Recent Foodsville publications

Mahi Kheer (Dessert made our of Fish)

subhasonai123@gmail.com — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:17:44

Have you ever tried with a dessert made out of Non Vegetarian items and that too the most smelly item ------ FISH .................. Believe me its delicious, very high calorie, energy booster work better than Red Bull even. TRY IT AT ONCE.

Something besides Tyson

tessaloveshorses@comcast.net — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:26:53

FOR ONCE I WON'T HAVE A BIG SPEECH ABOUT HOW AWFUL Tyson is and i'll simply say something. Has anyone watched Jamie Olivers food revolution? It's such an Eye opener! We should start all start one wherever we live! (can you tell i'm a huge protest group fan?)

Meeting wednesday!

tessaloveshorses@comcast.net — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:17:45

Be sure u r on for thursday. I'll post all info from T.A.T. meeting then. Wendy's, Mcdonalds, Costco, and wal-mart all serve Tyson chicken. Thx!

pls help!

tessaloveshorses@comcast.net — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:16:26

hey can anyone pls tell me how to post a publication in my group? pls send me a message!

a "Fridae"

chelsealuvspigs@comcast.net — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:47:52

I am also babyanne0305, but my user logged me out, and i can't get back in, so plz look up babyanne0305, and get the recipe there :) thx!

a "Fridae"

chelsea@foodsville.com — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:45:30

a spin off of a sundae, only less prep. time and less ingredients, too!

Teens against Tyson

tessaloveshorses@comcast.net — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:38:27

Information on Tyson
1. employees run over animals with forklifts
2. dismember animals for fun
3. blow up with dry ice bomps
4. scalding animals
5. break legs to fit shakles
6. feed anti biotics that create imunities to antibiotics in us
7. hires illegal immegrents for almost no money a day
8. had to destroy 15,000 breeder hens because they had and influenza called h7n9

Teens Against Tyson, or T.A.T.

chelsea@foodsville.com — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:38:12

Tyson Framing Industries is a place where they practicly tourcher their animals. I know, I know. "We eat them. What's the BIG deal?" Well, i'll tell you. Their chickens get run over with forklifts, blown up with dry-ice bombs, and kicked and shoved around for absolutly no reason.

homemade baked potato chips

tessaloveshorses@comcast.net — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:32:24

[empty]

Edisto Oyster Roast - old school on Peters Point.

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:23:30

    I have written extensively about oyster roasts and the general ambience associated therewith, but a few days ago Laura and I decided to do one for Valentine's Day. We used to have an oyster party in NYC on Valentine's Day whereat we had raw oysters, drank champaign and consumed some side dishes like Virginia Ham and black bread with butter. It was a lot of fun. People got to eat their fill of raw oysters, something not many of them had ever had the opportunity to do. We quit having this party years ago because the day after was so hard on the hosts. We were trying to recreate, in NYC, the oyster roasts familiar to me from my kid-hood on Edisto Island. Roasting wasn't possible so we went with raw.
    Most of the oyster roasts I have been to in my adult life - that started somewhere around age 40, I think - have been, in fact, oyster steams. Some one buys a bunch of bushels of oysters and then places them in a basket in a big steel steamer box. After about a minute or two the oysters relax and open up; the basket is lifted out and dumped on the table for the many to enjoy. Depending on the oysters this can be a pretty good or a pretty bland feed. Either way, lots of cocktail sauce gets used and the taste of the oysters is almost secondary. If they are bland oysters, it's more like a cocktail sauce feed.
    We had recently been to a real roast, where the hosts had built a big hot fire of oak logs and covered it with a 3' by 6' sheet of stainless steel diamond-plate supported on iron legs about 18" high. The oysters were dumped on the red hot steel and covered with a sopping wet cotton rug. In the old days they used burlap which I am told was made from Hemp. Interesting roast that could have made, I thought. Burlap being hard to find these days, cotton rugs are substituted. The oysters are in contact with the steel for a couple of minutes and actually do 'roast'. The shells char on the bottoms and the oysters pick up some little smoke and develope flavors not found in raw or steamed oysters.
    I wanted to do a roast this way and I wanted to do so on a couple of days notice only invitng people at the last minute. The Fisk brothers loaned me their steel plate contraption and I set about cutting up oak. I had a number of very nice pieces of live oak from a blow down two years ago and I thought to use that. The chain saw made quick work of cutting the pieces into nice 18" sections and then two separate log splitters were borrowed to split the pieces into usable fire wood. This took the better part of a day and left me limping. The next day I moved the wood from the splitting stage to the roasting arena. This was accomplished slowly with the use of the tractor and front-end loader and took another six hours, more or less, and I was limping harder. Lots harder.
    On the day of the roast at about 12:30, the brothers arrived and looked at the pile of wood and the as yet unkindled fire and decided with hardly a word exchanged between them that my heart was in the right place, but that I wasn't getting it done and wasn't likely to. They started the fire ... lots of diesel fuel and palm fronds ... and then left me to keep feeding oak to the fire and returned a half an hour later with picnic tables and benches and serious outdoor lights. Starting about 5:30, the fire was ready and they started roasting Oysters. I hope to do this again one day, but don't think I will attempt it without first recruiting the Fisks. They had been invited to an oyster roast, but ending up managing it. (Much to the relief of at least one cousin who believes that no one who has lived in the north as long as I have could possibly roast one oyster much less bushels of them)
    I got to attend my own party. I would feel that I hadn't really done much about having a party as they did all the cooking, but the wood gathering had left me mostly crippled and drooling. It was all I could do to put away my half bushel. and I had to do much of that sitting at a picnic table.
     It must be said, that a roasted oyster is a different food. These were local, from within a few miles of the event and the cocktail sauce went untouched. The mignonette went untouched. The bread and butter went stale. People ate oysters. And then, they ate more oysters. And then there were more eaten. The hot sauce didn't get opened and the lemons were ignored. Three couples had been unable to attend on account of last minute kid issues and we had a few bivalaves left, but if we had had full attendence we would have run way short. In fact, if I hadn't remembered to bring out the venison chili mid way through, we would have run out of oysters before we ran out of appetites.
    So, all in all, I can't wait to do it again.... but I won't take it so lightly the next time. I may have to start the wood pile soon. We can eat these creatures comfortably for another ten weeks or so. I understand why these events were once upon a time so anticipated and special. It is no simple thing to undertake. I am still beat, like someone took a stick to me, and consuming alarming handfuls of Tylenol ... but oh, the shellfish. What an experience. I was surprised at the number of people who had never had oysters this way or who hadn't had them this way since they were kids - kind of like me.

IN VINO CE ANCORA VERITA MA BISOGNA CERCARLO

franchiseremedies@sbcglobal.net — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:47:00

THERE IS STILL TRUTH IN WINE BUT YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT

In vino veritas never interested me in the slightest. I always knew what it meant, but it didn’t apply to me, because I was stupid enough to say whatever I felt like saying without first having to get drunk. To be sure, I never learnt to play the frat boy pretend to go along with the flow gambit that gets people into fraternities and enables them to subscribe to absurd company mission statements as though they weren’t really all bullshit.

In another dimension, however, I had the great good fortune to learn about wine without having to take courses in it. I have enjoyed so much of it for so many years, and have such a wonderful palatal recollection, that at this advanced age I unabashedly consider myself to be an expert in vetting vino.

Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” contains the suggestion that the past cannot be recalled, no matter how acute one’s intellect may be. Thomas Wolfe echoed the sentiment in his “You Can’t Go Home Again”. What was can never be revisited because we cannot go back to who we were when we were there before. The intervention of experience changes us.

And yet, current experiences conjure up recollections, however indistinct. Proust’s taste of a Madeleine, like my sip of wine, brings back sweet recollections of places, events, music, people, sentiments that we cherish, even in some impressionistic mind’s eye picture. Last week I stumbled upon a few bottles of the Greek white wine Robola. I first enjoyed this wine in Charleston South Carolina in a small Greek restaurant next to what used to be the Riviera Theater on King Street. Belinda and I enjoyed this wine together during a really delicious Greek lunch of souvlaki and salad with fresh baked pita on a sunny day in a beautiful city where I spent part of my youth. This bottle brought back that memory of a day almost twenty years ago.

There are many other bottles that would bring back many more memories, but that I really don’t think I will buy. There is a limit to what I am willing to spend on a bottle of wine. While I sometimes exceed that limit when I am entertaining clients, I usually don’t do that for personal consumption.

In the early 1960s, when I was in law school, wine was unbelievably inexpensive. As a law student living like Rodion Raskolnikov I could still occasionally afford the occasional Chateau Margeaux at about $ 10 a bottle. Even as late as 1974 wine was very accessible. A case of Mouton Rothschild in Detroit then could be had from the Red Wagon wine store for about $ 250.

The so called Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 caused disruption in currency markets all over the world. People went nuts. Time magazine posted a picture of a wine bottle on one of its covers relating to a story that people had begun buying fine wine to hedge currency fluctuations. Wine became more than something to drink, and even more than something wine snobs “laid down” for future consumption. By 1975, what I had been able to enjoy at $ 250 a case went to $ 800 a case. The normal demand for wine as something to enjoy exponentialised by the demand for wine as a currency hedge, considering that no more wine was produced, drove the price through the roof. It has not come back down.

The effect was both terrible and beneficent for me. It was terrible because I used to enjoy really good European wine. It was good because it incentivized the improvement of California wines to the point at which they soon became more enjoyable just for their sheer luscious qualities. I remember a bleak winter spent driving from city to city in the Midwest, up to my ass in snow, taking depositions and attending preliminary injunction hearings in several courts in a franchise case in which the franchisor decided to work me to death to break my resources and make it impossible to represent my franchisee clients. The franchisor failed in that effort. But I kept a case of Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet in the back seat that I enjoyed as I drove along with my Quarter Pounder with cheese and large fries. To this day I find it hard to eat a good hamburger without a bottle of that wine. The price of Mondavi Reserve Cabernet today helps me control my cholesterol by not eating too many hamburgers. Also, if they catch you enjoying a bottle of good wine while driving today it is as bad for you as it might be if they caught you on your cell phone.

Similar happy days memories of almost twenty years ago associated with a case of good wine on the back seat include almost a week enjoying Oregon with Belinda and a case of Yamhill Reserve Pinot Noir in the back seat as we drove along. We had only recently begun our great love affair that continues to this day. We used to buy that wine directly from the vintner and have it shipped in – but not anymore due to the fact that really good Oregon pinot noir sells today for around $ 70 a bottle.

Italian wines are now priced far above fair value. Not so hot Italian wines are now masquerading as fine wines, promoted by glamorous marketing and passing for the earmarks of sophistication for wine rubes. Robert Mondavi has teamed up with Frescobaldi to produce some delicious super Tuscans, Luce and Lucente, but they are now priced beyond what would be considered a daily wine event for normal folks. In Spain, Jorge Ordonez has taught the vintners how to overprice in comparison to quality. A good Rioja today from Baron de Ley, their Finca Monestario bottling, is now about $ 700 a case. At $ 300 a case for the lesser Riojas you are being scammed. You can buy wonderful Chilean wines for about $ 170 a case if you know what you are doing and shop carefully. Chile is the bargain of the planet right now, but Concha y Toro has discovered that people will pay $ 700 a case for their Don Melchor bottling. It is delicious, but at $ 700 a case it is not something regularly enjoyed.

One could posit that overpricing is good for wine aficionados because if you drink the best every day, then the best becomes ordinary. I must admit that these really top shelf bottlings are extremely delightful on the celebratory occasions when I enjoy a bottle or two with a friend. The days when I kept five cases of Mouton Rothschild and much more of Clos Saint Denis (Domaine DuJac) on hand in the wine area of home are long gone.

I enjoyed Mouton Rothschild instead of Lafitte Rothschild in those days due to price differences without noticeable taste difference. The vineyards lay across a narrow path from each other and belonged to the same vintner. But Mouton was a second growth Paulliac while Lafitte was a first growth. The 1895 Bordeaux classification was that significant. In 1973, Mouton was made a first growth wine. The Rothschilds had the label done by the French artist Marc Chagall, and on it was the statement, “Second je fut. Premier je suis. Mouton ne change.”

There is an old joke about the wine snob who brags that he can tell by tasting which wine, which vintner, which vintage, which vineyard, which field in the vineyard, which day of the week the grapes were picked, which end of the field the pickers started on, and whether the picker was right handed or left. He was handed a glass of piss and took a sip, pronouncing it to be piss. “Yes. But whose? He was asked.

Wine is much like art. It is exactly like art in so many respects that it is certainly liquid art, and, at its best, liquid music. But what causes wine to be at its best is a composite of many dimensions. Some of these are serious and some are hilariously funny.

I had a wonderful Belgian friend who was the president/managing director of a European client of mine who, when not focused with all his might on very serious matters, could find his sense of humor and allow me to really enjoy it. I miss Cecil DeWagter a lot and much of this retrospective is dedicated to my memory of the dear man. One of his sons had the luxury to be able to become a world expert on a subject of absolutely no relevance to anything. How nice it was of Cecil to be proud of his son’s expertise, even if there might have been only one institution of higher learning in the world that had the subject anywhere in its curriculum. If you study at Carcassonne, you can fall in love with the poetry of Andre Chenier and the music of Umberto Giordano.

Et puis d’un ton charmant ta letter me demande
Ce que je veux de toi, ce te je te commande,
Ce que je veux? Dis-tu. Je veux que ton retour
Te paraisse bien lent; je veux que nuit et jour
Tu m’aimes. (Nuit et jour. Helas! Je me tourmente.)
Presente au milieu d’eux, sios seule,sois absente;
Dors en pensant a moi; reve-moi pres de toi;
Ne vois que moi sans cesse, et sois toute avec moi.

Cecil loved to hold court on the subject of European wine. He was wealthy enough to have enjoyed the best and frugal enough to be conversant about the vins ordinaires of all of Europe. Cecil explained that every bourgeois cuvee had two gradations – villages and superieur. What most of us had heard of as the grade of wine just below vin ordinaire was simply called plonk. But few of us ever considered that there might be a plonk villages and a plonk superieur.

Below plonk there is pighette – slang for piss. Accordingly there is pighette villages and pighette superieur. Finally, the bottom of the ladder, that lowermost rung beneath which nothing exists, with its two gradations, is called tordre boyeaux (twists your bowels). If you have not tried it, you are no connoisseur. One cannot go outside of an envelope if he does not know the dimensions of the envelope to begin with.

Wine, like fine art, involves a lot of bullshit. The bullshit is hysterical and I have already written about it here. http://www.seamusmuldoon.com/chef.htm . The difference between connoisseurship and pretense to connoisseurship is galactic. But people buy the trappings and pretend. The pretense is so absurd that it is funny. A section of that story deals with wine bullshit. So many people never realize that just looking for very enjoyable wine on your own – once you know the ranges of taste that you enjoy and can afford– is so much fun.

Robbie Burns Birthday Again

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:32:42

Tonight we are having a few people over for the haggis. The haggis is premade and fully cooked so it only has to be gently brough up the temperature in a pot of water. Last year it was quite good, but somewhat surprising when pierced witgh the knife. It oozed out like highly seasoned lava and solidified into a kind of course pate'. It will be fine.

What kind of vegetable do you serve with a haggis? This year I have elected to go with buttered cabbage, boiled potatoes and bashed neeps. Seamus Muldoon has a dish, Colecannon, that's made with mashed potatoes and cabbage, but because the haggis is so like oatmeal in consistancy I am going to boil the potatoes instead of mash them - for texture and visual appeal, you know. We are also having Bashed Neeps. The first I heard of Bashed Neeps was in a Patrick O'Brien book and I expected to be able to review the recipe in the companion book, "Lobscouse and Spotted Dog", but me copy is in South Carolina so that's out.

Bashed neeps are - essentially - mashed turnips treated much the same way as mashed potatoes. The turnips are diced, boiled for 15 minutes or so until tender and then mashed with butter and some other seasonigs... Cardamon has been suggested. I am unsure if the Scots would go for that, but we will let you know.

I have a bit o' single malt whiskey lyin' around, too, so the guests will each get a tint o' that.

The birthday poem, given to me this morning by one who has at times made his living wering kilts and dispensing whiskey as a "highlander", is in the style of Burns...

Upon a hill there stood a coo.
IF it's not there noo
It must have shifted

Well, I think it's funny.........

I hope the piper gets here on time.

Chicken with Forty - or more -cloves of Garlic

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:59:23

This is a variation on the Classic printed in the 1967 Gourmet Magazine brought to my attention by foodist Seamus Muldoon and elaborated on under the original posting. The priciple differences are the addition of carrots and Vermouth and the omission of browing the chicken before cooking. THE COOKING TIME IS APPROXIMATE. The color of the sauce will make most people think you made it tomatoes, but none are involved.

New Twist on Forty Garlic-Clove Chicken.

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:37:24

The first time someone made forty clove chicken for me I was unimpressed. It was a valiant effort by a friend who didn't - and still doesn't - cook much, but I appreciated the effort. His recipe was true to the classic... "take and chicken and forty cloves of unpeeled garlic, put them in a roasting pan and seal it up. Roast it till done, remove, carve and serve with garlic cloves as garnish" I tried it a couple of times over the years as it seemed to have potential, but it never moved me and it never seemed that the garlic ever really penetrated the chicken. A recent trip to Costco to get veal stew resulted in my buying two organic chickens and a two pound bag of garlic instead as there was no veal stew meat to be had - no, not even for ready money.

I got out a couple of books and looked over recipes for the dish and decided that I didn't love any of them and thought to do the following. I roasted forty or so cloves of garlic and THEN stuffed the chicken with them and scattered the ones that couldn't fit in the cavity around the bird. I used a heavy enameled, cast iron pot. Seasoning was mostly the garlic, a little teeny bit of salt and a sprinkle of herbs d'provence. Half way through the roasting I added a half cup of Vermouth and a big handful of cut up carrots. After about an hour and a half total cooking time, I removed the pot top and hit the broiler for a moment to brown the chicken, took it out and let it rest on a platter, degreased the pan drippings and mashed the garlic cloves and carrots together. (I squeezed the garlic out of the skins and discarded them) This produced a reddish paste to which I added a little salt and pepper and some chicken stock. When the stock reduced I allowed the pan to cool and added a bit of butter to the paste to thicken it up and served it on the chicken pieces.

Mighty good. It's worth doing and gets added to the list of recipes to hold onto when one has lots 'o garlic. It makes a pretty sauce and the carrots and garlic compliment each other with the garlic being sweeter than the carrots. Other herbs could be used and I am sure they would be good. The vermouth is important. It's a great flavor enhancer for chicken.

Mirepoix and Fish

pinkney@meadandmikell.com — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:05:09

    Someone asked me recently about fish cookery. Cooking fish is something that I don't do very well. I think it's a specific talent, like baking or pastry making and while I do cook fish from time to time, my repertoire is exceeding limited. It may be that the methods for cooking fish and the variety of fish are, indeed, limited. A cousin tells me that the best way to prepare fresh caught Trout or Sea Bass from the St. Pierre is to clean, season and immediately fry. I have to say, I don't disagree that this makes prime eating, but often fried Bass tastes like fried Trout or fried Catfish. It tastes 'fried'.
    Fish can be baked, roasted, grilled, fried, eaten raw ... whatever. Not being constantly on the water and not really being of the fishing pursuasion just yet I mostly have access to fish market products. A great favorite is Salmon filet. Wild Salmon is available from time to time, but farmed Salmon is always there. Farmed Salmon doesn't need any help staying moist in the cooking process. Wild Salmon, like wild deer or buffalo needs some assistance, however, and that brings me to mirepoix.
   Wild Salmon is good baked or poached - I have never fried it - but in any preparation other than poaching, it can easily dry out. Frying would probably keep it moist, but it just doesn't seem the thing to do .... like frying duck legs. I like to make a mirepoix to cover the Salmon filet and bake the whole thing. A mirepoix is a basic 'thing' in French cooking and consists of 'sweating a combination of equal parts finely chopped/minced onion, carrot and celery. These three roots are tossed into a pan together with butter or oil and cooked until they soften - not brown.
    I use a lot of butter when I am doing this for Salmon filets and add a squeeze of lemon juice and a fair amount of salt and pepper. I then cover the filet with the mixture and bake or broil ten minutes to the inch in a closely fitting vessel. If I don't have a close fitting vessel, I use tin foil to make one and place it on a baking pan. I like to make sure that the butter and fish oils don't run off and burn on the pan. It's a sort of bake/broil/poach method that gives wild Salmon a chance to keep its moisture. The mirepoix and rendered oils and butter make a good sauce and, if this is served with rice, a good 'gravey'.
    A local caterer uses a dollops of mayo mixed with the mirepoix when it has cooled. This holds it in place and forms a sort of coating or crust. I am surprised at the number of people who despise mayo, being a huge fan, myself. It isn't necessary, but if you like mayo, it does help hold it all together. Sometimes I will add a little minced mushroom to the mirepoix, but that is moving towards a duxelle. If we are adding the mushroom a bit of minced Parsely won't take you too far out of bounds. Savory doesn't do any harm, either.
     Actually, now that I think about it, duxelle does a great job on fish, too. That's another post though.