17 posts tagged “misc”
And happy Halloween.
Whoa, some of these suckers really are striped. It's a wonder, how these things can be done. Makes me wonder what carrots would look like today, sans William — the loyalists marchers in Belfast would have to call themselves the White Men or something...
The tomato season is coming to an end. I wonder what it'll be like, using supermarket tomatoes again. Hopefully, not too bad.
Roma, Early Girl, Better Boy, Heirloomy stripey Petes and what have you; oh yeah. They're not all equally fantastic, but I know thing fer sure: every single one of 'em is better than anything I've ever had in a supermarket. And that includes the yuppie, fancy-pants hippy marts and all.
I just wish cilantro and chili peppers grew as easily as tomatoes.
Prior to growing (or attempting to, as it were) chili peppers, I thought jalapeños were green. I mean, that's what they looked like, in the supermarket. But yeah, they go green, and then red. Never thought much about that. I mean, there are red apples and green apples. They don't change color as they mature. Peppers aren't growing that well this year though. Tomatoes are going wild, but for some reason, the peppers are having a hard time.
I don't know this for a fact, but I've got a feeling that if one were to administer Beaker the appropriate amounts of ecstasy, pot and Jack Daniels, we'd end up with something very close to Guy Fieri.
It's been a while since I did one of these things. Maybe it's because the Food Network just doesn't do anything interesting anymore. I was extremely happy that Fieri won that competition — whoa, the best cook won? Who'd have thunk it? Of course, having picked the best cook, Food Network logic dictates that he mustn't actually cook anything much, but rather spend most of his time visiting restaurants while gushing and ooh-ing and aah-ing over everything he eats.
Some environmentalists have an infantile and fanatically despondent self-loathing view of humanity — that somehow, we're just not a natural part of the ecosystem. And that pretty much all our influence on nature is negative, while all other creatures live in perfect, beautiful balance with it, allowing nothing to go to waste.
Well, screw that. Birds are damn wasteful. This isn't the result of birds being scared away mid-meal — this is just the normal way birds eat tomatoes. Got some netting up eventually, but the first half dozen tomatoes went to the birds. Bastards.
Roma, Heirloom, Better Boy, sod that for a game of soldiers — here's Early Girl! This thing is sprouting all over the place. This is gonna be great. As will the Roma, Heirloom and the Better Boy, of course. I'm having visions, here, I am. Mozzarella, tomato and basil toast, anyone? Salsa, anyone? Uncounted tomato based Indian dishes, anyone? I can't wait.
Warnings have been issued, about how ten tomato plants might be overwhelming. Well, screw 'em. You're either with me or against me. And the tomatoes. Yeehaw!
(What do you mean, I have to put my beer down and step away from the keyboard?)
Ever heard of Nando's? No? Me neither. Until I ran across it, trying to figure out what this African Piri Piri dish was all about. Apparently, this chain restaurant was opened in South Africa and is famous for its hot and spicy chicken, but also for its wacky advertisments.
One of which depicts a blind woman walking out of a Nando's only to be led into a lamp post by her seeing eye dog. Her food falls to the ground, where the dog eats it. There were of course, complaints, causing the government agency that oversaw advertising to call for it to be taken off the air. I don't know if it was taken off or not, but damn, that's pathetic. What harm could possibly come of this? Do they think seeing eye dogs are gonna watch it and raise up in revolt? Will they coordinate their efforts through Twitter?
Idiots. It's called comedy.
I'm not glad, but rather sadly relieved, that the US isn't the only nation who's thrown away their old national pasttime, for the new one: Finding More Stuff To Be Indignantly Offended By.
What bugs me the most is that they're never personally offended. They're always offended on behalf of others: "How dare you use the phrase 'spelling nazi' — my cousin's grandfather's uncle's niece's teacher once knew a man who knew a man who heard about someone who died in the concentration camps!" I mean, it's not as if those blind bastards would even see the ads.
A friend of mine has a severe addiction to fancy-pants, expensive glossy cookbooks. He won't even shy away from celebrity chef cookbooks. It's atrocious. Still, most of them are actually very good, mind you — and he's a better cook than me, so I can't really give him too much stick because of it. Happily, he'll lend me something, almost every time we have dinner together. This time, he brought over a really fancy looking, $40 thing about African cuisine:
It is endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with an almost Charlie Mansonish rant about God, Adam and apartheid. It struck me as slightly odd to have Tutu endorse a cookbook — what the hell does he know about food? I guess they just decided to go with the most famous African they could get ahold of. I mean, Idi Amin was an insane, murdering despot, but at least cannibalism is culinary related, you know?
But what got me was the signature... This is just too damn funny. In this fantastic, immaculately beautiful book, they used a horrible, low-quality image that just screams amateur and/or idiot:
This is hilarious. What the hell were they thinking? I'd really love to know who were responsible for that one, because it surely must have cost someone their job, or at least a really stern talking to...
If you need extreme heat when grilling, the best way is to start your charcoals in the normal way, with a chimney starter — and then place the grill grate on top of the chimney itself. The shape of the chimney will feed more air to the charcoals, and produce exceptional high heat. Doing this, I managed to char, and create beautiful grill marks on a 1/2" thick flank steak, while keeping it juicy and red inside. Can't do that with a gas grill.
The drawback with this method is that you have only a very small cooking area, and just one level of heat — you can't move the charcoal around to create different heat zones.
(I had to re-shoot some of these pictures, so the charcoal, the position of the grates, sunlight etc. might jump a little back and forth, but I think it should be easy enough to follow.)
This method requires two pieces of kit: an extra bottom grate (the shelf were you normally place your charcoal) and the charcoal "separators" that are used for indirect grilling — these things basically create vertical walls that holds the charcoal in place, to the sides of the grill.
Here's a picture of it:
With this, you've now raised the charcoals much closer to the cooking surface. So the charcoal goes on this grate like so:
And finally, the cooking grate goes on. The charcoals are now only about an inch or two away from the cooking grate. Very high heat — maybe not as extreme as the chimney method, but you get a far bigger cooking area. And equally important, you can also create a lower heat zone off to the side.
Tragically, this wasn't my invention. A friend of mine came up with it when he retired an old grill and decided to hang on to a few spare parts — including the bottom grate. But at least I did manage to figure it out on my own, even though I never actually saw how he did it, hehehe. And of course, grilling on the chimney — that one, I gleaned from Alton Brown.
