What’s small, bright, and makes all of our picnic dreams come true? Indeed, a tiny grill from Bodum. We’ve been hunting a round, portable, lidded grill for a while now and this just might be the one. Tom and I have narrowed it down to yellow, but the FYRKAT Picnic Charcoal Grill also comes in green, blue, orange, white, and black.
With a couple of days off ahead of me, I’m getting ready to paint the bathroom (again). Our building manager has kindly repaired the walls, too, and will be priming today so I have high hopes for the finished look, especially considering the challenge of painting over orange without priming… which I had planned to do previously. The new color, already in parts of our kitchen, coordinates with our transportation shower curtain and complements our towels.
So, nothing new required. Or so I thought. After spotting these fish hooks in a local magazine this morning, I think I may need to head to Ingebretsen’s for some new svensk bathroom hardware.
The hooks, $9.50 each, are also available in black and dark blue. Find them at Ingebretsen’s locally (1601 East Lake Street), or on ingebretsens.com.
Image: Ingebretsen’s
Loving garlic as much as I do — and I love garlic — I was briefly in heaven when I discovered at a Lebanese restaurant in Cairo a dip called thoumiya. The name presumably derives from the Arabic thoum (ثوم), which means garlic, and this dip was all about garlic — almost pure garlic, touched with lemon juice and beaten into a fluffy cloud of ecstasy.
As you can tell, I departed the Middle East with no small amount of enthusiasm for this dish. Imagine my dismay when I found no mention of it in any Middle Eastern cookbooks, and could find no information on the Internet (perhaps owing to transliteration difficulties). It was as if I had imagined the whole thing, or perhaps been tricked by a djinn.
Or so I thought, until today, when on routine provisioning trip to Kowalski’s I saw glowing out from the shelf like a red and white beacon the words “Garlic Supreme”. One look at the texture and color and I knew I had finally found that magical sauce from of my memories, courtesy of the St. Paul Flatbread Co. The first thing I did upon returning home — before even putting the groceries away — was crack this open and I was immediately transported; it was perfect, lemony, light, and above all garlicky.
It would be more in the spirit of this blog for me to post a recipe for a homemade version — and I suppose I will probably do that one day — but for the moment I am happy that I can have a small piece of heaven for just $3.99.
As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.
“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli, grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.
Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.
With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.
With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.
The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.
How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.
Ever since, oh, January 2nd I’ve been on an organization and cleaning binge. Perhaps the rest of you find yourself in this new-year-cleaning mode as well? If you don’t have the itch to clean, don’t feel bad—I don’t mean to say our place is in perfect order. Given the de-decoration that occurred on January 6 and the distance and darkness of our storage area where holiday décor is stored year round, I’ve yet to deal with a certain number of boxes of ornaments and lights. As they say, no one is perfect. On the other hand, our linen closet is pristine, as is the office area and every surface including windowsills and (!) kitchen cabinets. With all this in mind, I’ve been thinking back to some organization aids found on our visit to one of the fall craft fairs at the Midtown Global Market. There we found St. Paul-based online retailers Olive and Myrtle who carry, among other things, Beehive SoftBowls by MIO. Exploring MIO’s own web site today, I found some other fun treasures. Here are a couple of highlights, including the bowls themselves, which are definitely on my wish list.
Incidentally, Olive and Myrtle also carries one of my favorite gifts from Tom, a game called Pandabo made entirely of bamboo. It’s a bit like Jenga, a bit like Pick up Sticks, and a lot of fun. Tom picked up the game here in Linden Hills at Wonderment, but it’s good to know it’s also available online.
Images: MIOculture.com, Olive and Myrtle
