A quick response

I got home from my Memorial Day trip Tuesday night, and there was one of those little orange postcards from the post office in my mailbox.  I had a package!  I assumed it was my box of freebies for donating to a local public radio station, but it turned out to be *TWO* replacement plates for my garlic press.  OXO, thanks for sending those out so quickly…..just in time for my next batch of marinara sauce!

In the news

(Click on the links to go to the full articles.)

Home canning is becoming hip again.

People have been buying home-delivered boxes of produce from local growers for years.  Now you can buy your meat the same way.

As everything gets more expensive, sales of Spam are rising.  (I’d rather eat less meat than eat Spam, unless it’s Spam musubi.)

Weird Gadget of the Week: Roasted Garlic Express

Does anyone really need a dedicated appliance for roasting garlic?  If I received one as a gift, I’d unload it just because I don’t have the space in my tiny kitchen.  I already have a garlic roaster: it’s called an OVEN and it came with the apartment.

You’d have be the owner of The Stinking Rose to justify owning one of these.  (I would much rather have a root canal without painkillers than dine at The Stinking Rose.)

$34.95 plus shipping at AsSeenOnTV.com, but you might try looking at Goodwill first. (If you’re in San Francisco, the Bayview location has the best stuff!)

Thanks, OXO

OXO replied to my e-mail about the broken garlic press within hours:

From: “Info” <info@oxo.com>

Subject: [Bulk] RE: OXO Question about a Product

Cynthia,

Please provide your shipping address and we will send you a replacement

Garlic Press plate.

Thank you,

OXO Consumer Care Center

They also left a comment on my previous post.  I’ll let y’all know when I get the new part in the mail.  Thanks for the quick response guys!

Finally, an OXO Product that Sucks

This garlic press, made by OXO, can squish garlic with the skin still on, and it has a removable press plate that makes it easy to clean.  Unfortunately, that little part is also easy to lose in the garbage disposal.

I have contacted OXO to see if I can get a replacement part, but since this item is not listed on their website, I have a feeling it’s been discontinued.  Without the press plate, this thing is useless.

Weird Gadget of the Week: Hillary Nutcracker

Crack a nut between her stainless steel thighs!  Obviously a male Republican came up with this one.

Get yours at AsSeenOnTV.com.

“A watched pot never boils”

Boiling water for iced tea today made me think of a favorite scene from ST:TNG; unfortunately I couldn’t find a video clip online. I found this on Memory Alpha, however:

“I have been testing the aphorism, ‘A watched pot never boils.’ I have boiled the same amount of water in this kettle sixty-two times. In some cases, I have ignored the kettle. In others, I have watched it intently. In every instance, the water reaches its boiling point in precisely 51.7 seconds.“

– Data, exploring the Human perception of time

Yes, I’m a Star Trek fan.

Mashed Potatoes: a few methods

For years, all my mashed potatoes came out of a cardboard box.

Then I worked in retail for a while, and took advantage of my employee discount to buy a KitchenAid stand mixer (in turquoise). The instruction manual came with a recipe for mashed potatoes, so I tried it, and it was good. The recipe has you mash the potatoes first with the flat beater, then you whip them at top speed with the whisk.

You don’t need to peel your potatoes before boiling; just wash them. The skin is good for you! When you boil your potatoes, add a few cloves of garlic. You can also boil your potatoes in a slow cooker for 4 hours on High or 8 hours on Low, while you’re out working or doing errands.

I recently started making mashed potatoes by running the cooked potatoes through my OXO food mill, using the coarsest milling disc. The mill can make short work of several pounds of potatoes. With this device, you don’t need to own a potato ricer, which is great for those of us with tiny kitchens and limited storage space.

Cooking, Portion Control and the Single Girl

For dinner last night I opened a package of chicken breasts (two) and baked them in Trader Joe’s Satay Peanut Sauce.  This was really more food than necessary for one person, but I ended up eating all of it, rationalizing (this time) that it was the only thing I’d eaten all day.

I tend to do this a lot, since most packaged foods and recipes are in quantities for more than one person. (Yes, I know there are tons of single-serving frozen meals out there, but they can be pricey and most taste like cardboard.)  I’m not a big fan of leftovers.

Of course I have people over for dinner on occasion, and my roommate and I often share meals, but most of the time, what’s a single person to do?

Marinara Sauce

I adapted this recipe from one I found on the Williams-Sonoma website.

• 2.5 lb. tomatoes
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 5 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 Tbsp. oregano
• 2 Tbsp. basil
• Salt and pepper to taste

This is the point in the recipe where I attempted to puree the tomatoes using the infamous Martha Stewart food mill (see below). Because the spinning part is about half an inch from the bottom, it took me almost an HOUR to smash the tomatoes completely, and no matter what I did I still had chunks left over. I would have been better off using my blender.

The original recipe tells you to first sauté the garlic in the olive oil, add the remaining ingredients and cook on the stove top (add the basil at the very end). Since I didn’t feel like slaving over the stove, I threw everything in my Crock-Pot (set on High) and did something else for four hours.

The Crock-Pot method worked well for the most part, but I will make some changes for my next batch of sauce. When cooking with a Crock-Pot there is no reduction, so the sauce was really runny; next time I’ll crack the lid open a bit. Also, there was really no point in adding any olive oil; it just floated there on top. Finally, I will not add the basil until the end of cooking.

I froze most of the sauce and put the remainder in the fridge to eat later. The sauce reheated and reduced nicely on the stove top a few days later. I added some fresh sliced shiitakes from the farmers’ market (buy the ugly ones, they’re cheaper). This sauce was yummy with some pasta and fresh parmesan.

This is a great thing to make in a big batch on a lazy Sunday afternoon and freeze it for later. Cooking in a Crock-Pot allows you to ignore it while it’s cooking, without burning the place down.