Eric Ripert Goes to Costco...

Good News! I'm back.

Currently I'm about 5 days away from the end of the quarter. New posts to come soon, but until then I'll leave you with this hilarious video where a GQ writer takes Eric Ripert to Costco- and according to him, the food is really good! Hooray for Costco.

Definitely worth a look if you need a food related pick me up.

Kitchen Tip - Milk

This is probably my best Kitchen Tip so far - and it will completely change the way you buy milk from now on.

I don't drink that much milk. What used to happen a lot is that I'd buy milk, pour myself a glass, put the milk back in the fridge and four days later the milk would have gone sour before I had a chance to do anything with it.

I can get a carton of milk to last for at least 14 days now without it going sour. This is the trick - as soon as you open the carton of milk, pour the milk into 2 clean restaurant quart containers (we have tons of them, you can get them when you order soup from a Chinese restaurant.) You'll have a little extra milk after you've filled your two containers, either drink it or pour it into another container. 

Put the containers both back into the fridge. Shove one container behind the other so that you use up the first container of milk before you open the second one, and don't open the second container until you need it.

 For some reason the milk keeps fresher for much longer in the containers then if it was just sitting in a carton. I think that the milk in my fridge has been sitting there for three weeks now and it STILL hasn't gone sour. 

Give it a try and let me know how this Kitchen Tip works for you.

Cooking Save - Too Salty Pasta Sauce

A few weeks ago I made pasta sauce with a can of tomato puree that my mom had given to me. The tomato puree was organic and I didn't want it to go to waste so I made pasta sauce with it. I seasoned the sauce like I normally would have but unfortunately I didn't realize that the puree already had salt added to it.

The sauce ended up being too salty and I didn't want to throw it away, so I mixed in some plain Greek yogurt. The thick yogurt gave the sauce an extra creamy consistency and the new sauce coated the pasta beautifully. It tasted like just like normal pasta sauce and it's a good way to sneak some more calcium into your diet. I grated on a little pepper and voila! The pasta sauce was edible once more.

Sweet Tea

 Ok. So I just finished reading 12 of those Sookie Stackhouse books. You know the ones that the show True Blood is based on? All I can say is that they are wildly addictive and my sleeping schedule is really off now that I've stayed up really late (multiple nights in a row) because I couldn't stop reading them. I'm glad there were so many of them and that they kept me so entertained for the past 3 weeks. I don't think that I would have gotten through finals week as stress free as I did without a bunch of good books to read during my little study breaks.

Because the books are set in the South, the characters drink a lot of sweet tea and eat french fried pickles. (Who knew you could fry a pickle?) and that got me thinking that I haven't had a glass of homemade sweet tea in a really long time. Plus, I live in Seattle and any iced tea that we get in a restaurant undoubtedly comes out of a soda machine. No one really makes it at home here, and it's a perfect drink for a hot summer's day.

In Seattle we get about 5 of those a year...

Serve with a little wedge of lemon or two in each glass and you'll wonder why more people don't drink this all year long. Cheers!


Makes 12 servings

3 Quarts of Water (12 cups)
10 Black Tea Bags
1 3/4 cup Sugar

1-2 trays of Ice Cubes
6 lemons quartered (preferably organic)

Time - about 20 minutes

Directions

Bring 3 Quarts of water to a boil over medium high heat (this should take about 12- 14 minutes.)

 Turn off the heat and toss in the 10 tea bags. Follow brewing directions of the tea. I used the organic black tea from Whole Foods. It was $4 for 70 tea bags and I steeped it for 3 minutes.

 

Steeping...

After 3 minutes, remove the tea bags and stir in the sugar. It should be a little too sweet if you taste it now. Once you pour the warm/ hot tea over the ice, the ice will melt, and mellow out the tea to the perfect sweetness.

You could pour it into a pitcher with a lot of ice right now if you're serving multiple people and leave out a bowl of the lemon wedges so that people can tailor the lemon-iness to their liking.

 Or for an individual serving, ladle your tea over a glass full of ice and squeeze in a wedge or two of lemon. I personally like my glass of sweet tea best with two lemon wedges squeezed in.

Now it's time to lay outside with a glass of tea and a good book. Enjoy!

-------

If you happen to have leftover sweet tea, stash it in your fridge for later. When you pour yourself a glass of refrigerated tea, add about 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of water. The extra water will make up for the lack of rapidly melting ice cubes that would have watered down the tea originally. Add lemon and a couple extra ice cubes if desired.

Cooking Fail - Cheap Steak

I've bought cheap steaks before from the supermarket for about $3 a piece and they've usually had pretty good flavor. As long as you salt and pepper them and only start cooking them once they've reached room temperature, you're usually pretty good to go. So I was really surprised when these "outside round bottom steaks" from Whole Foods were so incredibly tough and tasteless.


I got a package of three steaks for $6. Then covered them in the compound butter (the lemon and garlic one we put on the French Bread) and then let them sit overnight in the fridge. The next day I let them come to room temp and then put them into a medium hot pan and cooked it for a little less than a minute on either side. It was SO tasteless. In an attempt to save it, I just slathered more of the compound butter onto the steak. It tasted a lot better but it was still so tough, even when you cut it across the grain.
I'm going to make it a point to never buy this kind of steak again. I'll keep on the look out for a cheap, decent tasting steak next time I'm at the supermarket.

Weird Lookin' Produce-1

So I'm finally back! As of March 1st I'm 3 years in remission! Yay!

To celebrate, I'm going to start off a new segment on my blog called "Weird Looking' Produce." Basically, anytime I spot an odd looking (affordable) fruit or vegetable, I'm going to buy it, try it, and then post about what those unusual foods taste like.

So first off are an Heirloom Tomato and a Yellow Plum. I brought them both from Whole Foods. That tomato is huge it was a pound an a half and cost $3.50, but it had lots of pretty colors and I thought that it might taste significantly different from a regular tomato as it looked really different from a normal tomato.

Inevitably, despite it's unusual appearance and $3.50 price tag- it pretty much tasted like a regular old tomato, except that it had a little bit of a grassy taste, and it wasn't very sweet.
The yellow plum was really pretty also. It had a faint red blush at the top of the plum and it was kind of shaped like those peaches that you see in Asian cartoon drawings. It tastes just like a normal purple plum.

My plans for the giant tomato is to make it into a pasta sauce sometime this week and I'm going to eat the plum now while I do my homework. Let me know if you've come across any weird produce! What did it taste like?

New Plan

Hey everyone. I should probably explain why I've been absent for the past few months. My grandfather died during Winter Break and we had to fly back to Holland for the funeral. Since then I've been swamped with school and honestly I've found it really difficult to find time to sleep let alone blog.

But I'm going to try and post something once a week. I think that at times like this (after so many family members dying in such a short period of time, which has been absolutely awful, and incredibly heartbreaking) that I need to focus on the things that give me comfort. Cooking (and subsequent eating) tend to be very comforting tasks and hopefully you, dear reader, can also benefit from these forthcoming recipes.

Wish me luck,

Elaine