How to : Bakin' Bacon

I've always been a "nuke it in the microwave" bacon cooker, but recently tried baking bacon in the oven. It turned out very well. Here's how you do it:

Preheat the oven to 400.
Line a baking sheet with foil.
Lay out the bacon so it is just touching.
Bake 15-20 minutes depending on how crispy you like it.

How to Make Biscuits from Scratch

A few years ago, I wanted biscuits, but I didn't have canned biscuits and was out of biscuit mix, so I embarked on a journey to teach myself how to make biscuits from scratch. I discovered that it is not so easy as to follow a recipe's directions. Biscuit making has quirks and I'm proud to say that although my biscuits aren't always beautiful, they taste much better than I ever hoped. :)

Presenting...my son Caleb to demonstrate how to make biscuits from scratch:

First combine the dry ingredients:
1 3/4 cup flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

One of my first hurdles was flat biscuits. I had not mixed the dry ingredients well enough to completely incorporate the baking powder. The trick is to sift or wisk the dry goods briskly. I don't have a sifter, but a wisk is easier to clean anyway.

Next add the fat, I use 5 tablespoons of real butter, but you could add 4-6 tablespoons of butter or shortening or a combination of the two.

The trick with the butter is to get it into tiny pieces and let each tiny piece be completely covered with flour. Your butter has to be very cold. You could do this with two knives (hard) or use a pastry cutter (as Caleb is doing). You could even do this with your finger tips if you work quickly and don't have hot hands. The resulting mixture looks similar to cracker crumbs.

No picture, but the next step is to add 3/4 cup of milk. Stir it lightly 10 or less times, just get everything kind of wet. Then set the bowl aside while you flour the area where you'll be working the dough. The time lets the flour absorb some of the milk and makes the dough easier to work with.

Caleb's favorite! Pat pat pat! You don't knead biscuit dough. Form a ball and pat gently to about 1/2 inch thickness. Sprinkle on a little flour if it sticks to your hands (see mine?). Then fold it over in half and again in half so it makes a little square of dough, pat pat pat again and fold again. Do this only a few times. The folding lets the butter make layers, but working the dough too much will make your biscuits too tough.

Finally, pat out into a disk - 1/2 inch thick (or so), cut out biscuit rounds, place them on a baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray and bake at 450 for 12-15 minutes - voila!

Make Your Own Take Out vol. 2

How do you stretch 1/2 pound of ground pork to feed 6 people? Easy! Make Potstickers!

I'm not sure whether to say that potstickers are convenience foods or that they are labor intensive. In a way, they are both. They are a food that if you invest time in preparing, you will have a convenient Asian meal another time. Here's what you need:

1/2 lb ground pork
1/4 cup finely chopped green onions
2 tbsp finely chopped red bell pepper
1 egg, beaten
2 tsp ketchup
1 tsp yellow mustard
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
35-50 small wonton wrappers (1 package will be a little more than you need)
a little cup with water in it

and later on when you cook them:
3-4 tbsp vegetable oil
1/3 cup chicken stock for every 6 or 7 potstickers you plan to cook

You could season the pork any way you want. I'm not crazy about worchetershire sauce, so I usually substitue with soy sauce.

Assembling the potstickers is the labor intensive part. If you grew up shelling peas, you might find this relaxing! I can wrap up 1/2 lb worth in about 45 minutes.

Mix up the ingredients (pork thru cayenne pepper) in a bowl, then set up a work area including these elements:
1 plate with wonton wrappers on it, cover with a damp paper towel
1 empty plate (the assembly platform)
bowl with pork mix in it
little cup with water
teaspoon sized measuring spoon
2 cookie sheets - lined with parchment

Take one wonton wrapper and put it on the assembly plate so that it looks like a diamond, scoop up a modest teaspoonful of the filling and place it directly in the middle. Dip your finger in the water and dampen just the edges of the bottom half of the diamond. Fold the wrapper over and work the air out (important!!!) of the potsticker sealing it where you put the water.

You could leave it like that, but that leaves two big "ears" that have no filling in them, I fold them a 2nd time like this (left picture is front view, right is back):



Place each potsticker on the cookie sheet. When the sheet is full, put the whole thing in the freezer. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Once these little guys have been in the freezer half an hour or so, you can dump them into a zip top bag and keep them in your freezer. When you want to eat them, you can just take out however many you need - 6 is good for me, 10 leaves me feeling overstuffed. (Note: There is no need to defrost.)

To cook these you heat up (med-high) a pan that is NOT non-stick - sticking is part of the cooking process here. I use a back burner to heat up my chicken stock. Use a pastry brush to "paint" the pan with oil. When it's hot, put the potstickers in and wait 2 minutes. In 2 minutes they will be totally stuck to the pan. Reduce heat to low and pour in 1/3 cup chicken stock - it will hiss and steam a lot! Put on a tight lid and cook 2 more minutes. After 2 minutes, they should let go - remove to warm plate.

Before cooking the next batch, reheat the pan, add water and scrape off any "stuff" that gets left behind. Each batch takes about 6 minutes including cleaning.

Serve with whatever sauce you want (I like hoisin) and some egg rolls (Chung's is the best, IMHO). With homemade Asian cuisine this easy and cheap, you might never go our for Chinese food again!

According to the Joy of Cooking cookbook, this is also the most authentic stir frying method for vegetables. I've tried this and the result is crisper than just stiring it until it seems done.

Recipe by Alton Brown

Chewing the Fat about Frying

Now I know most of you avoid deep fried foods because they’re unhealthy, greasy and just plain bad for you, but not me! No, I skip fried foods because I’m scared stiff of boiling oil. Or at least…I was. And then one day I bought a deep fat thermometer, AKA candy thermometer – different from a meat thermometer because it goes up to 400 degrees, I don’t want to eat a chicken that’s seen that kind of heat!

It turns out that although liquid fat is, well, a liquid, frying with liquid fat is a dry cooking method. When foods are cooked in boiling oil the heat of the oil begins heating up the water in the food, turning it into steam and forcing it out of the food. That’s why there are so many bubbles when you fry food in oil.

The trouble with fat is if it’s not hot enough, your food will just sit in the not-quite-hot-enough fat for a while waiting for all that bubbling to begin. So you shouldn’t put the food into the fat until it reaches a high enough temperature to begin cooking the food as soon as it hits the fat. That’s where the thermometer comes into play. After some experience, you should be able to tell if it’s hot enough by watching it, but a deep fat thermometer is essential for deep-frying novices.

Once the food is in the sputtering, popping fat it will bubble like crazy until almost all the water is gone. It works like two people pressing their hands together and leaning into each other. So long as both people push, neither will fall. If one lets go, the other one ends up with a bloody nose. Once the water stops pushing back on the fat, the fat starts seeping into the food – making it really greasy, really fatty, and really bad for you. If you pull the food as the bubbling begins to subside, you should get crispy fried food, not soggy, greasy fried food.

Like all cooking methods, it takes some practice – and I’m still practicing myself – but knowing a little more about oil (other than it’s greasy!) has given me the cautious confidence to use it as a cooking method from time to time.

Happy Thanksgiving : Sugared Cranberries

These little treats are sweet and tangy, they look great garnishing cakes, pies, or gelatins, and they are so easy to make. All you need is:

1 part granulated sugar
1 part water
1 part cranberries
Superfine sugar (AKA regular sugar that you ran through the food processor)

First make a simple syrup by mixing the water and sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Stir so that the sugar dissolves and then bring it just to a simmer (**DON'T LET IT BOIL**). Take it off the heat, stir in the cranberries, then pour all of it into a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let it set overnight (or at least 8 hours).

Drain the syrup off the berries (don't rinse them!) and place the superfine sugar in a shallow dish. Add the cranberries and gently shake the dish so that they roll around and get coated in sugar. Move them to a pan so they can lay in a single layer. Assuming you aren't storing them in a bathroom (and that it isn't August in Florida), they will dry in about 1 hour.

The heat from the syrup will cook the cranberries just enough (if you boil them they will pop). Letting them sit in the syrup will make the sugar stick. The final result is a candied little berry that has a crispy sweet bite to contrast a cranberry's tartness. Trust me, you can't eat just one!

Writing in Chocolate

I discovered a new way to melt chocolate and use it for decorating. Chocolate melts at a very low temperature, which means you should never just put it in a pot and stick that pot on a burner. You can melt it in the microwave, but you have to pull it out every few seconds to stir and check it. The best way (most of the time) is to use a double boiler. Since you need very little heat you can boil the water, turn off the burner and then set the top of the boiler with the chocolate. You don't have to be there to check it or stir it, a few minutes later it will be ooey gooey.

I needed to melt chocolate, then put the melted chocolate in a baggie, snip off the end and "draw" with the chocolate. The double boiler was fine, but it wasted a lot of chocolate transfering it to the bag. So the next time I was in this situation I dropped some chocolate chips in a baggie and took out a dish rag. I got the dish rag wet and rang it out, then popped the rag into the microwave for about 30 seconds. Then I took the steaming hot rag and wrapped it around the baggie. Minutes later, the chocolate was melted in the bag! Voila! And no mess!

Cooking Methods : Foil Packet Dinners

Cooking with foil packets is a clean and healthy way to cook. That said, it won't work for every meal, I think pork chops and steak need a little direct heat to give them some color and taste, but using chicken breast you can vary this method in a thousand ways.

To cook with a foil packet, work in layers. From the bottom up:

A big piece of aluminum foil (roughly a 15-18 in. sheet).
Rice right in the middle, but not too close to the sides, think a rectagle about 3 in. by 5 in. with the 3 in. side parallel to the long side of the foil.
A raw chicken breast
Dry seasonings
Sauce or Salad Dressing
Choose two chopped veggies
Shredded cheese

Fold up the long ends of the foil to make a tent over the mound of food. Crimp the foil so that it is sealed, then crimp the ends. Put the packet on a cookie sheet and bake at 400 deg. for 25-30 minutes.

When it's finished, just transfer the packet to a plate and pierce the foil a few times to release steam (away from your face, it's hot!)

Here's how I like to make foil packets, but be creative!

When I boil the rice water I add a chicken boillion cube. On top of the chicken breast I sprinkle ground cumin and cayenne pepper and drizzle on ranch dressing. I top it with broccoli florets and diced pepper (red, green, orange, whatevers handy). Finally, I love colby jack cheese.

Wouldn't it be easy to replace the dressing with spaghetti sauce and use mozarella - almost like chicken parmesan. Or you could use jasmine rice, teriyaki sauce, and snow peas for a sort of Asian packet. That's why this recipe is more of a method than a meal.