The reader Frobozz’s comments to the early June pork ribs post hit the nail on the head in a lot of ways. He’s right: there’s no need to have coals on both sides of the Weber, a single pile of coals on one side is enough (and don’t use a coal rack or anything like that, just pile them loose. Another tweak (learned from an amazing book called “Mario Tailgates Nascar Style“): after soaking your wood chips for an hour or more (depending on thickness … I sometimes use mesquite chunks I chip myself with a hatchet), put the soaked chips into foil packets and punch holes into the packets before putting the foil packets directly on the coals. Smoke city.

Here are before and after pictures for some beef rib slabs we bbq’d up this weekend.

Whatever you do, the secret is: use patient low temperature for a long time. In many important contexts (cooking ribs is definitely one of ‘em), slower is better.

Temperature Control: how about putting a thermometer on your cooker? Don’t bother with one of them fancy wireless ones, they aren’t very reliable. A simple Teltru BBQ thermometer such as ones you can find at KCK.com is rugged and will do a great job. You can achieve success without a thermometer of course, but using one is an easy way to tell that it’s time to add more coals (and how many) without opening the kettle.

Be careful not to rely too much on your thermometer. The first (and only) time I cooked a whole hog, I was convinced based on a meat thermometer reading that the old boy was done after about 12 or 13 hours. An old hand gave me good advice: throw your meat thermometer away, just take out a knife and cut into the meat to see. Sure enough, he wasn’t done, he needed another 6 hours.

Lesson learned: technology is fine, but nothing beats experience and common sense.

family meal n.“I had arrived at 4 p.m. to experience a daily ritual that takes place in hundreds of restaurants across the city, and in thousands more across the country: family meal. Chanterelle was the last stop on a month-long, eight-venue culinary tour of Manhattan. My mission was simple: to see how a restaurant, with seemingly endless talent and resources in the kitchen, nourishes its staff, and how that 20-minute meal impacts the seven hours of dinner service that follows.”

haji stove n. “The chai itself is usually green, but sometimes will be black. It is made by putting the tea leaves in the pot and boiling the water, often on a burner sitting directly atop a propane cylinder. If they are making shiir chai (milk tea) the leaves are put into the milk directly and the milk is not quite boiled. The propane rigs are commonly referred to in American parlance as haji stoves.“

sad adj. “For Cathy Riddle, another Appalachian Fair champion who uses White Lily for everything from green tomato bread to sad dumplings (the kind with a chewy center), the selling point is consistent good results.”

bathtub cheese n.“The germ can infect anyone who eats contaminated fresh cheeses sold by street vendors, smuggled across the Mexican border or produced by families who try to make a living selling so-called bathtub cheese made in home tubs and backyard troughs.”

Courtesy of Double-Tongued Dictionary

I was originally going to make this with chicken breast cutlets, but the turkey cutlets were half the price in my grocery store, so I went with them instead. The recipe is relatively low fat. If you’d rather not waste the egg yolks and don’t mind the extra cholesterol, substitute the 3 egg whites for another whole egg, but the extra egg whites seem to make the coating stick better after cooking.

¾ c pecans
1 egg
3 egg whites
¼ c flour
4 turkey cutlets
salt and pepper to taste

Take ½ c of the pecans and pulse in a food processor to make a coarse chop. Set aside on a plate. Take the rest of the pecans, plus the flour, salt and pepper, and process until a fine powder, and set aside on another plate. Put the eggs in a bowl and mix.

First, dredge each cutlet in the fine pecan and flour mixture. Then, dip into the eggs. Then dip into the coarse pecans. Let the cutlets set a bit.

In a frying pan, heat 2 tablespoons of oil, and then slip the coated cutlets in, and fry until golden brown, about 3 or 4 minutes a side. Remove to a paper towel to wick off excess oil.

I’ve been having a bunch of fun with the Spore Creature Creator this past week. It’s a game that lets you create all sorts of weird creatures — like an electronic Mr. Potato-head. And since I’ve been doing that instead of posting updates to this site, I thought I’d try and remedy that. So, even though it’s only vaguely food related… here’s a video I created using it, and that I uploaded to Youtube.

More jargon and recently coined food words and phrases from The Double Tongued Dictionary.

God shot n.“The [espresso] machine is for people who like to fiddle—and not everyone wants to grind beans, pre-heat demitasses, tamp at just the right pressure, “temperature surf” and do all the other hoo-ha necessary to produce a perfect shot (or “God shot,” as they call it on Coffeegeek).”

meat glue n. “Transglutaminase: Commonly known as meat glue, it is used to chemically bond proteins together.”

sushi index n.“There’s something called the sushi index.…The Americans are eating less fancy-fancy because they are screwed for the dollars.”

meat without feet n. “Professor Omholt knows that persuading many people to overcome their knee-jerk distaste for lab meat—or ‘meat without feet,’ as one animal organisation has referred to it—will be tricky.”

New words and phrases coined about food, courtesy of the Double-Tongue Dictionary.

vegecurious adj. “Tomerlin says about half of Spiral’s customers aren’t vegetarian, but folks she dubs ‘vegecurious‘ (sounds vaguely naughty). She advises first-timers to start with more entry-level dishes such as the taco salad or chopped barbecue sandwich.”

lawnmower beer n. “Summer may be the best time to eschew the exotic and just go for a simple ‘lawnmower beer’—something to chug after a sweaty session of yard work.”

Droste effect n. “At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O’Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the ‘Droste effect,’ is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa.”

You may remember my entry from a few weeks ago where I described all of the food served in the elaborate ten course meal in the first class dining room of the RMS Titanic on the night it sank, April 14, 1912. In it, I was unable to provide the recipe for the dessert named Waldorf Pudding, but I speculated that it didn’t necessarily have to have apples, raisins, or walnuts just because those were signature ingredients in another recipe named after the New York hotel, the Waldorf Salad.

Well, a bit of research turned up a couple of cookbooks dating back to the turn of the 20th century. One is the Calvary Presbyterian Church Ladies Aid Society (of Springfield, Mo.) Cookbook, dated 1903 … A “Mrs. Milligan” submitted a recipe for Waldorf Pudding that clearly contains apples. It is as follows :

A WALDORF PUDDING.
Fill a buttered pudding dish with peeled and sliced apples, alternating layers of stale cake or bread crumbs and allowing two tablespoonfuls of melted butter to each pint of apples. Crumbs should be on top. Set in a moderate oven to bake until the apples are tender. Pour over a cup of milk and two eggs beaten with half a cup of sugar and bake to a pretty brown. Serve with cream. — Mrs. Milligan.

On the other hand, in another cookbook, called Everyday Desserts, by Olive Green, dated 1911, there’s another recipe that has no apples at all:

WALDORF PUDDING
Break up half a pound of stale lady-fingers and cook to a smooth paste with a quart of cream. Add half a cupful of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of butter, a wineglassful of sherry, and a sprinkling of grated nutmeg. Cool, add the well-beaten yolks of four eggs and three tablespoonfuls of almonds blanched and pounded to a paste with lemon-juice. Turn into a baking-dish, sprinkle with sugar, and bake in a quick oven.

Here’s a very interesting bit of information from our friends at Serious Eats about the numbers they put on those little stickers on items from the produce department…

Conventional produce gets a four-digit number.
Organic produce gets a five-digit number that starts with 9.
Genetically modified items also get a five-digit code, but that code starts with 8.

Examples
4139: Conventional Granny Smith apple
94139: Organic Granny Smith
84139: GMO Granny Smith

I’m seeing more and more people get into the spirit of environmentalism by bringing their own durable grocery bags into the store with them. My local Trader Joe’s has a contest where they’ll give away a $25 gift card for to one lucky customer who brings their own tote. And Whole foods is officially phasing out the use of disposable plastic grocery bags by the end of the month. The city of San Francisco has completely banned their use over a year ago, and other cities are thinking about following their lead.

I’ve amassed a collection of cloth bags from several of the grocery stores where I shop, and I keep them in the back seat of the car. Now that I’m no longer bringing in the plastic bags to the house, it does present a bit of a problem … we’ve always recycled them as trash bags, because the trash chute in our apartment building is too small for anything bigger than one of those plastic grocery bags, overstuffed. It looks as though we may end up resorting to buying bags just to throw away again. One step forward, one step back.

Anyway, if you’re a crafty person and want to try your hand at making your own reusable grocery bag, the people at City Bag Trade offer up a pattern, so you can make your own from whatever fabric strikes your fancy.

As an aside and an update to the last entry about the Titanic, some people who saw it were wondering what the other people on the ship were eating. The 2nd Class Dinner Menu for April 14, 1912 lists :

Consummé
Tapioca
Baked Haddock
Sharp Sauce
Curried Chicken & Rice
Spring Lamb, Mint Sauce
Roast Turkey, Cranberry Sauce
Green Peas
Purée Turnips
Keep reading…