She: Cous-Cous Method

When my mom told me she was buying cous-cous for meals, I promised to add this post. Mark showed me a great way to make cous-cous very fast and simply, and even better, virtually mess-free...my favorite! This method just steams the cous-cous in a ziplock baggy, which you can then chuck into the fridge inbetween meals. Get: 1 cup cous-cous, 2tsp olive oil, 1.5 cup boiling water, 1 small cucumber, 1/2 onion, small handful of mint (or basil), 1/2 tsp cyanne, 1/2 tsp salt, and fresh pepper.

Thats the most basic list of ingredients. Everything than can be cut/diced, including the mint, should be. Put the cous-cous and the oil in the baggie first. Then add all the veggies and the salt/peppers. Pour in the boiling water and seal the bag. Let it sit for a few minutes, and voila! I personally add some apple and/or roma tomato (but add those after it steams), but dried cranberries or raisins are also nice, especially with mint! This is very healthy as a side dish, and a nice alternative to something mayo-heavy like coleslaw. Best of all, besides the knife and cutting board, there's nothing else to wash. :)

He: Rice

Sorry...no pretty pictures this time. This is just an information post to help clear some nutritional information out of my head. This is just about rice, spurred on by an article that I read earlier today in cook's illustrated that was talking about the best ways to cook brown rice.

Just so that I don't run into any potential issues with Cooks Illustrated getting pissed off that I put up their cooking method on the internet, I won't. The way that I normally cook brown rice is basically the same way that I cook white rice. I usually do a ratio of 1.5:1 of water to rice and steam it until tender (at least 45 minutes). you can get more complicated than that, but for basic rice that works. When you have significantly more rice you need to add more time, but for simplicity's sake I'm just putting up this. Now, you don't have to be limited to just water for cooking your rice....you can use just about any liquid under the sun. I have found over the years that you need to be careful not to use any sort of high acid liquids (tomato juice, wine, orange juice, Dr. pepper) to cook your rice because it has a tendency to cause the grains to split down their length. Also, I personally prefer to add salt before cooking, while Brandy prefers to season her rice after cooking (my method is see as the more western technique, her's is the more eastern).

The next big topic that I want to share is nutritional information when dealing with rice. For many years now in assorted cooking circles I've had people blast at me for not having issues with parboiled rice (Uncle Ben's rice). They say that it's basically a white rice, and when white rice is made it's pearled, or tumbled to remove the outer bran and with it goes most of the nutrients. While the glycemic freaks are right that plain white rice isn't all that good for you and will cause a glycemic spike in your system that will cause you to store most of the calories in the rice as fat, Uncle Ben's/parboiled rice isn't quite the same thing. The way that parboiled rice is made is that it's flash steamed while it's still a whole grain (brown rice basically). What happens is that a lot of the nutrients that are in the bran layer actually adhere to the inner white part of the grain, and when this rice is tumbled it doesn't lose all of the nutrients that unsteamed white rice does. True, you will still have a glycemic spike by eating parboiled rice, but at least you will get more nutrients into your system while this happens.

The last thing that you should think about when you are out shopping for rice is, where is your rice coming from? You can get just your basic old Uncle Ben's rice, or Minute rice (if you really want to support Kraft foods and mega-agribusiness) or you can purchase rice from a legitimate American company that grows fantastic rice. The company that I'm imploring you to try is Lundberg Family Farms . All of their rice is grown right here in California...actually I've met some of the people in the company and cooked for all of the growers and they're just fantastic people. They actually produce rices that the world market sees as being the best in the world. If you try nothing else you have to try their short grain brown rice just once. I also wholeheartedly recommend their wild rice blend...it's just some really tasty stuff

If you need recipes for what to do with rice let me know and I'll put some up here.

He: Sous Vide pictures

For anyone that is keeping track of things based on the dates that are posted at the top of the posts...get over it. Sure, I've taken a lot longer than I said I would to put up pictures...what can I say? I'm a king at procrastination...even when it's something that I like.
This first image is the bag of chicken and the seasoning, and the thermometer. The thing that I want everyone to see is the temperature on the thermometer (which is right around 120 degrees). This is lower than the final cooking temperature that was reached several hours later, but important to see nontheless.

The second image is of the bones at the end of the cooking of the chicken. I wanted you to see this to illustrate a principle that happens in meat that everyone takes as law. Chicken meat that is still red is not necessarily undercooked. According to my favorite food scientist/chemist/god to all chefs Harold McGee, 'When meat is heated quickly, its temperature rises quickly, and some of the muscle proteins are still unfolding and denaturing when the pigments begin to do the same. The other proteins are therefore able to react with the pigments and turn them brown. But when meat is heated slowly, so that it takes an hour or two to reach the denaturing temperature for myoglobin and cytochromes, the other proteins finish denaturing first, and react with each other. By the time that the pigments become vulnerable, there are few other proteins left to react with them, so they stay intact and the meat stays red'. Basically what he is saying is that since the myoglobin(the particle in meat that has the color) breaks down so slowly the color never has a chance to react before the molecules that it will react with will already be denatured and unable to cause a reaction to change myoglobin from red to brown. This accomplishment can also be done chemically through sodium nitrite (the salt used to cure meats like bacon), or through normal table salt (if it has enough time in contact with the raw meat). Therefore, with this very slow cooking method that I have presented here, since the meat is raised to a temperature that will kill all errant microbes very, very slowly the myoglobin never has the appropriate proteins to react with to break down.
Oh, to answer the question that was asked about the website of the food chemist that explains how to do sous vide at home it's: www.khymos.com

He: Sous Vide cooking

Okay, what the hell is sous vide, and why in the heck would I want to do it. Sous Vide means 'in a vacuum' in French, and it's been all the rage in high end restaurants for the last several years. Chances are, unless you've dropped a couple hundred bucks for one of those multi-course extravaganzas at a mecca of great food, you've never seen the term....that's okay I will explain.
The principle behind the technique is based in the idea that there is an absolute perfect point, temperature-wise, that you want to bring any protein to where it will be the most palatable. The trick to all of this is best shown by making a custard...creme caramel, creme brulee, or for that matter creme anglaise or even just french toast. With all of the aforementioned dishes there is that idea 'sweet spot' where the egg is just set and the dish is creamy without being runny. I really like the way that Alton Brown explained it in his first book. If you don't have his first book, I'm not going to go through the explanation for you in detail. As always, if you would like the long explanation, please post a comment and I will answer to the best of my ability (just expect to learn a lot more than anyone could possibly want to know).
In terms of the 'sweet spot' for meats, there is some variability depending on the final results that you're after. For the sake of simplicity, and because I don't have any pictures to back up any other meats today, I will just stick to chicken. The ideal 'sweet spot' for chicken is 152 degrees. How did I come to this number you ask? Well, the number is something that many chemists and food scientists that have hated having dry chicken (or for that matter any other poultry) so they did experiments and research into the actual chemical and physical changes that take place. Luckily for me, I didn't have to wade through millions of pages of scientific papers to find out about this 'sweet spot' for America's favorite bird I just checked out the section on meat in Harold McGee's food bible. Okay, I also used this great website written by a chemist that explains how you can scam the true technique for minimal money at home. Again, if you want that link you will have to post a comment.
The pictures that you see are of the last chicken dish that I put together. In the bag are two chicken leg quarters, along with a pile of seasonings. For those of you that wish to attempt this technique here's the other ingredients: Annatto seeds, cumin seeds, black pepper, garlic cloves and bay leaves....oh yeah, and one gallon ziplock freezer bag.
All that you do for this techique is to flash blanch the chicken for 5 seconds in rapidly boiling water to kill external bacteria, and any other nasties that you might not want to have. Stick the chicken in the bag with the seasonings. Suck as much of the air out of the bag as you can(I found that a straw works really well for this). Then all you have to do is drop the bag of chicken into water that is maintaining 152 degrees for at least 6 hours. I want to say that this batch I think I cooked for 36 hours, but who's counting really. 36 hours you say!...is he absolutely deranged? Nope, the chicken never has a chance to overcook because it never exceeds the temperature range of the 'sweet spot' which is anywhere over 160. How did I maintain temperature for that long? Well, the only thing that I did was to add ice cubes if the temperature ever went too high...which happened once or twice....and I'd turn the heat up just a touch if it was too low.
This technique is sooooooooo stinking simple that anyone should be able to make the most succulent chicken of their entire lives this way.

Okay...in the hopes of having something posted, pics or no here it is. The pics aren't up because B won't materialize the cord for our digital camera, and I suck with photoshop. I promise that I will get the cord from her and post very, very soon.