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George Foreman Grill: A lean, mean, bacon machine

Posted in Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 22, 2011| 2 Comments »

The good news: Earth Fare will sell you two pieces of sliced applewood dry rub bacon.

The bad news: You’ll feel like a tool asking for two pieces of sliced applewood dry rub bacon.

C’est la vie.

Bacon has been an “it” food for a while now. You can join a bacon of the month club, buy bacon vodka (or make your own) or enjoy a chocolate bacon bar (I, alas, did not enjoy this flavor mix).

What you can’t do with bacon, however, is cook it without making a mess. Before you all shout at once “Put it in the oven,” I’ve tried that. Baking bacon still spattered the oven interior a little, but mostly it just seems utterly ridiculous to heat the oven for the small amount of bacon that the husband and I eat at one sitting.

Thanks to Michael Scott on The Office, I knew about the George Foreman Grill’s potential as a bacon cooker. It wasn’t until Earth Fare — and its tempting meat counter — swung into town last year that I really considered getting back into the bacon-cooking business, however. (And I do realize that Fresh Market has a tempting meat counter, with butchers standing by who would sell me two slices of bacon, but thus far I’ve lived in two cities with a Fresh Market, and both stores have been located at the most dangerous intersection in town. It’s just not worth the drive.)

I’ve already outlined using the Foreman Grill as a panini press. It does a great job with bacon, too, but only if you’re cooking a very small amount.

You have to cut the bacon slices in half if you’re using the smaller grill, and then lay two halves on the grill. Close it, let the bacon cook for about 3 minutes, then open the lid and flip the two pieces over. Do this two or three more times and you’ve got bacon ready to go on the table. Or, actually, ready to sit on the plate and wait for the other two pieces of bacon to finish cooking.

If you’re crafty, you can put the two other half slices of bacon on the grill after the first two shrink down, giving you a head start on Round 2. Because cooking bacon takes forever.

If you’re lucky, all the grease from the bacon runs into the grease tray underneath the front of the Foreman. If you’re unlucky, then part of the grease runs up under the grill and drips on the countertop, onto which you sagely placed a couple layers of paper towels before you began this project. Toss those, wipe off the grill with dry paper towels, spray some cleaner underneath the grill, wipe and you’re done.

The applewood bacon? Totally worth it. Two slices cost me $1.30. The husband came downstairs for breakfast without being called (a rarity) and said, “You know how in cartoons the characters can see waves of smells, and the waves just sort of lift them up and carry them along? That’s what the smell of this bacon cooking is like.”

Cartoon imagery? There is no greater compliment.

 

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First 2011 food find: Little Debbie Banana Pudding Rolls

Posted in Eats, Family, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2011| 5 Comments »

It’s good to have friends who help you maintain a positive attitude and healthy habits. It’s also good to have friends who urge you to make questionable choices every once in a while.

When I emailed a photo of a surprising food find — Little Debbie Banana Pudding Rolls — to a former colleague earlier this week, he responded immediately:  “My professional advice to you is to buy two boxes of them right now. Why two? Because you’ll eat one box on the way home from the store.”

How could a girl resist?

I grew up eating Little Debbie products at my grandparent’s house in South Mississippi — my brother and I could always find a box of the treats on top of the refrigerator. I am the Forrest Gump of Little Debbie products, with a readily accessible running list of the different varieties taking up valuable space inside my brain. Ask me about nearly any of the company’s products, and I can run down a quick review for you. Here are just a few that popped into my head this very minute:

Devil Squares: Their substantial filling and sort of weirdly textured chocolate coating combine for a unique and delicious culinary experience that made me, as a child, feel slightly more sophisticated than my tomboyish habits generally merited. (more…)

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Do One Thing: Wine problem solved, piano bench cleared

Posted in Do One Thing, Home, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2011| 1 Comment »

The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.

Day 2: I labored over whether I should include purchases in this challenge. As the sole board member, I voted “yes.”

When we were in New York City in early December, I saw this nifty little device in Pylones that allows you to stack up to 10 bottles of wine safely and efficiently. I realize that other people have wine racks on their countertops and walls and even on top of their kitchen cabinets, but proper wine storage demands protection from light and temperature variations. Thus, most of our everyday wine (“everyday wine” … we sound so sophisticated) is stored in the bottom of the pantry, far away from the stove and other sources of heat.

The bottles, however, tend to arrange themselves in a mishmash, no matter how carefully they’re initially placed. Any stacking at all requires something extremely heavy and unneeded to prevent rolling, and unstacked bottles rolling around on their sides waste a tremendous amount of vertical cabinet space.

Thus, when I saw the incredibly neat pyramid of wine bottles enabled by the Wine Stack, I pointed it out as just the thing we needed to fix the wine problem back home. My husband looked at it and declared that we would definitely figure something out when we got back.

I should have picked up the Wine Stack and carried it to the register, but what I didn’t realize at the time (yep, still learning after 15 years) was that his comment could be translated as follows: “I do not recognize this wine problem you describe; therefore, I shall forget this discussion in approximately 3 minutes.”

So, when I was trying to put the pantry in order last week after a round of holiday baking, I mentioned this solution we were going to figure out. The husband paused for a couple of seconds, and said, “I guess we should have bought one of those wine things while we were in New York.”

Sigh.

I ordered my Wine Stack on Sunday night, and I’m counting it as my second Do One Thing act of the year.

Day 3: I cleared off the piano bench, a hotspot for downstairs junk like books, magazines, gloves and scarves. Every house has a spot like this. Of course, now that I’ve swept it clean, I need to maintain a subresolution of keeping it clean.

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The George Foreman panini maker

Posted in Eats, Family, Home, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

In cooking, imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery. I love it when someone else tries to replicate one of my dishes. I love it even more when that someone is my mother.

The husband and I have owned a George Foreman Grill for the better part of our marriage. (Actually, we’re on our second grill. The cats broke the first one about 10 years ago.) We used to cook burgers on it; its sole use lately has been to sear the occasional hot dog.

Last year, I saw a couple of comments on food blogs recommending the Foreman Grill as a fast, cheap panini maker. It makes sense: The device is, after all, simply two heavy sheets of metal that press together.

I made grilled cheese sandwiches with it. Blah. The only bread I tend to keep around is some brand or another of wheat bread, the kind that doesn’t go bad in four days since I don’t actually EAT bread every day, and the husband tends to like a PB&J on the weekends. It didn’t grill very well, Foreman Grill or not, partially because it didn’t really fit on the grill (it’s a smaller model).

Enter Earth Fare. Heading to the checkout one day, I saw a display of bread that stopped me in my tracks, bread that looked like it had been freshly made just to fit on the Foreman Grill.

I made an experimental sandwich when I got home, smearing honey mustard on two slices and bundling a small bundle of ham and cheese in between. Best panini ever.

When Mom was here for Christmas, the only kind of bread Earth Fare had left was two loaves speckled with pieces of olives. Best panini ever. (And I realize I have to stop saying that or my credibility is going to be shot.)

For lunch today, I grilled the last two pieces with a couple of slices of Havarti from Costco. Perfection.

More perfection: Mom texted me yesterday to let me know she had switched the plates out on her waffle maker to make sandwiches like mine. Ingenious.

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The customary candies of Christmas

Posted in Christmas, Eats, Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Kids love routine. You may think it’s exciting that you never know what you’re having for dinner until you pull it out of the freezer or the drive-through worker’s hands, or that you can make it to work/school on time only if you miss that first critical red light, but trust me, children want a degree of predictability.

Growing up, my brother and I had a few entirely predictable Christmas gifts, and I, for one, loved the routine. They were all candy items, and they didn’t stop until we had probably grown too old for some of them:

  • DeMet’s Turtles: Our maternal grandparents would give us each a box of these rich goodies every year. They were pretty basic: caramel-covered pecans coated with chocolate, in a vaguely turtle-like shape. They were also huge: If you ate more than two at a time (and just try to stop us), you could potentially suffer from that mythical stomachache that adults always warned us about. Meh. We were hardy children. No candy-induced stomachaches for us.
  • Chocolate mint patties: My paternal grandmother used to wrap up a box of these for each of us every year. You’d think that, given the popularity and year-round availability of the York Peppermint Pattie, these wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but they were thinner than Peppermint Patties and just more Christmas-y. (My in-laws still give my husband a box of them every year.)
  • Chocolate-covered cherries: My mom always made sure I got a box of these – not sure if my brother ever liked them. I loved biting through the thin chocolate shell to release the liquid surrounding the cherry. Looking back, I’m not sure how I ever ate so many — they may be the richest, sweetest Christmastime treat I remember.
  • Lifesavers Storybook: It was just a little cardboard box, hinged to resemble a book, but it held six or eight rolls of Lifesavers in different flavors and I was ALL about different flavors. Imagine. My favorite flavor was pineapple. I recently stumbled across a Lifesavers Storybook filled with gummy Lifesavers. We would have scarfed those down in minutes — maybe our paternal grandmother knew it would take us awhile to get through a box of hard candy.

We had other holiday traditions. We always went to my paternal grandmother’s house on Christmas Eve to unwrap presents, and left when the weatherman announced that Santa was getting close. My maternal grandmother always put walnuts in our stockings hung by the chimney with care, and we always dumped them back into the walnut bowl on Christmas morning. At some point, my grandmother started making fruitcake cookies every year, despite the face that nobody seemed to like them.

It’s funny that the goofy little things are the ones you remember the best. I can’t recall the “big gifts” that I got from year to year, but I can assure you that I would trade them all for one more Christmas with all my grandparents, swapping turtles and chocolate-covered cherries around the tree.

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The joys of destination dining

Posted in Eats, Photographs, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2010| 6 Comments »

From Jean Georges in Manhattan: Warm sweet potato cake with a cranberry compote and cranberry foam.

 

When the husband and I go on vacation, we tend to plan our itinerary around food. We’re not the only people who do this, but I get mixed reactions from a few folks, some of whom apparently expect to hear more about the shows we’ve seen in New York City (most recent count: 0) than our sake-tasting and evaluation of the freshly made tofu at EN Japanese Brasserie (evaluation: awesome).

Some people get it: After a recent photo documenting our pilgrimage to the Doughnut Plant, one Facebook friend noted, “You take the best doughnut vacations ever!” Indeed, we do.

So what’s with our vacation food obsession? Honestly, we eat like monks at home. We have old-fashioned oatmeal (or steel-cut oats, if there’s time) with walnuts and raisins for breakfast every day. I almost always have a fresh salad and quinoa or hummus for lunch, while the husband consistently has a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Dinner might be homemade lasagna or something easy, like a cheese sandwich pressed into submission on the Foreman Grill with a bowl of leftover Cowboy Stew. We rarely go out to eat. We’ve found that one of the consequences of cooking your own healthy, delicious food at home is that your average restaurant food doesn’t measure up anymore.

What does measure up, however, is your above-average restaurant food. And this is what turns our vacations into the pursuit of destination dining. So while I can’t be bothered with a 10-minute drive to Krispy Kreme for Hot Doughnuts Now (trust me when I tell you that growing up with a Krispy Kreme within easy driving distance makes their doughnuts way less of an attraction later), I am perfectly willing to make a 15-minute hike to the subway station, stand on a crowded car for five minutes, make a 10-minute hike to the Doughnut Plant and stand in a long line for a Valrhona chocolate doughnut. I deem the calories worthwhile.

And that’s how my photo albums end up filled with pictures of doughnuts, ice cream, cheeseburgers and steamed shrimp, while we forget to take pictures of ourselves. Sorry, Mom.

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When salad became more than iceberg lettuce

Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 4, 2010| 2 Comments »

I still remember the moment I discovered that salad could mean something more than iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and dressing. I was at a fancy mountainside restaurant in Birmingham, Ala., with my future husband, probably around 1995, when the waiter brought out our small starter salads. They were filled with … leaves. And no hint of the crunchy, flavorless iceberg lettuce my fiance and I had both grown up thinking was the foundation of salad.

I learned that the leaves were baby arugula greens, and suddenly a new culinary world opened for me: Salad was no longer that bland bit of crunch existing only to carry dressing or serve as a low-calorie, tasteless diet option, but a real opportunity for nutritious, delicious creativity in the kitchen. Non-iceberg greens could be sweet or bitter and carry their own weight in a salad without relying on the dressing to make up for lack of flavor.

How did America get so obsessed with iceberg lettuce? Probably the same reason that grocery-store tomatoes and apples taste like mushy cardboard: According to Practically Edible, iceberg lettuce is easy to grow, easy to ship and lasts a long time in the fridge compared to other greens.

Through the early ’90s, it was nearly impossible to find any other kinds of greens in your average suburban grocery store, at least in Mississippi. I only had to remember one lettuce code during my entire six-month stint as a Jitney Jungle cashier in 1990.

I’m working my way through a big batch of Sylvetta Italian arugula mixed with other fresh greens this week, thanks to a winter CSA split with MrsDragon over at Mrs Dragon’s Den.  I even had to wash the dirt and a couple of tiny worms off, since my greens had just been plucked from the ground only two days earlier. Best salad ever.

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As Pictured Below: Fright Night

Posted in Eats, Photographs, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 31, 2010| 1 Comment »

I couldn’t decide whether this image was scarier in black and white or color, so I posted both versions. Calluna pointed out that the jack-o’-lantern seems to be giving a “death stare” to the fallen leaves. It’s always fun when somebody else finds something funny or poignant in one of your photos that you didn’t notice.

I’m off to buy the bag of emergency candy that my husband claims we have to keep on hand, just in case we get trick-or-treaters after three years of coming up empty. Methinks somebody has a craving for tiny Snickers.

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The glue gun may have won the battle, but I won the war. At least this one.

Posted in Crafts, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2010| 3 Comments »

I finished a crafting project and only blistered one finger with the glue gun! This is epic, you guys.

My mom brought me several of my late grandmother’s pins earlier this summer. I have my doubts that my grandmother actually ever wore most of these pins, as they lean toward the sparkly and the offbeat, while my grandmother leaned in the opposite direction.

Still, they were hers. Or, at least, they were given to her and she kept them for a long time and now they’re mine.

I’ve gotten tired lately of hiding my treasures in boxes. Fun jewelry deserves a fun display. One day in early August, I was walking through my favorite thrift store, A New Leash on Life Marketplace, and while I was digging through a box of old, beat-up frames, it hit me: 3D pin frames. My husband would later call this wondrous idea a “pin cushion.”

I purchased a few of the smaller frames and went to work. First, the frames had to be painted, because I do not get along with gold and bronze accessories. Black seemed like the color to best offset bright silver jewelry. I had fun with a wooden frame that features highly stylized scrollwork, layering red, then silver, then black for a unique finish.

Before: blah.

The hard part was next. I bought your garden-variety pillow stuffing and some black cloth. I glued three edges of the cloth to the little piece of cardboard that goes between the frame and the glass, stuffed it with stuffing until it reached my visualized shape and glued the fourth side down. Finally, I crammed the cushion into the frame opening.

It took more maneuvering to get the pins into the cushions than I had imagined, and I had to thread a tiny piece of invisible thread around the tops of the pins to keep them from tilting forward, but overall I’m calling it a successful project. Glue gun injuries aside.

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