The Forbidden Zone

The Forbidden Zone... The Forbidden Zone... Who recommended that I watch the Forbidden Zone? Step forward and get your spanking.

As a movie, Forbidden Zone is bad. It succeeds as a musical, or as an act of unrestrained creativity. The music is very good. The screen is full of the bizarre and original. This is what happens when very talented, very creative people get together and make a movie with no budget and no script. As I watched Forbidden Zone, my jaw dropped and I constantly thought "What the Hell!" But, I never wanted to stop looking. It's endlessly inventive.

I finished watching the included documentary about the Forbidden Zone. It makes a little more sense now. The Forbidden Zone is a series of musical numbers and performance art pieces. The plot was added afterwards.

Mark and I saw the Forbidden Zone through Netflix which recommends movies based on your ratings. We couldn't decide what to rate Forbidden Zone. Should it be one star, or five? Five stars because it is distinct, original and endlessly watchable. One star because it is a piece of crap. It's like watching an accident that doesn't end. You know that what you are watching isn't good, but you can't look away.

Roger Ebert likes to give great trash two and a half stars. The idea being that great movies come along so rarely that there must be room for great trash. In that spirit RO and I gave Forbidden Zone three stars.

Tomato Sauce

I finally bought "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." It's a great reference on technique and tricks as much as it is for recipes.

Case in point... tomato sauce. My old recipe is good, but the sauce is dark and more liquid than I'd like. I've always assumed that premade sauce from the store could be light and thick because they use industrial food additivies.

Skimming through MAFC, I ran into a tomato sauce recipe. What's different about this recipe is that it calls for sweating the veggies, not sauting and for the addition of some flour. These two changes seem to have lightened and thickened my sauce. I double checked with the "Joy of Cooking" No mention of adding flour.

Good job Julia.

Meals that turn out very well...

Pan sered salmon with roast asparagus, onions and mushrooms, served with quinoa or brown rice.

Prepare the quinoa, or brown rice.

Clean and trim the asparagus. drizzle with oil, salt & pepper. Broil for 10 minutes, turning after 5.

Saute the onions and mushrooms for 5 minutes. Mix with the asparagus under the broiler for the last five minutes.

Pan seer the salmon for 90 seconds a side.

If your timing is good, everything should be ready at the same time. Serve with a sprinkle of parsley and enjoy.

Sweet Potato Pie.

I want to make more pies. Not entirely from scratch, but that will come.

When I made beef wellington, I learned that I can buy pre made pastry. This opens a whole new world as I can make pies without having to make the crust.

My first pie was sweet potato pie. Google for the recipie. It turned out wonderful.

Cream pies seem easy and I know I love them. Cheese cakes are just a twist on cream pies, so maybe I'll make more of these.

Beef Wellington.

I made Beef Wellington as a birthday gift. The Wellington recipies are a bit more fussy than I usually go for. None the less, it turned out well and I will make it again.

Beef Wellington is a recipie that can be tweaked in many ways. At it's most simple, it is a tenderloin roast, covered with pate and fried mushrooms and onions, wrapped with pastry and then baked.

Expensive version-- use a very high quality cut of meat. The pate should be foie gras. Use truffels for the mushrooms. Make the pastry yourself.

Cheap version-- use a lower quality roast. Instead of pate use minced or chopped chicken gizzards and chicken breast. Use frozen pre-made puff pastry.

Egg Whites and Angel Food

I had a dozen egg whites sitting in my freezer since October 2007. I kid you not. When I need yolks, I'll save the whites in a dark corner of the freezer. Today I stubled on a zip lock bag of yolks dated to 2007.

So, I thought I'd try them out in an angel food cake-- Alton's recipie. I substituted regular flour for the cake flour and everything turned out fine.

Let me make that more dramatic-- I made an angel food cake with two year old whites, a flour substitution, an electric beater cranked to high and it still turned out great.

I love angel food cake. Especially with peanut butter and chocolate sauce.

Kennydale Beach Park After Dark

To stave off the heat, last night we went to Kennydale Beach Park to swim, to have a light picnic and to watch the sun set.

What a great place. After the life guards left, the beach came alive. People kept showing up, mostly teenagers, but many families as well. You could hear laughter everywhere. Of course, the best part of swimming someplace without a life guard is that you can do whatever you want. Lots of people were swimming outside the buoyed off swimming area. People were jumping off the rails, playfully pushing each other off the dock, playing tag in the deep water, floating on air mattress and all those other officially unsafe, yet fun, activities.

The sunset was beautiful and broadly red. Then the sky turned a deep dark blue. Perfect for swimming.

What goes around comes around...

Lard is making a comeback. It's mostly monounsaturated fat. Also, the food you eat with it is more rich than without, so you eat less.

White Sauce

I've been experiementing with white sauces over pasta. I've found an easy way to make them. I just have to get used to the proportions.

Last night I melted 2 tbsp butter into a small pot at medium heat. I sprinked that with 2 tbsp flour. After the flour and butter are combined I added 1 cup of milk. Then I whisked until thick

Mixing the flour with the butter to form a roux is what makes the sauce easy. For years I've added the milk to the pot immediatly after adding the flour. This makes clumps. Mixing the flour with melted butter first makes the additon of milk go easy.

My sauce was good but a bit thick. I'm going to cut it back to 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp flour.

Cafe Lure, Tapestry Saloon & Calico Cheesecakes

917 South Third Street Renton, WA

Cafe Lure, the Tapestry Saloon and Calico Cheescakes are three establishments, right next to each other, all owned and operated by the same couple.

The food is great. The decore is so-so. But the food is great. Did I mention that the food is great?

I've been to the Lure three times now. Everything we've ordered has been beautifly presented and very tasty.

Of course there are always a wide variety of cheese cakes for dessert.

Nettles II

Cooking with nettles is fun. I've made a great Nettle lasagna with them. It's just a spinach lasagna with nettles substituting for the spinach. The nettles are thicker and tastier than the spinach so they go well in the lasagna.

Stinging Nettle Lasagna

Stinging Nettle Lasagna is just my regular lasagna with stinging nettles instead of spinach. I turned out very good. The nettles have more texture and taste than spinach.



Get a 9 x 12 baking tin. Ready three layers of lasagna noodles. That's probably nine regular noodles.



You will also need a good thick meet sauce and a nettles and cheese layer.

Amazon Fresh II

A bit more on Amazon Fresh.

They tend to run out of products a bit more often than I'd like. So far I've missed thick cut bacon, the large Jiffy brand crunchy peanut butter and lemon grass. In all cases I could sign up for a notice. The item was re-stocked within a week.

The produce and meats have been high quality.

Delivery has been punctual.





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Amazon Fresh

I like using home grocery delivery. There is no convenient grocery store around me so grocery delivery saves me a couple hours a week. The scheduled delivery and the minimum purchases force me to plan ahead which kills impulse buys and means I eat out less often.

In the past I've used Safeway.com. Unfortunatly their fees are slowly increasing. Last year I could get free delivery for orders over $75.00. This year it costs $10.00 for orders over $150.00.

Since I'm buying for two, $150.00 in groceries is too much. The vegitables go bad or I run out of perishables before my grocery list is up to $150.00.

Safeway's delivery schedule isn't that convenient. If I order today, my groceries are delivered tomorrow night. Yes, technically they could be delivered between 10am and noon tomorrow, but I have a day job.

Along comes Amazon Fresh.They have free delivery on orders over $75.00. Amazon also has unattended predawn delivery. If I order by midnight, my groceries will be on my door stop by 6am the next morning.

Refrigerated and frozen goods are left in returnable freezer totes.This is so good. I can reasonably spend $75.00 a week on food and the perishables

Safeway.com has a larger selection than Amazon Fresh. For similar items, Amazon appears to be less expensive than Safeway.I'll be using Amazon Fresh for some time to come

Stinging Nettles are in Season

Weate stinging nettles yesterday. They pop up all over the back yard. Mark heard that you could use them as food so we gave them a try.

Stinging nettle tea is nice. It tastes like green tea with a little bit of a sweet after taste.

When you cook a nettle, it gets rid of the sting. When cooked it tastes much like spinach but a little thicker, a little more firm and with little more texture.

Raclette III

Raclette is great for sea food. The slower grilling time makes it hard to over cook shirmp or scallops. The food hits your mouth hot and tender.

Raclette II

The food stretching abilities of raclette continue. Last night we fed four people with one chicken breast, one steak and a mix of vegies. And we were all stuffed at the end!

In Praise of Raclette

I love my raclette. What is raclette? It's a table top grill and broiler. You can cook little packages of food exactly the way you want. And, it's propertly hot when you eat it.

The slower cooking process of the raclette has another benifit. It encourages us to eat more slowly. You can't cook more than four or five forkfulls at a time before you need to prepare another little tray of food, so the meal is slowed way down.

Which is perfect for me because I tend to scarf my food down.

When you eat more slowly, you eat less. I swear I eat a third less food with the raclet than with a normal meal.

Raclette is also very convienient and easy to keep clean. All I have to do is chop up some veggies and meat and the meal is ready.

Pizza Dough III

Slowly my pizza dough is improving. It is now tender and crisp. I still have problems getting the pizza off the palette and onto the stone, but that's a matter of practice.

The more I make pizza, the more I realize that a great crust is as much about technique as it is about ingredients. I have to take my time. This isn't a recipie that produces pizza in under an hour. And I have to go slow to make sure the crust is thin. I use a rolling pin and I dust with flour every time the pizza dough becomes sticky.

This should be enough dough for 4 8'' pizzas.

Ingredients...
2 tablespoons sugar.
2 teaspoons Kosher salt.
1 tablespoon pure olive oil.
3/4 cup warm water.
1/2 cup whole wheat flour.
1 and 1/2 cups bread flour.
1 teaspoon instant yeast

Mix together and kneed. I kneed it in my stand mixer for 15 minutes. If the dough sticks too much, then scrape it into a ball, sprinkle the ball with flour and keed some more.

Put the dough in a lightly oiled dish. Cover and let rest in the fridge for 24 hours. I've read several "Worlds Best Dough!" recipies and all of them have this rest stage. It is important for the dough to develop and soften up.

When the dough has rested, take a quarter of it and make it into a ball.

I raise the dough in a microwave.

I put a cup of water in the microwave and nuked it on high till the water was boiling and the interior of the microwave was steamy.

I set the dough ball on a plate, covered it with a wet cloth and microwaved it for 20 minutes at 10% power. I checked plate after 10 minutes to ensure it wasn't too warm or dry.

Next, I rolled out the dough. I went slow. I started the dough with a rolling pin. And I dusted the dough with flower every time it got sticky.

It is important for me to to start with a rolling pin. While it is romantic and authentic to roll out pizza dough with only your hands, a rolling pin is fast, easy, more consistant and no one will taste the difference.

I rolled out the dough till it was as thin as the rolling pin could make it. Then I let the dough rest for five minutes and rolled it some more. I went slow.

Then, I dusted the dough with flower and finished stretching the dough out by hand. In the end the pizza was thin, so thin I could almost see through it.

Again, I dusted the pizza palette with four and corn meal. Put the pizza dough on the pallet, lightly cover with tomato sauce and the ingredients. The operative word is lightly. Too much water from the sauce or ingredients and the pizza will be soggy.

Baked at 450F for 10 minutes. Next time I'll try 500F.

Gazpacho

I've been making Gazpacho's lately. You don't need to follow an exact recipie.

Take a slice of bread. Get it wet. Throw it in the blender.

Add one quarter cup of olive oil to the blender.

Add one and a half cups of diced tomatoes to the blender.

Add one cup of seeded and peeled cucumbers to the blender.

At a tbsp vinegar (balsamic or sherry) to the blender.

Add one small hot pepper to the blender

Add one quarter of an onion and two cloves of garlic to the blender.

At this point, I keep adding vegies to the blender till the blender fills up. Try a bell pepper, or carrots, or celery, or zuchini.

Blend for two minutes until everything is a liquid-- a soup.

I strain my gazpacho, but that is not necessary.