Tuesday, April 14, 2009

More Random Thoughts...

It's was a relatively uneventful weekend (with the exception of the bunny-centric fun in the post below) so, for lack of anything earth-shatteringly exciting to report, I figured I'd post about a few random things that have been kicking around in my brain...

1) The Myth of Cooking Times: I use the power of the interweb to stalk how people find my recipe blog. (Everyone on the planet has been googling "grilled leg of lamb" this past month, by the way...) One search I see on occasion is from people looking for cooking times for various hunks of meat, and it reminds me that this idea of "cooking times" is one of the most irritating (to me) myths in cooking. Here's the thing: If you have a perfectly calibrated heat source and your protein is the exact shape that the recipe was written for, then you're golden. I would like somebody to explain to me, though, how they can claim to know the cooking time for meat on a grill. Different grills I've owned have all had different versions of "High," and some of my less-awesome grills have had different versions of "High" in winter than they did in summer. There is no freaking way you can tell me that something cooks for a set amount of time on a grill.
Similarly ridiculous is suggesting cooking times in X minutes/pound for things like beef tenderloin. As Alicia's wise South African friend noted when she prepared us a lovely dinner in Dubai (featuring perfectly cooked tenderloin), the diameter of the tenderloin doesn't change with weight, just the length. The doneness of single portions of meat is straightforward to judge by touch, but if you find yourself cooking big hunks of meat, do yourself a favor and buy a meat thermometer... Ideally, buy yourself a remote digital meat thermometer like the one below (which, you will notice, is sticking out of the hunk of lamb on the grill above) so you can enjoy a cocktail in the other room while your meat cooks to perfection.
2) The Naming of Things: Someday I would really like to learn about the psychology of advertising. It must work - at least to some extent - or companies wouldn't spend so much money on such things... But I wonder about the data that supports product name changes. Do more people eat at KFC now that it's not called "Kentucky Fried Chicken" (thanks to the absence of that ugly F-word in the new name)? Do more people really buy the Uniq Fruit now that it's not called the Ugli Fruit? Really? Do more people buy "dried plums" since they lack the stigma of "prunes"? I really can't imagine these techniques being successful... I would love to hear if they actually impact sales, or if they just make companies feel like they're being proactive and shifting paradigms and thinking outside the box...

3) Brilliant Discovery: There are a few products in the world that I love deeply and tell everyone I know to run out and purchase. The one I rave about most often is probably Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. (Seriously. If you have marks on your walls and don't have a Magic Eraser, you should go buy one right now... Don't even finish reading this first... I'm mean it.)
Anyway, the newest addition to the list is Powdered Peanut Butter. This stuff is absolutely amazing. It's made from roasted peanuts that have been pressed to release the fat (which the company then turns into the world's most fantastic peanut oil), so it's all natural. It doesn't taste super-fantastic straight out of the jar, but is perfect to cook with. I had stopped making this Ginger-Peanut Chicken Salad that I love (below) because the peanut sauce ends up being so full of fat, but it tasted just as good as I remembered it when I made it with powdered peanut butter, and a quadruple-batch of peanut sauce prepared with the powdered peanut butter contained half the fat of a single-batch prepared with regular peanut butter. Awesome. I can't wait to do more cooking with this stuff.

Speaking of delicious things, below is a picture of the awesome shrimp salad (with lots of dill) that I made to celebrate spring... Unfortunately it was freezing cold and pouring down rain when the time came to grill the shrimp, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I learned that they were super-tasty cooked (indoors) in a court-bouillon instead...
In other news, I'm learning the ins and outs of my neighborhood and feeling more and more like a true "Walthamite" (if that's what we're called). I've found some pretty awesome short-cuts to avoid the main drag (which has ridiculous traffic on weekends and stands between me and pretty much everywhere that I would like to go) and I found a Korean grocery about a half-mile away so I can stop complaining about the dire state of the Asian aisle in grocery stores here. (Today I even managed to fine-tune my route home from work such that I've shaved a good solid 45 seconds off of my commute. Needless to say, that makes me pretty happy.) Everything else I can think to say involves the bunnies, so I'll leave it at that for the non-bunny-related news of the week... I'll be attending a conference on robotics for the next couple days, so expect me to be much smarter by Friday...

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