Monthly Archives: December 2008

Thomas Keller was in town to sign and promote his new book, Under Pressure Cooking Sous Vide. I am a big fan of his work and went down to the ferry building and got not only his new book signed, but also his other cookbook at I own, The French Laundry Cookbook. I have been looking for a cookbook for Sous Vide items and this is the first one I have come across. Been flipping through a couple of pages of it and it looks like it was designed for professionals. Even though I am not one I think I will attempt a few of these recipes.

Soup is one of those dishes that can make you feel all good inside. Its a comfort food and on the cold nights in San Francisco it really hits the spot. I usually don’t do soups, but I am making one of thanksgiving so I thought I would go on a test run with this soup before going onto the main event. The biggest thing I was trying to accomplish was a smooth texture, above all else that was what I wanted, just to make sure the techniques I was doing worked. To get the soup smooth I put it through a blender and then strained it through a seeve, then repeated. This resulted in a very smooth soup with almost no chunks or changes in textures.

Paella is a dish that I have been looking forward to making. It’s the quintessential Spanish dish combining saffron with rice, meat and seafood. Finding ingredients for this dish shouldn’t be hard to do, but for some strange reason it was for me. I ended up going to 3 supermarkets and a butcher to find some chorizo. Normally it shouldn’t be that difficult to find, but I was looking for some fresh made stuff or some Spanish chorizo which is a lot harder to find then I thought. I ended up with some from whole foods, not the greatest in the world, but it worked.

I was a little dissapointed with the taste, I think it was under seasoned. It wasn’t really that bad, but I think I could have made it a lot better then I did. The thing with Paella is that it is hard to make a small batch so I ended up with a ton of it. Next time I will have to scale back or wait for a long time to make it again

Hamburg steak is a Japanese dish that has it origins in a classic western dish, Salisbury steak. Many may know of this dish from frozen dinners or school lunches, and this variation isn’t much different. It also a component of another dish that I make called Locomoco which is a Hawaiian dish.
This version is made from a combination of ground beef and pork mixed in a 5/3 ratio. To this diced onions are added, I usually caramelized them before I mix them in. This gives the onions a sweeter more mellow flavor not as raw of a taste, plus the softer texture melds well with the meat. Next is a couple of eggs and breadcrumbs to bind everything together.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, but a good majority of Japanese cooking can be done with 4 simple seasonings, soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake. When these 4 ingredients are combined in varying ratios you can get many different sauces, teriyaki sauce is a good example. Lots of Americans know this sauce, and you can buy bottles of premade sauce at almost any market. It is the common word that is used when a chain restaurant or fast food place wants to add an exotic twist to their menu, either that or a pineapple slice. These teriyaki sauces have a different consistency and tastes then the basic sauce. usually its additional spices of flavorings. These additions, at least to me, make the sauce less like a teriyaki and more like something else.

When your hungry and don’t feel like going out to buy groceries, but still want to cook its MacGyver time. When you have a fully stocked kitchen this type of challenge isn’t that hard, but if you don’t it can be quite challenging. Some may think that I have one of those fully stocked kitchens, but I don’t. There are a lot of spices and components to make dishes, but not enough to make a complete dish from a recipe.

Pasta is one of those dishes that is pretty easy to make with limited ingredients. If you have some pasta and butter you can simple brown the butter, a little salt and butter, and toss the pasta in it and you pasta in brown butter. Luckily I found some frozen shrimp, and garlic. Melted the butter, and sauteed the minced garlic and shrimp. Tossed some pasta and had a nice tasty dish.

If your looking for a meal that will fill you up, last for days, and tastes great even days later, try a stew. Stews are great dishes to do if you’ve got a lot of time on one day, but not a lot on the following days. If I am especially busy during the week I’ll cook up a pot of stew, it usually last a couple days so no cooking dinner, and no fast food or frozen dinners either!

Stews are simple to make, but they take time. It takes me usually two hours of cooking time to make a stew. This is because I use a tough cut of meat that requires a lot of time to break down the connective tissue and make tender. For me they are also hit or miss on the viscosity, sometimes too thick others too thin. Reducing helps drop the liquid level, but it is still usually thin. To thicken it up I usually make a roux then add the stew liquid to it to help it thicken up.