Slow Cooked Chuck Roast with Veggies (and Beets)!

• 2lbs of Beef Chuck Roast
• 8 russet potatoes (peeled and cubed)
• 6 carrots (diced)
• 1 really large onion (about .75lbs; chopped)
• 4 beet bulbs (about 0.5lbs; sliced, trimmed, and then chopped)
• 1 can of condensed cream of mushroom soup (mine was 98% fat free)
• 1 package of onion soup mix
• 1 vegetable bullion cube
• S&P to taste

Hmmm, mmm, mmm... browned the chuck roast quite liberally in a bit a vegetable oil to get those really nice complex Maillard by-products. Now there are some that might tell you that you don't have to brown your meat if you're gonna slow cook it and that it's just another step, but don't let them fool you. There is no way to get those complex savory flavors that get formed by high heat browning in a slow cooker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction).

Okay, so then chop up all the veggies. To work with beets, you slice em apart first, and then trim off the thick skin, and chop them up into small cubes.

Heat up the condensed soup. I added two cups of water and the packet of onion soup mix and a veg bullion cube. Added about a tsp of salt and pepper, whisked it, and added it to the ingredients in the slow cooker and cooked for 8 hours.

Homemade Butter!

I hosted another Sunday Brunch today, and treated my guests to a treat of homemade butter that I made just before they came -- and dude, that butter was frackin' delicious on the pancakes.

I took 2 cups of cold heavy cream (straight from the fridge) in a bowl and used an electric hand mixer on it at it's slowest setting and watched it undergo its various transmutations:

• After about 4 minutes the mixture started to get a little thicker and started to resemble a flat whipped cream, with many air bubbles forming on the surface.
• After 6-7 minutes, it seemed like a full bodied whipped cream, having expanded in volume some.
• At 8-9 minutes it suddenly started to harden quickly and turned into a cottage cheese consistency within seconds. I thought I was done, but there was no liquid separating from it so I kept going.
  
• A few more minutes and it started to yellow, and liquid started forming in the bottom. I kept at it for another minute until it seemed like no more milk was separating from the butter.
• I then poured the chunky liquid mess into a cheese cloth of a bowl and squeezed it to get most of the liquid out. I then saved this liquid and used it for pancakes.
• I then took some ice water in a bowl and rinsed the bar of butter that I formed in it to get the residual milk off.

What I was left with had an incredible taste on pancakes... especially if it's not fully melted... the thin slices of butter sandwiched between the pancakes and syrup were mouth-gasmic.

New England Clam Chowder

This is a HUGE amount for us NECC lovers, half the recipe for a more manageable amount.


Ingredients:

• 1 package bacon (12 slices, diced)
• 4 med onions (about 4 cups diced)
• 4 tbsp butter
• 7 potatoes (about 10 cups cubed)
• 3-4 cups water
• 4 cups half and half
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 44 oz minced clams
• Salt, pepper and dill

Directions:

1. Dice 12 slices of bacon into squares and cook in a large pot until almost crisp (over low-medium heat if ingredients are piled over each other.)
2. Add 4 medium onions (about 4 cups diced) and continue cooking until onion caramelize and bacon is crisp.
3. Add 4 tbsp butter and 4 tbsp flour and mix to form a roux.
4. Add 7 cubed potatoes (about 10 cups diced, we didn't peel ours).
5. Add about 3-4 cups of water, to almost cover ingredients. Cook 20 minutes covered.
6. Add 4 cups half and half and 2 cups heavy cream.
   
7. Add 40 oz of minced clams with their juice. And cook for another 5 minutes without boiling.

Salt, pepper and dill to taste. Serve with toasty bread!

This soup will win you many honors and awards.

Sunday Brunch

Potluck-style Sunday brunch is a tradition I started in my fourth year of college in NY when I lived in what used to be an old sorority house which had this absolutely amazing old cast iron gas stove with an oven and a huge flattop griddle large enough for a dozen or so pancakes. It annealed our social bonds and created a great environment for the sharing of ideas. I've taken this tradition with me to Birmingham, AL, to help me forge ties with some of the local nerds and philosophers.

Okay, so today we had a festival for seven people. The keystone of the gluttony were pancakes from scratch. I used this basic metric that I've devised for two large servings:

1. Add 1 tbsp vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar) to 3/4 cup of milk (2%). Let this stand for 5-10 minutes to thicken up a little and get nice and frothy.
2. Then quickly whisk in (I used a hand mixer) the following ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp melted butter (non-salt)

So in this case, I multiplied all the proportions by 3 - which still ended up being a little much, these are BIG servings. I might need to redefine that recipe for 3 servings.

I would then quickly start cooking over a medium heat on un-oiled non-stick pans. When I got through half the batter, I added a half cup of thawed blueberries and blackberries -- the frozen ones are so much cheaper, last longer, and don't really affect the taste much in cooking.

Before cooking the pancakes we started preparing a quickly put together starchy side (just enough for 7 people, it was a hit):

1. Boil 7 unpeeled and cubed potatoes (one per person) 15 minutes.
2. Place on baking pan and mix in one can condensed cream of mushroom soup and about 4 tbsp sour cream.
3. Bake covered for 10 minutes at 350. Add about 1 cup mozzarella cheese, though I would've added sharp cheddar if I had it, and bake for an additional 7-10 minutes uncovered.

Verdict: Absolutely delicious. A bit too many pancakes for the group. All the potatoes were licked clean. I think I'd add a little more milk to the pancakes to make the batter a little less thick and the final product a little more fluffy. The potatoes turned out great, and were really easy to make. Some garlic and onions might be a good addition in future attempts.

Culinary Self-Discovery

My name is Igor and I work in a laboratory. I'm a neuroscience research assistant by day, and a budding chef, mostly on weekends. I find working in a kitchen to be very similar to being in a laboratory, filled with predictable (sometimes not) complex synergistic chemical reactions, gently balanced under the critical scrutiny of an investigator.

I've slowly been delving deeper and deeper into the culinary arts and cultivating my own culinary aptitude over the past... oh... five years. Right about the time after I moved away from home and finished my first semester at SUNY New Paltz, when I could finally move off-campus and separate myself from the mandatory meal plan.

Actually I started a little earlier. I remember when my "flexible" meal plan in which I had a set amount of dining dollars to spend on food had run out prematurely because I was using it to buy excessive amounts of Sushi. I had to invest in a small electric heat plate and a small skillet and started buying semi-perishables like eggs, potatoes, onions, and cooked sausages to start clandestinely (it was against some fire codes or something) preparing sustenance in my dorm room.

Anyway, I slowly discovered all the benefits and joys of cooking over a long and fun process of kitchen experimentation which is still on going. Briefly, cooking offers obvious health benefits because you know what's in your food (mostly) and avoid processed foods and preservatives which carry with them a great deal of long-term health uncertainty (for the record, I don't specifically cook healthy, but by merely preparing your own food, healthiness to some degree is an unintended consequence, and a welcome perk); it certainty enriches your understanding of food, gets you more in touch with what you eat, and making eating at restaurants or friend's dinner parties all the more interesting as it presents a curiosity and challenge to analyze and reverse engineer the foods you love to recreate them at home; it's an easy way to impress friends and loved ones; it builds social bonds, to cook for someone, to nourish them, is a very intimate way to connect to someone and to build trust -- not to mention all the recipe exchanges and food technique discussion opportunity with other cooks; it's a very rewarding exercise in which you can start a project and get results and feedback that same day -- quite a contrast with working in a research lab. Of course, the real reason why I go into it in the first place is because of the incredible economic savings of cooking at home. It has evolved into somewhat of a hobby since then!

Recently I started cooking high volumes mostly because of time constraints, browsing the internet for cool recipes, and expanding my culinary repertoire by talking to friends and trying out new foods and new ingredients in cooking. I was recently gifted the book "Cooking for Geeks" by Jeff Potter, which is taking me to the next level of cooking nerdom -- which I highly recommend to any nerd cook. I've also been somewhat inspired by the movie "Julie and Julia" -- a delightful true story of Julia Childs rise as an influential chef paralleled with her influencing a girl in modern times to engage in cooking every recipe in Julia Childs "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" over the course of a year, and blogging about it.

ANYWAY, welcome to my kitchen notebook, and join me as I evolve my mastery of food prep.