Cooking aboard or outdoors

Yup...its coming

Ground control to Major Tom

Ground control to Major Tom

Take your Protien pills and put your helmut on

Ground control to Major Tom

Ground control to Major Tom......

I guess the good part is the new beef burger will be classified as a strategic material and manufactured to strict guidelines by some government contractor with powerful lobbyists in DC.

 

It is now possible. "Cultured beef" or "stem cell" beef. Let's see if the link works. http://www.gizmag.com/cultured-beef...ail&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-2706530767-89957674

 

Crap! I was right!

 

Dinner a few nights ago, to celebrate finally making it home after three weeks at work. Grilled hamburger and pork meatloaf; cheesy mashed potatoes; zucchini squash.

I fired up a burner on the left side of the grill and set the meatloaf to the right side, on a double sheet of aluminum foil - with the edges folded up to catch the drippings, so I wouldn't make a mess on the burners that were off. Obviously, I cooked with the lid down. And since I was using propane, I laid a foil packet of soaked applewood chips over the burner's drip guard for smoke.

I glazed the loaf about halfway through cooking it, after the smoke did its thing with the meat, and buried it under a pile of sliced Vidalia sweet onion and green onions. Should've waited longer to bring out the onions; some of the bits got toasty. But they added flavor anyway....



add: I just noticed the time stamp is off. I swiped a battery from the camera for my computer mouse last week, and I guess I didn't replace it in time.

 

And to think I thought I was the only one that did that. My camera insists that every pic I take was taken in 2010.

Awesome looking meal, by the way.

 

Ditto on the awesome looking meal.

 

Soylent green

ingredients: 1 or more cadavers....
Anybody have the rest of the recipe?

Mine has a dark brown stain obliterating all that followed.

Maybe dried blood...don't know.

 

When I said I buried the meatloaf under onion slices and green onions, I meant it....

I think it was a good idea. Next time I'll wait longer to spread them - and do it while the glaze is still wet, instead of letting it set up.

Everyone wound up scooping some of the onions from the sides, where they had marinated in the juices, and spreading those on top of their meatloaf too.

Maybe next time I should do the Martha Stewart thing for a side dish: toss some zucchini rounds, bell pepper slices and thin onion wedges in a bit of olive oil; sprinkle some sea salt; and stick a pan of them in with the meatloaf for a half hour or so.

 

Does that mean your camera is a year younger than mine?

Pity you and your camera weren't around. You'd have arranged a serving of everything on a plate, and made it a work of art.

 

Troy, your address please I will come over for dinner

 

Give me fair warning if you decide to visit California, Daniel, and I'll cook you anything you want. I'll even serve it with home-brewed beer.... I've started making my own version of weissbier again.

 

Much apreciated

 

Heavy Duty Chowder.

Lunch at work today - and tomorrow, and maybe next day too...

This isn't for those purists who insist on everything being organic and garden-fresh, but it turned out pretty good anyway. The clams are canned. Almost everything else comes frozen and would keep nicely in an ice chest for a couple of days, to make a filling one-pot meal halfway through a weekend cruise. Or halfway through a weekend Jeep run, for that matter. And obviously, this list of ingredients is based on what I had available; it isn't the final word on how to make chowder.

1 8-oz pkg of frozen skinless sausage

1 20-oz bag of frozen diced potatoes with onions
1/2 fresh onion, chopped
3 or 4 cloves fresh garlic, finely chopped
3 or 4 dried chile Japones, chopped (including seeds)
1 3-oz snack pack of baby-cut carrots, (or whatever's available), thin-sliced

2 6.5-oz cans of minced clams
1 small tub of Knorr concentrated chicken stock (comes in 4.66-oz 4-packs)
Flour to thicken (optional)

1 16-oz (1 lb) bag frozen sweet corn
2 cups of milk. Or use canned evaporated milk (unsweetened), and dilute 50/50 with water
2 Tablespoons of butter or margarine
Thyme or oregano to taste
Fresh-ground black pepper


Brown the sausage in a wok, deep pan or pot. Remove the links and set aside.

Add the bagged potatoes and onions, fresh onion, garlic, chile Japones and carrots to the sausage drippings. Cook until the potatoes are lightly browned.

Open the minced clams. Drain just the juice into the potato mix, stir in the concentrated chicken stock, and bring to a boil until the potatoes start breaking down enough to thicken the liquid; add water if necessary. You can add a little flour at the end, if you like your chowder thicker.

Thin-slice the sausage links back into the pan, if you have any left after snacking on them while cooking... Add the corn, the drained clams, the butter and herbs, and heat to the simmering point.

Grind black pepper over it to taste, and enjoy. If you want to get fancy you can ladle the chowder over slices of garlic cheese toast, or float the toast on top.

add: I took a picture as usual, but for some reason my laptop insists the SD card needs to be formatted before being useable - which of course, would erase everything on it. That's a new one on me; I've been using that card the whole time I've owned camera and laptop, and never had a problem before.

Ah well, face it. It's hard to take sexy pictures of a pot of soup anyway, so I guess no one's missing much.

 

Rerun of a post on my own gun forum a while back. The forum has pretty much died, mostly because I committed the cardinal sin of voting for Obama (twice). Apparently it's sacrilege to own and shoot guns nowadays - unless you're also a liberal-hating 'conservative,' and believe Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Kenya and hates whites.


Last night's dinner on the grill during my fishing trip, per tlarkin's insistence that it doesn't count unless there are pics.

I dropped by a Mexican-oriented market on my way to go fishing yesterday, and picked up four pork 'country ribs'; about 1/2 lb each. Country ribs are actually cut from the end of the loin near the shoulder and contain no ribs, but whatever -- I'm not going to argue about the terminology. They're tasty, and often the best deal in the store.

Come dinnertime last night, I fired up the Lodge grill my older son gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago -- which is basically an Americanized version of a double hibachi. I highly recommend it, by the way. One of the best presents I've ever received. I love hell out of it, and use it regularly when I'm cooking just for me instead of for a crowd.

While the grill was heating, I sliced up some veggies, all in rounds about 1/8" thick:

2 small russet potatoes, skin on
1 large white onion, peeled
1 large green bell pepper
2 jalapeno chile peppers

Normally I'd have added a couple pats of butter, but I didn't have any. But one of my 'country ribs' was mostly fat, instead of being meaty like the others. So I sliced the fatty part of it up thin, and added it to the pile.

I dumped the veggies into a plastic bag along with a liberal amount of Pappy's Louisiana Hot Spice Seasoning, and shook it thoroughly. Then I wrapped them all in aluminum foil, and set the packet on the grill. I punched three or four holes in the top, let it cook until steam started coming out of them, then gave it a few more minutes.

Meanwhile I put the pork on the grill, including the meaty end of the 'rib' I had sliced up for the veggies. I turned them onto all four sides, and they were done just a few minutes before the veggies. Unfortunately, that few minutes was long enough for me to pig out on meat, so I didn't have room for many veggies. But that's OK: this morning I cut up the leftover pork, added it to the veggie wrap, and set the packet back on the grill for a while. It made a very satisfactory breakfast, mid-morning snack and lunch....

I was too lazy to load my dutch oven table, and not ambitious enough to lean over a grill on the ground. So I turned my cast iron camping wok upside down, and used it as a pedestal to keep the Lodge grill away from the plastic liner on my tailgate. It worked very nicely.



And as long as we're doing food pron, here's a picture of the fancy bottle of California Riesling my wife gave me for Christmas. I'm not a always the sharpest tool in the shed, but I had enough sense to thank her profusely instead of mentioning that I generally hate white wines. And it turned out to be very good.

 

Oh, I'm sure Texans would applaud Sheridans choice, and fervently hope other union generals go with him!

Oh and isn't Riesling a Rhine wine? and considered yellow? not white?
Not really up on wines, except "bottoms up".