The Whole Dish podcast: Cooking live crabs precedes creamy casserole feast Also looming large in my family’s seafood pantheon is crab — the South Coast’s native Dungeness. Just as smoking salmon became a family tradition over the years, so did cooking live crabs wherever we happened to find ourselves. After we pulled our crab pots [...]
Flounder, mentioned in this blog’s previous post, was just one of many fish on my childhood menu. Chief in South Coast residents’ estimation, of course, is salmon. And the highest esteem always was awarded to my dad’s home-smoked salmon, which used to be a staple but is now scarcer with the dwindling fish runs. So [...]
I had to nix a meal of frozen fish sticks on a recent grocery-store tour. The exercise and its “$10 Meal Challenge,” covered in a previous post, requires participants to prepare a meal for four people using every food group for the specified budget — and by purchasing primarily whole foods. That means nothing that [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: ‘Pure and simple’ bone-marrow preparation Boiling up some leftover bones — roast ham, chicken and the like — with a few other odds and ends, essentially constitutes a free meal. Even highlighted on their own, bones are incredibly inexpensive. Or so I realized when I paid $3 for a half-pound of [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: Adapt Spring Green Pilaf to any vegetables, herbs If your family is anything like mine, varying quantities of leftover Easter ham still claim space in your refrigerator. There’s no denying that the holiday roast is great sliced for sandwiches. And I almost always dispatch the last of our ham, whatever can’t [...]
The classic cure-all, chicken-noodle soup, was reformulated recently in the Chicago Tribune. Crispy-skin chicken atop udon noodles bathed in a stock of the roasted bird and veggies are the main deviations from the typical chicken-soup format. Concentrated flavors of fennel and lemon persuaded me to prepare this version for my family, all suffering from the [...]
Traditional dishes that seem like smorgasbords of meat I suspect got their start with much, much less. That’s because the obvious way to make a meal from a couple of poultry parts, a single sausage and a pork knuckle or bacon end is to throw them all together in one pot. Cooks fortunate enough to [...]
Purchasing bacon ends, instead of strips, is my preferred method for saving money while improving certain dishes. Bacon ends, as I mentioned in my most recent podcast, are suited to dishes in which bacon is chopped into chunks, known as lardons in classical French cuisine. Dicing raw bacon, of course, allows the fat to render [...]
The most budget-friendly meats don’t offer much in the way of “meat” at all. Cooks can expect lots of bone, tendon, gristle, sinew and — if they’re lucky — marrow. Almost indigestible when raw or undercooked, these undervalued bits become delightfully chewy, jiggly and wiggly, even creamy and silky when rendered, braised and stewed over [...]
The Whole Dish podcast: Repurposed animal fat enhances plant-based dishes In the pursuit of kitchen wisdom, devising smarter strategies for preparing and consuming meat is a valuable lesson. So I planned a class to teach as a volunteer for ACCESS, in partnership with Rogue Valley Family YMCA. The test run of “Smart Ways With Meat” [...]