What's Cooking (Take Three!)

[Jenise]

Jenise, I buy dry packed scallops at our local meat/seafood place all the time. They are fresh, all I do is remove the muscle tissue on the side and cook. I never have gotten any sand. Are you getting them live?

No, usually frozen. Actual fresh are not available here, but the sources differ (these were from Nantucket) and pretty much results are the same. The occasional grain of sand is pretty much a constant. If I eat three scallops, inevitably one will have a grain.

[Jenise]

Tonight, wokness: Beef (flank steak), shitake and green onion stir fry on rice.

Paul, I juice lemons and oranges this time of year, After I juice them, I put a few of the halves into freezer bags. When I need lemon or orange zest, I take a half out of the freezer, let it sit for a few minutes, then zest away with my zester. Just another option for you. I have not tried the one you use but will.

Jenise, I used to buy all my scallops from Costco and never noticed sand. Now, I buy them from my local grocery store, which is carrying Pacific Seafood. Sometimes, I want to get the pink scallops and then I go to another shop to see if they have any. Still, no sand. Maybe you are just more sensitive to this than I am. Usually, my scallops are eaten with a seafood stew or in pasta. I have also made scallop tacos.

[Jenise]

Karen, I too have bought Costco for years; only in the last month I acquired these Nantucket scallops when I ordered some lobster online (never again, they cheated me by several ounces per tail). They had sand, but the majority of what I've ever used are the Costco scallops so that's where most of the sand has been, too.

I made a mincemeat pie today. I usually put some poppy seeds in pie crust to impart a bit of crunch. Right now the pie is cooling off. Mmm, mmm.

Update: the pie was yummy.

[Jenise]

Larry, I've only tasted mincemeat once when my grandmother made a pie every year at Christmas when I was a kid. I remember that I didn't like it one bit, and I had the impression that it's a sweet pie--but can it be made savory as well?

We spent the entire day yesterday cleaning up the garage. First time since we moved in back in 2003. All the doors open, 39F degrees out, and I was wearing flip flops and a t-shirt. I didn't really care about the cold (yes I know it's cold, but do I care? That's different, I'd rather feel nimble) until about 5:00 when I came in to thaw out and give some consideration to dinner at which point a fresh tomato bisque and avocado toast sounded divine. So that was dinner.

Tonight: spaghetti in a roasted garlic tomato sauce topped with a square patty of fried Italian sausage.

Most kids don't like mincemeat pie. It has a deep and rich flavor, sometimes with booze, somewhat analogous to fruit cake.

You should buy a jar of None Such Mincemeat filling and try a pie yourself. After Christmas the jars are on clearance and you can get prices as low as a dollar or so. I usually pick up two or three at that price. Go to the None Such website and take a look at the ingredients; you can then visualize what it should taste like.

FWIW, I'm eating a slice as I type this.

I wanted something hot and different for breakfast this morning. Saw a small amount of black beans leftover from another recipe in the fridge, so built from that. I crisped up a white corn tortilla, flipped, and smeared it with Black Bean Chili Sauce, then topped it with the black beans, added a couple of spoonfuls of homemade pepper jelly on top and heated through. Drizzled with fresh lime juice and it was delicious and very satisfying. A small Satsuma Mandarin rounded out the flavors.

I'm such a fanboy... here's Max on mincemeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRH5DODIgE0

Short form: Yes, it had meat originally. The fruit sugars preserved the meat through the winter season. As a fruity winter food, it became tangled-up with Christmas cookery pretty easily. Fast forward to today, there is no urgency to preserve meat nor to use up random bits (e.g., ox tongue) of meat so the pie is now essentially indistinguishable from fruitcake.

Short form: Yes, it had meat originally. The fruit sugars preserved the meat through the winter season. As a fruity winter food, it became tangled-up with Christmas cookery pretty easily. Fast forward to today, there is no urgency to preserve meat nor to use up random bits (e.g., ox tongue) of meat so the pie is now essentially indistinguishable from fruitcake.

Some brands, such as None Such, still have meat: Water, Corn Syrup, Raisins, Dried Apples, Molasses, Corn Starch Modified, Distilled Vinegar, Dried Orange And Lemon Peel, Salt, Spices, Beef, Fruit Pectin, Natural Flavor.

This time I added chopped walnuts because I had some. Good addition. None Such also has a version with some booze (or you could add your own).

None Such also has a version with some booze (or you could add your own).

Heh. Max said that makers of canned mincemeat took advantage of loopholes in Prohibition law to sell product with 14% alcohol!

Also a fan of mincemeat. My mother in law was a fabulous pie maker and made one at least yearly with real meat, usually leftover slowly braised chuck. It was fantastic. I've never tried to recreate that but I have used the Nonesuch version adding my own apples, dried figs or whatever dried fruits came in Christmas baskets adding some brandy or rum and orange juice to rehydrate the fruits as needed and nuts. Especially savory with a crust made with leaf lard.

The stars aligned .....My order of Huacatay, aji amarillo and aji panca arrived yesterday and I picked up a beautiful organic chicken at the market for Peruvian pollo a la Brasa for a recipe featured in a recent Washington Post article. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/202 ... een-sauce/ I've been seeing huacatay and aji amarillo in other articles and magazines and just had to try them. Aromas are terrific.

Those are the tastes of yesteryear. Vegetarian mincemeat pie was in my mother's core rotation of weekly pies when I was a kid in the 80s. It was delicious but I don't think I've seen one since then!

The stars aligned .....My order of Huacatay, aji Amarillo and aji panca arrived yesterday and I picked up a beautiful organic chicken at the market for Peruvian pollo a la Brasa for a recipe featured in a recent Washington Post article. https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/202 ... een-sauce/ I've been seeing huacatay and aji amarillo in other articles and magazines and just had to try them. Aromas are terrific.

Beautiful color on that chicken Christina, did yours come out like that? I love it when a recipe I make looks like the picture. I have the aji amarillo in my spice cabinet but have not even heard of the other two.

Regarding the scallop and sand problem, are these whole scallops in the shell in the dish, whole scallops with the shell removed, or just the big adductor muscle that opens and closes the shells? I wouldn't expect there to be a sand problem with the adductor muscle, but scallops are bottom dwellers that prefer sandy areas so I would expect a bit of sand in the stomach or mantle cavity. Nowhere as big a problem as with burrowing bivalves such as clams, though.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Paul, it's extremely fine grained sand but in IQF'd frozen scallops, abductor muscle usually attached but otherwise nekkid. The sand somehow gets lodged in the flesh, even though I rinse them before use.

Dinner tonight is a braised porcelette shoulder. Had it in the outside freezer for a long time, too long but it's so cold it's like storing something at the North Pole. I trimmed off the outer layer and believe it will be just fine, however chose this cooking method to fully infuse it with other flavors just in case: rosemary, mushrooms, chicken broth and garlic. Oh, and gin! I was just about to reach for my standby white vermouth when it occurred to me that the botanicals in a good gin just might be very interesting! The rest of the meal hasn't been thought through yet. Will probably serve it on rice, and maybe we'll have a plate of cold radishes to start.

Yes, Karen. The Peruvian chicken came out as pictured in the article. It was delicious and I will definitely work with using the Huacatay- Peruvian black mint in other recipes. It is very interesting and unmistakable. Will definitely do the chicken again and the aji verde would make shoe leather taste good. Used it on an avocado radish salad and can easily see it on steamed or roasted vegetables

What brand of Huacatay did you get and where did you source it? Thanks

This weekend I'll be making sambar and idli, and also mapo dofu using some 5-spice pressed tofu that I bought as a whim.

-Paul W.

Mince Pies - individual size - are a Christmas tradition here, and stocked by bakeries and supermarkets who have a range at different prices, but sold only for Christmas. They are sweet, the contents are mostly dried fruits and until recently suet provided the fat - which may explain beef on the list of ingredients seen by Larry. Thus vegetarian ones don't use suet.

Apparently they originated with meats sweetened with dried fruits that crusaders encountered in their time in the East. Over time the meat element shrank till it disappeared, leaving only suet which most didn't know was a meat product.

Hence the name mincemeat, though here meat has disappeared from packing, leaving mince pies as the name

Keen cooks make their own filling to their own recipes or one can buy it in jars to fill your own pies - which I used to do. But now I buy a couple of packets of this ones highest rated in the papers - this Christmas Waitrose brown butter mince pies with Courvoisier – rated 5 stars in The Telegraph, see here

Peter, do English shops start selling mince pies around the start of September? I must be an old grump-bucket, but it annoys the blazes out of me when Australian shops trot out the mince pies about three months before Christmas. Likewise, when hot cross buns go on sale shortly after new year. I'm sure there are more important things to be annoyed about, but ... really!

Matilda, count me among the old grump-buckets who wince when Christmas merchandising starts early.

WCRB is Boston's radio station devoted exclusively to classical music. It was originally a commercial station, but after the death of its president and founder, Richard L. Kaye the station was bought by Boston public broadcasting organization WGBH (the folks who brought us The French Chef and Joyce Chen Cooks). Anyway, WCRB did live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra every Saturday starting at 8 PM (they still do). BSO concerts vary in length and so the 10 PM to midnight time slot couldn't be formally scheduled as a program. To fill this dead air, Richard L. Kaye personally hosted a program called WCRB Saturday Night. It featured quirky classical music, Klezmer (Kaye was a big fan), satire from Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, Gerard Hoffnung, etc., and a half-hour British radio comedy (The Goon Show and Round the Horne and the like).

In the mid 1950s Stan Freberg released a satirical sketch called Green Chri$tma$ that was a parody of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchett is a spice merchant from New Jersey. Scrooge is an advertising consultant chairing a meeting to help merchants with Christmas-based ad campaigns. When he hears that Cratchett was sending out Christmas cards featuring the Three Wise Men, Scrooge exclaims, "And they're bearing your spices! Now that's excellent!". He doesn't understand when Cratchett explains that there's no product in it, and he considers "Merry Christmas to you and yours" to be an odd slogan. The sketch features several appalling Christmas ad campaigns that are only a step further down the slippery slope than the real ones. For instance:

"And I suppose you'll have a pack of your cigarettes peeking out of Santa's bag again?"

"No, this year he'll be smoking one. And it's made him more rugged, too. Both sleeves rolled up and a tattoo on each arm. One of them says 'Merry Christmas'"

"And the other one?"

"Less tars."

Richard L. Kaye would play Green Chri$tma$ every year on the next show after he'd heard or seen the first Christmas-based advert. Originally this took place sometime in November, but gradually it got earlier and earlier. Kaye gave up the tradition when he played Green Chri$tma$ the weekend after the US July 4 Independence Day holiday.

-Paul W.