A Day For Taking Risks

I finally got around to testing that idea i had about making baked beans with peanuts instead of beans. (Hey, they’re all legumes here) It actually worked remarkably well. I used part roasted peanuts, part raw -- the roasted ones seem to have come out much better texture-wise: they’re darker, softer, and generally tastier. But all told, it’s not bad. Weird, but not bad. I mean, it helps that it had like half a cup of dark brown sugar and four strips of bacon, but it’s not bad! I admit that I had a backup dinner option ready, but I won’t need it!

I also finally got off my butt and submitted my short story The Body and the Bomb to Strange Horizons. I really hope they take it, because of all the markets I’ve looked at, that one has just blown me away. They publish quality fiction and articles (all free to read, though assuredly not free to produce, hint hint), and their submission procedure is amazing: they’re responsive, they give you a tracking page, they just give you information so that you’re not (just) sitting at home in the dark biting your nails. They’ve published a lot of good authors, who seem to be fiercely loyal. Oh, and they pay professional rates, which means that publishing through them makes an author eligible to join SFWA, which is one of my goals for this year.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

For some reason, my food reading lately has been dominated by things that sound (or used to sound) very wrong to me.

Making french fries starting with cold oil. This bothers me; it seems like the resulting fries will just drip oil, but the claim is made that exactly the opposite is true. I will have to try it at some point, preferably on a day that the garbage goes out.

Savory oatmeal. OK, I get the theory, it’s basically porridge, jook, or the basis for white pudding (think black pudding without the blood). And I like a good savory breakfast (see down the list) but this just seems weird to me.

Salted coffee. I actually picked up on this one a while ago, and can attest that it works well -- but it still just seems wrong, especially because I think salted tea is disgusting.

Hydrating nuts. Certainly hydrating beans makes sense to me. And I’ve even joked about attempting to make baked beans with peanuts instead of the more usual legumes. But this is intriguing and weird and I’m having a little trouble with the idea.

Vinegared drinks. I touched on this earlier when I talked about gastriques, and mentioned that some people were putting them in cocktails. I’m not sure I can bring myself to drink the Vinegar Cocktail in that link... but it does sound awfully interesting, and like Kate in the comments I have also heard of adding pickle juice to drinks, even to beer. Speaking of beer...

Beer for breakfast. All right, this has nothing to do with what I’ve been reading, and everything to do with going to have a good Irish breakfast last week on the 17th. But several people remarked on how well Guinness goes down in the morning, and I was surprised to agree! Ancestry does tell, I suppose...

Turkey, Divided

Every year I wind up cooking the Thanksgiving turkey. I don't mind it, but it's a tad stressful: it's a long cooking time and it's tough to tell partway through how well things are going. And of course, if you get the dark meat done properly, the white meat won't be done right, and vice versa. The turkey is just a poorly-constructed animal, really.

So this year I decided to fix that. With a nice sharp knife I completely dismembered the turkey. The breast and torso went into the oven with a temperature probe set for 165, with the wings put in upside-down (that is, tips down, limb up) The legs, however, were done on the stovetop -- I browned some pearl onions and mushrooms, set them aside, then scorched the skin side of each leg. I flipped the legs back skin-side up, put the onions and mushrooms back and glugged in some marsala wine, added some black pepper and salt, then set the whole thing to cook on low heat for the several hours the breast spent in the oven.

The white meat came out no better or worse than expected (I'm not a fan anyway), but I was able to cook it exactly as long as I wanted. But the legs just came out fantastic. On top of that, since I cooked them with the lid shut there was plenty of great stuff in there for making gravy, which went very well over everything.