Alternate Plan

Say your wife is making a 100+ run of tamales and they will be steam cooking in batches all day long, turning your house into a spicy sauna. What do you do? You come up with an alternate plan.

Find that neglected turkey deep fryer that you use once a year. Drag it out, fire it up and put some water in the bottom. Bingo! Mass outdoor steam system. The only downside is that your neighbors will be sniffing around for leftovers.

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The Well Is Deep

I was talking with edible AUSTIN‘s editor, Marla Camp, when the first issue came out. She said the biggest question she was hearing was whether there would be enough stories about food to keep the magazine going. I guess there is. Issue No. 3 just came out and it doesn’t look like the end is anywhere in sight. Highlights for me this issue are the Mole, Living Soil and a cliffhanger about an interloper.

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Soufflé

This was fun. I finally got a soufflé to rise. Sometimes cooking takes a little science. I have found that a lot of cooking seems to be based on lore, not science. Case in point, egg whites in a soufflé.

After failing a half dozen times, I looked up what is actually going on when a souffle is rising. Turns out that the egg whites need to have enough air in them to expand the mixture and the base needs protein to stabilize it so it won’t deflate. Who knew?

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Safety Tip

When you are reducing 24 pounds of pureed tomatoes outside on your grill, to make ketchup, you are going to attract a lot of bees. If you don’t have one of those net-covered beekeepers hats, at least flip your collar up so it is harder for them to fly down your shirt.

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New Year’s Eve Dinner

The traditional New Year’s Eve dinner at our house is Beef tenderloin with mashed potatoes. We threw in some peas this year, too. The potatoes came out extra good, thanks to the new food mill I received for Christmas (thank you, Santa!). They were fluffy from the get-go and needed less milk and butter.

I cooked the tenderloin in clarified butter. Sounds fancy, but it’s not. Cooking down a stick of butter separates it into it’s three component parts: water, milk solids and butterfat. Normal butter burns at a relatively low heat, and the milk solids are the culprit (white stuff in the bottom of the pan). If you remove those and just use the butterfat (clear, yellow oil), you can get that good butter taste and not have all your smoke detectors go off.

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