Merry Christmas!

“Keep the change, you filthy animal.” – Home Alone, 1992

 

This one is not about food, except that I work in the industry and the subject of this post also works in the industry.

Winston, you are a lying, forked-tongue devil.  You’d steal from your own mother if you thought it’d get you ahead.  You are a coward.  A sneaking, stinking, coward.  I’d be angry about your shifty, low down tactics except for one thing: I know you’re going to die how you live.  I regret that I probably won’t be the last person you see before that happens.

Marc, you’re a thief.  You take advantage of people, both your customers and the people who work for you.  You’re a career criminal.  You stole from me, from my wife, and from my children.  That 885 dollars you had to STEAL from me, that was my holiday.  I never forget people who wrong me, and you’re #1 on my list.

They say when you leave a job, you should take care not to burn bridges.  As a rule, I think that is generally good advice.  But the unique thing about bridges is that they go two ways.  Oh, sure, I don’t want to upset my opportunities in the future, but what about employers?  They should be equally concerned about the damage they do to the people who work for them, because in a small company in a small industry, your reputation is everything.  Rest assured, both of you, that I will never extend a friendly hand toward either of you.  You’re worse than scum, and I won’t have my good name sullied by your corruption.

Here’s to 2012, and I’m not sad to see the end of 2011.  I’ll make sure I’m getting the last laugh.

The Birthday Edition

Let the pedestrians walk clumsily through the puddles
And let the water run over the asphalt in a river.
It’s unclear to the passersby,
On this rainy day,
Why I’m so happy.

But I’m playing the concertina
For all the passersby to see.
Unfortunately,
Birthdays
Only come once a year.

-Krokodil Gena, “Birthday Song”

We do a thing in my family where, on your birthday, you get to choose the spread for dinner – and no one can complain about it.  My birthday rolled around this year and I was faced with a dilemma.  See, what I want for dinner is a bloody chunk of ribeye, a 22 ounce bottle of Rogue Dead Guy Ale and some cheesy mashed potatoes.  Preferably, someone else will prepare it for me, and someone else will foot the bill for it, too.

Herein lies the dilemma.  If I want that, I have to do all the work, which diminishes my enjoyment of the meal by a fair margin.  Second, it’s hardly a present if you have to pay for it yourself, and considering the popularity of slave wages at my current place of employment, dropping 100 bucks on steaks for my family is pretty much not going to happen without me selling a kidney or skipping the mortgage for a month.  And let’s face it, with the abuse my body takes from coffee and beer, I need both of my kidneys, and I think the wife and kids would take a pretty dim view of being homeless.

So I didn’t get that birthday dinner.  I had to improvise.  Enter a lazy man standby from Stouffers: Family Size Macaroni and Cheese.  At 8 or 9 bucks per tray, the price is about as high as I can go.  The kids like it, and I think it is OK.  The problem is, over the last few years, they seem to have cost-reduced the cheese right out of the stuff and it’s been getting soupier and soupier, which I don’t like so much.  And, there comes a time when I’m so damn depressed that the idea of same old same old food just doesn’t taste good.  So I decided to try something new.

Anyone familiar with the product knows that you can microwave it or bake it and you get almost the same product either way.  I can’t settle for that though, so I fired up the grill and added some mesquite chips to the fire.

I then proceeded to bake this Mac and Cheese for about 90 minutes on med-low heat on the old Weber Genesis, rotating every 15 minutes.  I pulled it off the grill when the sauce in the middle of the tray was bubbling and the edges were slightly browned.

This doesn’t photo that well, but here ya go:

The end result is a startlingly delicious version of an old favorite.  The subtle smoke enhances the cheddar cheese and increases the complexity of an otherwise fairly bland, straightforward dish.

Further experimentation with the concept indicates that if you wet the mesquite chips, the smoke flavor becomes overpowering and the dish becomes pretty gross, so don’t do that.  When smoking cheesy food, less is more.  You can add a salsa garnish, sauteed jalapenos and onions, or chopped bacon if you want to further expand on the idea, as well.  All have been well received by my entire family.

Meals That Stick Around

There are a few dishes that my mother made that stood out to me as a child. One of them was some sort of asian shrimp with gravy, served over rice. I think she might’ve made that twice. The first time, I remember my dad coming home from work and us sitting down to eat, and the dish wasn’t exceptionally well received. I don’t know why, but as a child, any seafood except crab legs was a hard sell at our table.

Not too terribly long after that, she made that dish another time. This time, I remember my parents arguing over it, and my dad actually got up from the table, took the recipe card from my mom’s file box, and cut it up using a small kitchen knife. The shredded index card ended up in the trash. My mom was upset, and I think as a child, I was probably a little scared.

I remember that dinner very clearly. When you’re five or seven and your parents act oddly, these things tend to stand out in your mind. Thankfully, my mom also made a lot of good food; dishes that stand out as equally strong, but for different reasons. One of them came from a large cookbook that I can visualize, but not remember the title. It may have been a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.

Anyway, this is the dish I want to talk about today. I don’t know what it’s called but I remember that it was delicious, and every time we had it, everyone left the table feeling happy and full. Basically here’s what you do:

Take 1lb of italian sausage links, sweet or hot, and slice them into 1/2” thick segments. Take about 1.5lb of new red potatoes and cut them so they’re roughly the same size as the sausage slices. Take 2-3 bell peppers, any color, and cut into wide slices. Slice 1 large red onion into wide slices. Put all these things into a casserole dish and bake them until the sausage is cooked through and the potatoes are soft.

Now, I know those instructions leave out a lot of information. So, the first time I made this dish after living on my own, I had to improvise because I didn’t remember the baking step. Instead, I fried the mix in a large frying pan. The peppers and onions burned and pretty much disappeared into a caramelized tar that coated the sausage and potatoes. It was good, but not like mom fixed it. I later learned that you should probably add the onions and peppers a little after the sausage is browned if you want them to retain their piece identity.

I’ve been playing around with this recipe since then, at times adding extra spices, olive oil, different potatoes, and different onions. It never seemed to me that it was ever bad. This is one of those dinners that’s comfort food. It’s good, filling, and has a nice ratio of meat to veggies. In fact, if you stopped reading right here and added this concoction to your repertoire of recipes, you’d probably thank me, and if you did, I’d say, “you’re welcome!”

But if you keep reading, you’ll discover what I did to take this simple meal up and over the top. You’ll need your grill, some mesquite chips, and a skillet that you’re not afraid to use on your grill. I used my cast iron frying pan. It’s non-stick by nature and is known to be fire-safe.

1lb sweet italian sausage, cut into 1/2” slices
1.5lb new red potatoes, cut into ~1/2” cubes
2 bell peppers, sliced 1/2” wide
1 large red onion, thin sliced

1 medium yellow onion, sliced 1/2″ wide
1/2c Bella Sun Luci sun dried tomatoes in olive oil, drained and sliced in 1/4” slices

First get your grill lit to a ‘medium’ fire and start heating up the wood chips. Then add the sausage and on top of the sausage, add the potatoes. Order of addition is important here because we want the oils from the sausage to help keep the veggies from sticking to the pan.

Put the pan on the grill and cover for about 3 minutes or until the oils start to sizzle, then stir. You may need to increase the heat to get the wood chips smoking well at this point. Remember to keep stirring, especially if the heat is cranked up on your fire. Once the sausage is about half cooked, add the peppers and onions.

Stir, cover, and stir again, repeating every few minutes until the potatoes are browned and onions begin to caramelize. Next add the sun dried tomatoes and keep alternating between stirring and covering. The more you keep it covered, the more smoke flavor will be absorbed, so if you really like that flavor, keep the grill closed as much as possible without burning the veggies.

Again, the sausage will be cooked through and the potatoes will be soft when the meal is cooked. A little caramelization on the onions and peppers is a good thing. Serve with something sweet or tangy, like applesauce, to offset the savory notes in this dish.  Serves 6-8.

There It Goes

I could’ve sworn I added a post between September 2010 and March of 2011.  But it isn’t there.  The only thing in the empty space between today and back then, is a HUGE gap in time.  Way longer than I wanted it to be.

But I started my new job, the Holidays came, the weather turned arctic, and I lost a lot of time along the way.

My blogging mentor is going through some tough times, too.  That doesn’t help anything.

Right before the Holidays last year, I stepped on the scale and was shocked by the numbers.  They were way too high.  So I decided I needed to get that number down, and I haphazardly decided to go on a diet.  Except, I really had no plan.  No way to measure what I was doing, no discipline in the eating, no method to the madness.  I decided I’d just “eat less.”  And, surprisingly, that worked.  I cut like 15 pounds by eating smaller servings, but at some point along the way, my progress came to a halt.  I floated between 10 and 15 pounds under my pre-holiday weight.

Two weeks ago, I was talking with my brother and he recommended My Fitness Pal, a combo App/website for the health-minded.  I downloaded the App and started tracking my intake vs my input-based recommendations and I saw some interesting things.  Without getting into great detail, the premise for the program is a way to track your activities and your food intake and allow you to adjust both to achieve a goal.  The App is easy to use and the database for foods is shockingly comprehensive.  Your favorite Panera sandwich?  Check.  Chicago style Hot Dog from Portillo’s?  Check.  Basmati rice?  Check.  Beck’s beer and Doritos?  Check and check.  Seriously, it’s all in there.  And, you can even enter your own recipes and it saves them for future use.  It adds and divides all the pertinent nutritional info and gives you a good snapshot of what you are eating, meal to meal, day to day, and week to week.

I’m weighing in weekly every Wednesday and as of last week, I was down 6 pounds from where I started.  So there it goes.  Time goes fast, and so does the weight, once you find a plan that works for you.

FDA and Baby Formula: A Non-Event

Abbott recently recalled some ready-to-mix infant formula due to possible contamination  from a common beetle that was found in the facility of one manufacturer responsible for preparing and packaging certain Similac-brand products.

Lots of people are very upset about this.  I’d be disturbed to learn that my baby might’ve eaten crunched bug legs.  The gross-out factor of “my baby just ate bug guts” is very high.

I don’t mean to apologize for Abbott or FDA, but I do want to add some industry-insider information to the slew of information and misinformation available on the Net.

First, this recall was voluntarily performed by Abbott.  FDA neither required nor requested the recall.  FDA did not fall down on the job of making sure that food for our babies is 100% safe.  In fact, infant formula is regulated very strictly, even moreso than other pharmaceuticals.  The reason for this strict regulation is that babies have no control over what they’re given to eat by their parents, and they have no options for other sources of food besides the formula given to them by their parents and caregivers.  As such, the most rigorous standards are in place, and beside the regulations, there is the not-inconsiderable factor of human compassion.  No one, not even a greedy capitalist, wants to hurt little babies.

Say what you want about motives, but babies grow up to be consumers, and sick or dead kids don’t spend disposable income later in life.

Second, Abbott is a pharmaceutical company before anything else.  I’ve purchased top-shelf equipment from them for use in the places that I’ve worked.  I’ve toured their facilities and met their people, and never have I ever had the slightest misgivings about any of their operations.  See, Abbott has to release their study publications and information for public and peer review if they are to be accepted in the scientific/medical community, and as such, any equipment, processes, and procedures must be 100% modern, state-of-the-art or the work performed at Abbott will be judged invalid by those same communities they seek to impress.

Third, I currently consult for a company that manufactures food products for Abbott.  Abbott visits this plant on a monthly basis for audits in order to ensure that the products they buy meet the very rigorous quality standards that are required by their scientific and academic pursuits.  If *anything* is out of order, the reps from Abbott who visit my facility have the power to halt any process for which those requirements are not met, up to and including the suspension of our status as an approved co-manufacturer.

I don’t pretend to have all the details with regard to the Similac situation, but here’s a practical analysis, based on the above.

1 – They don’t actually know if bugs are in the finished product, but they were located in the plant that produces said product.

2 – The publicity from an infestation, particularly after the debacle faced by PCA after the salmonella outbreak in peanut butter back in 2008/09 can be ruinous in the short term.

3 – Based on the possibility of contamination of finished product due to infestation of common pests, and the quandary of affecting infants, it was safer and less costly to initiate a voluntary recall than it would have been to ignore the problem.

Finally, let’s all remember that it is ridiculously difficult to cause harm to a human based on isolated consumption of biological parts of other creatures.  Our bodies are meant to run on practically anything, and they do exactly that.  You can eat paper, bugs, leather, and all sorts of things and surprisingly, you won’t die.  Even little babies are pretty tough like that.  Before you freak out about this recall, remember that if humans weren’t so tough, chances are you wouldn’t be reading this.  Something you ate would have killed you by now.

Vermouth Onions

I bought a bottle of Hendrick’s gin for the boar roast, thinking that none of us would be too cranked on beer to enjoy a martini or two…  Boy was I wrong.  I was supposed to live-blog each step of the cooking process and I think I got as far as the first turning of the ribs, which actually started before anyone arrived.  Shame on me.  At this point, it’s totally irrelevant, though.  Being broke and unemployed, I relied heavily on the good graces of my friends to supply a lot of the various other side dishes and booze for the event.  Then it started to rain, which inevitably led to more drinking because what the heck else are you going to do when the weather gets that way?

Someone else brought some vermouth.  A third person brought bleu cheese and spanish olives.  Ideally, this would make some really interesting martinis.  Embury says a cocktail is only as good as its worst component, and boy, was he right.  The vermouth was crap and the olives were worse.  The end result was one dumped martini and a depleted supply of homemade lemonade, and an empty bottle of gin.  But what of the vermouth?  What do you do with a three-quarter full bottle of vermouth?

Before a few days ago, I didn’t even know what vermouth was.  Apparently, in the old days it was a wine made in Germany that was flavored with herbs and wormwood.  I knew that absinthe is also a wormwood drink, but have not yet tried absinthe so I don’t know if the flavors are similar but the vermouth in my fridge is a mildly dry white wine with some herbal or floral notes at the back end.  Wikipedia also says it can be subbed for white wine when cooking, and as I am not really a fan of drinking white wine, I was waiting to see what I might be able to concoct that’d get this weird stuff out of my refrigerator.

Let me digress a moment:  We’ve not had pork chops in my house in over a year, literally.  Cathy asked me if we could pan fry some chops in butter and onions, and after thinking about it for a half-second, I realized that it would be probably be a damn good meal, and that we’d probably been in the dark on pork chops for so long that even if they turned out like boot leather, they’d still be different enough to be really good.  She also asked for sauteed onions as a garnish.

My first instinct was to finish the onions and then cook the chops, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed as though the right answer was to fry the chops in butter and then saute the onions in the drippings and butter. So I did that instead.  But by the time I’d pan-fried all 16 thin chops in butter I had quite the rime on the bottom of my pan.

Enter the vermouth.

I poured about one and a half cups of dry vermouth into the hot butter to deglaze the pan and then dropped three sliced onions into the resulting bubbling concoction.  Almost immediately, the smell became overpowering in a very good way.  The onions began to cook down and I stopped to taste them.  I then added a dash of sea salt and tasted again.  Something was still missing.  I realized I had some fresh rosemary left over from the ratatouille experiment in the freezer, and I dropped one small sprig of rosemary into the frying pan.  Almost immediately, the character of the aroma shifted from caramel sweet to a deep herbal freshness.  Perfect.  After a few more minutes, the onions were completely tender and caramelized to accent the pork chops.  The vermouth completely removed the burn-on from the chops, and the resulting sauteed onions were actually the best I have ever eaten, in my life.

The pork chops were mighty tasty, but the vermouth onions were the stars of the show.

Here’s what ya need in order to do it:

2 sticks of butter

3 medium – large onions cut into wide slices

16 thin-sliced porkchops

1 sprig fresh rosemary

1.5 cups of dry vermouth

Chapter 2 – OK, that’s all great, but what do I NEED?

If you missed out on Chapter 1, you should probably start here.

So what do you need? Honestly, not much. You can do just about any cooking with a range of some sort and an 8qt pot and a large saute pan, both need lids. You need a place to cut and a sharp knife. You should have some way to clean up afterward, too.

But if you’re reading this blog, that’s probably not really the answer you’re looking for, and that’s OK too. Hell, we all want toys and tools and variety and things that make life easier, right? So here’s some things that I have that I like.

Pots and Pans

I purchased a set of 18/10 stainless steel pots from Costco. For those not familiar with 18/10, another name for this is 316 Stainless. 316 is the type of steel used to make the equipment that is used by pharmaceutical companies, dairies, and many, many other food producers in the US, Canada, and Europe. It’s not the most durable metal (you’ll never find it used inside a car engine), but it is very, very highly resistant to corrosion (rust) and for that reason you’ll find it in all these other places.
But there is a problem with stainless steel: it has poor heat transfer rates so it actually makes a shitty pot that heats unevenly and has a lot of hotspots.

You’re probably wondering, “didn’t he just tell me to buy 18/10 stainless?”

Yes.

But here’s the thing – the pots to buy will have a copper core, a layer about an eighth of an inch thick that spans at least the bottom of each pan, and may extend up onto the sides. The thicker this copper is, the more evenly your pots will heat.

This reduces hot-spotting in your pans, reduces burning of your food, and will ease cleanup when you’re done with dinner. No one wants to work too hard cleaning up after a great meal, anyway.

So what about true copper pots? Oh, they’re much better for cooking and maybe one day I’ll have one copper kettle in my kitchen, but no more than that. They are extremely expensive, hard to maintain, and when you cook acidic foods, like tomato sauce, they dissolve a little, and that dissolved copper oxide goes into your food. Over a lifetime, I doubt this is harmful, but why ingest metal if you don’t have to?

You could probably spend the equivalent of one month’s mortgage on a set of good cookware. That’s a lot of money for most people, and maybe you’re thinking that it’s just too much money for what are essentially just chunks of metal. But, remember that it’s very, very likely that if you do spend that much on a set of good cookware from All-Clad, it is highly unlikely that you will ever need to buy any new pots for the rest of your life. Using myself as an example, I’m about to be 32 years old. If I live to 75, that’s 2 cooked meals per day for the next 42 years. Break the cost down like that (84*365 = 30660) and you’ll find that $1500.00 spent on pots comes to about a nickel per meal. Got a spouse? Cut that in half. Kids? I have four, so I can divide the $0.049 by 6 for a whopping 5/8 of a penny per meal. Cheap. And heck, if you live longer than another 42 years, it’s even less. I’m not even going to think about adjusting for inflation.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to spend $1500. Try this instead, which is similar to my main set, for $179, shipped:

Costco

Here’s a couple other places* to consider shopping for new cookware:

Williams-Sonoma
Macy’s

Occasionally you can find similar stuff on Amazon, and get deals on shipping.

Knives

I will admit right here that the set of knives in my kitchen is ridiculous. Stupid. Cheap. Horrible. Chinese crap magnetic stainless steel. I won’t tell you what to buy because I can’t testify to solid performance when it comes to kitchen knives. I can tell you that the set of Farberware knives I have I bought from Kohls nearly 10 years ago. I bought them because they were one-piece construction and easy to clean, particularly at the joint between blade and handle.

I have since learned that the type of steel from which they are made is at least as important as the ability to clean them. But I can’t replace them just yet, so they’ll continue in my kitchen for another few years.

I know that Gerber makes awesome knives because I have 3 of their pocket knives and would gladly use them in my kitchen if my wife never saw me do it. Unfortunately, she’d see me and then not eat whatever I cooked.

I have heard that there are some awesome santoku knives out there, and I do think that I could get by with one really high-quality knife. Part of a blade’s quality is in its ability to hold a sharp edge. I’ve learned how to sharpen knives so they are dangerously sharp, but the cheaper knives won’t hold an edge for a long period of time. I think that there’s a tradeoff… You can spend a lot of money on a knife that stays sharp, or you can spend a lot of money on abrasives to keep junky knives in top form.

I am not religious about sharpening, though, so my knives are a source of daily aggravation. Don’t be like me. Get one good knife and keep it sharp. The rest of them can be crap stainless steel from China that is magnetic and gets spots in the dishwasher, but your workhorse should be a chef’s knife or a santoku and you should spend some money on it. I hear that Wusthof makes a really special hollow-ground santoku.

And speaking of things to cut with, you should have something to cut on. I own 2 cutting boards. One of them is a nylon board and the other is bamboo. The bamboo is a recent addition and it’s about 50% larger than the nylon board. This size differential is why I got it. It’s tough to cut a pizza on the smaller nylon board.

Some like glass cutting boards.  I want to like them because I know they can be cleaned really well, but glass will really wreck a knife edge.  There are two other types of cutting boards available, though.  Wood, or nylon.

I have found that the “nylon vs wood cutting board” debate has been done to death and I do not want to get into it. I will say, as I have said previously, that wood is not allowed in a food production facility because it is impossible to clean.

I will also say that if you must have a wooden cutting board, bamboo is a pretty tough and environmentally-friendly alternative to a hardwood like maple. I like my bamboo cutting board.

Baking Pans

You can find two different types of baking pans: metal or glass. If you go with metal, you have coated steel or disposable aluminum. Both of these are equivalent. The coated ones cost 3x more than the disposables and they last just as long.  The coating comes off, your stuff sticks to the pan, and then the pan gets all rusty and gross, and then you should throw it in the trash.  Or recycling bin.

Glass (pyrex) baking pans take a little longer to transfer heat, but they do it more uniformly (just like copper-core pots) and they are easier to clean. And as long as you can clean them, they are 100% reusable. I use mostly glass bakeware in my kitchen for these reasons.  If they somehow become unusable, remember that 1 pound of glass to a recycling facility = 1 pound of glass out of that facility.

Clean up

You need three things. In order of importance, here we go:

My grandpa taught me about elbow grease. He advised the use of elbow grease for just about everything I came across until he passed when I was 14. I never really understood what he meant until I started cooking on my own. Sometimes, you get in there with a vigorous amount of elbow grease and the results will stun you.

Soap is also great and helpful, and one bit of new info I proffer to my readers is something that would have saved me and my siblings a lot of angst as we grew up. In a food manufacturing plant, we use a technique called CIP, or clean-in-place. CIP describes the methods for cleaning pipelines and 500 gallon kettles and pumps and nearly everything in most modern food plants. There’s a chemical we use to do this and it goes by a lot of different names: Caustic, Alkali, Chlorinated Caustic, etc. All of them sound nasty. And almost everyone has some of this stuff in their house. Usually, you can find it in a Clorox bottle. It is, essentially, bleach. Bleach dissolves both fats and sugars. Usually, anything burned on is made of some combination of fat and sugar.

So if you burn popcorn or milk or almost anything else onto the bottoms of your stainless cookware, pouring straight bleach onto the burn-on and letting it sit for an hour or two should be enough to loosen all but the worst of the problem (which is where you will need a lot of elbow grease). Preferably, it should be placed outside or in some other well-ventilated area because the fumes are something else. Also, bleach will wreck nearly 100% of things it touches if they are not metal or glass. Skin, clothes, eyes, pets, carpet. DO NOT splash this stuff! Don’t! If you mess up with bleach it can permanently change your life, and not often in a good way.

Warm water is your friend, and possibly the one best invention that makes cleaning with elbow grease a possibility. If you are using water that’s as hot as you can stand it without scalding yourself, soap and elbow grease will both reach maximum efficacy. Don’t be afraid of the left water handle. Use it with reckless abandon.

* This blog is not sponsored by these companies, or any other.  I only recommend them because they have what I like.

Wild Boar!

I woke up on a sunny morning at the crossroads of US-66 and the 21st century. By nightfall, the smell of burnt rubber and blood filled my nostrils, and an old friend hit town. The next morning, the sun blinded me awake and I knew that it was no dream. Art had arrived in a fury.

My Task was At Hand.

I rose from my bed, dressed, and visited my secondary refrigerator; the Amana in the garage that we refuse to admit is all but done-in.

I pulled the door open, and ignored the imp that switched the light from off to on. I was distracted.

Blood was in the air. Fresh blood.

But not mine. For my Art is the Art of the Flame.

At 11am this Saturday past, I lit my trusty Weber Genesis Silver B and tossed the first of a series of pieces of meat on the cast-iron grates, a pair of ribs from a 240lb wild boar from Texas.

These were not your daddy’s baby-back ribs, either. Each set measured about 10” by 18”. I rubbed each rack with sea salt, garlic powder, and guajillo chile powder. I set the Genesis on indirect low and cooked them for about 2.5 hours, basting every 30 minutes with honey.

At high noon, the first guests arrived. I heard the rumble of an angry V8 and knew that Art, the person, had arrived.

He’s the one who shot the pig, the founder of the feast.

By 2 pm, we were ready for the second round of meat. This time, it was tenderloins. They received the same treatment as the ribs. Low flame, rub, and time.

At 4, we tossed on a shoulder and shank. They got the same treatment, sans honey.

By 6, everything was well-cooked.

* * *

Here’s what you need to know about cooking a wild boar.

1 – The meat is lean, leaner than the leanest beef you’ve ever seen.

2 – The meat is red, like raw beef.

3 – It must be cooked well-done. Trichnosis has been all but eradicated in store bought pork, to the point you can cook most store-bought pork rare without worry of any food-borne sickness, but wild game is totally different and should be treated with the utmost care.

Some personal observations about prepping and cooking wild game:

1 – You have to be ready for real blood, and a lot of it. And fur. Be ready to cut fur off of your food. If you are not used to this, it will shock you but it isn’t really that bad, and you may find that using a sharp knife may be more “in-tune” with the process than using kitchen shears may be. That said, my garage refrigerator may never be the same.

2 – You may get a little nauseous when you are slicing up pieces of a real dead animal, but it may help to recall that your grandparents probably did this on a weekly or more frequent basis. It was how they got their meat. They did it, and so should you. Also try to think that you aren’t the person stringing the dead boar up in your yard. If you think what you are doing in your kitchen or on your deck is gross, think about what happened before it got to you. You should be kissing that meat as you toss it on the grill.

I now know I can field-dress a deer or gut a fish, no problem. There’s a serenity that comes with preparing meat. Cutting the plastic wrapper will never get you there. It’s not about the generally gory task; there’s more to it than that.

3 – Flavor. Be ready for a more wild taste. I am not ashamed to admit that the ribs I made were not ‘good’ in the traditional sense of the word. I choked down the meat from two bones. I heard from Art that the middle bones were better than the ones from the edges, which was what I sampled. The tenderloins were almost as good in texture as any store-bought meat I’d made before, and the flavor was beyond good. The shank and shoulder which finished the grilling extravaganza were among the best-prepared meat I’ve eaten – in my life.

4 – Wild pork is so lean you have to cook it like beef brisket. There’s next to no fat to soften the tissue so you have to rely on cold heat and a long time to make things right. I would expect that if you are considering cooking any type of wild game, this may be something to remember. Slow, low, and lots of moisture in the heat.

* * *

Want to know more about how this Texas boar got to Illinois? Let me know! Have other questions? I’d love to answer them. Email me or just leave a comment via the links below.

Tacos!

An unscheduled trip caused this one to be pretty late and I see my site traffic has plummeted in the interim. Sorry about the over-promise.

More than half the crap I do in the kitchen is totally off the cuff, or a simple case of bait and switch because I found out at the last second that I didn’t have an ingredient I really wanted and had to improvise.

No one ever knows about these things when they happen unless I tell them, and things usually turn out OK. Sometimes, I discover a certain improvisation that really works well. This recipe includes one of those improvs that really rounded out the flavor of the meat.

Tacos are great for kids and parents. It’s dinner in its own pocket. Portion control is simple, and leftovers are often even better than the original meal. They are multifaceted, and it’s relatively easy to choose one or two ingredients that you know will go over well with the pickier eaters in your family.

Despite the flexibility of tacos, there are a couple places where you really, really can’t move too much. The tortilla is one of those things. There are A LOT of different brands of tortillas out on the market, but I’ve really only found one brand in Chicago that is worth buying. Azteca? Might as well wrap your fixins in kleenex. Hell, kleenex is probably sturdier and tastes better, too. Mission? Very popular and prolific around here, but they are pretty wimpy and gummy. Prone to breakage. Not great. Del Rey? Now we’re getting somewhere! Nice flavor but the texture can be inconsistent.

The best tortillas in the Chicago area are made by El Milagro. They are consistently tender yet strong, have a great, home-made flavor, and THEY ARE RIDICULOUSLY INEXPENSIVE at $0.89 per dozen. If you can find these in your area, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Buy them. You will not be sorry.

This last time around, I used chicken for the meat. Three chicken boneless, skinless breasts are more than enough meat for a family of 6. You could probably use 2 and be OK, but I hate the idea that someone might leave the table and still be hungry. I marinated the meat for about an hour before cooking, but you could skip the marinating and just use the recipe for the marinade as a mop for the meat while it’s cooking on the grill.

Marinade/Mop

1/2 cup Sprite soda (Improvision here)
1 Tbs ground ancho pepper
1 Clove garlic, minced
1 Tsp cumin
Salt to taste

Grill the meat over indirect medium heat for about 5 minutes per side or until they are cooked through. Dice the meat into ~1/4” cubes after removing from the grill.

While the meat is marinating, make your own pico or salsa. This is the place where you’ll get to showcase some creativity or a special ingredient.

For this particular meal, which turned out exceptionally well, here’s what I used and what I did:

4 Roma tomatoes, finely diced
1 small red onion, finely chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, gutted and minced
1 can of pineapple chunks, very well drained (Dole Tropical Gold is about the sweetest canned pineapple available)
3/4 cup of chopped fresh cilantro
Sea salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
Cumin to taste

Blend all those ingredients in a bowl and stick it in the fridge for as long as you can. If you’re organized and can do it at lunch time, the flavors will have a better chance to blend. But throwing it all together works too.

Note: You can increase the heat by including some of the seeds from the pepper, or increasing the amount of peppers in the pico.

You’ll also need:
Sour Cream
Shredded cheese, like cheddar, monterey, or a blend thereof

And you might want to include:
Crumbled Bacon
Shredded Lettuce
Shredded Cilantro

Heat the tortilla over an open flame, if possible. I use a small warming burner on our stove for this and it works really well. I flip them over with my fingers. Be careful, though. Don’t come running to me if you burn yourself, others, or if you torch your house doing this trick.

After it’s warmed up and you haven’t harmed yourself or your home, fill it with the grilled chicken chunks, some pico, and some or all of the other fixins. The creamy cheese and sour cream blend with the tangy pineapple and fresh tomato in a way that is remarkable. Your kids will love it, and so will you!

Ribs, the OTFP Way

Summertime is my favorite time of year.  Unfortunately, we’re still a long way from summer on May 25 here in northern Illinois.  But, sometimes we have some flashes of some real summertime weather in May, and when that happens, you have to ride those times as far as they’ll go.  We’ve had a spell of 90 degree heat here, and of course, the first thing we think of is not cooking inside, where the house will become hotter than it already is.

One of our favorite ways to cook is grilling, and though I admit I don’t grill quite so often in January as I do in June, I am a year round griller.

I sort of want to save some of this info for a future chapter of ‘things you should have in your kitchen’, but if any of my small but (hopefully) faithful fan base is in the market for a new grill, I cannot recommend highly enough a Weber Genesis-series gas grill.  They aren’t especially cheap but this falls into the category of price=quality.

I am sure there are more than a couple die-hard charcoal grillers out there.  Let me assure you: I used to live and die by charcoal until I got my Genesis back in 2004.  I like the charcoal flavor, but as a trained professional Taster, there are some things that aren’t good about charcoal-cooked meat.  The good parts of that flavor are replicated perfectly by a gas/lp grill after it has a few meals on it, an thus, taking that into account and combining it with the added convenience of fire-and-forget lp, I doubt seriously my return to charcoal.  Anyhow, I use a 2004-vintage Weber Genesis Silver B model gas grill to do my at-home grilling.

Ribs…  You can buy 2 kinds of ribs in most places: beef or pork.  I always choose pork because they tend to be softer and more flavorful.  Beef is almost always tougher, more prone to drying out, and because they are bigger, harder to cook in quantity sufficient for a family of six.  99% of the meat I buy I get from Costco because prices tend to be a little bit lower and the overall quality of the meat is roughly a billion percent better than what I can get at the local Jewel/Albertsons or Dominick’s/Safeway.  I often say that Costco is the next best thing to having your own herd of livestock.

So, here’s what you need to do ribs, OTFP.

Gear:

Grill

Tongs

Baking pan (pyrex is best but metal works too)

At least 3 or 4 hours

Basting brush

Materials:

1 or more slabs of pork ribs

Sea salt

Sarawak black pepper, ground

1 clove garlic per 2 slabs

About 16 ounces of Sweet Baby Rays Original Barbecue Sauce

Serves 2-3 per slab for light eaters.

Procedure:

Preheat your grill to about 200F.  Anything higher than 220F is too hot and will dry out the meat.  Less than 200F will require more cooking time.

Fill the baking pan about half full of water.  Half empty, if pessimism is your thing.

Season the ribs with salt, pepper, and garlic to taste.  I find that half a clove is about perfect for a full slab, but your mileage may vary.

Ribs must be cooked indirectly or you will burn the undersides and dry the meat out.  This is great if you want flavorful pork jerky on the bone, but I’ve never met anyone that wanted that end product.  I cut each slab in half because that’s what fits best on the grill.

Place the baking pan of water directly over the heat source.  This will buffer heat transfer and add humidity to the cooking chamber.  Place the ribs so that they are centrally located between two low heat sources.  If you have a 3-burner grill, keep the middle burner unlit and cook in the middle.  If you need to use charcoal, prep the grill as though you are cooking a roast, with two fires, and get regular Kingsford charcoal (blue bag).  It lights easily and burns very evenly.

The first hour is low maintenance.  After one hour, turn the ribs 180 degrees to ensure even cooking.  Make sure the baking pan still has water in it.  Same thing with the second hour, but you may want to turn them every 20-30 minutes if you know your heat sources are unevenly hot.  The bones should ALWAYS face down.

If you’re running 220, the third hour is going to be where the most cooking happens.  Again, you should be turning the ribs every 20-30 minutes and watching to verify that the baking pan remains full of water.  If the pan goes dry, the ribs are going to dry out and you’ll see shrinkage of the meat at the ends of the bones.  The juiciest ribs will pull back only about 1/4” from the edges of the bones.  Any more shrinkage than that means your fire was too hot.

The fourth/final hour is where the basting happens.  You should slightly increase the heat for the final hour to about 275F, or simply add about 2 briquets of charcoal (no lighter fluid) to each fire.  Once the charcoals start to burn or the grill heats up to about 275, baste lightly with SBR’s sauce.  Again, turn the ribs every 20 or so minutes, and reapply the sauce at each interval.  If you do this right, there’s almost no shrinkage due to moisture loss, and the sugars in the sauce don’t burn or become bitter from overheating.

Serve with your favorite side dishes.  Our family favorites are a mustard potato salad, applesauce, and a salad.