Author: urbanmonique

I cook, write, throw flies, and play music in the Great Pacific Northwet.

House Made


The theme of today’s Big Wild show was Walleye recipes; I don’t have any fish around, (Wish I did, because after talking about it, I’m hungry.)  Here are the two variations we covered, plus some semi-homemade sauces to make things really cool:  While these are basic recipes you’ve probably had before, I’d bet a lot of y’all haven’t made your own sauces for these variations; once you do, you’ll never go back to store bought!  Note also that these would work great with a bunch of fish; cod, snapper, tilapia…

Beer Battered Walleye

Cut Walleye fillets into appropriate size for frying, 3” to 5” long by 1.5” wide or so would be just fine.

Heat peanut oil to 375º F in a deep fryer or deep pan.  Prepare batter;

House Made Beer Batter

1 12 oz. bottle of beer, (Anything decent, but please, no light!)

2 cups all purpose flour, sifted.

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

Option:  Shake or two of ground chile

½ cup Flour for dredging

Douse fish in batter, then quickly dredge them through flour. Tap off any extra flour and, with a slotted spoon, carefully lower fish into hot oil.  Make sure your oil stays at or slightly above 375º F to keep fish from getting greasy.  When fillets are golden brown, (About 4 to 5 minutes), remove and place on paper towel to cool.

Serve with House Made Tartar Sauce, (See below) and;

South by Southwest Cole Slaw

A nice, basic coleslaw with a little edge to it…

For the Dressing:

1 cup real mayonnaise

¼ cup granulated sugar

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

½ to 1 tablespoon creamed horseradish

¼ teaspoon celery seed

Salt and Pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in a non-reactive bowl; take your time and pay attention to the sugar, you want it to dissolve and blend in completely; until the gritty appearance and mouth feel is gone, keep blending!  Allow to chill, covered, for at least 30 minutes

For the Slaw

4 cups cabbage, red, green or both, finely shredded.

¼ sweet onion, shredded

¼ cup cilantro, shredded

1 Teaspoon mild chile powder, (Green or red as you prefer)

Mix all ingredients in a non-reactive bowl.  Add dressing and toss to coat thoroughly.  Refrigerate and allow to blend for at least 15 minutes.  Serve cold

House Made Tartar Sauce

Making your own basic sauces like this is a real treat!

1 Cup real mayonnaise, (Unless you must, no reduced fat or fat free!)

1 Tablespoon Pickle Relish, (I like sweet relish; use what you prefer)

1 Tablespoon fine minced shallot (or sweet onion)

Juice from ½ to 1 fresh lemon

Salt & Pepper to taste

Optional:  Shake of ground chile powder (I like Tabasco)

In a non-reactive bowl, throw in the mayo, relish, and shallot or onion; mix all these together well.

Begin with ½ lemon and slowly squeeze in the juice, (Remember, no seeds!), and make several taste tests for the level of tartness you like; use more or less lemon as you prefer.

Add a shake of salt and/or pepper as you prefer; do this sparingly and taste test after allowing seasoning to blend and sit for 30 seconds or so.

You can add a very light shake of chile pepper on top of the salt and pepper or in place of the pepper, as you see fit – I like all three!  Note:  I am referring to dried and powder chile, not to chili powder; there’s a big difference and chili powder would confuse this sauce!

Cover the bowl with a paper towel or plastic wrap and refrigerate the sauce for at least 30 minutes, (An hour is better), serve cold with additional lemon wedges and a dusting of finely diced parsley for your fish.

Lemon Dill Walleye

Here’s a non-fried style that will let the delicate flavor and feel of Walleye really shine,

Place Walleye fillets on a sheet of aluminum foil.

Blend;

1 stick of butter, room temperature

Juice from ½ to 1 lemons

1 teaspoon finely minced dill, (Dried OK if that’s what you’ve got!)

¼ teaspoon onion powder

¼ teaspoon celery seed

few shakes of Salt & Pepper

In a non-reactive bowl, cream butter and then add all other ingredients and mix thoroughly.  Coat both sides of each filet by hand with the mixture.  Seal fillets in aluminum foil and grill (Outside, on your grill!), for about 15 to 20 minutes; open the packet and test the fish, (Careful of steam!); remove when cooked through and allow to cool for 5 minutes prior to serving.

More Site Tweaks


Took a little time to tweak a few things that were bothering me, and to respond to a couple comments I was sent:  As a result, the main reading panel is now significantly wider, which allows for, naturally, both more text per line and bigger pictures – Thanks for the suggestion, you know who you are!  Also tweaked colors a bit to what seems to me to be more pleasing and easier to read.

Enjoy!

Burger Heaven


Are there burgers in Heaven? Well, if not, then we got a problem…

What American comfort food is rootsier than Da Boigah? After a particularly grueling week at the café, and for quite literally the first night I’d be able to cook for in something like a week, I ad killer burgers on the brain. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, my absolute Job #1 reason for cooking is to make great things that Monica loves: There are lots of reasons to cook; love is the best one there is, hands down, end of story… (And M knows and loves a good burger!)

Now, as soon as I knew that’s where I was goin’ for dinner, I started thinking sides; naturally, my first inclination was to pull out the deep fryer and go for classic, twice-fried frites, but… Well, we are getting older and we do have to nod to the 21st Century and maybe at least try to be a bit healthier than that, right? That said, spuds not being part of the side was not an option, so I decided to go with a nice, fresh spud salad; we’ll do this one with olive oil, fresh citrus and vinegar, so we’ve got a lighter take on potato salad we’ll amp up with some fresh herbs. Ready? Let’s rock!

If you’ve ever had a truly amazing burger at a local joint, I’ll bet you 10 to 1 that they either grind their own beef, or have their regular supplier do that for them: Custom ground and seasoned burger, done fresh, is what separates Holy Crud from Ho Hum in Burgerland.

So off I went to the market, where I found nice chuck steaks for $4 a pound, (They were marked ‘For marinating’); that’ll be the heart and soul of our burgers. The relatively high fat content coupled with nice big chunks of meat is gonna be great, but it does need a little help to put it over the top; I went with aged, Choice Tenderloin, which I found for $9 and change a pound, which ain’t bad, (And we’re only buying a half pound so…). I ended up with a mix of roughly 2:1 Chuck to Tenderloin.

I found fresh baked onion rolls for buns, and more of that really nice medley of red, white, and blue potatoes we had a little while back; they’re not only pretty, they’re real tasty; I can quickly become a creature of habit when I find something really good out there…

A quick note on shopping and hunting; our closest market happens to be an Albertsons; don’t discount a chain store just because it’s a chain store. This one, and many like it, are more often than not staffed by professionals with years of experience; yes, their bakery mostly does stuff I don’t want, but there’re real bakers back there, believe me; the quality and variety of fresh bread and rolls they put out daily is really quite good; you may need to dig around a bit to find something great, but often enough, you will. Likewise, their meat department may not be as good as some of the artisan solo outfits and Carnicerias we enjoy here, but they usually have good stuff and those folks behind the counter are real butchers; they love to have you ask for something special, believe me! We can’t go for the high end every day, and nor should we; find what’s good, close at hand and go with it.

OK, so once we get home, I stuck the beef into the freezer for a little bit. Any time you’re grinding meat, making sausage, etc, you want your protein as cold as you can get it; this will help keep the fat and meat in a proper matrix while you work with it, thereby avoiding mushy, unpleasant results; more importantly, cold keeps your food out of the temperature danger zone, thereby avoiding making you and your loved ones sick; always a plus, that, eh?

I set up the grinder attachment on the ol’ KitchenAid, cut the beef up into strips manageable for the hopper and got to seasoning. As with sausage making, you can season ground meat before or after you grind it, of course; I prefer doing so before, because you get a more even distribution of spice as the meat is grinding. For these burgers, I went with Hawaiian flaked salt, fresh ground pepper blend, (Black, red, white, green; our go-to mix), onion powder, celery seed, granulated garlic, smoked paprika, and a dash of Worcestershire. I seasoned with a fairly light hand, because we just want to accent the meat’s great flavor, not blow it out of the water… So into the grinder she goes, using the coarser of the two plates I have available. I gave the freshly ground burger a few tosses to make sure everything was well blended, then covered it and stuck it in the fridge to think about things for a while.

While the burger was incorporating all those flavors, I put the spuds on to boil. Just a note on water; it’s sad to say that not all tap water is created equally these days, (Especially coming from a kid who grew up drinking from streams and lakes and even garden hoses!) My bottom line on cooking with stuff is simple; if it does not look, taste, feel and smell right, do not cook with it! The concept of taking, say, a nasty bottle of wine and cooking with it because it wasn’t good enough to drink: Negative, Ghost Rider; that’s a no-no! Same goes for a thing as elemental as water. If yours doesn’t taste good to drink, do what we did and get a decent filter for your kitchen tap; from home brewed coffee to things you boil for dinner, everything will taste better; you can thank me later…

A trip out to the herb garden found Garlic Chives and Cilantro looking very nice indeed, so I took some of those, then added fine diced green onion, red bell pepper, and fresh tomato: All that, plus a few pieces of great Apple smoked bacon, will go into our spud salad.

For the salad dressing, I squeezed the juice from one lime and one lemon, and then added a couple tablespoons of grapefruit juice; I whisked some nice extra virgin olive oil into that at a roughly 2:1 ratio, added a dash of sal de mere, fresh ground pepper, and celery seed, and there you have it. I quartered the spuds, put everything into a stainless bowl to mix and then into a ceramic bowl, covered in the fridge, for a good hour to allow everything to blend: As M rightly points out, stuff like this salad are gonna be great tonight but much better tomorrow; like good soup or stew, salads marrying a bunch of wonderful flavors are gonna be at their prime round about 24 hours later…

OK, back to the burgers and the fun part. I formed four thin, wide patties, then cut up some of my stash of 2 year old WSU Creamery White Gold Cheddar and placed a nice layer of that in the middle of one patty. Then we assemble; a layer of burger, then cheese, then burger, seal and plump up the edges of each so we have a nice round patty of uniform thickness throughout. I let them hang in the fridge for 30 minutes or so to marry flavors further.

And that’s that; the burgers hit the grill over nicely glowing coals for about 4 minutes each side, with the cover on and vents wide open. I put the buns in a warm oven with a little dish of water to get nice, moist heat going. Finally, I sliced onion, tomato and pulled some lettuce leaves. M got condiments out and we were good to go.

At the point that she turned to me, burger in hand, with that serious knit-brow look and said, “This is, without a doubt, the best burger you’ve ever made; seriously…” I considered my mission a success…

Bierkuchen


Just finished taping several more episodes of The Big Wild, during which one of the boys said something that flashed me back to a recipe I’ve not made in a long time; I promised I’d post it now, so here ya go! Who says beer’s just for cooking? It’s for baking, too! NOTE: If you copied this in the first day or so it was up, please do so again! I posted the initial recipe from memory and was a bit off on my ratios; not fatal, but not as good as it could and should be – Do ‘er up as she is now and you’re good to go!

Here’s a great tasting cake that blends the distinctive sweet/savory flavors of beer in a dense, moist cake recipe. Darn near any dark beer with character will work great, from Porter to Bock to Stout; for something really special, try it with Sam Smith’s Taddy Porter or Guinness Stout.

It’s best to have ingredients at room temperature prior to combining. You’ll also want your beer flat and the alcohol removed: Pop the beer open, pour it into a saute pan and let it sit until it comes to room temp. Heat the beer over medium-low heat to a simmer; continue to simmer until you smell that the booze has simmered off. What you’ll have left is the nice skunky/sweet characters that you want!

The Batter:

2 cups dark brown sugar

3 cups All Purpose, Unbleached Flour

1 ½ cups Dark Beer

2 cups butter

2 teaspoons Baking Soda

½ teaspoon salt

3 medium eggs

½ teaspoon Ceylon or ‘True’ cinnamon

½ teaspoon Allspice

½ teaspoon Mace

¼ teaspoon ground Clove

Combine sugar butter in a large mixing bowl and cream them until the blend is smooth and even. Add eggs one at a time, beating each one into the mix thoroughly before moving on to the next.

Preheat your oven to 350º F.

Sift the remaining dry ingredients together, (Flour, baking soda, salt, and spices), and make sure they’re well blended.

Add half the dry ingredients and half the beer to the butter/sugar/egg mixture, blending thoroughly. Add the remainder of the dry mix and beer and blend thoroughly again.

Generously butter and flour a loaf or Bundt pan, and pour in batter using a spatula. Gently tap the pan on your counter to make sure the batter settles all the way in and is even in the pan. We’re using a rubber baby bumper bundt pan for this one…

Bake for approximately 1 hour, until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Let the cake stand in the pan for about 5 minutes, then turn it out onto a small mesh wire rack. Allow to cool thoroughly.

Mix ¼ teaspoon of powdered Cinnamon with 4 tablespoons of Confectioners 10X sugar and sprinkle liberally over the cake.

Really does Go great with the beer you made it with; you might also top this with fresh berries or citrus fruit medley, or go all in with a Hazelnut whipped cream.

Post Printing Activated!


Sorry, gang;
I’ve been so tied up in stuff that I forgot an important chunk of a blog like this ‘un; the ability to print each post…

I shook off the fog and got ‘er done, so, if you see a post you like and wanna hard copy of it, just click on the post in question: Once that’s up, cruise down to the bottom and you’ll see a print button there; click it and you’re good to go! I also stuck the ‘Press This’ button down there; that’ll allow y’all to easily select and repost stuff from here if and when you see fit.

Enjoy!