Der Stroganoff

From America's Test Kitchen


Ingredients

3/4 lb of beef stew meat
1 lb pack of wide egg noodles
12 oz sliced mushrooms
1 medium chopped onion (it's under the mushrooms...)
1 can Chicken Broth
1 can Beef Broth
1 small pack (8oz?) sour cream
1/4 cup brandy (not pictured)
Salt, Pepper, cooking oil





Equipment: Wooden spoon, large skillet. A large skillet is key in that you won't have to brown the meat in batches.

Cut the beef stew chunks to a more uniform size. How small is up to you but the smaller you do the less you have to cook to get it tender. I cut them into about 1/2" cubes.

Pat beef dry with a paper towel and toss with a sprinkle of salt and pepper.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a large skillet on high. Dump the meat in and keep it on high. Ensure that the meat is getting to brown and not overcrowd and steam. Otherwise, you may want to brown the meat in batches. You want them brown bits on the pan for flavor. Remove the beef.

While still on high heat, dump the mushrooms and onions. Season with a bit of salt and pepper. This is more to draw out the liquids as the broths are salty enough. Cover for a couple minutes for them to steam themselves.

At this point there should be enough liquid to scrape up all the brown bits in the pan. Do so with a wooden spoon. Cook uncovered to let the liquid reduce out as the onions and mushrooms cook, about 10 minutes. Add brandy and let that cook out.

Dump in the broths and add the meat back in. Bring to a boil and simmer for about an hour. Prepare about a cup of warm water on the side.


Now it's time to add the noodles. Just dump the whole bag in. I don't really care about overcooked egg noodles so I think this method's just fine. Stir in to get as much noodles as you can in the liquid.

Let simmer covered for about 2 minutes and fold the top less cooked noodles in. Simmer for another 2 minutes. Repeat this process until the noodles are fully cooked. If you don't think you have enough water, add a bit of that warm water.

Remove from heat, stir in sour cream. Serve in the skillet.

Screw you, brussel sprouts rock.

Annnnd they're in season!

Salami, the kind you get whole and cut into chunks. Used some Volpi brand "rose" salami.

1/2 lb Brussel Sprouts
3 cloves chopped Garlic
1/4 Onion
2 tablespoons butter

Luckily, I had some clarified butter (damn you Byron for wanting so much damned butter!) so I used that. On medium high heat, sautee the onion until brown, added the salami until it was crispy. Removed.

Add the garlic and brussel sprouts, season with salt and pepper. When the brussel sprouts are a bit brown, add 1/4 cup water and reduce it down.

Anna won't even try the stuff....

Clams Recipes Synergies

Sooooooo... you know what I turn to when I'm all tired and stressed?

Clams.

Clams fucking rock.

Baked Stuffed Clams

1 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
8 Cherrystone Clams
1 12oz pack of bacon, finely chopped.
At least 1/4 cup Freshly Grated Parmesan
Bread Crumbs
Chopped Italian Parsley
Some cooking wine (1/4 cup?)

Clams Oreganata

2 dozen littleneck clams
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 teaspoon italian herbs
At least 2 tablespoons Freshly Grated Parmesan cheese
Chopped Italian Parsley
Bacon Grease

Render the Bacon:
Chop up the bacon and render in a large skillet over medium heat. Now's a good time to finish up your chopping/slicing/grating/cleaning up. Render until you have crispy bits and a good about of grease. About 10-15 minutes.

Saute the veges
Empty the grease into a small bowl. Turn the heat on high. Toss in the stuffed clams veges (not the parsley). Add some black pepper (NO SALT). Saute/Sweat until the shrooms and onions are cooked. Because there're a good amount of veges, they'll probably steam up and you can use that to deglaze the skillet. Otherwise as some water or cooking wine. Remove to a mixing bowl.

Cook the Cherrystones
Toss in the Cherrystone clams with the cooking wine. After about 3-5 minutes the clams should start to open up. Remove them as soon as they open.

Separate the clam shells and take out the meat. Rinse out the shells and place on a baking sheet. Chop up the meat and mix in with the stuffed clams mixture.

Cook the Littlenecks?
Now you're supposed to shuck these guys but after a couple attempts (I never bought a shucking knife, which my parents swear by) I figured you know what... I don't really care if it's overcooked and sometimes the clams that don't close while I'm cleaning them are actually alive and when (up until I cook them.). Soooo why not.

Toss into the same skillet, which should have a good amount of liquid from the wine and cherrystones, but this time over medium heat at a low boil. Again, remove the clams upon opening, even just a bit. Separate the shells.

Finishing up the Stuffed Clams
Add bread crumbs and cheese to the mixture so that everything's coated with cheese and bread crumbs. Add some parsley to taste. ASo now you have a good amount of clams liquor that's also deglazed the bacon bits in the pan. Slowly add the liquor to taste (add some, mix, taste.) Spoon the mixture into the shells.

In a preheated oven at 350 degrees, bake for 15 minutes.

Finishing up the Clams Oreganata
While the stuffed clams are baking, you can mix up the clams oreganata mixture, and mix in clams liquor and bacon grease to taste. In my mind, you can never have too much parmesan cheese in it so feel free to add more. So now you should have this paste that you can smear onto the half-shell clams. Place on a baking sheet.

When the baked clams are finished, take them out to cool and turn the oven to the broiler setting (or if you have one of them bottom broilers, I guess you can do this whenever you damned well please.) Wait about 3 minutes for the broiler to heat up and put in the clams on the top rack. Leaving the door slightly ajar, broil for about 1-2 minutes or until the clams are golden brown.

Serve both with some lemon.

St. Louis Restaurants have Shitty Eggplant Parm

So St. Louis Italian food is pretty weak. On top of that, they have some pretty shitty eggplant parm. So here's yet another thing that you should consider just making at home.

Really good eggplant parm is greasy crap with cheese and sauce. The fact that it's vegetarian's just a way to keep people happy.

Oh wait... this recipe was based off the "How to Cook Everything" book that the Lady supposedly bought for herself to learn how to cook food...

Ingredients:

2 Medium Eggplants
Flour
3 cups - shredded Cheese - I just get whatever "Italian Mix" is on sale. You can be all fancy and get mozzarella (for the inside) and parmesan (for the crusty topping) but I'm too cheap for that.
Fresh Basil

2 cups Tomato Sauce:
http://urbandrivel.blogspot.com/2007/10/marinara-sauce-americas-test-kitchen.html

Notice how this is sort of similar to the zuppa di clams recipe... it's no coincidence, folks.

Optional Super Robust Stuff
16oz sliced Mushrooms
Crushed Garlic (lots)

Slice the eggplant thin, like a 1/4 inch thing. You can trim some of the skin off but that's supposedly the healthy part. Salt both sides with coarse salt and drain in a colander for 30 minutes or so. Rinse and squeeze dry with a paper towel. (My mom was like don't throw the paper towel away! You can still use it! We did. :P)

Heat up olive oil in a large skillet/pan to medium heat. Dredge eggplant slices in flour and brown both sides, about 3-4 minutes a side. Drain on something (like those air dried paper towels from earlier... :P). Add black pepper as they cook (remember that the eggplant's already been pretty salted.)

Super unhealthy optional delicious thing to do:

So after going through all that eggplant, you now have a boat load of brown floury goodness. Hopefully, none of it is burnt... you can get rid of that. Toss in shrooms and garlic, season with salt and pepper, and saute. Set aside.

In a baking dish, spoon the sauce to just coat the bottom. Layer down eggplant, cheese, basil, shrooms, cheese, and repeat with the last being cheese. Don't let your structure touch the edges, pour the remaining sauce around the edges. Your thing won't be stuck to the pan that way.

Bake in oven for 20-30 minutes. Mince some basil on top and serve with any of the remaining sauce.

When will I learn...

So whenever Stephen Chow comes up in conversation Anna has to bring up some Wei Xiao Bao movie that he's done that I've ignored for quite a while. Eventually I tracked it down (Called the Royal Tramp), downloaded it and watched it.

It was a pretty freaking stupid movie. Even for Stephen Chow.

DELETED.

It came up in conversation again. I said it was a dumb movie and I don't ever want to watch it again.

I'm downloading both movies right now...

Leg'o Lamb

Ancient Chow Recipe most likely derived from when Dad decided that he hates turkey for Thanksgiving

1 Boneless Leg'o Lamb
Good Seasons Italian Dressing Mix - 2 bags

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees f

Boneless leg'o lamb is usually netted. Take off the netting and pat the leg dry with a paper towel. Season with the mix all over and tie back up into its original form (one way is to take the netting off without cutting it and then reuse it.)

Stick a meat thermometer in the center of the roast.

Put the lamb on a roasting rack in the oven and bring the temperature down to 300 degrees. Roast until the meat temperature reaches 130 degrees for medium rare. Take out, but don't take the thermometer out. Let it rest for at least ten minutes with aluminum foil loosely covering it.

Slice and serve.

Zuppa di clams - redux

So after boat loads of iterations I've finally come to a recipe that I think will be THE recipe for clams from me - it's essentially using a tip from America's Test Kitchen for the tomato sauce:

24 Clams
1/4 cup red wine
12 olives (or more or less depending how much you like them)
3 tablespoons olive juice (the stuff the olives have been sitting in... I pretty much take as much juice as I can from the bottle so that there's still enough left to leave the rest of the olives submerged)
1 tablespoon capers (I didn't rinse these.)
1 28oz can whole tomatoes
1 Shallot - minced
2 cloves garlic - minced

Preparing the tomatoes - seed and strain the tomatoes and remove center green parts. Leaving too many seeds in there can make it bitter. Try to leave the tomato meat in as whole a piece as possible. Diced seeded tomatoes may work just as well but I didn't like the texture as much. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the tomato juice.

Big deep stainless steel skillet (or anything... just not nonstick.): sweat the shallots, garlic, and capers. No need for salt.

Turn the heat up to medium-high to high. Add the tomatoes. They should be strained enough so that they start leaving a fond (brown bits) on the skillet. After a tomatoes stop steaming up for a while, add the red wine to scrape up all the brown bits until the tomatoes are getting sticky.

Dump in the clams, olives, olive juice, and tomato juice. Cover.

Stir periodically to let clams open. It's done when all the clams are open. Serve with bread for dipping.

DONUT CRAWL

Tentative route for a donut crawl cuz yelp.com couldn't handle links with ampersands O_o:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=10602788046972978433,38.616931,-90.261886%3B11766214560119156495,38.604800,-90.263150%3B6943662351902346876,38.604920,-90.264470&saddr=Arsenal+St+%4038.604920,+-90.264470&daddr=World's+Fair+Doughnuts+%4038.616931,-90.261886+to:Eddie's+Southtown+Donuts+to:6525+Chippewa+St,+St+Louis,+MO+63109+(Donut+Drive-In)+to:Lubeley's+Bakery+%26+Deli+Inc+to:Donut+Stop+to:6935+S+Lindbergh+Blvd,+St+Louis,+MO+63125+(Krispy+Kreme+Doughnuts)+to:Arsenal+St+%4038.604800,+-90.263150&mra=ps&mrcr=0&sll=38.614993,-90.254145&sspn=0.050902,0.087204&ie=UTF8&ll=38.586552,-90.26041&spn=0.101844,0.174408&z=13

If the direct doesn't work, try cutting and pasting into your browser.

Original yelp thread: http://www.yelp.com/topic/saint-louis-time-to-take-this-offline

Bourne Ultimatum is a Platformer

RUN RUN!!!!

PUNCH PUNCH!!!!

JUUUUUUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Randomly ran into Simon and Jim at Dos Reales at 4:30pm. What are the odds of that.

Children of Men...

Awesome movie. Reminds of me THX 1138 for some reason... in terms of how the storytelling went.

Chicks and Robots

So transformers was ridiculously cheesy with a broken flow... but Transformers rocked. It saddened me that a lot of the Autobots except for Optimus and Bumblebee were pretty much pussies, but the Decepticons are much cooler anyway.

Soundwave totally stole the show.

Back with a vengeance

Macaroni and Ham Soup: My roommate in college used to make a heaping crap load of mac and chop up a huge thing of ham so there'd be individual bowls of mac, ham, and green onion. Roomies and neighbors would just spoon the individual ingredients into their bowls and season to taste. For people who would like measurements, here some some guesstimates for 3 servings.

Ingredients:
8oz uncooked macaroni
1 cup cubed ham
2 green onions, chopped
2 cans of chicken broth s
esame oil (about 1 tspn per serving) w
hite pepper

Cook the macaroni per instructions and heat the chicken broth (microwave or on stovetop... whatever). In a bowl, top the macaroni with ham, green onion and pour in chicken broth. Add white pepper to taste. Let sit to cool off for about a minute to let flavors meld.

Rack of Lamb

Recipe
Continental

2 frenched racks of lamb (they usually come in packs of 2)
1 pack of fresh mint (1/4 cup?)
1 pack of rosemary (1/4 cup again?)
Salt 2 tablespoons?
Pepper 1 tablespoon?
4 cloves garlic
1 cup Olive Oil

2 cups Madeira Wine (The cheap stuff is fine...)

Throw all spices/herbs into a blender/food processor and start blending into a paste, gradually adding the olive oil so that it forms a paste. Brush onto the lamb.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees.

Set pan on high heat and sear all 4 sides of the lamb and place on a roasting rack and stick one (through the small side) with a meat thermometer. Roast in oven until internal temp reaches 140 degrees... about 3-4 hours.

While roasting:
In the searing pan reduce whine on low heat until about a half cup is left, whisking the burnt yummies into the sauce. salt to taste. You can run it through a strainer to get the gunk out but they taste good :)

Remove from oven and transfer to a cutting board or someting and cover with tin foil and let sit for 15 minutes.

Cut and drizzle sauce over it.

Yay.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

ANNA'S MOVING TO ST. LOUIS!!!!!!

YOOSACKWEHIFF

I forget the actual acronym but it sounds like enough.

Been working lots of paid overtime.

Oh and the highlight of the moment is that Joan is visiting in Feb and insists on watching "Meet me in st. louis" when... we meet in st. louis. -_-

Alas... the things we do for friends...

Clams in Tomato Sauce

Recipe
Italian

2 Dozen Clams... any shellfish, really...
1 can of your favorite marinara sauce (Trader Joe's is awesome)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon capers, rinsed.
2 shallots, chopped
4 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped
8 green stuffed olives (less or more depending on how much you like the stuff)
1/4 cup white cooking wine.
salt and pepper to taste

In the biggest/deepest sauce pan that you have, heat oil to medium heat. Saute shallots, garlic, olives, and capers until shallots and garlic brouwn. Add the clams , and cooking wine. When all the clams fully open, remove the clams and set aside. Add marinara sauce and stir. Cover and simmer for 20-30 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in clams.

Serve with pasta or bread.

If you want an even more seafoody taste you can add clam juice.

Leading to this new theory

So there's this 40 year old guy at work with 3 kids. He's sitting at Happy Hour with my Coop and he's like...

"So who was that hot blonde chick you brought over to my house the other day? (in reference to his xmas party earlier)... noticed that tatoo she's got on her lower back... like a freaking BULLS EYE! My wife had one on her hip when she was younger... man... after three kids, it's a freaking BOUQUET."

Oh man... the people I know... This is a ridiculous contrast to say... talking about social issues at Kathy/Simon's party?

Roth 401k

Roth 401k

Gah I'm becoming my parents. But in all seriousness to all you kids out there, it's all about the slowly but surely as early as possible.

And all you people my age who are millionaires... screw you :P

S.P.L. after Seven Swords

Man, if I didn't see S.P.L. after Seven Swords, it would have sucked. Despite the fact that Sammo Hung AND Donnie Yen were in it, it was just plain stupid. But alas, it's pretty good compared to other HK movies.

But DAMN.

Seven Swords so sucked it. Worst HK movie EVER. Based on a Korean series that was yet another repackaged version of Seven Samurai. Man. Tsui Hark is melodramatic like nobody's business. And to top it all off, the fighting sucked. SPL fights were pretty sweet, but not often enough. If you're gonna give me crappy ass storylines and crappy ass character development, you'd better fill it with ridiculous fights!

Ah wells.

New White Flight

This article talks about how some schools are becoming increasingly Asian and how parents, White and Asian alike, are getting worried.

Schools with more emphasis on Sciences and Math
Schools with less emphasis on Sports, which, I have to admit, is pretty important.
Schools with seemingly more academic competitiveness amongst students.

I dunno I guess parents do have a right to be worried about it. White parents are worried that the schools a too academically competitive. Asian parents are worried that their kids get too used to Asians always being around and will totally freak out if they end up in a place like... St. Louis :P

I do think, however, that parents have as much responsibility to "train" their kids for the outside world as much as their everyday social environment. And in all seriousness: If you have a kid who spends all his/her time with Asian kids and he/she doesn't know how to act around... non-Asian people... I dunno what to say... there's something odd there.

Also, the "White is Dumb" thing is pretty stupid. But then again, these are high school kids.