What I learned today

All U.S. butter must be at least 80 percent butterfat.* (That leaves about 18 percent as water and 1 to 2 percent milk solids).

*USDA specs.

All U.S. butter must be at least 80 percent butterfat.* (That leaves about 18 percent as water and 1 to 2 percent milk solids).

No wonder it almost, but not quite, causes melted chocolate to seize.

All U.S. butter must be at least 80 percent butterfat.* (That leaves about 18 percent as water and 1 to 2 percent milk solids).

No wonder it almost, but not quite, causes melted chocolate to seize.

Perhaps try European-style butter, which is a few percent higher in butterfat.

[Jenise]

Plugra, and others now. I'm surprised how many European butters are showing up in regular markets.

For Adventure fans: "A hollow voice says plugra."

-Paul W.

Can I throw the spoon rest at the troll?

What i learned in past few weeks…..i like hearty greens more than I thought.

We grew some chard in our garden this summer and i really liked that. Now I have moved on to collard greens and I REALLY like those. Our son was visiting the other day and as a veggie dish I sautéed some onions in EVOO, added collard green stems pretty finely chopped, then added more of the leaves and also some de-stemmed Tuscan kale leaves…..oh and some sliced garlic (vs minced)….threw in a little chicken stock and cooked it down. It was so good. My son who HATES spinach was a big fan as well.

Who knew?

John, that greens mix with some variations appears on our table in soups, as a pasta sauce, as a bed for poached eggs or a cutlet Milanese, as a stuffing for shells or ravioli. I grow a lot of chard, kale, escarole and hate to waste it. Glad you discovered it

What i learned in past few weeks…..i like hearty greens more than I thought.

We grew some chard in our garden this summer and i really liked that. Now I have moved on to collard greens and I REALLY like those. Our son was visiting the other day and as a veggie dish I sautéed some onions in EVOO, added collard green stems pretty finely chopped, then added more of the leaves and also some de-stemmed Tuscan kale leaves…..oh and some sliced garlic (vs minced)….threw in a little chicken stock and cooked it down. It was so good. My son who HATES spinach was a big fan as well.

Who knew?

John, I love cooking greens like that, and I always finish with a drizzle of fresh lemon juice, or pineapple or apple cider vinegar. Love vinegar with greens. I have not tried collard greens yet? Do you plant them late summer or late winter?

[Jenise]

Welcome to the club, John! So many places you can go with that. They make excellent pasta main courses to which bacon is a very friendly ingredient, or piled on a grilled slice of bread and topped with a bit of fontina-ish cheese as a crostini.

I learned yesterday that, while you need high heat when seasoning a wok or a cast iron Dutch oven, a 100,000 BTU propane ring is too much of a good thing. The oil burns before it gets a chance to bind to the metal.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

An expensive lesson, Paul! New wok ordered?

The wok and Dutch oven are OK. But I'm going to have to break out the steel wool to get rid of surface rust and then try again.

-Paul W.

The surface rust on the wok and Dutch oven turned out to be minimal and steel wool took it right off. Last night I had both utensils on the indoor butane wok ring to thoroughly dry them and then applied a coating of peanut oil. I was planning to finish the seasoning process by baking them in a closed gas grill (too much smoke to do this indoors). But unfortunately we have a nor'easter in progress so that will have to wait.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Good luck with that storm, Paul. Btw, last night I made rice (to go with a Vietnamese beef and red onion dish) which I make in a pan whose only job in this whole world is to make rice. It's a squat little Circulon teflon pan that I got, free I think, when I bought my Circulon wok. I love both pans. After 20 years the teflon coating remains intact--a record with no equal in my teflon experience--and I've built up a nice seasoning, which I protect. Even when cooking rice, I spray it with cooking spray (Spectrum organic) before every use. Last night I washed out the pan myself but no soap and water, so it had that nice shine from the oily film left behind and left it in the drainboard to self-dry. Later, passing through, I found it sitting on the stove--DRY. Oily film GONE. Guess who decided to dry it for me? No matter how much I preach, it still happens.

The storm's gone now. New Hampshire got a lot of rain and some heavy wind, but Cape Cod got really pounded--wind gusts up to 75 mph, lots of flooding, trees and power lines down.

Chef Carey told a story (can't remember if it was here or in his book) about his treasured, beautifully seasoned wok that hadn't seen soap for 25 years. Students in his cooking class took turns washing up after each lesson. One student was incredibly proud that he'd been able to get a metallic shine on the wok after a lot of scrubbing.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

I feel his pain! Wow, 25 years. Bob just doesn't get it. I mean, he does when I explain it, but he has trouble remembering which pans are to be treated which way or at least remembering to stop and think instead of just robotically scrubbing everything in sight.
I try not to complain too much--I'm very lucky as he does most of the dishes, so the occasional need to re-season something isn't all that horrible. But still.

[Jenise]

That once upon a time in America (thinking back to the earlier discussion re chicken paillards) there was a cut called City Chicken. In one recipe I looked at, it was mentioned as interchangeable with a veal chop for a quick stovetop preparation, so probably meatless/boneless but whether light or dark meat I can't tell. Oh, and you were to ask your butcher to prep this for you. God forbid a woman should attempt to cut something off the bone herself! (Though, more likely, it was about getting, say, four-six matching pieces without having to break down three whole chickens.

All the references to city chicken that I can find say that it is not chicken at all. It is chunks of pork and veal and also known as mock chicken (its original name). It became popular during the Great Depression because those cuts of meat were less expensive than chicken--excess hog and beef production was being bought up by the government to keep farmers solvent and then sold on the market dirt cheap (the alternative would have been to plow the excess animal carcasses into the ground--unthinkable when people were standing in bread lines for food). Polish-American city chicken consists of veal or pork scraps placed on a wooden skewer, shaped to resemble a chicken leg, then breaded, pan-seared, and finally baked. Pittsburgh lays claim to the dish, though recipes popped up in other rust belt cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Youngstown.

-Paul W

[Jenise]

Paul, great find, obviously I had no idea. Funny that they would call it "chicken".

Another thing I tripped over today in perusing these books. My MIL Jean apparently subscribed to an on-going service of 1-2 page recipe supplements issued often, possibly monthly, by the books publisher. All hers are in the dessert category, so I can't tell if those are the only supplements she subscribed to or only the ones she kept. Up to February of 1946, flour was referred to as either plain flour or enriched flour. There's no March thru June edition, but the July 1946 one suddenly calls for "emergency flour" and provides tips for using it. Brought on by the war, the emergency didn't last all that long. By mid-1947, they were back to simple enriched flour. Here's a fun read, a newspaper article dated May 1946 explaining emergency flour:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=987&dat=19460502&id=52VlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=s5MNAAAAIBAJ&pg=505,2327490

That's really interesting, Jenise.

Interesting read. So emergency flour had more of the kernel and bran in it. Hence no need to add B vitamin enrichment. But it would have been coarser and behaved more like whole wheat flour.

Paul, great find, obviously I had no idea. Funny that they would call it "chicken".

Apparently "mock chicken" and "mock duck" were trendy novelty dishes at hoity-toity restaurants around the turn of the 20th century. These were made from the "other white meats" (veal and pork) prepared so that the result looked like chicken or duck. Chinese cuisine has a bunch of this sort of culinary joke. Veal and pork became wildly popular in Great Depression America, displacing chicken, and these mock chicken dishes (including city chicken) went mainstream. I had assumed, as did the author of the article where I read about this, that there was a shortage of chicken, leading to a spike in chicken prices. Not so--chicken was plentiful and prices were stable. But there was severe overproduction of beef and pork. Wholesale and retail prices collapsed. To keep farmers solvent, the government bought up the excess at pre-glut prices. The problem was then how to dispose of this meat. With people starving it wasn't politically feasible to simply destroy it (which would have stabilized wholesale and retail prices). It ended up being practically given away. Consumers gravitated to veal and pork because they were so much cheaper than the alternatives such as chicken, and the popularity of veal and pork dishes (such as mock chicken/city chicken) skyrocketed.

-Paul W.

I learned a quick hack for one serve of fried rice. Arising from a desire for the dish and not wanting to toss a food product I would not have thought to buy.
My vego s-I- l who was locked down with me recently had bought some single serve microwaveable brown rice cups and they didn’t get used so I thought I’d see what happened. It’s already cooked, tick; it’s cold, tick. It’s brown rice, whatever,. So I just subbed it into my usual method and it made an acceptable dish. And actually the perfect amount of rice which was nice, I habitually end up with too much when I cook rice.

Chinese fried rice originated as a solution to the problem of what to do with leftover cooked rice. And also what to do when you get unexpected visitors--Chinese hospitality dictates that you offer a meal to visitors. Fried rice is something you can knock up at the spur of the moment.

-Paul W.