The Joy of Cooking

Greetings,
Well here is day two of the old blog.
To recap, I made the pie and a most delightful dinner as well. Steak on the grill, baked potatoes, grilled sweet onions and creamed corn and of course mulberry pie. I must admit that I am a fairly decent cook. I like baking more than general meal prep. I can make darn near anything. I have been cooking since I was old enough to hold a rolling pin. My grandma would make pie dough and give me some scraps to roll out on my own. After rolling the dough out I would cut little circles about the size of a half dollar, butter them and sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top and bake. I thought that was just the best thing in the whole world.

I was always with my grandma and watched her do everything. I learned the technique of making noodles and canning and making applesauce and so on. Cooking just seemed like a normal thing to me. I was in 4-H and home economics in high school. I also had an aunt that was a great cook. My mom, not so much. Well I was doing o.k. with my culinary tasks and then I met a wonderful young woman who turned me on to the Joy of Cooking cookbook. She is diabetic and has been since the age of about three. She explained to me that being a diabetic means that you really need to know what you are eating and the only way to really know is to make it yourself from scratch. So my cooking door was opened to real scratch cooking. Yes I did watch my grandma cook from scratch but I got married in the 70's and pre-cooked foods and short cuts were the way to go then. So once I started cooking from scratch my whole world opened up.

Even though I was a fair cook the two things that I just could not get right were fried chicken and steak. Grandma made fried chicken and it was darn good but after getting popped in the eye with hot fat one Sunday I no longer watched that process. My grandparents were frugal people so I do not recall ever having steak while living with them, or later with my mom.

Fast forward to the double nauts; that is a Jethro Beaudeen term from the Beverly Hillbilly's in case you wondered, meaning 00 as in 2000. Thank God for the food network: Good Eats, Paula Dean, Emeril, Bobby Flay and so on. I have learn so much from watching those shows and reading cookbooks. I have a few, more on that later. I tended to over cook steaks because I like them well done. Not everyone does however and if you want to be able to chew your steak there is a simple process to cook them so that they do not resemble or taste like shoe leather.

So now back to yesterdays evening meal. I marinated my two New York strip steaks for about two hours. I used garlic wine vinegar, diced garlic, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, Mrs. Dash and lemon juice. Put all of that with the meat in a zip lock and stuck it in the fridge. I think it took me the two hours to clean the grill. After the two hours I had the spouse turn on the grill to medium and when it was hot enough to brand a calf, I slapped the steaks on and closed the lid and turned the heat to low. The meat was about 3/8 inch thick so seven minutes on one side and flip. Seven minutes on the other and we had steak. It was the best I had ever made. Even the spouse said so. Of course he was in hog heaven because of the mulberry pie I had made for dessert. It turned out very good he said. I don't eat mulberries so I don't know. I just tasted the crust to see if it was flaky. It was.

About 9:30 we drove out behind the big silver barn and watched the 15 minutes of marvelous fireworks. Then it was watch the Cubbies win and off to see the sandman. How boring is that?

Today has been catching up on little things and computing. I do have domestic things to get done so off I go. I am working on the pie photo.

Always, one day at a time.