Sephy’s Platzish

As I had mentioned the other day, I’d been doing some reading while working, and one of the things they have available for reading are old issues of magazines, such as Cooking Light. In the March issue of the magazine, there is a recipe that piqued my interest - Risotto with Italian Sausage, Caramelized Onions and Bitter Greens. I actually went through the effort of manually writing the recipe down by hand; of course, I then found out that I could print it, but it actually was cool being able to cook off of your own handwriting.

Anyway, before I could actually get to the business of cooking the food, I had to gather some of the ingredients; specifically the sausage, shallots, wine, cheese and arugula. I also had to go to my bank to deposit my paycheck. Now, unlike most people, I have to travel 18 miles to get to the bank (something that I’m going to get sorted out sooner rather than later), so I decided that I’d stop at an Aldi that is right in the neighborhood of my bank.

I go around the store, find the stuff I came there for, along with some other provisions for the week ahead (and the months ahead, considering that I got table salt ), and head into the checkout line. Now, if you’re not aware of their policies there, you cannot use a credit card to pay your bills - it saves them money in having to pay credit card fees. However, you can use a debit card, and that was the plan that I tried out.

It didn’t work. I tried it three times, and all three times I saw the message “300 - Denied” - the clerk said that she was seeing an error that the card was an unrecognised card. Fortunately, she could just set aside my order, and allowed me to go to the ATM to get cash. Thus begins the next part of the adventure - finding a low or no-fee ATM to use (now that I think about it, I could have just run down to my bank and used the ATM there as it took longer to do what I did instead of just running those 6 blocks or so). Anyway, I try the first bank which is across the street; this is the same bank that has branches in just about every grocery store in the area, and at those, their convenience charge is $1.50 - not at this one though. They wanted $2.50 to use the drive-up machine. No deal I though, so I went to the grocery store across the street, and settled for paying $2.00 to get money out of the bank, and went back to Aldi to pay for my shopping ($18.95 - most expensive item, white wine - $2.99 for 750mL).

The next step should have been quite easy - go to the normal grocery store and pick up the rest of the ingredients. However, thanks to the bizarre setup of the store, I wound up spending so long in there that I got the call I had been waiting for - one from my mom wondering as to where I was. As it had happened, I had finally found where they had the grated cheeses (in the dairy case - at the very far back end of the store, and hidden at that). The redeeming news of it all is that I did get quite a bit of walking done - shoulda brought my pedometer.

Now, on to the cooking!

I should note from the outset that I used slightly different ingredients to the list set out by the recipe, mostly due to not having the exact items, and not finding the exact items. I used regular chicken broth (4 cubes of bullion and 5 cups of water to match the order they have in the recipe, which I now realize should have only been 4½ cups…I think that much evaporated out of the pan while it was simmering), along with regular Italian Sausage.

It all started by sauteing chopped onion and sugar until it was brown; I didn’t get it fully browned, but trying a bit of the mixture while it was sitting, it didn’t taste too bad.

Then, the next step was to take the onion out and fry up some Italian Sausage (the recipe calls for sweet, and I believe mild is the same thing); you could also just buy some Italian seasoned sausage from the store (the stuff you use for pizza) and use the sausage which has had the skin removed (not as bad as I thought it would be). You simply crumble it up when it’s frying -

Then the tiring part of the cooking begins where you have to stand over the pan, stirring it constantly while you add the rice, shallots, and the liquid (you can’t add it all at once, because it has to be completely absorbed before you can add more). I think the reason for the constant stirring is that you don’t want to let the mixture sit still for a long time and allow the liquid to evaporate out.

The next couple of pictures show how much the consistency of it changed in the 20 or so minutes that I was stirring it up. It’s hard to believe that, when you look at the final product, it was only 1 cup of rice that was put in, but that’s all that was called for.

Just after adding the first of the liquid - 1/3 cup wine.

About 8 minutes in; note how much more pan is covered.

After 15 minutes, look at how big the grains of rice have become.

After getting the liquid put in, the next step was to put in the arugula, onions and some lemon zest (though i think that could have been done without; I’m not a fan of the zest of citrus), along with some of the infamous romano cheese that I had such a hard time finding. Since the whole pot was still very warm, the greens wilted right down and almost melted into the rest of the dish.

As far as how it was received - I liked it, but it did have a bit of too much of a lemony flavor to it, probably due to the zest of the lemon, but it was certainly an interesting dish - and now that I know that the rice we’ve had for quite a long time is still good - one that I wouldn’t mind to try again, but this time with different ingredients. I didn’t mention the cheese being added to my mom, but she didn’t mind it either as far as I can tell.

I think risotto is one of those very versatile recipes that you can do a ton of stuff with. Who knows, I might be making risotto every week now.

The never ending winter seems to have given itself an extension today, with one last hit of snow getting us on Good Friday. In fact, it pretty much rounds out the whole Lent season perfectly - fish fries were cancelled or postponed on Ash Wednesday, and the same thing happened today; though the one that has to be the largest on Good Friday, if not all year round (sorry, Tennessee, I think a proper fish fry is only held on Wednesdays and/or Fridays, not a week-long event, but if you’re certifiably larger, then so be it ), was open to serve their two tons of fish.

Out here in the ‘burbs, the big story was that nearly every church didn’t have their services today, along with the fact that over 10 inches of the white stuff fell today, which, officially at the airport (which was closed, stranding hundreds of Easter travellers), makes this the second-snowiest winter on record (even though it is technically Spring, in both meteorological and astronomical terms, the snow season runs from July 1-June 30), with at least 94.3 inches (239.5cm) of snow falling in the official gauges.

In a bit of a change, I went out and did quite a bit of shoveling of the snow - usually we’d let our semi-contracted plow handle all of it, but since the cars are now on the other side of the house, we really don’t want them to get plowed in. Plus, I suspect that with less of the driveway having to be plowed, it might save us some money on the bill, if they come by. The first time I did some shoveling, I took the camera along with me, and snapped this picture looking back toward the door at how much snow there was -

Of course, since this is Good Friday, this is the one day that we absolutely do not eat meat (though apparently eggs are OK), so dinner was going to be a fish fry benefitting the local fire department, but that’s been postponed to next week. As I had mentioned on the Aussie Blogger Forums, the alternate would be baked salmon, and that is exactly what we did for our dinner tonight. This is part of the same salmon that has been sitting in the freezer for a while now, when we bought a whole darn thing for $1.99/pound at the grocery store, but it was still in decent shape. The seasoning was simple - a fish seasoning that we bought from the store a long time ago, Szeged brand seasoning, with Hungarian paprika in it.

I let the salmon sit for about a half hour while I went out and did quite a bit more shoveling; ducking when my mom came out with her still camera to take shots of the snow (that plan worked perfectly btw ), then put it in the oven at 375°F (190°C) for about 15 minutes, along with some asparagus that was seasoned with olive oil, garlic, black pepper, kosher salt, thyme and basil. I also chucked a couple of potatoes into the microwave to warm up for baked potatoes (btw a great hint on those potatoes is that you can buy the ones that heat up in a bag, and they work perfectly; they’re more than regular baking potatoes, but the convenience paid off).

While waiting for the stuff to cool a bit, I had my camera by me, and did some experimentation with the macro feature; it’s a function that I didn’t really understand until last year, but I’ve learnt how to get great results from that now. Here’s what the salmon looked like in macro -

And here’s the asparagus, also in macro mode. These pix were all taken using an F-setting of 3.2, that’s why you see the blurring in the immediate foreground and background.

I’ll have some more pictures of the snow on Sunday; I might also take some pix while out tomorrow, if I get the chance, to show what more of the area looks like covered once more in snow.

One last thing, this is another experiment of using an offline blog editor; let’s see how it handles the picture uploading…

Something that probably nobody over here knows (or really cares) about is the fact that last Saturday was Australia Day (and Republic Day in India). I did some searching for what a “traditional” Australia Day menu was, but all I could figure out was that it was just a day for a barbecue - just like July 4th is for us here.

However, I was curious, and posed the question to the folks at the Aussie Bloggers Forum - and I have to say that I did Sam Kekovich proud. While I didn’t make the lamb on the 26th, it was made in what he would term “Australia Week” - heck, they already had G’day USA going on, so why not? As I mentioned in the thread, I found a recipe that sounded perfect for what we had gotten - lamb shank - Garlic Lovers shank.

By the way, I didn’t buy Australian Lamb, but got locally-sourced product, as you can see on the packaging.

The first step was to remove the fat - there was quite a bit of it - and then cut slits into the meat for garlic to be stuck literally into the meat. Then, you doused it in olive oil and put it under the broiler to brown. The next two shots are before and after - before with just the oil and garlic, and then after, seasoned with pepper, salt, oregano, mint and some red wine in the bottom of the dish for good measure (and to use it up; I opted for the Yellow Tail if you’re curious).

Then it was into the oven for a couple of hours (though I really should have done it for slightly less time since it was only one shank, it was slightly dry after cooking) wrapped under aluminium foil, during which time I prepared the side dish. It’s one that long-time readers might remember from my chicken adventures in May. Ironically, this Greek Salad is featured in an Australia Day menu, so all was somewhat right with the world again.

I did do it slightly different this time - taking out the seeds from the tomatoes, also slicing the onions smaller and adding in some green capsicums (peppers for my fellow Americans ). However, I wasn’t impressed with the vinaigrette again - I think it’s just too bitter for my tastes; I did find out that Kraft Zesty Italian dressing works well with it the next day though.

By the time I had the salad done, the meat was ready to come out of the oven and sit for a few minutes. Here are a couple of shots of how it looked right after coming out of the oven; one of which you may have seen already

The last thing was to move it onto a platter, remove the meat from the bone and tuck in to my first lamb meal since 2004 when I visited an awesome restaurant called Fogo de Chão - where they have Gauchos from Brazil go around with large sticks of meat and serve you just about anything you might want - chicken breast, sausages, pork roast, filet mignon (bacon wrapped), lamb shank. They have a salad bar as well, but I only grabbed a piece of smoked salmon and a couple of asparagus spears; didn’t want to fill up on the sides now, did I?

Here’s what it looked like on the platter; one shank comfortably served two.

It is definitely a meal that I’d like to try again, when shank is on sale. We got it for $3.98 per pound ($8.95/kg or so), so really it isn’t that expensive of a meat at all. Plus, I’m sure that Sam Kekovich would be quite proud.

Though in this case, “the like” is probably more filed under “I can’t wait until spring”.

I love having a washing machine upstairs; I really do. However, there is one slight problem - in the winter, we have to be extremely careful to make sure that the outdoor discharge pipe isn’t frozen so that the water will actually drain out of there. I still remember the first time it failed last year - there was a large mess of water on the floor, and I then said “right; I’m not bothering, I’ll just go ahead and finish my clothes tomorrow”.

So, we get to this winter, and we have a plan all in place for the washer - run a bit of hot water through the washer to make sure that the pipe is clean, and if it isn’t, then the hot water will thaw the pipe. That worked all winter until last week when the temperatures got well below freezing - to the point that even running hot water didn’t work.  We had another spillover with the floor getting a bit of water over it, but fortunately the washer had stopped before all of the water went onto the floor.

The course of action then was to just let the water flow out on its own course. A few hours later, we tried another water run, and it didn’t go through, but this time we did a small amount of water so it didn’t run onto the floor, thankfully. Eventually, the water did flow out, and we made a bit of a bad assumption - that the water had actually flowed out.

We get to today, and time to wash clothes once again. Run the hot water through the washer, and it doesn’t drain. We decide to remove the hose from the outside, and find out that the pipe that leads into the house has ice in it! Not a good thing at all, obviously. After some work with a screwdriver and a hammer, the ice is still not all the way gone, so I come up with a silly idea - take some of the water that’s near boiling in the tea kettle and put it on a towel, and drape the towel over the pipe.

Magically, within a few seconds, it works and the water is flowing out of the wash tub.

We went ahead and did some shopping - including getting a new food which will be talked about on here in a couple of days, and it wasn’t too bad of a price either.

We get home and run a load of washing; everything runs fine, but I noticed something - there was a kink in the hose, which could lead to the washer running over once again. I go out and fix it, but didn’t realize that I caused more harm than good in doing that.

The next load of washing goes in, and upon it draining out, the water gets stuck and there’s a ton of water on the floor.

Some days you can’t win them all I guess.

Also, some more bad luck - I went to a shop to see if they had some double-choc Tim-Tams, but they only had original. I didn’t get anything from there, but I did notice that they had some more Aussie products - like more Arnott’s products, along with some more Cadbury bars including Time Out and Flake, along with their drinking chocolate (but not Milo…)

Yesterday, we had to run to Target to pick up some photos that we had printed professionally - trust me, it cost a lot less to print them professionally than to print them at home - 136 pix printed (with same day pickup) for $28 - compared to having to buy probably at least two or 3 color cartridges at $15 or so each, and probably a black cartridge at $6 - plus having to buy some more paper, you can see the logic behind getting professional printing done.

Anyway, as we were perusing the stuff in the store, I looked at the cards section, and they had something I had never seen before - political cards. They had a couple of cards featuring Barack Obama - one was with him in a mockup of what you’d see on the Oprah magazine, with headlines like “How to Spend Liberally to look Conservative” and other little plays on words. Another card they had that sticks in my mind was one featuring our ever-so-smart President and Vice President. Let me put it they way they did it (at least in my memory) -

Cheney: Good news sir. We are getting more than 100 Brazilians to assist us.
Bush: That is great news. (Card flip)
Bush: How much is a Brazillion?

The last line is “A Brazillion wishes to you on your Birthday.” Personally, I think it’s quite brilliant, though I know that there are some diehards in the right wing who will split a vein over it. To them, I simply say be less serious about everything.

Anyway, we then went towards the kitchenware section, where I saw what has to be the most ridiculous thing ever for a kitchen - an avocado slicer. Yes, who needs a spoon and a knife when you can buy one thing that is only good for one task and costs quite a bit more than you’d pay for a spoon and a knife - $12.95 at Target?

The last thing we went to was the soft drinks aisle - while I don’t drink soda anymore, except for the odd taste here and there - my mom still does, but she’s been converted to Coke. We saw that they had them for 3 for $9 for 12 packs, and as I was putting them into the cart, I said, somewhat half-heartedly, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the store closest to us would have them at $2.75 each for sale this week.

As it so happens, we get the Wednesday circulars, and lo and behold, one store has Coke on sale for just that price - 4 for $11 ($2.75 each).

I tell ya, sometimes I feel like freakin’ Nostradamus!