The fun of birthday snacks

 

Today happens to be my birthday.  The night before last, my wife and I were talking about what she would like to get me as part of the celebration this week, something in addition to other things that were already planned.  I suggested getting a snack food.  She asked for a list of some of my favorite fun snack foods, things I don't usually get or that I at least regulate so that I don't eat too much junk food.  So we started making a list, first a couple items, then added a few more, and so on, so that she could choose something for me.

She texted me from work yesterday saying that she had something for me.  I assumed it was going to be a single item from the list.  Well, she got 14 items.  You can see them all in the picture above, except for the chocolate milk which was in the fridge and I forgot to pull it out to include in the picture.

Now, her taking the time to get all these items and to surprise me with the number of different fun snack foods is worth a blog post all by itself.  But there's also this to think about:  fun snack foods, whether made fresh or bought at the store as preprocessed items, or even ultra-processed, well, these items are certainly not the most healthy for us, but they are definitely very very fun.

Food is something we need to eat in order to survive.  And why not have a little fun with it at the same time.  There is certainly something to be said for eating extremely healthy, but I'm for moderation in all things.  Eating healthy is important.  But sometimes the joy that comes from eating "fun" is just as important.

Thanks to my wife for her wonderful and unexpected massive contribution to my birthday celebration.  And I hope all of you have someone who will spoil you in the same way once in a while. 

Eat for fun when you can.  It's worth it.

National Ice Cream Day

 

Today is National Ice Cream Day!  Now, for me, it's not one of the greatest food days of the year because in actuality I celebrate it all year long, not just a single day.  As many of my readers, friends and family know, ice cream is far and away the most favorite food of all for me. 

I enjoy especially making mint chocolate ice cream, French vanilla, triple chocolate, roasted strawberry, and even something a bit more unusual like lavender with blueberry swirl.

All my ice creams are made beginning with a custard base.  This means I heat up cream and sugar and eggs until just the right temperature.   Then other flavor components go in.  And the whole batch is chilled overnight before it's frozen in my trusty Cuisinart ice cream freezer.  This freezer uses canisters that must be frozen before use.  I keep 5 canisters ready in my freezer at all times.  This is because sometimes I like to make lots and lots all at once.  After each batch of ice cream is completed and packed in containers, the canisters must be cleaned and then refrozen.  So 5 is a good number to have in my freezer.  They take up a lot of space, but it's worth it.

I'm always thinking of new flavors I want to try.  A couple times in the past, I have made banana with caramelized white chocolate.  It's very very good.  But the busy-ness of my schedule has kept me from doing the final tweaks I customarily do with new foods to be added to my menu.  And so it hasn't happened yet for this flavor.  But it will eventually.  And in addition, there are many other flavors I want to experiment with.

I've seen some pretty unusual flavors, such as beet ice cream....hmmm.  I've never tried some of these offbeat flavors, and I'm not sure it's worth it to satisfy my curiosity to buy a whole cone or sundae made of this kind of flavor which I would probably have to do at a high price since this kind of flavor is usually only made by trendy high-priced small ice cream shops.  Perhaps sometime I will, but it's hard to see me doing it for such an unusual flavor for which I have an instinctive doubt.

In any event, enjoy the day, eat some ice cream, and keep doing it regularly.  I have to exercise considerable restraint to not eat it every day.  If it were healthy to do so, I'd definitely do it.  

Mac and Cheese Day

 

Today, July 14, is National Mac and Cheese Day!  Yesterday my wife and I tried a quaint country café in a small town outside of the Kansas City metropolitan area.  The meal included a side of mac and cheese.  It was OK, to be blunt, that's all it was.  But it was still a nice comfort food to eat.  Most of the time in restaurants, at least in my opinion, the mac and cheese is only OK.  It's often too liquidy, or the cheese flavor is too bland, or the pasta is not tender enough.

I'm a big fan of multiple cheeses in mac and cheese to give it lots of flavor, and a little pepper and dried mustard as well as a few other things; the pasta should be very tender; and too liquidy just isn't fun.  There should be a minimum level of viscosity to the cheese sauce.

The really hard thing about making good mac and cheese is whether or not it can be reheated and still be more than satisfactory.  I'm have three different mac and cheese recipes in my repertoire.  However, I only use one for orders on the website.  That's because the other two recipes, while excellent in all ways, only work when they are fresh.  Sometimes when sitting and chilling overnight, especially if the sauce is too liquidy, the pasta absorbs a lot of the moisture.  Sometimes the sauce simply can't take being reheated in a way that leaves the dish tasting at least close to the same level of excellence as when it's fresh.  Sometimes, especially with sub-par sauces, the sauce and cheese break down, separate, become yuchchchh!

So even though I have three recipes which I love and which have different flavors due to the types of cheeses in combination, two of them are only made for occasions when they will be eaten immediately.  The third one, after much testing when I was developing it, has proven itself to be very very good even after reheating.  It's even better when fresh, as almost all foods are.  But it's the one that can take reheating and still prompt an enthusiastic response from kids and adults and which can also satisfy my obsessive desire to make high quality, highly delicious food.

Never underestimate the significance of reheatability in foods.  Test them for it. Tweak them.  Do everything you can do in order to prove that they are reheatable on a consistent basis.  Then you never need to worry about the quality when eating them on Day 2 or 3 or 4.

Shaping chocolate chip cookies

I have multiple types of chocolate chip cookies in my repertoire.   One of the most popular ones is a cookie that uses 3 different types of chocolate and is made with cake flour and bread flour.   In the process of experimenting with this cookie over time, I discovered something interesting about the timing of shaping the dough.

When I finish mixing the dough, I immediately place it in a plastic wrap-lined bowl.  It will sit in the fridge and chill for at least 24 hours.  And when it comes out, it looks like this:

It is one massive chilled ball of dough which must then be cut.  I put on knife-resistant gloves to ensure that trying to cut a very dense block of dough with a very sharp knife doesn't result in some very bad cuts.  

Once this gigantic dough ball is cut, then it is finally shaped into cookie dough balls that are ready for the oven.

Many cookie doughs are shaped before going into a fridge for chilling, but they don't show much of a difference if they are shaped afterwards instead.  But when I tested out shaping before and after chilling for this dough (I do these kinds of process variation experiments all the time with the foods I make as I refine them), I noticed that the cookies that were shaped after chilling had a difference in appearance and texture.  The ones shaped after chilling were much nicer.

I find this fascinating.  I still haven't figured exactly why this is, although I have a suspicion it is due to how the cake and bread flours are affected by the compaction that occurs during shaping.  Most cookie doughs are made with all-purpose flour, so this is a significant difference.  And for this cookie, there are lots of jagged chunks of chocolate in the dough, and so the shaping of each dough ball is vigorous, more so than with other doughs only made with chips. 

Someday perhaps I will delve more deeply into the science of this.  For now, I simply know that the shaping must come after chilling.  And that results in an excellent cookie that is one of the most asked-for cookies on my menu.

Fish

This weekend begins National Fishing Week in Canada.  As I recently visited Canada and have now met some of my wife's family who live in Canada, it seems a fun thing to take note of.

I remember in my youth, I fished several times:  a few times with a grandfather, and a few times while in Boy Scouts.  However, I never got into it enough to want to do it all the time.  In fact, I found it to be rather uninteresting.

However, I love working with fish. While I tend to do most of my work with saltwater fish as opposed to freshwater, I will work with any fish or any other seafood that comes along.

Give me a nice salmon filet, a fresh piece of red snapper, or some scallops (I prefer sea scallops but I will take bay scallops as well), and I am happy man in the kitchen. 

I love eating a McDonald's filet of fish sandwich, and I've often thought of trying to replicate that and improve on it in my own kitchen. But it's one of those many things on my cooking to-do list that I haven't gotten around to yet.  

One of my very favorite things that I have done more than once, which I did completely experimentally, was to purée scallops, then freeze them in small little medallions (miniature patties), coat them afterwards in a breading and grated parmesan cheese and then deep fry them.  They are so incredibly good.  I haven't codified the recipe or the process yet.  It's also another of those things on my to-do list that awaits my attention.

One of my true pleasure in working with fish is a simple piece of clean red snapper.  The meat is white although the skin is red and silver.  And I simply sautée it slowly with butter and seasonings.  It doesn't need much added to it as the flavor is mild and can be easily overpowered, but the flavor is very nice even if mild.

I won't be out fishing during this National Fishing Week, but perhaps I will go to the seafood counter and find something interesting to cook.

Enjoy these first days of summer, everyone!

Frozen banana purée

 

Some time ago, I puréed some over-ripe bananas and froze them.  It's always a bit of a time-planning adventure to figure out when to acquire bananas so that they have long enough to over-ripen in time for the day I want to have banana bread.  If you make the bread with bananas that aren't ripe enough, then the flavor is simply not strong enough.  In fact, when made with bananas that are at peak freshness for eating, which also means no dark spots anywhere on peel or fruit, then the finished bread doesn't even taste "banana-y", in my opinion -- maybe a tiny bit, but that's all.  So I got some bananas, let them ripen until the they were soft and mushy and darkening nicely, and then I peeled and puréed them, and then froze it all .  Hmmm.....

Well, I never like to assume anything.  Good cooking means planning and testing and tasting.  So I did it.  And you know what?  It worked very well.

Freezing some things which are meant to be thawed later and mixed with other ingredients doesn't always work for every food.  So for banana bread, one of my most favorite of all foods, I had to be really sure.  And I have to say I was happy with the result.  

I think that when I ate the loaves, the power of suggestion (knowing that this was from frozen banana purée) made me think that perhaps there was the tiniest of tiniest differences when made with fresh, but I can't really be sure.  

However, all things considered, the banana bread was excellent.  It's good to know that I can take this shortcut in the future.  I like to be able to ripen those bananas a good long time, and then when I think they are ready, I still let them ripen one more day.  Now I can do it and freeze it and always have this ingredient ready for spur-of-the-moment banana bread baking.

Food on vacation

 

Well, it has been a number of days since I last posted.  I have a good excuse, though.  My wife and I were on a trip, a road trip to Toronto, Canada, and then to Niagara Falls.

In the photo above, you can see one of the boats that goes right up to the falls.  We weren't on that one, obviously, but a couple hours after this photo was taken we were on the Maid of the Mist and were sitting in the same place as the boat in the photo and wearing blue ponchos (blue ponchos for those taking a boat from the American side, red ponchos for the Canadian side).  It was memorable, for certain.

While we were on this trip, we ate lots of food.  Some of it was fast food as we went for "quick and easy" while on our driving days.  Then other times it was lots of good food from sit-down restaurants, both in Toronto and Niagara Falls.  

In Toronto we ate some excellent dishes at a couple fantastic Pakistani restaurants, an Italian bakery, and a wonderful ice cream shop.  Then in Niagara Falls, we got to try some things from a couple small street food vendors and a wonderful burger places at the hotel where we stayed.  I was impressed that in both places a large cultural diversity meant there were numerous excellent restaurants to try.

And I picked up a couple ideas on things I want to learn to make from these restaurants.  Hopefully you'll see them on my menu in the future.

For now, though, my wife and I are reducing our food intake for a few days because we stuffed ourselves.  And it was sooooo good.  I would do it again.

Simplicity

 

I read a quote today that I really like.  The 1800s French chef Urbain Francois Dubois said this:

"The ambition of every good cook must be to make something very good with the fewest possible ingredients."

The is a nice statement.  The simplicity of food can be advantaged in a way that doesn't require us to add dozens of separate ingredients to make something really delicious.  There is a beauty in making something with strawberries, for example, that has so few ingredients that the flavor of the berries can't help but come out with strength.  But sometimes with simplicity, it's not just the flavors of a single ingredient.  You can make something with a small handful of ingredients and still have two separate flavors come out boldly -- strawberry lemonade, for example.  

Sometimes I will see a recipe that has literally dozens of ingredients.  Sometimes that is reasonable such as when making a stew or soup that we expect to have many different things in it.  But sometimes the number of ingredients is such that one has to wonder if half of them even make a difference.  You can argue both sides of this issue. Sometimes a massive number of ingredients does make a difference, indeed.  But not always.

But in general, I love the idea of focusing on few ingredients and letting those flavors be bold and powerful.  

Making a food with only a few ingredients is always nice from a practical point of view as well.  Their is a simplicity in the production as well as the content.  And that means it's quick and easy.  

Whether a recipe calls for only a few or many ingredients, what matters is the enjoyment one gets from making it and eating it and sharing it. 

But I love that quote.  It's a good one.  And it can remind us to focus on simple flavors.

Food experiments

In every kitchen with an active cook, baker, or chef, all across the country, experiments are going on almost every day.  The vanilla poppy seed muffins which I like to make, shown in the photo above, came about because of my own experiments.  I wanted a good vanilla muffin with a streusel topping and poppy seeds and all I could find were lemon poppy seed recipes.  After creating my own recipe, I eventually found other recipes for a similar vanilla-based muffin with poppy seeds.  But the one I have was entirely crafted by me.

I, like many other denizens of the kitchen, love to experiment.  Sometimes these adventures involve only subtle changes with ingredients.  Others involve complete remakes of something old into something new.  And some sound crazy when first verbalized but then turn out great when completed.

One of the weirdest things I have ever heard of, though, I read about this past week.  There is something called a sequin salad that used to be made several decades ago.  In fact, Jell-O even put out the recipe as something to use it's product for, sometime back in the 1950s, I think.  I'm not sure whether Jell-O originated it or if it came from someone else, but here's what it is.

Sequin salad - vinegar soaked vegetables, such as cauliflower, red peppers, onion, pimentos, etc., seasoned with salt and pepper (sometimes) and suspended in lime Jell-O.  

I can't imagine even in my wildest creative, most imaginative moments that I ever would have come up with an idea like this.  I didn't find a lot of information online about whether or not this was really enjoyed back when it was made.  I only could discover that it doesn't seem to be made anymore, and most people who come across this example of wild food experimentation are also as incredulous as I am.

Now, if anyone who reads this has ever tried this or is willing to try it and report back, then please do so.  As for me, I can't even bring myself to put this salad together.

I will continue to experiment, but probably never with something as wild as this idea.

Noticing details

 

Good morning!  So far, this month has been so extremely busy that I didn't even realize I was behind on posting here.  So I will try to catch up.

Lately, as I have been working on plans to take this food enterprise further, I find myself noticing details more and more when I'm out at other food establishments.  I notice what seems to work in terms of service.  I notice when it seems customers are happy and when they are impatient.  I notice the decor.  I notice the constancy, or often the lack, thereof, of quality when I eat someplace more than once.

Basically, I keep tweaking my ideas in my head again and again based on what I see that either works or doesn't work in the food world as I'm able to explore it. 

These details may or may not cause significant changes in what I want to do with my food.  I already have a well-honed set of ideas that is governing what I want to develop.  But I still continue to look at details both small and large. 

OK.  That's all for now.  But I will post again soon.  Today I'm studying cake rusk.  Haven't had it?  It's wonderful.  Think of it like biscotti, only it's pound cake.

I'll explain more later.  Have a great rainy (at least if you are reading this in Kansas City) Monday, everyone!