So Starbucks is going to close for three hours tonight to train the staff in core values and the like. Gee...maybe they should listen to what the customer has had to say, instead?

I enjoyed Starbucks when I worked in NYC, it was several steps above the carts on the street. But lately, I'd rather pull my own espresso shot. I enjoyed Howard Shultz's book Pour Your Heart Into It, but I think the company that he was so passionate about is long, long gone.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 11:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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...should not be put into a can.

Addendum: A friend sent me three links to something else that should not be in a can. The brain reels...and does the jig.

Honestly, I can't even take beer in a can any more. Let alone coffee! Soda, still tolerated...for now!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Now here's somebody with a lot of free time on their hands. From J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a reconstruction of The Battle of Helms Deep and The Battle of Pelennor Fields...using licorice, gummy bears, chocolate pretzels...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Did you know that there is a standard for making tea? Making tea, for all love! more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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When the sun is streaming through the kitchen window and strikes the pot of coffee, it is then you see that the container of black gold that gets your morning started is nothing more than a bunch of muddy-looking water.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 12:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And there you have it! We ended the meal with espresso and a variety of holiday cookies, plus nuts (peanuts, cashews and chestnuts). The beef was amazingly tender, the Puddings did not burst into flames. A success all around!

The only downside was a variety of illnesses that have been in the family. As a result, instead of the large number of guests we expected, we only had...one guest. So we made up plates and sent them back to various sick houses!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In doing this dish, I took several recipes and more or less combined them.

For the aging process, I used a recipe from Alton Brown's Good Eats for Dry-Aged Standing Rib Roast with Sage Jus. I took some cooking hints from the current edition of the Fannie Farmer cookbook (a book we've used so much that the edition we got when we first got married literally fell apart). Most of the recipe, plus the recipe for Yorkshire Pudding (below) was sent by a friend from her copy of A Treasury of Great Recipes by Mary and Vincent Price (!). more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:20 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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This is a dish that I've pretty much developed on my own. It's versatile. I've done it with chicken, I've done it with kielbasi, I done it with both chicken and kielbasi, I've done it with different vegetables.

In this case, I used parsnips, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions (pearl onions).

Peel and slice the parsnips and carrots. Peel and dice the two kinds of potatoes. In today's recipe, the dicing on the potatoes was larger than the parsnips and carrots. For those, I used my newly acquired "wavy knife", a chopper that puts a wave into the vegetable as it cuts it.

The pearl onions were dunked into boiling water for about a minute, then put under cold running water until the cooking process stopped. This causes the outer skin to wrinkle, so it is easily removed. Cut off any remaining root matter, but other wise leave whole.

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. In a roasting pan, mix together the vegetables, olive oil and a variety of spices. I used salt, pepper, rosemary and thyme.

Place in oven for approximately an hour. The dish is done when you can easily thrust a fork through the larger pieces of vegetable.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This one my wife did. When I was growing up, I would eat almost anything except for sweet potatoes and turnips. Seeing that I would only turn away from those two, my parent's didn't really push me to eat them. I now have grown to appreciate both, but as I was busy with many other items, my wife prepared them.

Peel the turnip (we used a yellow turnip). Cube. Put in water and bring to a boil and cook until softened, about 20 minutes.

In the meantime, dice an onion and saute until soft and clear.

Mash the turnip. Mix in the onion along with a little butter. Serve.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another easy to make item. Get fresh string beans. Pick out any that are blemished and discard. Cut off the ends and discard. Slice into several sections, or leave in one piece, your preference.

Steam for about ten minutes until cooked, but still crisp. Serve with butter, salt, pepper.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Since some of the folks that we expected today only ate chicken, I made some roasted chicken. Since the standing rib roast (mostly the roasting pan and rack!) took up so much room in the oven, I ended up cooking the chicken on the grill.

My basic recipe is quite simple: Wash and dry the chicken (in this case, I used a combination of thighs, legs and wings). Lightly coat in oil (I use olive oil). Sprinkle with salt and pepper and any other spices you care (I used crushed rosemary and sage).

Place on grill on low heat, turn every fifteen minutes or so. After about 45 minutes, check to see if done by cutting into thicker pieces. Meat should be white all the way through, the area around the bone should not be red, any juices should be clear.

Easy as cake. I don't know why some people consider chicken such a mystery.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:35 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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...Yorkshire Pudding.

Well, the second test run worked. Six portions of pudding batter, divided into muffin tins, into the oven. I used lard this time, not butter. No smoke, no hissing, no spilled contents. Full baking time was reached and we have lovely looking puddings!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly; Anthony Bourdain (Harper Perennial, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-089922-6).

The review can now be found here.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another new venture was the preparation of some brown stock. Now, I've made chicken stock for years and years and years. It's second nature—roast a bird, when you are done picking over the carcass, you take the carcass and make a broth out of it. The same with a ham bone. Eat a ham, finish the ham, toss the bone into a pot with dried peas and make pea soup.

Earlier in the year I took a lamb bone and made stock out of it...so I thought I'd give it a try from start to finish with the intention of making broth. more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One new entry in this year's feast will be a Yorkshire Pudding. I did a "dry run" a few weeks ago using a recipe that Vincent Price had written (a friend sent me a photocopy). Alas, I used butter (low smoke point) as the fat, there was a lot of smoke, it set off my allergy-induced asthma and I had the worst attack that I've had in a couple of decades (still trying to recover).

So I'm going to do another "dry run" today. There are about a billion recipes for this dish out there, here's one.

I blame Sherlock Holmes and Jack Aubrey. If I hadn't read so many tales about either character that involved food...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The main course for the holiday feast is going to be a standing (beef) rib roast. One thing I'm doing that is new for us is allowing the beef to age. I blame Alton Brown; I saw an episode of Good Eats where he showed how to do this. So now I've got eight pounds of beef in the refrigerator, three thermometers monitoring the situation.

Will this work? Will it taste better. Nothing, other than the Yorkshire Pudding, is making me more nervous about this meal.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've been working hard on our various holiday feasts. We're hosting (maybe) twelve for Christmas, so this past weekend has been a lot of preparation work, cleaning and the like. I started off yesterday by making scones, lots of scones. Some will be for us, some will be for guests, some for co-workers.

The recipe I use was first published in 2000 in Bon Appetit. I found it at The Gunroom site, which has a collection of recipes suggested by list members. I've found it to be a very versatile recipe. For example, one time I dropped the lemon and ginger and added a tablespoon of cocoa powder and chocolate chips. I usually swap the lemon peel for orange peel, add dried or fresh cranberries, use dried blueberries and the like.

The recipe makes about twelve scones, when I use my middle-sized pastry cutter. Yesterday I made six batches, sprinkling each with red, green or blue crystallized sugar for the "seasonal touch". So, I made 72 scones! more...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 06:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I don't watch many food-related shows on television (I don't watch much television, period, but that's the subject of another posting). I think Top Chef is pretty silly (there is so little difference between this and Project Runway that I keep waiting for the crossover show): it appears that the contestants are chosen for egos rather than the reality of the kitchen. And what is so dang hard about pastry courses, anyway?

Most of my culinary viewing is Alton Brown, either through his show Good Eats or the occasional seasonal mini-series, Feasting on Asphalt. Most cooking shows have the host mumbling at you and going through the motions of food preparation. Brown tells you the science behind the cooking, and does it with a lot of humor as well. Good stuff! Asphalt's two seasons were road trips, featuring road food. In the first, he traveled across the US via Route 66. In the second, he traveled along the Mississippi, from south to north. Lots of great looking food in both seasons!

One show that has caught my attention is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, seen (by me) on BBC America. Each episode, Gordon Ramsay tries to turn a failing restaurant around. I am utterly amazed at the trainwrecks that have managed to stay in business long enough to these saving throws.

I'll have to be careful. I may end up getting a digital video recorder just to make sure I don't miss any episodes!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 11:09 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I feel a heart attack coming on just looking at this thing. Pigs in a blanket around a pizza? Bacon, sausage, pizza rolls (on a pizza) and more! Well, at least there are a few vegetables scattered on it...

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 09:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Here at TexasBestGrok, deep dark questions keep us up at night. Well-fried beans made from scratch or canned? Salsa from New York City or local products? What kind of chilis make the best hot sauce? Discuss.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:13 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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