The 500 dollar blender on my wishlist

All I have in my apartment is an immersion stick blender, which is useful and a good multitasker and compact enough for a lot of easy blending jobs, especially soups or sauces.  Lately I've been finding it lacking in the smoothie and drink making department, but I've finally experienced the straw that broke the camel's back. 

So I'm been digging these expensive chocolate soymilk protein drinks like from Odwalla or something, but it's basically soymilk, sugar (or cane juice or whatever they call it), chocolate, and banana (mostly for texture I think or else the drink would be too thin and watery).  Supposedly chocolate milk is good for you some how, like a great post work out drink.  Anyway, I get an idea for just a Mexican chocolate milk, just blend up milk, cocoa powder with some chipotle and arbol powder, and cinnamon.  Now, if you've ever blown bubbles into your milk when you were a kid, you would know that the milk can create a large mass of foam.  Well, that's what happened, milk spilled over the cup after 2-3 seconds of blending with my stick blender(even though I only poured enough milk to fill the cup half way).  I poured some of the milk out and some how lost a huge load of cocoa powder into the sink too because it didn't even get integrated into the milk.  I tried whisking the mix a little bit more hoping to recover something for the ordeal but it was no use as the drink was a gritty mess. 

I've been wanting to drink more smoothies lately since they're easy, tasty, and pretty nutritious.  And way too expensive when buying it outside at juice places or buying bottles of it.  Using my stick blender has been a hassle since it has trouble pulverizing frozen fruit.  After doing a little research on blenders and watching Alton use it, I came across the Vita-Mix.  Supposedly comparing regular blenders to a Vitamix is like comparing a shovel to a bulldozer.  This is basically food service grade stuff.  It apparently canpulverize the raspberry seeds in your smoothies and can make soup with the heat of its motor if what the people on the forum are saying is true.  The model I'm looking at is like $450.00 though.  Bleh.  I'll probably get one eventually, I'm totally loving what I'm hearing about this thing. 

A sandwich 5 years in the making

One of my favorite shows on Food Network is "Best Thing I Ever Ate."  Each week has a theme and it just has a bunch of talking head interviews with celebrity chefs or food personalities who wax poetic (is that how I use that term?) about their favorite dish spliced with footage of the dish/restaurant/whatever.  I dig how everyone is just so passionate about what they'r eating. Cat Cora mentioned this sandwich here at about the 3 minute mark at a place in Santa Maria that looked really good.  I always wanted to go to Santa Maria to try their barbeque back when I lived in Santa Barbara 5 years ago, which is just about 1 1/2 hours south of there.  Supposedly it's one of these great traditional barbeque enclaves like Kansas City or Memphis with their own unique culinary specialties you can't find done well anywhere else.  I never made the trip there but maybe one of these days when I'm traveling up and down California.  Anyway, the traditional cut of meat of Santa Maria is tri-tip, and I saw a smaller 2 1/2 pound roast for sale wandering the meat aisle at S-Mart after checking out the discount produce.  I figured I'd finally try making it myself during the long Easter break.  I probably spent like 4 hours going to 3-4 stores collecting the right things, like going to OSH to get wood for smoking, Safeway to get bread, another grocery store which I knew had a wider variety of barbeque sauces, balsamic vinegar, etc.

Preparing the Santa Maria style salsa and tri tip was pretty simple.  I followed most of this recipe for the salsa.  Most of the traditional recipes for Santa Maria tri tip uses like a dry rub consisting of garlic powder, garlic salt, pepper, and dried parsley.  I don't have garlic salt and just used garlic powder and salt and  added in fresh garlic and parsley for more flavor (I apparently forgot at the time that fresh garlic and herbs burn on the grill).  I used some hickory chips for smoking and cooked it on a gas grill over high heat for a few minutes and then over indirect heat until a digital thermometer read around 132 ish.  Not sure if anyone knows what a digital thermometer is but you leave a metal probe inside the meat and a coated wire comes out from it, and I ended up burning my finger trying to take the probe out after cooking.  Sort of sucked. 

The sandwich was really good overall, probably one of my better dishes I've cooked in a while.   

Salmon burgers

Here's a random concoction I made up, trying to make something interesting out of fish like tacos or something that isn't just a piece of fish on a plate.  I keep some frozen salmon and mahi mahi around in case I think of something to make, and I forced myself to take a piece out of the freezer and thaw out in my fridge and use it.  At first I was just going to cook it and eat it plain with some vegetables on the side but never got around to cooking it.  After a few days and some panic over whether it was going to spoil soon I thought I should make a burger out of it.  I think most of the recipes for salmon burgers were like recipes for tuna salad: some herbs, some pickles like capers or cornichons, and mayonnaise.  I put a little chili sauce and a bit more yogurt than mayonnaise.

For some reason I thought the mayonnaise and yogurt would basically make the salmon patty un-overcookable but I was wrong. The patty was leaking a bunch of water as I let it set up in the fridge and it was this super wet unmanagable mixture.  The thing was falling apart in the pan too, so I figured it would take a while before getting overcooked.  If you ever had overcooked fish, or any overcooked piece of meat really, it's basically inedible.  It's like eating cotton balls, the food like sucks all the saliva out of your mouth and it's tasteless.  I chose an awful bun to eat it on too.  I got a dutch crunch roll from WinCo but it was terribly dense.  It was disappointing because I was looking forwards to eating it but I could barely take a couple bites out of it.  Ah well.

Alton Brown Approved: Sardines on toast

I was watching Good Eats a few months ago and Alton did an episode about dieting.  I didn't catch the whole episode but it did make me notice that Alton has been looking mighty skinny on those Welch's commercials.  I haven't watched the last few seasons of Good Eats as regularly as I'd like, mostly because a lot of his show topics are hit or miss, but apparently he was a huge balloon last season.  He says he lost 50 pounds in 9 months so kudos to him.  This dieting episode wasn't all that great, like he showed how to make a smoothie, making it way more complicated than it has to be.  He did talk passionately about sardines which made me get some.  I'm not stranger to sardines though, I used to have rolls of bread filled with sardines packed in tomato sauce in elementary school. Maybe it's an Asian thing.  I went to the Food4Less around here and wandered down the Asian section and they had cans of sardines packed in tomato sauce stored there right next to the oyster sauce and whatever.

Alton made some sardines on toast, with a shmear of avocado to offset the fishiness.  Avocados are expensive as hell too and mixing it with fish seems weird, so I vetoed that idea.  I don't know if the stronger fishy flavor of these fish bothers people, it's not like it's a bad sign like a fishy smelling hooker is.  It's just a different taste.  Anyway, get some sardines packed in oil, brush the bread with that canning oil.  I thought that was the coolest step Alton did.  The sardines themselves you can just smoosh on some sourdough bread.  I put some herbs, roasted tomatoes, and some lemon in the mix too.  It's a pretty good late night snack or quick meal. 

Pan evolution

Having good equipment in the kitchen is essential to making good food, and since I'm a guy getting a bunch of random gadgets is always fun.  I read a good post on the internets about steel pans detailing their pros and I read they were basically the same type of pans that are used in restaurants.  I always figured, if its good enough in the industry it's probably really good for me.  I thought I had to go to a restaurant supply store to get them but never got to go to one.  I did try going to the closest restaurant supply store near me once but it was closed down.   But then I saw that Sur la Table was carrying the pan I wanted so I eventually picked up a couple.  Steel pans need to be seasoned and cured like cast iron pans.  I don't understand the entire process, but it's something about attaching carbon to the metal toa nonstick surface.  Supposedly it's nicer than teflon pans and the like since there aren't chemicals to create the nonstick surface, so that's an added bonus. 

I bought one pan a week ago from Sur la Table and been seasoning it for fun for the past week.  It takes years to create an awesome surface from regular normal cooking but I've just been seasoning my pans for fun.  I just stick all of my cast iron and steel pans into an oven with a little oil inside and just bake them for a while at various temperatures.  Sort of sad what I do for fun, but it's kind of fun to look at how it changes. It's like those fashion people who like those distinctive wrinkles in their jeans after wearing them for a long time.

Meatballs and garlic bread

Meh, here's another thing that I was too lazy to post up.  Here's another dinner idea I stole from Everyday Food, meatballs with a some garlic bread on the side.  I always liked meatballs as a kid, which are basically the only good part of spaghetti and meatballs.  Whenever I got to an Italian restaurant I'm always tempted by the spaghetti and meatballs, but I really don't want the spaghetti.  Whenever I buy TV dinners spaghetti and meatballs or swedish meatballs are some of my favorite entrees to buy.  But then I feel like I have to eat the pasta or else I'm wasting a lot of food.  Maybe if the pasta were acting more as a side dish than a cohort or main part in the dish.  Ah well.

Meatballs make semi-good leftovers too since they can turn into sandwiches.