Food Follies – Page 29 – Cooking, Baking, Recipes, Food, Desserts

Guac… what?

I’m usually a basic Lay’s potato chip type of person – I like potatos, oil, and salt in my chips, and not much else. But for some ungodly reason I thought I should branch out a bit and try some of the flavors I’d been dismissing for so long now, so during a sale, I bought a bag of Lay’s “Cool Guacamole” flavored chips.

First of all, they are a really weird dusted green color that’s obviously artificial. Second, the major identifiable flavors are jalapeno and lime juice and MSG. (Which always makes me swell up like a balloon, so I have a personal vendetta against it.) Thirdly, there’s absolutely no avocado in it whatsoever. The flavor itself was “okay”, but there are too many other factors running against them at this point. So, as you can tell, I’m going back to my plain Lay’s, thank you very much. If you’re the kind of person that loves flavored chips, then you may like them – just don’t expect anything at all close to guacamole!

Speaking of guacamole, John brought home a couple of lovely, photogenic avocados the other day, which I photographed and then ‘designed’ and made them into t-shirts and cards, and posters and such! (Click on the graphic to see this image on the products in the Food Follies shop.) It’s oddly difficult to photograph food in a way that makes it look like it’s supposed to. I remember taking a photo once of a baked ziti that was fresh out of the oven and looked SO good, but the photo came out looking like beige shiny plastic (melted cheese) slopped over bumpy red stuff. Ahhh, well – it was better to eat than take pictures of anyway – LOL!

DeRose Wine

We tried another excellent local wine last week, this time it was a Cabernet Sauvignon from DeRose Vinyards. The wine had an excellent fruity taste which was smooth and not overpowering. This was easily a good cheese wine, and would probably go with almost anything

Mmmm… doughnuts….

Police follow the doughnuts, find the stolen Krispy Kreme truck, and are rewarded with… any guesses? *grin*

Tomato Florentine Soup

I was cleaning out the fridge and realized I had half a bag of spinach leaves that needed to be used very soon. I decided on Tomato Florentine Soup, which I was already familiar with from work.

At work, I’ve always used frozen spinach, which is more bitter than the fresh leaves and made flavoring the soup more of a challenge. The fresh leaves were a pleasure and the soup had a wonderfully sweet taste.

One thing I did notice was that the pasta seemed to absorb the salt, and I found myself adding a lot more to flavor it. I never noticed this at work, but I had to be light on the salt anyway, since many of our residents were on low sodium diets.

Speaking of work, my full time job as a cook often kept me too busy to post here. As of last Monday, that’s no longer an issue, I am no longer employed. Ironically, now I will have more time to cook and write up recipes for the site.

I’ve learned a great deal as a professional cook; however, its a very demanding job, often unnecessarily so because of poor management policies and corporate downsizing. Cooking at home is far more enjoyable, even with no counter space and less equipment. Its far better to learn the tips and techniques from television (and blogs like this one!) and practice them on your own.

Chocolate Room

Chocolate Factory Makes Room Good Enough To Eat: “HALLE, Germany — Germany’s oldest chocolate factory celebrated its 200th anniversary this week in a very special way. Halloren created a room entirely of chocolate. The room took months to make. It includes 108 wall panels made of sweet and bittersweet chocolate. The stucco is made from marzipan, accompanied by a coat of white chocolate paint. Authentic 19th century dishes and cups were also created, as was a delicious rocking chair. The room is air-conditioned to prevent the chocolate from melting. About 2,000 pounds of chocolate and 500 pounds of marzipan were used to create the sweet masterpiece.”

Pre-Holiday

We’re having an early Thanksgiving this year – tomorrow actually, as John is working on Thursday. I made the apple pie this morning (Just assembled, not baked yet.) and every time I make one I think, “This is so easy, I should do this more often!” and then promptly forget again. I use Granny Smith apples because I like the tang; they are also my ‘eating’ apple of choice too. (Although I also like MacIntosh and Cortland, but the latter seem to be only an Upstate New York thang and I can’t find them out here on the West Coast.) The squirrels and rabbits and raccoons are going to get a treat too, as I’m tossing all the peelings and cores over the fence. They’ll be completely gone by tomorrow morning, easy.

The Perfect Cheeseburger

First of all, we really need a hamburger icon.

Last week we went to a local diner that features a “colossal burger” on the menu. It usually measures up to it’s name, but this time the burger seemed to be just a little bigger than a quarter pounder. I left the restaurant feeling disgruntled, disappointed and craving my colossal burger.

Tonight I decided to balance my culinary karma. I bought a pound of Coleman Ground Beef and made two whopping burgers, plus Kristen cut up a whole mess of potatoes for some natural fries.

Coleman beef has a very “clean” taste. I don’t know how else to describe it. Its also free of those nasty, chewy globules that come in cheaper meat. (Please don’t write to tell me what they are, I’m sure that I don’t want to know.) The meat is expensive, but well worth the money.

My secret to great burgers is to put some onion powder into the raw meat. The oniony flavor gets evenly distributed through the beef and gives the burger an extra dimension of flavor that you don’t get from adding raw onions.

Mmmmm, colossal burger….

Jonesing for Weird Soda Flavors

Jones Soda is at it again, just in time for the holidays, of course. Their turkey and gravy soda is coming back, as well as a green bean casserole soda (I don’t even like the casserole itself!), and a few others, the least gross-sounding is cranberry soda, which might actually be quite tasty. (Which reminds me – I really miss Schweppes Raspberry Ginger Ale. I haven’t seen it in many years and I wonder if they even still make it.) But anyway, my favorite quote from the article is this one: “‘Oh, man, I can’t drink that!’ cries out company chief executive Peter van Stolk, after pouring himself a drink of mashed potatoes.” *grin*

What’s in the Fridge?

I call it ‘leftover casserole’ or ‘goulash’. Other people might call it ‘cleaning out the fridge’ – LOL. I took the bowl of John’s remaining homemade tomato sauce, chopped up the three large meatballs, added what was left of a jar of four cheese pasta sauce, plus what was left of a jar of ground beef pasta sauce, plus a nice flavoring of parmesan cheese, and mixed it all up together in a casserole dish. Then I added some cooked penne pasta (had this been a real goulash, such as from my childhood, it would have been wide egg noodles, but what are you gonna do), mixed, sprinkled more parmesan cheese on top for decoration, and popped it in the oven.

I can smell it now – mmmmmmm. There’s NOTHING like a house filled with the smell of cooking. If all of those companies that make air fresheners could duplicate that smell, they’d be five times as successful. (Of course, I also think that if they could make a cologne that smelled like freshly baked bread, interpersonal relations would probably reach an all time high. *grin*)

Nothing Like A Merlot

John and I finally cracked open a bottle of wine that he got last year at work for the holidays: A local wine, Pietra Santa, from the Cienega (See-YEN-eh-guh) Valley; a 1998 Merlot. The first sip packed a punch in the back of the throat, but the taste was very pleasant and slightly…. musky, in the good way that Merlots tend to be.

I’d definitely recommend this wine, and think it would probably go well with a steak dinner, provided the steak was cooked without a lot of added flavorings or marinades – don’t need too many flavors jumping around together when you’ve already got the wine going too. (Oh, and steak fries would be good also. We actually just had some potato chips with it, as it was after dinner, but it was an excellent combo, if not overly genteel – LOL!)

Also, drinking wine after 7 p.m. here has the added benefit of making our hands and feet feel a bit warmer tonight as well, of course. *grin*