Why Does Anyone Buy Artificial Vanilla?

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Last week I ran out of vanilla extract. I’m not sure when or where I bought that bottle of vanilla, but it must have been years ago; it could have come with the house for all I know. In any case, the bottle real vanilla extract was acquired before I became a serious home cook. Since I’ve taken a more active interest in cooking I’ve noticed that everyone recommends that you the real extract versus the artificial stuff. I was actually surprised to see that my vanilla was in fact the natural stuff.

When I went to the grocery store to get a new bottle they had the real and artificial stuff side by side and the real stuff was about three dollars or so more expensive. This was a decent sized bottle that will probably last me several years, so I couldn’t help but wonder who would bother buying the artificial stuff.

I made banana bread this evening and I used a quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract. It’s not like there are many recipes out there that call for a half cup of vanilla extract. A bottle of vanilla extract for most people will last several years, so the extra three or four dollars every couple of years will be imperceptible. If you are literally so destitute that you can’t spare an extra three dollars for something that will last for years then you probably aren’t spending your money on vanilla extract anyway. If you are buying artificial vanilla extract there is a pretty good chance that you are cheap.

You Should Cook More Turkey

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I had a great culinary epiphany this Christmas season; I need to cook more turkey. I had only cooked two turkeys in my life and then I cooked two over the holidays. I had bought a couple of frozen turkeys in November for $1.49 a pound. I gave one to the food bank and cooked the other Christmas day. Despite my limited experience cooking turkeys, and the turkey being slightly less than 100% defrosted, it turned out fantastic, so fantastic that when I went to the grocery store a few days later I picked up another one, this one a fresh turkey for 99 cents a pound. The turkey cost less than 12 dollars! I’ve paid more than that for a small chicken.

Turkey had become synonymous with special occasions like Christmas and Thanksgiving since it they are a great way to feed a large crowd, but turkey is often one of the cheapest meats to buy, particularly if you keep an eye out for sales. Grocery stores are always offloading unsold turkeys at cheap prices after major holidays. If you have a moderate sized freezer you should always buy a couple whenever they go on sale.

Just because you are cooking a turkey it doesn’t mean you have to prepare some kind of elaborate meal with all the fixings, though you certainly can. You can just stick one in the oven around noon on a weekend and by suppertime you have a pile of juicy turkey. When I made my post-Christmas turkey I just had French fries, dressing and gravy with it. After the main meal there is plenty left for sandwiches, and then you can make or pile of turkey soup using whatever dried up leftover vegetables you have in your cupboard or fridge. And if you don’t want to bother making soup you can just throw whatever’s left out for the crows. It’s still a good deal even if you don’t eat all of it.

It’s amazing how much more chicken is sold than turkey. It’s understandable that there is more chicken sold as it comes in a more manageable size. A basket of turkey wings at your local sports bar just wouldn’t be the same. Nevertheless, the fact that that chicken outsells turkey by a thousand to one suggests the turkey industry needs to do a better job of marketing itself. Everyone likes turkey bacon club sandwiches yet no one ever cooks a turkey. It doesn’t make any sense. If you are trying to feed your family quality food on a budget, there are few better options than turkey.

Don’t Serve Chilli to Your Guests This Christmas

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Everyone seems to like making chilli at Christmas. If you are having a crowd of people over for a party during the holiday season you should keep in mind that no matter how great your chilli recipe is, they really wish you hadn’t made it. Absolutely nobody wants to eat anything that requires cutlery or plates at a crowded party.

If you are having some people over for dinner, feel free to serve chilli with some nice fresh bread and whipped butter. I’m sure they will love it. But if you have a crowd of people over for drinks, nobody is going to want to try to drink beer and eat a bowl full of chilli at the same time and then have to locate the garbage can. They just want to grab the occasional potato chip or sausage roll with their non-drinking hand. It is bad enough that you have to hold a bowl and a spoon/fork for an extended period of time, but if you are going to properly eat chilli than you will need roll to go with it. Since humans are only equipped with two hands, one of which needs to hold your beer, eating chilli at a party quickly becomes a logistical nightmare.

Make life easy on your guests. Serve them snacks that can be eaten with one hand does not leave anything to be disposed of, be it bowls or bones. That’s right, no chicken wings either. If you want to impress your guests with homemade appetizers, try serving something like quesadillas, chicken strips, or a good old nacho dip. And even if you like impressing guests with you cooking skills, even your most ardent foodie guests will be quite disappointed if you do not have a few bowls of store bought kettle cooked potato chips lying around.

You Don’t Need a Rice Cooker

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The other day I saw an ad in a flier for a sale on rice cookers. 50% off. Most things that are truly 50% off are good deals. If a rice cooker was 100% off it wouldn’t be a good deal. The only way you should take a rice cooker into your home is if the rice cooker manufacturer pays you rent. You already have a rice cooker in your house. It’s called a pot.

Making rice is easy. You put rice in a pot, add water, put the lid on it, turn the stove on medium wait a little bit and then you have tasty, ready to eat rice. I have never bothered to investigate the features of a rice maker just as I wouldn’t spend any time learning about a toast buttering machine.

Most kitchens are too cluttered with too many unnecessary tools. If you want to make your life easier in the kitchen you need start getting rid of things you already have, not adding more useless clutter. Rather than adding a useless rice cooker, throw away that electric can opener taking up counter space, then give away your knife block and buy yourself a single good chef knife.

If you make kitchen appliances and want to grow your business, the way you do that is by convincing consumers they need more types of kitchen appliances. There isn’t a lot of money to be made in simplifying kitchens. The next time you are tempted to buy some new gadget like a rice cooker, look at all of the kitchen tools and appliances you already own and ask yourself how many of them actually use.

Everyone is Opening Wine Bottles the Wrong Way

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If you’ve ever been to a fancy restaurant you will notice that the waiter always starts by cutting around the mouth of the bottle to remove the top part of the foil covering. After removing the top part there is a slightly jagged edges of foil around the mouth of the bottle and the wine passed over those edges as the wine is poured. This makes absolutely no sense. Aside from being a waste of effort, it is also not particularly sanitary.

The logical way to remove the foil from a bottle of wine is to simply make one slice up through the entire length of the foil and remove it entirely. It takes a fraction of the time and then the wine is passing over nothing but clean glass as it pours. One of the reasons why the top of a bottle is covered in foil is presumably to keep the mouth of the bottle clean, so why would anyone want to pour the wine over foil that has been exposed for years instead of the clean glass underneath.

Wine bottles can sit around for a long time in your local restaurant or liquor store. A thin layer of dust will build up over time in even the cleanest environments. People will occasionally walk by the bottle and sneeze or cough. People who do not always wash their hands after going to the bathroom will grab a bottle by the neck and hold it up for a closer look before putting it back on the shelf.

Most waiters in fancy restaurants no doubt pride themselves on their cleanliness, and maybe all of the members of your dinner party group are all have very clean hands, but would want them to dip their finger in your glass of wine after pour it? No? Then why would you want them manhandling the top of your bottle of wine before pouring it for you? The next time you open a bottle of wine, ignore the waiters in fancy restaurants (but listen to this random food blogger) and just remove the entire foil cover.

Store Bought Frozen Meatballs are the Perfect Way to Let Your Holiday Guests Know How Little You Think of Them

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If you really can’t stand whichever friends or family members you are entertaining over the holiday season and want to express your disdain for them without creating an awkward scene, all you need to do is go to your local grocery store and buy a box of frozen meatballs to serve them. It doesn’t matter which meatballs you choose. Swedish meatballs, home style, pub style, whatever box you pick will clearly and succinctly communicate the lack of esteem in which you hold them.

Like 90% of the human population I love meatballs and have tried many different types of store bought frozen meatballs, every one of which was an abomination. I’ve enjoyed many frozen food section appetizers in my day; chicken wings, mozza sticks, sausage rolls, chicken fingers. I probably wouldn’t break them out for an anniversary dinner, but they were good enough for a casual evening having a few drinks with friends. I feel like every person who makes frozen meatballs is a lonely and hateful person who resents anyone with a circle of friends and an active social life.

I have never tasted a store bought meatball that tasted like ground beef was the primary ingredient. Without fail, every single one has been a rubbery mass of a vaguely meat flavoured gelatin substance. If you take a store bought frozen meatball out and leave it out on your counter for a few hours, you can squeeze it as hard as you like and it won’t break apart. They do not in any way resemble the standard homemade meatball, which has meat as the primary ingredient.

Homemade meatballs are not that difficult nor very expensive to make, you just need to get your hands a little dirty. All you need to do is mix together some lean ground beef with an egg, bread crumbs or oatmeal, and whatever herbs you feel like adding in and then baking them for a half hour to 45 minutes  and you’re done. If you are having people over whose friendship you value, who have done favours for you in the past, and who could count on in times of need, you should not think twice about getting your hands dirty for a few minutes.

It is one of the facts of life that you will frequently have guests at your house, particularly during the holidays, whom you really don’t like and don’t want to encourage to accept the next invitation that you unwillingly extend. Those are the times when you want to break out the box of frozen meatballs. For $12.99 you can let someone know how little you think of them and significantly lower the odds of them ever accepting an invitation again.

Mango Chutney Recipe

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Mango chutney with papadums is the best food that most people have never tasted. If the Indian food industry had its act together it would rank just behind salsa and tortillas in popularity. It should be up there with butter chicken as the most popular Indian food for people who don’t really like Indian food. While there isn’t a great deal of variation among the butter chicken recipes out there, and all of them taste fantastic to the average person, the recipes for mango chutney vary wildly, from the simple to those with an ingredient list a page long. If you want to be sure of serving your guests something they will definitely like, keep in simple and let the mango be the star of the show with the spices and supporting characters.

Ingredients:

  • Two diced fresh mangoes
  • Half cup roughly diced onion
  • 1 cup sugar (brown or white)
  • Three tablespoons white vinegar
  • ½ tsp turmeric
  • Level ¼ tsp ground cloves (cloves are powerful, so you can actually add slightly less, never add more than this)
  • 1 tablespoon grated ginger
  • Quarter cup water

Directions:

Throw everything in a pot at the same time, turn on high until it starts to simmer and then turn the heat down on low and allow to gently simmer until the onions and mango are tender, about 30-45 minutes. When everything is tender blend with an immersion blender until smooth and set aside. Bottle half of it and set aside the rest to cool before serving.

Cooking Horrible Healthy Food

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Cooking, like any field of endeavor, has its activities that bring nothing but sheer joy and excitement, but also has those mundane and joyless tasks that you do because you know you have to but hate doing all the same. Few things bring more satisfaction to a cook than the sound and smell of a juicy striploin sizzling on a cast iron pan with butter or taking a piping hot dish of macaroni and cheese out of the oven. Unfortunately there are some unappetizing, joyless dishes that you need to prepare if you want to ensure that your family has a healthy, balanced diet. Making something taste less awful is not nearly as motivating as making something taste amazing, but it is a valuable and necessary skill for any cook.

Do you like the taste and texture of quinoa? If you do, you are a liar. You may be lying to yourself, but that still makes you a liar. Perhaps you like to shredded cardboard as well. With the exception of Kale, nothing symbolizes the health vs satisfaction trade-off like Quinoa. It isn’t that it tastes all that bad, in fact it hardly has any taste at all; it’s that it is so good for you and so ubiquitous that it is becoming difficult not to eat it. Lobok tastes terrible but it’s no better for you than any other vegetable and you probably don’t even know it exists.

As uninspiring as it may be, you need to have a strategy for eating healthy, uninspiring foods. There several strategies that you can use. For some healthy green vegetables like broccoli and asparagus, you can serve them as a small side with a meat dish to make the meal healthier. If you take a bite of a steak, a forkful of twice baked potato, and then a piece of steamed broccoli or asparagus, you will hardly notice the taste since the taste of the steak and potato is so much more dominant and satisfying. You can eat a head of broccoli without hardly noticing.

Some vegetables have a bland taste but can carry other flavours fairly well. Quinoa is one of those, and if you want to eat it you need to boil it not with water but with some flavourful liquid. Some people like chicken broth but I prefer diluted lemon juice with some basil. I also through some lemon zest in with it. I don’t actually like lemon all that much but it sure tastes better than quinoa and the taste is strong enough that it does a good job of masking what I am eating from my taste buds.

When all else fails, you can simply pour some melted cheese over it or wrap it in prosciutto, and while both options can work well, they are a bit of a cop out. If you really want to eat more healthy things but can’t bring yourself to do it, then try adding them into pot dishes where they will get lost in the mix, like adding pot barley to your beef stew or throwing some lentils in your soup (no too many though, they soak up a lot of water). The point is you and your family probably need to eat more things you don’t like, and you need to come up with a plan that allows you to do so from time to time without completely ruining your dinner.

Too Many People Can’t Make a Proper Grilled Cheese

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There are few things as satisfying as a properly made, hot of the pan, grilled cheese sandwich. Anybody can make a fantastic grilled cheese, but not everybody does. Perhaps because it is so easy, many home cooks get complacent because it is so easy and manage to mess it up by not putting any thought into it at all, while others ruin them by overthinking, kind of like the reasons good golfers miss two foot putts.

Those who don’t put enough thought and effort into a grilled cheese throw a slice of processed cheese in between the bread, which is absolutely inexcusable. Aside from the fact you should not have processed cheese in your house in the first place, if you can’t take one minute to grate a handful of cheddar you are simply too lazy to ever been a respectable home cook.

On the other end of the spectrum people feel like a plain grilled cheese is beneath them and make the classic mistake of trying to improve upon perfection and ruin it by using real butter or whole grain bread. If you want to impress people with your cooking ability then make beef wellington. When it comes to grilled cheese sandwiches, stick with what works. If you absolutely have to put some kind of personal touch then add a sprinkle of Monterrey jack with your cheddar.

 

Never Try to Make Real Sourdough Bread

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I bought an award winning book from a French baker living in Sweden who is a passionate advocate of baking break using sourdough starter rather than yeast. Though I was suspicious of his tiresome raving against “industrial” bread and “multinational” corporations caused me to roll my eyes, I admit that I was intrigued by his description of the sourdough process, and I endeavoured to give it a try.

What intrigued me most of all was the idea that you could make bread rise without using anything other than flour, water, and salt. Essentially sourdough starter is made by adding water and flour together in a jar and letting the naturally occurring bacteria start to grow. At the beginning of the process I was actually rather impressed with myself as the mixture started to bubble just like it was supposed to. On the downside it also smelled awful. It also looked disgusting. I mean, who wants to have jar of wet flour fermenting away on your kitchen counter.

When it was time to make the sourdough bread I followed the author’s directions to the letter. In order to have a better personal connection or whatever to the bread, I dumped all the flour onto a board and made a well in the middle to add the water and the sourdough. When I added it the water immediately spilled over the top of the well and all over the floor. Then started wildly mashing together the flour and water into a messy pile of slop. I added what I thought was enough water to replace what spilled, but I’m not sure how accurate of a guess I made.

I finally managed to knead the thing into a ball and put it in a bowl to rise. It became zombie loaf; not entirely dead or alive but smelling terribly. After two days I threw it in the garbage and then made myself a wonderful loaf of French bread in a few hours using good old industrial yeast.