Marvelous day for good eats, eh? It was sunny and 95F here in Florida, the perfect day for a refreshing afternoon snack. After a quick trip to The Fresh Market , Jennifer and I munched on this:

The perfect afternoon snack: perfectly ripe sideless yellow watermelon slices with huge fresh organic blueberries.

Dinner was a very successful experiment. This is one of my favorites:

Veal Osso Bucco on saffron risotto. This is one of my favorite dishes I’ve ever made.

Not bad for a lazy Sunday.

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Since I’ve been learning a little more about cooking, I’ve been trying to focus a little less on just grilling meat. Aside from a 2.5 lb prime grade cowboy cut ribeye that I burned the other day (it was salvagable once I trimmed away a black layer), I’ve got the grilling thing mostly down.

So I started really looking into different dishes than I normally would make and I focused on using non-traditional exotic spices like Garam Masala. This week we started playing with cooking with cocoa and chilis. It’s farily common knowledge in the culinary world that cocoa powder and chilis complement each other. Even the Mayans used chilis in their hot chocolate. And now Lindt makes a chocolate bar with chilis. So we tried two dishes.

First was cocoa chili steak. It was a choice ribeye crusted with cocoa powder and crushed smoked chipotle dust had a sweet and hot aftertaste. The butter dripped tri-color rotini was a nice complement.

A much better example of the combination was the cocoa chili chicken mole pronounced (MOH-lay). The mole was entirely unique, the taste was both sweet and chocolatey, the cocoa was unmistakable. That said, every bite had a very slight aftertaste of chipotle. I’m not much for spicy hot food, but the post-bite burn was just enough to make it interesting. I was really happy with the tender sweet potato and the vidalia onions, which had absorbed so much of the sauce that they had a very sweet flavor. Overall, I was impressed with this recipe.

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In my previous foray with chicken fried steak, I found that round cuts, at least, unaltered, made for a poor dish. After consulting some recipes, I found that a much longer tenderizing period could be a solution, or using a "needling device" to create your own cube steak. In opted, for my experiment, to use cube steak purchased from the local supermarket.

A few tips I can share: get the cube steak patty slightly wet, salt and pepper, flour, egg wash, and put it back into the flour. But here's the kicker: use your hands. Be gentle, but pat the mix in. Make sure it's evenly coated. This stuff isn't glue, it will unevenly coat unless you do it properly.

My only objection, I'm afraid, is that my sawmill gravy was a little thin. I made it with leftover oil, flour, chicken broth, and whole milk, but I suspect I used a little too much broth or a little too little flour. Either way, it tasted great, it just was too thin. Nonetheless, the dish was an overwhelming success.


Image hosted by Flickr

Tags: Food, Fooooooood
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As a many-decade-devotee of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Deluxe, aka "Kraft Dinner," I have always hesitated to make my own Mac n' Cheese. It's hard to top what's already damned close to perfect.

Turns out I was wrong. I modded a few recipes out there and ended up with a damned tasty dish. Jenn and I tore through 4 servings in 2 days, and last night I made another massive batch. 6 dudes ate 10 servings and 2 asked me for the recipe. Creamy mac and cheese, I now know, is overrated. Real baked and mac and cheese is light and cheesy and doesn't leave you feeling like you just ate a brick. I'm still perfecting it, but when I think I have, I will post the recipe.


Mac n Cheese, originally uploaded by firsttubedotcom.

Tags: Food, Fooooooood
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Tonight was my first shot at making "Country Fried Steak." Normally, I can just kind of imagine a recipe and it comes out good enough, but this one slipped, I admit. So here's my advice if you choose to go for it with Country Fried Steak:

1. Use Cube Steak. If you decide to go with round, use meat tenderizer and give it plenty of time to sit. I used round and tenderized it with a mallet and it was still really tough. It needs to be very soft to almost crumble apart.

2. You will need to coat it in either buttermilk or an egg wash, but if you do use buttermilk, let it sit in the buttermilk for some time. The crust was too weak and broke apart, sadly, while still in the oil.

3. Think about gravy BEFORE making the steak. It's not too hard to put together either a white or brown gravy, but it's very hard to it after the steak is ready... at least, if you want to serve it while the food is still warm.

Overall, I'd rate this a 6/10. It was good enough overall, but it was bad chicken fried steak. Next time, perhaps.

Tags: Food, Fooooooood
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I consider myself a bit of an amateur chef, as some of you know, and although it's really just a hobby, a year or so ago I started taking pictures of some of my favorite dishes. I have a few things I still need to capture, but many I've preserved for posterity. Either way, I have decided to move all my "food" pictures from Picasa over to Flickr. First off, there's a Slashfood group there, to which I plan to contribute, and secondly, I grow increasingly tired of Picasa Web's ridiculously non-scalable interface. Also, it's a little weird to have so many food pictures intermingled with pictures of my family. So... yeah.

If you're interested, check out my food pics here.

Tags: Food, Flickr
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This weekend's interesting experiment: make Giner Ale from scratch. It sounds very complex and everyone has asked how to do it. There are directions floating around online, but let me provide some gently tweaked guidelines. Read on for the details.

Tags: Food, Recipes, Ginger Ale
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Small Axe (at least, the firsttube.com build) has had "related posts" displayed on each entry's page for some time. However, since the "topics" I use are all random and unrelated to the post, the related posts weren't... uh... related.

So, I added a new configuration option. Now you can choose in the backend whether or not you want related posts to be "related" by topic or by tag. By toggling the option, suddenly, related posts were -- get this -- actually related! This is entertaining the hell out of me, and because of that, I will be forced to tag THIS post "Nerd." Sigh.
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