Nibbles

No One-Trick Ponies In Our Kitchens!

Nibbles

I’ve often said that our hands and the best kitchen tools every made. They can do so many things and are always (sorry, I have to) close at hand. They can break items down and combine others together. They can mix, measure and mold. And it is those same hands that guide and utilize all the rest of the tools in our culinary arsenal.

So if hands are the most versatile and we expect so much of them, why should we expect any less of the rest of our tools?

As much as I love kitchen gadgets and little doodads that do specific things in the kitchen, I really love finding multiple uses for those one-trick ponies populating my cupboards and drawers.

Back when I taught cake decorating we’d try to come up with different uses for those shaped cake pans that are very popular for their ease-of-use but, let’s face it, not exactly versatile. If you trace the basic outline of the pan on a spare cake-board or piece of paper you get to see it without all the details. Turn each drawing 90-degrees and you might see something else in the shape that you didn’t see before. Bingo: another use for the same item! Our rule of thumb was trying to get at least 1 use of each tool per dollar spent.

Albondi-subsYears (and years) ago I bought a baguette pan. Great for keeping those lovely loaves rounded instead of flat on the bottom but kind of a pain to store and not exactly made for multi-purposing. But! Making meatball subs with leftover albondigas one night with the aim to toast them/melt the cheese without the stuffed rolls losing all that yummy filling, that baguette pan was the perfect tool to hold the subs just right in the oven. And the other night when I was baking English marrow squash stuffed with seafood, that same baguette pan was, again, perfect for keeping the squash halves perfectly positioned.

This weekend, helping my brother get ready for his housewarming party, he had a watermelon I decided to get a little fancy with. Of course, being a bachelor, a melon-baller wasn’t part of his kitchen. In a pinch, we decided to use an ice cream scoop (the crescent-shaped kind) and it worked great! It made larger-than-usual egg-shaped watermelon pieces which were much more practical for a casual summer party and made cleaning out the watermelon shell a while lot easier than trying to do it with a pairing knife!

What single-use kitchen tools have you found other ways to use?

Talk About Your Local Color!

Nibbles

May Farmers MarketFor the month of May it was undeniably purple!

I’ve still been enjoying my bi-weekly visits to the local farmers’ market and loving how simple a start it makes menu-setting for my weeks. If I had to state a downside, the only one I can think of is that if our plans get juggled and we push a day or two off, sometimes the produce just doesn’t last long enough! But, hey, it’s a smallish price to pay for just-picked goodness.

I’m even starting to make friends with a couple of the farmers!

As spring began we were excited to see more farmers showing up to the market and were looking forward to the variety the season would bring. I always seem to find new or uncommon things to try each time.

One week in particular I brought home tart plums (that we paired with boneless pork chops), purple beans that turn green when you cook them (well, mostly green, there was still a little bit of a brown tinge to it), and Norwegian purple potatoes (these are the ones with purple skin and white flesh, unlike the Peruvian purples that have purple flesh and skin–those I got later in the month). The following trip yielded some red noodle beans about a foot long, each, as well as some beautiful Japanese eggplant.

Of course it wasn’t all purple–there was plenty of greens, yellows and reds to be found.

What’s catching your eye at the market–farmer or otherwise–this season?

Summertime Ice Cream Treat: Magnum Ice Cream Bars

Nibbles

It’s Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial beginning of summer–what better time to break out the ice cream makers, scoops, dishes and toppings.

But wait, maybe you’re pressed for time or just not into complicated frozen desserts. So you head to the ice cream section of your local grocery store and maybe, just maybe, you see something different that catches your eye.

Magnum Double Chocolate Ice Cream BarsMagnum ice cream bars have recently hit the American market and the premium perks don’t end at the snazzy packaging. These bars feature vanilla bean or chocolate ice creams dipped in rich Belgian chocolate. Some (like the Magnum Almond) come studded with nuts while others (Magnum Double Chocolate and Magnum Double Caramel) feature sauces in between the ice cream and chocolate.

But how do they taste?

I was offered a coupon for a free box of Magnum ice cream bars and went, first, for the Double Chocolate–how can you go wrong with more chocolate?

What we have here, folks, is chocolate ice cream with a thin coating of chocolate on it, a layer of chocolate syrup/sauce and the outer layer of Belgian milk chocolate. Being a bookkeeper I can tell you that that’s 4 chocolates, not 2, but I guess Quadruple Chocolate doesn’t roll off the tongue the way Double Chocolate does, so we’ll let that slide.

A cross-section of a Magnum Double Chocolate ice cream barAt first bite I was loving the chocolate upon chocolate flavors but, as Todd pointed out (yes, I shared), it was almost chocolate overload the further you got into it. I also found out that my co-tester is not a big fan of chocolate ice cream (3.5 years together and there’s still new things to learn!), but even so he liked them okay.

With that in mind, though, I picked up two more flavors on this week’s shopping trip: Magnum Classic and Magnum Double Caramel.

In the Classic variety, the Belgian chocolate really gets a chance to shine compared to the vanilla bean ice cream–which was pretty tasty itself–and tastes really luxurious. I’ve had richer ice creams before, but they were usually small batch chef-made varieties, so take what you will from that.

The Double Caramel, however, left us a little wanting. The caramel was lost in the shuffle of chocolate and vanilla bean and what you did get it of it was sharp and unpleasant instead of rich and creamy. Of the three versions we’ve tried I think we’ll be sticking to the Classic.

Aside from the ice cream bars themselves, packaging can either add to or take away from the experience. (Prime example? Apple products–hello pretty!) In this case Magnum does a great job at enhancing their product. Working for a printing company for 15+ years I tend to notice finishing details and know there’s a reason for most boxes having square corners: they’re natural, easy and cheap. Rounded edges require die cutting and specialty folding set-ups–that’s a step many manufacturers aren’t going to take.

The bars, themselves, are wrapped in printed gold foil sleeves; another step up from the waxed paper in most ice cream bars. Usually I find gold packaging tacky, but Magnum hits a nice balance between garish and classy. Even the sticks are branded and are a little different from your average popsicle-stick.

At 3.28 for a package of three they’re not that expensive ($1.09ish per bar) but they’re not the value that some other brands offer. It’s nice for a treat or to satisfy a craving, but I don’t think it’s destined to become a freezer staple for our home.

~~~oOo~~~

As part of the Foodbuzz Tastemaker Program, I received a coupon for one box of Magnum ice cream bars. All opinions and observations are my own.

MCC: A Tarte of Proines (aka Spiced Plum Spread)

Nibbles

Medieval Cooking Challenge buttonIt’s the second month of the Medieval Cooking Challenge, an experiment where we take real Medieval recipes and prepare them in our modern kitchens, bringing the past into the present.

Spiced Plum Spread on Olive Oil Toast, garnished with Lemon Zest

Spiced Plum Spread on Olive-Oiled Toast, garnished with Lemon Zest

After last month’s Andalusian Lamb (which was a little complex), we’re going later within the Medieval period and a bit simpler in method of preparation. This recipe for a dried plum (aka prune–but don’t let the connotations of the word scare you off!) spread that is great on slices of baguette as an appetizer or an afternoon snack or used, as the name would suggest, as a tart filling or topping.

 

The original recipe is from 1587 England, from a book known as The Good Huswifes Jewell, 1587

To make a Tarte of Prunes [alternately spelled Proines]

Put your Prunes into a pot, and put in red wine or claret wine, and a little faire water, and stirre them now and then, and when they be boyled enough, put them into a bowle, and straine them with sugar, synamon and ginger.

Gotta love that creative spelling from back then!

The redacted recipe quantities I’ve taken (and adjusted ever so slightly) from a fabulous modern book: Shakespeare’s Kitchenby Francine Segan. Not all of the recipes in this book reference their original Italian or English inspirations but some do, and it was indispensable as I planned my first Medieval feast for 60-80 people.

~~~oOo~~~

Spiced Plum Spread

1.5 cups Red Wine
9 oz Pitted Dried Plums (aka prunes, about 30)
3 Tbsp Sugar
2 Tbsp minced Ginger
2 Cinnamon Stick (2 inches or so)

Combine all ingredients in a large pot and simmer until most of the liquid has either been absorbed or evaporated and what’s left is very thick. Remove the mixture from the heat and remove the cinnamon stick. Mash the cooked mixture until a fairly smooth consistency is reached.

Step-by-Step Spiced Plum Spread

Makes approximately 1 cup.

Originally I’d suggested using crystallized ginger and adding it to the mixture between the cooking and mashing stages but decided to go with the minced ginger since I had it on hand. (I buy it in the tubes from the produce section–comes in very handy and keeps wonderfully!) You can use more or less of the ginger and cinnamon to suit your own preferences.

~~~oOo~~~

At this point what you do with it is up to you. You could go old-school and fill a single large or several small tarts shells with the mixture and serve it as is. Or you can serve it, warm, in a small crock with fresh bread and soft butter like you would a marmalade or jelly. Based on the rich flavor this dish provides, I’m thinking a topping for a cream cheese tart would be fabulous–the cream cheese only slightly sweetened so as to cut the richness of the plum topping the way vanilla ice cream can cut through the richness of a double-chocolate cake.

If you have fresh plums available (I know we have a few left over from a recent farmers’ market trip) you can use them in addition to or instead of the dried variety but you’ll need to use more of them to start with as well as more sugar (drying concentrates the fruit’s flavor and sweetness) and it will probably need to cook longer to give it enough time to thicken properly.

I’ve got a party coming up next month so I’ve stashed mine in the freezer to save until then–it’ll be a nice addition to the menu I’ve got planned.

~~~oOo~~~

Did you try this month’s Medieval Cooking Challenge? Make sure to leave you link in the comments!

Would you like to get on the mailing list for future month’s challenges? Head over to the MCC page, sign up and grab the button for your sidebar!

Extreme Couponing…At What Cost?

Nibbles

If you watch any sort of cable reality shows, chances are you’ve heard of one of the newer ones: Extreme Couponing. I’d heard about it and rolled my eyes at the very thought–how on earth could clipping coupons be extreme, much less worthy of television coverage?

And then we saw it.

The other night, after finishing my DVR’d Housewives, the television returned to TLC in the midst of an episode of Extreme Couponing. And Todd and I watched transfixed. The stashes, the hours spent clipping and checking out. The sheer mass of products accumulated in only a year to 18 months!

We sat through 2 shows back to back just trying to make sense of it all. And this is the conclusion I’ve come to.

Beginning with the Best of Intentions

Many of the women profiled told as how they’d turned to couponing when their budgets felt the crunch of the current economy and, really, who can’t empathize with that?

If you haven’t been let go at some point in the past few years or kept your job at reduced hours, you’re one of the lucky ones. And if you did keep your job and hours intact, chances are those raises that got you through cost of living adjustments haven’t been showing up in a while. We’re all feeling the pinch.

So clipping coupons to stretch the budget makes perfect sense.

A Decision Made Out of Fear, Often Goes Too Far

And that’s the crux of what I saw over those two shows: the fear of not being able to feed one’s family takes root deep in the mind, and overcompensating is the result.

Within a very short time many of these women went from barely making ends meet to having stock-piles of non-perishables with values in the several-thousands to the tens of thousands, paying only a small fraction (between 1% and 5% if the example trips are any indication) of that value out of pocket.

So the practical side of me starts wondering: how often do these shopping trips happen? Every couple of weeks was the impression I got. How often do they really use the products they purchase? Hard to tell, but how fast does any household go through half a dozen bottles of shampoo or 100+ 2L bottles of soda? Not to mention the shelves of cereals and cupboards full of chips?

And then there was the woman who has cases of kitty treats even though she didn’t own a cat.

Shopping By Coupon Limits Your Options

This is a big reason why we don’t bother clipping and using coupons: we don’t buy the sort of things that have coupons available.

How often do you see coupons for a 5lb bag of potatoes? But one coupon extremist schools us on her money-saving strategy of skipping the large box of potato flakes by buying the individual packets and getting more bang for your couponing buck. Let’s ignore the fact that mashed potatoes are one of the simplest foods to prepare and that a raw potato gives you far more options than a box of preservative-laden flakes, by going for the single-use packets over the larger box you’re opting to create more paper waste.

Not that I advocate buying in bulk just because it’s there, but if it’s something you use regularly, why not also do your part for the environment?

Looking Beyond Your Own Home

Yes, these shoppers are ensuring their families against famine and being budget-friendly to boot. But what else is going on, here?

There’s a coupon for detergent so one coupon extremist helping her daughter-in-law start her own stock-pile clears shelves of the product from her local store. Granted, the daughter-in-law has a new baby and there’s a lot of laundry involved with a small child, but what about the other non-extreme shoppers who come after this shopper and find empty shelves? What about only taking what you need, instead of what you can just because it’s there?

Most of these deals, by the way, are achieved by taking advantage of stores who offer double-coupon discounts either as a rule or on certain days of the week. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the case of double-coupon promotions, it’s the store that finances the doubled coupon, not the manufacturer. So the shopper who saves $990 on her groceries just cost the store approximately $445. Considering the value of at least one of these shoppers stashes was over $10,000, I’m beginning to wonder how many minimum-wage cashiers or stock clerks have been laid off due to the actions of the couponerati?

Where Does it End?

Going back to my theory of this being a fear-response, the adrenaline rush these shoppers experience when they get their final total (after several hours spent in the store) is highlighted. The fear of a single total being off (many trips have to be broken down into several transactions in order to take full advantage of the various offers and coupons being applied) heightens the exhilaration when they succeed at gaming the store out of so much for so little.

We all know the thrill of getting a good deal every now and then but I think the extreme couponers are actually addicted to this feeling–very much like a gambling addict!

And these stacks of stocks, squirreled away in basements and closets and finished attics give the shoppers a feeling of security. They are proud of their cache. It is a sight to behold. But I also wonder if, having tasted the victory over the shopping budget as these women have, will it be enough? When will they have enough cereal and extra-strength pain killer stashed away so that they can relax? Or will it continue to the point we see these same shoppers featured on another shock-reality series: Hoarders.

It’s Not All Negative

Don’t get me wrong–I think everyone should have a hobby that gives them a sense of fulfillment. And I’m not anti-coupon across the board; we use the occasional one on the rare occasion a promotion fits our plans (not the other way around).

One woman is reported to give away some of her coupon-gotten-gains to her local food pantry–that’s excellent and I applaud her for sharing her windfalls with those who could really use it. Another family hunts and gets much of their meat that way (which, if you’re going to hunt, having it be for sustenance is a great reason) and does grow a few items and even preserves tomatoes (as salsa) and pickles–another great use of resources.

But that level of sustainability was rare to see.

Many of the women spent 35-40 hours a week clipping coupons, organizing coupons, reading store sales paper and searching online for the hot deals of the week. If I had that amount of time available I like to think I’d skip the couponing, garden a number of my vegetables, and make even more food from scratch, spending my money on basic ingredients which can be bought, safely, in bulk and turned into healthy, nutritious food without all those extra chemicals and preservatives that are in so many of today’s coupon-frequent-fliers.

But that’s me.

There’s no doubt that the Extreme Couponers are organized and, hey, using their math skills in a very practical way. But the show, in general, highlighted a level of obsession rooted in fear which leads to greed and potential obsessive hoarding in the future that I cannot condone.

All things in moderation, folks, even coupons.