Ring in the New Year with Alton Brown

While I'm on a mini sabbatical from work, sometimes not getting all of those Monday holidays off is a good thing, I have tried a few new and old applications from Alton Brown and looking forward to the new Good Eats on Thursday and Iron Chef America on Sunday.

First, the Christmas ham was AB's city ham again this year. I had a bit of a technical difficulty with it. While searching high and low in the Charleston metro area for a shank end ham I failed to notice the one I did procure was spiral cut. That made peeling the rind very hard. Though it turned out great anyway.

Last night I made the dried cherry scones from I'm Just Here for More Food, post to follow soon with a decent photo. This is from my iphone and has very bad lighting.

Remember!

New Good Eats on Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Egg Files VII. I have a ton of egg whites in the freezer so this may be good.

The second day of the new year, Iron Chef America features a battle with Iron Chef Mike Symon and Anne Burrell vs Iron Chef Cat Cora and Robert Irvine. A cross promotional thing and at 8 p.m. so head's up on the time change. Last year's Super Chef battle will air at 10 p.m.

On Monday, January 3, if you have the day off unlike me and for some odd reason your employer gave you Dec. 23 off rather than Jan. 3, there will be a Next Iron Chef marathon starting at 9:30 a.m.

And if you haven't registered to win the program signed by AB, do so now by heading over to my newest food site: Your Mise en Place or Mine. com

Alton Brown at Cooking for Solutions

The Cooking for Solutions 2011 event will include Alton Brown. The event at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Montery, Calif. is scheduled for May 20-22. Tickets go on sale Jan.4 for Aquarium members and Jan 24 for non-members.

The Cooking for Solutions website will have all of the details, visit it.

3N3VVBF8EAHH

An Alton Brown Related Giveaway

Up for grabs now is a program signed by Alton Brown. While attending the Fabulous Food Show last month in Cleveland, I asked AB to sign one of the programs for a giveaway on the site. Altought he thinks bloggers lack integrity and I'm not good enough to interview him, I suppose he doesn't mind signing things for giveaways on the site... kinda strange but I'm happy he agreed to do so someone has a chance to get a signed item.

When I told him it was for a giveaway on the site, he drew a long line after writing "to" then promptly placed "you name here" under that line. Of course I chuckled all the while watching AB do his goofy thing.

Now I'm happy to give this interesting piece away to a lucky reader.

To get this you have to jump through a few hoops, of course. Starting in January, my goodness 2010 is almost gone (good riddance!), I will be giving more attention to another food site called, Your Mise en Place or Mine. My goal is to get it loaded with readers interested in a variety of food and culinary news and information. So to drum up some business for the new site, I connecting this giveaway to it.

All you need to do is, hop over to the site and find the post about the giveaway (www.yourmiseenplaceormine.com/win-program-signed-by-alton-brown). The rules and everything are posted there. Good luck!

It wasn't Alton Brown, but 1st FN host interview!

One of the wonderful things about having a writing outlet is that many others enjoy reading what I have to say. And while it still dumbfounds me that people and companies not associated with Alton Brown, in any way, want me to write about them while AB still is completely against giving me a shot, I am one thousand percent (or more) grateful to those people who are willing to give a review book, sit for an interview, etc.

If anyone would have told me the first interview with a Food Network host I landed would not be Alton, I would have call that person nuts. After all, why or who else would want to talk to me other than Mr. Brown? Well, it has happened. My first interview with an FN host! A few weeks ago I had the wonderful pleasure of talking with Daisy Martinez. She is the host of ¡Viva Daisy! on FN and ¡Daisy Cooks! on PBS. Her newest cookbook from Atria Books, Daisy's Holiday Cookbook, is a wonderful guide to making holiday meal planning and execution easier. All with a Latin spin.

Daisy brings her Puerto Rican heritage to her cooking style. She trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and worked as a prep kitchen chef for the PBS show Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen before having her own shows.

The best part of the experience was talking to Daisy. From the start she was warm, bubbly and fun. It was like talking with an old dear friend, though I had never met her before that phone call. We talked a lot about Latin cuisine, although most of that didn't make into the final article, the misconceptions from people the United States, the broad scope of the cuisine, the diversity of seafood and the ethnic influences from the unexpected. Like, did you know there's a huge Chinese population in Cuba and the Dominican Republic? Or a huge influence from Italian immigrants in Argentina? That, of course, impacts the cuisine in these locales.

My goodness, I could've spent an entire afternoon talking with Daisy about cross-cultural cuisine sharing and the vast expanse of the Latin palate. The whole interview was a blast from start to finish.

Holiday Cooking Tips from Daisy Martinez

Dec 20, 2010
Lisa Hechesky

Food Network host and Latin cuisine expert, Daisy Martinez, offers easy holiday meal planning in her book "Daisy's Holiday Cooking"

In her holiday themed cookbook, Daisy’s Holiday Cooking (Atria Books), Daisy Martinez offers both easy entertaining and meal preparation ideas with her signature Latin twist. Martinez, host of Food Network’s ¡Viva Daisy!, infuses her Puerto Rican heritage into her cooking and also brings a greater awareness to true Latin cuisine in the process.

Daisy Martinez Holiday Cooking and Planning Tips

The idea to create a cookbook and holiday entertaining guide came from the hectic modern lifestyles of many people, which impinges on having time to bring together friends and family for the season. “People today find holiday entertaining so daunting,” she says. “The thing is to come together around a table with people that you love and break bread. That’s what it’s about. But with the holidays, with so much more going on, today moms really don’t have the luxury of being at home just to take care of those things—decorating the house, buying the gifts and the other stuff that we [women] end up doing by default. After all is said and done, we have so many responsibilities put on us that entertaining is out of the question.”

To survive all of the demands of the holidays from meal making to event planning, Martinez, the mother of four children, offers several ideas. “You want a nice festive, appealing meal for you to come together with your friends and family. So one of the things that I do in the book is that each chapter is menu driven but the menus are such that you can swap out and mix and match so you can create your own menu. Then I have a prep schedule because I’m all about the do ahead. Anything that I can do ahead, I do.”


Read the rest at Suite101: Holiday Cooking Tips from Daisy Martinez

Talking Good Cooking with Harold McGee

For me, this interview was the equivalent of hitting a bottom of the ninth, game winning homerun. While it still baffles me about Alton Brown and his stance against interviewing with me for this site or my other writing outlets, I am always grateful that others in the culinary world find it worth their while to spend a few minutes to talk cooking and food with me.

And no more so than Mr. Harold McGee. I was quiet honestly in shock, and still am, over opening the email and reading about setting up the interview. After all, he's the man who wrote the book, literally, on using science to improve cooking. Way, way before AB even thought he might someday change up the cooking show genre.

So, to talk with Mr. McGee about his new book, Keys to Good Cooking, was just about the best thing ever for a cooking/food geek ever hope for. Now if AB ever changes his mind, that will be a tape-measure grand slam.

Harold McGee Offers Sage Advice in New Book

Dec 14, 2010 Lisa Hechesky

Looking at the science of everyday life lead Harold McGee to discoveries in kitchen and about food. In his newest book, Keys to Good Cooking, the renown food science guru provides expert advice for the home cook to improve his or her knowledge and skills.

Keys to Good Cooking

Building on the success of On Food and Cooking, the gold standard reference book explaining the hows and whys of cooking and science in the kitchen, McGee presents a succinct manual for curious cooks wanting more than just a collection of recipes. Keys to Good Cooking demystifies the act of cooking, debunks popular culinary myths and delivers information to assist any cook, from the novice to the seasoned. The 24-chapter tome discusses an array of topics from food and kitchen safety to recipe selection. The crux of the book, however, explains science and how and why it effects what is done in the kitchen. Also, it serves as an essential companion book for most many cook.

McGee, a former literature and writing instructor at Yale University, penned On Food and Cooking in 1984 and the subsequent revised edition in 2004 won a James Beard Award for best reference book in 2005. He currently writes the food column, The Curious Cook, for the New York Times and his own food science blog also by that name.

Q&A with Harold McGee

* Why did you decide to write this new book?

People who have read and enjoyed those others have pointed out to me that when they were having a particular issue in the kitchen, a particular problem or question, it often took them quite awhile to find the answer in the many, many pages of those other books that also include cultural history and chemical makeup and that kind of thing. So, I thought it would be useful to put together a book that would concentrate the practical elements of those earlier books of mine and expand on them. And make a book that would be usable not so much in the armchair but standing up in the kitchen in the midst of cooking.

* Are you steering away from recipes? You’re book is more about understanding the technique and the concept behind what’s happening.

Yeah, but I wouldn’t say exactly steering away from recipes. But there are lots of recipe books out there already. We have no shortage of recipes. But we do have a, maybe, too strong reliance on recipes and not enough of a basic understanding of what we’re doing, especially if we cook only a few times a week, as most home cooks do these days. If you’re a professional and cook everyday you develop, very quickly, an understanding—even if it’s just intuitive—of what’s going on. So this is a book that’s meant to supplement recipes with information that they often don’t provide.

* Why do you think recipes are written more as directions, step-by-step, rather than trying to understand those concepts the home cook may not know?

I think for a recipe writer those things may not be directly relevant or they assume that most people are going to know or something like that. It is hard to say, there are so many different writers of recipes and styles of recipe writing. Often there are space constraints, especially if they are writing for newspapers or magazines. Their editors are always trying to cut out stuff, so you end up with the bare bones.

* Which, then, puts the novice at a disadvantage.

That’s right

* And that’s where you come in to try to help us understand what’s left out.

Yes, and also to give you some perspective on recipes because recipes often sound as if this is the only way to do things. Usually there are lots of different ways to get to a good result. So I try to include that information as well. How to chose a recipe based on what is you’re looking for or what your kitchen has to offer in way of tools.
* Do you see science as being more accepted in the kitchen now versus when you wrote your first book?

Oh yeah, back then everyone thought it was kind of a strange connection to try to make and assumed anything to do with science and food must have to do with manufacturing of strange new snack foods and that kind of thing. Happily times have changed and people now realize that science isn’t a particular application or a particular body of knowledge, it’s more of an approach of curiosity and desire to understand things. And that it has a lot to offer the professional cook and casual cooks that don’t get to put in that many hours at the stove. For them, especially, understanding a bit about what’s going on can make a big difference.


Read the rest at Suite101: Harold McGee Offers Sage Advice in New Book

If you are interested, the book would be wonderful as a present for yourself or another cooking geek in your life.



** Photo credit: Karl Petzke**

Alton Brown's Whole Pumpkin Pie Soup

Today the pumpkin soup Alton Brown made in a recent Good Eats episode is pulling double duty. One, of course, I am going to tell everyone about my experience making it. And second as part of Share Our Strength: Share Our Holiday Table a progressive virtual dinner where food bloggers contribute dishes to help raise awareness and funds for the SOS program. View the entire list of the good folks using their blogs to make a difference here. My dish for the dinner party is soup.

Any viewer of Food Network knows it is a partner with the organization to help end childhood hunger in America. As a viewer and AB or Good Eats fan, think a moment about this wonderful organization's mission and help out with contribution.

After seeing the pumpkin episode, I knew the whole pumpkin pie soup would be an interesting dish to try. First came procuring the pumpkins. Surprisingly, after Halloween all of the megamarts here stop selling all pumpkins, not just the Jack-o-lantern style. There was nary a sweet pie gourd to be located. My mom asked a produce man at a Kroger if they had any pie pumpkins. His reply, "The season is over. Good luck finding one."

I then remembered the Capitol Market, that's Charleston's farmers market. Lo and behold sitting outside of the Purple Onion, a bin of sweet pie pumpkins! I scarfed up a few!

On to making the soup. I didn't rush out an buy a drywall saw to open the top of the gourd. My serrated bread knife worked just fine. Besides if you've carved up a few Jack-o-lanterns in your day, this step is easy. Clean out the seeds and membrane and you are ready to go. The ice cream spade does work well in this case, I had an old one not used for ice cream anymore because it didn't work that well. I saved the seeds to roast later, a yummy and healthy treat!

Lube up the outside of the pumpkin with oil and place in a baking vessel. This was a tricky spot for me. I planned to use my souffle dish like AB did in the episode, but the kitchen is currently in a messy state because of a broken washing machine and I couldn't get to my casserole dishes. So I had to make do. I devised that baking the pumpkin in my saucier would work because the shape was about the same. Turns out, it worked wonderfully.

The only thing I didn't like about the soup was the goat cheese. I don't have the taste for it, tried it a long time ago and didn't like it then. At first, tasting the cheese from the package it seemed ok. But the heat of baking it 30 minutes must have intensified the flavor and made it too strong for my liking. Next time it will be sans goat cheese.

Whole Pumpkin Pie Soup

Serves:
4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

* 1 whole baking pumpkin, approximately 4 pounds, rinsed
* 2 teaspoons vegetable oil
* 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
* 1/2 small yellow onion, diced
* 1 teaspoon kosher salt
* 1 clove garlic, minced
* 1 small apple, peeled, cored, and diced
* 1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
* 1/2 cup heavy cream
* 2 ounces goat cheese
* 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

Directions

Heat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Make a lid on the top of the pumpkin by cutting around the stem at a 45 degree angle. Make sure the opening is large enough to work within. Remove the seeds and fibers with a metal spoon or ice cream scoop and kitchen shears. Reserve the seeds for another use. Brush the exterior of the pumpkin and the lid with vegetable oil. Oil a round casserole dish large enough to hold the pumpkin and place the pumpkin inside.

Combine the butter, onion, salt, garlic, apples, chicken broth, and heavy cream in the hollow pumpkin. Replace the lid of the pumpkin to cover. Bake for 1 1/2 hours.

Remove the lid. Add the goat cheese and thyme and bake an additional 30 minutes, uncovered. Remove the pumpkin from the oven, and gently scrape some of the flesh into the soup mixture. Puree with an immersion blender to desired consistency, being careful to avoid the sides and bottom of the pumpkin. Serve immediately.

Keys to Good Cooking

If not for Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking, Alton Brown may very well still be directing commercials for diapers and toilet paper instead of teaching viewers the ins and outs of science in the kitchen.

Today, as in moments ago, I had the fantastic opportunity to interview Mr. McGee! Yes, you read right! Mr. McGee, the guru of food science, talked with me about his new book Keys to Good Cooking and food science. This has to be THE most wonderful news in a long, long time!

Of course if you do not know who he is, then you're not a good Good Eats fan now are you! :P But his first book, On Food and Cooking is one of the foundations AB used to create Good Eats and his approach to instructing viewers about science in the kitchen.

I will be working on my article today so watch this space for the interview, I will be sharing it here shortly!

Vote for Alton Brown at Tasty Awards

The 2nd Annual Tasty Awards have announced the list of nominees and this years Alton Brown is among honorees. AB will be receiving the The Kikkoman Pioneer Award. And he is up for Best Male Host in a Series. Good Eats is also up for Best Food Program: Television.

Voting for viewer favorites is open, so let's vote AB a couple more awards! Tasty Award Voting

Last year AB was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award and voted best male host in a series.

Christmas Cookies NOT from Alton Brown

While I wait for Alton Brown to have a change of heart about granting me an interview and not lumping me with the vile bloggers who lack intgrity--hey, even the Grinch's heart grew and it is Christmastime after all--I want to share the latest article about a cookbook I have written. This fall, I was blessed with obtaining a few interviews with other cookbook authors who do appreciate getting some exposure on this site; therefore, I want to share with everyone here as well.

This time I was given the change to review The Christmas Cookie Cookbook by Ann Pearlman. Her book is a companion to her first fiction work, The Christmas Cookie Club. Pearlman was a Pultizer Prize and National Book Award nominee for her memior.

The cook book offers tips on starting a cookie exchange and many recipes for a varity of cookies and some candies.

Author Ann Pearlman Shares About Christmas Cookies
Dec 6, 2010

Lisa Hechesky

Cookies are nearly synonymous with Christmastime. Whether leaving them for Santa Claus or the original purpose for the animal cracker box (to hang as an ornament on the tree), it seems everyone enjoys the little sweet treats and make an extra effort to find, bake and eat them for the holidays. In her latest book, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee Ann Pearlman offers cookie aficionados a fun way to enjoy the little baked delights.

Before the Christmas Cookie Club

The Christmas Cookie Cookbook both a handbook for starting a cookie exchange and cookbook filled with recipes for cookies and candies. The cookbook stems from Pearlman’s first fiction work, The Christmas Cookie Club a story detailing the lives of a group of women involved in a Christmas cookie exchange.

Pearlman, a practicing psychotherapist, lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a mother of three, grandmother of four and has penned several non-fiction books. Her book Infidelity: A Memoir exposes the effects of men’s extra marital affairs on the women in their lives through three generations of her own family. Nominated for the Pulitzer and National Book Award, it became a movie for the Lifetime cable network in 2004.


Q&A with Ann Pearlman
Your background isn’t in food and your previous book, The Christmas Cookie Club, wasn’t necessarily about food, did that make it challenging to write a cookbook?

I often wrote kitchen scenes and narratives of recipes in my fiction so that one of my readers commented that reading my books made her hungry. Being in a kitchen and cooking is one of the things I remember most about my childhood. My great grandfather was a baker and my grandmother made complete from scratch meals every day and enlisted everyone to help. So, whether it was experimenting with curry powder with my Mom or baking a coconut cake to look like a lamb with my grandmother, I associate love and fun and, of course, delicious food with cooking.

How is the process of writing a cookbook different/similar from your other writing?

The research is different! For example, I made several recipes to come up with the most perfect almond cookie. Instead of bugging people to read various chapters I shoved food at them, requesting, “Taste this please and tell me what you think.” You get an immediate response from tasters, while it takes time to get feedback from readers. I tried to capture that research in the story about the molasses cookie bake off that is included in the book.

With both food and stories, there’s a wide diversity and variation in all our tastes and opinions!

Read more at Suite101: Author Ann Pearlman Shares About Christmas Cookies

Thanks for reading the whole article on Suite 101.

Alton Brown's Brined Turkey -- Tried and True but New Too

Every Thanksgiving since 2001 I have heeded the advice of Alton Brown to utilize a brine for the turkey. And for every years since then, the turkey came to the table moist, succulent and tasty. This year, no exception.

But...

There's always a but, right?

I decided to change some things up. It isn't that I just did a turkey breast, typically that's what I do rather than a whole bird since my Turkey Day is a very small affair.

Since watching a Food Network holiday special some years ago when AB did the honey brined smoked turkey, I have wanted to smoke one as well. Smoking meats just may be my favorite method of cooking and most certainly a method which AB introduced and taught me how easy it is to do at home.

However, November usually brings cold weather, sometimes snow, and that isn't conducive to outdoor cooking. Nevertheless, I was determined to smoke a turkey breast this year. Luckily, the weather held up and I was blessed with a 65 degree, albeit windy, morning to smoke some fowl.

Since 2001, I have sworn by AB's original Good Eats Roast Turkey. Not varying from it in the slightest, until now. Because I liked the idea of smoking the turkey and that AB used honey in the brine for that fowl, I wanted to make a combination of the two brines.

I only had raw honey on hand and that did not seem to be appropriate for what I wanted. So I thought about the contents of the original application. Then the light switch moment arrived... brown sugar.

The sweet component of the original brine was in the form of brown sugar. Ok. What is brown sugar? (Sounds like a Jeopardy! answer doesn't it?) It is white sugar coated in molasses. Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. Why not add molasses instead?

Molasses has long been a staple in my BBQ sauce and those tasty pork chops from AB, so the flavor works well with smoke. I knew it work here.

In building the brine, I added some molasses (of course, I didn't measure to tell you exactly how much) omitted the brown sugar but kept everything else as with tradition. Soaked it and prepared it as for the oven. The fun thing was prepping the bird while trying to watch for AB on that giant turkey in the Macy's Parade.

I have my version of AB's Army surplus smoker but I wasn't certain if this would be big enough so I turned to my big Kingsford grill/smoker, which was still out from summer. This would be perfect.

A chimney starter's worth of natural charcoal briquettes--I like Stubb's brand and luckily the local Lowe's still had bags--and some well-soaked hickory chips and I was ready to go. For this smoking project, I used indirect heating by placing the charcoal and chips on half of the rectangle grill and the bird on the other half.

Probe thermometer set to 160 degrees, rest for 15 minutes... you know the drill.

Anyway, I when I cut into the breast and saw that glorious smoke ring (you can kinda see it in the photo), I was very pleased with myself.

As for the taste, well simply fabulous. My mom said it was the best turkey I had made and she even hinted to this being a summer smoking project.

Of course the brine made the turkey so moist all of the way through like with the oven roasted version.
Whether its smoky or from the oven, brining the turkey is the way to go. Next to inspiring me to do smoking, turkey brining is one of the top things I have learned from AB.

Now, if he could only convince me to deep fry a turkey. If I ever do, I'd build that turkey derrick.