Don't Try This at Home!

The Ultimate Cookbook...

It's 2,400 pages and 47 pounds, and costs $625.

I think I'll wait for the Kindle edition...

Geek Cookbook...

...that requires exotic (and expensive) lab equipment to follow.  The cookbook ain't cheap, either ($625 list, $422 at Amazon).  It's written by uber-geek Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft.  I'd love to have the time and money to play with this...

Do It Yourself Sous-Vide Cooking...

Sous-vide cooking sure sounds good – hi-tech cooking!  I just might have to try it...

More Feasting...

Debbie and I went a little crazy with the cooking this year. For four successive days we've feasted on some luscious dishes...

We had about a pound of lobster meat left over after our Thanksgiving Day meal, so on Friday I made lobster rolls. For those of you who may be (sadly) unfamiliar with lobster rolls, this is a traditional American dish from the northeast (especially Maine). Many people believe this is the very best way to enjoy lobster. There are almost as many recipes for lobster rolls as there are people who make them; about the only things I can see in common between them are these: (1) it's all about the lobster; other ingredients are kept to a minimum, and (2) they need to be on toasted rolls.

Being on the West Coast, we can't just go down to our grocery and buy lobster rolls in the bakery section of the grocery store. Hot dog buns are just not good enough. So we made a “San Diego substitution”: we used Dudley's potato bread, grilled in butter to toast them. The filling I made by roughly chopping the lobster meat into about 1/2” pieces, then adding some finely chopped celery and chives (not much of each), a little mayonnaise, and some chopped tarragon. I wanted to use fresh tarragon, but we were out – so I rehydrated some dried tarragon in a little lukewarm water, and it did quite nicely (you have to have the dried tarragon that's in little pieces, not the powdered type, for this to work). That's it! We just mixed those ingredients, piled it high between a couple slides of grilled potato bread, and feasted. My oh my, that was good!

On Saturday we roasted a small turkey. Debbie made a fine white gravy with the giblets and drippings, and we had open-faced roast turkey sandwiches, on toasted potato bread, with gravy. Yum! And then on Sunday I made broth from the leftover turkey bones, and Debbie turned it into tlapeno (a traditional Mexican soup) made with turkey instead of chicken. She's made this dish quite a few times, and this was her best yet – a simple, clear-broth soup redolent of turkey, full of tasty ingredients with a great texture. Naturally, being Debbie, she made vast quantities of the stuff – we could have fed a significant number of Marines with it! But it was just the two of us, so now there's a wonderful, giant-sized container in the refrigerator chock full of this delectable stuff.

I suspect we're both going to take a few days off from cooking…

Making Us Crazy

Early this morning I cut up a big pork loin roast into cubes and stuffed it into our slow-cooker, along with some onion, garlic, cumin, and a chipotle pepper. Ten hours later — about 5 hours from now — we will have carnitas, probably my all-time favorite Mexican food.

But in the meantime, the delicious, intoxicating aroma of cooking carnitas is wafting through our house. And it’s making us crazy. Crazier, anyway.

Somehow the dogs don’t seem to care about this smell. Isn’t that weird? With their sensitive noses, I figured the intense meatness of this smell would reduce them to quivering, whining, begging lumps of canine protoplasm. But they’re asleep, as though nothing were going on.

Go figure!

Update: Well, maybe the dogs knew something we didn’t. Despite the glorious odor while it was cooking, the resulting carnitas were less than excellent. Not even very good. In fact, they were just barely on the right side of awful. Somewhere between the slow-cookery and the final saute, something went horribly wrong…