Chad Chandler

I very rarely blog about political or cultural issues, but this commentary was so dead-on accurate that I just had to comment on it:

In a recent episode of Top Chef, the American cooking show I appear on, I complained about the other judges’ insistence on pronouncing ‘paella’ as ‘py-ay-a’. ‘You don’t say “Bar-the-lona” or “Me-hi-co”,’ I pointed out. ‘So why say ‘py-ay-a’?’ I thought this was fairly uncontroversial, but it was as if I had just produced a white hood and a burning cross. [...] the only people who take offence if you Anglicise foreign words are upper-middle-class Caucasian Americans. They imagine that other, less fortunate people will be insulted by your ‘imperialist’ attitude and they get offended on their behalf. In fact, to imagine that non-English-speakers are a poor, victimised group, requiring the protection of the American elite, is far more condescending than mispronouncing non-English words.

I don’t know why, but this is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’ve even had a similar conversation.

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I’ve finally moved into the 21st century and bought a smart phone. It’s the new Motorola Droid:

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The wife wanted to eat in to celebrate her birthday last week. She asked for surf and turf:

We bought some fillets at the butcher shop and ordered some lobsters from the Wicked Fresh Lobster Company, a local company that flies in fresh lobsters from Maine. We ordered late, so the lobsters arrived pre-steamed. I was actually a little grateful for that, because cooking lobsters can be quite a production. All I had to do was boil water in a stock pot to re-heat them. That meant I could focus on the steaks and the broccolini.

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Mark Bittman’s no-knead bread recipe (based on Jim Lahaney’s method) is billed as idiot-proof, but it’s really not. Or maybe it is, but idiots like me aren’t very good at it. The first couple of times I tried it, I followed the recipe exactly and ended up with a bland, dry bread. The second time, I added more water and the bread came out too dense and gummy. Next, I followed the helpful instructions from America’s Test Kitchen/Cooks Illustrated and had better luck. Since then, I’ve altered the recipe further and learned how to incorporate additional ingredients and flavors to the bread.

Here’s my basic recipe: Chad Chandler’s (Almost) No-Knead Knock-off Bread Recipe

It reads like a complicated recipe, but it’s really not. Once you bake a loaf of bread, you’ve essentially mastered and memorized the cooking process.

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As regular readers know, I’ve been experimenting with homemade bread for months now. My early results ranged from inedible to palatable. Some loaves even went directly from the oven to the trash can. In retrospect, I handicapped my learning process by adopting and abandoning several different methods and recipes before perfecting one. After initial success with Bittman’s no-knead bread technique, I decided to stick with it. Ironically, in my attempt to improve the recipe (and others like it), I ended up teaching myself how to properly mix and knead dough. Now I can tell when dough needs more flour or more water, and what’s appropriately “sticky” and what “dry” should feel like. In other words, I finally feel competent when it comes to baking bread, but not overconfident. Yet.

I’ve tweaked Bittman’s no-knead bread recipe by incorporating tips from America’s Test Kitchen and adding my own touches:

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Roasts were on sale this weekend at Publix, so I decided to dry some beef jerky.

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I’ve been baking bread at home for a while now with mixed results. This weekend, I finally made some very good bread:

I used the no-knead technique made famous by Mark Bittman and Jim Lahaney (video here), but I incorporated some tips from America’s Test Kitchen.

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Asparagus was on sale at the grocery store, so I decided to take another stab at my potato and asparagus salad. Last time I made it with our homemade mayonnaise.

This time I simplified the recipe to cut down on time an effort.

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