Weekend Evaluation: Working Hard or Hardly Working

I do wish I worked from home every Friday, I would get a lot more meat smoked.

Smoked Ribs, Molasses Braised Beans, and Beer Mustard Slaw

Molasses BBQ sauce

 Positive - Since my computer at work is a complete disaster I worked from home.  This gave me the opportunity to cook something that took a long time.  So I got the ribs in the 'smoker' at noon and let them go for 5 hours at 200-225.  I was glad to get these out of the freezer too.

I had no problems keeping the smoke going this time.  I moved the baking stone to floor of the oven and set the hotel pan right on that.

The barbecue sauce was good (pan drippings, molasses, cider vinegar, tiny bit of ketchup)

Negative - Again these didn't taste much like smoke.  Maybe I need to trim them better, maybe I need to get some better wood chips.  

The beans were ok - but tasted kind of harsh, not sure what I need to do to understand these bbq flavors better. 

This slaw tasted bad - I made a really typical slaw, but the mustard totally didn't work here

Whole Wheat Pancakes

My mission to finish the whole wheat flour continues.

Positive - A few years ago I thought I would never even be ok at making pancakes, and here we are - it takes me 15 minutes from start to finish.

Negative - These weren't particularly interesting.  I was just trying to make breakfast saturday morning.

Coffee Salted Caramel  Ice Cream

Positive - I took most of the idea for this from an article in Imbibe about cooking with coffee.  The ice cream was a really basic base (no egg) that I steeped coffee beans in.  I didn't expect it to be as coffee flavored with out adding actual coffee, but it was good.

I usually am terrible at making caramel, but this time it was really easy.  The recipe called for coffee beans to be steeped in the caramel as well; and I did it, but wondered how I was going to 'strain them off' as the recipe called for. As I thought ,you couldn't pour the carmel the next day, so I had to pick the coffee beans out.

Negative - Not much negative here.  I didn't think I churned the ice cream long enough but it was fine.

Zucchini Fritters w/ Corn Tomato Salad over Arugula

Positive - Every summer you have to come up with a bunch of ways to use zucchini.  For whatever reason this year I've been going with fritters for some reason; probably because I'm not that good at them


The corn salad was really good, probably because the ingredients are so good right now - corn, tomato, red scallion, and basil.

Negative - I still don't think I'm frying these fritters properly, they aren't as crispy on the outside as I'd like.  Maybe I'm adding too much egg, I'm pretty sure I'm getting enough moisture out of the squash (salting, sweating, squeezing dry).

Corn, Okra, Tomato Stew

Pan roasted Okra, Curried Yogurt Sauce, Whole Oats

Started with a sort of soffrito base of green pepper, onion and garlic that were run through the food processor.  Cooked that for a while until it started to color, added some corn stock (just simmered corn cobs in water) the okra, let that cook for a while, then added the corn and tomato at the end.

Yogurt sauce had coriander, cumin, fenugreek, turmeric, and fennel.

Oats were cooked in the pressure cooker for speed.

Positive - The stew tasted good, if a bit under seasoned; but with the yogurt sauce it was ok.  By themselves the oats did taste a bit oatmeal-like; but with savory ingredients it didn't taste like breakfast.

I know that okra gets a bad rap for being 'slimy', but I think these were cooked ok.  You probably want some of that 'slime' from the braised okra to give body to the stew, but the okra wasn't falling apart. The pan roasted okra was cooked fast; browned over relatively high heat on the cut side then cooked through on the skin side.

Negative - Again, a bit underseasoned, so maybe a little boring. 

Plating was strange. 

Buttermilk Biscuits

Positive - I think I finally found a biscuit recipe I like; I've been giving new ones a shot every few months for years; I think this finally has the right amount of levener (4 tsp BP, 1/4 tsp BS, 2C flour), maybe it's just that I bought new baking soda when we moved. The butter/lard combo tasted good too - as it does in pie crust.

Usually I mess up biscuits, but these came out pretty good, with one major flaw (see below).  The repeated folding (kind of like making puff pastry) technique paid off this time, you can clearly see all of the layers.

Negative - I didn't properly flour my bench scraper while I was cutting these out and I managed to pinch one side of each one.  So they're all lopsided. 

Eventually I'll make perfect biscuits, but I'll take these for now.

Fried Green Tomato Bacon Egg Sandwich

on Buttermilk Biscuit

Fried green tomatoes are another food I've never really tried to make, and hardly ever eat, but I always buy green tomatoes at the market a couple times a year and say I'll give them a shot.  Normally I end up just kind of searing them in oil really quickly in a frying pan to brown them and soften them up, and then eat them on a sandwich or something.

So when I had the biscuits I figured it was time to just do it; I mean it's easy enough.  Standard breading procedure, with corn meal and buttermilk instead of egg and breadcrumbs.

Positive - The fried green tomatoes tasted pretty good, most of them had a decent enough crust.  The first few bites of bacon tasted awesome; but some was a little tough.

Overall the sandwich tasted pretty good, but was sort of a mess.  I think they looked better than the picture Gretchen posted too.

Negative - I cut some of the tomato slices too thick and those were sort of hard in the middle.  I ate really fast, and everything was really hot.  So I didn't really taste much to be honest; that's a typical problem for me.

CSA

Chioggia Beets
Green Bell Peppers

Cherry Tomatoes
Red Tomatoes
Baby Arugula
Cucumber
Cantelope
Peaches
Nectarines