07.29.09
Posted in Cooking, Produce and products tagged knives at 2:13 am by kyrias
I totally sliced up my fingers deboning a chicken the other day. To be clear and not utterly fear-mongering, I bled on one slice and merely had bits of skin pared off on other fingers.
This, people, is what happens when you use the wrong knife to debone a chicken.
I was using a chef’s knife to debone and the combination of the larger and therefore unwieldy blade and it’s lack of flexibilty was causing me problems.
So I decided I really need/want a deboning knife.
Zack’s mother had gifted Zack and Azora with some really superlative knives. They are amazing. I have made many declarations along the lines of telling them that I shall steal said knives if we ever break up house.
I knew somewhere that they were probably somewhat pricey, but I never quite realized just how pricey they were until Googling for a deboning knife from the same company.
For the uninitiated — cooking with dull knives is a pain. It makes the work go so much slower and I tend to cut myself more because dull knives slip more often. Especially when slicing onions into paper-thin slices.
So. I looked for the knives and found that:
The lovely chef’s knife that I so adore? It’s $99.95 dollars, bought on its own from Amazon.
The vegetable knife that is also lovely to work with? $69.95.
The nice little paring knife? $51.95.
You can also buy them all in a set for slightly cheaper! $195.95!
I think my jaw dropped when I saw the prices, and my heart with it. I really wanted that deboning knife — but definitely not for $107.95. Not at this point in time at least.
So Azora, Zach…any chance Zach’s mother will be wanting to gift you guys any cookware anytime in the future?
Or maybe I don’t need the heavyweight boning knife.
I’ll settle for the flexible boning knife for $87.95.
If all else fails, I guess I can settle for the flexible utility knife for $67.95…
I have to say though, I’m really, really, really lusting after this sashimi knife for $127.95.
As the convo with Thene went:
Thene:
but still. $100 for a knife is obsecene
especially if you’re not even going to kill anyone with it
teraninse says:
…looky this *links*
I’d totally kill someone with this
and enjoy it
Thene says:
ooh YES
teraninse says:
…you understand, this is good
Thene says:
sashimi <3
HUMAN SASHIMI <33333
teraninse says:
…I know, right?
I could TOTALLY perform the death of a thousand cuts with this
Alright. Joking aside. Before the US government decides to deport us two crazy women.
If it weren’t already clear, we were joking.
But still…
That is one sexy knife.
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03.08.09
Posted in Ethics and morality, Produce and products tagged Akai rice, scam at 6:21 pm by kyrias
The Asian community in the U.S seems to be having a slight problem.
Akai rice: reputed by telemarketers to make you younger, help you lose weight, help prevent and alleviate symptoms of diabetes, detox, lower blood sugar …
What, wait, it doesn’t also cure AIDs?
There’s one main Chinese channel that you can get via Comcast in Framingham, MA. Zhongtian. Perhaps you can get more channels elsewhere, but I’d be willing to bet that if you’re Chinese, either you have Zhongtian or you have it and additional channels.
Which makes the people who are selling this almost unavoidable if you’re Chinese and watch Chinese TV.
My mother’s friend was buying this rice at $13 for 3 pounds. Consider that I can buy really good rice for about $1/lb and pretty damn good brown rice all the way from Japan for $2/lb…
Skeptical cynic that I am, my first reaction to hearing that it came from France was: “Since when does France produce enough rice to be exporting it? I’ve never even really heard of France producing rice in any large quantity. And also, is rice even a traditional food pre-immigrants? Wut?”
Turns out I was wrong. Rice has been around in France for a while now.
Then, honestly, all those claims just sound like that theory I heard that having sex with a virgin cures you of AIDs.
In an effort to find out more, I Googled Akai rice.
No hits that were official, not counting that website I linked to. No official French company’s website. However, I did find that Wikipedia thinks they’re running a scam. There’s also some mention of them on ripoffreport.com, but I don’t know how reliable that is.
So I kept looking.
No mention of “Akai Ranch” when I tried Googling that and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Turns out, they do grow rice in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. However, that’s the only truth I can find regarding their claims. Well, asides from the fact that, yes, they do have flamingos and bulls and horses and a nature preserve there.
As for the region, there’s a Camargue red rice that’s apparently gourmet and ridiculously expensive. However, there’s no hits for “Riz rouge de Camargue” + “Akai Ranch”. Nor are there any hits for “Camargue red rice” + “Akai Ranch”.
Then my mom brought a bag home because her friend was all about how great it was and how it helped her daughter lose weight. I looked in the bag and it looked like a mixture of whole grains, but what was really disturbing was that they didn’t list exactly what was in the bag. The ingredients list is as follows: “Akai’s blend of aromatic rice-grains”.
Um. The last I heard, the FDA requires an ingredients list on all food products. It really sketches me out that there isn’t a “real” ingredient’s list on that bag.
At this point, this Akai business is starting to sound really troubling.
Then let’s talk about nutrition.
If you eat whole-grains, you will feel fuller for longer on slightly less food. This is because unprocessed grains take longer for you to digest and the additional fibre will make you feel fuller, faster. So yes, if Akai is a blend of whole grains, then eating it will probably make you lose some weight assuming all other variables stay constant. Easier said than done, I know.
Detox? Well, I know that people have become healthier since going on a whole-grain diet, but detoxing? They can’t support that with any sort of science.
As for blood sugar: if they are whole grains, because it takes longer to break down and there’s more fiber so you’re essentially releasing less sugar into your bloodstream over a longer period of time. So I can see why you wouldn’t have a huge surge of blood sugar post-meal. But claiming that it alleviates symptoms of diabetes is just irresponsible.
I’m not even going to dignify that comment about looking younger after a diet on Akai rice by addressing it. Wait, maybe I just did.
Anyways. There’s nothing Akai rice can do for you that you couldn’t get with a much cheaper bag of brown rice. If you want to go hardcore, feel free to look up multi-grain rice substitute blends, or recipes for them and mix your own.
At $4.33/lb, you decide if it’s a scam or not. I’m noting that Lundberg’s blend is $4.59/lb, but at least you get a real ingredients list and it’d still be probably be cheaper to mix your own if you buy in bulk from your local natural food store.
Personally, I’m positive even if mixing my own from grains bought in bulk is more expensive, I’m not giving a company that spreads such irresponsible claims my money. In my opinion, they’re essentially preying on people who are either ill or just want to eat and feel better.
Not cool at all.
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02.22.09
Posted in Cooking, Produce and products tagged roast chicken at 4:52 pm by kyrias
This is the most visually unfriendly blog I’ve seen in a while. I’d say the most visually unfriendly ever, but then I’ve seen what horrors people do to their MySpace pages.
- The multiple little columns that wraps the text so frequently is just annoying. Call me whiny, but the amount of back and forth I was doing started getting on my nerves, fast. Mostly because it exacerbated my ADD to where I sometimes couldn’t link up the sentence in my mind when I was going back and forth. Not to mention when I’d go down a line or up a line by accident and then had to re-read.
- Then there’s the teeny tiny text. I could, and did use CTRL+++ until it was large enough to read comfortably, but then that just emphasized the irritatingly painful fact of how one thought was split up into three parts because of the tiny columns.
- They really could have just deleted the “Food I’m loving right now” column on the far right. It’s not hugely amazing enough to warrant a column by itself. For that matter, the blogroll column could be shifted to below the “about” column and it would have done well enough there.
It’s otherwise a good blog that I’d enjoy reading, but the format put the shudders in my soul.
On a happier note…
Roast chicken is one of those things I’ve never like experimenting with because I don’t like white meat and there’s a disconcertingly large amount of it on a whole chicken. I’ve also found it hard to get it to where the dark meat was cooked but the white meat hadn’t already given up the ghost and was heading towards being jerky. Then there’s how it seems very difficult to get the spices to penetrate the meaty part without having the skin being unedible for all the spice on it.
As I got a craving for proper roast chicken though, I decided to try again.
This time I rubbed it all over with generous handfuls of Montreal spice rub, stuffed it with more garlic cloves and a lemon, and rubbed it over again with celery seed powder.
Then, per instructions by the Interwebs, I left it in the fridge overnight, uncovered, so as to get the skin to dry out as much as possible.
This morning, I roughly cut up potatoes and carrots to make an impromptu rack for the chicken, drizzled olive oil over it all, sprinkled some salt on, and tossed to cover. I also poured about a cup of water onto the bottom of the pan so the vegetables wouldn’t scorch.
I pulled out the chicken, dotted it with butter, set it up on the vegetables, and put it into a oven that had been preheated to 500 degrees. After 10 minutes, I turned the heat down to 350. I figured that the heat lost from opening the oven would be regained faster if I had the heat turned up higher and it would crisp the skin nicely.
About an hour and a half later, I pulled out the chicken and tested it. The juices ran clear, but when Azora cut away part of the thigh, it appeared to still be somewhat red at the bone. I pulled the wings off to eat, because they were done, and stuck the chicken back in for another half hour.
In retrospect, I could have kept the chicken in there for another half hour, because the meat was just slightly underdone. Not so much as to be even pink or bloody, but it had the texture of not being entirely well-done. However, it was pretty good as is, if one didn’t think too hard about food poisoning. Still, considering it was about a 8 pound bird, the 20 minutes per pound at 350 degrees sounded like it would have made it a bit too dry.
Noting, however, that we ate the drumsticks first, so perhaps the breast was well-done at that point.
The potatoes and carrots had a lovely flavour from being cooked in chicken drippings, olive oil, and butter. Next time I think I’ll put in more carrots because the roasting really did wonders for them.
I will make up a spice rub myself next time. The Montreal spice rub was tasty, but a bit on the salty side, so I could have done with mor spice but I was afraid that the salt would have made it inedible.
Not a bad turnout for my first roast chicken.
Next time, we’ll see how I can adapt the beer can chicken recipe so it turns out just as well.
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02.20.09
Posted in Cooking, Produce and products tagged Boston local stores at 7:35 pm by kyrias
Azora and I went investigating fishmongers today.
I got a pound of farmed salmon from New Deal and a mackerel — if I had known that Courthouse was right down the road and had Alaskan salmon, I would have gotten it there. Neither store had cod with skin — supposedly no one wants to buy cod with skin now. I think it’s a blooming shame, because crispy fish skin is actually pretty tasty.
If I bought the cod with skin, the fish would have been one meal, and I would have stir-fried the minced skin until it was crispy and made fried rice with it. Now that I know that they throw out the skin, maybe I’ll ask them to save it for me in the future. Can’t imagine they’ll charge me full price for something they usually throw out, so I might get to benefit from other people not knowing the joys that is crispy fried fish skin. On the other hand, doesn’t sound too good, does it? 
Oh well, more for me. 
The salmon is going into salmon fried rice to stretch it and I think I’m pan-frying the mackerel with a bit of garlic and oil. I think a pound of salmon at $15 a pound will make enough fried rice for 8 people. Not bad, right?
As for the mackerel, it’s my first time frying a whole fish, so we’ll see how that goes. Near 4 dollars a pound, which isn’t bad, for what it is.
On our way there I also noticed the Mayflower Poultry store. They had chicken hearts for sale and chicken legs for 89 cents a pound if you bought 5 pounds. Needless to say, I snapped up half a pound of hearts and 5 pounds of chicken legs. They said that their chickens weren’t given antibiotics and weren’t fed animal byproducts. Although not organic or freerange, I think I’d rather give them my business than to Purdue or others of their ilk. The chicken hearts I had tasted very fresh and I’ll see if the chicken legs are just as tasty. Yelp has good things to say about their roasters, so that’s next on my list. They also have buffalo steaks and venison, very tempting indeed.
When I got home, I marinated the chicken hearts in Chinese cooking wine, 1 teaspoon salt, three scallion whites, and 5 cloves of minced garlic. About an hour later I strung three on skewers and starting cooking them — over the gas stove.
Unfortunately, even with soaking the skewers, the flame burnt right through the bamboo before the chicken hearts were done. This was when Azora came by, had one, and then had the brilliant idea of cooking them on the forks.
So we each took a burner, strung them up on the forks, and went right to town.
The verdict?
Tasty, but marshmallow toasting forks would have worked better. That’s going on the shopping list.
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11.05.08
Posted in Produce and products tagged food, psuedo-patriotism, rants at 1:53 am by kyrias
I have to admit, I got my dander up when this person started ranting about how worthless Chinese bakeries were.
It’s really not about patriotism or other such rot. It’s really more of a question of “why the heck would you try to get something quintessentially not-Chinese in China?”
I don’t expect to get proper Chinese food in the U.S — why would you expect the average Chinese bakery to turn out a proper baguette?
However, Yi Soon Bakery in Allston does have very nice, proper Chinese breads. You know, Bo Luo / Polo bread, sweet breads with taro/ red bean/ matcha fillings, or my ever beloved scallion buns. Or those soft buns with sausage, scallions, or bacon and cheese baked into them.
Azns tend to make softer buns — the bread that they sell have non-existent crusts, making them the perfect foil for all the savoury or sweet things that they match them with.
If I’m lusting after Azn bread, often called “tang zhong mian bao”, I’m thinking about quite a different thing than when I’m thinking about a nice crusty peasant loaf for my Gruyere or garlic toast.
Learn to eat what you can where you are — one would think a seasoned traveller would have known that by now.
Which, by the way, I’m now in dire need of the recipe to make the soft buns that forms the base for pork-floss buns or my lovely scallion buns. If anyone can find something that’s guaranteed to work, that’d be lovely. I’ve been Googling madly and haven’t found something that’s guaranteed to work with measurements in cups instead of weights.
I’d love to bake in weights — but the brokeness within which I find myself does not lend itself to buying a kitchen scale, yet.
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11.03.08
Posted in Frugality, Produce and products tagged budget, food at 2:41 am by kyrias
Not all produce is grown equal. Certain types of vegetables and fruits have more pesticides on them than others and with fruits such as bananas where there’s a thick outer skin — it doesn’t really matter that much.
So if you’re on a money crunch but would still like to eat organic, here’s a list of what to buy organic and what is optional - as per SmartMoney.
Organic: Not:
Apples Bananas
Cherries Kiwis
Grapes Mangoes
Pears Papayas
Berries Pineapples
Nectarines Oranges
Plums Asparagus
Celery Avocados
Potatoes Brussels sprouts
Spinach Broccoli
Bell peppers Cauliflower
Lettuce Sweet corn
Onions
Sweet peas
Seafood
Processed foods
Tomatoes
Green beans
Meat, eggs, dairy
Baby food
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