The Yum Yum Factor

Detour Coffee has brought out the camper to the the Green Living Show The Green Living Show Highlights of the food variety at this years Green Living Show:

I have always loved The One of a Kind Show, both as a visitor and even as a vendor back in another life when I did a line of kid's glass art called Buster Boy. These days, I am just there as a shopper and I rarely miss a show if I can help it.

If you read this blog, or know us personally, you will know that there are only a handful of ways to eat pasta in this house. Shack, who loves pasta above all other things, really just means spaghetti/rotini with tomato sauce and meatballs OR with meat sauce, which is just really tomato sauce with meatballs smashed up in it. The only two exceptions are, of course, lasagna which is just a shape shifting pan of spaghetti and meat sauce and carbonara but that has lots of bacon in it and, well, BACON. I, on the other hand, love all forms of pasta with all kinds of sauces - olive oil sauces, cream sauces, fettuccine, farfalle, orecchiette - you put a bowl of some sort of carby goodness in front of me and I will be happy but if I say I'm cooking "pasta" for dinner, I mean meatballs/meat sauce/marinara with spaghetti or rotini, maybe penne if he is feeling adventurous. For that reason, I  was absolutely certain that I must have written down my recipe for plain old spaghett...

featured wine and beer and lots of great food will there for the tasting The Green Living Show The Green Living Show is almost up on us so this week I stopped in at Hawthorne Food and Drink on Adelaide and Church to check out some of the food and drink that you will be able to sample at the show.

Okay, time for a sous vide recap: Again, what is sous vide and what the hell is an immersion heater/circulator/cooker?

This is my first attempt at using one of my own recipes for the sous vide cooker and I am kind of going rogue with the technique which is probably why it was a mix of mainly success with some bumps in the road. I have been wanting to make another asian flavoured meatball like my Vietnamese meatballs but with a nod to Japan for a long time now. We LOVE our little Vietnamese meatballs made with chicken or pork but it's really easy to bake them just a smidge too long and dry them out. Now, with sous vide, they never overcook so, like the sausages, all they require is a little kiss with a hot pan afterwards to brown them up.

After two weeks of doing almost nothing that doesn't involve sous vide, I felt like it was time to step off, go back to basics and make something that I would have loved before I discovered sous vide. I think I will have to start using the term BSV and ASV from now on. "Oh, I was so naive back in the day. I, too, used to love to BBQ steak BSV" "Oh, you poach in vinegar water? How cute. This is the only way I can imagine cooking eggs ASV" You get the picture. So, there is no funny story to accompany this dish. The day I made this, it was supposed to be sunny and 9C and, instead it was more like 2C and overcast. Is that an improvement over sunny and -33456666C? Of course. Does that mean I am still not bitter and have not decided that 2C and overcast is freezing cold and I was not getting out of my pjs for freezing cold? Of course not. I bought some stewing beef and I have been eating a ton of Korean food lately so I made a Koreanish Beef Stew, ...

Finally, the temperatures have risen about 0C for the first time in what feels like years! It was a glorious week for that reason and I, for one, have ditched the socks and started wearing my favourite metallic Vans again in celebration.

Okay, so, for me, the two reasons for owning a sous vide are the ability to make the perfect steak and also the perfect egg. With a couple of weeks under my belt, I kind of feel like I have a handle on those two things and I am ready to move on.

I wish I was a Mariachi. At least I wish I had Mariachi pants.

I love sausages. The only thing I DON'T love about sausages is that they can be a bugger to cook. When you grill them, you can end up with half of them burnt on the outside but still underdone on the inside and then the other ones are overcooked and dried out. Don't even get me started about them busting open before they are done and losing all of their delicious juices. In the winter, I poach them, which works well, but I couldn't help but think that sous vide might be the answer to all of my sausage dreams. As always, I read a hundred articles about sous vide pork sausages before I started and the general consensus was to cook them at 60C or 140F for anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. I had three types of pork sausage and, as you can see down there, I sealed some of them in my Food Saver bags and I left the two Italian sweet sausages for the zip lock bag. I used my Anova Precision Cooker with my polycarbonate bin and I watched House of Cards while they cooked. I...

 So, here is the first important lesson that I just learned for you, you're welcome. We were out and about and decided to splurge on an expensive bit of meat at The Friendly Butcher on Yonge St. for our next sous vide dinner. Because we had made an amazing strip loin in an hour, we were excited to see what kind of results we would get with this cut, a favourite of ours for the grill. We get home, I prepare a mojo to marinate the steak in since we decided we would turn it into tacos and then I sat down to check on times and temps for flank steak. Well, as it happens, cooking a sous vide flank steak is not ANYTHING like making a strip loin because flank steak requires five million years in the water bath. I read at least 20 recipes and charts and it looked like it was going to require anywhere between 18 hours and 48 hours. So much for tacos for dinner. Flank steak is considered a leaner, tougher cut of meat so it requires a much longer cooking time to soften the...

the 13 minute at 75C egg was almost perfect but that white was still just a bit too runny for me I'm a bit obsessed with poached eggs and, to be honest, for most of my life, I never made them at home. They are fussy, the white are always all over the place, I either undercook them or overcook them half the time and I always have to drain off the water from the bottom of the bowl before I eat them. Never mind the headache of trying to make them for more than one or two people, keeping them all hot, holding them over in a water bath, yadda yadda. It's just easier to order them in a restaurant that specializes in great breakfasts. With that in mind, it makes sense that the very first thing I made with my hand dandy Anova sous vide cooker was a poached egg. Actually, I made half a dozen poached eggsI had barely busted that baby out of the packaging before I was firing up a big pot of water. At first, I was cooking them at between 63C and 65C , which is touted as being THE...