No need to call for help....I tried two bottles that I had in the fridge, but they had been in there too long since I'd first opened them. So, my bad. Then, I opened a new Beaujolais Nouveau [redundant?] and I didn't care for it. I LOVE Beaujolais Nouveau, but I'd never tried this one before. Sigh.
Now I'm trying again with a white Burgundy. This is too much work. If it doesn't work out, I'm going back to water.
It's been so long since I've had flour go bad that I can't remember it, though I have racked my brain. I simply go through flour so fast, it's hardly ever an issue.
But last night, I made some of my favorite sour-cream muffins, and after one bite, I knew the flour was off. Rancid flour is a great way to ruin a bowlful of otherwise wonderful ingredients.
Fortunately, it's easy to tell if your flour is bad: Just smell it. You'll know.
I think this may have something to do with the heat put off by my new oven...drastic temperature changes can't be good for the flour that sits on the counter right next to it. I guess I will have to move things around a bit.
I will add, this recipe uses self-rising flour, which in fact, I use for hardly any other recipes. But I still go through 2-3 5-lb. bags a year, well within the storage guidelines recommended by baking911.com, a site I can't believe I hadn't found before. It's for baking geeks. Yes, I already paid $24 for premium membership. [Hey, you go to the mall, I go to the kitchen. It's all good.]
I can admit, I like Hallmark Channel and Lifetime far more than a 36-year-old woman should. In fact, I've liked them for years. Go right ahead and take your potshots. I've never been cool, so I don't pretend.
But the commercials....I can hardly stand the commercials. They aren't as bad as the creepy ED-herbal-supplement commercials on G4. These are mostly food commercials. Or mops. Or drugs for insomnia and depression. Sigh. I love being pegged into a demographic.
At any rate, here were two commercials I saw right in a row tonight. I don't get either product:
• Birds' Eye Steamfresh Singles: These are frozen vegetables, packed 4 single-serving bags inside each container. The value here is supposed to be: "A single serving that steams itself in under two minutes." Umm. Let's say your average bag of frozen vegetables has six or eight servings. So, to get a single serving, you have to open the bag, scoop out a half cup or so [small bowl, if you're not into measuring things], and microwave it....for about a minute. As far as I can tell, the real value of the Birds' Eye Singles is that you don't have to re-seal the bag before putting it back in the freezer, since each serving is individually packaged....ie., more plastic.
• Philadelphia Ready-to-Eat Cheesecake Filling: Basically, this purports to be cheesecake in a tub. You scoop it out into a crust and eat it. DO WHAT??
I will say, I'm not opposed to ready-to-eat. But I don't get how Birds' Eye has managed to make a product out of some extra plastic bags. And if you want ready-to-eat dessert, why don't you just buy Sara Lee? Frankly, they're not half bad for what they are. All you have to do is thaw.
My coworker's family is originally from Lebanon and Syria. And her mom must be the most awesome mother in the world, because several times a year, she sends pastries to my coworker. My coworker is often kind enough to share a few with us.
I could eat my weight in baklava, any day, any time. I am sure I could eat you under the table in Middle Eastern pastries. I'm busy searching my family tree for the Middle Eastern connection, because these are my favorite treats in the world. I can't figure out how I don't have any ancestors outside of England, Scotland and France, given my inability to stop eating anything made with nuts, phyllo and rosewater.
And as has been publicized here in the past, my cooking skills and heritage revolve around things like meatloaf and cornbread. Which I am damn good at making. But I want to make these pastries.
So for months, I've been begging my coworker to get me some recipes. For baklava, for any of these other delicious little treats. Her response is always the same: "You don't make it. You buy it."
And I will say, the pastries she's shared with me from the Shatila Bakery in Detroit rock my world. But I've gotten obsessed with making them myself.
I've been doing some recipe research, and I already knew from eating these things for so long that I wanted to use pistachios and rosewater. Lots of recipes call just for walnuts, which are good, but I wanted the flavor of the pistachios.
Have you ever tried to find unsalted pistachios? I searched for weeks only to notice late last week that I apparently had neglected to look in my regular grocery store, The Turnip Truck. Pistachios, check.
That left just the rosewater. I've seriously probably looked in 15 grocery and gourmet stores in the past month, hoping to find some. I'm not the kind of person who'll go ask if I don't see it. I'm sure a few of these places could have ordered some for me. But it kind of became a quest on my part. I was about to declare defeat when I thought about Claudia. Claudia who is always ordering fascinating ingredients from parts unknown. I figured, I'll go over to cook : eat : FRET and find a mention in one of her old posts of a place to buy stuff.
Heck, she's got a whole section of links to great shops in her left-hand column. I tried igourmet.com first and found exactly what I needed.
I'm telling this whole long story here so I don't have to go make some tonight. I'm going to be really mad if this stuff doesn't turn out right. Stay tuned.
So there are several problems with my freezer.
An overarching issue which led to the other three is:
For almost 10 years, I had an extra freezer. And you get used to living with that extra space. But I decided that the last freezer I bought was a pain, since it didn't self-defrost, so I sold it with my old house 2 years ago. I have got to get another one.
Until then, I try to cram too much in this teeny box. The current theory is that that blue bag of chicken in the middle just slightly edged the door open, allowing three bags of chicken broth in the door to partially melt and drip. The other side effect is that my food-safety-paranoid self felt compelled to throw away all the meat in the freezer except, oddly, the alleged perpetrator, the blue bag of chicken. It was rock solid.
On the plus side, it was a nice opportunity to review what I keep in the freezer, and to remind myself that it just doesn't matter how many times I buy some things [frozen fruit, frozen vegetables, frozen fish], I am never, ever going to cook with them. And that I have brown sugar enough to last two years.
I decided earlier today that I will put everything in my house away. Yes, everything. Pause.
For some reason, I started with the three spice jars sitting on my kitchen counter. Which led to reorganizing the entire spice cabinet and throwing away several jars of 6- and 8-year-old spices.
This could be a lengthy project.
In other news, I discovered I need to get more Greek spices from the Old Towne Restaurant in South Carolina. You should, too. It's the best Greek spice mix I've ever tasted!
I will start by telling you, I love pimentos. They are one of my favorite extra items to add to a dish. Perhaps it stems from my in vitro love of pimento cheese. [Oh, people, if you don't make your own pimento cheese....but that's another post.]
And yet today I discovered a use for pimentos that made me stop and say, Hmm. And not in a "Hmm, this is great, I can't believe I never thought of it before" way, but in a "Hmm, I don't know about that" kind of way.
I ran downstairs to our local lunch shop--I don't eat there much but I had gotten swamped and had to reschedule a lunch with a friend. We had planned to eat at the always-wonderful Kalamata's. Please, you must go there--and grabbed a cup of soup. It was in one of those to-go containers for liquids, where there's a little pinhole in the lid. And just a teeny bit of soup leaked out the pinhole and I had to lick it off my finger. When I did, I didn't taste potato, or creamy soup. I tasted only pimento.
If you have a delicate soup, let me recommend against the addition of pimentos. Their flavor is so distinctive as to transform a creamy potato soup into Pimento (potato) Soup. The cream and potato flavors were just totally overwhelmed.
Now, pimentos are fabulous in many dishes....often in a casserole or a sandwich spread. I'd say olives and capers are foods with similar issues: In the right place, they absolutely make your dish. In the wrong dish, they don't blend and your dinner is all about capers. Is that what you want?
I didn't think so. Go forth and cook accordingly.
So I was a cooking demon this weekend and I should have been better about writing it up for you all. I'm terribly sorry. But I was also busy playing Mom all weekend. Sorry, they come first. :)
But I do have to share this important tip:
When you run out of regular flour, there are times and cases when you can substitute self-rising flour. BUT. But. If you need to substitute self-rising for half the flour in your pie crust, be sure you leave out ALL the salt. Or you will be sorry.
I made a great chicken pot pie this weekend (the recipe is in Cook's Best except I used an onion and a half bag of frozen mixed vegetables instead of a carrot and celery) but I realized after I had the filling in the dish and was measuring the flour for the crust that I had almost used all my flour earlier in the day making chocolate chip cookies. When this happened to my mother when I was growing up, she'd call my dad at work and say, "Larry, send someone out with some all-purpose flour."
Dammit, I don't own my own grocery store.
So I figured it would be OK to sub half the flour with self-rising -- hey, if you ever want a fluffy pie crust, it's on a pot pie, right?? -- but 3 minutes later, I forgot and put the salt in the pie crust recipe anyway. [Pie crust recipe: Flour, salt, butter, water.] For those of you who don't bake every day, the "self-rising" part of "self-rising flour" is salt and a leavening agent, like baking soda or powder. So now I had double the salt. Which I remembered when I took my first bite.
I decided after a few more bites that really it was fine, but I was glad I didn't have company. Or mostly that I hadn't used it on a pie. But especially, don't you make the same mistake. And better yet, do like I usually do, and buy an extra bag of flour when you get halfway through the first.
Tonight I was on one of those culinary fishing expeditions. You know: I have this, this and this, so what can I make with that? I had some potatoes that needed to be used, an onion, some leftover cheese....In my head it quickly became potato cheese soup. For some reason, I actually turned to the cookbooks tonight. Rare, I know.
I went through three of them before I happened upon a Beer-Cheese Soup recipe in Crescent Dragonwagon's Dairy Hollow House Soup and Bread Cookbook. It didn't take too long to whip up and my goodness, it's delicious! Normally I wouldn't have been able to make this without going to the store--I'm a wine girl. But Nash sister's boyfriend left me with some beer last night, and so it was quite the serendipitous meal.
As I was cleaning up I got to thinking about these two ingredients. They really are magic. Frankly, I can take or leave beer [except of course for really expensive beer] as a beverage, but when you put it into a recipe and cook it, wow! It adds a depth and richness to your food. Even cheap beer like Rolling Rock -- hey, it's decent cheap beer, but cheap nonetheless -- makes soup, a sauce or bread really unique: malty, deeper, better.
And then there's the evaporated milk. I rarely cook with real cream, unless it's a special occasion. First, I figure I'm probably using too much butter for my own good anyway, and if I am picking between butter and cream, there's just no contest for me. So I try to tone it down with my other dairy products. Normally I use evaporated skim milk -- really good for you -- but for some reason I had this can of regular evaporated milk hanging around. It's still miles better than cream, healthwise. The best part is, you can substitute this for cream in just about any cooking recipe. I say that because if the recipe calls for whipping, you'll want the real thing. But for soups and sauces, I'll choose evaporated milk every time. You still get a rich flavor, with many fewer fat grams.
Here's an item I find it hard to be without now: Kashi granola bars. These things are actually good. [I find most commercially made granola bars to be either candy [Kudos. Man, delicious, but come on.] or cardboard [Quaker Valley]. Even chewy cardboard is not good.] But the Kashi bars not only taste good, they are in fact, pretty decent for you, too.
