The perfect eating container for leftovers

What's your container of choice for pretty much anything?

Plates are OK, but they don't handle lots of more liquidy or soupy things. Plus if there is a sauce over a starch (spaghetti or beef stroganoff or chicken cacciatore), then a plate leaves a bunch of sauce behind.

A bowl is ok, but when you've microwaved something to get it nice and hot, say tomato soup, it can be hard to handle. Plus most bowls aren't big enough on the bottom to hold a large piece of stuff, say meatloaf over potatoes with some vegetables on the side.

My choice: a large pyrex measuring cup. One that measures 4 cups. It's like a bowl with a handle. It's glass so you can see the food and can microwave or even bake it. It's Pyrex so you can thermally shock it. The only downside is these are a big expensive. Good thing my wife has no interest in using the one and only one we have.

Coffee and dates, who knew?

I like dates a lot (the fruit, obviously, otherwise I would have said "I like going on ..."). My favorite is a big plump juicy medjool. They are great solo, in salads, in baked goods. They are a super healthy sweetner. And given how sweet they are, the have fewer calories than you might expect. Where else could I use them, especially as Costco burdened me with 2 lbs of medjools?

Coffee!

They have a gentle earthiness along with a complex sugar taste which goes great with black coffee. And hence my culinary discovery. Remember you read it here first. Except that it was terrible. So terrible, I had to dump the cup.

The true poached egg part II

I've been making poached eggs for 4 months now. And some of what I thought previously was a bunch of wrongness. After much experimentation, here's my drill now.

1. Boil some water in a small pan. Don't over fill the pan. My goal is to barely cover the egg(s). If the water is too high, the egg falls farther in the water and separates more.
   
2. Cut the heat off or very low, before adding the eggs and wait if necessary. The water should be still when adding the egg(s). In particular, not boiling and do not swirl the water.
   
3. Crack the egg in a small , thin rimmed bowl. I use a chinese rice bowl, for example.
4. Put the lip of the bowl almost to the top of the water and gently dump the egg in. It should stay largely in one main blob.
5. Each egg you add will lower the water temperature, so keep track of the order they have been added.
6. Once all eggs have been added, turn back on the heat to get bubbles forming but not roiling.
7. Use the boiling water to heat up some bowls to hold the finished eggs. I use the same bowls I broke the raw eggs into earlier, after rinsing them out the hot poaching water.
8. After the whites look like they have solidified, but the yolks still look "too soft" remove the eggs with a slotted spoon. The first egges in can be remove a good bit before the final eggs, if you've made 3 or more eggs.
9. The eggs will continue to cook in their own residue heat in the heated bowls.
10. Enjoy with salt, pepper and/or some butter. And toast.

I like my yolks still runny. Done right, they rival the best softboiled egg and it's a lot less work.

The longevity of certain dairy

I need to start a new tact on this blog. Let's face it I'm not adding new recipes with any regularity. But that doesn't mean I'm not cooking or thinking about food. So I'm retooling this blog to be about food, but not necessarily cooking it.

So let's venture into an area that few talk about. Spoilage. Or really the lack there of. I've discovered that certain dairy items keep much longer than you or the manufacturer might believe.

Let's start with a few easy ones. Unopened sour cream or unopened yogurt basically keep for 3-7 months which for dairy is "forever." If we have unopened sour cream in the fridge, I won't buy another one, no matter how old it is, because it is still good to me (that's shorthand for my opinion not necessarily my wife's). Once opened though, all bets are off. With sour cream you've got maybe a month. Yogurt not even that.

More interesting is milk. The less fat it has, the longer it keeps. Half and half is iffy. I've had many a carton go bad shortly after the expiration or even before the expiration. Ironically, the half and half carton that stays good the longest is also in the biggest. It is from from Costco, which in Norther California sells stuff from Producers Dairy. This stuff stays good through the whole carton about 40% of the time which is amazing given it takes 2-3 weeks to use up. About a 1/3 of the time we get a bad carton, which goes bad by the mid point, but that's how tricky half and half is in general. In order, I buy from Costco, Trader Joes and then Safeway and then Albertsons. The Costco item is not ultra-pasteurized either, so it is by far my favorite half and half and it ss the cheapest to boot.

Whole milk keeps perhaps two weeks past its expiration if unopened. The next grade, 2% low fat is good for 2-3 weeks. And while I don't drink non-fat, I won't hesitate to open a carton of 1% low-fat that is a month past its expiration, with reasonable expectations it is still good.

There is a routine I use in testing milk. First, give it a good sniff. Next, optionally, is have someone else smell it, say your spouse. You may get a mild rejection with some commentary like "No! Why do you always ask me to smell rotten food?" Next, pour out a small cup and walk over to the kitchen sink, lean over it, and taste a small bit. Be prepared to spew it out, immediately. In particular, do not let any of it get to the back of your mouth where some of it might be swallowed involuntarily. Swish it around, tasting it. Then spit most of it out, even if it seems reasonable. Swallow what remains. And now you can make an informed judgement.

In fact, I opened a carton that was almost three months past its expiration a week ago, and did the routine as I thought it might still be good. (This was Trader Joe's 1% and the expiration date was Dec 02. This was done in the last week of Feb.) It all seemed OK, until the final swallow, where I picked up the odd flavor of something yogurt-esque. It was not rotten, but it wasn't fresh. I reluctantly poured it over my cereal. And after one spoonful, I had to toss the whole thing. This was not a good yogurt taste.

And finally I would be remiss to not mention the piece of manchego cheese I found yesterday. I think it was 2 months old. It had some grey/white mold growing on it. I was desperate for something to cleanse my palate to help me enjoy the red wine I was having. So I cut off a piece and cut/scraped off the mold. This was a bit challenging as the cheese had hardened (aka dried out), and was rock hard in places. I finally got my fully clean piece, and it was like a Parmesan now both in texture and in flavor. Tasty.

End note, after a night out on the counter, the mold had turned black. Two months of cold and all it could muster was a light grey. I guess it was just waiting for the right growing conditions. And yes, this is how they teach you not to end a piece of writing.