Yarn Zombie

As I’ve often mentioned on this blog, my family loves food. We are foodies, and proud of it. We are the people sitting across from you at restaurants, taking pictures of our dinner. We are the people who linger in the cheese department, carefully weighing the pros and cons of buying a new, foreign cheese. We are intrigued by new cooking techniques. We are the ones who celebrate Christmas with Waffle Night and food baskets, and celebrate Hannukah just because we like potato pancakes.

My dad came for a visit this weekend. Surprisingly, my parents hadn’t ever watched Top Chef before my mom’s visit here last month. After she went home, my parents Tivo’d it and got caught up on the current season. The new Top Chef fixation combined with mine and Travis‘ current obsession with the cookbook ‘Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day‘ and wound up making my dad’s visit the most food-focused one yet.

I’ll admit that a lot of times I’m too lazy to cook. Every once in a while I’ll get in the mood to do something ambitious, but I normally always try out things when Travis isn’t home (so if I have a complete FAIL, it’s just my meal that is ruined). Gradually, though, Travis and I have been expanding our food repertoire over the past 4 months. We’ve added handmade tortillas, which opened up an entirely new world to us, because you can put anything on a tortilla. I’m now making fried rice and avocado salad all the time. The now constant bread supply combined with being able to harvest goodness from the garden means we can survive on sandwiches this summer if we so choose.

I’ve been trying to eat healthier and make a lot of my own food. There’s a lot of crap that is put into processed food nowadays that I’m fairly certain my body does not need. So I’ve found myself lately trying to focus on purchasing ingredients rather than something that comes in a box or a bag. I’m not cutting out processed food entirely, but trying to take small steps to get used to the idea of preparing more food myself.

There’s a lot of stuff, though, that I just prefer not to deal with. It’s mainly all meat. I’m not a vegetarian, but I can go for many meals sans-meat without a problem. Raw meat grosses me out, so whenever we want to eat something like hamburgers or chicken, it’s always Travis who takes care of it.

Anyway, like I was saying, this weekend was a Perfect Storm of Edible Proportions. Travis and I have been getting more ambitious in our food, but we’re still without some basic cooking skills. My dad makes awesome food and was able to steer us in the right direction. Click below the fold for some foodie goodness.

The first recipe we tried out of the Artisan Bread book was for their basic boule dough. It’s good, and the flavors definitely become more complex the longer the dough sits in the fridge. After two batches of that type of bread, we moved on the Light Whole Wheat bread. This used 1 cup of wheat flour to 5 1/2 cups of all purpose.

It produced an awesome sandwich bread. It’s just a wee bit brown and granier than the first recipe, but still light and fluffy and wonderful. It’s the perfect bread to top with honey butter.

After we went through the Light Whole Wheat, we moved on to Portuguese Corn Bread, which, unlike American corn breads, uses yeast to rise.

This dough was a lot sticker and harder to work with, since it wanted to adhere to the pizza peel and not move onto the pizza stone. Its finickiness is worth the trouble, though, since the result is amazing. I has a wonderful texture, due to the cornmeal, tastes nummy, and is bright and happy and yellow.

Speaking of yellow, and also speaking of bread, we picked up a good serrated bread knife at Jungle Jim’s!

The blade is actually coated in teflon, which is pretty cool. Also, it’s yellow. Colors make me happy. We’ve needed a new bread knife, too, since our old one was sad and dull. Hooray for proper kitchen tools!

Oh, need I mention that my dad wound up buying a copy of the Artisan Bread book, too? I didn’t think so.

So, we went to Jungle Jim’s on Friday. It was my dad’s first time, and he was properly overwhelmed. We wound up getting some bizarre food/drink/chocolate, but I haven’t photographed a lot of the stuff yet. I got some weird chocolate candy from Croatia called a Bananko. It has bananas and monkeys on the wrapper, but an examination of the ingredient list seems to show that neither bananas nor monekys make up part of the candy.

Travis was adventurous at Jungle Jim’s, and boldly bought something called ‘Gypsy Bacon.’ It must have been bacon from gigantic pigs, because it comes not in strips, but in slabs.

Here it is cooked with some Light Wheat toast:

That’s one piece of bacon on that plate, by the way.

We went a little meat crazy, so much so that I started to call this weekend the Weekend of Many Meats.

Of course we made tortillas:

We had enough for dinner, breakfast, and part of lunch.

Serendipitously, I happened to be on Ruhlman’s blog this weekend and read a post pimping Eric Ripert’s new internet site, avec eric. A lot of what he’s going to be doing on this blog is posting videos of different sorts of cooking that can be done with a Cuisinart convection toaster oven.

Hey! I thought. I have a Cuisinart convection toaster oven! (I love it, by the way, and would gladly recommend it to anyone) Let’s see what Chef Ripert cooks in it! It turns out the first video he has posted is how to make a broiled red snapper filet. Now, I’m definitely not a fish person. I’ll eat fish, but primarily in breaded stick formation, mainly because I’ve never really expected to find actual decent fish in the middle of Ohio. However, the video intrigued me. It’s just so easy! Take your filet, salt and pepper them, brush them with butter, and then broil for 5 minutes. Can it be any simpler than that?

So I made the bold move of announcing that there would be fish for dinner Sunday night. After some talk, we decided to go with a surf-n-turf theme (in case the fish turned out yicky, we had a back-up protein).

We went to Whole Foods to get our meats. Now, I had always looked longingly at the seafood counter in Whole Foods, not because I’m into seafood (like I said, I’m not), but because all of the things they have on display are so aesthetically pleasing. I may not want to eat it, but it all looks beautiful.

What I didn’t realize is that there are 2 seafood counters at Whole Foods, and the one I never look at, the one that actually has naked, raw fish and stuff, was the one I needed to get my red snapper from. So I go up to the fish guy and squeak out, “Hi, I’m cooking fish for my first time and I need some red snapper?”

And he’s all, “Hey, great! You need to pick one out. They’re right there.” And he points to this display of dead fish that are all looking at me, because they all have heads and eyes and look like fish, not like a cute, rectangular white piece of meat.

Anyway, I got through it all without fainting. The fish guy filleted the fish right in front of me, which was kind of cool/creepy. And he put the cut of fish in with a bag of ice to keep it cold until we got home, which I thought was nice.

Travis and Dad picked out a brontosaurus sized piece of dry aged meat.

I made fish first, and paired it with the avocado salad Dad and I had been having every day as an afternoon snack.

It came out really good. Travis even ate it! Hooray! I managed to cook it and touch raw fish without freaking out, and even made a cheery lemon crown garnish.

Then, Travis and Dad cooked the steak. They made it on a cast iron skillet, which promptly smoked up the entire house. We had it with canned Trader Joe’s corn (which is, apparently, the best canned corn known to mankind) and some slices of the Portuguese corn bread.

I haven’t mentioned desert at all, because it was pretty much the same thing the entire time Dad was here: banana scallops, inspired by Richard Blaise of Top Chef. I won’t go into it here, except to provide a picture of the goodness

and to direct you to the recipe, which is posted at the annex. Check it out. You will drool.

I expect the next post will be less food oriented and more craft focused. Travis was actually the craftier of the two of us this weekend. He made another lamp and spun a bunch of yarn, so yay Travis!