Recipe: Lamb Curry (Rogan Josh)

Posted on August 12, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Lamb Curry

Lamb Curry (Rogan Josh).

Lamb Curry (Rogan Josh) comes from the generally excellent Indian Instant Pot Cookbook and has a pleasing combination of warm spices. However, I very nearly burned it because the recipe does not have enough liquid to generate pressure. (Most IP users say you need a minimum of 1 cup of water; some say 1 ½ c if using a larger size Instant Pot.) Solution: cook it in a Dutch oven or slow cooker. Makes 4 servings and can be doubled for a crowd.

Ingredients:
1 c onion, chopped
2 t garlic, chopped
1 t ginger, grated or fine chopped
½ c Greek yoghurt*
2 T tomato paste
1 t paprika
1 t Garam Masala
1 t salt
½ t ground turmeric
½ t ground cinnamon
¼ t grated nutmeg
¼ t cayenne pepper
1 lb boneless lamb, cut into 1 inch cubes

Method: combine all ingredients except lamb and mix well. Add lamb and toss thoroughly to combine. Marinate in refrigerator for at least 2 hours and up to 24 hours. Cook over low heat in Dutch oven or slow cooker until lamb is very tender, at least 2 hours. Serve Lamb Curry (Rogan Josh) with rice.

*The Indian Instant Pot Cookbook recipe had 1/2 c yogurt and 1/2 c water.

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Recipe: Onion Jam

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Onion Jam

Onion Jam.

I wanted to reproduce the Divina Onion Jam I bought at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and was mostly successful. This stuff is intense; use it sparingly on a sandwich or serve on a charcuterie plate with a nice runny brie. Makes 1 cup maybe.

Ingredients:
2 large onions, peeled and sliced thin to yield 4 c sliced onions
¼ c neutral oil
Kosher salt, a generous pinch
Black pepper, a few grinds
¼ c white sugar
1/3 c vinegar: red wine, balsamic, distilled or a combination
2 bay leaves (optional)
Sprig of rosemary (optional)
Sprig of thyme (optional

Method: heat oil in a cast iron skillet and sauté onions at medium heat, stirring frequently. They will wilt, then gradually turn light brown as they caramelize. Regulate heat so the onions do not crisp. When they have reduced by half, move onions to the edges of the skillet and add sugar in the middle. In a few minutes it will begin to bubble then turn light brown as it caramelizes. Stir as needed to keep sugar from sticking or burning.

Divina Onion Jam

This is the jam I was attempting to duplicate. It’s lighter in color because they used distilled (i.e. white) vinegar. It’s about $8.50 on Amazon which is not a bad price when you see how much your onions will cook down.

Toss to combine onions and sugar and add salt and pepper and optional herbs. Add vinegar and fold into the onion mix. It will reduce gradually. Turn off the heat and fold some of the onion over the herbs to absorb their flavor; leave the pan on the warm stove till the liquid has evaporated. Remove the herbs and serve the onion jam immediately or transfer to a storage container. It should keep for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator.

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My cole slaw obsession (and frustration)

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Russell Cole Slaw

Russell’s Deli in Ballston Spa, NY feeds my cole slaw obsession with a serving that’s perfect in size and flavor balance.

Long term readers know I have a deep and abiding relationship with cole slaw, bordering on obsession. One of the most popular recipes on this site is the garlicky Vincent’s cole slaw that was served at a sadly departed Dallas seafood place. I tried for years (and am still trying) to duplicate the sour slaw served at the Highland Park Cafeteria. When you get me wound up, I will tell you that cole slaw (and cabbage in general) is a miraculous and almost perfect food.

But when I order cole slaw in a restaurant or fast food place, that obsession often leads to frustration.

Obviously, when coleslaw is available, I will request it. (If a sandwich or entree comes with a side of french fries, I will ask if I can substitute cole slaw.) And the experience leaves me disappointed just as often as I am delighted. The first problem is portion size. Many places unashamedly serve you cole slaw in a 2 oz condiment cup and advertise it as a salad included with the meal or charge extra for what should be considered a no-fee condiment. A proper serving should be the size of an 8 oz container, loosely filled, which amounts to about 1/3 pound.

Deli counters let you choose your portion size but can ding you on price. At today’s prices, cabbage and carrots (which typically appear in the commercial mixes) are both under a dollar a pound. How much should I pay you to chop, mix and dress it for me? I’ll spend up to $5 per pound without a second thought, but my town has one place that gets $7.49 and another $9.95 a pound. And we’re not talking NYC overhead here.

New Way Cole Slaw

This serving of coleslaw from New Way Lunch in Glens Falls, NY is lovely to look at but tastes like it came from a processed tub.

Plus, a surprising number of places do not know how to make coleslaw. It’s either underseasoned (a good fast food cole slaw needs the right amount of salt and a pinch of sugar) or dipped out of a processed tub. I happen to like those supermarket tubs and buy them occasionally, but don’t want to pay an up charge for you to dip it for me.

I like to keep an eye out for foodservice ingredients when I am standing in the ordering queue, and I believe I have seen a Hans Kissle cole slaw dressing at more than one establishment. It is not currently on their website, so maybe I am mistaken or perhaps you need a secret code to order. But these places dish up the proper foodservice cole slaw I am looking for.

There is also a Hans Kissle cole slaw sold in prepackaged tubs, just like my local supermarket’s house brands, but there are no outlets locally where I can buy it. (Once upon a time I found a special on mini-cups and liked them, but the store that had them doesn’t today.) Hans Kissle’s headquarters are in Haverhill, MA somewhere north of Boston so maybe it’s time for a road trip.

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Trader Joe’s Premium Peeled Garlic

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Trader Joe Peeled Garlic

Trader Joe’s Premium Peeled Garlic. Fresh package on the left, 3-month old package on the right.

I use a lot of garlic when I cook. I hate peeling garlic. Ergo, I use already-peeled garlic cloves. I have tried several brands from Asian markets and also the Spice World brand, which is sold at my local big box store. The price is great, currently $4 for a pound of the Spice World. But the cloves start to deteriorate as soon as the package is opened and by the time I’m halfway through most of the cloves are moldy. Of course I’m too cheap to just throw them away at that point, but trying to find usable cloves among moldy ones is not a lot of fun.

Trader Joe Peeled Garlic

A closer look at a sealed packet of Trader Joe’s garlic. No mold!

Recently I was traveling and picked up a package of Trader Joe’s Premium Peeled Garlic. I’m a fan! It’s $2.49 for only 4 ounces which does not sound like the kind of thing a cheapskate would go for, but I brought the remainder home with me and am still using it three months later. The package contains several smaller packets of a few garlic cloves each, sealed in what is not quite a vacuum pack but definitely has had some air removed and maybe neutral gas pumped in? (No, they’d have to say that on the label.) That’s why the garlic can stay fresh, though the cloves are viable for a while if you have leftovers after the little packet is opened.

Trader Joe’s Premium Peeled Garlic is “grown in California” which is a bonus if you’re concerned about buying fresh food from an overseas source that has reached your produce shelf at the end of a long journey. Look for it among the refrigerated items in the produce section.

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Food for Thought: What’s Annie Cooking

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Annie Tuna Salad

Mom’s tuna salad from What’s Annie Cooking.

What’s Annie Cooking is a hobbyist food blog written by Annie Slocum, a home cook in Denver who says she was heavily influenced by time living in San Francisco. She loves to read and collect cookbooks, and the typical recipe is one in which she borrows from a cookbook (with credit) and adds her own variations.

Annie Curry Shortbread

Curried Shortbreads from What’s Annie Cooking.

The recipes are really appealing and match the flavor sensibility of Burnt My Fingers readers (at least this one) quite nicely. We discovered the blog searching for the recipe for Annie Somerville’s corn stock in Fields of Greens (our own copy is in a box somewhere after a move) and found her recipe for the stock on its own, then converted to Green Corn Soup.  Next up was her mother’s tuna salad which includes frozen peas, stuffed olives, hard boiled eggs and chopped nuts… a winner. We are also tempted by Curry Shortbreads which are just what it sounds like… a savory treat like classic shortbread but with curry flavors.

Annie is not very prolific: she posted one recipe in July 2023 and one in June after a hiatus since March 2023. But the blog has been going on a long time, back to 2011, so there’s plenty to choose from. Maybe if we try some of these recipes, and comment on them, she will post more often. Check it out!

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In search of the elusive chuck eye steak

Posted on July 20, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Chuck Roll Schematic

To find the elusive chuck eye steak, look for a roast matching the configuration of Rib 5.

I was lucky in my experiment breaking down a chuck roast that I got one with a nice chuck eye steak included. This is by no means guaranteed. According to this source, there are no more than 2-3 chuck eye steaks per side and you can expect that some of these will be harvested and sold as such. That’s one reason the chuck roasts I saw on sale were so mysterious to me: couldn’t find the elusive chuck eye steak because it wasn’t there.

Also lucky, this week Certified Angus boneless chuck roasts dropped to an irresistible $3.99 a pound at my local market. You can’t go wrong at that price because if you don’t get the cuts you want you will still have some nice stew meat or you can turn the scraps into a pot roast. I took the attached diagram from Texas A&M to my butcher case and spent a good hour perusing the roasts (to the irritation of the butcher who was restocking).

It’s now clear I’m looking for a roast with a cradle of fat and a clear separation below a steak at the top. I’d lucked into such a roast previously and found another today. A roast without such delineation is going to be from further forward on the animal and will provide some good eating (the roast I grabbed yesterday somehow yielded a nice flatiron) but not the elusive chuck eye.

If you want to research further, here is the scholarly article that yielded the above diagram. This article ranks beef muscles for tenderness. This industry fact sheet has another tenderness ranking. (The longissimus, which makes up the chuck eye steak, is oddly not among them.) Or you could just do what I did: buy a bunch of meat, get out your knife and your cutting board, and dig in.

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Breaking down a chuck roast

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Chuck Roast

This is the chuck roast we’re breaking down. Note the seam between the eye and the denver where we’ve already pulled it loose by hand.

I used to sell meat for a living (Allen Brothers, Niman Ranch mail order) yet for the life of me I cannot reliably break down a larger cut of beef. Part of the problem is that the roasts marketed by butchers tend to be irregular and look nothing like the neat diagrams you might find on a website like Certified Angus Beef; the best stuff is separated into steaks and chops and the roast is what’s left over.

But, with spare ribs $10.99 a pound (bones included), chuck eye steaks $7.99 and boneless chuck roast $5.99 a pound at my local supermarket, it was time to give breaking down a chuck roast a try. With the roast pictured above (this is a crosswise cut looking toward the front of the animal) it’s easy to visualize it being attached to its more costly neighbors, the rib eye and the short ribs. You can see the chuck eye in the middle, and at least one denver (the butcher’s term for boneless short ribs) at the bottom. At the very top is the (not at all tender) mock tender and that long piece at the bottom might or might not qualify as a second denver.

Chuck Roast Separated

Chuck roast, separated.

And here’s what we got after we broke it down. At the top is the chuck eye, which we immediately fried up and enjoyed. Below that are the two denvers. At the right are the mock tender and other bits that will go into stew or be ground into burgers. The very modest amount of fat and silver skin (from the top of the denver) which we removed is at bottom right.

Next time I might try a bone-in chuck roast, which is in some ways more difficult but also easier because the bone gives you a reference point. I am inspired by the Bearded Butchers videos on TikTok, though lately they’ve been into waygu and various gadget cuts. How about you?

 

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Recipe: Crab and Corn Fritters

Posted on July 11, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Crab and /corn Fritters

Crab and Corn Fritters.

Why dilute perfectly good crab meat with cracker crumbs when you can make Crab and Corn Fritters? This recipe is particularly good right now, when fresh corn is in season. Makes about 20 fritters.

Ingredients:
Corn kernels from 2 ears fresh corn, about 2 c
½ lb lump crab meat
1 c all purpose flour
1 ½ t baking powder
1 ½ t sugar
¾ t Kosher salt
2 large eggs
1 c whole milk
1 t Tabasco
½ t Worcestershire sauce
Oil for deep frying

Method: beat eggs and combine with other wet ingredients; mix thoroughly with whisk. Mix dry ingredients thoroughly then make a well in the middle and pour in wet mixture; whisk or stir to combine. Gently fold in corn and crabmeat, taking care to keep crab pieces intact.

Crab Fritters Racked

Recipe makes about 20 fritters, or 4-6 appetizer portions.

Heat oil to 325 degrees and add fritters one at a time, using a tablespoon or scoop to make 2 T portions. (Mound the batter high in the spoon to do this.) Fry 2-3 minutes till the bottom is golden brown; flip over and repeat. Drain on a rack or paper towels.

Serve hot, with garnish of Kewpie mayo, tartar sauce or lemon juice. Leftover fritters can be frozen and reheated in oven with little loss in quality. For best results, freeze individual fritters on a sheet tray then transfer to a storage container.

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Okay, not all frozen pizza is terrible.

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
Frozen Pizza

We tried all these frozen pizzas. With one exception, they weren’t terrible.

Last week’s post produced a number of comments from people who have found decent frozen pizzas at Aldi’s and Trader Joe’s. After trying them, we have to agree that not all frozen pizza is terrible and the problem is the low expectations that supermarkets have for their customers when stocking the freezer case. Here’s what we tried:

Roasted Garlic and Pesto Pizza with Deep Fried Crust from Trader Joe’s. Good flavors and an addictive chewy crust. (One commenter said he liked the crust so much he wished he could buy it plain and add its own toppings.) It didn’t have enough toppings for us, but that’s our general complaint about Neapolitan-style pizzas.

Pizza Parlano from Trader Joe’s. The Trader features this pie proudly on his website and several readers recommended it, but it’s a hard pass for us. Crust and toppings have the mediocre taste and texture of the frozen pizzas that prompted our original outrage, in spite of “Italian sausage, uncured pepperoni, roasted peppers & roasted onions”. Actually, we think the inclusion of green peppers may be a key to the frozen pizza problem as they turn watery when heated up.

Artisan Style Crust Pizza: Pepperoni with Mushrooms and Black Olives from Aldi’s.  Really good sharp flavors, especially the black olives, on a crust that was neither too crackery or too bready. Readers had recommended several Aldi’s pizzas, but our local store was out of most of them. We also tried:

Carolina Inspired BBQ Thin Crust Pizza from Aldi’s. The most cracker-y crust of any we tried, but redeemed by a generous and juicy topping with a sweet barbecue flavor. A lesson to other makers who keep their toppings light because they think the thin crust won’t stand up to thicker layers of cheese and sauce.

PICS Artisanal Pizza

A surprise in our supermarket pizza case!

Semidried Tomato & Brie Pizza from Price Chopper. A sleeper! We found this in the freezer case in our local supermarket alongside other thoroughly mediocre pizzas with the PICS house brand. The toppings were juicy and flavorful and the crust was just right; wouldn’t be upset to be served this at a pizzeria. Sadly, this is the only “Artisanal Hand-Crafted” pizza in the case. The awkward title (and the fact it is not included in the pizza listings on their website) suggests some marketing experimentation at work. We hope it is successful because we would buy more pizzas like this one.

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July 4th Barbecue

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Burnt My Fingers
4th of July Burger

4th of July burger with cheese between two patties.

We have a “Firecracker 4” run in our town that attracts thousands of visitors and our friends’ son Shea Weilbaker has won it twice in a row. We’ll go downtown to see if he three-peats, then turn our attention to serious 4th of July business: barbecue.

Our smoker is on hiatus so, though we have several racks of baby backs in the freezer, we’ll probably go with a double grilled hamburger (our recipe has lots of mods for this simple repast), Jack Daniels-style baked beans and some Better-than-KFC Cole Slaw. And maybe some nice mustardy Texas-style potato salad.  Dessert might be pecan pie, Mom’s chess pie or we might get lazy and go for a double scoop at our nearby Stewart’s.

Mom's Chess Pie

Mom’s Chess Pie with whipped cream, an excellent addition. Photo by Becca Oppenneer.

And, no 4th would be complete without fireworks, which have been in short supply in recent years due to civic budgetary problems, COVID and other distractions. But now there’s a big display planned from the roof of our local parking garage so we’ll hope the rain stays away.

While you’re partying, remember that the holiday is not actually about beer and sunburn but liberty and justice for all. In fact, if you have a Penzey’s store near you you can get Justice (or another half-cup spice or blend) for free by buying $5 worth of something else. Saving money while celebrating… now that’s the American way!

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