A monthly look at new words and phrases about food.

chicken on a throne n. We are not made of stone, and we could not resist including a clip of America’s most surreal superstar, humbly demonstrating in his own kitchen how he makes roasted chicken with pears. More important than the crazy vocal cadence or his recipe, though, is the technique, sometimes referred to as beer can chicken or “chicken on a throne,” though technically known as indirect grilling. (This refers to the famous viral video of Christopher Walken.)

enhanced chicken n. People shouldn’t be paying chicken prices for saltwater. But some unscrupulous poultry producers add as much as 15 percent saltwater—and then have the gall to label such pumped-up poultry products “natural.” Some in the industry euphemistically call chicken soaked or injected with salt water “enhanced chicken.” Of course this isn’t really about enhancing chicken, it’s about enhancing profits. Someone’s clucking all the way to the bank.

VB6 n. VB6 is short for Vegan Before 6, the increasingly popular veggie-heavy diet that converts say can do wonders for both the body and the planet. Coined and devise by food writer Mark Bittman, the regime is pretty self-explanatory: No animal products, processed food or simple carbohydrates during the day. After 6 p.m., anything goes.

Courtesy of The Double-tongued Dictionary and Schott’s Vocab.

My wife and I have pretty much stopped ordering steak when we go out, since I seem to be able to cook it better than they can, for less money… granted, I can’t say how my steak compares to the really expensive steak houses. They probably have access to better cuts of meat than I can get, so they might have an edge in that department. Still, I’m sure we’re saving money, even if it is an extravagant meal, but since I only do it about once a month, it’s bearable.

First off, you need to buy the proper steak. It won’t do to go to the Safeway, and buy whatever red meat they’ve got on sale. The cut of steak that you choose is important. It boils down to three, as far as I’m concerned : filet, strip, or ribeye. My wife prefers the filet mignon, but I usually always go for the strip. I’ll only buy ribeye if it’s on sale, since it’s a substantially fattier cut.

You’ll also want to find the best butcher that you can. For me, that ends up being at Whole Foods. Look for good marbelling — little lines of yellow fat flowing through the  deep red of the meat. I also like to get one that’s an inch thick.  I’ll sometimes go for the dry-aged steak, which costs $4 more per pound, but most times, I’ll just go for the prime. Recent prices peg that at $17 a pound, with one steak usually coming in at one pound, and one strip steak like this will feed both of us for one meal. Pricey, yes, but if you went to a fine steak house,  there’s no way we’d both eat for $17.

45 minutes to an hour before you’re ready to start cooking, take the steak out of the fridge and to let it start coming to room temperature. 20 minutes before you start cooking, set your oven to 300º and let it preheat. 5 minutes before you start cooking, turn a burner on high, and put a cast iron frying pan on it, and let it start getting hot.

Meanwhile, unwrap the steak, and dry the surface off with a paper towel, then liberally coat the steak with salt and fresh ground pepper. You can also put a couple drops of canola oil on one side, and rub it all over that side.

Now turn on the exhaust fan, and open a window a little bit, because there may be a little smoke. Put the steak(s) in the pan, oiled side down, and let it cook for 4 minutes. Then turn the steak over, and cook another 4 minutes. Then move the pan into the oven, and let it roast. The amount of time you let it roast really depends on how thick the steak was. I’ve found that for a 1 inch thick steak, roasting it another 8 minutes seems to give a good medium-rare.

There’s a way to tell how your steak is cooked by touch. Hold your left hand out, relaxed, and feel the section of skin at the base of your thumb and forefinger. This is how a rare steak will feel when you press it. Now flex your hand, stretching your fingers and thumb out. Press your finger at the fleshy base of your thumb near the palm. This is how a medium steak will feel when cooked correctly. (I can’t tell you how to figure out what a well-done steak feels like because I’ve never done it, and think it’s a bit of a sin.)

Once your steak is of the proper doneness, you’re still not ready to eat. You have to let the meat rest. Let it sit on a plate for 15 minutes, loosely covered with foil. This lets the piece of meat relax a little, and allow all the juice that’s been forced into the center of the cut to redestribute.

Bonus : You can do this same method on a charcoal grill. Follow the instructions for preparing the meat, but instead of preheating the oven and the pan, prepare your charcoal grill as you normally would, but keep the coals only on one side of the kettle. (In a gas grill,  if you only light one element, you should be able to replicate the same cooking conditions.) Grill the steak over the hot side, similar to above, at 4 minutes a side. (You could even cook it 2 minutes, then turn the steak a quarter turn, and cook it for another 2 minutes. This will give you those professional looking grill marks.) Once that’s done, move the steak to the cooler side of the grill, and put on the lid. There’s no telling how long you’ll want to cook it this way, since it really depends on how hot your coals are. You can try telling by touch, or by using an instant read thermometer.

On an instant-read thermometer, your rare steak should read about 110º in the center, before resting. Medium rare, 120º, and medium, 130º. If you must eat your steak well done, you’ll be ok if you get it up to 145º.

The package instructions couldn’t have been more tempting : “Thaw, rinse with cold water, and serve.” About the size of medium sized shrimp these little pink curls have the consistency of lobster or crab, which isn’t surprising, because they come from the same family. Langoustines are north atlantic lobsters, usually harvested in Scotland and Norway. Unfortunately, these particular langoustines have zero flavor. I can’t think of any preparation method that would have improved them, short of not buying them. Grade: F.

I’ve never been much on the importance of plate presentation, and I’ve got no scientific proof to back it up, but I can tell you that if you’re looking to lose weight, one of the first things you could do is get rid of all your plates and bowls. My wife and I are trying to lose weight — she’s using an organized program, and when she first started, I would dish out her evening meal, and it would sit, lonely, in the vast emptyness of the plates we had. Not long after, I bought a bunch of plain, white salad plates from a discount housewares store. These plates are probably 8 inches across instead of the 12 inches of our old plates. Now when I serve up our servings, the plates seem more overflowing. I also bought smaller bowls. These hold about a cup or so of liquid, half as much as our old bowls. If nothing else, it helps us both feel like we’re not skimping on our meals, and I do believe we both feel more satisfied, and less likely to opt for seconds.

“Hey why don’t you put MY recipe on your site instead of just listing me as ‘my “other” brother?’  The homemade pasta thing is da bomb and this sauce makes it that much better..it’s basically your sauce with a few changes.  It’s turned out very well the last few times I tried it.  It is a Jeff smith recipe you showed us but with small, but important changes. I know You know how to do this recipe, but I was shocked at how much sweeter it was with the shallot not garlic.  Even when I watch it carefully, garlic seems to give some bitterness to it as the shallots and butter sweeten the alfredo really well.  When reduced, it makes a great sauce over the homemade pasta.  We added lobster that was already boiled earlier in the day.  (2 of them) and then added some sherry to make it more like a St Jaque recipe…mahvellous!”

3 or 4 tablespoons olive oil
2 SHALLOTS (not garlic)
1 small red onion finely chopped
3/4 cups whole milk (light cream)
3 tablespoons butter
finish with Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (handful)

bogo acronym In the retail industry that stands for Buy One Get One. “Unfortunately, the bogo deals tend to favor families with more mouths to feed than ours. What am I going to do with a second ham?”

bet dieting pp. Betting money on losing weight, particularly where the money goes to a charity or other organization that one disagrees with. “Bet dieting is the newest rage and there are a few websites that enable it, but stickk.com has an extra ploy: the ‘anti-charity.’ Choosing the most politically controversial non-profit charities to motivate someone to achieve their goals is a great idea. Science and the stock market know that risk is a much more powerful motivator than reward.

medible n. Food containing marijuana. marijuana + edible. “Eating edibles (often referred to as Medibles) gives some suffers of chronic ailments more relief or a different kind of relief than simply smoking or vaporizing it.”

jacket fries n.pl. They’re what some restaurants call “jacket fries”: oblong slices of fried skin-on Idaho potato. “Crisp at the edges but thick enough to be fluffy in the middle, they’re a lovely hybrid of chip and french fry that’s worth the 75-cent upgrade from the standard crinkle-cut fries.”

veggiedag n. The Belgian term for a day upon which people abstain from meat – literally, “veggie day.” Officials in the Belgian city of Ghent are to forgo meat once a week (on Thursdays) in an acknowledgment of livestock farming’s detrimental effect on the environment. “The UN says livestock is responsible for nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, hence Ghent’s declaration of a weekly ‘veggie day.’ Public officials and politicians will be the first to give up meat for a day. Schoolchildren will follow suit with their own veggiedag in September.”

eco-kosher adj. The trend among some kosher-keeping Jews to eat only food that has been ethically, sustainably and, where possible, locally sourced. “The book of Leviticus requires that meat come from animals that chew their cud and have split hooves in order to be considered kosher. But for eco-kosher Jews, those laws have come to represent only part of the equation.”

credit munch n. Recession-prompted comfort eating. “There is an apparent correlation between dwindling finances and expanding waistlines. Stressed-out Britons have piled on 20 million stone in a year trying to ‘comfort eat’ their way through the recession. The condition – dubbed the credit munch – has seen three-in-five Britons put on weight in the past 12 months. The term has also been used to describe a trend for bringing home-prepared lunches to work.

cookprint n. What do you call the impact you make on the planet when you cook? It’s your “cookprint“— the entire chain of resources used to prepare meals, and the waste produced in the process.

Courtesy of The Double-tongued Dictionary, Word Spy, and Schott’s Vocab.

I picked up a new cookbook last week, and I’ve been trying some of the recipes in it, with varying success. The cookbook is called Cheater BBQ: Barbecue Anytime, Anywhere, in Any Weather, by Mindy Merrell and R. B. Quinn. The basic premise of the book is that you can bypass hours of slow roasting over a fire, using wood to create smoke and flavor, all by using a bottle of liquid smoke.

(If you are a bbq purist, I’ll wait for you to finish screaming now.)

Ok. Here’s the deal. I don’t think the premise is completely true. I think that long, slow roasting over a flame with natural wood smoke produces really great results that you really can’t replicate in any way. That being said, if you live in an apartment building, or just don’t have the time or inclination to wait around for 16 hours while your hunk of meat gets from raw to succulence, then this book just might be something that might interest you.

My first foray into the world of bbq bogosity …
Keep reading…

I don’t often get a chance to cook for more than one or two, so when I go up to Cincinnati to visit my in-laws, I’ve fallen into the pleasurable habit of doing all the cooking. It’s almost a given that I’ll be doing it, too. My mother-in-law prepares an envelope full of cash, so they subsidize all of the grocery shopping. My sister-in-law’s kitchen is pretty well stocked, but each trip always means she’ll be getting something new. Last time, she got a food processor out of the deal, this time, all she got was an oven thermometer and a few new utensils.

My menus are never particularly elaborate — in fact, when I do try to get too fancy, it usually fails. The trickiest part is to make sure that there’s enough variety each meal so that there’s something that falls into everyone’s dietary comfort zone. My wife and I, for example, can’t do a meal that relies too heavily on carbs, like pasta. My mother-in-law will only eat vegetables, and no red-meat. Each meal also ends up having the left overs from the day before rolled in, either wholesale or reincorporated.

This year, I started with two grilled and bbq’d spatchcocked chickens, with grilled asparagus, corn on the cob and cole slaw.

The next day was rainy, so I knew I needed to cook indoors. I was going to try pan fried trout and baked beans, but when I got to the store, the only trout they had was still floating, alive in a fish tank. While part of me knew that they’d be the absolute freshest fish I could ever get, another part of me just couldn’t bear to order the execution of 5 of these trout. If they were already fillets in the butcher case, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So I ended up making baked flounder fillets with fresh pesto, brown rice risotto, more corn on the cob, plus salad and cole slaw.

The third night, I was cooking for 9 people, total, so I made grilled strip steaks, and a whole salmon fillet, along with grilled yellow squash, salad, coleslaw, and fresh corn bread, with leftover corn. (I tried to turn the fish and rice left over from the night before into fish cakes, but I ended up using all of my eggs in the double batch of corn bread, and the fish cakes disintegrated in the frying pan with nothing to hold them together.) For dessert, a strawberry-rhubarb cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

The final night, the goal was to finish off everything that was left over, so it was the most varied menu of the week. I grilled up some marinated bratwurst and italian sausages, plus the leftover steaks from the night before, as well as the last of the chicken (a wing and a thigh). The leftover salmon was turned into a cold salad with macaroni. I made some more grilled asparagus and yellow squash. For dessert, angel food cake with blackberry preserves, and fresh berries, topped with whipped cream.

As I said — this isn’t haute cuisine, by any stretch. And there also wasn’t a cookbook in sight. The recipes were stuff I either make so often, I know them by heart, or I improvised. Nevertheless, I end up pleasing everyone at the table, and they all leave happy and satisfied, so what more can you ask than that?

For her third anniversary of blogging, Pioneer Woman gave  away five 14-cup food processors last week. She asked people to post what they were making for dinner last Wednesday.

The contest rules specifically insisted on only one entry per person. Still, she got 18,710 entries!

On a recent trip down south, my (other) brother, his son, and I managed to hit a couple of fine and famous eateries on a road trip to Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, ending up in Huntsville, Alabama. Although we only went to each place once, we tried to go for variety in what we ordered.

We all agreed that the Loveless Cafe in Nashville was, hands down, the best meal we had. Down-home-style food, friendly waiter, and an endless supply of homemade buscuits. I had the country ham plate, with a side of collards and carrots. My brother, Tom, had their pit-smoked turkey breast with cranberry barbecue sauce. My nephew, TJ had the fried chicken. (TJ, 16, born in Richmond, but raised on Cape Cod, claimed it was the best fried chicken and the best biscuits he’d ever eaten in his life.) I have a feeling, if I were a local, I’d be a fixture at this place. So, so very good, and definitely worth revisiting. (Open 7 AM – 9 PM, 7 days a week. 8400 Hwy 100, Nashville, Tenn. 615-646-9700.)  Review @ Roadfood.com / Loveless Cafe Menu

I’d intended to make this trip all about southern barbeque, but neglected to confirm this with my traveling companions, who only had a very limited appetite for the delicacy. Internet searches claimed that the best bbq in Nashville was in the touristy part of town. Called Jack’s, the ribs were pretty smokey, almost too smokey for my taste, and they were served dry, though there were several options of sauce to choose from. Tom had a pulled pork sandwich, and my nephew had the pulled chicken. They both thought it was pretty good.

The other bbq restaurant we tried was called Interstate, in Memphis, the city of bbq. I’d gotten several recommendations about this being the best place in the best city for bbq. I ordered the combination platter, so I could try everything they had to offer. It came with a couple beef and pork ribs, some pulled pork, and pulled beef, and some smoked sausage. It was all covered in a thin bbq sauce, so the plate looked bloody. The spicy sausage was the best, I think, while the pork ribs and the pulled beef were close runners up. It also came with a side order of bbq’d spaghetti, which I was told to specifically look out for. I wasn’t too impressed, unfortunately. Regular spaghetti coated in more of the sauce and bits of pulled pork, I think. I guess I was hoping for a transcendental experience, being in the best of the best bbq restaurants, so maybe I was expecting too much. I almost think I’ve had better bbq here in Virginia than the stuff I got that day. I’ve since read that some locals think the place has gone downhill in recent years.

I really should have sampled more places while I had the chance. The other places we ate were unmentionable — chosen for convenience rather than quality food — a necessity on a road trip. I do hope to get back to the Loveless Cafe again, though.