Food, cooking, eating, and me

Unless you are a webmaster, you may not be aware that those who are can view what surfers searched on to find your site. I see an occasional question in my stats, so I thought I’d answer what I can and make suggestions how to get better results from searches. Note: some of these in the first group I had to turn into questions. Some in the last group I was unable to figure out what the question might have been.

Is microwave heating ok for peanuts? If you just want them warm, yes. If you want to cook them you’ll probably get better results frying, baking, or boiling them, depending on the results you’re looking for.

Can potatoes be peeled soaked in water ahead of cooking? Yes.

What are the best potatoes to use for home fries? Any fresh potatoes can be used for home fries.

Is it ok to reduce sugar for making cookies? If you reduce the sugar by 25%, they will be less sweet and probably a bit thicker. If you reduce it by much more than that, you may find it significantly changes the results. Try and see!

Should I boil potatoes before making home fries? No.

Eating baked food with bugs in flour? Safe, but why?

How much xanthan gum should you add to gluten? It depends on what you’re making how much xanthan gum you should add to gluten-free flours, probably from 1/2 teaspoon to 1-1/2 teaspoons per cup. Some recipes may not need any, depending on the other ingredients and the expected result. But you should never need to add xanthan gum to gluten.

Does pumpernickel bread have gluten? Yes, unless it is made without wheat or rye.

Eating stale shrimp? No, throw them out.

Are Funyons gluten free? Yes, but they are made on a product line that is also used for making wheat-based snacks.

What is the difference between hash browns and home fries? A long time ago I read that the difference between home fries and hash browns was that home fries are made from raw potatoes and hash browns from pre-cooked ones. Think hash, which is made from precooked ingredients. But the lines are blurred. Shredded type hash browns have to be made from raw potatoes. So I wouldn’t count on the different terms meaning something special to anyone.

Is there a trick to breakfast potatoes? Depends on what kind of breakfast potato you’re trying to cook. The tastiest and quickest home fries are made from raw potatoes.

Can olive oil be substituted for vegetable oil in cooking home fries? Sure, why not?

Where to buy coconut sorbet? I tried a commercial brand once, and it tasted awful. The artificial flavor taste stayed in my mouth for a long time, even though it wasn’t supposed to have artificial flavor in it. Maybe make your own?

How do you make frozen shrimp with red pepper? I would thaw the shrimp in a large amount of water to remove any stale taste or preservatives. Then make the sauce separately. Poach the shrimp until barely done, add the sauce, and serve. When you cook raw shrimp in a sauce they release a lot of water that dilutes the sauce. If you boil it down until it is thick again, the shrimp will be overcooked. What I do is make the sauce exactly as I want it, poach the shrimp separately, then serve the shrimp with the sauce on them.

Do you have to boil potatoes before sauteeing? Depends on the recipe you’re trying to make.

Cooking food for me. For you? What exactly do you like, and what are you good at cooking?

English term used when onions get dark while frying. Browned…caramelized…burnt…blackened?

Is mayonnaise gluten free? It should be, but be sure to read the label and contact the manufacturer if there are any ingredients you aren’t sure about.

What’s an easy and fast way to cook groats? Whole buckwheat and oat grains are often referred to as “groats”. I have found the quickest way to cook them is to soak them overnight in my rice cooker, with the timer set to cook them when I want them to be ready. Kasha (not Kashi) can be coarsely ground buckwheat groats, so it cooks more quickly.

The rest of the questions below either I don’t know about or I can’t figure out what they want. When you search, try to include the important words in your query and leave out words like ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘an’, ‘in’, etc.

Fastest way to cook boiled peanuts
How long should raw peanuts be boiled for maximum f
5 minute savory dishes fo
The best way to cook brea
To dip food into liquid before eating it
Cooking cake free to play
Ingredients that are added to chocolate that haven’
How to make gluten free batter
Savory dishes with milk in it
Do you have to boil the p…?

Nowadays you most often see the term “hash browns” used for those prefried/refried chopped potato patties that you get at the drive-thru of your favorite fast food emporium. Less often you will find slower food restaurants that still make the old-fashioned shredded-style hashbrowns, either on the grill or fried in a pan. Those are rare around these parts. I live outside of the land of Waffle House – not that I think Waffle House does a particularly good job with them, at least not with any great consistency. Just as I described in the previous breakfast potato posting on home fries – hash browns also often tend to be soggy and unseasoned, but since they start with raw potatoes, sometimes they are even not quite cooked through.

It is really not hard to make them well, but there’s a trick or two to it. So get out your shredder. That’s what we’re making today.

Just kidding, Folks. But if you’re going to be making these, you’ll need a good coarse shredder. The food processer blade will puree the heck out of those potatoes, not a pretty sight. Actually I prefer the coarse shredding disk that came with my now-ancient Cuisinart food processor. You can however use whatever coarse shredder you have available to you.

I start with about a pound of potatoes, which will serve two generously or four as a side. Scrub them well. I like to leave the skins if they are tender, but I peel the potatoes if the skins are tough-looking. I then put them in a bowl with a teaspoon of salt, toss them well, and let it sit for about half an hour to draw off excess liquid. At the end of this time they are limp and starting to brown a bit. I put them in a sieve, run fresh water over them, which removes the brown color, and press them really well to get rid of that extra liquid, even wringing with my hands.

Now they go back in the bowl. I add a tablespoon of potato starch – which I purchase in an Asian store – and some white pepper, and toss it all well to mix it.

Now the fastest way to cook these is in individual pans you have going on the stove at the same time. If you’ve got a regular stove, you’re making four individual portions from the recipe, and you’re making a fancy, complicated breakfast, this will be monopolizing your stove for a while, so you should probably plan to cook these first and when done, pop them into the oven to stay warm while you finish up whatever else you are cooking.

You’ve got some choices, too. I personally think the crispy thin parts are the best, which means cooking in two 12″ non-stick frying pans or four 10″ ones at the same time. But you could also cook the entire recipe in the 12″ pan and cut it into wedges to serve. Decisions, decisions, decisions…

I grease the pan I am going to use or pour a tablespoon of butter, fat, or olive oil in it and drop in the potato mixture, tossing it with a fork to distribute it evenly, then pressing down. I then set the heat to medium and cook until the underside is golden brown, adding more oil if it is all absorbed and the pan gets dry. When it is golden brown, it is manageably firm, so I slip it onto a plate or a pan lid without an inner lip, invert the pan over the plate, and flip the two together so that it can brown on the other side. A little more oil will be necessary for this side to brown properly.

Now I fold it and plate it up to serve with eggs and maybe meat. A warm plate is best.

You can fry up some bacon or ham, peppers and onions to top it for a Waffle House-like treat. Also, melted cheese is yummy if you can handle it. We used to love having these smothered in bacon, onions, red peppers, and three cheeses back when I was speedskating and able to handle both casein and calorie overload.

OK, homefries are supposed to be gluten-free. They’re just supposed to be potatoes fried in a pan, golden brown and crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and seasoned with salt and probably pepper and maybe a little cayenne. You would think that would be a simple thing to do, but between badly-made traditional homefries which seem to be little more than lukewarm unseasoned leftover potatoes and those that are deep-fried and breaded or batter-coated, let’s just say the bar doesn’t seem to be particularly high nowadays.

It’s a shame, because making excellent homefries is so easy to do. I’ll let you in on my “secret” method, which is so much easier than any I have seen before, and it’s much more reliable, too. But first, a little homefry talk.

Years ago I read a discussion in an old cookbook that said that the difference between homefries and hash browns was that the homefries were made from raw potatoes, while hash browns were made from precooked ones. Linguistically this makes a lot of sense, as the word “hash” is generally used for things that are precooked and then panfried, like corned beef hash. Meanings have drifted, so now “hash browns” are generally raw shredded potatoes pressed into a patty or a pancake and fried until set, while “homefries” are recooked precooked potatoes. (We are going to ignore the abomination which is breaded or batter-fried potatoes masquerading as “homefries” from this point. If you like them, you can buy them from Sysco, just like the restaurants do.)

I have read over and over again that you have to boil potatoes before making them into homefries, not only to “save time” but because they won’t come out right otherwise. I can tell you with certainty that neither of these are true. It’s much faster to make them without an extra boiling step, and homefries are made more reliably with raw potatoes than with precooked ones. Another issue – one I would make a great effort to avoid – is that there are certain varieties of potatoes that set up and get hard when refrigerated. They do not soften up again when reheated, and no matter what you do with them subsequently, they taste like leftovers. Potatoes like these make terrible homefries when precooked, but make excellent homefries using my method.

The method:

Scrub potatoes and peel them if the skins are thick. Dice any size you like, from 1/4″ to 1″ cubes. Put in a pan with a little extra fat – olive oil, butter, bacon fat, chicken fat, and beef fat all work. Heat on medium high, stirring every five minutes or so until they are about 50% brown. Season with salt, black pepper, and red pepper flakes or cayenne for heat, paprika for color. Cover and lower the heat to medium-low. Continue to stir every five minutes until potatoes are cooked through. Cooking should take maybe 20 minutes for large cubes, less for small ones. Any excess oil can be removed from the pan by blotting with a paper towel at the end.

That’s all there is to it. I used to make these almost every day when I was cooking breakfast for my family. It’s just a matter of stirring occasionally, so the cooking process takes very little time, and is easy to coordinate with eggs or meat or toast to make the breakfast I call a “blue plate special”.

A favorite variation is to fry up bacon and cut into pieces. Set these aside while frying up the potatoes. In a separate pan saute onions until they start to get translucent, then cover until cooked through. Add to the potatoes, top with the bacon, and serve as is or with cheese melted on top – a huge favorite from my cheese-eating days. We used to love that on a cold morning.

OK, the word is spelled ‘gluten’. It’s not that hard, and it makes a difference.

• gluten: a tenacious elastic protein substance especially of wheat flour that gives cohesiveness to dough – Merriam Webster on ‘gluten’
• glutton: 1 a : one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking b : one that has a great capacity for accepting or enduring something {glutton for punishment} – Merriam Webster on ‘glutton’
• glutten: not a word
• gluton: not a word, but perhaps they will someday give this name to a newly-discovered subatomic particle

As long as I’m on proper spelling, the word celiac is derived from a Greek word meaning abdominal cavity. The disease is spelled celiac with a small ‘c’, celiacs is the plural of celiac, referring to a group of gluten-intolerant folk, and celiac’s is something that belongs to a person with celiac.

It really is possible for just about everybody to either learn how to spell properly in the first place or look up the words that they are unsure about. Garbled writing that is full of typos is hard to read and fails to communicate its message. Typos are just carelessness. Proofread once and fix those typos. We are not writing for our own consumption on the web, but for many people, each of whom must take extra time to decipher an unclear post, and some of whom may be unable to figure out the intent, owing to the fact that their native language may not even be English. One person’s saving 30 seconds on proofreading may result in hours of extra work over many readers.

Thank you.

So sorry, it’s been too hot to bake. I’ve used up all my frozen cookies and brownies, but until we have a break in the heat, there’s no way I’m going to turn on the oven.

Of course we did have a couple of nice days this week, but those were the days when my hot water heater was dead and waiting to be replaced, so I didn’t want to make a mess in the kitchen until I was able to clean it up again.

But I did make some awesome garlic shrimp.

Now the problem with cooking shrimp in sauces or glazes is that raw shrimp give off a lot of water when cooked. You could saute them in a little fat at a very high temperature, high enough so that all moisture evaporates immediately. But cooking them at a high temperature will generally overcook them. The unfortunate tendency is for them to give off their water and then stew in their juices. This is made worse by adding a sauce for them to simmer in. You end up diluting the sauce with the shrimp juice, which upsets the balance of the sauce. Then the shrimp get overcooked if you try to boil down the sauce, and if you don’t, it’s just a soupy mess.

I find that the key to making tasty shrimp is to poach them first, then add the finished sauce or glaze, toss, and serve. This will make sure the sauce or seasoning you use clings to the surface of the shrimp.

Considerations in poaching shrimp:
If you can get fresh raw shrimp, and you can afford them, then go for it. Raw gulf shrimp are never available here. Frozen raw shrimp should be soaked in a lot of water to get rid of any fishy or stale taste and remove the slimy polyphospate they add.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. (Enough salt so it only tastes a little bit salty, of course!) Drop in the raw shrimp, peeled if you intend them to be eaten with a fork. When they start to curl up, fish them out or pour into a sieve or collander and add a little cold water to stop them from cooking. With most shrimp it takes less than a minute, so be ready. THE SHRIMP SHOULD NOT BE HARD AND WHITE. A raw shrimp is floppy and curved, a properly cooked shrimp is springy and shaped like the letter ‘c’, and an overcooked shrimp is hard and firm, curled up in a little circle.

To make garlic shrimp, crush raw garlic cloves, added freshly ground black pepper and red pepper flakes and sauteed this very gently over low heat in butter and olive oil. Add plenty of salt – it should taste too salty. This is a seasoning used in the dish, not the main dish itself. When the shrimp are cooked, drain completely, then add the shrimp to the garlic oil and toss thoroughly. Serve over rice or rice noodles. Pea pod with red peppers will go well with this.

I love to eat, and I love to cook.

That love has brought me a bookcase full of cookbooks. It has taken me through to a Culinary Arts degree. It has brought me to the point where I love to play with recipes and experiment until I master some technique or perfect a recipe list.

I remember as a person in college, loving to cook, but finding many recipes that just didn’t seem to work for me. My bread used to come out heavy and tough. Looking back, I’m not really sure why, nor what happened to change that. In cooking school I took baking courses, which was undoubtedly a major factor. But one thing I feel is that it is important to become one with the process. Only then can you help it evolve.

As a kid, I lived in a household that was all natural. My mother was totally fanatical about this. We bought all kinds of organic foods back when it was in no way trendy or fashionable. We ate, as a snack, medicinal-tasting bars masquerading as “healthy candy”. Nowadays these things are sold at a premium price, with names like “power bars”. I don’t eat them. I eat food, not medicine. If you need to take into consideration the health-bestowing qualities of a food when you judge its edibility, as far as I’m concerned it’s inedible, and I won’t eat it.

Finding that first wheat and now dairy do not agree with me has made things more challenging. I still feel, as I always have, that we should concentrate on the good things we have to eat, rather than buying nasty or inferior materials as substitutes for the food items we no longer can have.

I have no objection to eating rice a lot. I don’t like most store-bought cookies, and I’m finding that gluten-free homemade cookies can be better than the best store-bought cookies, as good as their homemade wheat flour counterparts, so long as you have the right recipe.

My quest is to find, to develop those recipes and print them here. Be seeing you.

I haven’t had pancakes since I gave up gluten, and I’ve been getting a craving for some real maple soggy pancakes lately. So yesterday I decided to see if I could make some purely buckwheat flour pancakes using xanthan gum. I used a recipe I’d long used for pancakes during my glutening years, substituting white buckwheat flour for white flour and adding 1 teaspoon of xanthan gum per cup. I also added a bit of dark buckwheat flour, as it suited my mood that day to make the pancakes a bit earthy.

I found that the pan must be pretty hot for them to rise properly, but otherwise, they came out very much like buckwheat pancakes normally do. They soaked up real maple syrup just like I wanted them to. I had two servings leftover, which I froze individually in freezer bags.

As the weather warms up, my thoughts turn to cold composed salads, things lined up on top of salad greens. Think of Cobb salad, not as itself, but as a starting point for inspiration.

The past couple of days I have put dry greens in the bottom of a rectangualr glass baking dish, and put rows of things like cooked asparagus, rinsed canned black beans, halved hard boiled eggs, chopped cooked bacon, green olives, and walnuts. Yesterday I cut the tomato and put it into the salad first. Today I held it back and put it in at the last minute, preventing the salad from picking up too much water.

I include a little covered takeout cup of homemade mayonnaise to dip into.

To eat, I pick off the pieces, and when they are mostly gone, I put salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil on the salad greens and stir before eating them.

It’s an incredibly attractive lunch. Everyone is always very jealous…

It was time to make some almond milk.

I never really had any use for fresh milk aside from cooking, even before I realized I was lactose-intolerant. But I did like almond milk, at least the homemade non-sweet kind.

Have I ranted yet about how Americans insist on having everything sweet? So all available nut and soy milks are quite sweet, to cover up for the fact that they’re not cow’s milk. Horrors! Imagine being able to taste what you’re eating or drinking because it’s not sweetened! The trend is for everything to be sweeter and sweeter, and most Americans follow the trend blindly, not even realizing how they are ratcheting up the sugar themselves. Yogurt? Sweeter than ice cream, but that’s ok, it’s fat-free. Thai or Chinese restaurant food? Americans insist on sugary sweet sauces. I’d better stop now before I get carried away. You know how I get.

Back to the almond milk. It is white and delicately flavored, though you might not guess it has almonds in it if you didn’t know. You can use it in a baking recipe, but don’t boil it by itself, as it will curdle. You can mix it with equal parts of carrot juice for a nice morning juice drink. You can use it to make panna cotta, though it will be light and delicate, not the heavy, rich creamery type.

Best of all, for us cheapskates, you can make a gallon for the cost of a pound of almonds, currently going for $4.89 here at the natural food store.

Almond milk

Well! Where to start?

I just got back from an interesting vacation spent visiting my Mom while house-sitting at my sister’s. This gave me the opportunity to do a little cooking research.

I haven’t done all that much cooking research lately, for several reasons.
First, I live alone, and I don’t need to cook large quantities of food to keep other people from getting bored. I always fix my own lunches, using leftovers whenever I have reheating facilities. I’ve said in the past that I don’t get bored cooking and eating the same things repeatedly because I only cook things that are good enough to eat over and over again, and I still feel this is absolutely true. I design my meals to make good leftovers, and it impresses the heck out of everyone who eats in my presence.

Another reason is that I’ve been going through a process of understanding dietary limitations. So I can’t eat wheat, which has pretty much eliminated baking, a major topic for research for me until recently. And it has also pulled the plug on that seitan cookbook I was researching to write.

But who needs seitan, anyway? (Just kidding here, I used to love it, and I expect to be sharing recipes in the future.) What I did discover last week just before I went on vacation was the celiac disease support website Celiac.com. Thanks to reading the recipes and techniques they use there, I was able to start making bread-like bread again, and I even made chocolate chip cookies, all of which I will be posting as quickly as I can.

Questions? Leave a comment and I may write an article or blog entry discussing my thoughts on it.