I was reading through a rather lengthy article in the January/February issue of Cooking Light, and was quite fascinated by some of the info. No matter how much I think I know, there’s always more to be learned about the different cuts, the methods of cooking, and how lean or fatty any cut is . . .

The article was titled “How to buy the best beef,” and was written by Aliza Green, the author of a new book titled Field Guide to Meat. Photo at left is from the article itself.

How about these factlets: (1) we Americans consume 63 pounds of beef a year (wow, no kidding?);(2) In 1976 we ate 89 pounds per person per year (yikes); (3) 90% of the beef we eat is grown right here in the U.S., with most of the balance coming from Canada; (4) cattle weigh about 1000 pounds at slaughter, and are 18-24 months old.

The article went on to explain about what info you can get from the new labeling laws. I knew most of that part. But it also gave a more detailed explanation of grain-finished– cattle fattened on grain, usually corn, during the 3-6 months before slaughter. Problem is that cattle don’t instinctively eat corn, so when they do they experience “stress” and other ailments, therefore they’re routinely fed antibiotics. And they also receive growth hormones (remember DES?) to increase their size (larger cattle = higher weight = more profits into pockets of producers). Grain-finished, however, means more value for our consumer dollar. Then there are the grass-finished. These cattle forage on grasses and legumes and the meat is leaner, lower in saturated fat, cholesterol and calories. This meat generally has a more gamy flavor. Problem: it’s more time consuming to raise, which therefore increases the expense. Most of such beef is imported from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Brazil. Many people believe that grass-fed cattle are a more sustainable choice. Lastly, there is dry-aging. It’s a traditional process preferred by many steak lovers. It concentrates, or intensifies flavors, as it hangs in temp- and humidity-conrolled rooms for 10 days to 2 weeks (longer the better). Most dry-aged meat is sold in large vacuum-packed packs. The time in-bag is called “wet aging.”

The article also stressed budget-friendly, lean and flavorful cuts. In addition to the usual that we probably know about already (tenderloin, flank and sirloin) it recommended the Bottom Round (best if marinated); Hanger Steak (rich and beefy, for searing, grilling or broiling); Tri-Tip (rich flavor, affordable, for roasting or grilling whole, then sliced); Shoulder Tender (like pork loin, to be sliced into medallions for grilling); and Shoulder Center Steak(moderately tender, to be served whole or sliced). Since I go for ribeyes, I generally don’t even look further, but perhaps I should.

Lastly, I was intrigued with the list of the top-selling cuts of beef. I think they did not include ground beef (60% of our beef dollars go to ground beef), since the list below is about “cuts” of beef:
(1) top round steak, boneless
(2) ribeye steak, lip on, bone in (yes!)
(3) ribeye steak, boneless
(4) loin top sirloin steak, boneless
(5) bottom round roast, boneless
(6) chuck under blade pot roast, boneless

Tweet

Last Friday came and went, and I totally forgot I was going to write up a brief post about the one-year anniversary of my blog. Here’s what this blog-writing has done for me:

1. I didn’t know I was going to enjoy the writing part so much. Maybe I really am a frustrated journalist, or something. I surprise myself sometimes with how much I can write about one little recipe. Now, ask me to write something about politics, or air quality, or to write a short story, and I’d likely develop night terrors.
2. Making and eating some of my old favorites have been a real joy. You know, the comfort kind of food we made back in the 60’s and 70’s. And since my daughter Dana reads my blog every day, who grew up eating those favorites, it’s given me a fun connection with her I certainly didn’t predict! Even her husband reads my blog – for a guy who doesn’t cook much, I’m tickled that he enjoys reading my posts.
3. Lights, camera, action! The blog made me buy a light so I could photograph better. I was really unhappy with the state of my food photos until it arrived on the scene. Learning more about my camera has been a good thing. I’d never read the manual, really, so now I know how to do very close photos. I don’t stage them as well as many other food bloggers, but my photos are passable, I do believe.  [And since I posted this essay, I’ve purchased a really good DSLR camera that takes even better pictures – starting in mid-2009]
4. Making friends, albeit long-distance and via email only, with people here in the U.S. of A. and around the world has added a lovely dimension to this whole blogging business. If you haven’t read The World is Flat, blogging is just one cog in that level playing field (most of it related to world economies) we’re all a part of.
5. My husband wouldn’t be able to tease me – if I didn’t have a food blog – about how I whisk every plate of food over to the photo corner just before we sit down to eat. He loves exaggerating about how I slide a plate past his nose and then it disappears.
6. My routine – certainly if I didn’t have this blog I’d be more carefree with my morning time. I rise, dress, breakfast, blog. Some mornings there’s a detour to the gym in that routine.
7. The writing does take some time – probably more than I’m willing to admit. Time that I probably should be cleaning windows, paying bills or filing. It does take about an hour for me to write up a recipe (if it’s not already in my MasterCook file), export it to text, upload the photo, go to Picnik and manipulate it, add titles and my copyright, write the story text in LiveWriter, spellcheck it, upload it to my WordPress wysiwig editor window, fine-tune the photo, correct the posting date and time, add categories and tags, enter the trackbacks. Then I upload the PDF recipe onto FileDen, where I store all of my printable recipes, enter the link back into the story.  And then it gets posted. Whew!
8. But overlying all of it is the FUN I have doing this. If a blogger doesn’t have fun, she/he wouldn’t do it. Trust me on that one.

I do thank all of you who read my blog, near and afar. It makes my day. Since I’ve moved my blog to this new site, lots of my readers haven’t migrated over. Don’t know why. I still have more people looking at my old site. Presumably with time that will change.

Tweet

I read the most interesting article in the March 2008 issue of Cooking Light. Written by David Bonom, a chef, it’s about the four groups of tastes that comprise the food we eat. And why it’s important. He tells the tale that when he was in culinary school he presented to the instructor a creamy broccoli soup for review. The teacher, Chef Pardus, tasted it and said “Good. “Now take it back to your station and put a drop of white wine vinegar in a spoonful and taste. Compare the two.” Bonom says that lesson was a lightning moment for him. He did as Pardus suggested and said the soup just tasted . . . better. He couldn’t taste the vinegar, but there was a difference. He said the components (cream, broccoli, shallots) became more distinct. It taught him to consider the effect of acid, and that familiarity is how we learn to balance dishes.

Actually, the experts have added a fifth taste beyond the sweet, sour, salty and bitter. It’s called umami, best described as savoriness. Umami is what happens when you add a touch of sugar to a vinaigrette, and when you slow roast onions.

The instructor recently prepared a sandwich for the author – and commented that it had good balance. He said it’s “the sweetness of the basil, saltiness of the ham, the acid in the tomato and pickled jalapeno, the umami in the bread, tomato and ham.

The article went on to give examples of how to flavor dishes we make with the different components. Here’s the Cooking Light list:

• Salty: soy sauce, fish sauce, cured meats such as bacon, pancetta or prosciutto, anchovies, olives, mustard, capers, bring or aged cheese such as feta or Parmesan.
• Sour: vinegar, lemon and lime juice, wine, sour cream, buttermilk, yogurt, tamarind, rhubarb, pickles, cranberries, mustard, lemongrass.
• Bitter: radicchio, endive, watercress, cabbage, kale, mustard greens, broccoli rabe, dark chocolate, campari, brussels sprouts, grapefruit, coffee, walnuts, black pepper.
• Sweet: sugar, honey, maple syrup, fruit juice, molasses, many fruits, chocolate, ketchup, caramelized onions, roasted bell peppers, hoisin sauce.
• Umami: aged cheese such as Parmigiano-Reggiano, vine-ripened tomatoes, mushrooms, corn, cured pork such as prosciutto or serrano ham, smoked or cured fish, shellfish, asian fish sauce, soy sauce, miso.

The article included several recipes, which you can read online, demonstrating these combinations of tastes. It also listed a short cheat sheet, of sorts, for what to consider when you’re preparing something and know it needs SOMETHING, but you don’t quite know what. Bonom says it’s a nuanced skill. Sour likes sweet. Salt is constant. Bitter tastes should not dominate and can be balanced with salt and fat. Here are his strategies:

• Too sour? Add sugar, honey, or another sweet ingredient.
• Too sweet? Try a dash of vinegar, lemon juice or another sour ingredient. Salt will also tone down sweetness.
• Too bitter? Add salt, if possible. Fats can also take the edge off bitter ingredients.
• Too bland? Start with salt. A touch of an acidic ingredient also brightens flat flavors. Even a pinch of sugar might help round out the taste.

So, there’s your culinary school lesson for the day. I clipped out this article and plan to tape it to the inside of a cupboard door near my range, so when I’m contemplating “what’s missing,” I’ll have a reference.

Tweet

I was reading a blog over at Tea and Cookies a few days ago about the blogger’s younger years and how she developed a love of cooking. It’s a cute story, if any of you want to click over to read it. She poses the question in her posting about how it happened that she ended up with a food gene since her mother doesn’t really like to cook and rarely cooked when she was growing up. She wonders how she and her brother ever developed their love of cooking with that kind of background. Good question!

So this got me to thinking about the food gene in my DNA. In the last week or so I’ve mentioned my mother’s cooking a couple of times. Maybe a bit disparagingly. I’m having some guilt pangs about that, although my mother died 10 years ago. I’ve written some of this before – my mother and father both grew up during the Depression. Money was very hard to come by. Both families were farmers in the San Joaquin Valley of California. They grew some of their own food. Both families had chickens. Neither had cows. One family had pigs. One family grew tomatoes some years. The other grew hay and tomatoes. Or corn. Remember – crop rotation. Can’t grow the same crop year after year as the soil is leeched of nutrients that way. My mother and father, both in their 20’s, actually met one summer, in line, in their respective family’s trucks, waiting to deliver the tomato crop to market, to a group cooperative, I think it was, actually. My mother was accompanying her father to the market that day. The trucks were in side by side lines, and a conversation began, chatting from one truck to the other. Finally, my mother climbed onto my dad’s family truck and the two talked and got to know one another. A romance was born atop a truck full of tomatoes. Awww.

So that brings me to my early years . . . my mother never really complained about the cooking she had to do. She was a housewife and stay at home mom when that was the accepted profession for every wife. We had simple meals. Entertaining usually meant gathering in our backyard over a simple picnic table with my dad wielding the tongs and spatula at the grill. We ate hamburgers and hot dogs, home made potato salad and cole slaw and strawberry shortcake. Bisquick was one of my mother’s favorites. Along with Minute Rice. We had some canned vegetables and some fresh. Frozen vegetables came into existence during the 50’s, I think, and my mom was a happy consumer of frozen spinach, corn, peas which we ate in rotation with occasional fresh zucchini or yellow squash inserted. I think you get the picture!

My recollection about how food piqued my interest started in 7th grade when I took Home Ec. I looked forward to the class, but retain no memories whatsoever of the food we made with the exception of the one meal I made at home. We’d done chicken sub gum and egg fu yung with white rice. So I asked my mother if I could recreate the meal at home. I made it all alone and I was so proud I could hardly contain myself. I was 13. The chicken was quite bland, considering how much I enjoy spices and seasonings now, but my mom and dad gave me all the praise I needed to nurture that little gene somewhere.

I don’t remember cooking full meals much at home even after that success. My mother did the cooking. She did enjoy baking, though. She made great pies. She was quite well known in her circle of friends for her great pie crusts. She tried her darndest to teach me her technique (she of the Crisco, ice water type) to no avail. She made great apple, berry and stone fruit pies. And she baked cakes from scratch and other desserts as well. So I learned how to do some of those, but I never got the pie crust thing down. (Now, I use a butter-based crust that whips together in the food processor and succeeds well enough. I still can’t do the Crisco type.) So, I began helping her with baking, and I suppose that’s a gene I did inherit from my mother.

When I got married the first time I was 20, and cooking was what was expected of me. I didn’t resent it – I looked forward to it. I suppose it was a form of relaxation. I worked for some years, stayed home when my daughter was young, then went back to work full time in the 1970’s and worked continuously until I retired in 1995. During that time I shed one husband and married the love of my life, who also really enjoys food and entertaining. We’re a good match.

Generally, when I’m not down with a broken foot like I am now, I do all the cooking and he does the dishes. Although in recent years he took on breakfast. He enjoys doing that, although we eat the same breakfast every single day, by choice. It used to be fruit smoothies (mango, to be exact), but we’re eating more low carb now, so have our single sausage link, half a piece of toast (usually with a tad of peanut butter on top) and a very small scoop of Greek yogurt. Coffee, but no juice.

In all those years I’ve derived a huge amount of satisfaction from cooking. I love entertaining (although I will say that now that I’m in my mid 60’s, cooking a full dinner is a lot of work . . . rarely can I put on a dinner that meets my satisfaction anyway, in less than about 6-8 hours of preparation) and probably the most important thing to me is what people say about the food when it’s served. Hopefully they enjoyed it. I cook what I like and not everyone’s tastes are like mine.

I love hearing stories from friends about their cooking experiences. About the history of a certain family meal. About the failures too. Those are always good for a few laughs. And believe me, I’ve had my share of them too. I probably won’t share recipes here from something that doesn’t taste good or that was an abject failure. I’ve read other bloggers who do post such recipes. I doubt I’ll do that. Since I still have about 300 recipes to go (to post here) I’ll be at this a good long time giving you recipes that are GOOD, rather than things that aren’t.

So, I know I have people who come visit my blog now and then. Rarely do people comment, though. But, I’d love to know how you happened to get a food gene. Surely you have one since you read this blog, right? Tell me about your food gene.

Tweet