On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
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31 comments
Aw, come on… the RABBIT is the yummy part! And so appropriate for Eater!
Are you French? You realize that the French children get their eggs from bells because the Easter Bunny has boycotted the country?
They rarely sell hot cross buns down here. They are really a raisin bun with reduced cinnamon and less icing, although some people make them with chopped candied fruit instead of just raisins. [I think they do it to get rid of leftovers from Christmas.]
What do you get when you pour boiling water down a rabbit hole?
Hot cross buns.
Or really pissed off rabbits and a few gophers…
ellroon´s last blog post..Response to a person frightened by gay marriage
Not French – but Mom was Tennessee mountain. When we visited there, we ate what my uncle shot.
andante´s last blog post..
you’re on a roll today.
hipparchia´s last blog post..
And you say my jokes are bad! 🙄 😕
😆
😈
[i loved the one about it’s being a law that you have to move to florida when you turn 60]
hipparchia´s last blog post..
Wild shot is one thing, you take protein where you can find it in rural areas. It’s raising them as if they were turkeys that makes me queasy [I blame it on Beatrix Potter].
Now, the only good turkey is well basted and slow cooked with cornbread dressing.
No, no – roast the turkey upside down so the flavors & juices run into the breast , etc. meat (I’m telling this to a turkey expert? I’ve got some nerve). No stuffing in the bird except maybe an onion, carrot, and celery. Cornbread stuffing outside, definitely.
Lord, it’s good & moist. I’ll never fix it any other way again. Maybe not as browned and purty, but in my old age I’ll take moist & tender over purty.
I was just glad I didn’t have to dress any of the kills, and I’m sure everyone else was, too. I think they soaked the bunny (okay, wild hare) in milk for a wile, then cooked up a stew.
Like ‘possum.
andante´s last blog post..
The turkey is “good” because it is dead – that simple.
I don’t worry about the white meat because I don’t eat it. Actually I roast turkey thighs these days. Turkey breast is only good for sandwiches, and then, only with a lot of real mayonnaise on good bread.
I’m skillful at killing and cleaning them, as well as in using the device that pulls the tendons. They don’t use the tendon puller in the factory birds [takes too long] which make the legs a PITA to eat.
The bred-for-white-meat modern turkey doesn’t have enough fat, which is why it is so dry. The fat layer under the skin should baste the bird naturally, but they have bred that out to produce the modern factory bird.
If you want it browned, give it 15 minutes at a higher temperature at the end, and baste it with butter. It will look like it just returned from Jamaica. I don’t know why you want it brown, people don’t like the skin anyway, although dogs and cats like it. Low and slow produces better results. If it’s frozen defrost it in the refrigerator for a few days to avoid frost damage caused by warming too quickly as well as the loss of fluid from the outside of the turkey.
I imagine the milk would reduce the gamey taste, as well as adding some butter fat to very lean meat.
We tried (okay, Mr. Andante tried) flipping the bird (in the nicest sense) once. The thing fell apart, but the resulting mess did brown. I say if you want purty, get one of those plastic Dubya models.
10-4 on the thigh – if you’re purchasing an individual piece, definitely the best. And 10-4 on the drumsticks…back in the day, my sister and I moaned that there were only two per bird. Now they’re trash.
andante´s last blog post..
Another nice thing about thighs is that they are relatively cheap, as they are generally a by-product of people wanting only the breast.
The current factory turkey has tough leg tendons to support the weight of the breast, and if you don’t pull them, you can’t get around them to the meat.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with just using a good ham, with a bone so there’s bean soup at the end of the process.
Mayo? On turkey? Hmmm… Cranberry sauce, yes! Mayo… no. You guy’s put mayo on everything! Canadians do too! Even hamburgers! Yuck!
LOL
Mayonnaise on turkey sandwiches, not on hot turkey.
It’s a Southern thing, Kryten, but it has to be real mayonnaise, none of this fake crap.
We eat a lot of cold food and salads, and it is an easy base to hold things together for a fork.
Definitely, Kryten – never on hot. And definitely not the low-fat stuff, which is really vile. Think of it as putting good mustard on a sandwich.
Oh, Lord, a good ham. I’ve been putting a small butt portion in a crockpot on a little layer of brown sugar and letting it go all day. Scrumptious, and it tastes like REAL ham, not any fancy stuff.
Don’t tell anyone, but I then use the bone twice. One week for a pot of beans. Then freeze it for a week or so, and use it and all the remaining ham bits for a good navy bean soup later. Winter stuff, but so good with cornbread. Good any time, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve got to get off this steroid med; all I can do is think of food and eat it. Doctor told me today I was doing well, and we’d start weaning off it. The Decadron, not the food.
andante´s last blog post..
Bean soup is good anytime, even if you have to turn up the air conditioner.
Back when stores actually had butchers, you could buy decent ham hocks for soup, but no longer. You have to buy the ham and do it yourself, and that requires freezer space, if you can’t draw a crowd for the first meal.
I cut it up into packages for various purposes after the first meal, including the bone and chunks for bean soup, but it is harder to get a really good ham down here because everyone is selling the output of a few large agribusinesses who don’t take the time to cure the hams properly.
Well… OK then. *Real* Mayo is OK, and on sammiches… SOME sammiches! 😆
I was forced to eat that Kraft garbage when I was a kid. I hated it then, I hate it even more now! 🙂
My Gran always used a pig’s trotter (except when we had ham on the bone) for soups, especially Minestrone, because the gelatin helped thicken the soup and was good for you. 🙂
mmmmmm.. bean soup! i’m planning to make some this week, with leftover ham. not quite as good as using a real hambone, but tasty nonetheless.
hipparchia´s last blog post..
Oh, no, Kraft?! That is child abuse in most Southern states, Kryten, and we never mention salad dressing [British salad cream] for fear of being attacked by real Southerners.
a fresh trotter is useful in soup making, but it doesn’t come pre-seasoned like a good ham bone so you need to add more of your own.
When you can’t get one, Hipparchia, you make do with what’s available. Good ham supplies most of the necessary elements. We are definitely getting some soup weather.
soup weather indeed. i had leftover chili tonight.
btw, i absolutely despise real mayo, kraft for me! [though i only use it to hold potato salad or deviled eggs together, and then only with adequate mustard added].
hipparchia´s last blog post..I’ll take door #3
Too many years in a chemistry lab.
😮 Everyone know Kraft don’t make food! They create bioweapons! Their products are designed to kill Kids taste buds and turn them into mindless consumers of Krap as adults. 😆
BTW… Kraft *cheese* (and that’s a serious insult to real cheese makers and bovines everywhere) can be used as an emergency puncture repair kit. It bounced too. 😆
Kraft does make real cheese, but you have to read the label to find it, because they also make something called “processed cheese food” which is a puzzling description. I was unaware that cheese required food beyond what was provided by the milk from which it was made.
I would note that for years Kraft packaged, rather than making cheese [the real stuff] that was actually produced by dairy coops all over. A lot of the US corporate food business works this way. Small companies that you never heard of really produce the food, but Kraft buys it in bulk and repackages it for retail sale.
I assume that they still work this way, a middle man and marketer, rather than an actual manufacturer.
I’m hopeless when it comes to thickening things, so I just remove a cupful or thereabouts of beans, mash them up good, and stir them back in the rest of the mess. Works for me…the more mashed beans, the thicker the soup.
The manufacturers have gotten very ‘krafty’ about hiding that ‘food’ label, and in some cases you need sharp eyes to find it.
My favorite local Mexican place serves a scrummptious cheese sauce over, well, everything. (Not to mention fabulous margaritas!) I once asked a charming, hardly-English-speakjing waiter what variety of cheese they used. He thought hard for a moment, then said “Land ‘o’ Lakes”.
Sorry Kryten…it’s a brand here. I’ve since found out it’s a Monterey Jack cheese, pure and simple.
andante´s last blog post..
Starch is a good thickener adante. 🙂 Can use potatoes, even zucchini will dissolve and thicken soup. But geletine is best I think.
Kraft is a brand here too unfortunately. 😉 They make lots of… barely edible products aimed at kids. 😉
Now… King Island cheese is seriously *REAL* cheese! 😀 Actually… the best *everything* comes from King Island. Best seafood, best beef… They export a lot of AAA grade prime beef to Japan for teriyaki, teppan yaki, etc. Has to be almost perfect for that. 🙂
I used to go to a great Mex restaurant here, but it closed down because the area was being redeveloped. I miss that place… Was a great Spanish place there too. Still… I can’t afford to eat out much these days. 🙂
I don’t claim to be a chef, but that’s how I thicken bean soup, which was learned from my Mother. Since she was raised in a village in upstate New York, it isn’t a Southern thing.
Some people make a gravy flour, others use corn starch, and a few grate a potato in the stock to thicken. Gelatin is a sure way of doing it, although most Americans only think of Jell0 when anyone mentions gelatin.
I have a habit of just letting things cook down.
a classic split pea soup recipe is to cook your split peas [with ham!], then puree about half of them [with some of the cooking liquid] and mix that back into the non-pureed peas and their cooking liquid.
i’ve been known to use box mashed potato flakes to thicken stuff, but for soups i usually keep adding veggies until it’s stew, or serve it over rice [or both].
as for kraft, i don’t like their box macaroni and cheese at all, but i love the generic box mac and cheese that’s made with that radioactive-orange ‘cheese’ powder.
also, some day i’m going to run away to king island.
hipparchia´s last blog post..I’ll take door #3
Full disclosure, verified by my Mother – Kraft’s cream cheese and Limburger was was made in upstate New York for years, and some of my relatives worked at the plant. They were already Swiss and Dutch cheesemakers, so it was real cheese.
I haven’t seen a brick of Limburger in decades, but it was a popular cheese in New York.
My family also provided the milk that the cheese was made from – generally Holstein herds.
h… I think we should *ALL* run away to KI! 😀 While we still can… 😉
Here’s a piece of KI irony for you… Many Americans, and Aussies, and others consider French bottled water (eg. Perrier) to be the best. Well, the elite French consider KI Cloud Juicetm (bottled rain water) to be the best! 😆
It’s just about that last place on Earth where the rainwater is simply pure water and won’t cause acid burns. 😉 Which is of course a major reason why the produce there is so good. In most countries, it hardly matters if you use chemicals in fertilizers, pesticides, etc… it comes with the rain anyway.
Actually Bryan, my Mother once worked for Kraft here, and she got freebies and they weren’t bad. It was a different company back then, like all of them now really.
Yeah… Let’s all pack up and move to KI! 😀
Back when a good steady profit was all that was needed for a company to prosper, they weren’t looking to cut corners and speed things up. It was after they started to slice pennies in cost that everything went bad and HFCS replaced sugar, and artificial flavors took over.
It was a lot better when everything we ate came from a farm, instead of a factory with a laboratory attached.
We are killing ourselves to make money for the wealthy “investors”.