Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Too inconsequential to be sued

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Shocking, but not surprising.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

No one could have predicted…

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Women: They Get Shit Done

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Also, too.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

How has Obama failed you today?

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Nevertheless, she persisted

This blog will pay for itself.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

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Food

Washington Cherries

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I don’t know if I have just been particularly lucky with my purchases this year, or if the weather patterns and combinations this year led to an exceptional crop, but the cherries this year have been just outstanding. Large, plump, juicy, and sweet, with a deep flavor of cherry. Obviously they are cherries so they have a cherry flavor, but you know what I mean. Sometimes a fruit can be super sweet from the sugars, but not retain the taste that makes it that particular fruit. This years, the cherries have been sweet, but really retained that “essence” of cherry.

Just very tasty. The skin, too, has been very good- crisp, yet retaining some elasticity that give them a delightful mouth feel.

If you can still get some, I would highly recommend it this year- but act quick, because the season ends soon.

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Open Thread: Very, Very Lost in Translation

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Click to embiggen:

I can imagine the moment of existential doubt as the poor man thinks, Did I somehow miss some *really* important English-language culinary category?…

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Pandemic Pressure: The Meatpacking Industry Is Not Sufficiently Improved Since 1906

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… when Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. Efficiently chopping up carcasses is inherently messy & potentially dangerous; doing so at the greatest profit *to factory owners* is predictably dangerous, and not only for the workers. The DesMoines Register published this almost a week ago:

A rash of coronavirus outbreaks at dozens of meat packing plants across the nation is far more extensive than previously thought, according to an exclusive review of cases by USA TODAY and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

And it could get worse. More than 150 of America’s largest meat processing plants operate in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, based on the media outlets’ analysis of slaughterhouse locations and county-level COVID-19 infection rates.

These facilities represent more than 1 in 3 of the nation’s biggest beef, pork and poultry processing plants. Rates of infection around these plants are higher than those of 75% of other U.S. counties, the analysis found…

As companies scramble to contain the outbreaks by closing more than a dozen U.S. plants so far — including a Smithfield pork plant in South Dakota that handles 5% of U.S. pork production — the crisis has raised the specter of mass meat shortages.

But experts say there’s little risk of a dwindling protein supply because, given the choice between worker safety and keeping meat on grocery shelves, the nation’s slaughterhouses will choose to produce food.…

The meat packing industry was already notorious for poor working conditions even before the coronavirus pandemic. Meat and poultry employees have among the highest illness rates of all manufacturing employees and are less likely to report injuries and illness than any other type of worker, federal watchdog reports have found.

And the plants have been called out numerous times for refusing to let their employees use the bathroom, even to wash their hands — one of the biggest ways to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Amplifying the danger is that, in many places, meat processing companies are largely on their own to ensure an outbreak doesn’t spread across their factory floors.

Factory workers, unions, and even managers say the federal government — including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — has done little more than issue non-enforceable guidance. On its website, for example, the CDC has released safety guidelines for critical workers and businesses, which primarily promote common sense measures of sanitization and personal distancing…

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Late Night Open Thread: So Say We All!

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Elsewhere…

Beat sweetner, from Axios‘ premier performer of such:


Gosh, one wonders why.

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I Thought I’d Share an Alain Story: Sourdough Edition

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A number of you all indicated you loved the stories Alain would tell in his posts and his comments. And before I go any farther, I was in touch with Carol today and what you all wrote in your comments to Cole’s post, as well as mine last night and today really made her load a little lighter.

On the 6th I was texting with Alain – I had asked him about upgrading to a new 4k AppleTV as I’ve been running my old one and as a result was unable to watch my superhero cartoons and movies adapted from comic books in glorious 4K Dolbyvision – and I wanted his opinion on whether it was worth it. Yes, I asked a tech guy who was also a tech gear guy if I should upgrade my tech. Silly me!

After establishing that I should upgrade, which I have done (hence the HDMI cable references yesterday), he asked if I wanted some sourdough starter. Before we go any further, while I love sourdough bread, I don’t eat very much of it because I don’t do well with refined carbohydrates and refined sugar. So I largely avoid bread and all the other things I love that are made of refined carbohydrates and include refined sugar. He lulled me in on the sourdough by asking about a candy store in Tallahassee and then segued into the sourdough. Here’s what happened:

(ETA: When I first entered Alain’s information into my phone, I entered it based on how it sounded when he pronounced his last name or how I thought it sounded, so Chamot wound up as Chailmont – don’t judge, I’m tone deaf…)

Alain Chailmont: Look up Lofty Pursuits or Pd.net. Public displays of confection. I’m so jealous you can drive there.

Adam L Silverman: Ok

Alain Chailmont: Just amazing craft and addictive watching. Candy making.

(Adam here: at this point I’m looking up Lofty Pursuits to try to figure out where they are so I can determine how long it will take me to get there)

Adam L Silverman: Ok. That’s a six hour drive depending on traffic. So I could drive there, but I could also drive to Atlanta

Alain Chailmont: Yeah. But it’s a fuck closer for you than me! lol

Adam L Silverman: Yes, but…

Alain Chailmont: You won’t be stopping by, I dig.

Adam L Silverman: Not any time soon. Also, statewide and county wide shelter in place order

Alain Chailmont: Neither will I. I don’t expect business to take me to Tallahassee Which is why I ordered a week and a half ago from them. Can’t wait to get my order.

Adam L Silverman: Gotcha. Enjoy! Time for me to walk the dogs!

Alain Chailmont: Careful of the 🐊

Adam L Silverman:

Floriduh! Man Never Takes a Day Off! Even During a Pandemic!

Alain Chailmont: I showed Carol that earlier, she figured some folk would finally listen because that’s a relatable distance. Lol. Any interest in some Sourdough starter? My new batch is almost ready to dry and I’d be happy to send you a sample.

Adam L Silverman: Passover starts this week so no bread and I also can’t tolerate refined carbohydrates, so I generally avoid bread. But I appreciate the offer. I’m sure TaMara would appreciate a batch!

Alain Chailmont: Just for thought – my primary usage is sourdough pancakes. When the starter is cultivated well, they are so complex. The fermented flour is usually easy on digestion for those with issues.

I’ll send her one!

Adam L Silverman: Okay, send me one. I’ll find a use for it

Alain Chailmont: Shall do. Hott Stuff Sourdough is my brand 😂 it’ll await your efforts indefinitely as long as you keep it dry and in the dark.

Adam L Silverman: Not a problem. Thanks!

By now you’ve noticed that 1) I didn’t actually want any sourdough starter, but…, 2) I threw both Passover and TaMara at him as a distraction, neither of which worked, and 3) when that didn’t work I gave in. What you can’t see in those texts is that I gave in because I could feel through the texts that I wasn’t being a good friend. That the sourdough starter was important to him, so I’d take some and find a use for it because that would make him happy. And because it was an easy thing to do to make him happy. And it did make him happy.

Two days later, feeling the need to extract a bit of payment for knuckling on the sourdough starter, I had this conversation with Alain:

Adam L Silverman: You got Popehat in trouble

Alain Chailmont: Haha lol

Adam L Silverman: Do we need to schedule an intervention?

Alain Chailmont: I. Am. So. Cool. For once.

Adam L Silverman: Don’t let it go to your head

The next day, while kibbitzing about Passover seders, or in my case the lack thereof, Alain returned to sourdough starter:

Alain Chailmont: My new batch dries tomorrow and so i begin shipping again Saturday lol

Adam L Silverman: Just so you know, you can’t sell that stuff within 500 feet of a school or a playground!

And that’s my Alain sourdough story. I didn’t want any, I could feel through the texts on my phone that not wanting any was upsetting him, so I said I’d take some. I’m sure there’s a packet en route in the mail, and I’m going to put it to damn good use in his memory!

By the way, Gretchen Koch an amazing graphic artist with a PhD in religion, she did this on the fly for Popehat:

I Thought I'd Share an Alain Story: Sourdough Edition 1

 

Open thread!

PS – I’ve got a baking/confecting post I’ll put up tomorrow night. I made chocolate coated peanut butter truffles earlier sweetened only with agave. They’re setting up right now in the fridge.

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Sourdough Respite Thread

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It’s gotten to be a bit of a joke that all us middle-class types are learning how to make and use sourdough cultures. Alain did a post on it a while back.

I had a culture a long time ago, and I was never entirely happy with it. I thought I’d try again. I started about a week ago with dried apricots and ginger, just for the heck of it. The recipe I read recommended using dried fruit to get an initial batch of yeast, which appealed to me.

I’ve been feeding the starter gently for about a week and decided over the weekend that it was time to try it out. I used the surplus starter in pancakes, which were good but unspectacular.

The big project, though, was a loaf of bread. A couple of baguettes, actually, to suit the albondigas soup I wanted to make.

The initial response of the dough yesterday morning was sluggish – the problem I had had in the past, so I started being a little disappointed. But last night it got more enthusiastic. I formed it into loaves this morning and baked them.

Oh my! Great crust and good flavor! I’d like it a little more sour, but I am told that my starter will become more sour with time.

A whole baguette and a part of one on a cooling rack, the partial one broken to show the interior texture. Beautiful golden-brown crust!
Closeup of the broken surface. Big bubbles and little ones.

And here’s dinner:

Bowl of soup with little meatballs in a tomato broth. Buttered bread on a smaller plate to the side. China with fruit decorations on a plaid multicolor place mat.

ETA the recipe for Albondigas Soup

Albondigas Soup

Meatballs

  • 1 lb ground beef
  • 1 egg
  • 1/3 cup rice
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped
  • ½ tsp cumin
  • ½ tsp oregano
  • pepper

Mix the ingredients and form into meatballs about an inch in diameter.

Soup

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 large onion
  • 1 cup chopped carrots
  • ¼ cup chopped celery
  • 1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 2 cups tomatoes, peeled and chopped
  • 2 cups stock
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 1 bay leaf
  • chopped parsley
  • salt and pepper
  • summer squash
  • kernels from 1 ear corn

Saute onion, carrots, celery, and garlic in the olive oil. Add tomatoes, stock, and seasonings, with additional stock or water as necessary. Bring to a boil. Add meatballs a few at a time. Let mixture simmer 15 minutes. Add cubed summer squash and more water or stock if necessary and simmer 15 minutes more. Add corn and simmer 5 minutes. Serve.

Open thread!

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Open Thread: Pandemic-Related Trouble in the Fields

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There’s been discussion, on other threads, of how or why farmers are being affected by the national (and global) lockdowns. American farms, even the ‘family’ ones, are as much a part of the just-in-time supply chains as any other business:

… Just as virus-spooked consumers have rushed to grocery stores to stockpile everything from toilet paper to pasta, farmers raising America’s cattle, hogs, and chickens have filled their bins with feed, fearing the spread of the coronavirus would disrupt their supply chains. “I’ve had some calls from customers of mine looking for feed because the mills are out,” says the Fayetteville, Ark.-based Beaver. “There’s a rush to buy just because of the uncertainty in the market. They just don’t want to be caught without.”

Keeping America’s 95 million cows, 77 million pigs, and 9 billion chickens fed isn’t as simple as it may seem. Farmers are worried their feed mills could close as employees get sick or that their slaughterhouses could slow production, forcing them to keep animals for longer. They’re also concerned that a shortage of trucks, which are being waylaid to supply supermarkets, could make it harder for farm supplies to reach them.

Even the plunge in gasoline demand affects the feed supply. As ethanol plants shut down—because the fuel additive isn’t needed when gas isn’t selling—the animal feed market is being starved of an important ingredient called dried distillers grains (DDGs) that are a byproduct of ethanol production. Distillers grain is a key ingredient in rations for beef cattle and dairy cows.

The rush to fill bins hasn’t happened only in the U.S. French feedmakers stepped up ingredient purchases at the start of the lockdown, and demand jumped as plants that produce biofuels started to slow down. A similar trend occurred in Germany last month. “This is a new phenomenon,” says David Webster, head of animal nutrition and health at Cargill Inc., adding that the agribusiness giant has seen its global feed sales volume climb 10% or more in the past month. “We saw a bit of this in China in February, but now we are seeing globally, in every geography that we operate in, so it’s testing the system, so to speak.”…

Still, because farmers’ bin space is limited, they can’t really hoard the same way that consumers are doing, says David Hoogmoed, president of the Purina Animal Nutrition unit of Land O’ Lakes Inc. (The Purina that makes the dog and cat food is owned by Nestlé SA.) “What we are seeing isn’t a run on feed, but a keep-everything-full scenario,” he says. “While the producer [in the past] may have run things down to the last minute and ordered feed for tomorrow, they are building in, in their inventory management, more of a safety stock.”…

Another complication for the meat producers — if the processing plants aren’t open, nobody’s selling livestock:

Here’s an explanation from a (Canadian) farmer about the other side of the demand/supply chain. I’ve stripped out some of the twitter framing to save space:

Of course the question comes to why. First off it has nothing to do with price. Milk in Canada has a fixed price coming from the farm, depending on what it’s used for. Whether it’s a big order or a small one, whether it’s today or the first of March – the price is set.

Second has to do with shelf life. Of course milk doesn’t last forever and this is especially true of raw, unpasteurized milk. It’s required to be picked up from our farm within 72 hours. And then would need to be processed within a day or two. It can’t just sit and wait.

Third challenge is storage. I said it’s required to be picked up within 72 hours, but our farm & most others only have 48 hours worth of milk storage on farm. That’s because milk is picked up every 48 hours. It would be an extra cost that would have to be accounted for.

The same is with tanker trucks. There are enough milk trucks to pick up every farm every 48 hours. But there isn’t a fleet waiting for more. That would be an extra cost that no one has wanted to pay. So once it’s picked up, it has to be unloaded within the day.

That brings us to processors. And I feel for all of them right now.
Before this started, demand was pretty constant. Tim Hortons would need a pretty steady amount of cream week to week. My Loblaws store would need a pretty steady amount of 2%.

Processors would be able to adapt to small increases or decreases. But what’s happened over the last few weeks is nothing short of a absolute shock to the system. Plus, many are working with new rules of physical distancing for employees to make sure they stay healthy & operating

Figures out of the US (Cdn #’s should come soon) show increases through retail of 53% in milk, 84% in cheese, 127% for butter. All while food service demand collapsed.

Keep in mind food service wants buckets of sour cream, not tubs, or 10lb bags of shredded cheese, not packets. Think even cream where Tim’s uses a big bag of cream through a SureShot machine, while you want 500ml at a time.

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Silence of the Butter Lambs

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Lamb carved out of butter

The mister and I aren’t doing Easter this year since it’s just the two of us quarantined in the swamp compound. It’s not an important holiday to us since we aren’t Christians except in the cultural sense. The family gatherings were the point of the holiday to us, and that’s off for obvious reasons this year.

Neither of us is enthusiastic enough about the foods from our respective family of origins’ traditional Easter feasts to recreate them on a two-person scale. (“Eternity is two people and a ham,” according to Dorothy Parker. Smart lady!) So, we’ll have spaghetti and meatballs instead.

That said, not even a plague can interrupt the Easter butter lamb tradition!* My adorable mother-in-law lives fairly close by, but I haven’t seen her in weeks because I love her and do not want to inadvertently expose her to the virus. She’s having Easter dinner tomorrow with a few friends in her neighborhood who’ve also been carefully locked down.

I don’t approve of that, but it’s not my call. However, I figure since she’s going to have Easter dinner regardless, she should have a butter lamb. So, my mission today is to deliver the above-pictured safely handled butter lamb in a sanitized container.

Open thread!

*If you’re asking yourself WTF is a butter lamb, please see last year’s post on the topic for a link to the backstory, plus a step-by-step tutorial on how to make your own. It’s fun!

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Late Night Open Thread: What I’ll Miss in the Outside World

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Since there are no good independent bookstores around here, I order most of my books online. But I’m worried about some of my favorite ‘local’ restaurants surviving. There’s one in particular, which we made a point of visiting last Friday — it’s almost half an hour north of us, closer to Gloucester than Boston, and serves delicious New England ‘comfort food’; it’s now shut down ‘until April 6th’. And I’m not sure about our favorite local Chinese place, even though of course they *do* have takeout (which we’ve been utilizing at least once a week for the past six weeks). Not to mention my personal favorite Indian restaurant… I always get takeout there, cuz the spice-averse Spousal Unit can hardly stand to go into the place, but it’s a white-tablecloth joint & most of its clientele seems to be large Indian families raiding the buffet…

Yes, I know, there will still be restaurants, and if I were a better person I could theoretically learn to make all my favorite dishes right here in our kitchen. But it’s not the particular dishes, so much as the dishes from those particular restaurants!

What are y’all gonna miss visiting, while we’re on lockdown?

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Bailey Eats a Burrito

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We can use an open thread, so here’s a video clip of very good boy Bailey swiping and eating someone’s burrito at Warren campaign headquarters earlier today.

Current defense attorney, former Federal prosecutor, burrito aficionado, and Michael Avenatti bête noire Ken White has taken the case!

Also, everyone, for the love of someone’s, anyone’s, and/or no one’s (for the atheists) Deity or Deities (for the polytheists), please use horizontal mode for pictures and videos!!!!

Whose a good boy, with very bad gas? Bailey is!!!!

Open thread!

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Things That Keep Me Up All Night

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There are so many awful things about Trump and his coterie of dipshits, scumbags, and malcontents that it is hard to narrow down what the worst part about them might be. In just a few short years they have amassed a record number of sins against decency, morality, and the law, both big and small, and every aspect of their existence simply appalls me. But still, every now and then, they do something that just sets me off and just makes me berserk. Things like this:

Donald Trump and his entourage reportedly failed to eat a single item of a special vegetarian feast prepared for him during his trip to India.

The American president and his wife, Melania, were presented with the menu during their visit to Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, one of the former homes of the Indian independence hero.

In an effort to please the famously carnivorous tastes of the president, the chef — a well-known award-winning chef called Suresh Khanna — adapted a number of famous Indian delicacies to make them more recognisable for their guests and even included more familiar items such as chocolate-chip cookies and apple pie.

But neither Mr Trump nor the First Lady touched anything from the special high tea menu.

“Some food items were arranged for the members of the visiting delegation, but neither the US President nor the First Lady had anything during their visit to the Ashram,” one of the Ashram’s trustees, Kartikeya Sarabhai, told the PTI news agency.

Mr Trump is infamous for enjoying a classically American diet, featuring cheeseburgers, Diet Coke, well-done steak and ice cream among his favourite dishes.

I just want to scream. I would absolutely kill to experience this. The top chef in India preparing a personally designed meal for me?

Everything about these fucking lowlifes is awful. They have no taste, no class, no sophistication, no appreciation of the actual finer things in life. Just horrid. I know we are supposed to all be rending garments about the debate performances tonight (I did not watch), but fuck it all I’d do anything to have any fucking one of them replace Trump. Even god damned Bloomberg.

I know this is a minor thing considering everything they have done, but if I am still alive in 50 years (I won’t be. God, I hope I won’t be unless they do find a cure for aging) this will be one of the things I am still salty about and will remember every time the name Trump is brought up.

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Recipe Exchange: Sunday Pot Roast, Instant Pot and Slow-Cooker Versions

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Sunday Pot Roast

In my quest to update some of my older recipes for Instant Pot style cooking, here is one of my favorites. I love being able to set this up and an hour and a half later have a perfectly cooked pot roast – tender and flavorful – along with all the sides.

Sunday Pot Roast

  • 4 lbs Pot Roast (chuck roast)
  • ¼  cup good whiskey (or red wine)
  • ¼ cup beef broth or water (more if needed)
  • 1 tsp rosemary
  • 2 bay leaves (remove before serving)
  • ½ tsp salt & pepper
  • 1 large onion, quartered
  • 6 medium potatoes, quartered
  • 1 lb bag baby carrots

slow-cooker or Instant Pot

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: “Like Sending Bees to War”

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No good intention goes unpunished, per the Guardian — “the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession”:

… A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Environmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US.

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”…

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness…

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Breakfast for Dinner: Instant Pot Pancakes – Light, Fluffy and Fun

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Auto Draft 7

I made a half batch, plenty for two

I just found out about a taste treat called Japanese Souffle Pancakes. I put the recipe on my list to try soon. They are a little complicated and I knew I wouldn’t have time for a while. Then my cousin chimed in and told me about Rice Cooker Pancakes, a simple pancake recipe you make in your rice cooker. They looked amazing.

One problem. I don’t have a rice cooker.

But I do have a Multi-Pot (a type of Instant Pot) and I figured there must be an equivalent recipe. There were several. So I had to give it a try. The results were yummy.

First, the pancakes:

Perfect Pancakes:

  • 2-1/2 cups flour
  • 1-1/2 tbsp baking powder
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2 cups buttermilk* (I use buttermilk powder and water)
  • 2 tbsp oil
  • 2 eggs
  • Opt: blueberries, cinnamon, pecans, bacon

Bowl, whisk

*you can substitute milk. Or you can add 2 tsp lemon juice to milk and let sit for 3 minutes to create a buttermilk equivalent.

Whisk together dry ingredients, then add wet ingredients and mix until everything is combined. The batter should still be lumpy, you don’t want to overmix.

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Hanukkah 2019: A Festival of Lights in Food

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My family has just left. I’m exhausted. I’ve been cleaning and cooking since about 11 AM this morning. Though I did my baking last night.

One of the butcher shops in the area where I get meat and chicken from regularly has grass fed beef short ribs for a reasonable price. Since my brother, sister in law, twelve year old twin nephews (begun, the clone war, has), and my Mom were coming, I bought two cryovac packs of the beef short ribs. Which is four racks of three ribs each. And I smoked them. Except for one rack, which I did in the oven at 250 degrees Fahrenheit because the Mominator doesn’t eat smoked meat, chicken, turkey, etc. I also made latkes. The Mominator made her arugula and beet salad with goat cheese and avocado. And I made a no sugar added, sweetened only with agave pecan pie cheese cake. Pictures of everything but the salad below because I didn’t get a chance to take one before people started dishing it out. Once I hit publish, I’m going to collapse. And it has been raining steadily since last night, so I had to do this on the enclosed and screened in back patio, which is why my house smells like BBQ pit.

Here’s the rack of ribs that I did in the oven. They’ve, as well as the other three racks, been minimally prepped. I removed the silver skin, then liberally kosher salted and freshly cracked black peppered the four racks. Then I wrapped them in paper towels, sealed them up in a very large tupperware tub, and left them in the fridge to form a pelicule for 48 hours. What you see below is how the meat looked just before going in the oven and on the grill. You can see the other racks wrapped up behind it just waiting to go out.

Hanukkah 2019: A Festival of Lights in Food

And here are the other racks just placed on the grill and before I put the lid down.

Hanukkah 2019: A Festival of Lights in Food 1

I don’t have a dedicated smoker, so I did the 60/40 approach. Or 70/30. The coals went on the far right near the bottom vent, once they’d burned almost to white the apple wood chunks went on. The ribs went on the rest of the grill with an aluminum pan full of water below it to help moderate the heat, keep everything moist, and catch drippings. I inserted a wired, probe thermometer into the deepest portion of the largest rack, then I dropped the lid, adjusted the air vents, and let them smoke slowly at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. From about 1 PM to 5:30 PM.

They came out perfect!

Hanukkah 2019: A Festival of Lights in Food 2

Smoky, juicy, tender, and perfectly cooked!

Hanukkah 2019: A Festival of Lights in Food 3

I modified the latke recipe I learned from my Dad a bit. First, I made sure not to include any knuckle blood from grating my hands instead of the potatoes on the box grater! Then, instead of grating all the potatoes, I grated half and boiled and mashed half. I then mixed the mashed and grated potatoes with one large onion diced finely, salt and pepper to taste, and let the mixture sit in the fridge covered for about an hour before I made the latkes. I pan fried them in about a 1/4 inch of oil in a high sided 12 inch diameter pan on the stovetop.

Here’s the mixture pre latke formation:

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And here’s the first batch frying in the pan:

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And here’s a beef rib and some latkes all plated up:

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Finally, we have the cheesecake. The crust is made with Kedem vanilla tea biscuits, which have very little sugar (it was about the least amount I could find that didn’t have sugar alcohols). I ground up one package, mixed it with melted butter, and formed it into the cheesecake crust/base. The cheesecake is just my standard cheesecake recipe, with one modification – no white sugar. Instead I used half a cup of agave. The recipe is below.

Cheesecake:

Ingredients

3 8 ounce packages of cream cheese.

3 eggs

8 ounces of sour cream

Vanilla to taste

1/2 cup of dark brown agave (add more if you want it a bit sweeter). And if you don’t have an issue with sugar, just use one cup of white sugar.

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a spring form pan. Whip the cream cheese and the eggs together one package of cream cheese and one egg at a time until combined and smooth. Add the sour cream and whip until incorporated and smooth. Add the vanilla and the agave and whip until incorporated and smooth. Cover and refrigerate.

For this cheesecake, I wanted something a bit different. And since I didn’t get to make or have pecan pie on Thanksgiving as my Thanksgiving this year was whacked (don’t ask, I did a good deed for someone, but it meant I got none of the traditional foods, and I wasn’t feeling particularly well either), I decided to pecan pie my cheesecake. In a high sided sauté pan I melted a stick of unsalted butter. Then I added agave to taste and brought it to a boil. I then added 3/4 of a cup of heavy whipping cream, whisked everything together, and added a cup and a half of pecans. Stirring the entire time to both thoroughly coat the pecans and to keep the pan caramel from scorching. Once everything was turning golden brown, I took it off the heat, arranged the candied pecans on top of the crust, poured the cheesecake batter on top, and then swirled the warm caramel into the cheesecake batter. Once that was done, it went right into the oven for an hour. At the end of the hour I turned the oven off, cracked the oven door open, and let the cheesecake cool in the oven for an hour. The third hour it spent cooling on the counter and then when that hour was up it went into the fridge. The pictures are below. And before someone from NoLa (cough, lamh, cough) says something, yes, this is more like a pecan praline cheesecake than a pecan pie cheesecake.

Here’s the pecans and caramel setting up:

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And here are the candied pecans layered on the pie crust:

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The batter in the pan with the caramel swirled in:

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The cheesecake ready for serving:

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And, finally, a slice of the cheesecake!

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If I had to do one thing differently, and I will for next time, it is that I’m going to lightly chop the pecans and swirl them into the cheesecake with the caramel rather than layer them on the bottom. That one issue aside, it tasted amazing! You’d never know there was no white sugar in it.

So everyone who celebrates have a happy and healthy Hanukkah! If I don’t do a post tomorrow, I’ll be covering on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as I won’t be celebrating, but I am going for Thai food.

I’m exhausted, so I’m going to crash. Though not quite this tired!

I may or may not check into the comments later.

Open thread

 

 

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