Magic Dinner, and That's No Crock

'Tis the season. . .

. . .when long-cooked dishes return to our tables and life gradually becomes more and more busy as the Holiday Juggernaut approacheth. Maybe you want the time to bake cookies for everyone you know. Or put up jars of the last tomatoes of the year. Or recreate that long-lost spun-sugar Titanic that you made as a final project in Pastry School (too bad the ants found the original one!) But dinner still needs to be made, friend.

Well, you probably know someone who brags all the time about their crock pot and you think "I want dinner to be magically ready when I come home from work, too. . ." But you have a small kitchen without the parking space to plunk down one of those overgrown hot plates. We cooks know that the most important Kitchen Real Estate is counter-space. . . especially adjacent to a sink and power outlet (wow!)

Don't worry about that office blowhard. Have you got a regular old soup pot with a decent lid? Do you have a working oven? Chances are very good that even a crappy apartment oven can handle 225 degrees for a few hours. . .

Congratulations! Welcome to Magic Dinner Prep School!

Cooks Should Never: Hotwire Pasta Machines

Fried!

Let's say, hypothetically, that you were operating a newly-purchased, beautiful expensive Italian pasta maker/extruder and it suddenly stopped functioning.  And you traced the problem to a blown fuse, which no one in the greater Metro area can find. And say the machine was still full of dense semolina dough that was threatening to become cemented permanently inside the interstices of the extruder's delicate parts unless something could be done to disassemble the machine.  And imagine that the special Italian wrench for removing the parts in peril was NOT included with the machine by the seller for the simple reason that the parts can be easily loosened by running the machine backwards for 10 seconds. . . except of course it won't run AT ALL.  Time is passing as you and your boss make phone calls to every single electrical supply house within 50 miles and they all say "What size is the fuse? Really? We could order it for you. . . be about 10 days."

Robot Rehab

Operator Error

(The most common cause of equipment failure.)

The flat blade to our Robot Coupe dicer looked like it had been used to chop gravel. Getting a new one would take a week. . . There's 40# of fresh salsa to be made, a bucket of mirepoix to be chopped, and it's Thursday evening, Chef!

Caramel Squash Butter

Caramel Squash Butter

Here's a recipe that may provide welcome variety once you've made that squash soup, squash puree, and spherified squash gel. . .  It only takes a little bit of cooked winter squash to make a pint jar, and it goes down well on toast on these cold mornings.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups (packed) Cooked Squash (see below for techniques to maximize flavor)

1/2 c Sugar

1 pinch Salt

1/4 c Water

1/2 tsp Cider Vinegar

10 cardamom seeds (not the big pods), cracked 

How to Carve the Toughest Winter Vegetables

It has happened to all cooks: 

We are tempted to do something we KNOW is dangerous, but we really WANT to do it anyway. Take this beautiful hard winter Golden Nugget squash:

Its skin is like armor. It's going to be SO GOOD, if I can just get the blessed thing apart! And so we end up going at this spheroid with our knife while it rolls unpredictably, berserk, causing us to nearly lose a finger.


Well, no more of that for my readers! Here's a series of knife techniques that will allow you to apply big forces safely to bust into the treasures of tough winter vegetables.  No Rutabaga is too mighty to withstand these methods!