Penance…
With all of the talk of bacon around here lately, I thought I’d throw a crumb to our vegetarian friends. 101 Cookbooks has posted a delicious-looking recipe for Carmelized Tofu. Go forth, yea veggies, and eat soy.
Gourmet Kitchen on a Shoestring
The ever-wonderful Wisebread has a guide to putting together the kitchen of your dreams on a tight budget. They hit on, among other things, buying bulk spices and growing your own herbs in pots, two things that will not only save money (as they mention), but give you better quality, fresher ingredients as well.
They recommend Ikea as a good source for good-quality pots & pans and utensils on a budget, which can be true, but they’re forgetting the best place of all: your friendly neighborhood kitchen supply shop.
Stacked steamer structure
January 19th, 2008
Say that ten times fast. Alton Brown has put up a swanky design for stacked metal steamer baskets on the front page of his website (I’m not linking directly to it because it’s a pdf and if you haven’t already, you should explore his site). Thwarting the specialized steamer pots and bamboo steaming racks (which rock, by the way) with a classic Alton Brown appliance mod.
It pretty much involves using a threaded rod to attach multiple baskets together. I only have one thing to add to his how-to, make absolutely sure to use stainless steel hardware. I’m pretty sure that everyone can agree that oxidizing metal is not good eats.
Bitter chocolate keeps your heart healthy
January 15th, 2008
The American Heart Association’s journal Circulation recently published a study in which it would appear that dark chocolate it good for the heart, specifically the flavanols, which are essentially the bitter anti-oxidant compounds you find in cocoa and tea.
Hot on the heels of this research, an editorial in The Lancet points out that some of the most delicious “dark” chocolates have had all of the good stuff (flavanols) removed and are instead just loaded with delicious sugar and fat. Both of which will cause your heart to seize like the 1.5L engine in a ‘85 blue Honda Civic run for 600 miles without any oil… While there’s no good, consistent way to tell if the heart healthy goods have been removed, chances are that if the words “milk” or “sweetened” appear anywhere on the packaging you might as well just inject a syringe full of beef fat right into your heart. On the bright side, if you do have a weakness for truly dark chocolate you can eat it knowing only the fat content is causing the hardening of your arteries and that the flavanols are doing there best to keep you alive.
Bacon Salt Review
January 15th, 2008
Earlier we told you about an exciting, confusing, utterly terrifying new product: Bacon Salt. The fine folks at Bacon Salt were kind enough to furnish Impoverished Gourmet with samples of the new porcine-flavored seasoning. Dig in — it’s gonna be a long read.
Vanilla Ice Cream with Bacon Salt — more on this later