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You are here: Home / Archives for Food & Recipes / Cooking

Cooking

John Cole’s Amazing One of a Kind Beef Stew

by John Cole|  December 23, 20212:49 pm| 120 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food & Recipes, Open Threads

Like I said, I got some time on my hand, and I have been craving beef stew, so I thought I would cook up a big batch of beef stew to store in the freezer and have for dinner. As I was doing it, I thought “why not share my recipe since it is so easy.”

Now be foreworned, this may not be how you have had beef stew or how you make beef stew, and I am certain it will piss off the professional chefs and the recipe afficionado types, because I don’t really have measurements. I just eyeball it and go.

What you will need for this (other than a big pot, and stove, and a knife), is the following:

Big ole hunk of beef: You can use anything you like from the cheaper cuts of beef. I had a massive chuck roast in the freezer that I bought for pennies on the dollars months ago because I still shop like I lived through the depression, so that is what I used. But you can use round, sirloin, brisket (although who would do that it is so damned expensive these days), etc.

Veggies: I am sure there are official veggies for some types when it comes to stew, but my attitude is you are the one eating it, put in whatever you damned well please. Personally, I added carrots, potatoes, turnips, onions, celery, parsnips, mushrooms, and peas to this one.

Flour and seasonings: Any old flour will do, but I had some AP on hand and that is what I used. For herbs, I had some fresh parsely, rosemary, and thyme, a head of garlick, and some bay leaves.

Oil: Any old oil will do. Again, I am sure some people will bitch about using a specific type, but I just used olive oil because I only have avocado, olive, sesame, and chili oil on hand and olive made the most sense.

Misc: Tomato paste, red wine, lee & perrins, beef stock.

Directions:

Turn your sink on so it is cool, and give your beef a good wash and pat it dry with towels. Put it on the cutting board and ignore it. Fill your sink with cool water and half cup of salt, throw all your veg in it. This will serve to start the wash on your veg, firm up any loose celery or what not, get any bugs off it, etc.

Go back to your beef. Cut it up into cubes the size you want. Throw it all into a container (I just use a big cambro I have on hand). Give it a couple splashes lee & perrins, a little bit of salt, and grind some black pepper into it. Put the lid on, and vigorously shake it for a bit until the salt/pepper/wworcestershire sauce is evenly distributed it. Put it aside.

Wash your veg, drain the sink, pull the veg out and put in another container (or your stew pot). Clean your cutting board and dry it off. Begin chopping your veg.

Again, this is a personal thing as far as I am concerned. It’s stew. No one gives a shit about precision knife cuts. I personally want big hunks of veg because they all cook different. I cut all but the biggest mushrooms in half and quarter the others, and so on. Just user your own judgment this ain’t rocket surgery. Once all your veg is done, put it aside. Obviously you cut your garlic normally or use your press, etc.

Go back to your meat container, give it a shake, and throw in a quarter to half cup of ap. Shake the living shit out of it. While you are doing this, bring your skillet with the oil up to temperature. When done coating the beef with flour, start to brown it in the pot/skillet. Take your time you want it nice and browned on all sides. If you have more beef than you can do in one run, just make sure to add more oil and let it heat up. You can just go ahead and throw the browned pieces into your stew pot with your veg.

Once all the beef is done and in the stew point, deglaze your skillet with red wine. Get all that flavor out of there, add in some of your beef stock and the tomato paste, heat it up and stir until it is consistent, and then dump it into the stew pot.

At this point, everything should be in your stew pot. Throw in your beef stock. I use stock I made myself, but if you are buying it I would recommend the unsalted so you can salt to your liking. Throw in the rest of the wine, wrap your herbs in cheesecloth and chuck them in, and bring it up to temp.

And you are basically done. Once it is near a boil turn it down to a simmer, put a lid on it, and be like Elsa and Let it Go. Just fuck off for a few hours, checking every now and then to make sure you are not burning it and to give it a stir. If it seems to be too thick, add some more stock or water. Not think enough, make a roux and throw it in. If it needs salt, add salt.

When it is almost done I like to throw in a half stick of butter to give it a creamier mouth feel, but again, that is me.

Again, just have fun, this is something that is really hard to screw up.

Also, this is what mine looks right before I put the lid on it:

John Cole’s Amazing One of a Kind Beef StewPost + Comments (120)

A Bit of Personal Thanksgiving Tradition To Pass the Time: The Story Behind the Cornbread Stuffing

by Adam L Silverman|  November 25, 20213:24 pm| 84 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food, Food & Recipes, Open Threads, Silverman on Security

Now that my workout is done and while I drip dry a bit before showering the grime off and then getting the turkey I spatchcocked and wet rubbed last night in the oven, and since we could use a new open thread, I figured I’d regale you all with the story behind the cornbread stuffing I’ve previously mentioned my family makes for Thanksgiving. So here goes:

When my parents got engaged they were living in Columbus, OH. Mom had just finished her SLP masters and was starting to practice and dad was finishing his doctorate. Both at THE Ohio State University. That year – 1966 I think –  they decided they were going to invite a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Mom figured that roasting a turkey was basically roasting a really big chicken, so all that was needed was to scale the cooking time up for the larger weight and size. But stuffing, well that was a huge mystery. So she decided to ask the nurses at the hospital where she was working. One of the social workers, Bessie King Jackson, came through without blinking an eye. Up until I decided to do this post, I never really knew much of Mrs Jackson’s history. All mom has ever related, largely because I’m sure it is all mom ever knew, is that Bessie was Black, a social worked, and from West Virginia. To help out my mom, Bessie Jackson wrote out a cornbread stuffing recipe on a 3X5 index card and gave it to a 26 year old Jewish woman from Queens and Silverman family Thanksgiving dinners have fortunately never been the same!

We still have that faded, slightly tattered and stained note card in a plastic sleeve stuck to the fridge at my mom’s house with a magnet. It travelled with her from Columbus to Tampa. From an apartment to now five different houses over her life in Tampa and one in Denver when my dad took sabbatical and went home for a year. Copies of the recipe, typed out, then emailed, and now saved as word, pages, and pdf documents, have travelled to Scotland with me when I was in grad school, then Philadelphia, Little Rock, NY, and Carlisle. My brother has it too, but he’s basically never left Florida, so his copy doesn’t travel far.

When I lived in Scotland, I used the recipe when my flat mates asked me if I’d roast them a turkey one year for Christmas as goose was too expensive. So off I went to the Saint Andrews Safeway and had a chat with the butcher who had to special order me a fresh turkey as it would have to be brought in from Edinburgh or Glasgow. We got to chatting and he asked how I was going to do it, trying to steer me to something more traditional like a roast so he wouldn’t have to do the paperwork for the special order. I explained what I was going to do with it, what I was going to serve with it, and then his eyes lit up. His wife was assembling a cook book of recipes that people had collected in their families over the years and the minute I finished telling the cornbread stuffing story he said: “I’ll get you that turkey, how many pounds do you want it, if you’ll give me the cornbread stuffing recipe and the story for my wife’s cookbook.” I made that deal! The butcher was thrilled, his wife was thrilled, and my flat mates and their guests were thrilled.

When I was deployed in Iraq, one of the last things I did before redeploying at the end of my tour was help the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division plan a Thanksgiving dinner that would invite and include a variety of local Iraqis we’d been dealing with. I made sure the officer overseeing the kitchen prep got a copy of Beasie Jackson’s cornbread stuffing recipe. Since I redeployed home the week before Thanksgiving – I’d promised my mom when I left for pre-deployment training in August 2007 I’d be home for Thanksgiving 2008 – I’m not sure if they were able to make it scale for an entire BCT plus invited guests as I was back home eating my mom’s cornbread stuffing.

I’ve made Bessie Jackson’s cornbread stuffing in multiple countries. Every year at USAWC, I’d invite my international students, any others – American officers or internationals – that didn’t have invites or plans from their sponsors/advisors, and anyone else in the resident course who was stuck in town with nowhere to go to my house for Thanksgiving. Mom would fly up for the holiday – I made her walk the entirety of Pickett’s charge one year when we went to Gettysburg the day after Thanksgiving, she was prepared to surrender to the Union before we even got to the halfway mark! – and of course make Bessie Jackson’s cornbread stuffing. Lieutenant colonels to major generals from Nepal, Kenya, Algeria, Turkey, Kuwait, and all over the US have had it.

I have no idea how old Bessie Jackson was when she passed the recipe on to my mom. Since I had no idea if she’s still alive, I decided I’d put my keyword-fu to the test and I found her obituary, which I’ll copy and paste below. I have no idea if she had kids or anyone in their families used her cornbread stuffing recipe. But I do know there would be no Thanksgiving in a Silverman home without it. Whether we’re all in the same place or we’re in different states or countries, my mom, my brother and his family, and I all make this every Thanksgiving. My nephews know how to make it, so when we all go, there will still be Silverman’s making and eating Bessie Jackson’s cornbread stuffing on Thanksgiving.

And here’s the woman who without knowing it has made 50 plus years of Thanksgiving dinners special for my family. I’ll help mom try to track down any of her kids or grandkids and let them know. She had an amazing life and did a lot of good in addition to helping my mom make a successful Thanksgiving dinner.

Bessie King Jackson, child welfare advocate for more than 47 years, departed this life Sunday, February 6, 2005, after a brief hospitalization. Born July 11, 1930 in Hot Coal, WV to Simon Peter and Mary Bell Pannell King, she was the youngest of nine children. Received a BA from West Virginia State College and a Masters in Social Work from The Ohio State University. Her compassion for bringing about change was evident in every aspect of her life. Founder and director of the Bethune Center for Teenage Families, president of the Evening Star Missionary Society at Hosack Street Baptist Church, a past president and Executive Committee member of Ohio’s AARP, member of the Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging Advisory Council, a committed member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority for more than 50 years, appointed by Governor Taft to the Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Task Force, a former Court Appointed Special Advocate for the Court of Domestic Relations, Juvenile Division, and in 2004 was inducted into Ohio’s Senior Citizen Hall of Fame. Preceded in death by husband, Garland. Survived by daughters, Garlena Jackson, Jerri (Lawrence) Jackson-Fowlkes, and Patty Jackson; grandchildren, Leighton, Candice, Cedric, Jhamerra, John, Kayelin, Vivica, Jasmine, and one great-granddaughter, Laniyah; sister-in-law, Juanita King; cousins, Richard and Sara Johnson; a host of other relatives and friends. Service of Memory 9:30 a.m. Saturday, February 12, 2005 at Hosack Street Baptist Church, 1160 Watkins Road. Pastor Daryl Hairston, officiating. Mrs. Jackson will lie in state Friday 12 – 4 p.m. at DIEHL-WHITTAKER FUNERAL & CREMATION SERVICE, 720 E. Long Street and after 6 p.m. at the church, where the family will receive friends from 7-9 p.m. Interment Glen Rest Memorial Estate. In lieu of flowers, friends may contribute to the Bessie King Jackson Memorial Fund, c/o Huntington National Bank, 17 South High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215.
Published by The Columbus Dispatch on Feb. 10, 2005.

A happy and healthy Thanksgiving to all of you! And if any of our readers in the Columbus, OH area know any of Mrs Jackson’s children or grandchildren, feel free to share this with them. And let them know that every year at Thanksgiving we honor their mother’s/grandmother’s memory and give thanks that she helped my mother out with her generosity.

Open thread!

And the recipe is in the comments.

A Bit of Personal Thanksgiving Tradition To Pass the Time: The Story Behind the Cornbread StuffingPost + Comments (84)

The Seven Stages of Brisket

by Adam L Silverman|  May 29, 202110:10 pm| 104 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food & Recipes, Open Threads

Like grief, but beefier and more appetizing, there are seven stages of brisket. Also, Seven Soldiers of Victory!

  • Stage 1: In the cryovac;
  • Stage 2: Out of the cryovac, rinsed off with the hard/unrenderable fat trimmed;
  • Stage 3: Dry rubbed, wrapped in paper towels, and in the fridge forming a pellicule for 24 hours;
  • Stage 4: Wet rubbed, bedded down on and smothered in thin sliced onions, and in the oven for at least five hours at 275F;
  • Stage 5: Out of the oven snd resting;
  • Stage 6: Sliced;
  • Stage 7: IN MY BELLY!!

Here we have a Stage 4 brisket just before it went into the oven:

The Seven Stages of Brisket

This was then covered in silver foil and placed in a 275 degree Fahrenheit oven for five hours.

It has just come out and is now resting. I will slice it before I go to sleep tonight, put the slices back in the drippings, cover it, place it into the fridge, and tomorrow afternoon it will go back into a 275 degree Fahrenheit oven to bring it back up to temperature for serving.

I had wanted to do it hybrid, braised in its own juices, which is my way of doing a Jewish style brisket as I don’t like braising it in tomato sauce. But instead of done slow in the oven, I wanted to do it slow in an indirect heat with natural hardwood coals on the kettle. However, one of the people that this is being prepared for does not like anything smoked, so even though this wouldn’t be really smoked, I can’t take the risk.

Next time.

Right now the Dog Lanterns are looking at me with the “Is it ready to slice?” “Why isn’t it ready to slice?” look. They know that they will have late night noms. In fact, they’ll be Midnight Nomming!

Nomming after midnight,

Noshing till the dawn.

Snacking till the morning,

Then I’m gone, gone…

Nom Nom King Shark GIF from Nomnom GIFs

Open Thread!

And Nom Nom!!!!

The Seven Stages of BrisketPost + Comments (104)

ATTN: Pod People

by John Cole|  May 6, 20214:46 pm| 42 Comments

This post is in: Cooking

I have everything to make mulligatawny soup but I forgot to pick up chicken thighs and the only ones I have are on two whole frozen chickens so that is out of the question. Do you think I could substitute shrimp instead? I have a bag of frozen shrimp I picked up a couple months ago on sale and forgot about in the freezer. What are your throughts?

ATTN: Pod PeoplePost + Comments (42)

Respite Open Thread: WAFFLES & MOCHI !

by Anne Laurie|  February 10, 20217:27 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Nature & Respite, Readership Capture

I’m beyond thrilled to share that on March 16, I’ll be launching a new show on @Netflix called Waffles + Mochi! I'm excited for families and children everywhere to join us on our adventures as we discover, cook, and eat delicious food from all over the world. pic.twitter.com/dedUWMp9SY

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) February 9, 2021

Per the Washington Post:

… In addition to executive producing “Waffles + Mochi,” which debuts March 16, she’ll play the proprietor of a “whimsical supermarket” that employs the titular puppets, who are best friends and aspiring chefs. (One is an adorably small orb formed like the Japanese rice cake and the other a creature whose ears are shaped like the griddled breakfast treat.) “I’m excited for families and children everywhere to join us on our adventures as we discover, cook, and eat delicious food from all over the world,” she wrote in a tweet on Tuesday.

Netflix described the 10-episode series as “the culinary adventure of a lifetime” in which the characters hop aboard a magical shopping cart to seek out ingredients all over the world. “Whether they’re picking potatoes in the Andes of Peru, sampling spices in Italy, or making miso in Japan, these curious explorers uncover the wonder of food and discover every meal is a chance to make new friends,” the streaming service says….

“Waffles + Miso,” whose previous title was “Listen to Your Vegetables & Eat Your Parents,” is a lighthearted entry into the catalogue the Obamas are developing with Netflix…

I guess the original title didn’t test well with, er, parents. On the other hand, I’m tickled that mochi is now sufficiently widely known to be used in an American-produced kids’ show… and that waffles (waffu) are now global!

Respite Open Thread: WAFFLES & MOCHI !Post + Comments (77)

Recipe Exchange: Kamala Brings It

by TaMara|  November 24, 202010:45 pm| 54 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food & Recipes, Recipe Exchange, Recipes

I am going to have to up my game:

Kamala Cornbread 1

Kamala Cornbread 2

show full post on front page

Kamala Cornbread 3

Kamala Cornbread 4

Kamala Cornbread 5

Kamala Cornbread 6

 

Auto Draft 30

I’m going to enjoy this administration.

Open thread

Recipe Exchange: Kamala Brings ItPost + Comments (54)

Open Thread: Just Because We Are Staying Home Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Have Good Food

by TaMara|  November 15, 20203:09 pm| 110 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food, Food & Recipes, Open Threads

Open Thread: Just Because We Are Staying Home Doesn't Mean We Can't Have Good Food

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, next to 4th of July. Food, family, friends…and leftovers. I compiled some favorite recipes here. Unfortunately this year, it will be a socially distant and quiet affair. No way am I traveling to see family, much as I would love to.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have good food. I’m pulling some more of my favorites this week and will post here as I do. Some I’ll update with instant pot versions.

This is a good start:

JefferyW makes Cornbread Stuffing,  part 1 here and part 2 here.

Roasted Butternut Apple Soup makes a great starter, recipe here.

I think I’m going to volunteer for mashed potato duty this year so I can make these again, a lost recipe found, Hearty Garlic Mashed Potatoes, link here. I made them years ago and then completely forgot about the recipe.

And this recipe is the reason I think I get invited to many holiday gatherings, my Cranberry Upside Down Cake, click here.

Every year my brother deep fries a turkey. I’m going to miss that. I have a real fear of deep-frying anything, which is why all the deep-fried recipes on my blog are from JeffreyW. I will still cook a turkey though, because, leftovers.

Not sure how you want to cook your turkey this year? I’ve listed some ideas from people smarter than I am: turkey four different ways, here.

show full post on front page

I’m not a fan of traditional candied sweet potatoes, so tonight’s featured recipes are some non-traditional styles of recipes for sweet potatoes.

Cajun Sweet Potatoes

  • 4 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1/4 cup butter,  melted
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp brown sugar
  • 2 tsp Cajun seasoning
  • ¼ tsp cumin (opt)

Covered casserole dish, well-greased

Steamer and saucepan

In saucepan, add water, steamer and sweet potatoes. Steam until you can easily stick a fork in them. They don’t need to be completely soft. About 10-15 minutes. Add sweet potatoes to casserole dish. Combine oil, butter and spices. Pour evenly over potatoes. Cover and bake at 375 degrees for 25-30 minutes until potatoes are soft. You can adjust cooking time if you prefer your firmer or softer potatoes.

Sweet Potatoes w/Apples

  • 2 large sweet potatoes, peeled & cubed
  • ¼ cup water
  • 2 apples, cored & sliced
  • 8 oz can sliced pineapple (including liquid)
  • 2 tsp butter
  • ½ cup orange juice
  • ½ tsp cinnamon
  • ¼ tsp salt

2 qt casserole dish, greased

Add ingredients to casserole dish. Stir gently and bake at 375 degrees for 40-50 minutes, uncovered, until apples and potatoes are very soft. Cover if it begins to brown too much

=======================

Meanwhile, consider this a much needed open thread (which will guarantee a flurry of additional posts!)

Bon Appétit!

Open Thread: Just Because We Are Staying Home Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Have Good FoodPost + Comments (110)

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