Pizza done right

Twenty or thirty seconds in the microwave removes much of the grease from pepperoni slices.
Thank you to Cook's Illustrated for the tip.


Dough from Capone Foods "00" pizza flour with sauce made from milled Roma tomatoes. A little salt and fresh oregano, basil, marjoram, thyme and rosemary or some Penzey's Italian Herb Mix adds authentic flavor. Rao's tomatoes are the best canned tomatoes. Fresh mozzarella is topped with a sautéd mixture of mushrooms, shallots and minced Small Farm garlic. Pepperoni and Canadian Bacon or ham are last to go on before the pizza goes into a hot oven.

A Birthday Request for Alton's Fried Chicken

GB&D

We stayed pretty close to Alton Brown's Fried Chicken recipe mixing paprika, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and salt with the flour to dredge the chicken before frying in organic non-hydrogenated all vegetable shortening at 325 degrees F.

Doesn't take long and it beats the heck out of KFC.

Use good chicken such as Bell & Evans.

Technique does not make up for using supermarket previously frozen chicken.

Beef Stir Fry

First of all, you do not need a wok for a stir-fry and unless you have a burner specifically engineered for use with a wok, a conventional stovetop will never heat a wok to proper temperatures for stir frying.

First in the sauté pan: cubed beef tenderloin into hot tea oil. Once browned, out of the heat and into a bowl with minced ginger in soy sauce. Set aside.

Into the sauté pan go the onions, bell peppers, carrots and scallions. Next, minced garlic followed quickly by bok choi, mushrooms and a cup of chicken broth.

Make a slurry from a tablespoon of cornstarch and a couple tablespoons of water and mix into stir-fry. Add some soy sauce and oyster sauce to taste. Both contain enough salt that the dish probably does not need any more seasoning.

Add the cooked beef in ginger and soy sauce back in to the mix. Some cubed chicken tenderloins went into this mixture as well(optional). The sauce should be thickened by now. Turn the heat off and add the scallion greens and crunchy bits.

Stir and serve over jasmine rice with steamed shu mai for a tasty dinner.

Eggless Onion Rings

Sweet Vidalia Onions dipped in milk and dredged in a mixture of AP flour, paprika, salt, and garlic powder. Fry in canola oil at 375 degrees F for just a couple of minutes until GB&D.
Cool on a rack for just a minute or two before serving.

A Birthday Request for Alton's Fried Chicken

GB&D

We stayed pretty close to Alton Brown's Fried Chicken recipe mixing paprika, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and salt with the flour to dredge the chicken before frying in organic non-hydrogenated all vegetable shortening at 325 degrees F.

Doesn't take long and it beats the heck out of KFC.

Happy Birthday Brookester!

Yes, there is cake too, but this is apple season and some Cortland apples found their way into a mixture of sugar and freshly ground nutmeg. Birthday Pie!

Mussels Mariniere et Provencale

Mussels Mariniere with a Provencal twist, this dish starts with sliced scallions and minced (Small Farm) garlic sweated in butter with chopped parsely and basil. Stir in a little tomato sauce before turning the heat up and adding some dry white wine.

In goes a couple of pounds of cleaned, debearded mussels -a quick stir- and on goes the lid. Five minutes later, all but one of the mussels are open and opaque. The closed mussel is discarded and the rest are served with salad and toast points.

Delicious. The Super Stop & Shop in Hudson, MA has an interesting seafood department. Sometimes the display of seafood looks exactly like you would expect the seafood to look in a supermarket display case. Keep in mind that this is New England and the competition for fresh seafood is abundant. Seafood lovers who are used to the display at places like Captain Marden's
are not likely to be impressed by a supermarket seafood department.

Somehow, Stop & Shop is putting some exceptional seafood on the shelf. Not always. Not even regularly, but often enough to make the seafood department a regular stop when you make your way through the store. Since they expanded the Stop & Shop to a Super Stop & Shop, the likelihood of spotting a beautiful wild-caught salmon fillet or some fresh sea scallops has made it well worth looking. You might be disappointed, but you just might change the menu for tonight.

These mussels were very clean and fresh. The 2 pounds of shellfish contained not a single one with a broken shell and all but one opened during steaming. One or two mussels were a little gritty, but they were all firm, fresh and flavorful.

It would be preferable for customers not to have to carry around yet another plastic card in order to pay non-artificially inflated prices at Stop & Shop and preferable to not be "earning" Stop & Shop gas credits at a gas station 20 miles away. (That means paying more for milk and bread to "earn" so called credits that expire before there is any chance of redeeming them.)

The Stop & Shop marketing department is working hard to rip customers off for a little bit here and a little bit there, which is a lot of money when you have as many customers as Stop & Shop does. Actually, to be precise; Stop & Shop is a subsidiary of Royal Ahold. (They own Giant, Peapod and a number of grocery related businesses globally.) The marketing schemes might be Stop & Shop's work but it might just be Royal Ahold's.

The seafood department is worth a look.