A food memoir of weight loss, family recipes, digital cookbook and nutrition information for family and friends
The 5 Ingredients You’ll Always Find in Jacques Pépin’s Kitchen
https://www.foodandwine.com/jacques-pepin-pantry-staples-11790988
Memo to Self – OK to use cheaper olive oil for cooking. Dried herbs essential, fresh is better.
Memo to Self – For this dish one boneless chicken breast feeds two people. Jacques says this in the video but I didn’t believe him.
I’ve always preferred baking sweet potatoes over boiling and mashing sweet potatoes because my boiled version always turned out watery.
I just learned you have to boil the peeled sweet potatoes whole. After about 45-50 minutes check to see if the potatoes are cooked through. Then drain and return to the cooking pot. Turn the heat on to low and start smashing, and mashing while constantly stirring to avoid burning (I use a wooden spoon). After about five minutes a good amount of moisture will have evaporated from the potatoes. This is why sweet potatoes made this way aren’t too loose and watery. Add a splash of milk or half and half, a bunch of butter, salt and pepper to taste.
Memo to Self – buy more sweet potatoes, eat more sweet potatoes.
Celery leaves. I always tossed them out until The Boss informed me she doesn’t like big chunks of celery in dishes I make that use celery for an ingredient. I recently discovered you can use celery leaves like a fresh herb, finely chopped and added to your creation in lieu of big chunks of celery. So far I haven’t gotten any complaints about the tiny green stuff floating in the soup.
10 Ways To Use Celery Leaves In The Kitchen.
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1572645/uses-celery-leaves/
Memo to Self – instead of buying celery with less leaves buy celery with more leaves, especially bunches with dark green leaves which have a more intense flavor than the stalks.
I am very, very bad at cooking tofu.
Remember Baked BBQ Tofu? Well I recently discovered I can’t even fry tofu properly.
Memo to Self – order out for tofu.
Sunday 9/22
My Mom loved hard boiled eggs. But beyond the egg, what she loved was her hot sauce. Tabasco, the one of a kind hot sauce from Avery Island, Louisiana. Mom always ate her boiled eggs with Tabasco and we’re not talking a few drops here and there. She would cut the boiled egg in half and hit that thing with so much Tabasco you literally could not see any yellow.
I thought this was disgusting.
I was 25 years young when I was introduced to the strange land known as Texas. What do you mean these chips are not potato chips? What’s that tiny bowl of red stuff? I was and still am a Jersey Boy from the mean streets of Newark. Seriously, people eat chips made from corn dipped in this red stuff?
It was not love at first bite. But like many other things in life I learned to love Texas and all things about the Lone Star State. This Jersey Boy met and married a Dallas girl and we created two more Texans. I acquired my desire for Thai food in Texas which then led me to other forms of spicy heat. The years sped by and when the Sriracha craze hit I never got on that train. I did keep a small bottle of the Huy Fong chili garlic sauce in the fridge which became my go to sauce when I needed to heat up my mild bland homemade chili made specifically not spicy for the someone else I live with.
My chili garlic sauce had to get tossed because the expiration date was years ago. I guess I never used this sauce as much as I thought. Today is the first day of Fall and chili season grows near. I needed a replacement hot sauce. The Tabasco, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, some cheap Mexican hot sauce and the omnipresent jar of medium salsa were just not going to work for me.
Then suddenly (Devine Intervention?) this hit the grocery shelves.
Thanks Mom. I hope you are enjoying your hard boiled eggs wherever you are.
How to Use Chopsticks – the article https://thewoksoflife.com/how-to-use-chopsticks/
The video:
Lesson #4. You can always get better at something.
Back in my East Coast days I would take a bunch of guys into NY Chinatown for some authentic Chinese food. The restaurant was a classic hole in the wall, one of the places that didn’t cater to non-Chinese diners. All the menus were in Chinese and the family banquet style menus were posted near the ceiling on the wall. The group would get seated, tea was served, and I would point to the menu on the wall for our table. Sometimes I pointed to a menu I thought I had ordered in the past and the food was different from the last visit. Didn’t matter. It was all good.
My friends all got forks, spoons, and knives. The waiter would remove my silverware and return with a pair of chopsticks and one of those awkward soup spoons. I always had to ask for a fork and regular spoon because I was really bad at using chopsticks.
I still can’t use chopsticks very well. Too bad we didn’t have the internet or YouTube back then. At least I now have instructions and a video to watch.
Time to practice!
Technique matters. Note the parboiling then rinsing of the potatoes.
Not all potatoes are the same. Note the specific variety used.
Garlic. But of course.
My mind drifts back to the time I spent in Madrid, sitting outdoors at a cafe enjoying the evening, a glass of Spanish wine and potatoes.
Lesson #3. You can always get better at whatever dish you think you know how to cook. Even if it’s simple fried potatoes.
This video has over one million views. The house smells wonderful now.
The next time I make these potatoes I’ll cut back on the amount of olive oil.
When you buy a huge jar of tomato paste from a Pakistani grocery store only do so when you use a lot of tomato paste in your cooking. I used maybe 2/3 of the jar and when I opened it yesterday I found a wonderful BLOB OF MOLD growing on the inside.
I am back to buying canned tomato paste and freezing the excess for future use.
When you buy ground red chilies from a Pakistani grocery store Mild is HOT.
garyskitchen.net 