Pathetic Humans, Prepare to Write Down the Recipe!!!

There are going to be quite a few pictures in this post, so when you come to one that is awkwardly placed in the middle of a section, please imagine that as I am telling the story to you, I am turning the book toward you so that you can see the pictures.¹ (and since I'm still here in the intro section. Apologies to anyone who got notified of this post twice. I had to go back and fix some HTML because I'm that obsessive.)

Recently, I purchased a new stainless steel pan and since it wasn't a non-stick surface like the rest of our pans, I figured it would be a good time to work on my pan sauces.






Now, one could make a pan sauce from all sorts of things, but to be quite honest I hankered for a hunk of, a slice, a slab or chunk of, I hankered for a hunk of beef.² Since I watch Good Eats fairly often, regardless of whether I have seen the episode before or not, I happened to have recently watched Alton Brown make steak au poivre in Tender is the Loin, Part I. I decided that with a few minor adjustments, including using New York strip rather than tenderloin steaks, I'd give the recipe a try.

First up was a little butter an olive oil in the pan. Once that was hot, it was time to add the steaks which were coated in coarsely crack black pepper. I do mean coarsely; I used the mortar and pestle rather than a pepper grinder.






Once the steaks were done, they were taken off to rest while I made the sauce. The first step was to deglaze the pan with cognac.

Ok, I'm going to go on a tangent for a minute, so bear with me. Cooking with something that I would never keep around, like cognac, is a pain. As many of you know, I believe that pretty much anything containing alcohol tastes exactly like everything else containing alcohol, which is to say like cough syrup. Needless to say, this makes my need for cognac or any other alcohol pretty limited even for cooking. When I decided to make this, I went looking for cognac with the intent of buying something inexpensive and preferably only a small amount, after all, I needed only about 1/3 of a cup. Once I got to the grocery store, my idea went straight out the window as I saw that the smallest bottles to be had were around a liter. (I guess it's good that I hadn't gone to Sam's Club.) On my way home, I figured I'd give the local convenience store a try. As it turned out, they did have smaller bottles, as long as a half pint of Hennessy was ok. So, now I look less like I'm planning to cook and more like I'm trying to reenact any one of a million different rap songs. Ok, back to the main post.


I added the cognac to the pan, and then brought a lit match (a very long one) to the pan to light the vapor.






Note that in this picture, there is very little flame. That gave me a confidence that would come back to haunt me later.


Once the alcohol had burned⁴, I added heavy cream and mixed, scraping the bottom of the pan to get the fond off, then let it simmer for around 5 minutes to thicken.






After that, it was just a matter of adding the steaks back to the pan to get them nice and coated in the sauce and then serving.⁵






It turned out pretty well. It was a little hot because of all the black pepper, but it tasted great.


Steaks were still cheap at the grocery store, so I tried it out again. This time, I was working without a recipe, but still following the basic method from the steak au poivre. I minced one shallot clove⁶, then set about cooking the steaks as I had before. Once the steaks were done, I deglazed with cognac and flamed, then added the shallot and some beef stock. Once the sauce had thickened, I brought the steaks back to the pan and covered them in sauce. This one turned out pretty well, too. I wasn't sure about the amount of shallot to use, and I probably would have increased it a little if I were to do it all again.









Now, remember how I said that confidence would come back to haunt me? The second time, we captured the lighting of the cognac on video. If you have sound on you will hear the whoosh of the flames followed by the dogs barking and then, at the very end, Melissa saying that we shouldn't try that again. What you don't see is that the flames reached all the way to the ceiling and that while I was moving the pan back and forth I was also looking around to see if anything was on fire. It wasn't. After the flames had died down and the video was over, I did check in the mirror to make sure I still had both eyebrows. (I do.)







So, what did we learn? If you let me cook, I may or may not burn down your kitchen. But if I don't burn the place down, I can produce some tasty food.<sup>7



1</sup>You did know that I picture you all as a bunch of kindergartners sitting cross-legged in a circle around me as I tell stories, right? Ok, good.
²Apparently, I was so hungry I could eat a wagon wheel.³ Also, I'm sorry.
³Those of you who either are too young or too old or didn't waste your youth watching cartoons and therefore don't know what "Time for Timer" means can go here to check it out.
⁴Note that I'm not telling you that it had completely burned off. No matter what you have been told over the years, all of the alcohol in a recipe does not evaporate during cooking. You're never going to get drunk off of what is left, but if you do not for health or other reasons want any alcohol in what you eat, don't use it at all. Even in a case like this where you burn it, I wouldn't trust that it is all gone.
⁵This is my other big deviation from Alton Brown's recipe. He added more cognac at the end. I didn't add any extra due to my very limited tolerance of the flavor.
⁶Is that even the right term for one section of a shallot? It is now.
⁷More pictures can be found on Flickr by clicking on any of the ones in this post and viewing the entire set, which Laziest Girl has helpfully decided should be called "The Idiot's Guide to Setting the Kitchen on Fire."

Trivial Tuesday

Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday night. (Letting you know in case you haven't had any exposure to television, radio, the internet or a newspaper since then.) As you probably heard during the Oscar telecast, the film was based on a book called Q & A by Vikas Swarup. This was not the first time Danny Boyle has directed a movie based on a book. In fact, it was the third. The first time was the movie Trainspotting. What film starring Leonardo DiCaprio was the other adaptation of a novel directed by Boyle?

Bragging rights are at stake. Impress me and impress your friends by commenting with the correct answer.

It's Not Ironic; It's Just Coincidental

We've had a lot of snow this winter. Seriously, a lot. Back in mid to late January I saw on the news that our snowfall total for the year was already 9 or 10 inches above average. When the city decides that there has been enough snow (usually >4 or 6 inches in a 24 hour period), they send out the snow plows. As anyone who has lived in an area with lots of snow can tell you, the plows don't care much where the snow goes as long as they push it off the road. A giant wall of snow at the end of your driveway? That's your problem. The road's clear now. As annoying as being plowed in (our out, as has happened to me at least twice this year) is, the bigger problem is that since we have no curbs, the snow also gets pushed up against where people's mailboxes are. As the snow piles higher and higher, and the plows push more and more snow in the general direction of the mailbox, ours could no longer take the strain and, as we discovered when some of the giant snow pile surrounding it melted, was only being held upright by the snow. It now lists to one side and back*, threatening to topple completely at any moment.

This of course, is also our problem and has resulted in multiple trips to Home Depot, first for the post kit, then a new "if we're doing this we might as well replace that too" mailbox, then for the mounting board, which is for some strange reason not included with either the post or mailbox. On one of these trips through the store, we came across this display.




At first, it simply added to frustration and anger on my part, but finally I realized that there isn't much that I can change about it, so I might as well laugh.

The sad part about this is that once we finally got all the pieces we need to replace it, it has started snowing again, so we are stuck having to wait.


*Do you have any idea how hard it was to resist a "back, and to the left" joke?

A Superpowers Drug You Can Just Rub Into Your Skin? You'd Think It'd Be Something You Have to Freebase.

Because I can never resist a chance to see what I'd be like if I were a superhero or to do what all the cool kids are doing, I give you my alter-ego:

I'm not exactly thrilled with the name, but it's automatically assigned when you use the hero factory. And to be quite honest, I can't think of a better one. Suggestions?

When faced with the "abilities" section, which would more accurately be called "accessories", I considered the lightsaber, katana and pistol, but figured that even my superpowered self would be more likely to wield a spork than any of the other options. With my trusty spork by my side, I would definitely have powers matching those of the legendary Matter Eater Lad. No, I'm probably not the most useful superhero, but at least you'll never have to worry about those pesky leftovers at the superhero banquet.

It's reasonably accurate, at least from the neck up. From the neck down, it looks like I not only found motivation to work out but might find my name in the Mitchell Report as well.

Something about the uniform with the blue/gold makes me think of Invincible or The Immortal, but I'm probably the only one who will see that or even know what I'm babbling about. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some crime to fight. Tasty, delicious crime.

But I Don't Think Either of Us Barks in Our Sleep

You hear about how people look like their dogs all the time, but fortunately that isn't the case with us. We discovered, however, that rather than looking like our pets, our pets have adopted our sleeping habits. 

Chewie is a light sleeper who will wake up if he is even slightly disturbed, but if he's been sleeping for a while, he is very grumpy when he wakes up. If we leave the house, he naps in his crate until we come home and let him out. Then he goes stomping across the house, head down, until he gets to the door and goes outside. You can talk to him, but he won't even acknowledge anyone. 

Booker, on the other hand, sleeps very soundly, but once he's up, he's up. When he goes to sleep, nothing disturbs him. In fact, he sleeps so soundly that I sometimes touch his ear to make it twitch just to make sure he's responding at all. (Yes, it irritates him, but it makes me feel better.) Of course, if I wait long enough, he'll let us know he's just fine with a nice loud snore.

No, our dogs may not look like us, but one sleeps like me and one sleeps like Melissa. I'll leave the sorting out which one is which to you.

Trivial Tuesday: The Triumphant Return

It's been far too long since I've done this. I don't even know who's still out there that will bother to comment or try to answer, but here we go anyway.

We're rapidly approaching the mercy killing that is the ER series finale. ER was responsible for giving a boost to the careers of several actors, including George Clooney. It's pretty well known that Clooney also starred on the short-lived sitcom E/R earlier in his career; however, he is not the only person to have appeared on both shows. What Battlestar Galactica actress also appeared on both E/R and ER?^*

First person to comment with the correct answer wins bragging rights, but nothing of actual value.

^*How many hints did I give you in that one sentence? Not doing this in such a long time has apparently made me go easy on you.

There Will Be Posts

I don't have anything to say right this minute, but I will have something up here tomorrow. So, look for a brand new post tomorrow night. I promise.

In fact, it will be something that hasn't been seen around here in a long time. And no, it's not my toes.<sup>*



*</sup>Did I really just make a fat joke? I haven't posted in forever and that's all I've got? I really should hang it up. I'm getting to old for this.

I'm Not Dead and Other Bits of Useless Information

Since you aren't all privy to all of the email, IM or other conversations I've had with some, but not all, of you, I figure I should post an update answering some of these questions.

Q: Yo, you dead?
A: No, despite my eating habits, I am still alive. The inactivity on this site is not the result of my departure from this life, but thank you for your concern.

Q: Have you given up your blog completely?
A: Are you kidding? I just forked over ten bucks to keep this snazzy URL. That would be like spending money on Netflix and never watching or returning your DVDs...You know what; let's move on.

Q: Are you going to post again?
A: What do you think you're reading now? Ok, maybe I shouldn't berate the few readers I have left. Will I post other things again? Yes. Will I post on a regular basis? Well, don't hold your breath for the 3-5 days a week stuff anymore.

Q: You haven't posted 3-5 days a week in a couple years, if ever.
A: That's not a question. Now shut up.

Q: Why aren't you posting anything?
A: Multiple reasons. First, I've had this blog for over 4 years now. I've only got so much to say, and there's only so much I am willing to discuss in a place like this that is quasi-anonymous and not remotely private. Second, my job has been getting more demanding as time goes on, and recently, I changed positions (sort of) making things even more demanding. This all means that I don't have much in the way of mental capacity to think of things to say. Rest assured, when I think of something to post about, you'll see it...assuming I have time to write and can write coherently.

Q: So, anything exciting going on in your life?
A: Not really, no. Unless you want to discuss lot release and need by dates, I'm a boring conversationalist.

Q: Have you at least seen any good movies recently?
A: Actually, yes. We went to see Coraline last weekend. If you haven't seen it, please do. It's great.

Q: What about TV?
A: The usual. Lost, BSG, Good Eats, etc. I did give up on Heroes part way through the first half of this season. It was so bad that I've cancelled the TiVo season pass for it. It could suddenly turn into the best show ever, and I'd never know. We did get an HD TiVo for ourselves for Christmas and have discovered that the ability to watch movies and old TV shows instantly using Netflix and TiVo is a great thing. We've watched lots of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that way.

Q: Read any good books?
A: Yes, I have. I have a soft spot for fantasy and I started reading Brandon Sanderson after hearing that he was going to be finishing The Wheel of Time. I've read Elantris and all three of the Mistborn books and recommend that fantasy lovers do the same. Now, in preparation for this fall's (scheduled) release of the last WoT novel, I'm rereading all of the Wheel of Time books. Of course, that's around 9000-10000 pages (or around 3 million words) of the same author, so we'll see how that goes.

Q: Some of these don't really sound like questions people have asked you.
A: Again, please put your submission in the form of a question.

Q: People didn't really ask you all this stuff, did they?
A: No, it was mostly the things about if I had quit or if I was ever posting again. It did give me a chance to have a conversation with myself and give updates on several things, though.

There you have it. You're now all up to date with my life. If you actually read this far, you have my thanks and my apologies. As a reward, feel free to throw out a topic for discussion. I'll probably ignore it, but you never know; you just might end up with a long-winded diatribe on it. I may be busy, but I'm still opinionated and wordy.