Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Tonight I made myself a hamburger for dinner. And I also pre-made myself hamburgers for several more dinners. Well, I semi-pre-made them. 😅



I bought a 3-pound package of ground beef Friday. Safeway had 90/10 beef at a good price, though the rub was I had to buy a "value pack" for that price.

Usually what I do when I buy these larger packages is portion them out into Zip-lock bags of anywhere from 0.5 pounds to a full pound each and put them in the freezer. The drawback to that is it's still more than I typically make in a serving. Hawk doesn't enjoy red meat much anymore, so it's usually just me eating ground beef. Even a half pound is too much for one dinner for me. Often I make a burger for one meal out of it then brown the leftover meat in a skillet and combine it with marinara sauce to make a meat sauce for pasta. But still, it means when I defrost a small portion of meat I have to be planning two meals out of it— otherwise I risk some of it turning gray and going to waste. I hate wasting food.

This time I decided as long as I was making one hamburger patty for tonight and parceling out the rest of the ground beef to freeze for later, I could make several hamburger patties. I made a total of 7. One went on the grill right away. The other 6 got wrapped individually in wax paper (seen in the photo above) and stacked in a large freezer bag. Now I can thaw just the right amount for one dinner at a time.

"You know you can just buy pre-made hamburger patties," you might observe. Yes, I can. But I don't care for the frozen ones. They're not as good as making my own. And buying the fresh ones is pricey. Yes, I kind of traded off time for cost here by forming patties myself... though even if I bought preformed patties fresh from the grocery store I'd still have to parcel them out into separate wrappers for freezing.

I've been a temporary bachelor the past few days. Hawk has been away on a business trip. She left early Tuesday. For the past four days now I've been on my own.

These past four days have been nothing like the pop culture notions of what happens when a middle aged married guy is left on his own for a few days. The house is not a disaster zone. There are no piles of pizza boxes and takeout bags in the kitchen. There are no stacks of dirty dishes, either. The fridge was never filled with "care packages" of precooked food for a man who can't boil an egg without burning the pot. In fact during the past 4 days I cooked slightly more than I ate, so there's a "care package" for my spouse in case she wants an easy meal of reheating some pasta.

As for things outside of keeping the house clean and cooking for myself? Well, to borrow a phrase Hawk has used when the roles have been reversed 100s of times in the past, "It was nice having the place to myself for a few days." I woke up at my normal times, not when her too-early alarm jolted me awake at 5am or when she came to bed at 1am. I focused on my work during the day. In the evenings I took it easy and only worried about my own wants and needs.

I've quipped in the past that periods of unemployment have been like practice runs for retirement. Is this temporary bachelorhood thus a practice run for being a widower? Oh, hell no! It's just been a few days of living alone knowing things will return to normal afterward.

Hosting a dinner party is tough nowadays. I don't just mean the effort of shopping for food, cleaning the house, preparing food, and cleaning up afterwards. Even just planning the menu is getting difficult. So many people have food allergies nowadays that if you get 2-3 people with different no-can-do lists it's hard to assembly a reasonable sized menu that offers enough choices for everyone.

BTW I don't dispute people's food allergies. Many folks out there observe that food allergies "didn't used to be" so common and therefore conclude that they're fake. I instead attribute the apparent increase to better awareness of medical conditions today versus years ago. I believe the same proportion of people have always had various allergies or sensitivities but now more of them know they have such conditions.

For example, one of my college roommates learned a few years after graduation that he's lactose intolerant. "When did that start?" I asked. "You always loved splitting a pizza with me." "I've probably always had it," he explained. "I just thought I had a weak stomach. Now I know why."

For a small gathering we hosted Saturday night there were already competing allergies and religious restrictions in play, even with just a few people attending. The menu was quickly whittled down to, "No meat, no dairy, no eggs." Ugh, what's left? I grumbled silently.

Cutting across the issue of planning a menu around different people's limitations is the matter of how hosts view their responsibility for entertaining guests. At one end of the spectrum people take the attitude of, "Our house, our menu, and guests are rude if they don't eat all of it and say thank-you." At the other end of the spectrum are hosts who bend over backward to accommodate a guest, setting the entire menu around pleasing a single person even if the hosts and their family find it unsatisfying. From reading online discussions of hosting problems it seems not uncommon to find people operating at either of these extremes.

In the lead up to Saturday's party I felt we were reaching the bend-over-backwards extreme. My partner had quickly negotiated a menu with the guests that respected all of their needs— including the tough restrictions of a person who told us he might not even be able to attend, and if he did come, it would be hours late. Finally I told my partner on Saturday after lunch that I was probably going to eat nothing at dinner. In my own house. I was even considering no-showing my own party because I found nothing on restrictive menu appealing to eat.

Fortunately it didn't come to that. My partner agreed to relax some of the restrictions when she realized how dissatisfied I was. I got her to recognize that when we're entertaining people with limitations we don't have to make everything on the table fit everyone's limits simultaneously. At the same time, of course, we're not going to tell a guest, "Hey, we heard you can't eat X, so here's the one thing with no X in it for you!" There's a happy middle ground in making sure that each person has at least a few food options they can enjoy.

A few weeks ago I bought a Wienerschnitzel kit from Costco. I made half of the meat in the kit following the recipe on the box.



The result was pleasingly similar, visually, to the picture on the box. I note that because that's not always the case with boxed meals. See this chicken parmigiana from Trader Joe's as an example. The schnitzel tasted okay... but merely okay. The meat was tough and bland— a problem I've found, BTW, with all sous vide meats, including (and especially) those cooked by friends who've sworn up and down while inviting me to taste their cooking that it's the most tender, flavorable meat they've ever had and is comparable to a high end steakhouse. High end steakhouse? I'd send it back at a Denny's!

Like I said, it was kind of bland. So I got the idea to try preparing it differently when I cooked the other half. Here I made a jump between cuisines and geographies. Let's switch from doing it à la Vienna to Parma. Pork cutlet parmigiana!



I reheated, breaded, and sautéed the meat the same as when I made it as schnitzel. I did sauté it at a lower temperature, though, to avoid charring the breaded coating. Then I put it in glass baking dish with marinara sauce and a covering of shredded mozzarella cheese and placed it under the broiler until the cheese melted and became just slightly crispy. On the side (not included in the meal kit) I made spätzle— I kept that part of the meal Germanic 😅— creamed spinach, and garlic bread.

BTW, my recipe for creamed spinach is different from most. Instead of making basically a béchamel sauce with milk, butter, and flour to mix in with the spinach I simply use a few tablespoons of butter and a few ounces of cheese. For seasoning I use a pinch of nutmeg— but literally just a pinch, as even 1/2 tsp. of nutmeg can overpower a dish— and salt to taste. I wish I could claim credit for this recipe but I found it on the label of a can of spinach years ago. I've been enjoying it ever since.

One of the challenges of living in our post-industrial society is sorting through the amazing array of choices we have. Which is the best for each of us? That question applies to big-ticket purchases like cars as well as prosaic, everyday purchases like groceries. With cars it's well understood that a shopper should test-drive at least a few before buying. Such a comparison might only be checked once every several years, though. But how about groceries? How often do you buy a few of nearly the same thing and try them all? With groceries the costs are way lower than cars, yet I'll bet few people think of doing that very often. I know I don't. Hence the Beer Tasting 2022 project I started months ago. Recently I decided to apply the same idea to two different brands of mozzarella cheese.

I love mozzarella cheese. And as I've been cooking at home a lot more the past few years I buy it fairly regularly. There are several different brands I see at the grocery stores I usually shop. For years I've basically bought whichever one's at the store I happen to be at, or whichever one's on a small sale versus the other. Embedded in that habit is the assumption that the cheeses are equally good, so all I've got to solve for is price and convenience. But are the cheeses equally good? It's time to check!



To keep this comparison simple and apples-to-apples I bought two blocks of mozzarella cheese. One is the pseudo-Italian brand Galbani that Safeway carries, the other is Trader Joe's brand. (I call Galbani pseudo-Italian because while the label and all the advertising touts it as "Italy's #1 Cheese!" the fine print says what's sold here is made in the US.) I left pre-shredded cheese out of this comparison. I already know shredding it fresh from a block myself tastes better than pre-shredded. I did that comparison over a year ago; I just didn't write about it. These cheeses are also both the whole-milk variety rather than part-skim milk. That's another comparison I've already done. Buy the whole milk stuff, it's better!

These cheeses look virtually the same. The shapes of the blocks are slightly different, but once shredded the cheese is indistinguishable. It's the same color and texture. Of course, color is not the basis for choosing cheese. Taste is! So, how do they taste?

There's a clear difference in taste between these two. I was surprised because I thought they'd be close. Trader Joe's mozzarella is way better. TJ's has a creamier, very slightly nutty flavor. Galbani tastes like plastic. If I hadn't just opened the sealed package and shredded it by hand I would've though it came from a bag of shreds.

I invited Hawk to try the cheeses, as well. Without me telling her my opinion first, she made exactly the same observation I did.

"Are you going to throw the Galbani out?" she asked.

"No, it's not quite that bad," I said.

She agreed and offered to use it on a dish she was making. But then once she made it she said the flavor of the cheese was so poor she left that part of the meal uneaten. So maybe I will throw out the remainder of the 1-pound block. We're well enough off that we can afford to trash $5 of cheese we don't enjoy.

On a Costco shopping trip a few weeks ago we picked up a package of Kevin's Korean BBQ-Style.



Our experience with heat-and-eat packaged foods at Costco has been mixed. A few are genuine hits, items that we buy again and again. Most are "enh".... They're edible, but not enjoyable enough, or not good enough in terms of quality-price ratio (QPR), that we'd ever buy them again.

We bought this package of bulgogi because (a) we haven't had it before and were curious to try it, and (b) we like bulgogi. I've traveled to Korea numerous times and always enjoyed the barbecued meats there— bulgogi, bulkalbi, etc. We've enjoyed numerous Korean restaurants in the SF Bay Area. And I've made the dishes myself at home from scratch, including making the meat marinade/sauce from scratch as well as from bottled sauces. Oh, and (c) this was on sale, $5 off. 😅

I can make a decent Korean beef dish from scratch. It's not restaurant quality, but it's good enough that you know what it is. I hoped buying a package would yield at least as good results with less effort.



Inside the package are 4 sealed envelopes. Two are precooked meat, sous vide style; two are sauce.

Above I mentioned QPR.... I was disappointed to find that this package marked "32 oz." contained maybe 20 oz. of actual meat. (The scale shows 22.36 oz. but those plastic envelopes weigh almost a full ounce, then there's all the cooking fluid packaged in with them.) For the full price of $19 per package this is already looking like a poor QPR.



Because the meat is already precooked, preparation is just a matter of draining the meat, briefly searing it in a skillet, and tossing it with the sauce. I used just one of the two sauce packets as it seemed like both would make it overly saucy. Also, the sauce is sweet; adding both packets would make the dish overly sweet. I garnished the meat with sesame seeds before serving.



I wasn't feeling like going full Korean with dinner the other night so I made mashed potatoes and green beans to go with the meat. That very non-Korean pairing turned out to be fine as Kevin's Korean BBQ-Style Meat is not very Korean, either. The flavor is way too sweet, even with only half the sauce used. And sweetness is practically the only dimension of the flavor. There are no real notes of garlic, onion, or ginger. It might pass muster for "Korean" food in Iowa.

Even worse, the meat isn't good quality. It's tough and stringy. In Korea, a good barbecue restaurant is basically a butcher shop with stoves. People go there not just because the sauce and preparation are good, but because the meat itself is fundamentally good.

I finished off the meat from Kevin's because it wasn't bad enough to want to trash, but it's nowhere near good enough to buy again.

When we were shopping at Costco last weekend we spotted this little number I've never seen before:



The idea is pretty obvious. Think "Pigs in a blanket" for people who don't eat pork (as it's against religious dietary laws). I call it "Definitely No Pigs In This Blanket!"

The idea is so obvious we've already made it ourselves at home. We've combined Hebrew National's kosher hot dogs with ready-to-bake dough like Pillsbury croissants, rolling them up together. The results of that have been... a little spotty. It's hard to get the hotdog cooked the right amount (not under, not over) while also getting the dough baked the right amount. We figured a ready-made dish like this might be designed to have both parts bake correctly together.

How did it turn out? Well, the first thing we found is that that these Definitely-Not-Pigs-In-A-Blanket are small.



It takes about 4 pieces to equal the size of one normal Hebrew National hotdog. I guess that's good if you're serving them as appetizers, though I gotta say: the picture on the box makes them look not tiny.

So, again, how did they turn out? They were okay. As we hoped, they're designed so that the meat and bread both cook up appropriately. As for the taste... well, there's something just more special about when we crafty it ourselves than when we pour it out of a box straight onto a baking sheet.

A few days ago I mused again how cooking nice meals at home requires time and preparation. Neither of things things are hard; they just require... time and preparation. 😅

The nifty thing about preparation is that it can be done in advance. Well, some of it can be done in advance. And some of it can be done so far in advance you forget about it!

That happened to me when I was digging through our freezer Sunday morning to figure out what I could prep for dinner Sunday night. I found I had some pieces of good ribeye steak... from last December! I'd bought a large package on sale, parceled it out into more or less one dinner size portions, and frozen each portion in a separate bag. Would the meat still be good 10½ months later? Well, I'd already done the prep work to maximize the chances. I'd defrost it, grill it, and find out.



When I grill a steak for dinner, it's almost never just "I grill a steak". A good meal requires more than just good meat. And I do mean more-more than pairing it with a good red wine. 🤣 I opened a can of spinach and prepared it as creamed spinach, adding butter, a mixture of cheeses, and a few spices. I boiled and mashed potatoes. I toasted a roll of bread with butter and garlic. And, of course, I opened a bottle of good red wine.

The steak turned out pretty good. The marinade I threw together on Sunday afternoon worked well. Due to the thinness of the steak I did overcook it a bit, turning it out somewhere between medium to medium-well. I prefer medium-rare. But with thin steaks it's challenging to catch that sweet middle ground between still raw inside and slightly overdone. The good news there is that I have at least two more chances to improve my cooking technique; I have at least two more little packages of ribeye I want to use up before they reach their anniversary of sitting in the freezer!

When the Coronavirus pandemic started I made a huge shift in my eating habits. Overnight I went from dining out in restaurants 12 times a week— basically most lunches and dinners— to cooking and eating every meal at home. I didn't eat restaurant food at all for the first month. Since then, and especially since getting vaccinated over a year ago now, I've eased back toward my old habits. I haven't gone back to dining out 12 times a week but I'm getting close. Lately I've been dining out, say, 10 times a week.

Lately my cooking habits have regressed, too. Instead of preparing delicious, made-from-scratch meals several times a week, like I did early in the pandemic, I've shifted to making mostly convenience meals: heat-and-eat meals, microwaveable food, etc.

This week I decided I can do better. I used to do better! So I know I definitely can. It just takes... planning. And time.



Tuesday I made myself a steak dinner. I defrosted and grilled some short rib I've had in the freezer for... ugh, over a year. (I wrote the date on the freezer bag I packed it in.) That tells you how far behind my old cooking cadence I've fallen. On the side I made creamed spinach from a can of plain spinach, adding butter and cheese to it in a saucepan, and heated a roll of French bread in the stove. Not pictured: the 2½ glasses of Cabernet Franc I drank with it. 🥩🍷😋

Making this meal proved two things. ...Well, three. It was delicious. But other than that it proved two things.

First, cooking real meals at home takes planning and time. Before you can eat the meal you have to buy the food. Then you have to prep it. Then you have to cook it. The steak, for example, I already had in the freezer. But I had to plan ahead to defrost it. I started that Sunday night. But then I had such a long workday on Monday I was left with no time to dress it... or to refill the propane tank for the grill outside! So I put off making my steak dinner until Tuesday. Tuesday it almost didn't happen, either. But late in the afternoon I carved out time to buy gas and I switched my plan from marinating the meat hours in advance (I had no time to do that) to using a last-minute salt and pepper rub instead.

The second lesson is kind of embedded in the first: While cooking takes planning and time, it's doable... when planned ahead. You've got to buy the food or defrost it ahead of time. If there are prep steps like marinating meat, you've got to plan those into the schedule. And when unplanned stuff happens like working stretching 'til after 6pm with no break, as it did on Monday for me, you've got to be ready to call an audible... like "I'll make the steak on Tuesday; let's go out for pizza tonight."

That Monday night pizza was awesome, BTW. But so was the Tuesday steak dinner. And it was actually way cheaper, even though it was prime meat, because I cooked it myself instead of paying a restaurant.

Last week ago I decided to try making Chicago style deep dish pizza at home. I bought a pair of pre-made pizza crusts at Trader Joe's and topped them myself. How did it turn out? Check this results picture and decide for yourself....



...Okay, you can't taste it through the screen, but I think you can see it looks pretty good— and very much like a Chicago pie. It tasted pretty good, too. It was better than the frozen Gino's East deep dish pizza I've bought numerous times since local Safeways started carrying it almost 2 years ago.

How did I make it? As I said above, I started with a premade crust and topped it myself.



First I brushed the crust with olive oil. Then I laid down a thick layer of mozzarella cheese. Okay, the mozzarella cheese was store-bought, too. I'm not into making my own cheese! Then I put on a good layer of pepperoni— okay, that was store-bought, too; I don't slaughter or cure my own meat 🙄— and, finally, a layer of marinara sauce. The marinara sauce was homemade! I'd made it the night before. ...No, I didn't grow the tomatoes. I used canned tomatoes. 🤣 But I made the sauce myself from base ingredients, including the crushed garlic I sauteed to start it.



Putting the sauce on top was key to getting the look— and frankly the taste— of authentic Chicago deep dish pizza. I could have gone a little heavier with the sauce I spooned on. As you can see in the picture it doesn't quite cover the pie from rim to rim. I was worried about it spilling over when cooked. It didn't, because the cheese melted down.

What really put this pizza over the top of anything frozen I've tried was that sauce. Its flavor was spot-on. Not just for pizza in general but especially for Chicago pizza. The marinara I made is mostly tomato (as it should be). And it's high quality. One of the problems I've found with frozen pizzas is that their tomato sauces are all terrible. Even Gino's East, which is otherwise the best frozen pizza I've found, has a sauce that's simultaneously overly sweet and harshly acidic. 🤢