Cactus Jim and the Poole Horizon...

Gawd-awful punny title. All Jim could hear was, "Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon" with apologies to JT. Not a bad album, for JT. It was released the year and month of Jim's birth and he had it on cassette along with "Sweet Baby James" (a "nice price" double album) and it sat in his cars for a million years.

Homemade Guacamole

Tonight, Peta made some guacamole and fried up some corn tortillas for ersatz chips. She used avocados, tomatoes from the garden, garlic from the garden, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper and cumin. Tasty tasty! We couldn't wait to eat the main dish, so we sat down to munch and watched an episode of "Master Chef" on the interwebs and had fun making fun of the "fucking amateurs", as the Dude would say.

Grilled Mexican Shrimp with Prickly Pear Cactus

Last week, Jim had begged Peta to be able to buy two prickly pear fruit because "they're only 25 cents!" However, he had no idea what to do with them. So he found this recipe for a Prickly Pear dressing over Shrimp and decided to go with it.

We didn't have xylitol or rice syrup, so we used honey. Unfortunately, the hearts of palm that we had gotten specifically for this dish the day before at our asian market in San Rafael were rotten/fermented/disgusting; we went without.

It was a quick healthy feed to which Peta gave her approval, "I'd eat this again". Good enough!

Jim and Peta

Bam-Bam Flintstone's Baseball Bat

When Jim was a kid, there was always that younger or special neighborhood kid who got to use the double-sized red bat rather than the skinny yellow one when playing whiffle ball. Jim has always called it the Bam-Bam bat due to its resemblance to the bat favored by Fred Flintstone's son Bam-Bam.

Why this story now? Well, after neglecting our zucchini (AKA courgette) plants for a while, what else can you expect but enormous green Bam-Bam bats. You certainly can't fry them up and how much zucchini bread (AKA chocolate chip cake with fleck of green) can one eat. A lot, as it turns out and that's not going to help us with our "livestrong" quest.

Soup is healthier and, with a food processor, a breeze. Jim and Page made this Zucchini-Basil Soup for band practice Thursday night. It was healthy, but boring as hell. He and Peta subbed chicken broth for the water, added more onion, garlic and basil and added a quarter cup of homemade crème fraîche to the mix. Muuuuuch better. Probably pretty low in calories, even with the changes. I wouldn't give the original recipe even three stars, but the new and improved recipe might get three for flavor and four for health.

Jim and Peta

Have You Seen the Muffin Man??

One of Jim's favorite times camping with his family was when his father would make "Dad's Famous" English muffins. Essentially, they were just store bought muffins grilled on both sides in butter and slathered with Food Club grape jelly. But Dad made them and they were a welcome treat from those little individual boxes of Kellogg cereal or variety packs of Quaker Oats (not the red ones!!!) that we ate all summer on our trips across the country.

Peta has developed a fondness for English muffins of late and Jim has always wanted to try Alton Brown's recipe. So when we were at the shops, Jim said, "No Peta, don't buy those store brand English muffins. I'll make them for you!" Unfortunately, Peta has a good memory, so Jim arose early to make the muffins. Imagine his dismay when he read the ingredient list and saw "powdered milk", the one thing of which the pantry is quite bereft. Typing quickly, he found this recipe and, even though he hates the AllRecipe site, was on his way.

But wait, English muffins are not quick breads and take yeast, which means a punch down and rising times. Quick, hurry, while Peta slumbers. The process took and hour and a half and Jim used melted butter rather than the shortening. By using a tuna can, we got 21 muffins rather than 18, so each muffin has only 141 calories, rather than 190. However, the muffins from the second rolling had to be allowed longer to rise. We suggest that you roll them all out, cook the ones from the first roll out (more than half of them), remove them and then put a few more in the pan along with your eggs, eat breakfast and then put the muffins from the second roll on while you clean the dishes.

Good eats for cheap.

Jim and Peta

PS: We also put store bought Mimosa Jam that Monica and Chris gave us on an eggless muffin.

Gaijin Shusi

Maybe we should have written the more PC "gaikokujin" or "foreign-country person", but we're going with "gaijin". Being that Peta is in a family way, the ocean food web is collapsing and farmed fish and practices are pretty grim, we've been limiting our sea-borne top-predator meals. However, we do enjoy the ritual and taste of sushi and homemade can taste good for a fraction of the price. We've both made makizushi or makimono (the omnipresent rolls that serve as "starter sushi") before, but never together, so we wanted to start slowly. Also, we're not big on Krab, so California rolls are "right out". So why not prawns?

Shrimp Tempura
We used the Tyler Florence recipe at the Food Network site. A major change was using plain ol' AP flour rather than the rice flour that was called for. We also bailed on the sesame oil, fearing that it wouldn't go well with the sushi rice. Who knows how true that is? The seltzer water really lightened the batter up. Getting the shrimp off of the bamboo skewers without rubbing the crispy bits was a real pain though.

Sushi Rice
For the rice, we used the Alton Brown recipe. Jim has used the recipe before for sushi with success and this time was not different. However, the first time he made sushi, he did not realize that one cannot merely use Japanese short-grained rice and call it "good" and that one need not cover the entire sheet of nori with said rice. Bland-tasting, pinwheel lollipop-sized sushi is decidedly not good eats.

Roll It Up
With our new bamboo sushi rolling mat (makisu), half of the rice recipe, nine shrimp, one avocado, two scallions and a section of seeded cucumber, we were able to cover four nori sheets and made shrimp and cucumber rolls; two shrimp and avocado; cucumber, avocado and scallion. The two and three ingredient combination apparently put us into the realm of futomaki rather than the single ingredient hosomaki. The wasabi was the powdered kind that comes in the can. Booooo! It's just horseradish, hot mustard and dye. We'll make the pickled ginger once we run out of the store bought. Can't be that hard! No green tea, but definitely next time.

Jim and Peta

PS: Next stop, gunkanmaki. Jim just like that it means "warship roll" and was invented in 1931. If we were paying attention to Japanese foods, perhaps we might have seen what the parlance of the time was and been able to predict what would happen ten years later?

More About Bananas...

This post is not the side by side comparison that was promised in the last post. Sorry to those eagerly awaiting the competition. Problem is, Peta just got a muffin tin and had a hankering for chocolate. So we made Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins from an Epicurious recipe. We didn't change anything and the muffins were (are) pretty good, but Jim would have added one more banana and some toasted walnuts since a few of the muffins were small and those additions would have helped the volume as well as corrected the somewhat dry quality of the muffins.

Still, one could do worse than take brown bananas and make tasty desserts out of them.

Jim and Peta

One Banana, Two Banana, Three Banana, Five?

Peta has been drinking her banana smoothies quite a bit these days, but there always seems to be one that gets too brown. So we've taken to letting them ripen completely to increase sugar content and then chucking them into the freezer. Once we have three bananas, we can make banana bread.

We used different recipes last year, but this year we've settled upon the recipe in our The New Best Recipe book. This recipe calls for three bananas and is good, but the lack of more banana flavor has us wanting to add chocolate chips into the mix. Jim swiped a copy of the new Cook's Illustrated magazine this month and found a banana bread that calls for a whopping six bananas!

The first five are removed from the freezer and strained to collect the juice or microwaved to do the same. The liquid is then reduced by half to prevent a sodden bread and the result is a nice, flavorful banana loaf that does not want for chocolate chips. We added toasted walnuts and we and our weekend guests finished it in short order.

Are the extra two bananas and extra step necessary. Probably not. We'll do a side by side at some point and blog about that one in the future.

Jim and Peta

This Ain't No Pie Eatin' Contest...

The title to this post is, unfortunately, what Jim thinks of when he needs a metaphor for when someone is writing a check that his/her body can no longer cash (another mixed metaphor itself) from the cinematic tour de force that was Rocky V:

[Tommy Gunn and George Duke show up outside the bar before the climactic fight scene]
Overweight Drinker: Yo Rock, you need some help?
Rocky: No, guys; ain't no pie eating contest.

This time, however, he and Peta could have used some help in the pie making contest that went down at the Gallo Wineries "family picnic".

Although we had made a Spiced Plum Pie with Tender Pie Crusts on a trial run to bring down to our friends Peter and Kim's dinner (mango salad, chicken satay and red snapper fresh rolls, yum!) last weekend, we were not sure they the complex flavor of the pie would appeal to the palates of the judges. We got all of these free plums after gleaning the tree of a family nearby and gave some to them, the lion's share to the Marin Food Bank and kept the busted ones with which to make jams, pies and sauces. Maybe if we hadn't run out of cinnamon for the pie it would have been a different story.

Anyhooooo. We made Jim's "go to" naughty pie, Lemon Chess Pie with Tender Pie Crust. We couldn't find any blackberries at the store, so we did the Blackberry Compote with raspberries. The compote was more of a coulis really but it was/is tasty (more on why we have so much leftover in a minute). Here's the non-definitive difference between the two. We also served the pie with whipped cream which we had to the side, on ice, with the coulis. Out of seven pies, we did not even place! And one of the pies was a frozen pie which became a pool of goo in the Sonoma County sun. Ouch.

Well, here is the analysis (AAR for any military people) with what went wrong/right with the pie contest.

• We used a different corn meal that was very coarsely ground and thus gritty. Fortunately, most of this fraction remained in the little bit that we had saved for our mini-pie the next day.
• We put out a demonstration piece to show how to add the coulis and the whipped cream, but no one that I saw, added it. If you need to give instructions on how to eat your food, you are wrong.
• The color of the raspberry coulis did not work as well (or at all) with the bright lemon of the pie. The blackberries would have been much more palatable.
• The crust of the winner was super flaky, not tender like ours, and was definitely (OK, maybe not definitely) cooked with crisco or lard.

We know what to do for next year. Watch that waistline!!

Jim and Peta