I almost never decide what to make for dinner far enough ahead of time for refrigerator defrosting to be an option. The occasional holiday meal, a few times a year. Otherwise I usually make the decision an hour or so before.
But then, also, I rarely cook whole fowl, or cuts of meat sized for roasting. I think in the past year I did it for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, maybe New Year’s Eve, and our anniversary on 1 May.
I prefer to defrost meat by immersing it in cold water. Keeps the meat at a safe temperature, and is pretty fast. We pack everything we freeze in vacuum bags, so the meat stays dry, and for stuff like ground meat or sausage, there’s a nice high surface area/volume ratio, so the thawing (and freezing) is fast. regular ziplocks work well enough, if you don’t have an altar to Blaise Pascal in your kitchen. (you should, but that’s a whole other topic.)
How does Pascal come into this?
Made fresh pizza (dough from scratch, bien sur).
And here we have direct evidence of why my partner loves/hates when I cook. No patience for the little steps (like, say, chopping the zucchini into appropriately sized pieces!).
Basically, we had a bucket of veg (2 zucchini, a bunch of asparagus, and a head of broccoli) that arrived in our weekly grocery box this week, which I forgot about until last night. Roughly chopped the lot of them, and then olive oil, salt and pepper, and into a 450F oven for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, make a pizza dough (4 cups flour, 4 teaspoons fast-rise yeast, salt, sugar, olive oil, water) that claims to be no-knead (I think I used a Martha Stewart kitchen recipe). It was fine, but I don’t recommend it… out of all the scratch-built doughs I’ve done for pizza, this one was the worst/least interesting (still good! But least-good… and uses way too much yeast for the amount of dough you get). Lastly, get the last nubbin from a summer sausage my game store boss gave me for Christmas (him and his brothers, the two owners, give each of the employees a ridiculous amount of food as part of the Christmas bonus for surviving the November-December holiday INSANITY at a game/toy store… it must top $500/employee).
End result? A 7/10 pizza (well, 4 of them, but whatever). I am pleased I thought to use the veg in this way, as it was more satisfying than just roasting it would’ve been, but I’ve made much better dough, and the pizza sauce I had on had was bland.
Happy twist ending: our stand mixer has shown up and the attachments have been cleaned, so for the FIRST TIME in my life I’m going to make dough that is appropriately kneaded. I usually say I have kneading, but the truth is that there is no surface in my kitchen that is “safe” enough to knead on (too close to other things that will either end up in the dough or that the dough will end up in). Stand mixer fixes that problem.
There is a pizza dough recipe that Matt linked to way back in his Skull and Roses review that uses beer and a lot of kneading, and I have been dying to try it ever since then. I will finally! Yay!
The obvious question is: where are you going to put the stand mixer?
Next to the stove and the bread basket, probably? Or maybe on the other side of the bread basket.
Kneading dough takes considerably more space than a stand mixer and is more chaotic. The kitchen was supposed to be renovated to give me nice counter space… in March…
sigh
Oh well! This is better anyway. Right? Right.
Pascal wrote Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide.
If you’d proposed an altar to Papin I would have gotten it.
I have one of those, too, but it’s different device.
Oh, you’re talking about sous vide. I’m not sure if I failed to think of it because sous vide is beyond my culinary horizons, or because when I see the name Pascal I think of probability theory, adding machines, and theology.
Funny enough I had a total cooking fail yesterday and it involved my sous vide.
After a mini meltdown (by me) trying to find it (my storage area is a hot mess) I finally was able to set it up to make cheese cake for my brother’s birthday.
I was taking the pot of water to set it up in the garage (away from kids) and water sloshed then a step and BAM. I landed relatively okay but my big toe took the brunt and is many pretty colors but not broken.
Brother took a rain check on dessert.
Pictures of a previous time I made it and didn’t end up on the floor bruised and doused in water.
It is my week for cooking again. Last night was a stir-fried mixed vegetable julienne in Peking-duck broth. Tonight I made ratatouille and crumbled cauliflower & broccoli with dill tips:
The second Blue Apron of this box:
Blue Apron really seems to like mixing lemon juice and creme fraiche into pasta. It’s not something that would ever have occurred to me to do when you’re already putting other stuff or sauces into the mix.
Fresh bread. Boring, standard, nothing exciting about it, but I’m very happy how the stand mixer’s trial run went.
The dough hook, however, doesn’t seem to do as much as I expected. The dough kinda climbs it, and then just spins with the hook. I’m going to have to look into if that means it’s working properly or not… maybe I need to set the speed lower? I dunno. The bread turned out very well, though, so I can’t really complain. Softer crust, critically.
A lot of you seem to be posting about things you’ve baked. I’ve long felt that cooking and baking are two very different things: cooking is an art, but baking is a science, like chemistry. I cook, but I don’t bake, because it calls for too much precision to suit me; it has too much chance of going wrong and not being fixable in midcourse.
I’m the other way around! Much prefer baking!
These are my thoughts exactly.
I’m a George’s Marvellous Medicine style cook which does not lend itself to baking. My wife is a great cook and a great baker.
I’m never sure how much help they get behind the scenes, but the stuff they do on Great British Bake Off is both incredible and unfathomable to me.
The thing that always startled me visiting American kitchens was the lack of scales. I strongly suspect that this is correlated with the idea that baking is a thing which often goes wrong; it needs the most precise weighing measurement of any cooking process I’ve done.
A former roommate’s former girlfriend was a professional Bakist, learned in the ways of Bakecraft. The absolutely most critical thing she required for bakecrafting was a good quality digital scale.
The second most critical thing was “bakers math” which I still don’t understand to this day.
Between that and my, already significant, adoration for Alton Brown, my kitchen is host to two digital scales.
Is Alton Brown a massive star in the US? We can’t get it now but my wife and I became a bit obsessed with Iron Chef.
