We usually reserve flour tortillas for quick lunches grabbed at a taqueria filled with burrito stuff. If you’re lucky they grill them first, but usually they have those steamers that soften/warm them up. Yum, warm doughy crap.
Flour Tortilla?
Author Archives: Biggles
Justin’s Chops
What is the bastard child of Pork ribs? Pork chops.
And what is the cute older sister of Pork chops? Cajun Pork chops.
And thanks to Justin Wilson’s 1986 magnum opus, that is what we had tonight.
But due to the recipe stating “Let them cook until the gravy is done.” they did come out a little overdone.
But yeeehaw! Thems good eats.
Upside Down Chicken Roast
Last night I believe I came up with a decent upside down roast chicken. Sure it always tastes great, the dark meat cooks faster, the breast meat is juicy, but this time it LOOKED decent.
Freshy Fresh Roasted
Semi-early Monday morning found me in downtown Oakland California on a photo op for Blue Bottle Coffee Co. They needed some shots of some new stainless equipment, fine. I can do that. The building was easy enough to find and traffic wasn’t too bad, everything was going as planned.
Making my way to the back of the building past a few closed cafes I found James and Jan hard at work putting together an order destined for San Francisco (to a street with no parking meters!). They were clearly busy and I wasn’t, so I stood at the door to watch for moment. Here you see James hunkered in front of the roaster waiting to clear the last batch of beans for the SF order. No kidding. From the roaster, to the bag and out the door THAT very moment.
The next time you make it to the grocery store, Peet’s or Starbuck’s to get your pound of whole bean coffee and it says, “fresh roasted”. Say to yourself, “oh yeah? Right, whatever.”
I’ll bet you a bag of wet marbles they weren’t watched this closely.
As the summer winds down
Here we find ourselves at the setting of our summer 2003. Meathenge hasn’t been updated much since I took on the job of painting our kitchen cabinets, returning to our jobs after a summer’s break and all kinds of other chores for early fall. I find it quite refreshing to bring this summer to a thoughtful close. It’s nice. This part of the world doesn’t get much of a season change. Sure it gets colder, but we’re talking a change from seventy degrees all the way down to 50 during the day. Oh and it rains more during the cooler part of the year.
In this shot we see the last of the summer grilling. The last of the wafty warm days of summer spent in the park hanging out enjoying friends.
Home made bleu cheese dressing!
made homemade bleu cheese dressing last night, cuz the grocery store ones bit the big one!
1/2 cup mayo
1/2 lowfat sour cream
3/4 tub of cumbly bleu cheese from Trader Joe’s (all ingredients are from
TJ’s actually)
dash of the following: pepper, italian herbs, parsely, garlic powder,
worcestershire, mustard
2 dashes of: red wine vinegar and rice vinegar (cuz I didn’t have cider
vinegar)
yummy with carrots and veggie buffalo wings. heh.
this stuff rocked HARD. *never* buying store bought no more!
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This excerpt from an email from my sister. Thanks sis!
Turkey with Red Chili Sauce
When one starts with dried chili peppers you know it’s just got to be a tasty dish no matter how it’s served. This one was no different. I’m not sure why we used turkey, considering we just went through an entire 14 roast turkey. Oh well.
This dinner came out very nicely. I believe all we’d change would be the addition of raisins. The dish was too sweet. Look at those chilis! I used mostly the New Mexian Red chilis with maybe 4 dried pasillas tossed for the fun of it.
Brats & Breakfast and I ain’t so sure.
Yum, one of my favorite breakfasts. Egg in a hole with a side of sausage. The sausage is something new I found at the local grocery. I figure it is always worth at least one try. And the new brats weren’t so bad, but they weren’t that great either.
Over the last six months our local Raley’s has pumped up their sausage selection. I find it interesting with today’s low fat diets, then I giggle with excitement digging for something new to try. This time I noticed Johnsonville has something called Beer & Brats – with real Wisconsen Beer. Personally I don’t believe that is something anyone should brag about, let alone put on a label. Another strike against them are the fact they are pre-cooked. I know why they’re doing it. They last longer for the grocer and there is lower chance of getting a bad hunk of meat. But they just don’t thrill me.
As you can see they cook up nice looking, along with the white onions and eggyhole. I suppose they were okay, but I probably won’t buy them again.
Turkey Soup
Making turkey soup can be a dicey situation at best. The gravy and stuffing can be so rich, the skin to die for and the meat tender and yummy. And yet, when you boil down the carcass, add your goodies … well the damn thing is tasteless.
Here’s how I handled it this time. Instead of doing the whole carcass (too darned little tiny bones to pick out) I just cut off the pieces I wanted and tossed them into a large pot with water just barely covering. Sure you can simmer the poor thing for 15 hours if you want to. But I simmered it for about 30 minutes, just enough so the meat was barely coming off the bones. Yanking out the pieces was easy and trimming off the flesh was even easier. Back goes the meat into the broff.
Dice up the carrots, celery, onions and tons of fresh garlic (look close I had roasted garlic as well). Sautee the suckers in olive oil, butter, sage, salt/pepper until the onions are clear. I suppose that’s called sweating. Add to the simmering meaty broff. Oh and if you have some nice fresh Italian parsley, add that.
I suppose one of my secret weapons for turkey soup is having leftovers from a traditional turkey meal. This means gravy and dressing. Add all the gravy you have and enough dressing to thicken it a bit. These last two ingredients really dial in the turkey flavor. I suppose it would be fine without, just not nearly as rich.
Simmer the soup maybe 40 minutes, maybe even 30 would be fine.
Get some crusty bread and make it go!
Meat Cooking Show ALERT !!
Be on the look out for Alton Brown’s Good Eats show, “raising the steaks”. I caught a few moments of it between fending off the childses. What caught my eye was tossing, what looked to be flank steak, directly onto the coals. Yeah, my interest was piqued. So I set my “scout” on my satellite dish to search out that one show and come on automatically. I am set. You go now and look to find show. Go now.
Fresh Bread & Bacon
Alright, so we didn’t make bacon last night. But M made two loaves of fresh wheat type bread. We needed bread for the kid’s lunches today and were OUT. So instead of heading off to the local hag store for nasty crud bread she made it. No dumb bread machine either. Dumb machines. YOU GOT HANDS !!! Use’m foo.
Roast Turkey Dinner & How to paint a kitchen
I believe this time you deserve a bit of explanation here. Uh, well this is a tough one. You see, we were supposed to have a family dinner this last Saturday. That didn’t work out and I forgot to cancel the turkey order. Which means we were going to have a load of turkey for the next few days. Fine, because I WANTED A TURKEY DINNER WITH GRAVY. Okay now, that all makes sense right? Right. Here is where it takes a bit of a turn. Most of last week I’ve been antsy to DO something. Either the floor or the kitchen cabinets were going to get it. Some way, some how.
It wasn’t until Saturday night that I had a load of dreams all about painting the kitchen cabinets blood red. So be it, I was going to paint the kitchen cabinets! Luckily I love my family so I decided to use paint instead of real blood.
However, our semi-local paint store doesn’t have interior gloss blood red. They had a semi-gloss “rocket red” (just a few shades short of hot pink). Hey, I’ll take what I can get. If I don’t like them I can always do a darker wash or just paint over the suckers.
That’s right, our lower kitchen cabinets are now very very very RED. With chrome handles and hinges.
The picture above is me getting the bird ready while the oil base primer is drying.
We ate on time and the kitchen was mostly back into place by the time we were ready for bed.
BAM.
It was so damn good.
Chicken Flavored Salad Dressing
Okay well, it isn’t really. But my wife said it tasted like it was. Normally I don’t go for the creamy dressings, but if it tastd like chicken I wanted to know about it. Sure enough, it’s thick and creamy and tastes a bit like chicken. Yum.
Tacubaya – la taqueria de dona tomas
I had the pleasure of making it out for breakfast this morning by invitation of a friend. She suggested a newish restaurant at the 4th Street area in Berkeley. All she would say is, you just gotta have the tamales. Just gotta.
The building was a nice large industrial type with some neat angles to the walls. The tables and bar areas were all refinished recycled wood, so they had some patina left to them, quite nice. I perused the menu up on the wall a bit, but came back to the first item, chorizo with scrambled eggs. Oh and a tamale and a cup of blue bottle coffee and half and half and that would be plenty thank you.
The chorizo and eggs were right on the mark. Not too damn greasy, in fact they weren’t greasy at all. The heat came in to say hello, and the cilantro cleaned it all up fancy. I don’t like to admit it, but I’m not a fan of the black bean. I feel pintos are the way to be, but these were worth not leaving on the plate. Especially with the crumbly mexicanny cheese. Now take the chorizo egg love, a smoosh of beans and apply to the home made corn tortillas … and you have one of the best breakfasts of the year. But wait, it gets better. The Blue Bottle coffee compliments food. Their brew isn’t a dark roast such as what Peet’s spews (that stuff is a meal within itself). It was a complete joy to have with a meal.
Look, it’s a fresh shredded pork tamal with a sweetish red sauce. It was nice of the chef to set the tamal on a bed of husk. That way the sauce wouldn’t be disturbed by unwrapping the sucker, ah hell if the husk was on, the sauce wouldn’t have been there.
The scrambled eggs over tortilla chips slathered in red sauce with crema, crumbly cheese and white onions was … well really tasty as well. I had some of all.
Again, I can’t stress enough how nice it was to take a few minutes out of the day to sit and have a nice meal. There wasn’t anything I could have added to this meal, oh wait. Yes, actually there is something I could add. It would have been nice to have a smidge of fruity goodness. But other than that, total success.
Labor Day Meat FEST 2003
It was semi-early Monday morning when I began getting the meat together for the afternoon delights. The beef ball tip roast I marinated in balsamic vinegar, a nice cabernet, olive oil, spices and a few bay leaves. The pork got slatered in olive oil then some home made mexicanny dry rub and a few more bay leaves. Then over all I ground some fresh cinnamon. Yup. Those are my friend the butcher’s home made hot italian sausages. They are damn fine. The chicken was halved and marinated in fresh lemon juice, ground black pepper and a few other spices.
Here we see our little buddies roasting nicely indirectly with a mesquite fire and hickory chip flavor action.
Anyone got a match?
Oh man, they’re almost done!
They’re done. Meat Head made the corn bread using fresh scratch and BACON FAT !!! Mrs. Head made the macroni salad and I’m mad at myself for not grabbing some to keep at home. I wanted some later wiff hot sauce!
And last but definately NOT least is a cherry crisp made by my dear wife. It was AWESOME. Very cherry like. A nice finish to a meaty day.