Posted in Eats

My wife's mom bought a smoker/grill a while ago, and this weekend finally got to use it. What it really means is that my wife and I ended up smoking and grilling just about everything in sight. The last couple of days we've been grilling fiends. Grilling/smoking/BBQ'ing is something we're relatively new at, so each time was a bit of a learning experience. According to our test subjects, all the food turned out very tasty. Once we get a house, we're looking forward to doing a lot more outdoor cooking.

I rediscovered an important tip about cooking today. Anytime you're searing something covered with Scotch Bonnet peppers (or any other hot pepper for that matter), always, always, always make sure your kitchen is well vented first.

Excuse me while I go tend to my leaking nose...

At least my sinuses are clear now.

Mmmmm, turkey's in the oven, cornbread (Jiffy cornbread mix and a can of corn kernels), sweet potatoes (just plain roasted) are done and there's an ice cold 6-pack of Molson Ice in the fridge. All that remains is the gravy, dressing and macaroni and cheese. The mac and cheese is half done. Just need to toss it into the oven to finish. Gotta come up with a tasty veggie dish now.

Oh, this is gonna be soooo good...

Spent most of yesterday cleaning the apartment. Boy, did it ever need cleaning. Vacuumed corners that probably hadn't seen the business end of the vacuum cleaner since we moved in. Scary sight. But the place looks better now. Still cluttered, but clean. We just have too much junk in our apartment. One of these days, we'll have to go through and decide what's junk and what isn't.

Grits: A coarse cereal made from something called hominy, which apparently is a type of corn.

Anybody from the South, or with roots in the South can tell you what they are. Anybody not from the South will look at you funny wondering why you're talking about eating sandpaper. Anybody not from the South over the age of 25 will recognize grits as something Flo from Alice is always telling people to kiss.

My first encounter with grits was on that TV show, Alice. It was one of those sitcoms that I grew up watching, because it was funny and had strange characters. Flo was always telling people to 'Kiss my grits', which didn't really mean much to me at the time. Perhaps it was some unknown part of the female anatomy or something.

My second encounter with grits was many years later, when I made my first trip to NY to visit my future wife. There I learned it was a white gloppy substance that people ate for breakfast.

So over the years, I've learned to eat grits, and even how to cook them. Grits aren't something that I'll go out of my way to eat though. When I do eat them, it has to have lots of cheese. I've been told I cook a mean pot of grits though.

When cooking grits, caution must be exercised at all times. Cooked grits have high viscosity, and a very high specific heat. Anyone who's had grits splashed on them will tell you it BURNS. And it sticks to you, prolonging the burning process. If you try to lick it off, you'll burn your tongue, and the part that got splashed will still burn. I've always imagined that if there were grits back in medieval times, they would have been used for castle defense when the caudrons of burning pitch ran out (or even before).

Castle Defender: "They're coming! Prepare the grits!"

And I'm sure if the US military could come up with a way to keep grits steaming hot in a bomb, it would be far more effective than napalm.

Anyway, how do I cook grits?

2/3 cup water
2/3 cup chicken broth or stock
1/3 cup grits
pinch of salt
Cheese (whatever kind you want)

If your chicken broth/stock is homemade, go with all broth/stock. If it ocmes out of a can, go with half water/half stock. Canned broth tends to be a little on the salty side. Add grits to water/stock in a pot and bring to a boil. Stir often. Grits will stick to the bottom of the pot. When the grits become thick and gloppy taste for texture and add pepper to taste. If the grits are still a little hard and coarse, add 1/2 cup water/broth and stir. Cook until they become thick and gloppy again. Stir in the cheese (as much as you want). I like extra sharp Cheddar in mine, sometimes with a good healthy handful of Parmesan (freshly grated, not the stuff in the can) on top to garnish. You can use whatever kind of cheese you prefer. Serve in a bowl or over a fried egg. Immediately immerse the empty pot in hot water and let it soak. Don't ever let grits dry in the pot, or you'll need a chisel to chip it out.

Finally, a decent place to get Chinese food in Charleston. Our other favourite restaurant was Osaka, a Chinese/Japanese restaurant with a really good sushi bar. Unfortunately, it suffered some fire damage several months ago, and we're still waiting for them to finish renovations and re-open (at least we hope they're doing renovations and planning to re-open). In the meantime, we've been going to Shi Ki Japanese Restaurant on East Bay. Their sushi bar is pretty decent too, and they're one of the few Japanese restaurants that serves udon noodle soup.

Yesterday, we read about a new place, Red Orchids Chinese Bistro on Sam Rittenberg. So we went over there today to check it out. It's kind of a higher class restaurant in Ashley Crossing Mall, a very unassuming strip mall. The food is very good, several steps above your traditional cheesy Chinese restaurant with the all you can eat buffet (I just stay away from those places). Prices are very reasonable, and you get a good amount of tasty food, so it's a very exceptional value.

Went to another very yummy Chinese restaurant Friday night. Dragon Palace out on Daniel Island.

It's an unassuming place in a strip mall, but inside it's gorgeously decorated. The smells and tastes reminded me of eating at Chinese restaurants back home in Edmonton. Had Roasted duck with shitake mushrooms, steamed conch and beef chow mein. Very tasty food, not as warm as I would have liked, but still very tasty.

Saturday we went back for lunch. This time we tried the dim sum items on their menu. There aren't many of them sadly. We ordered shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, little juicy pork buns (another dumpling variant), and the roast duck cold plate. It's not a traditional dim sum with carts wheeled around, but the food was pretty tasty.

Now all Charleston needs is a real Chinese restaurant with real dim sum service on Sundays.

The eating season is upon us. Thanksgiving luncheons at work today (my dressing contribution is baking in the oven now), maybe another one tomorrow before heading off to my wife's parents house for Thanksgiving on Thursday. Ham, roasted turkey, smoked turkey, macaroni and cheese, dressing, pie, biscuits, collard greens (which I refuse to eat) and all the other yummy stuff.

Then it's off to Chicago for RSNA. That'll be 4 days of hotel living and restaurant eating. Looking forward to downing more than a few deep dish pizzas from Pizzeria Uno and Gino's East. Mmmm...deep dish pizza...mmmm.

And then back in time to start the Christmas baking. Stocking up on supplies to send out Christmas cookies again this year. We did fruitcakes a couple of years ago, which were surprisingly well received. I think it was the thorough soaking with rum we gave them. Making more than a 2 or 3 fruitcakes becomes rather expensive though. Last year we made spritzer cookies, which always seem to be popular. Butter, sugar and flour. That's pretty much all they are. It's hard to make them not taste good :) This year we'll be doing it again.

Once the cookies are done, it'll be time to start planning Christmas dinner. More turkey, ham and dressing. More mac and cheese and greens.

After that is New Year's dinner. Usually a little lighter fare. Leftovers from Christmas (if there are any left), maybe a ham, rice, a pot of black eye peas (which my wife's mom says bring good luck for the new year).

And then 10 months to rest up before starting it all over again.

10 pounds of flour, 7.5 pounds of butter, and about 4 pounds of sugar later, our baking is done. Now all that's left to do is package up the cookies and ship them off. Everyone will get their cookies late this year, but at least they taste good.

Oh, this is delightful! Stumbled on this petition site to bring Coffee Crisp to the US. There are reports of Coffee Crisp sitings, news articles about the effort, and interesting stories about Coffee Crisp in peoples' lives. Sign the petition!

I was just watching Kitchen of the Future on the Food Network.

Connected refrigerators that know what's in your fridge with RFID-tagged foods. The stove that you can control with your cell phone. The steam iron that tells you if it's on, or that it's still hot.

So now our e-fridge can tell us if we have any e-cookie dough to e-bake in our e-oven and then later e-eat. And we can do this all with our e-cellphone (mostly).

One of the best things about South Carolina (next to living close to the beach and ocean) is the barbeque. I'm not talking about burgers and hot dogs on the grill. No sir. I'm talking slow cooked, wood smoked hunks of pig. Smoky juicy tender shreds of pork and slabs of falling-off-the-bones ribs. Mmmmm, oh yeah.

There's lots of places to get barbeque around here. I haven't been to all of them, or all that many of them. But the ones I have been to have all been good. I'd hazard a guess that you would be hard pressed to find a bad barbeque place around here.

But what's a guy to do when there's no barbeque place around? Well, you could do it yourself, but that takes a lot of time and babysitting. Definitely the way to go though if you've got a few hours to kill and are trying to avoid yardwork. But not everyone has that much spare time.

That's where the slow cooker comes in.

Alton Brown says it pretty well in his latest rant/blog after seeing Supersize Me!.

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. We hand our lives over to big companies and then drag them to court when the deal goes bad. This is insanity.

Is MacDonalds food bad for you? What do you think? Does that mean you shouldn't eat it? No, it just means you shouldn't live on it or anything else made by someone you wouldn't hug.

and it is called Cold Stone Creamery. One just opened up on King St and their offerings are sooo good.

They offer ice cream in three sizes, Like It, Love It, and Gotta Have It. The Love It size is the one I usually go for, and is almost more ice cream then I can eat at one sitting.

But the place is very cool (literally). You tell them what you want (or come up with your own ice cream/topping combination), they throw some huge scoops of ice cream on to this ice cold marble slab and mix everything together in front of you. You can get it in a regular styrofoam bowl, or one lined with a waffle cone. Then the trick becomes eating it before it turns into a liquidy mess and drips all over your fingers and pants. Or else wait until it becomes a liquidy mess. I suppose it's up to you how you want to eat it.

Today's lunch time discussion centered on food and weight gain. The question that was posed was this: Neglecting influences such as metabolism, exercise and such, if you eat a pound (or kilogram) of food and nothing else, can you gain more than a pound of weight.

The actual answer to the question itself wasn't important. What I thought was more interesting was the distribution of answers. One of my friends at work asked a few random people in the cafeteria at lunch. Almost all the men said no, if you eat a pound of food, the most you could gain was a pound of weight.

However, the women that were asked all responded by saying yes it was possible, and that it was the calories that mattered, not the weight. Most of them quoted the rule of thumb saying 3500 food calories = 1 lb, so if that 1 lb of food you just ate had 5000 calories, then you could gain more than 1 lb of weight.

Interesting. So if eating 1 lb of food can make you gain more than 1 lb of weight, where does the extra come from? On the other hand, if calories is the only thing that's important then eat as much as you want as long as it's low-caloric density food.

Of course to really answer the question you need to factor in variables such as metabolism, physical activity and the like.

So how would you answer? Based on the trend from my friend's informal poll, you'd say no if you were a guy, and yes if you were a woman.

In a couple of short days, we'll be headed to the wife's folks place again to work on another holiday feasting. Their feasting and our working :).

This year we're doing the turkey and macaroni and cheese as usual, maybe the greens too. For the day after, we're going to be roasting up a bunch of those little chickens. The things people call Cornish hens. 18 of them. Prepared like the turkey so they'll be brined and all. Should be interesting. I don't think we'll be able to fit more than 5 or 6 of these things in the oven, so we'll be using every oven on the compound to do this one. Fortunately they only take an hour to cook. We tried out a few of them on a couple of friends last week and they turned out pretty good. If we can get the timing right and manage the 3 separate ovens I think this should turn out pretty good.

There's just one thing that bothers me about these little chickens. You can Google up plenty of pictures of cooked or uncooked Cornish hens. Finding pictures of what they look like alive is a totally different matter though. Kind of makes you wonder if these things are actually real, or if they're really some kind of manufactured food. Like Soylent Green or something like that.

We had the pleasure of eating at Robert's of Charleston for the first time last night. We'd read about the restaurant several times over the years since we've been here, and finally had a chance to make it there for dinner.

Robert's is not your typical dining out experience. My first thought when I walked in was that it's a lot smaller than I expected. There is seating space for about 36 or so, and judging from when we finished dinner, only one seating per evening. A very cozy environment, although it can get a little loud at times with everybody talking over the piano playing in the background.

If you go, be prepared for a bit of a long drawn out dining adventure. Dinner is a 5 course prix fixe menu (including white and red wines), which may sound a bit daunting at first. However, courses are served with enough time in between to give you and your fellow diners plenty of time to savour each dish, and then relax and digest a bit before the next course arrives. Seating started at 7:30, and we left around 10:30. Be prepared to take your time. There's nobody rushing food to you or running you out the door so your table can be filled by the next party. You have all the time you need to enjoy and savour the food.

Then there is the singing. Chef Robert is, it seems a classically trained singer, and dinner begins with him singing in the appetizer as he walks around the room proudly displaying it to the guests. While the appetizer is being served by the rest of the wait staff, he sings a few more happy upbeat tunes. This happens several times throughout the night, making dinner almost a theatrical event and much fun.

The food is equally as good as Chef Robert's singing. Starting with a sea scallop mousse (much tastier than you might think it could be) and finishing with a decadent slice of triple chocolate tart, it was probably one of the most enjoyable dining experiences I've had in Charleton. It's a bit pricey though, so save your quarters before you go.

The Passionate Cook is a foodblog guaranteed to make you hungry even if you've just eaten. Haven't gone through all of the recipe categories, but the ones I've seen so far look totally yummy. The food photos are pretty much guaranteed drool-inducers, and if they're any indication of the finished product, I definitely need to try some of these recipes out.

I have to go wipe off my keyboard now...

Found via The Girlie Matters

Now that we have a house, and a grill to use for the house, the wife has decided to start doing some entertaining for some of her fellow med student friends. So in an effort to get us to use the grill more often, she's started this Sunday dinner thing that she calls 'Guinea Pig dinner', where we end up cooking or grilling something we've never tried before. And since we haven't done too much grilling at all, there's a lot to try. So far we've stuck to relatively simple things: burgers, sausages, hot dogs, chicken, mostly to learn the nuances of the grill.

So, armed with a copy of How to Grill and Betty Crocker's Grilling Made Easy, today we have ribs and chicken to subject her friends to.

Basically we've graduated from experimenting with food on ourselves to experimenting on her friends.

When we get good at this, maybe I'll start inviting some of my friends...

Now that we have a house, the wife decided that we would be doing Christmas dinner at our place this year. That means instead of us heading out of town, the horde will be descending on our little house.

This year, instead of the traditional roasted turkey, we decided to try cooking it on the grill. So to practice, I threw my first turkey on the grill yesterday. We stuck with Alton Brown's tried and true Good Eats Roast Turkey (from the Romancing the Bird episode. The bird was brined overnight and then a basic BBQ rub spread liberally over and under the skin. Placed a drip pan under the rack over the two middle burners and fired up the two outside burners. Made a little foil packet filled with mesquite wood chips and tossed it on the grill. Once everything got nice and hot, on went the turkey and some sweet potatoes. Roasted everything until the thermometer in the turkey read 165°F (I never roast anything without a thermometer anymore) and everything came out just about perfect. The only problem was an area on the back of the turkey that didn't get cooked all the way. Must have been near a cool spot on the grill. Not a place where there's much meat for eating anyway, and the rest of the bird turned out fine. It didn't come out quite as smokey as I was hoping (a lot of the smoke escapes out of the grill), so I think next time I'll try to fashion some kind of foil tent to put over the turkey and wood chip packet. Still, it was a mighty tasty bird.

For a pre-Christmas dinner test run, the wife is hosting another post-exam party for her fellow med school students. We've also started the monster task of our Christmas baking, so the kitchen has seen a lot of activity the past couple of days. It's only going to get even busier from here on out.

My first attempt at nanaimo bars got off to a bit of a rocky, but very tasty start. Making it went ok, but when the wife wanted a variant without coconut, the second batch ended up not having enough graham crumbs for the amount of chocolate in the bottom part of the crust, so it turned out very chocolatey.

Then I screwed up the middle section, so had to disassemble the bars, scrape it off and re-do it. Then when it came time to cutting, the top chocolate layer ended up being not very cuttable, so the middle parts ended up getting squished out when I cut them into squares.

So they didn't end up looking like much, but initial reports from the people at work that I shared them with were very good.

The first batch of spritzer cookies were finished yesterday. Only, oh about 5 more to go.

Then for the wife's party of Friday, we're making some greens, mac & cheese and roasting a turkey. Most of that will get started today. We usually do a pretty good job with the greens (I don't eat them myself, but the people that do eat them have told me they're very good). Starting with a good stock is important, and we usually make the greens with a homemade turkey stock. Yummy. Mac & cheese will be thrown together tonight for baking tomorrow, and the turkey will be brining overnight for roasting tomorrow.

All of this is just to get our cooking skills honed up for the arrival of the Horde next week.

On top of all that, we're also heading out to go get the tree tonight. Looks like we're going to get wet doing it too.