My husband had an interesting and excellent idea recently.  Knowing that people enjoy lists and recommendations, he suggested that I make a list of “must have” cookbooks for the blog, explaining why each book is on the list.

Genius!  And I’m planning on taking it one step further.  Each month this year I’m going to review one of the books in my collection that I think is a “must have,” and at the end of 2012, I’ll have a list of 12 cookbooks that are really stellar.  At least, that’s the hope.

The rules – yes, I’m going to make some rules.  Because I love them but also because I think that benchmarks are helpful in assessing things that other people have evaluated.  So here are the rules:

1. I own the book
2. I cook from it at least somewhat regularly (you’d be astounded by how many cookbooks I own and never cook from – or maybe you wouldn’t!)
3. I’ve made at least three things from them which have come off successfully without modification (I am still always amazed at how many recipes need to be altered)
4. The book is in print or is reasonably easy to find if it’s not (I’m not going to recommend you try to find some obscure title that costs $142 when a perfectly good $20 model will do)

Enough rules!

The first volume I’m going to talk about is The Way To Cook by Julia Child.  I talk about this book a lot and I think about it a lot.  You remember the first boy/girlfriend you had?  Not the one you were just super crushy on, but the first one you had that you loved.  The one that made you think “oh!  I totally get it, this ‘love’ thing!”  If there is a cookbook version of that, this one is it for me.

The Way To Cook is the first book I really cooked with.  Before I owned it, I dabbled in cooking, mostly reading Food and Wine, going gaga over the photos and then trying to recreate what was pictured.  I was having fun*, but I was more just kind of making things than I was cooking.  And I definitely wasn’t thinking about technique or about understanding how or why things worked.

Julia changed all that for me, which is the reason I’ll always love her, no matter how enticing and wonderful future authors and cookbooks may be.  This was the first book I owned that explained how to make things, with photos, clear writing and something called “Master Recipes.”  I discovered if I learned these recipes, I would get a handle on a technique that would in turn allow me to tackle other recipes that were similar and feel like I knew what I was doing. Julia’s teaching began to give me the confidence that is so key to learning anything.  This book was the beginning of the foundation I needed to stop parroting what I saw in pretty food magazines and start to actually cook.

I would recommend any of Julia’s books, without having read them.  The ones I have are that good.  As is her excellent PBS series, The French Chef.  The Way To Cook will always be my first-favorite, but I would be willing to gamble that virtually any of her titles would be excellent for any cook at any level.

For more of my waxing on about Julia, here is another post.

Until next month – Bon Appétit!

Cheers.

Twelve Months of Books Quick Recap:

The book: The Way to Cook by Julia Child
How long I’ve owned it: 20 years (approximate)
Three things I’ve made from it  that always turn out, without fail: Pie crust (Pâte Brisée Fine)-page 381*, Mayonnaise-page 363, Anchovy and Onion Tart (Pissaladière)-pg 393 (plus a million other things)

*Which is a must-have element in learning, I think.  The goofing around stage is very important!  Have fun!!
**This has been my go-to pie crust since I’ve owned this book. It’s only now, twenty some-odd years later that I’ve even considered giving other recipes a try. It’s that good.

Keeping with our easy meals theme, I’m resurrecting a recipe that I’ve posted before.  Since we’re doing easy this month,  I think that applies to me too.

Lentils are extremely nutritious and very easy to make.  It’s just a matter of simmering with some spices (turmeric and salt) and then finishing with oil.  Brown lentils are super healthy, but they take a while – about 45 minutes to an hour.  Their cousin, pink lentils** (which you can see are actually orange) however, take about 10-15 minutes.  In fact, this light meal (which doubles as a nice snack) can be made in about 20 minutes, and it only takes that long because you need 20 minutes to make rice.

Simple, easy, delicious and pretty healthy.  Oh, and a perfect protein (legume and grain) and vegan to boot.  How’s that for covered bases?

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

Indian Spiced Pink Lentils

1 cup pink lentils
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
4 cups water
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 dried red chilies
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Rinse the lentils and pick out any weird stuff (like rocks).  Drain them really well and put them in a med-small sauce pan.  Add turmeric and salt and water.  Bring to a boil, skim off the foamy part (although I don’t know why you need to do that – if you skip the skimming and nothing bad happens, let me know).  Lower the heat to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes, covered.

Whisk lentils to break them up into a sort of chunky puree.  Simmer uncovered for another few minutes and let it get thicker.  Meanwhile, heat the oil and cumin in a small frying pan.  After about two minutes (seeds are toasty but not burned!), add the chilies and cook for another 30 seconds.  Take the pan off heat, maybe add a little more oil to cool it down (just a little), add the cayenne pepper and stir.  Add this to the lentils.  Add the lemon juice and gently stir.

Note – this stuff will thicken up as it sits around, and I think it gets better as it does.  It’s pretty thin when you first take it off the stove.  If you want to make it to eat now and like it thicker, try taking away one cup of water.  You can always add more if you need to thin it out.  Just keep an eye on it as it simmers to make sure that it doesn’t burn.

Serving this over rice is great.  You can eat it by itself as well or with some flatbread, which is a real treat!

*My schedule has changed recently and consequently, the Friday Tip may change days.  Stay tuned.
**If my world-wide-interweb sources are correct, pink lentils are skinned and split massour lentils, which are very similar to brown lentils.  I believe this is why brown lentils have considerably more fiber (over twice as much – I think it comes from their skins).  But both varieties are excellent, low-fat sources of protein.  If you need to watch your fat intake, you can use less oil in the finishing of the lentils.  I think I’ve already halved the amount from the original recipe, but you could probably do 1 TBSP of oil.  You just need enough to fry the spices.

Enough with my excuses for laming out on you.  Today let’s deal with the question that plagues all chefs (or at least everyone in this household), “when is it done?”

This applies to all things that you can cook or bake, from chicken to cake, but for this post I’m just going to deal with steak, for two reasons: 1. it’s a pretty straightforward example of how to figure out when something is done (without butchering it a second time) and 2. it’s a real shame to overcook a steak.

There are two ways to figure out when a steak is done without cutting into it:

Method One – Temperature

So the nice thing about this method is that it applies to many different things; you can take the internal temperature of a steak, a beef roast, a roasted chicken, a fish…I’m sure you could do this with a cake too (although I’ve never seen a recipe for cake list an internal temperature before).  Almost anything can be tested for doneness with a thermometer.  You will need one of these:

This is the instant read thermometer that I have and I like it a lot.  You can also get a meat thermometer specifically for checking meat, but they don’t go up to a very high temp, so you’ll need a different thermometer if you want to gauge how hot anything over 200F is (like frying oil or candy).  The digital aspect of this one is nice because you can get a really precise reading.

There are all kinds of sites that list temperatures for “done” on different things.  And there are raging debates on how hot something should be when it is “done.”  In the US, we tend toward overdone on many things because we are very* concerned with food safety.  General rule of thumb: the hotter something is cooked to, the tougher (or mushier) it’s going to be.  So if you can risk it, less is generally more (and if you get a decent piece of steak, food-borne illness really shouldn’t be a problem).  Here is the range of temperatures I use when I cook steak:

Super rare – 120 – this one is for beef-o-philes and my stepmother only.  It’s almost alive at this point.
Rare – 125 – serious beef lovers will like this, mostly red and pink.
Medium-rare – 130 – this is what I like, pink in the center but not red.  It’s still a nice tender steak, but it gives me the feeling of the food being cooked!
Medium – 140 – now your steak isn’t really pink anymore, or maybe just slightly.  It’s starting to get very cooked.
Medium-well – 150 – zero pink and pretty much zero softness.  Sometimes people insist on this, but it makes lovers of rare steak very sad.
Well-done – 160 – a “well done” steak is actually it’s opposite.  I generally don’t like to tell people what to do with food, but this is just overcooked.  I would be very disappointed indeed to spend $$$ on a lovely piece of beef and have to cook it this way.  You really might as well have liver.

Very important tip!
Steak (and all meat) keeps cooking when you take it off heat!  So undershoot a little.  You’ll probably need to experiment a bit.  If you want medium-rare, cook it to rare, let is stand for a few minutes and then take the temperature.  If it’s not quite where you want it, cook it a bit more (but not much, it’s really close!)

Once you get the hang of cooking steak using temperature as a gauge for doneness, you might want to venture into the super-impressive touch technique that most chefs use.  Yes, this does involve sticking your fingers in your food, but it’s how the pros do it, and I think it’s a great way of really learning what a cooked steak is.**  Plus you don’t need a thermometer!

Method Two – Touch

As the steaks cook, they start to change physically.  In color, of course, but also in the way they feel.  Much like a cake batter, they go from very squishy (or liquid in the case of cake) to firm outside, soft inside, to springy and solid, to brick-like.  And you can use this feel as a way to figure out if you steaks are done.  Here’s a guide for doing it this way:

Very rare – squishy.  Poke the steak when it’s raw.  If you’ve seared it a bit on both sides and poke it again, it’ll feel almost the same.  That’s how not cooked “very rare” is!
Rare – will feel like your earlobe.  Still pretty squishy, but firmer than very rare.
Medium – feels like the tip of the your nose.  Definitely not squishy.
Well done – essentially feels like your forehead.

This is how the steak will feel at the point when you should stop cooking in order to get the amount of doneness that you want.  A rare steak should be 125 when it’s done, so it should feel like an earlobe when it’s at around 115 or 120.  Make sense?

One great thing to do in order to teach yourself how to do it by feel is to use the thermometer and poke.  This will give you a great sense of how the meat feels at precisely the right temperature.  After a while, you’ll get the sense of when it feels done.

I also found this great guide that uses the fleshy part of the hand to gauge what different levels of doneness should feel like.  I haven’t used this cooking before, but going through it right now, it seems pretty spot-on and I think it would work.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

* In my opinion, overly concerned.  I have eaten a lot, and so far, I have yet to get food poisoning.  I realize that is a very unpleasant experience, but it is a risk I am willing to take in order to eat the foods I love prepared the way I like them.
**I am still learning to test for doneness this way, but I really believe it’s worth the effort.  You don’t have to rely on a thermometer and paying attention to your food (rather than relying on time or temperature) is absolutely the best way to learn about cooking.

Friday!

I am a solutions-through-gadgets kinda gal.  When I have a problem, like my poached eggs not coming out the way I want (I know, not the world’s biggest problem, but work with me), I can easily fall prey to gadgets that claim to be the solution to the problem.  Hence my ownership for years of these things:

I’m not sure what these are called, but I do know is that I never got them to work.  I also never got the “add vinegar to the water” method of egg poaching to work.  Or the “swirling the water before dropping the egg in method.”

What did work was the Cook’s Illustrated method of egg poaching, which is simple and allowed me to throw away my egg poaching thingies.  All you need to do is:

1. Keep the water at a very low simmer – not a boil! – at least until the egg sets.  This will help it stay together.
2. (This is the really important part) Crack the egg into a small bowl and then slowly and gently slide it into the water.

By slowly and gently, I mean slowly and gently.  This part of the “trick” I didn’t get until just recently.  Essentially, you need to almost dunk the bowl into the water.  Similar to what you would do with a new fish you were adding to an aquarium.  You put the edge of the bowl into the water and let the egg slide out.

How long you cook them is up to you.  I’ve seen recipes that say to turn off the heat and put a lid on them.  I usually just keep gently simmering for a few minutes, but the lid technique could help keep the eggs together as well.

I like the shape of these eggs as opposed to the perfectly round things that come out of “egg poachers.”  This method makes a pretty egg that looks like it would be served at a place that makes food to order.  And no extra equipment to keep around.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

Hola!  It’s almost the end of Friday, but a tip you shall have!!

I just started a new job (yay!), which will likely lead to more food postings (I’m now in the grocery business and work with quite a few folks who love to cook and eat, so I’m anticipating a lot of idea sharing), but has also led to me being more or less exhausted.  I’m expecting this to sort itself out in the next few weeks, but for now, posting may be thin and sporadic.

So we’ll keep this short and sweet (and late).  Powdered (ground) spices tend to go off quickly.  Not in weeks by any means, but most of us buy a container of cumin and find it sitting in the cupboard two years later.  It’s really not any good then.  It won’t make you ill, but it won’t taste like much, especially compared to a fresh container.

Enter the coffee grinder.  The one pictured above was given to me by a friend, but you can usually find one at the Goodwill (or your thrift store of choice) for a few bucks.  If you want to be fancy, buy one new (but please just get it at Target – save money on the grinder and splurge on good spices).*

Once you have the grinder, you can take whole spices and…grind them!  It’s not hard.  You just fill the grinder with spices and…grind.  You’ll get a nice powder, perhaps a little less fine than your store-bought variety, but that’s no concern (unless you’re making something that’s supposed to be really smooth).  The aroma when you take the lid off the grinder is AMAZING.  Truly.  Amazing.

And you can do all kinds of nifty things that you can’t really do with store bought ground spices.  Like toast the spices.  This adds a nice depth to them (that you probably don’t want on everything, but it’s quite nice).  You can also make spice blends, like garam masala, and once you get a basic recipe, you can alter to proportions to make it taste the way you like it.  Cool no?

Oh!  I almost forgot.  To do this, you’ll have to buy whole spices.  If you have a good ethnic market around, you should have great access to whole spices.  If you don’t, you might need to order them online.  There are a lot of outlets to get them.  If you have some space to keep the whole spices in airtight containers in your pantry, that’s ideal.

Also, if you are going to grind spices fresh for each recipe (which I actually don’t – we use so many ground spices that I usually just grind up a mess of whatever it is and then store that in a container), you’ll need to take into account that whole spices don’t measure the same as ground spices.  I usually more or less double the amount of whole that I’ll need ground in a recipe.  That generally works.  And honestly, aside from cayenne (which I never grind…I don’t even know what it is!) and maybe coriander, it’s hard to have too much of any given spice.

Hope that’s helpful!

Cheers.

*In case you’re wondering why you need to buy a coffee grinder to do this when you already have one that you use for coffee, open the coffee grinder up and take a whiff.  Smells like coffee, yes?  Coffee is hard to get out of a grinder (or anything for that matter).  Spices are too.  So unless you like your Indian food to taste like coffee and your coffee tasting like cumin, it’s best to have two grinders.  If you’re just dead set against having two grinders (and I hear you, I do), I’ve heard that you can take a piece of bread and grind it up in the grinder to absorb most/all the flavors of whatever it is you last ground in there.  Personally, while I’m thrifty, I’m also kind of lazy, and grinding up bread (instead of eating it?  Pishaw!) every time I want to use the grinder sounds tiring.  But it’s an option.