Bone Appetite

Naan but the Brave

We have been enjoying fresh local sardines for a few months now; the run is remarkable both for how large the fish are and how cheap they are (never topping $4 a pound thus far). Typically I gut 'em, butterfly them, put on a little olive oil and lemon juice, and if I'm feeling saucy, sprinkle them with a little fresh herb of some sort in the savory, provençal variety. For the kids I usually serve them up with some home made rosemary focaccia; the cooked sardines can go right on top of a piece, or the fishy sauce can be soaked up with a piece, or both. In any event it makes for a consistent fauxmediterranean vibe.

Then again, we've been eating the fresh sardines so much this year even I have been getting a little bored with this formula, so tonight, I went a little nutso and cooked up the sardines with a little soy sauce, dabbled with dark sesame oil, and spotted with some sesame seeds. And served them with naan (a commercial pre-bake from Whole Foods, heated up in the oven with some olive oil on top). And they made, well, a kind of dish taco that was really, really good, as well as easy to eat.

Herein recorded, and recommended for repeat.

Palm Beach Island Pizza

I recently was in Palm Beach for a family occasion, and we had pizza while we were there, but it was what I'd call New Jersey standard fare. Judging my the origins of most of the residents, and the complete lack of what I'd call a native trope in architecture, food, or culture, I suspect New Jersey cuisine is as close to "authentic" as one is going to get for this area. I did fall to thinking: what would constitute a native recipe here? (For all I know there may really be a Palm Beach Island Pizza recipe, but I'm taking the pledge and not googling for one before I post this recipe.) South Florida does have an agreeable mish-mosh of immigrant communities from north and south, and there may be a vestige of internal native Floridian cuisine to be had (grits are still on the menu, including at the Indian breakfast place my sister took us out to), but I couldn't put my finger on a South Floridian cuisine that has yet emerged. Not enough time to gad about, I suspect, to find it. In any event, I did notice both a slightly higher than normal incidence of mango about, and I was bemused to hear of a B&B frequented by family friends called the "Mango Inn", and when I started to make a traditional Hawaiian pizza the other day, I discovered we had no pineapple about the place but I did have a nice supply of mangoes. Hence this experiment, which turned out to be a nice enough result that I thought it worth preserving in our recipe files.

I note parenthetically that I am not usually one for the "sweet" pizza, but this turned out to be a very nice blend and my own exception to the rule of preferring savory or tangy 'za.

Palm Beach Island Pizza

Use a thin crust. I used my habitual 2/3 whole wheat 1/2 white flour recipe, divided in half, pre-baking the crust for 5 minutes.

red pizza sauce (mild, almost no spicing)
mozzarella
thin-slivered fresh basil
diced fresh mango (I'm sure frozen will do fine, mango comes out of the freezer unusually well)
pre-cooked black forest ham, diced into tiny cubes
parmiggiano

put down the sauce, top with the cheese, then the ham. Bake @425 for about 10 minutes. Add the mango, basil slivers, and a thin topping of grated parm; return to the oven until the cheeses just start to brown.

 

Pacific Rim Slaw

A pretty quick and extremely tasty salad; a house original.

1 Napa cabbage, sliced very thinly - omit the thickest parts at the bottom.
2 small carrots, grated roughly
1 large radish (or daikon, etc.), grated roughly
2 Tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
1 Tablespoon sesame seeds (plain or toasted, to taste)

Combine and toss with the dressing (below), adding the dressing very slowly and tasting periodically. The dressing can be strong so you want to be a little delicate:

Dressing:

1 Tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup shoyu
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1 teaspoon wasabi paste
2 Tablespoons yogurt (heaping) (plain non-fat is best, plan whole is fine)
2 teaspoons brown sugar
(mix thoroughly with a whisk).

Fresh Napa cabbage makes this much better than stuff that's been sitting around a while, but it will work either way.

Serve at room temperature. Serving suggestion: serve warmed triangles of naan with it, or serve a larger portion on a whole piece of warmed naan with a few slices of fresh fruit or mandarin oranges as a garnish.

Today is Sunday (The Meal Plan)

This week a the behest of my eldest, when we sat down to make out the meal plan, he wanted to base it on the song "Today is Monday". For those of you not famliar with it, this is a traditional American folk song that is in the counting-cumulative tradition, starting out with "Today is Monday, today is Monday...Monday, string beans, all you hungry children, come and eat it up", adding another dish each day, e.g. "Tuesday spaghetti, Monday string beans, all you hungry children, come and eat it up." Wednesdays Soup (ZOOP), Thursday Roast Beef, Friday Fresh Fish, Saturday Chicken, Sunday Ice Cream.

Duncan knows this song from the Eric Carle book illustrating it, which is a little weird (it has animals doing all the eating, including a fox with a whole chicken in its mouth on Saturday, but on the last page it has all children having a feast). This is one of those songs that's so old the origins appear to be really obscure, and that it's gone through changes, not always being about food (sometimes chores, as in "Monday's a washin'"), and the "menu" has changed over the years (I've seen versions with Shepherd's pie, Hassenpfeffer, "pudding", etc.) I knew the song originally with "Wednesday Prince Spaghetti day," which has to be some kind of weird advertising-induced New England 1960s warp.

In any event, here's what we ate this week:

Monday: cold string bean salad with fresh tomatoes and feta, with anchovies-olive oil dressing. Cold roasted potatoes and bread and cheese on the side.

Tuesday: wheat spaghetti with sauce from a jar, mixed greens on the side.

Wednesday: pizza and salad at Pizza My Heart. What, you say? It's ZOOP? Well, the Pizza My Heart was a fundraiser day for Duncan's school. Fortuntely, hot lunch at school on Wednesday was....ZOOOOP! So we solved that little dilemma for Dunc, and Izzy got Pizza at night.

Thursday: it was soccer night, so a full-on Roast Beef was out of the question. We're very strapped for time on Thursdays right now. So the roast beef was ground beef, roasted, in an, um, frying pan, with simple veggies on the side.

Friday: fresh fish! Well, it was a problem getting fresh fish on Friday since I've been doing the marketing on Sunday since I went back to work, which makes it a problem to have fresh fish on a Friday at a reasonable hour. So I broke out the frozen salmon cakes and crab cakes, which we made Fresh from the frozen package. So there, that just shows you how much I've loosened up on the meal thing now that necessity has forced me to do so. We had some lovely fresh peppers and squash in our veggie box this week, and I made a nice mixed veggie side dish. Served with some thai rice noodles.

Saturday: chicken. Hoo boy, I made up a whole chicken, roasted Bob Blumer style: lime juice, soy sauce, brown sugar, a little corn starch, salt and pepper, with the fresh lime rinds stuffed inside the chicken. Had a problem with the thawing of the chicken so the cook time went a bit over, and I think I should have charred the skin with the rub a bit, but it was nice, very tasty. More veggies from the box, tomatoes from our garden, another fresh bean and cheese salad (at Duncan's request), and brown rice. The reduction from the chicken (with the fat drained off) made a wonderfully piquant gravy which was awesome on the rice, too.

Sunday, ice cream. Well, despite Duncan's request, we didn't eat ice cream for dinner, it was for dessert. (We bought some from the store, forgot to buy cream for the ice cream maker.) For our main courses, we had some leftover frozen couscous stew supplemented with some lamb I got a deal on at the store today, and we had some weird greens with cilantro and fresh tomatoes from our garden for an extra veggie (although the stew was plenty veggilicious to begin with.)

Maybe it wasn't the most elaborate or creative menu, but it took a lot less time to whip up than this week's menu plan, that's for sure.

Recipe: Santa Maria Pinquitos, Bunkerlow Style

This one is not an adaptation, but came with some pinquitos I got for Xmas from some friends (thanks R&J!)...I'm keying it in because it's not on the Rancho Gordo heirloom bean recipe site, and I fear for the slip of paper on which I have it at present.

I'm making these tonight in part because I coincidentally also got two different kinds of Spanish smoked paprika in the old Xmas stocking, and I have a tritip that's been in the freezer for three months it's time to cook up. And, as you will note from the ingredients, this will test some of the more hallowed spices I discussed several posts ago in "The Taste of Old Spice"!

Adapted [according to the recipe slip] from Heirloom Beans by Steve Sando

1 lb Santa Maria pinquito bean
1 medium white onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 teaspoon Spanish somke paprika
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 taspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon tomato paste
2 teaspoons molasses
salt and pepper to taste

Soak beans for about 6 hours.

Drain beans and put in a stockpot with water to cover about an inch. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simer, partially covered, until the beans start to soften, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Meanwhile, in a small skillet, saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil for a few minutes, until softened. Stir the powdered spices into the onions and cook briefly, ntil fragrant.

Add the onion mixture, tomato paste, molasses, and salt and pepper to the beans. Cook until the beans are fully tender, about 20 or 30 minutes more.

Pinquito beans are supposedly a traditional accompaniment to Santa Maria tri-tip, but we like them on their own with tortillas or conrbread and braised greens.

Recipe: Green Demigod Dressing / Dip (Avocado Anchovy Dressing)

My riff on Green Goddess dressing, which I am far too humble to claim as Green God dressing: let it be the demi-god.

This is good tossed with a greens salad (blanched kale, collards, etc.) and put in the fridge with cherry tomatoes and optional pine nuts. It's also fine as a salad dressing; just add a tablespoon of olive oil or more to thin to taste. And it's an outstanding dip, most particularly for corn chips. Will keep for 3-4 days in the fridge.

1 avocado (note two-avocado variation, below), peeled and broken into rough chunks
1 cup non-fat yogurt (may use whole yogurt or mayonnaise for variants, but I like the non-fat version best; I think the mayonnaise variation is a little too rich but may be better for the dip version)
1.5-2 ounces of anchovies, to your taste, chopped up (about 6-7 anchovies or more)
1 shallot, minced
2 tablespoons lemon juice (for some extra pizzazz, try meyers lemons)
2 cloves garlic, pressed or chopped
1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon Louisiana-style hot sauce, or 1/4 tsp cayenne + 1 teaspoon vinegar
salt and freshly pepper to taste (I suggest starting with about a 1/4 teaspoon of each)

Blend in blender or food processor until smooth. Chill for at least a half hour for best results. Store in a glass container.

Yield: about 2 cups.

Variation: if you want the avocado taste to predominate, use two acovados and keep the rest of the ingredients the same, although for dressing you will want to add 2 or more tablespoons of olive oil.

If using with blanched greens for a cold greens salad, use about a 1/4 dressing to toss per one head of kale or collards, etc.

The Taste of Old Spice

Have you heard the rule of thumb that you should replace your spices and herbs once a year? I've heard that a lot around the new year, from multiple sources, and this only makes me deeply suspicious that there's some trade association behind it, sending out press releases and planted experts on the food channels and newspapers and so forth to spread the meme, so they can make more money. Spices aren't as expensive as they were once upon a time, and dried herbs are universally obtainable, and fresh herbs nearly so. But they're still expensive. I just counted, and we have 56 different spices or spice mixtures in our cabinet, not counting salts and peppers and our own mixed bottles, and neither am I counting refrigerated seasonings. Between $2 and $5 a pop, that's expensive advice to change your spices once a year.  I'm not throwing out my individually-housed safron threads, at ninety-eleven dollars a pop or whatever they were, that's for sure.

Now, there's a lot of spices in our house we run through a bottle of more than once a year. This may vary with whatever trend or fad we're in the middle of, or happenings in the family (fewer hot cajun dishes, for instance, with spice-averse kids in the house). But when we ran out of ground nutmeg during the Christmas baking season, I did pause to consider the age of the spices in our larder.

The nutmeg jar was one of three spices we've had for at least 15, probably 19, years. The other two, ground clove and allspice, are pictured at right. We remember this because the store we bought them at (the old Swarthmore Co-op) had a distinctive brand with the recognizable design we haven't had at any of our other stops. Now, these spices, like our garlic powder and ginger powder, do not get a lot of use because we mostly grate fresh seeds or pods or whatever now. But a dusting of nutmeg in a pinch is a lot quicker out of the bottle, so they're still used.

I checked all three of these relics. The nutmeg was still perfectly fine on the bottom. The ground cloves were extremely pungent, the allspice seemed a little flat but increasing the amount seemed to compensate fine in the recipes we were using.

Where did this advice about changing once a year come from? It's easy to remember and a good idea for, say, smoke alarms. But spices?

Now, this is why your cookbook collection should include a lot of old cookbooks and old editions. Harold McGee, my oracle from "On Food and Cooking", has nice generic advice about handling and storing herbs and spices, noting that the freezer in glass is the best way to store dried aroma compounds (as he calls them), although as a practical matter a cool dark cabinet is fine. Yet he also maintains that whole spices "keep well for a year" and ground spices "for a few months." (I wonder if what I learned in medieval history is all wrong, about the years it took spices to travel over the spice routes to Europe, and how this was such a big incentive for European exploration, to reduce the travel time to a mere 6-18 months?)

This certainly makes sense to me, things degrade when exposed to light and air. But in a year? What kind of rule of thumb is that?

Well, I went back to my 1961 edition of Craig Claiborne (New York Times cookbook) and he, while quoting the spice trade association directly, has no hard and fast advice, rather saying that the shelf life is quite relative to the particular spice or herb. Claiborne does include a brief history of spices in the American kitchen, noting that fresh herbs and kitchen-dried herbs were a common thing from the 18th century, but had virtually disappeared by the 1920s, only to make a comeback after World War II in the newly cosmopolitan post-war culture. Here's what my venerable Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook says: "Spices should be stored in containers with well-fitting lids in a dark cool place, away from the heat of the stove. Red spices hold their color and keep their flavor longer if refrigerated. Whole spices retain their aroma and flavor almost indefinitely." (The new edition, by the way, has a lovely color plate of a lot of whole spices.) I can find no particular advice about discarding spices in my earlier cookbooks, which strongly suggests the home economy of the time said, hang on to the few spices you use. Certainly my grandparents' kitchen had some aged (and yes, I admit it, often some suspect) spices.

The evolution, now that we're a much more highly ingredient-aware food culture, seems to suggest that with a greater variety of spices in regular use, and the emphasis on freshness in the local/organic/whole-unprocessed/slow/sustainable end of things, maybe we consider throwing out spices and replacing them. Maybe. But I have a hard time doing this.

So, I will admit: maybe I should toss the allspice and buy a new jar, or use fresh allspice nuts and grind them. And that gigantic bag of Gram Marsala I bought at the Indian grocery for $2 five years ago, maybe it's time to toss that one, or at least plan on it since I use it about twice a year. But the nutmeg was fine to the bottom, and the ground cloves are most obviously still usable. Maybe it's good housekeeping to have annual schedules for things like rotating the kitchen spices and cleaning the bottom of your drawers and so forth, just to keep the discipline and not let things slip too far. But I think this is a blunt instrument of the calendar, and ignores the cook's nose and tongue when considering whether something is ready to be thrown out.

The same is most obviously true of things in your fridge. Ever throw something out of the fridge that seemed OK just because it had an expired "sell by" date? Sure! But that doesn't mean it's gone bad. The nose is still your best instrument here. Yes yes, I know, if we're talking about mayonnaise better to toss it out on the better safe than sorry principle, but if we're talking about pickles, I say use the sense of smell and sight and not the number on the package. "Sell by" dates are a game of chicken the manufacturers play with consumer safety against their bottom lines; the longer items can sit on the shelf, the better the profit margin due to lack of lost inventory, but a sickened customer is generally bad for business, and returned products are as well. So it's real clear that the "sell by" dates are not "will spoil by" dates.

So here's the aha moment I had: NONE OF MY SPICE BOTTLES HAVE A SELL-BY DATE ON THEM. God knows how long they've sat in the store before I bought them. Sure, they're "sealed" but they're not vacuum seals. A tight seal in my cupboard has got to be nearly as good as the original seal by the processor of the spice. This of course only means that you won't get sick or die if you eat old spice, not that it's tasty, but even so, "freshness" of dried spices is not on the table to begin with.

What probably is a good idea, and one I've started taking up in the last couple of years, is labeling your spices with the date when you buy them. That way you can use the buy date as extra data -- to supplement your nose and tongue, not replace them.

Recipe: New Year's Black Eyed Peas

One of the several dietary traditions I inherited from my family, but virtually the only one from my father's side of the family, is the good luck New Year's black-eyed peas. I always associated this with the South, and figured that as a tasty but cheap legume flavored with pork, it had its origins in Southern agrarian poverty, whence the ancestors on my father's mother's side came. We at least have what I'd call a country menu for the day: 

• Black-eyed peas flavored with cheap pork product
• Jello with fruit salad embedded in it
• Corn bread
• Greens
• (optional) punch, with or without bourbon, almost certainly with ginger ale

I stick to this menu every New Year's, and it's to my dear spouse's credit that she has gamely gone along. This year the challenge was only in getting my eldest to try the peas, he now having decided that peas are yucky. We told him they tasted like meat and I got him to eat two. That should suffice for the good luck. To my surprise, when I looked up the origins of good-luck new year black-eyed peas on the Interwebs, the wiki claims that the black-eyed-peas-for-good luck came over to this continent with Sephardic Jews in the 1730s, mostly likely to Georgia, thence to the public at large. I have no idea what to make of this, but I guess I'll go along and believe anything I read on the internet. The pre-literacy on that side of the family into the 18th century precludes me from making any evidentiary conclusions about anything related to the family tree, particularly as I don't know whether my Grandmother picked this up from her own mother's side, father's side, or both, or just the culture at large.

In any event, here's my own version of how to cook the peas, plus or minus:

Cover two cups of rinsed black-eyed peas in water in a big pot (I use my trusty dutch oven) overnight. In the morning, drain them, rinse again, and set aside in a bowl.

Cut up one medium-sized onion into a rough dice and cook in the bottom of the medium-hot dutch oven with a tablespoon of heated cooking oil (these days I use the very inauthentic extra virgin olive oil; the flavor disappears in the vat of peas, so you can use almost anything, I think). Add salt and pepper, a quarter teaspoon of cayenne, a teaspoon of dry mustard (or a tablespoon of prepared mustard of your choice), combine with onion, and cook until the onion softens, 5-10 minutes. Add in about a half a cup of beer, combine, and bring to a simmer, about two minutes. Variation: use a quarter cup of bourbon instead of the beer.

Now add the soaked and rinsed peas and cover with water, and then about a cup more, usually 4-5 cups total of water. Add 1 tablespoon of molasses (less if you are not, for some reason, using beer). Bring the whole thing to a simmer.

Now add in your cheap pork product, sliced up according to the merits of the pork. In recent years I've been using about a half pound of shank, although I started out making this most years with salt pork, I can't find the latter now and can barely find shank. If it has fat and bone, don't bother defatting or deboning before throwing it in.

Bring back to a brisk simmer, then turn the heat to the lowest setting you have to to get the mixture to just bubble very mildly. Let cook for at least 90 minutes, preferably longer, up to 3 hours. Stir every 10-15 minutes (remember your pork cooking safety -- you want to get the pork good and done, so rotating it around your approximately 225 degree pot of peas is important.) Add a little water if it thickens before the time is up, but you do want the peas to reduce to a thickish pasty sauce with just enough liquidity to ooze a bit.

I usually then fish out the pork with tongs or a spoon, trim off the remaining fat/gristle/bone, dice up the remaining pork meat and throw it back into the pot, stirring it in.

Forgot to soak the peas? I rarely do these days, but if you really must, then you can of course boil the peas for 20-30 minutes, drain and set aside, and then re-insert them into the recipe as above.

The New Microwave: if it had an 11, would it cook at 110% power?

As a special Christmas treat, our microwave gave up its ghost of Christmases past. It was not as spectacular a death as I have observed on some microwaves: I was once present when a microwave decided to spark and catch on fire at a friend's house. No, the interlock mechanism between the latch button and the door appears to have once and finally given out, after being balky for several years. Both Mika and I were right in front of it as the microwave died in mid-zap; we at first thought a fuse had gotten tripped, and then maybe the ground protector on the outlet had flipped, but the microwave, try as we might, would simply not come back on.

There was once a time when this would have been considered a "major appliance" and fostered a trip to the bookshelf for consumer reports and an agonized discussion about what features we wanted and what brands were best. We're on our third microwave of the relationship since setting up housekeeping in 1987, and I remember well the great amount of research that went into the model we bought at Lechmere in Somerville for $129.95 22 years ago. That one (a GE) lasted 13 years, and broke more or less for the same reason the recently deceased Sharp did, namely the mechanical safety feature failed.

But time and tide being what they are in electronics, a larger (1.2 cubic foot, 1000-watt) microwave is now $50-$60 cheaper than the tiny 500 watt microwave was in 1987, and rather than waste a lot of time researching the ovens for what might be marginal differences in features and price that would not make a lot of difference in the end (we have limited options in our area for comparison shopping, anyway, being a less than metropolitan area, and Circuit City having exited the market a year ago). In the meantime, I found my body trying to put something into the dead microwave no less than five times between its failure yesterday and when I went out to buy a new one this morning (my body and brain often do not communicate, particularly in the kitchen). Obviously in the time-money-luxury-convenience tradeoff matrix of consumer purchases, getting a replacement fast was more important than marginal differences (if any) that could be achieved by better research.

So I went out the door this morning with the following list of criteria for finding a new oven:

• Don't buy a Sharp or a GE. I will not reward manufacturers who have created a product that broke on me.
• It must have a carousel. This seems to be the key to good microwaving, IMHO, having the food rotate inside.
• Capacity and power should be at least what we had before (1.1 cu foot, 1000 watts).
• Footprint should be approximately the same (we have a tiny kitchen and two growing boys).
• If possible, find a model that does not have a push-to-open latch, but has a handle on the outside.

On that last point, easier said than done: I could only find a couple of models like this. I comparison shopped at Best Buy, Kohl's, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Target, because this involved only a brisk walk up and down the Dunes shopping center and thus only one car trip and one attempt to park on a busy shopping day. (You get a sense of what my priorities in life are these days.) I found the model I wanted, an Oster, that had confusing and unnecessary controls (a "Popcorn" button, a "Soup" button, etc.) but which had the desired outside handle and a carousel and a minimally-acceptable feature set. It also had the very very nice feature of a child lock to prevent the kids from operating the microwave, which I found came in handy almost immediately (Izzy, my two year old, has buttonitis and has grown that he can now reach the place where the microwave sits.)

Here's the mistake I made. It was listed at $79.99 at Best Buy, which has a "we'll beat any competitor's price" "guarantee". In the course of my shopping, I found an identical one at Target for $79.99. What the heck, if I can get $10 knocked off, it's worth a trip back across the parking lot. So to make a long story short, since I had to wade through three employees at Best Buy, when I finally got a manager he offered to beat the price...by one cent. Yes, the "beat the competitors' price" guarantee was to sell me the same model at $79.98. In my continuing effort to not reward evil behavior, I told the guy I was going to pay a penny more at Target if that was the best he could do. That was the best he could do, so I bought it at Target.

All this is a rather long prologue to the hilarity that is major product design. Now you would think that the prices being what they are, in the perfection of the marketplace (ha!) now that we're about 30 years or so into the microwave-in-every-kitchen era (my in-laws excepted), my expectation would be that with component prices probably as low as they can go, manufacturers would seek to derive competitive advantage through better design and clearer user manuals.

Not so with this Oster. Buttons I expect to be "one touch" require 3 or 4 touches. The "minute plus" button doesn't zap food for a minute unless you press another button first. The "defrost by weight" feature requires that you memorize a little chart to indicate whether you are cooking chicken or beef or whatever (you punch in a numerical code) followed by the weight in pounds and ounces (with no leading zero for pounds, but a leading zero for ounces if you have between 0 and 9 ounces). There's no possible way to memorize this, or at least I have better things to do with my limited memory capacity. Hence the user manual goes up in the cabinet.

But the page illustrated herein really got me thinking. It lists the table of power settings on the microwave. You press "power" and "9", you get 90% power, "8" for 80% power, etc. So far, so good. There's nothing new here compared to any other microwave I've had. Can you notice the odd thing about this chart, though?

That's right, it includes a setting for "0" to indicate "0% power". Well, at first I thought, that's just another hilarious idiocy in technical writing. Or...was it? So I tried hitting 1 minute of cooking at 0% power, and hit start. And..the microwave came on, or at least the fan did, and it counted down from 1 minute!

Was this actually cooking anything, and perhaps 0% was some kind of base low power setting? I got a glass of water and let it sit to room temperature (measured with my new kitchen thermometer, THANK YOU SANTA CLAUS!) I then zapped it for five minutes at 0% power, with the microwave again humming with the sound of the fan, and the light on, and the countdown all taking up electricity. And when it pinged that it was done, I took the water out, and measured it, and it was at exactly the same temperature it was when I put it in.

So, yes, they have designed the internal software in the control pad to zap something at 0%. Maybe I'm being dense; maybe there's some reason to set it at 0% power. Although you'd think they'd also have an "infinity" button to cook it forever.

This may not seem like a big deal to my fellow cooks, but trust me as a software engineer this sets off all sorts of alarm bells about what sorts of corners they cut on the code-checking. I know, I know, there probably isn't anything actually dangerous lurking about, probably only more stupidity.

And, not to bury the lead, so far I'm quite happy with the new oven; it's cheap, it's got a lot more features than the first microwave we had, and it's pretty. I'm just a curmudgeon, I know.

Christmas Dinner

Just a little more retro-blogging to catch-up...

Christmas dinner menu! Ah! For many years my sister has been sending us tritips, the Central California beef cut that's oh so fun to barbecue, which was fun. But it's not a tradition we were wed to, and this year we decided to cook up something our youngest would eat...so drum roll please, we cooked a very traditional Turkey. We went pretty tame since there were only four of us at the table: mashed potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, steamed carrots, cranberry sauce (which we forgot), and a little bread and cheese. Almost all of it was make-ahead and we split the cooking down the middle (spouse got the turkey, I did the sides). The hardest part was finding a small enough turkey, and we ended up settling on a 9-pounder.

We were surprised to count on our fingers and realize this is the first turkey we've cooked ourselves in three seasons. I'm happy to report it came out great...just like falling off the old bicycle or riding a log, following the directions on the turkey package tends to have happy results.