she consumes no animal products at all, not even dairy or eggs.

I don’t really want to convert to veganism, or even vegetarianism. But after having watched several episodes of the show, I thought that the recipes looked good enough to try…nothing like the bland, boring “health food” that you may be used to. Christina really wants to see people get back into the kitchen and do some serious cooking…and to do that, the food has to look and taste good.

My goal here is to start eating meatless meals at least once or twice a week. Mike is a die-hard carnivore, though, claims he can’t live without his meat. But Christina offers some useful tips for getting your family to eat meatless…at least some of the time. She says that she’d love nothing more than for everyone to go vegan, but she is also a realist, knows that some of us will continue to consume meat, fish, and dairy products. All she asks is that we try to at least take some steps in that direction. And the advice she gives is good, very informative, yet without being preachy.

The first step, she says, is to start slow when trying to introduce meatless meals. Don’t go to your local health food store and go crazy buying all sorts of “weird” foods, such as tofu, tempeh, miso, etc. Start by picking recipes that contain ingredients that your family already knows and likes.

So, before we went shopping today, I looked through the book and selected a couple of recipes for our first meatless meal….a spicy lentil soup, and roasted red bell peppers stuffed with brown rice, corn, and other savory ingredients. Mike likes lentil soup, and he also likes stuffed peppers…even though he’s always had them stuffed with a mixture of ground meat and rice. I thought that since the peppers contain no meat, that I needed to add some kind of bean dish, to make the meal more substantial. I want to make it so that he won’t miss the meat.

Some of the recipes do call for “weird” ingredients”, that you may not find in a regular supermarket. For this first attempte, I avoided any of those recipes, and chose ones with common, familiar, easy-to-find ingredients. The only unusual thing on my list was miso, which I thought would be easier to find than it was. They didn’t have any at Shaw’s, even though they have a decent enough health food section. I did find some at Stop & Shop, though…they have a larger selection of Asian foods than Shaw’s does. I’ve never had this before, it’s supposed to be there to add an interesting flavor to the lentil soup. And many recipes in this book call for it, so it’s good to have it on hand.

Just a heads-up, though…this is NOT a low-fat, low-carb diet book. She does use a lot of carbohydrates, such as pasta and rice. And, although she doesn’t use butter, she does cook with a lot of olive and other good oils. But you really do need all of that stuff for flavor, and yes, you DO need carbs as well for nutritional purposes. So, if you’re looking to lose weight, you might be better off looking for another book, as well as checking out some of the top diet pills that are available. Yeah, you may lose some weight if you give up eating meat, but that is not the primary goal of this book.

Once I cook the recipes that i selected and Mike and I have tried them, I’ll post back here as to how they turned out.