me make food

Theresa’s work is having a party this afternoon. She wanted to fry it herself, but I was too scared of her doing that. Took a long lunch to fry it up for her.

Here is a vid from a while back. I make snot sucking noises and it is gross.

oh lots of good fud to be had this weekend

I ground up some of my cayenne peppers for a blackening seasoning.
They are awesome and I have a bunch of them. Should last me till I can grow more next year.

Oncee I saw pastrami on the smoking forums I get that bug. I hit a few places till I found some corned beef at Super saver. Yup pastrani is just smoked corned beef. I soaked it for a day to pull some salt out. Coated it with some cracked peppercorns and smoked the heck out of it.

It is absolutely amazing. It tastes so fricking good. I should of gotten it a bit more cooked, but it still kicks arse. Picked up some rye for sammiches tomorrow.

I loves me some smoked cheese, but the Hoffmans stuff runs about $5 for a small chunk. Headed to the store and got some cheap sharp cheddar and monterey jack. Cut them into chunks and since it was 35 degrees outside I knew I could get my cold smoke on. I put some hickory chunks in my chimeny starter over the propane cooker and got them going. Placed the smoldering chunks in the smoker and kept that going for around 3 hours.

The cheese was not getting that smoke color so I kept them on. When I decided to taste a slice I pulled it all off cuz it was so smoked. Darn good though. Still being cheap cheese it does not have the creamy texture, but the flavor is really intense. It will go well in our recipes, especially a good mac and cheese.

We use our toaster oven pert near 90% over the regular oven. It is so convenient, fast, and keeps the whole house from heating up. Our old one was a cheap toastmaster with the dumbest controls I have ever seen on an appliance, but it worked good. The convection fan gave out a month or so ago and then the bottom heaty thingers stoped working and it was done. Soggy totinos pizza is not very good.

We decided to not mess around when finding a replacement. First stop was target and BB&B websites. Found a few that could of worked, but after reading reviews we kept looking. Theresa headed to BB&B for some stuff and took pics of each toaster oven and their info cards. I started doing more research online of the ones she found. We had 3 things that were absolutely necessary.

1. broil function. To make the best garlic bread I find this necessary. I have a system and it works well. Also often you just want to get a bit of extra browing on something and broil is where it is at.
2. convection / fan bake. It really makes a difference and we loved that feature on the dead one.
3. good reviews. Yeah I know it is not actually a feature, but I want to hear normal folk lay it out there.

The cuisinart TOB-195 is a higher range toaster oven with some nice functionality and stellar reviews online. The amazon reviews rated it as being uber awesome. The only negative reviews were because it gets hot on the outside and because some of the outsidey parts are not actually stainless steel.

I did some extensive testing using probe thermometers and found it to have a really good accuracy. It fluctuates by 25 degrees, which is noted in the manual, but stayed close to the set temp most of the time. There is a probe built into the inside top wall that monitors the temp. This has actually thrown off my usual methods because it does not fluctuate wildly like the old one. I burned a pizza and have had to learn how to do my garlic bread all over again. The peppercorn steaks took much longer because the oven was actually at 250 and not something higher. We never really toasted bread in the old one because it would take too long. This thing heats up so fast and makes toast in 2.5 minutes and it comes out perfect.

It is quite a well built little thing. It is light and does feel a little flimsy on the sides and back because of the metal and plastic. the crumb tray is pretty lame which was a bummer. It slides out the back and is pretty thin metal. The broiling pan and its bottom are made of very rigid metal. It is very well made. it does heat up on the outsides quite a bit, but nothing to worry about. The touch pad is easily to use and wipe down.

We very much likey and think the price is fair for such a quality piece of kitchen equip that we will use the heck out of.

Our toaster oven died and I did a bunch of research and Theresa went to scope a few places out to find a good one to replace our dead one. I will post about the new one later, swears (it is soooooooooooo cool). Theresa figured she would check out Linens and things because they are going out of biz. The toaster oven was 20% off, she picked up some new curtains for the living room which 30% off, and she grabbed a new set of caphlon nonstick pans. We absolutely love these pans an need a new set in a year or so, but being 10% off and a special deal she simply could not pass it up.

BTW this limited time offer has been going for a year now. Still some of the finest nonstick pans I have ever owned. It all comes down to the thickness and construction. They slay the cheapo ones and many mid range price pans.

And one of those stupid 3 basket thingies for us to thaw food and dry out washed sucky bags in a place where Thunks the cat cannot get to them. Little bugger.