One on garlic bread and hash browns.

At the Haymarket beerfest I talked with the Le Quartier guy about some issues I was having. My biggest problem is during the second rising I get issues with the dough sticking to anything it touches. The no knead bread is very wet. I tried a very floured up tea towel with flour on top. When it rose gooey bits stuck to the towel. I heard wheat bran works, but did not like the taste. I just ended up using a bunch of flour which would build up a white crust that took a bit of work to scrape off. Pic below.

I hoped to get some good info from the Le Quartier guy and waited a bit to ask. He was glad to share the secrets I needed. First on the second rising no cling wrap. It needs to breathe a bit since it is so wet. But the real trick is to use rice flour to keep it from sticking to stuff. I got some white rice flour and it seemed like a really fine sand. When the loaf came out it was not crusted with the flour and you can hear the crust crackling while it cooled down. When it cooled enough I was able to wipe the little bit of flour sticking to it off with my hand. It was good.

We have been kicking the peppercorn steaks almost every weekend for about 5 months now. It gets pricey buying fillets of loin roasts. I kinda said we need to do something different since we have it so often, but Sam’s club had the PSMO (Peeled Side Meat On tenderloin) for $5 a pound for choice which goes for $24 a pound at Ideal. I simply had to try it.

I used the fine instruction of Alton Brown of good eats to trim it down.
Episode part 1
Episode part 2

If you watch the first clip it will show how to carve one of these up. We got the side meat roast, 2 big chunks of the loin for Chateaubriand (how we do the recipe lately), two fillets, two mini end cuts I butterflied for a snack some day, and the chain meat I will make an awesome cheese steak from some time. The savings were absolutely unbelievable. I think I will be chopping a bunch of these up for years to come.

I picked up a brinkman bullet smoker from an auction near my house about 5 years ago. This would be my second time using the thing in that whole span. It will get used a lot more after grubbing down last night. Theresa is not a big fan of smoked meat, but I dig it. I smoked some baby back ribs and two pork shoulder steaks. 7 hours with a stoking of the coals 1/2 way through and many additions of hickory and mesquite wood chips did wonders. I did not season them all that much so the pure flavor could shine through.

He also did a full episode on knives which you can see here

hat tip Jake

Saw a link to Top 10 Awesome Nostalgic Foods We Want Back and read their list. Right when it came to the tato skins I was like whoa man TGI fridays makes them now. Scoured the comments and saw someone gave them a shout out. I loved those tato skins as a kid and here at work they grace our vending machine.

So speaking of potato skins, we have baked potatoes once a week at least. We even used red potatoes this past week and did not find them to all that much different. I never eat the skins though. It is kinda funny because we olive oil and salt the potatoes before we bake them, but it is more for show. Well I tried a potato skin all oiled up and salted a bit back. Meh…..

DINK (double income no kids) has a local food review blog going on. I did not know we were dinkers, but that has a catch ring to it. Lets see, a review of a review blog, hmmmmmmmm….. nope not gonna go there. But, I will go there to read their takes on some places, you should too.

So speaking of food blogs, well kinda, that domain I bought is finally gonna get some work. Heavens knows there simply are not enough food blogs, and the world really needs another. So keep your eyes peeled for that. Basically I am gonna take every me make food post here and put them over there, work on producing more videos of the current things we have down good, Theresa has been working on the recipe list, and prob cross post everything here as well.

EDIT: jeeeeesh I did not even link to them on this post. Fixed.

I posted about the red velvet cake balls a day or so ago. We figured if we used Theresa’s checkerboard cake to make dual filled cake balls. We made ours from scratch the whole way. Man are they good.

My first bacon of the month package showed up. I am currently sitting on 6 pounds of bacon, so it is going to be quite a while till I get around to testing this. So review to come.

First 100% on GHIII

we were in a hurry so we roasted the chicken on the grill instead of the dutch oven with veg way. I got creative and jammed some aromatic veg in the cavity. Did not do much though really.

This is pert neat exactly like the no knead bread I love to make. Le Quartier sells it and it has some rye flour in it. It has the huge bubbles and uber crunchy crust I love so much. I still love what I make, but if in a hurry I will pick this up for sure.

I love how it has the baked on flour issue like I usually have. But, their loaf is so fricking beautiful. Ma gonna see if I can create that look here tomorrow.

The butcher gave us a 20 ounce chunk of tenderloin and we cut off a 7 ounce chunk for later. We making a cheatu Brion style peppercorn fillet tomight.

Theresa picked up this handi vac thingy mcbobber for us. We do freeze lots of stuff. I would of never bought this thing, but I am amazed at how well it works. Guess I will be washing there sucky ziplock bags like my mom used to di with the regular ones. BTW glad zip bags are so fricking cheap.

Our very first date I took Theresa to Spaghetti works. I might still have the matchbook from that date. Sure it was awesome to hang with her, but the garlic bread. Oh, that garlic bread. It is to die for. I have heard stories of some old lady that comes in every day and all she does is make garlic bread. I wish to meet her someday. Something about the slight goldenness and flecks of parsley encased in that crispy garlic cheese crust.

We garlic bread a bunch and have gone through many styles over the years. I have tried to recreate SW garlic bread many times and never came close, till tonight. It was so simple I am amazed. Butter, parm cheese, parsley, and fresh ground garlic. The fresh garlic was key. I used a microplane to turn it into liquid mush. We have used raw garlic before, but only the minced stuff in the jar. Powders just do not cut it. Spread it, let it brown, done. The garlic is sweet and the cheese flavorful. We have made it a few times and I think I still need to cut back on the butter, more cheese.

Did not mean to alarm. Stuff just not go good at work once again. I fine. Made some bacon cheeseburger mac tonight. was nummy.

Been a while since I made jerky. Usually I get a really lean roast and hand slice it really thin. Blend up a red bell pepper, some soy sauce, salt, cayenne and black pepper. This time I decided to chop it all up and it turned out pretty good. I rolled it out a bit too thin, and getting it on the trays was a pain. I ended up freezing it to peel it off the waxed paper and on to the tray. When it dried it was paper thin and the peppercorns I thought would chop up good in the food processor hardly chopped up. So there are 1/2 and whole peppercorns in there.

On Dinner impossible they make this lasagna which looked pretty good, and we have been trying different styles and figured this would be good. It is 3 layers deep, two cheese, and the top tomato sauce based.

The garlic bread I wanted to mix up a bit and add real garlic to it instead of some powdered variety like I usually do. I was looking for some sort of a cheesy garlic spread we could have around and use easily. Man did I over do the garlic. I used my microplane grater to work it in there. It was seriously intense. Will try again later.

The lasagna was pretty good. Without meat or other bulky fillings it was pretty flat and cheesy, but still really good. Some chicken would of been nice. We split it into two batches so we can check it out again here soon. Gonna need some soft foods for the next two weeks since Theresa gets braces.