Mince

There are a lot of kitchen instructions that people who cook a lot just take for granted.  I cook a lot, so I'm often guilty of this.  I recently learned (as I worked with someone else from a recipe card I had written) that not everyone knows that T is tablespoon and t is teaspoon; perhaps I'll cover kitchen abbreviations and conversions someday.  In any case, as you spend more time in kitchens, and experiment more with food and cooking, you will also start to take a lot of things for granted and eventually forget that there was a time when you didn't know them.  I will try to remember that I've also forgotten, and because I'd like this guide to be accessible to everyone, I'll occasionally post tips on how to do those things that any cook should know.  If it sounds too patronizing, understand that is not my goal--it probably just means that you didn't need that particular lesson.  If I get it wrong, let me know.  We're all learning here.

How to mince garlic cloves:
Break a clove of garlic from the bulb.  You can easily do this by holding the bulb in one hand and rolling your thumb against a clove.  If you're starting a new bulb of garlic, you may have to peel off some of the paper first to expose a bulb.

Peel the paper off the individual clove.  There's a knack to it, but once you figure it out, you're set.  It usually helps to work from the bottom of the clove, where the papery skin is thicker.

Use a big, sturdy kitchen knife for this part.  Put the clove on a cutting board, under the side of the blade.  Press down (carefully--after all, knives are made to be sharp, and the palm of your hand is a nasty place to get cut) on the blade using the heel of your palm to crush the garlic clove a little.  You don't have to flatten it--just smoosh it a little.  The picture shows me using a finger, but that's because I only have two hands, and couldn't get a shot of me using my palm while holding the knife and the camera.  Zaphod Beeblebrox might be able to manage, but he's a barely-functional drunk, and not to be trusted with your food.

Slightly smashed.  Unlike Zaphod Beeblebrox.

minced!

Next, chop up your slightly smashed garlic clove into even smaller bits.  I usually go at it from a couple different angles to get all the pieces nice and small, but maybe you want big chunks of garlic.  Who am I to judge?

Apple Cinnamon Muffins

Dad bought us a pair of muffin pans for Christmas, and as of this writing, I've only used them to make two things (multiple times each): popovers, and apple cinnamon muffins.  I have no regrets, but someday soon I'm going to try some other muffins, and maybe, if I get extremely ambitious, tiny pies.

In the meantime, there are muffins.  I got the recipe from Betty Crocker, but the one she posted online uses Bisquick, and that's not what I have in my book.

Start by slicing the apples thin.  You can peel them first, but  if you chop them finely, it really doesn't matter, and you get better fiber and nutrient content this way.  Also, I am lazy.

Stack up a few slices and cut them in both remaining directions.

Got everything in the bowl?  Good.  Mix it up.  If you feel it needs more cinnamon, or nutmeg, or maybe even a little ground cloves, those are all good.  Anything that works in an apple pie works in apple muffins.

Admittedly, this looks pretty awful now, but this is just a big pile of batter (with raw egg), so you shouldn't eat it,  anyway.

Spoon your batter into the muffin cups after greasing the bottoms only.  The recipe I have says it makes a dozen muffins, so I just try to get roughly the same amount in each cup.

After baking.  The Girl prefers them with streusel topping, but I had an eight-hour drive ahead of me, so I was lazy that morning.

Rosemary Raisin Bread

I got this recipe from a bread book my dad bought me a few years ago; it remains my favorite bread book, for at least three reasons:

1. there are lots of big, pretty pictures of bread.  It's like bakery porn in there, without the lingering suspicions of spoons and syrups.
2. the recipes don't even start until page 71, because everything up to that point is lurid descriptions of ingredients, methods, tools, and processes involved in making bread.  For someone whose background is in engineering (and who maintains a ravening curiosity of How Food Works), it's fascinating stuff.  This book remains the only cookbook I've ever just sat down and read.
3. this is the book that taught me how to bake bread.  It took me a while, but I got there.  It also has three vital recipes: bagels (which I've since memorized from making them so often), cheesy sexy bread (not what the book calls it, but more fitting), and the basic bread I use as a base formula when making pepperoni rolls (also memorized)

It's a good thing I don't need to add any more ingredients, because that bowl is FULL.

You have to be careful not to add too much liquid to bread dough.  This mess looks too dry, but if you squish your fingers in there a little, you'll feel otherwise.  This is when I stopped stirring and started kneading, and easily drew in the rest of the flour in the bowl.

However, since it's a recipe in a book, and not something I can just link to online, I don't really know how copyright protects it, so I'm not posting it here.  There is a chance that I may have to support myself at some point by convincing people to pay money for things I write, and it would really annoy me if some yahoo with a blog just put my stuff out there for free.  Trust me--if you want to start making bread, this is a good purchase.

before rising

after rising.  I know the aspect ratio has changed, but you can still see it's bigger, and the texture has smoothed out a little.

Suffice to say it's something that I had wanted to try for a while, but it called for powdered milk, which isn't something I usually have.  After I bought a big box of it for backpacking, I realized the opportunity was now, which worked out well since we also had a bunch of fresh rosemary waiting to find a good use.

After rising and chafing, form two round loafs and set them well apart on the baking sheet to proof.

After baking.  I assume they smelled good, too.

I did screw up a little, though: I forgot I was basically out of flour until I had already mixed wet and dry stuff together, so this batch was almost entirely whole-wheat flour.  Luckily, it still rose well and was very tasty.

section view!

Seasonal dishes

Give it a try.  That's all I'm saying.

Review: Campbell's Go Soup

I was already on the way to the check out lanes when I realized I already knew about this product, thanks to  the Chief Taster's infatuation with Stephen Colbert.  I bought it anyway.  The plan was to eat it on a mountainside somewhere, thus preventing anyone discovering my secret shame over getting marketed.  Hopefully, the fact that I selected it for convenience as a backpacking food will override the flashy graphics and the silly face on the bag:

This image was stolen from the Campbell's web site.  I'm giving it a decent review, so I don't think they'll mind.

I had my doubts.  I even had intentions to add some orzo or couscous to make it a more filling stew.  I'm glad I didn't.

I also wanted to test some gear, so I used the pot from my two-person cookset to heat the soup on our kitchen's gas stove (I don't have a good place to test the backpacking stove), because I figured that was a decent simulation of trail conditions.  I even ate it from that same cookset's bowl, but I used a normal spoon, because I have no intention of relying on the included folding "foon."

If this were a photography blog, I probably would have had the sense to use the blue bowl.

Results: surprisingly filling, and a tasty but not overbearing amount of spice.  Three hours after eating it, I still feel pretty full.  To be fair, I also had a couple slices of fresh mango, and didn't do any hiking at all in that time, but I could use this as dinner on the trail, after the day's hiking was finished.  Plus, you can prop up the empty bag while you eat and pretend you have a comically zany dining companion.  ...Making an O face?  The downside: lots of water weight.  Better for a weekend jaunt than an extended trip.

Salmon Honey Butter Glaze

Many years ago, after I had moved to Oregon, my brother got a chance to come visit the Beaver State with Dad and another friend.  He made us dinner one night; this is the recipe.  He had the foresight to sprinkle some pecans across the top, but I left for the grocery thinking I was buying an entirely different kind of fish, and thus had an entirely different recipe planned.  When I got there, the fish I wanted was no longer on sale, but salmon was.

No worries--I love salmon.  And I knew I had copied this recipe from my brother many years ago, though I had yet to try it myself.

Salmon Honey Butter Glaze
Combine 1 T each of:

• brown sugar
• butter
• olive oil
• honey
• mustard

per every pound of salmon in a bowl.  Put salmon in a greased baking dish, skin side down.  Brush the glaze over the top and refrigerate 15-30 minutes.  Sprinkle with chopped pecans, if you have them, and broil 4-6" from the top of the oven for 10-15 minutes, brushing with glaze every 5 minutes.

isn't viscosity fascinating??

I didn't have soy sauce.  I used the last of it a while earlier making Bourbon Chicken.  In fact, I had to substitute a little teriyaki sauce to finish the chicken recipe.  I did it again with the fish.  Turns out teriyaki honey butter salmon is pretty good, too!

a little over a pound of Russian salmon.  Da!

Need to know how to grease a pan?  Check the How To tag!

Something's fishy.  Deliciously fishy.

I also might have overdone it with the sauce.  Instead of delicately brushing a little sauce over the fish and applying more later during broiling, I dumped the bowl over the fish, rubbing the sauce over the surface with the fingers that had already greased the pan and put the fish in it.  During broiling, I spooned up some of the sauce in the pan and dribbled it over the fillet.

Then the smoke alarm went off.

The Chief Taster stood on a chair, frantically fanning the smoke detector with a magazine while I opened windows and turned on fans at both ends of the apartment.  There wasn't even that much smoke, so I guess we have a pretty good smoke detector.  Comforting.

Here's what I think went wrong: too much sauce and a gas oven.  Had I applied sauce a little more conservatively, there wouldn't have been so much pooling in the dish to cook away to nothing.  We have a gas oven, so the broiler is at the bottom, not the top.  Knowing this, I put the fish at the bottom of the oven; this put the sauce closer to the broiler than most of the fish.  The combined effect was a lot of sauce nowhere near fish that cooked into a hard black veneer on the baking dish.

Luckily, the fish was fine.  Hell, the fish was excellent, but by the time it got out of the oven and I had finished cooking the hash browns, I was so frustrated that I never took a picture of the final product.  Sorry. Rest assured, it was very tasty.  The Chief Taster paid the highest of compliments to a cook: instant praise muddled by the first mouthful of food.  I'm not entirely sure what she said, but her eyes were very expressive in what I took to be a positive manner.

Review: powdered milk

Powdered milk is a new thing to me.  Why would anyone buy powdered milk when they can get the real thing?

Backpacking.

Milk isn't really a crucial thing to have while backpacking, but it's an excellent source of vitamin D, a decent source of vitamin A, and a famous source of calcium.  Those are all good things to have in your diet if you're going to be hiking for a really long time, and if you don't want to cook breakfast on the trail, it goes well with granola.  I bought some recently, but I screwed up.  Without even noticing it in the store, I got the nonfat version.

Backpackers need the fat.  (see previous post)

The box I bought has five packets inside; each packet can be mixed with "about 3 3/4 cups of cold water" to make a quart of milk.  I don't want to make a quart at a time; I need to be able to make about a cup at a time.  I threw some math at it, and learned that for trail purposes, about 1.5 T of powder in a cup of water should be the right mix.

I poured about half of the result on 1/2 C of bulk granola from the grocery (recommended serving size) and drank the rest.  I wanted to see how that would get me through the morning, even though my typical morning in the apartment requires nowhere near the energy level of a morning hiking mountains with a thirty to forty pound pack.

I haven't bought any variety except whole milk since... well, it's been a very long time, anyway.  I don't know if it's because I'm accustomed to that flavor, or because I botched the proportions in the mix, but the milk I got from the mix was a little thin and low on flavor.  I'd like to try again with a "whole" powdered milk, if I can find it, but at least now I know the stuff works.  Not great, but it works.  For the purposes of backpacking or summer camping without a cooler, this will do, but I'm not switching to the box stuff on a regular basis.