What can I say? I miss Paris. In Paris (and all over France) you can get  something called the Tart au Pomme (Apple Tart) that has slices of apple fanfolded around a tart with a shiny glaze on them. Even the worst one picked up at Monoprix (think mini Fred Meyers) is very good. I didn't decide to make an Apple tart this week nor did I decide to make a pear tart until we had a BBQ and one of our guests brought a really large bottle of Chardonnay. We know from the past that pears poach really nice in Chardonnay so I started thinking about a tart made of them. I searched for recipes and found one with a frangipane filling and poached pears laying on top. This looked nice so I poached the pears and made my crust last night. Tonight I cooked the crust (too much), made homemade apple jelly for glaze and cooked the tart tonight.

The Frangipane is made from Almonds, eggs and creme. The pears (d'anjour) are poached in the aforementioned Chardonnay along with lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and peppercorns then glazed with melted apple jelly.

I've not had time for quite a while to do anything but add articles to this site. I still don't have time but I'm getting tired of looking at half hacked up modules and components. There have been several Joomla components and modules that I've not been satisfied with but I've not had time to find replacements. As of today the commercial MyBlog component is gone. This is something I paid for but ultimately didn't like the way it handled things nor did I like the fact that I couldn't add features to it. That's right, I wanted to work for free to make it a better product but since it's commercial I can't. My second choice was IdoBlog which is under the Creative Commons license. It says I can modify the code but all changes have to go back to the project and I can't give them to anyone else. This too isn't good enough. I'm now just running under the standard Joomla Sections and Categories with JomComment for comments and social bookmarking. I'll be looking into tagging and expanding RSS feeds in the future.

Also the sitemap is gone but will be back. The component I used for that was really nice but it too took over how things looked. If you clicked on an article instead of getting the standard Joomla article you got something formatted by the sitemap app. I didn't like MyBlog doing this and I don't like my sitemap doing this. Consistancy is the key here. If Joomla has a failing it's that you can get lost in a Joomla site just because the same article can look 3 different ways depending on how you got to it. I don't like this.

I've been going through the menus as well to make things simpler and more user friendly. The side bar will only be used for apps that deal with the content in the main pane. Before I had duplicate menus there for usability purposes. If for some reason someone couldn't use the top menus they could click on the section name and then have a second menu on the left. I don't like this. I'll be considering options.

I have some new exciting things that I may be springing on grantmcwilliams.com that I've been wanting for a while - namely reviews. I paid a chunk of money for  commercial review module and even though it worked great I couldn't use it with Joomla 1.5. The author updated it and wanted to charge me again so I deleted it. So far I've paid about $200 for commercial components and outside of JomComment they've all been a waste of money.

I usually only post about what we're cooking or have cooked but I just spent some time looking for new jam for those late night sugar cravings. Sometimes just eating a peanut butter and jam sandwich satisfies that craving instead of breaking out the ice cream so I like to keep it around. We have massive blackberry bushes in the back yard which makes excellent jam but unfortunately I didn't beat the birds to them last year. When I make jam I combine Blackberries, a little bit of plums and cane sugar for a nice clean taste. Plums are high in natural pectin so there's no need to add commercial pectin. Pectin needs sugar in order to thicken a jam but natural pectin needs 1/3 less than commercial pectin. This allows me to have more fruit, less sugar and no added pectin which is all good. My rant is that I don't have any jam from last year so I'm relying on off the shelf jams. After reading Omnivore's delima I'm also trying to avoid the petrolium based preservatives and corn syrup.

My rant starts here... Just go through the ingredients list of most jams and such a simple thing becomes very complex fast. Some of them have as many as 15 ingredients. Even the best (usually imported) have about 5 ingredients. Most have more than one type of sugar including sugar, cane sugar, glucose syrup, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup. We're still talking about berries that are full of sugar right? Why are we adding so much sugar to our jam? Then there's the preservatives. We're adding preservatives to a canned food.. Is this so it can sit in the fridge for 3 years after opening it? So I dug through all the jars and settled on the Safeway branded Jam which only had 2 types of sugars and one preservative. I think the worst offenders were Smuckers (no surprise there) and the best was the imported jams. Although the one we eat in Paris is also available in the stores here but the ingredients list is different here (longer) which I suppose is because of food regulations in the states.

My question is this - since the jam we make is really nice why can't they do that on a commercial level. Maybe the berries they're using aren't ready to be picked so they need to add massive sugar to cut the tartness. I do know one thing, as soon as my berris are ripe I'm making jam, lots of it!

So here's a bit fancier version of our simple meals. The main course is a salad made from Red Leaf and Romaine lettuce with a homemade caeser dressing, croutons made from baguette dribbled with Croatian olive oil perfumed with garlic, parmesan and grilled chicken.  A side of honey dew and a smoothie made of orange, mango, banana, milk and shaved ice.

The star of the show has to be the pears carmelized in crushed black pepper scented burnt sugar sauce.

Total cost for everything (for 4 people with leftovers) - $7.50 or $1.87 per person. The lettuce, pears, honey dew melon and oranges I buy from the asian grocery, the chicken, milk and baguette I bought from the grocery store.

Lately I've been getting more exercise and eating my lunch later. The side effect of this is that when dinner comes around I don't feel like eating as much so in the name of satisfying my desires we've been making lighter weight dinners.

The dishes you see to the right probably look familiar because I've had them up here before. The noodles are butternut squash filled ravioli in a browned butter sage sauce. Honestly this meal takes about as much time as it takes to boil the water. You don't consume very much of the butter since you're just coating the noodles. The salad was your basic balsamic vinegarette made using whatever balsamic vinegar I had left in the cupboard. As much as people like Trader Joe's it's taken me nearly 2 years to get rid of all the crappy balsamic that I've bought there (or had given to me). I've not had the money to buy good stuff so we're using it for things like this - vinegarettes.

Italian food in Italy is very light and refreshingly simple unlike the stuff you'll get in Italian restaurants here. I'll not beat that dead horse as I've said plenty about it in the past. Anyway this is a cheap, simplen and flavorful meal. I think the main investment is the Sage if you're buying it from the grocery. If you have an Asian market or you grow it yourself this meal is very inexpensive. I spent about $6.00 to feed four people (or $1.50 ea). Definately worth the cost.

About the time I've decided on Panasonics GH1 micro four-thirds camera Canon pulls a rabbit out of it's hat. As I've written before the GH1 is a DSLR like camera (no mirror so technically not a DSLR) that shoots equal stills to a DSLR but also shoots HD video which is a first for an under $1000 camera in this form factor.The next best thing was to spend a couple grand on a Canon 5d Mk II but that's outside my budget and commitment level. Now Canon introduces the T1i which has the 50d's 15 MP sensor and can shoot HD video like the 5d Mk II! Thanks Canon for giving me yet another thing to have to consider. I think the only thing the Panasonic has over it is size.

The press release

Sometimes while reviewing an establishment I draw a bit of attention from the proprietors. On occasion that attention is negative. It doesn't make sense because if I then give the business a bad review (because of the negative attention) then thousands of potential customers will see it and business will be hurt. It would seem that a better idea would be to just let me do the review and if things are good the business would prosper but this logic is lost on a lot of people. The reason I'm mentioning this is I got thrown out of a really nice asian grocery this week and was told to delete my photos from my camera. Review with photos coming in a few days... :-)  Isn't America great?

Thanks to a friend of minn

 

 

I'm not sure what was going on but a local store had London Broil for about $1.88 per pound so I bought some even though I don't care for it much. I figure with enough massaging I could use it for something. I can't really afford to buy lamb right now so I decided to use the London Broil in place of lamb in making Souvlaki. The beef got cubed then marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, Cabernet Sauvignon,garlic, oregano, salt and crushed pepper. The cubes of beef were threaded with onions, cherry tomatoes and red bell peppers on skewers and broiled. At 145 degrees it wasn't too tough to eat but a few pieces went over 150 and they got really chewy.

To go with it we made Chelo which is nice (especially if you like the flavor of butter). I know I'm mixing cultures by doing souvlaki and chelo but I think I can still sleep at night. I finally found a use for my Al-Clad Ltd sauce pan - making Chelo! I bought the pan and haven't really ever used it. Primarily because the sides are really low and well, Al-Clad makes the worst handles of any company in the world. I'm not sure why they do that. They ruin great performing cookware buy attaching a handle that has two really sharp pressure points on the wrist. Have they every tried to use them or are they just for looks? OK, I'm ranting about Al-Clad which isn't a good thing. It's just that they make really nice stuff and have really bad handles. Thankfully this Al-Clad pan (known from this day forward as my Chelo pan) is really small so it's not much of a problem. I have a single egg skillet that's also Al-Clad and works well because of it's size. My double boiler is Al-Clad but has two handles so it's OK. Al-Clad are you listening? It's just not me either, I was in Sur La Table and the guy selling a customer pans said "you might consider Calphalon if the handle bothers you". A-hah! The handles do suck. Ok I'm done ranting. For the purpose my Al-Clad pan makes Chelo fine so I guess I'll be keeping it.

 

 

 

 

I made these about a week ago but since I've been having some hardware issues with my site I haven't been posting much.

I used to be one of those people that couldn't stand the smell of steamed corn mush but something happened after I started traveling to Mexico. Now when I smell Tamales I'm immediately transported to the streets of Mexico City where heavy duty trikes laden down with giant gas powered steamers hang over the front wheels with steam eaking out their lids troll the street markets looking for customers wanting to buy tamales for next to nothing. I also think of a woman on Calle de Motolinia with a charcoal fire in the bottom of a grocery cart selling fresh grilled food. There was always a line waiting to get her food. This is Mexico City and that smell of Tamales permeates the city (along with smog of course). Now when I smell steamed corn I smile. Anyway we made Tamales in my one remaining steamer. Overall they were pretty good but the corn only versions were a bit salty. The filling in the others was a mixture of shredded chicken, raisins, onion, garlic, roasted tomatoes and chiles and oregano. I can't take any credit for the recipe at all because I made it straight from Zarela Martinez' Food from the Heart cookbook. It was her grandmother's recipe and in my opinion if it was good enough for Zarela's grandmother then it's good enough for me.

A friend asked me if the recipe was authentic because of the raisins. Number one, I don't think there's

such a thing as authentic anything and yes, anyone familiar with Mole's know Mexicans use raisins in their food.

A while ago I was steaming pumpkin in my large double level steamer and later awoke to the fire alarms going off. I scorched it pretty bad but the metal wasn't warped or anything. Since I have figured out how to get it back to normal I resorted to using my smaller steamer with only one level. This means I needed to steam the tamales in two batches taking 2 hrs to finish. When I get my big steamer either fixed or replaced I'll revisit Tamales.