Just curious- do any of you have an interesting salsa verde recipe that is something a little different?
Also, looking for a way to kick up my burrito meat up a notch in the spice area. What would you all suggest?
This post is in: Food
Just curious- do any of you have an interesting salsa verde recipe that is something a little different?
Also, looking for a way to kick up my burrito meat up a notch in the spice area. What would you all suggest?
by DougJ| 42 Comments
This post is in: Food
I’m a bit jetlagged and can’t get to sleep, hence this late night post.
I’d like to tell everyone about something new I had at dinner (or more accurately at a restaurant bar waiting for a dinner companion to arrive): bacon-flavored popcorn. I had it at a restaurant near Hyde Park called Texture.
It’s just as delicious as you would imagine.
by DougJ| 27 Comments
This post is in: Beer Blogging
Thought I’d give you a Sully-style view from my window.
by DougJ| 38 Comments
This post is in: Food, Open Threads
There seems to be a request for a generic open thread tonight.
However, I also feel obligated to share one London-related story my friend just sent me, simply because I find it amusing in a perverse way. No one could have predicted that a restaurant that had customers eat sand while they listened to the sounds of waves on headphones would eventually make people sick.
The number of people who have reported falling sick after eating at the Fat Duck has risen to 400 from 40 last week, when Chef Heston Blumenthal said he was temporarily closing his restaurant because of the health scare.
The Health Protection Agency and officials from the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead are investigating the complaints about the experimental eatery, west of London, which is famed for dishes such as snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream.
[….]The Fat Duck, which has three Michelin stars, was named the world’s best restaurant in the World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards in 2005 and has been in the top two for the past five years.
[….]The restaurant normally serves more than 80 people a day, and each spends on average about 220 pounds, Blumenthal said. The tasting menu costs 130 pounds for about a dozen courses such as the Sound of the Sea, where diners don earphones and listen to lapping waves while consuming seafood washed up on what looks like a beach. The sand is a mix of tapioca and Japanese breadcrumbs.
by Tim F| 25 Comments
This post is in: Food
Those of you determined to lose weight start dieting tomorrow will love this.
3 tbs butter
1 tbs salt
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp nutmeg
dash of cayenne pepper
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup whole milk
1.5 lb haddock filets, cooked and flaked (I baked for 20 min at 330, with bread crumbs on top to capture flavor)
3 tbs dry sherry
2 large egg yolks
4 puff pastry shells
Melt the butter on low in a medium pan. Add flour, salt, paprika, nutmeg, cayenne pepper and stir until smooth and bubble. Gradually add cream and milk. Cook until thickened, stirring constantly.
Whisk egg yolks and sherry in a bowl, then add 1/3 of the hot mix. Return to the saucepan and cook for 2 min. Add fish and cook for 1 min. until hot.
Serve over baked pastry shells (brush them with egg yolks before baking, 375 for 10-12 min, for a nice finish).
Happy valentine’s day.
***update***
Forgot to quantify the flour. I added one tablespoon at the beginning and about another half tablespoon as the sauce thickened.
The Balloon Juice Diet: <i>Haddock a la Reine</i>Post + Comments (25)
by Tim F| 46 Comments
This post is in: Beer Blogging, Food
I am a very happy person right now. Here is why.
* Rub 1-1.5 lb. pork tenderloin with salt, pepper and beef bouillon (I use Better Than Bouillon paste; the regular stuff might do).
* Sear on high heat for ~30 seconds per side in olive oil. I cook with olive oil out of habit; other oils or even butter might work as well. Definitely don’t make the mistake of cooking with extra virgin.
* Transfer to a baking dish just coated with cream and a little water, cover with foil and cook in the oven at 260-275.
* Cook mushrooms in the frying pan to pick up all the good stuff that the tenderloin left behind. Transfer to the baking dish once they’re crispy.
* Let the tenderloin cook for about an hour and a half.
* At the end, prepare some crusty bread the way a good restaurant does. Cut off a thick chunk and then cut slices into the chunk that reach almost but not quite through. At the end the slices, which you can tear off, will be crispy on the surface and warm inside.
The usual problem with pork is how thoroughly you have to cook the meat. Pan frying pork does not work because by the time it is safe to eat the meat is dry, it’s chewy and the fat, which ought to be the best part, is an unchewable gristle.
I knew about slow cooking from my wife’s recipe for chicken in cream sauce, but I have never seen a cut of meat transformed like this. The meat came out tender enough to cut with a fork, fat and all. The mushrooms were coated in a seasoned mix of oil, juices and cream curd asking to be spread on the bread. Yum.
***
Meanwhile, Erie Brewing should stop calling their Big Red a wee heavy ale until they mix in some peat-smoked barley malt. It has the alcohol to be a wee heavy, but so does an appletini.
***Update***
If you are going to try this recipe, follow the advice of many commenters and deglaze the pan with some booze before cooking the mushrooms. Naturally I recommend beer.
by Tim F| 30 Comments
This post is in: Beer Blogging, Science & Technology
Somehow, while dozing off the effects of my Thanksgiving raclette, I missed the most important news yet regarding this blog’s favorite chemical.
Researchers believe they have identified a fundamental cause of aging, according to a study published this week in the journal Cell. The mechanism was previously found in fungus and has now been discovered in mice. It’s likely that the same process applies to humans, said the authors of the research, from Harvard.
The study found that DNA damage, which accrues as we age, decreases a cell’s ability to regulate which genes are turned on and off in particular settings. Though DNA damage speeds up aging, the actual cause is not the DNA damage but the lack of gene regulation. However, this lack of gene regulation, called epigenetics, may be reversible.
For a long time most experts assumed that a sort of unbreakable yin-yang relationship links aging and cancer. Researchers looking for a way to make cells live longer constantly ran into the problem that cancer happens when cells live too long. The perception was reinforced when attempts to prolong life by up-regulating a protein called telomerase, which protects cells from dying after they go through a given number of division cycles, repeatedly ran into cancer problems.
Via resveratrol, research into the sirtuin proteins shattered that misperception. They key, as described in the article, is that aging has less to do with cell death than it does with gene regulation. If we fix gene regulation, or reduce the rate that it slides into dysfunction, then at the cellular level we fight aging. It In fact the new research does better than that: cancer is also a disease of gene dysregulation. It turns out that the famous trade-off is one hundred eighty degrees wrong: if you upregulate DNA quality control then you fight aging and cancer at the same time. As it turns out, the list of other stuff that also starts to work better includes infectious diseases (i.e., we get less of them), mental productivity and cardiovascular fitness.
In fact researchers knew about the effect for decades. However, earlier studies accomplished longevity by cutting a rat’s dietary calories to a point that almost no human could bear. The break came when a team at Harvard guessed that the starvation benefit hinged on a DNA silencing protein called SirT1. When they tried a massive screen for SirT1-activating chemicals the #1 hit was resveratrol, a compound previously known only as a phenolic in red wine. Resveratrol made yeast live longer, it made worms live longer and it had the same effect on flies. Mice and rats followed. Then came a research boom that may never slow down.
It may seem silly that our bodies already have the machinery to live into a healthy old age but prioritize something else. Why do we essentially choose not to live as long as we could? The key insight is that resveratrol, like the starvation diet that it mimics, strongly inhibits the sex drive and reduces the lifetime reproductive output. Nature wants us to get busy, fast, which means that if we want our bodies to prioritize quality control over making whoopee we need to trick it into thinking that we are on the brink of death (dead animals don’t make babies, so the body activates survival mode). We can do that by actually almost starving to death, but it is nice to know that medical science could soon offer a plan B.