New Fun Facts

What I learned last night:

1) It is very hard to get the last bits of mayo out of a squeezy bottle of mayonnaise.

2) A Wusthof chef's knife, properly honed, will easily cut through the side of a squeezy bottle of mayonnaise.

Another Food Tip From Someone Smarter But Wiser

Smart Balance spread does not emulsify into salad dressing. I tried to convince myself that it did, but I was smart enough to toss it before it touched salad.

Diced Tomatoes = Improv Food Awesomeness

I have now improved two improvised meals with diced tomatoes, and I come sharing my newfound wisdom.

1) "Real America" Tuna a la Tomato

As everyone knows, left to my own devices, I eat horrible things. This is why, since we had a coupon long ago, a box of Tuna Helper stood on our shelf in the pantry. I decided to make it for at-work lunches.

After a horrible experience with Hamburger Helper and Morningstar Farms Grillers (tastes like a very bad idea), I resolved always to add other things to "Helper" meals so that they have some taste and nutritional value.

This time, on top of Costco canned sliced mushrooms, I added a can of diced tomatoes, as well as the sauce packet.

The result: not bad. The diced tomatoes turned a plain cream-saucy dish (I used skim milk) into something closer to an Italian pasta. Definitely edible.

2) The Pedant Succeeds With Goat Cheese

Today, the Sherbs and I managed to find ourselves with an unplanned dinner, so I promised to make something. I had in my head the Amateur Gourmet's blog post about a penne alla vodka recipe from Lydia Bastianich, the Sherbs's favorite WETA Create food personality.

It was, of course, horrible with cold and rain outside, so we didn't want to buy anything. Which meant that we had no cream and no vodka.

However, after an excellent risotto last week, we had some leftover goat cheese. This was the inspiration.

I started with a can of Muir Glen diced tomatoes, which Cook's Illustrated considers the best brand of canned tomatoes, and a can of Hunt's diced tomatoes with random junk in it, which Cook's Illustrated did not rank highly but was on sale when I was stocking up on emergency pantry goods at the Teet (did you make out like a bandit on triple coupon weekend? We did!). Added to that the remainder of some vegetable stock, a healthy dump of garlic powder, Italian seasoning, and grated parmesan, not to mention more canned mushrooms, and it started to seem like sauce.

Then, in went the cheese and two small spoon scoops of low-fat sour cream. It creamed up just enough for true tastiness when we added the Barilla Plus rigatoni (I was too lazy to reach back further on the shelf for penne). The Sherbs and I both liked it a lot.

More Cookie Press Update

So the saga has come to an end - of sorts. Those following the William Sanoma Cookie Press story know that the scene took a turn (for the better? for the worse? it's unclear) a few weeks ago when I re-tried the WSCP and failed.

This weekend, while spending some time with family in New York (and a day of double Chinese food - how awesome is that?!) I spent a morning asking sort-of-grandma to try the WSCP with me to see if it was me or the press. Turns out, it's the press. The top (bottom? wherever you insert the plates to get the cute shapes) doesn't screw on and therefore the cookie doesn't press out. For the meantime, she lent me her CP (from HER mother, my sort-of-great-grandma) and I will impress everyone with my presses. And look into purchasing a new and better CP. Any ideas?

Whose Wii Remote Reigns Supreme?

The Sherbs and I picked up the Iron Chef video game for the Wii at Best Buy, and found it a lot of fun, although also a lot like cooking.

The game, in essence, is going through all the tasks of cooking the necessary dishes. Each particular type of food based on the secret ingredient (eggplant in pita! Carrot gyoza!) has a number of steps required to complete it, such as chopping, grating, running a stand mixer, or boiling a pot. Each step is turned into a 90-second mini-game where one tries to accomplish the task. Chopping and slicing are easy; boiling and grilling are tough.

So, should one pick four dishes, each with six tasks, one then must complete twenty-four cooking tasks, many of them chopping, slicing, or grating. The music, sadly, is a tad repetitive, as are the Chairman's repeated exhortations of the tasks' name (even with two different enunciations) and Alton Brown's Madden-like inanities (e.g., "John Madden’s inane and often insane ramblings are extremely tedious, and it seems as though he and his fellow commentator have a vocabulary of around 30 phrases which they just spout out sporadically and sometimes inappropriately") . Despite all this, The Sherbs and I had fun as a team of chefs against the computer, where we could switch off between grating and boiling tasks.

Is Iron Chef worth what we paid? We'll see how much fun we get out of it. Since the controls are easier than Cooking Mama (I still can't crack an egg in that game), I'm saying yes for now.

Food News Roundup!

1) Tribe and Sabra want every American to eat hummus. I'm game.

2) They still do not sell chive Bagel-fuls™ at The Teet.

3) They now make Splenda with fiber. I had some in my eggnog-flavored tea (which the box says is kosher dairy) this morning. I do not yet regret doing so.

4) La Tasca is not as good as Spain. Especially the patatas bravas, but also the paella. The cheese plate's good, though.

We want you! We want you!

Recently, one of my favorite political bloggers mentioned a foodstuff I'd never heard of: bean pie.

The country group Alabama had made me aware of sweet potato pie (and its silencing qualities); I had heard of rhubarb pie from Sesame Street (and then subsequently warned off of it by my rhubarb-skeptical parents, as well as Jack Nicholson); I am even familiar with shoo-fly pie (although, honestly, just from the song, and without Google I wouldn't know what the companion food was).

But back to bean pie. According to what appears to be the Nation of Islam's recipe (no, I am not kidding), bean pie is navy beans pureed with enough traditional piestuffs (condensed milk, vanilla, nutmeg, butter) that the beans cease to be vegetable and become merely starch for a pie filling. In theory, I think I approve.

A blogger who tried a packaged version said they tasted better than OK. Personally, if I were to have a bean pie, I'd make one. We do have a lot of navy beans lying around that we have no use for, so I wouldn't even need the commercially available bean pie mix.

Now, the real question is whether I make my own pie crust, or let Keebler do the low-fat cooking?