nothavanas | Entries tagged with alton

Meat
9:30 pm
5 tbl Planters Seed Co Brisket & Rib Rub, 2 tbl kosher salt, 1 tbl raw sugar; combine and use to cover 2x 2.5 lb brisket cuts. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
11:00 am
Remove meat from fridge & place in roasting pan on rack; preheat oven to 300 °F. Roast 1 hour; reduce heat to 245 °F, pour some red wine into pan, cover with aluminum foil, and roast another 5 hours. (I think)

BBQ Sauce
11:30 am
1 can diced tomatoes, in saucepan on high to start breaking down.
1 c ketchup; 1/2 c + 2 tbl brown sugar, 1/2 c + 2 tbl apple cider vinegar; 1/4 c molasses; 2 tsp liquid smoke; 1 tbl butter; 2.5 tsp Planters Seed Co Brisket & Rib Rub; black pepper. Simmered 25 minutes. Added more salt and some garlic powder to taste. Let simmer a while longer until delicious, then transfered to squeeze bottles. This amount exactly filled two plastic squeeze bottles of the size that is in the cabinet.

Sourdough Cornbread
10:00 pm
Start up sourdough starter, using some skim milk and some water.
9:00 am
add about 1/4 cup each flour and water; remove roughly 1/4 cup starter
12:30 pm
remove starter and differentiate with cornmeal, evap milk.

Honey Butter (thank you Alton!)
1:00 remove butter from fridge
1:30 whip butter with hand mixer; add honey, vanilla, cinnamon and mix. Transfer to small tupperware and refrigerate

Green Thing
1:00 pm
boil water; trim and chop green beans; boil for 10 min, then ice, drain, and hold.

Finishing
5:00 pm
check meat temps
remove to rest and cool (plenty of flexibility here)
D-30 minutes:
spike oven, heating pan and bacon grease
finish cornbread mixing, add grease, bake bread
melt butter, saute garlic, saute green beans
slice meat; serve with MACII tongs

this is good on pretty much any sort of bread.

2 sticks butter
2 tblsp honey
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp vanilla extract

(use the good stuff--local honey and Tahitian vanilla--if you've got it, which i do.)

Put the softened butter in a bowl and whip briefly with a handmixer. When it doesn't look like sticks anymore, add the flavorings. Continue whipping until it's all mixed together and the butter's light and fluffy. Transfer to tupperware and put in the fridge. Feel free to lick the beaters, meanwhile ignoring your cardiologist. You don't have one? You will if you keep licking butter off of beaters.

Things I made which were good:

Grilled Mexican Corn, from Cooks Illustrated, with a spicy creamy sauce. They have you rub the corn in oil mixed with chile powder before grilling, which gives it a great flavor. I used the broiler, since we weren't grilling anything else.

Vegetable stock, two giant pots full. I didn't bother sauteing any of the vegetables this time. I have made stock ice cubes from some of it, and used some of it in...

Vegetable soup that was sort of supposed to be borscht. Mainly it had a couple beets in it. It ended up being your standard tasty veggie soup with carrots and celery and potatoes and things.

Squash dumplings with brown butter. Thank you, Alton Brown! These were fantastic. You bake some potatoes and some squash (I had delicata, not butternut) and mash their fleshes together. You add salt and nutmeg and flour, then shape into little balls. I couldn't get the dough to become non-sticky, so I just sort of hand-shaped some blobs. I refrigerated them overnight (okay, I left them out in the garage) and boiled them in salted water the next day, until they float. Then you cool them in ice water and toss them with a touch of oil. Before you serve them, you brown them in butter which has first been browned itself, with some sage leaves. So fantastic, rich and decadent and relatively healthy, as decadence goes.

This was from Alton Brown.
While the water boiled, I chopped the chard, separating the stems and leaves, onions, and garlic. The chard leaves blanched for 3 minutes, then I fished it out and put the pasta (stripy bowties!) in the same pot. I cooled and chopped the chard, then sautéd the aromatics (including the chard stems, which were yellow) in some olive oil. I added a paste of equal parts butter and flour, cooking that for about 5 minutes, and then added lots of canned diced tomatoes. The next step was to add chicken broth, which I substituted with my homemade vegetable stock. I will be sad when I use all of that up. Then I added the chard and the pasta and tossed it to warm everything up, and finished with probably more Parmesan than it called for, a little rosemary, and some salt and pepper.

This is fantastic. The sauce has some of the same tomato-garlic flavor that makes our pasta sauce so amazing, but it's tempered by the roux and the stock, so it is a little creamy and the bitter chard really shines.
I did a lot of the prep in advance, as the water heated and as the chard and pasta cooked, so the actual cooking part went very smoothly.

My kitchen smells like Gargoyles Statuary right now, thanks to the massive amounts of clove in these cookies. Lebkuchen are great because they are dairy-free, honey-based bar cookies you can make way ahead. They're unusual in that you make them by hand in a saucepot. Really.

You boil the honey, let it cool, and add brown sugar, lemon juice and zest, and one egg. Then you add the dry ingredients to that and bake in a 9x13 pan.
This is Joy of Cooking 1997's recipe. I used TJ's Mesquite Honey, and weighed out the flour as per Alton Brown's conversion (2 1/2 c = 337 g). I sifted everything together in the food processor, including a ton of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. The dough ends up very crumbly, kind of like cheesecake crust might. The gooey ingredients measure (another AB rec) is a total lifesaver when measuring honey. What I don't recommend is grating your finger while zesting a lemon. Ow.

The frosting is powdered sugar, lemon juice, and vanilla. Easiest frosting in the world to make and to spread, especially over hot bar cookies. Now they cool, and I seal them off from air until Monday morning. They're to thank my students for putting up with a new teacher.

Alton Brown's Spiced Angelfood Cake, made at 50% scale so as to fit into my bundt pan. It came out absolutely perfectly and was a smash hit at the fondue/firespinning/music/kittens gathering Monday night. I've never made an angelfood cake before, but this was easy (with a handheld mixer) and quick to make.

I am contemplating what to do with six egg yolks, however.

Alton Brown's Cranberry Sauce, as seen last night on Good Eats. We had to sub cocktail for 100% juice, but it appears to be working.

Sausage and Celery Stuffing, with lots of bread and also onions sauteed in lots of butter. We had sage sausage.

Teddy Bear Bread. This one is currently at the first rise, but I'm certain it will be delicious as always.
The bears are now shaped and rising. They are so cute!

There will be turkey-roasting shortly, and gravy and mashed potatoes and the usual. Then the traditional Christmas Day turkey burritos with green chile sauce.

I do so love this salmon recipe. It just puts a beautiful flavor on the outside of the fish and lets the wonderful wild flavor shine.

Cajun Fried Zucchini, pg 40 of On the Chile Trail.

I did Various Summer Squash, including zukes, patty pan squash, crookneck squash, and an odd ridged variant of zukes. I had seven cups of squash, which took 3 and a bit cups of breadcrumbs. (Breadcrumbs equals 1 package of TJ's hot dog buns, dried in the oven on warm for about 10 hours and food processed vigorously.)
I needed only 1 cup of flour and the 2 eggs/1 cup milk ratio they recommended for the 2 cup batch. I used 3/4 cup half and half and 1/4 cup skim milk, since that's what I had.
The spice mix is tasty, but it underflavors the bits. I'd add a teaspoon and a half, rather than a teaspoon, per cup of dried starch product. Although as they cool, they taste more of spices and less of delicious warm fried food.

I've never deep fried before, so that was an experiment. I was quite terrified of the hot oil, quietly shimmering at 350 °F. But once I actually dropped the food in it was easy and not very splashy. I followed Alton's recommendation and let the breaded food sit for awhile, which I think was a good call. (What I did was to bread everything, and then fry everything.) Now I have two cookie trays piled high with fried squash. Om nom nom.

1 russet potato, stabbed with a fork, rolled in canola oil and sprinkled with salt. Microwaved for 5 min on high, left in the microwave for a while, then wedged into the oven alongside a cookie tray for 20 min at 325. Potato split, buttered, and sprinkled with Smoky Hills Cheese Blend.
om nom nom. (Directions from Alton Brown. He says 350, but the cookies took precedence on that one.)

Also, Grandma Morton's Ginger Cookies. <3

Ecstatic Salmon (Alton Brown’s “The Cure for Salmon” with really frakking good salmon)

$6 worth of Keta salmon from Loki Fish Company, bought from the cute guy who’s there all the time.
A tablespoon or so of blackberry blossom honey from Rockridge Orchards, from the charmingly outgoing owner.
Equal parts coarse sea salt and sugar (1.5 tablespoons each).

Mix the salt and sugar. Heat the honey until thin and spreadable, or just stop the microwave as soon as it boils. Put down a piece of tinfoil and a piece of saran wrap on top of that. Spread less than half of the salt-sugar mixture on the plastic in about the shape of the fish. Brush both sides of the fish with the honey, using all of it, and then lay the fish down on the crystals. Cover the fish with the rest of the salt and sugar. Wrap it up tightly and set the package in a dish. Weight with a plate and some cans of food, and refrigerate for two hours. Turn the fish over after one hour and reweight.
Unwrap the fish, and place it on a foil-lined baking sheet. Heat the broiler as hot as it will get, and when it’s there, slide the fish in. Broil for 8 minutes, if you have a filet that’s an inch and a quarter or so thick at the thickest point. The thin parts will be a little dry, but that’s ok.
Do not sauce the fish. Do not put it on a plate with dressed salad. Just eat it as it is.

I don’t know if this treatment would be as good with frozen and factory-processed fish. It would probably be very tasty. With the fresh wild fish, it is amazing. We’re talking borderline erotic.