Made my wife's family's "easy, quick" staple: White corn chili.
Very easy: Per pound of ground beef, add 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 can beans, 1 can white corn (drained; I prefer frozen); 1 jar your favorite salsa. Brown and drain the beef, drain the beans if want, bring everything to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Tasty stuff. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!:
Made my wife's family's "easy, quick" staple: White corn chili.
Very easy: Per pound of ground beef, add 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 can beans, 1 can white corn (drained; I prefer frozen); 1 jar your favorite salsa. Brown and drain the beef, drain the beans if want, bring everything to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Tasty stuff.
I am absolutely going to try this this week. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!:
Made my wife's family's "easy, quick" staple: White corn chili.
Very easy: Per pound of ground beef, add 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 can beans, 1 can white corn (drained; I prefer frozen); 1 jar your favorite salsa. Brown and drain the beef, drain the beans if want, bring everything to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Tasty stuff.
I'll give that a go. What kind of beans you roll with? Chili beans or what? [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!:
Made my wife's family's "easy, quick" staple: White corn chili.
Very easy: Per pound of ground beef, add 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 can beans, 1 can white corn (drained; I prefer frozen); 1 jar your favorite salsa. Brown and drain the beef, drain the beans if want, bring everything to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Tasty stuff.
Yea this sounds good, gonna give it a try aswell [Reply]
The other night I made pork tenderloin marinated in Lawry's Asian BBQ marinade and a bag of extra wide egg noodles with butter, salt pepper and parmesan reggiano cheese.
First marinated for 8 hours. Then took out of fridge to let heat up to room temp. Dried off both loins. Heated stainless skillet on high with a little canola oil to sear both. Then put in oven at 375 degrees for 20 minutes. When internal temp got to 138 degrees took out and tented. Then put pan on stove on med temp to deglaze and make sauce. Added white wine to deglaze along with some apple juice and left over marinade. Thickened nicely.
Was fantastic and had plenty of leftovers. Used some for nice cold pork sandwich on rye with mayo, dijon mustard, little horseradish, sliced radishes, and sprinkle of feta crumbles.
Originally Posted by scho63:
The other night I made pork tenderloin marinated in Lawry's Asian BBQ marinade and a bag of extra wide egg noodles with butter, salt pepper and parmesan reggiano cheese.
First marinated for 8 hours. Then took out of fridge to let heat up to room temp. Dried off both loins. Heated stainless skillet on high with a little canola oil to sear both. Then put in oven at 375 degrees for 20 minutes. When internal temp got to 138 degrees took out and tented. Then put pan on stove on med temp to deglaze and make sauce. Added white wine to deglaze along with some apple juice and left over marinade. Thickened nicely.
Was fantastic and had plenty of leftovers. Used some for nice cold pork sandwich on rye with mayo, dijon mustard, little horseradish, sliced radishes, and sprinkle of feta crumbles.
Pictures attached.
Sounds good.
I've stopped the "bring to room temperature" based on this. Worthwhile read. If you don't believe it, test it yourself.
Originally Posted by :
MYTH #1: "YOU SHOULD LET A THICK STEAK REST AT ROOM TEMPERATURE BEFORE YOU COOK IT."
The Theory: You want your meat to cook evenly from edge to center. Therefore, the closer it is to its final eating temperature, the more evenly it will cook. Letting it sit on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes will bring the steak up to room temperature—a good 20 to 25°F closer to your final serving temperature. In addition, the warmer meat will brown better because you don't need to waste energy from the pan to take the chill off of its surface.
The Reality: Let's break this down one issue at a time. First, the internal temperature. While it's true that slowly bringing a steak up to its final serving temperature will promote more even cooking, the reality is that letting it rest at room temperature accomplishes almost nothing.
To test this, I pulled a single 15-ounce New York strip steak out of the refrigerator, cut it in half, placed half back in the fridge, and the other half on a ceramic plate on the counter. The steak started at 38°F and the ambient air in my kitchen was at 70°F. I then took temperature readings of its core every ten minutes.
After the first 20 minutes—the time that many chefs and books will recommend you let a steak rest at room temperature—the center of the steak had risen to a whopping 39.8°F. Not even a full two degrees. So I let it go longer. 30 minutes. 50 minutes. 1 hour and 20 minutes. After 1 hour and 50 minutes, the steak was up to 49.6°F in the center. Still colder than the cold water comes out of my tap in the summer, and only about 13% closer to its target temperature of a medium-rare 130°F than the steak in the fridge.
You can increase the rate at which it warms by placing it on a highly conductive metal, like aluminum,* but even so, it'd take you at least an hour or so to get up to room temperature—an hour that would be better spent by, say, actively warming your steak sous-vide style in a beer cooler.
*protip: thaw frozen meat in an aluminum skillet to cut your thaw time in half!
After two hours, I decided I'd reached the limit of what is practical, and had gone far beyond what any book or chef recommends, so I cooked the two steaks side by side. For the sake of this test, I cooked them directly over hot coals until seared, then shifted them over to the cool side to finish.* Not only did they come up to their final temperature at nearly the same time (I was aiming for 130°F), but they also showed the same relative evenness of cooking, and they both seared at the same rate.
*Normally I'd start them on the cool side and finish them on the hot like in this recipe, but that method would have obscured the results of this test.
The cooking rate makes sense—after all, the room temperature-rested steak was barely any warmer on the inside than the fridged-steak, but what about the searing? The outer layer of the rested steak must be warm enough to make a difference, right?
Here's the issue: Steak can't brown until most of the moisture has evaporated from the layers of meat closest to the surface, and it takes a hell of a lot of energy to evaporate moisture. To put it in perspective. It takes five times more energy to convert a single gram of water into steam than it does to raise the temperature of that water all the way from ice cold to boiling hot. So when searing a steak, the vast majority of energy that goes into it is used to evaporate moisture from its surface layers. Next to that energy requirement, a 20, 30, or even 40 degree difference in the temperature of the surface of the meat is a piddling affair.
The Takeaway: Don't bother letting your steaks rest at room temperature. Rather, dry them very thoroughly on paper towels before searing. Or better yet, salt them and let them rest uncovered on a rack in the fridge for a night or two, so that their surface moisture can evaporate. You'll get much more efficient browning that way.
It was a market burger with horseradish cheddar, garlic aioli, arugula, and Nueske bacon. Plus pimento cheese fries and a homemade oreo cookie.
It was probably the 3rd best burger I've had in Chicago. Could have been great but the horseradish cheddar was way aggressive, and I like horseradish. The pimento cheese fries were probably my favorite and the homemade oreo cookie was likely great if you're a bigger fan of oreo's than I am.
Observations: It seems like it's a thing here that when dining out, you always take half home with you. This event confirmed it for me. I'm not sure if it's a caloric control strategy, a financial strategy, or the result of people living in 800 sq feet apartments with inadequate kitchens and lack the desire to cook. Most everyone we know here eats out A LOT, and rarely talk about cooking themselves or grocery shopping. I can understand a huge portioned entree, but taking half a cheeseburger home only to reheat it later seems criminally odd. [Reply]
Originally Posted by KCUnited:
Observations: It seems like it's a thing here that when dining out, you always take half home with you. This event confirmed it for me. I'm not sure if it's a caloric control strategy, a financial strategy, or the result of people living in 800 sq feet apartments with inadequate kitchens and lack the desire to cook. Most everyone we know here eats out A LOT, and rarely talk about cooking themselves or grocery shopping. I can understand a huge portioned entree, but taking half a cheeseburger home only to reheat it later seems criminally odd.
Seems like I remember the Olive Garden trying to start this thing where you order two meals at dinner. One to eat there, and another big tray to reheat for the family at home [Reply]
I've stopped the "bring to room temperature" based on this. Worthwhile read. If you don't believe it, test it yourself.
I think it matters more when you grill a steak as opposed to pan searing. It also seems to help me get the excess marinade off prior to searing. When it's right out of the fridge, it seems slicker and harder to get off. [Reply]
