So we got a pressure cooker, as an advance Christmas present. See, we had all these turkey bones to turn into stock and babysitting a simmering pot over 8 hours didn't seem like very much fun. When I realized you can get a good but basic pressure cooker for $30, the rest was history.
I made stock yesterday. I cooked it for an hour, and it seems like decent stock though I don't have a PhD in stock discrimination. The bones didn't break easily like AB says they should, so next time I'll try 2 hours (we do have more turkey bones—they didn't all fit in one batch).
Then, I turned my attention to beans for dinner. See, beans are a bit of a dilemna in our house. Erin loves them in almost any guise, but I am quite a bit more picky. I do like them when they are done right, but when they are not the right texture or taste too bland I turn my nose up. Of course the obvious things to do to make me like them are add plenty of salt and fat and cook them until they're one step from refried. Unfortunately this goes against every fiber of my wife's being, so we have a kind of standoff compromise: she makes beans the way she likes them (healthy and bland) and I eat them without complaining too much.
Armed with the new toy, I set out to rectify the situation. There were two obstacles: texture and taste. I won't bore you with the details of my research, I'll just tell you there are several old wives tales about beans and what I think I have learned to be the truth.
First, they say you should soak them. I believe this is true, but not for the reasons "they" say. I have seen enough anecdotal evidence online to indicate that you don't need to soak them to get good texture, and that the time savings in the cooking isn't very much. However, this article makes a good nutritional case for soaking. In short, the soak makes the nutrients in the beans more accessible to your body. So I did a quick soak (boil for 3 minutes, let sit for an hour or two).
Second, they say you shouldn't add salt. This appears to be largely untrue, with perhaps a grain of truth. Google "salt beans mcgee" for more details. So to my 1 lb soaked black beans I added 1 tablespoon salt. Based on McGee's information I will try adding the salt to the soak water instead in the future. They also say you shouldn't add acid. I didn't want chili, so that didn't apply.
The pressure cooker manual says to add a tablespoon or two of oil or lard to keep the foaming down and prevent clogging of the pressure cooker vent (that's a Bad Thing™). Lard is definitely the premier choice here. I guess you could add bacon instead if you have a lard aversion.
Somewhere I read the suggestion to cook beans in stock for more flavor. Hey, I had a bunch of turkey stock, why not? So I omitted the lard (I hadn't skimmed any fat yet since the stock hadn't cooled).
1 lb dry black beans, soaked
poultry stock to cover by about 1 inch
1 tablespoon salt
pressure cook 12 minutes then remove from heat and allow pressure to release naturally (about 30 minutes).
At this point I added some chopped onion and garlic and simmered while the rice cooked. Oh, speaking of rice, for excellent latino white rice just sweat some onion and/or garlic and salt, then add the rice and sautee until the rice changes color, then add the water, bring to a boil, cover and cook over low heat about 20 minutes.
There you go. Beans and rice in 2 hours with leftovers to last you all week. The beans were dramatically unbroken yet soft and not the least bit crunchy anywhere. The taste was fine, though not unhealthy or overly salty. The weak point this time was actually the rice (I wasn't careful enough and ended up with unbalanced flavor and too little rice to match the beans so we didn't have equal parts leftovers).
Sometimes when we hang out with Cam he’ll buy us some junk food. Last night I saw this and my curiosity had to be satisfied. The darkest chocolate I’d had before was 60% and that was a truffle with a lighter chocolate inside. Not counting the huge chocolate bar I found in the baking cupboard as a kid, of course.
For Christmas my aunt and uncle, with help from my sister, sent me a bunch of assorted items they picked up around town. One thing my sister picked up was a bottle of 100% maple syrup from Trader Joe's (which we don't have around here). I've been wanting to buy some real maple syrup for a while but thus far my wife has balked at the price which is at least 4 times as much as the corn syrup + artificial flavoring kind. The question then has to be, is the flavor worth the added cost? Naturally, a test test was in order.
Certainly you haven't missed the rash of food recalls. One that stands out in particular is that of the 
For some time I have wanted to try my hand at making cheese. It's such a varied product and unfortunately, artisan cheesemaking isn't something you see much in the US. It'd be fun someday to create my own type of cheese and have a cheese cellar chock full of the stuff. But that isn't going to happen tomorrow.
