Some Cooking Myths Exploded

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Image by Michelle Statler from Pixabay

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve started following a foodie YouTuber named Adam Ragusea, and he’s quickly become a favorite of mine because (ahem) he agrees with me on so many issues and so I trust him in other areas. There’s w-a-a-y too much conventional wisdom out there just waiting to be debunked, and he’s the man to do it. Here are three that I’ve especially liked to go along with the iodized-salt-is-bitter myth from last time:

MYTH #1: Let me start out with the misconception that I cited in my previous post: the ridiculous idea that home bakers should be measuring flour BY THE GRAM for yeasted breads. One of my favorite TV-show-based video channels, America’s Test Kitchen, really stresses this idea. They said in an episode about pita bread, for instance, that you should measure x number of grams for the water and flour, giving amounts for King Arthur brand bread flour. But if you were using another type of bread flour, they said, you should decrease the water by one ounce, as KAF has more protein than most other flours.

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Why I’m going to start buying iodized salt

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Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

So, I have a new fave YouTube food and cooking show that features a man named Adam Ragusea who is apparently a Big Deal on the internet. Not all of his videos are in the multiple-millions category, but quite a few of them are, and I’d say that his fame and fortune are richly deserved. I’m featuring his episode on iodine and the decline in use of iodized salt in this post, but let me say that I got acquainted with him via YouTube’s algorithm that has videos pop up on the sidebar according to what you’re watching at the time. I was researching bagel recipes, and he has one, so that one came up. In the course of that video he addressed an issue that bugs me every time I run into it: this idea that you’re supposed to measure your flour by the gram for yeasted-dough baking. That is such nonsense, and there he was, singing my exact same song about that ridiculous idea. But I’ll get to that in another post.

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How Did the Celebratory Church Breakfast Go?

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Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

Splendidly, that’s how. Remember the story of the plague of locusts that descended on Egypt in the Old Testament book of Exodus? Well, the nicest-possible locusts (we’ll say a swarm and not a plague) pretty much vacuumed up the food that I and my helpers made for yesterday’s before-church breakfast to celebrate our once again meeting as a full church. It was fabulous!

So here’s what I did, and here’s the one glitch I had (which I still haven’t figured out completely)—

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An Encouragement about Habits

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A goose doing his daily leg lifts. (I’m sure that’s what he’s doing!) Image by Alexandra ❤️A life without animals is not worth living❤️ from Pixabay

Not a food-related post today, but something I’ve found to be encouraging over the past couple of weeks as I’ve stuck to two habits:

  1. Doing my floor exercises, including the core ones, three times a week. As I write this on Wednesday morning I haven’t yet done the set for today, and I should probably start telling myself that I can’t have my coffee in the morning without doing the exercises first. Remember, the whole set takes only 10 minutes or so. Here’s that video I made about the abdominal ones–it’s a little on the amateurish side as far as production values go, but the exercises are genius. (I didn’t come up with

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Make Your Own Bagels–and Live to Tell the Tale

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Imperfect but delicious! These got a little mangled because they stuck to the pan and each other after rising. Note my strictures and instructions in the recipe so that the same thing doesn’t happen to you.

I find that I cannot resist sharing with you the success I’ve had with my version of whole-wheat bagels. I had tried a New York Times recipe awhile back and the results were, shall we say, underwhelming. They tasted fine, but they certainly weren’t bagels. More like flat little pillows, with basically no crust. Bah! I said at the time that I thought the basic problem was that my dough was too soft to hold its shape, especially during the boiling phase, and it turned out that I was right. One of the distinguishing characteristics of bagel dough is that it’s quite stiff, almost to the point of being dry. So take note in the recipe of the guidelines for how sticky (or rather non-sticky) the dough should be.

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You Have a Shot at a Free Copy of My Cookbook!

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Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind: Recipes, Equipment, Ingredients, and Unbelievably-Granular Advice for your ne...Is everyone starting to feel as if we’re digging out of the tunnel and breathing fresh air? I sure do. I got my second vaccine shot on Monday, March 8, so almost two weeks ago, and after being pretty much wiped out for most of the next day I felt fine and have continued to do so. (Charlie Sykes, a political commentator whom my husband and I follow obsessively, said that for about 12 hours after getting his second shot he thought he’d been beaten up by a gorilla. My symptoms were more along the lines of being punched a few times by a chimp.)

Okay. On to the subject at hand. If society is starting to open up again, that means just one thing:

Par-Tays.

We’re going to have wedding receptions. We’re going to have cookouts. (Hey, we were specifically promised that we could have those by July 4!) We’re going to have birthday parties, and special dinners, and brunches. What do all of those events have in common?

FOOD.

And that’s why you need a copy of my new cookbook.

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What I Had for Breakfast Today–and Another Cookbook Update

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photo credit: Jim Simons

Pretty cool, huh? Much better than the pictures I take. I thought I’d write a short post today describing this meal and also let you know that

MY COOKBOOK IS NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.*

The e-book will be available here on my website soon. We need to do a few tweaks for that and then I want to do a video about it, which should happen early next week.

If you want a paperback version you’ll have to go through Amazon, as I have no interest/capability in shipping out books myself. I will point out that I have little to no control over Amazon’s pricing, and the paperback isn’t cheap. Its price is, however, in line with other cookbooks. The Kindle edition is reasonable, so if you want to get it right away that’s also an option. I am going to be doing giveaways and discounts next week here on this site, just so you know.

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An Encouragement to Make the Homemade Version, If You Can Do So

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photo credit: Jim Simons

The picture (taken by my husband, so it’s much better than the ones I take, even though he was dealing with the lighting in our kitchen) is of a Costco frozen Italian meatball and one of the homemade ones I made using my own version of Alison Roman’s “Good-bye Meatballs” from her new “Home Cooking” video series. (Be sure to subscribe; she’s doing a new one every Tuesday. They’re short and funny. I love her because she’s so completely opinionated. Not that I could be described that way or anything!)

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Further Encouragement for Master Recipes (Esp. for Salad Dressing)

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Image by jlarbig from Pixabay

You may remember that I said w-a-a-a-y back last September that I had shipped the final manuscript for my cookbook to the tech department (i.e., my husband) and that we were planning to get it out perhaps before Thanksgiving but certainly before Christmas. I then gave you some previews, one for my salad dressing chapter. Well! Didja notice that there was no cookbook by the end of last year? We decided to release it later, this spring, with the hope that people would be planning parties for the summer by then and there would be all this pent-up demand for a cookbook specifically aimed at such occasions. That’s still the plan. Here it is the beginning of the fourth week in February; we should release it early next month, I think. Then I plan to do a few little demos highlighting the ideas from various chapters.

In the meantime, though, I’ve re-read the manuscript about 12 times, or so it seems. I got rather tickled at this from the great, great Smitten Kitchen blog, with the author talking about her first cookbook:

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What I Had for Breakfast–Oatmeal with All the Trimmings

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photo by Debi Simons

Continuing on in my occasional posts about what I’ve eaten lately, here’s a picture (yes, one I took myself—you can tell because it’s so terrible) of yesterday’s breakfast. It contained:

  • Old-fashioned oatmeal, cooked right in the bowl using the microwave, 1/2 cup of oatmeal to 1 cup water and a pinch of salt, nuked maybe 3 minutes on 50% power, stirred, then another 2 minutes or so, with perhaps a final 30 seconds on full power. Takes a little more time and attention than quick oats and quite a bit more than instant oats, but they’re well worth it because of their nice chewy consistency, their lack of added ingredients, and their slower digestion that results in less of a blood-sugar spike. The more processed a grain is, the quicker its carbs get dumped into the bloodstream. Plus, it’s almost impossible to find instant oats (which need only to be mixed with boiling water, as they’re pre-cooked) that don’t have lots of added flavorings and, especially, sugar. OF oats are a nice compromise between quick oats (which have thinner flakes and are partially pre-cooked) and steel-cut oats (which take around 20 minutes of stovetop cooking). I like them when they’re not cooked to mush.
  • Walnuts, which I toasted briefly in a pan with a little dab of butter and the tiniest sprinkle of brown sugar. They could have just been used plain, which I often do, straight from the freezer.
  • A pat of butter. Yes, butter.
  • Another tiny sprinkle of brown sugar. (Not really necessary.)
  • Some dried date bits, which I almost always have on hand. These are extruded ground dates dusted with oat flour so they won’t stick together, available online and at places such as Sprouts, and are much less expensive than regular dates. They add sweetness and texture. If you don’t have them you could use raisins. (That’s what my husband does, anyway. I hate raisins.)
  • Some half-and-half. You could also use whole milk. Please, no skim milk! If you’re on the anti-dairy bandwagon you could use oat milk, I guess, for a matching set. Or almond milk, or soy milk. Honestly, though, there’s nothing wrong with good old cow’s milk, and nut milks typically have less protein than regular dairy. They may or may not have fewer calories, depending on which variety you use, but your aim should be nutrition and satiety, especially for breakfast.

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