Nashville Food Blog

If my study is filling up with small appliances, it must be time for a Fine Cooking Test Drive! (Parental guidance warning: Princess Barbies may be harmed later in this post.)

Blendtec blender. Son of Bass-o-matic.

​I'm testing blenders for a a late summer issue of the magazine. Research reveals that most people use a blender for smoothies, so we're stocking up on frozen strawberries and vanilla yogurt. The next-most-common usage is "icy drinks," meaning cucumber-ginger limeade (and margaritas and daiquiris). Limes and Triple Sec.

Then we'll test the darlings by pureeing cream soups.

But let's face it -- all those tests are hardly worthy of a good blender. And especially a really great blender, and our lineup has some classics: the Oster Beehive, Waring, Blendtec.

It was Blendtec who had this fantastic idea for blending. Dancing Princess Barbies! Glowsticks!
Two Wii remotes! Weezer even got involved!

Photo by Susan Mullally

"That's my great-grandmother's antique. [7UP bottle]. It was passed down to Mary Deil to Gussie Johnson to the great-great-granddaughter, me," says Janice Dunlap, a disabled retired cosmetologist in Waco, Texas.

​The things that become antiques -- who can guess? These long-neck 7-Up bottles from the 1960s -- my cousin had one and I was so envious. This woman, part of a moving photo essay by Susan Mullally, has saved it through thick and thin, and it's her most treasure possession because (now brace yourself) it belonged to her great-grandmother.

(I know -- I can't do that math either.)

My oldest culinary possession is a handmade wooden sugar bucket owned by my great-great-great-grandmother. The most treasured is a rolling pin my grandfather made from a cherry tree on his farm. It's heavy, and the surface is impossibly silky, so it rolls beautifully. He also made knives, though they were hard to use and the blades dulled quickly. My mother finally replaced them all, but I have his whetstone.

Mezzaluna, fish-shaped bottle opener from Israel, grandma's sugar bowl -- what piece of kitchen gear is firmly attached to your heart?

Time to heat up the cast iron skillet and work on your cornbread recipe -- then submit it to the National Cornbread Cook-Off as part of the National Cornbread Festival.
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With Lodge, Brown Stoveworks and Martha White all based in Tennessee, and the event held in South Pittsburg, Tenn., it is truly a locavore event. (Well, actually, Martha White is now owned by those Ohio Yankees at Smuckers but works to keep its local identity by promoting cornbread and the Grand Ole Opry.)

Submit an entree recipe that uses Martha White cornbread mix and is cooked in a piece of Lodge cast iron cookware. Ten finalists will compete on April 24 for a $5,000 first prize and a $3,000 Five Star oven. (A word from our sponsor: Five Star's performance is so impressive that this Tennessee product deserves to be far better known. It's built like a tank, heats like a blast furnace, and the pieces mostly come apart and go into the dishwasher.)

​I used to have knives sharpened professionally, but was never happy with the results. My main knives, Wusthof Trident "Culinaire," had razor sharp blades originally. Now, even when I sharpen them myself, the resulting edge must be "sawed" to cut through grapefruit membranes.

The conclusion is that typical paring knives only have five to seven years in them. Christmas was time to replace them.

Did anyone ever sell Cutco knives to you or your mom? Because of the sales method (college students going door to door), you may have assumed it was crappy and cheap cutlery. I did, even when my own hard-working brother sold it. But 20 years later, everyone who bought from him still seems pretty happy with their Cutco knives. That's four times longer than five to seven years.

For Christmas I received a Cutco cheese knife and paring knife. General consensus is that the steel is harder than Wusthof and will hold an edge longer.

​The time right around the new year has a magical quality about it. It's a time of hope and optimism. A time when I'm stuck in the house with all my stuff. Time to get a fresh start on an uncluttered life.

The clutter goes into a box of stuff bound for Goodwill: ill-fitting clothes, untouched toys and gadgets, stray beach towels. Any items unused for more than a year, the rule of thumb goes, should go into the box.

One item that stays every year despite the rules is a set of Syracuse "Champlain" cups and saucers. They belonged to a distant relative I never knew. They take up a lot of room in a crowded cabinet. They never come out of the special padded box, except once, to set the mood for a Fabulous Fifties Bridge Party, with coffee and mints. They have to be washed by hand.

All good reasons to let them go, but look at the light filtering through the china. Look at the thin walls and the delicate pattern. It's like a whole other language, one that nobody speaks any longer.

What possession of yours -- real or psychic -- will survive the new year clean sweep?

Research has begun for a "Test Drive" column I write some months for Fine Cooking magazine. Past topics have included box graters, grill woks, probe thermometers, toaster ovens, juicers and electric skillets.
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Blenders are the next topic. Right now I'm developing tests to compare the machines and working up a list of test candidates.
I've owned the same Oster blender for 21 years, and It's a great piece of equipment. So Oster is on the list, as is KitchenAid, whose products always impress me with their quality. Waring's stylish, powerful blender is on the list.

After those, I'm at a loss. What other blenders should be on the test list?

My mom used to go ballistic when she couldn't find the kitchen shears. They were just too handy for little people to grab when something needed to be snipped. And they were always conveniently located in the same drawer.

My mother-in-law used to complain that her pie servers always went missing. Her theory is that she would take along the pie server with a pie to potluck and someone would notice how useful it was, or, more charitably, assume it was theirs.

Image from surlatable.com

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Now the Wood family meat fork has similarly disappeared. Not to be found. Dumped out the utensil drawer -- the fork is MIA. A meat fork is like a pipe wrench -- you don't need one often, but when you do, nothing else will get the job done. The upshot is that the giant, greasy country ham has to be turned with hands.

As if to compensate for missing meat forks, though, the bottle openers have reproduced. There were two, and now there are four, along with two corkscrews.

What kitchen gear comes and goes in your kitchen, and is it worse during the holidays?

Cookie time, er, I mean Christmas time has rolled around again, the ideal time to bake cookies for the flimsiest of reasons.
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Deciding which five or six cookie recipes are worthy of The Moss-Covered Three-Handled Family Christmas Cookie Tray is half the fun. Last year Food & Wine had a great spread of renowned chef's cookies -- top of the list for this year's tray are Nick Malgieri's Ginger Sandwich cookies with a lemon filling and Jacques Torres' Cherry Nut Mudslides.
During a Farmers Market foray, we ran across Muddy Pond Sorghum, and that means molasses cookies, preferably the ones from the Silver Palate.
But Relish magazine editor Jill Melton had a blog post recently on soft molasses cookies that sound -- and look -- really good.
The plan is to use the dough in our 1970s as-seen-on-TV cookie gun for molasses wreaths, sprinkled with sparkling sugar.
What other gorgeous bites of cookie pulchritude should be on our cookie tray? And what's on your family's holiday sweets platter?

Cookies are an appealing way to slip into the onslaught on the holidays. The lists, the shopping, the decorating, the holiday cards -- all that overwhelming list of stuff comes later. Cookies are a small, sweet way to step through the doorway.

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A weekend hunting and gathering foray turned up Tennessee's own Muddy Pond sorghum. That happened the day after the vintage Ronco cookie gun tumbled out of the cabinet.

A surf of Relish magazine's website turned up editor Jill Melton's great molasses cookie recipe, which she made with part molasses, part sorghum with a lighter result.

At the end of this series of connected incidents, our cookie tray is beginning to take shape.

The same combinations of circumstance and happenstance are working in millions of heads right now, in home kitchens and restaurant kitchens. What influences, what magazines, what cookbooks, family members, dietary considerations -- what's the recipe going into the holiday planning potion wherever you are?

There are lots of things to love about autumn and the approach of winter: college football, changing leaves, hot toddies in front of a roaring fire. But having to put the cover on the charcoal grill is not one of them. Add that to the fact that my family has spent the summer living in a condo with a "no outdoor cooking" covenant and you can see the potential for a sad time around our household.

Enter the SAVU Smoker Bag from www.hotdiggitycajun.com. I first met Jennifer Hunneycutt, the owner of this online food products business during the Gaylord Food and Wine Festival last summer. I was attracted to her booth by the fact that it smelled like bacon. She sells a variety of interesting kitchen and grill accessories, many of which are dedicated to applying smoke flavor to meat, something which makes her my friend.

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Lesson #1 in business school and media studies is: hardware PLUS software. PlayStation and games, TV and DVDs, iPhone and apps. The consuming must continue after the main purchase or you've got no kind of revenue stream.

The lesson extends to plumbing and refrigerators now, too. An astronomical plumbing estimate was discounted if we purchased a gold circle warranty plan that would ensure we were a plumbing priority. (Shouldn't we be anyway, if we chose to call that particular plumber?) And our Kitchen-Aid fridge was fitted with a water filter that has a complex business plan of its own.

The first filter was free -- easy decision. A timer on the fridge changes color when the filter's six months of efficient filtering are over. Handy! And at the same time, a notice arrived in the mail to remind us, along with an order form and a toll-free number. Time to buy that filter!

The filters cost $55 plus shipping, which seemed a little steep, but okay. (If you've examined the tubing of a 10-year-old refrigerator, you'll want to filter the water.) No ignoring the timer, either, because if the filters aren't replaced every six months, the ice maker stops working. It wasn't the money so much as the well-planned effort to separate us from it. It seemed a little forceful.

The decision was made for us when I snapped off a connection removing a filter.
The business plan accounted for this, though, and discount coupons for the filters arrived in the mail. $10 off! Free shipping!

But it was too late. We brought back the Brita pitcher. Funny how simple and old-fashioned it seems.
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This week's dining review of Nuvo Burrito, the gleaming burrito restaurant in East Nashville, praises NB's use of biodregadable cutlery and carryout boxes.

Nuvo Burrito's utensils are made of corn starch and will biodegrade in 30 to 90 days, depending on the conditions of the landfill. The carryout boxes are made with sugar cane fiber, which is biodegradable and compostable.

Co-owner Sean Perry says the company pays three times as much for these products as they would shell out for styrofoam, while the paper cups at Nuvo Burrito cost double what a similar foam product would cost. Such costs inevitably make their way to the consumer, but Nuvo Burrito's prices remain within the normal bounds for casual lunch.

As a consumer, does the shift toward biocompostable/biodegradable/post-consumer/recycled/sustainable/green products come to bear on your dining decisions?

screen shot from Sears.com

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Trendspotting's fun when you've been around for a cycle. Bubble dresses? So 1978. Electric skillets? Are we at granny's in 1968, or at a garage sale?

Some households never stopped using them (check the comments on Amazon.com for a survey). Manufacturers noticed and improved the functions with better heat control, safety features and clear glass lids. And the nonstick coating was improved -- it used to flake off into the food, causing a generation to fret over their cumulative teflon ingestion.

When Carrington married, brides were opting for steel, non-nonstick cookware, or "stick," she called it. Steel "stick" electric skillets are made by All-Clad ($299 -- save all week) and Presto.

Testing them for Fine Cooking magazine involved braising, searing, pancakes and stir-fry, and it all went well. No hovering over the skillet -- it cycles on and off by itself. No open flames. No need to lift the lid to check on the food. Fantastic.

And then: We. Fried. Chicken. I dreaded it -- my fried chicken is so-so, even with an iron skillet -- and now I was facing eight batches of it. To improve my odds, I picked an Alton Brown recipe that bathes the birds in buttermilk, then dunks them in spicy garlicky coating before the flour coating so the seasonings don't flake off -- why did no one think of that before?
For two days, those skillets, blazing three at a time, turned out the best fried chicken I've ever made. Crisp outside, juicy inside, with perfectly sealed, golden crusts. Like Prince's, but with a thinner crust.

Granny was a good cook, for sure. But her reputation for perfect fried chicken came compliments of yesterday's appliance.

At time of publication, an 8-foot stainless steel range hood was going for $2 on the McLemore Auctions site, which is selling off a bunch of restaurant equipment, including sinks, ovens, refrigerators and a pool table.

The auction closes Sept. 8 at 2 p.m.

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Watching nine vending machines, like the one pictured here, auctioned on the block--priced at $2 upon time of publication--it's tempting to raise a paddle. Just think of it: Hook up one of these bad boys in the house, stock it with a range of junk food and healthy snacks and calibrate the prices in some way as to instill a sense of value--or at least caloric value--in my children. A dime for the whole grain treats, five bucks for the empty calories...I see the applications for a public health care system. Paging Dr. Obama....

Anyhow, nine Model GO127 / 137 Electronic Combination Snack and Soda Vending Machines by Genesis Manufacturing, Inc. can be yours come 2 p.m. Sept. 1, when McLemore Auction Company closes the bidding.

Just for fun, let's say you got one, what would you stock in it?

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Killing time at the Goodwill off Eighth Avenue in Berry Hill recently, I window-shopped as if I were setting up a kitchen. That's how we did it back in the day. We bought Waring blenders, Kitchen-Aid mixers, Toastmaster toasters and Fiesta Ware at second-hand stores and estate sales. It was all terribly out of fashion, but it always worked for years.

Don't get me (or anyone at Davis Cookware) started on kitchen gear these days. But our single-sentence advice to you is: whatever mid-price piece of kitchen gear you're pondering, your odds of getting a quality piece of equipment are better if you go on eBay and find one that someone received 20 years ago as a wedding gift and never opened. New stuff is just unpredictable crap, which I've ranted about for ages.

I found two different Cuisinart products on Goodwill's shelves, including a coffee grinder/brew and this blender/food processor that would probably sell for $80 today. Doesn't seem like much, but you don't know what you're getting. At least at Goodwill, you know it works, because someone there fixed it. And when it finally stops, you can feel satisfied that you only paid $14 for it.

This happens to me a lot: I put a sauté pan in the oven in order to continue cooking its contents; I take the pan out of the oven carefully, wearing an oven mitt; I turn around to do something else; I grab the panhandle with my bare hand because I've forgotten that the thing just came out of the oven; I say things that aren't nice.

But what if the pan could tell me it's too hot to pick up? Tara Mullaney has designed a pan that does just that, though not in so many words: When the pan gets too hot to handle, quills made from "the shape-memory alloy Flexinol" (I'm taking this information on good faith) rise up and warn you that this is no place for a bare hand. Mullaney's a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute, and the Porcupine pan is just one of a series of everyday objects that respond to the current state. She's also designed a tea cup that shivers when the tea's gone cold.

(Via Core77.)

Restaurant professionals will chuckle at how much I enjoy cooking on this big galoot of a stove when I have the chance.

It has not one, not two, but three burning hearts, one for the griddle, one for the ovens and one for the burners. It's like a trio of mythic gods smoldering in a giant steel body. Crank it up and it roars to life like a flame-blackened Vulcan. And.I.Am.At.The.Controls. YESSSS! It's the domestic equivalent of driving a Lotus Europa.

In less than an hour, the big griddle on this ancient fixture cranked 72 golden corn cakes. Five others had to be trashed, though, because of a wicked hot spot in the griddle's center. Also, there are no indicators on the dials. You can only discern the relative temperature at which you're cooking.

To do that, you bend over and look into the flaming heart of the monster while turning the dial from high to low and back. You want medium, you sort of set it halfway. The griddle got hotter and hotter over the hour, so we cranked it down and down.

If you food service professionals can stop laughing long enough, tell me, are all food service rigs like this? Or is this one particularly eccentric?

Do you like golf? Do you love cooking with premium equipment? Do you like hobbing your nob with celebrity chefs?

Then Mississippi's Viking Classic Golf Tournament may be just the thing for you. Held from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1 at the Annandale Golf Club in Madison, MS, the Viking Classic is an official PGA Tour event featuring some of the top professional golfers from around the world. More than other tournament underwriters, who seek to spotlight their products by parking a Buick in the middle of a sand trap or erecting a giant Electrolux in the public parking lot, Viking Corp. has actually won awards from the PGA for its efforts to incorporate their brand into the tournament.

That's where foodies can benefit. Last year's tournament featured cooking demonstrations by Celebrichefs Guy Fieri, Cat Cora and John Besh, plus an assortment of up-and-coming regional culinary artists. This year promises another exciting offering.

For the rest of today, Viking is offering a 10 percent discount on any tickets purchased on www.vikingclassic.com if you use the code "june09." Packages range from a $20 daily ticket to the tourney to a $250 Master Chef Package which includes two season badges (you'll need steenkin' badges), all sorts of Viking swag, your choice of a Viking Professional Blender or Hand Blender and two VIP seats at a Celebrity Chef cooking demonstration. Heck, the blender alone is worth 150 bucks.

So if you're just now realizing that you came up a little bit short on that Father's Day present, surprise the old guy with a trip to see the pros knock it a mile and the masters of the kitchen do their thing. It's not but a 5 to 6 hour drive via I-40 with a very easy possible Tunica detour for you and dear old Dad to drop some change in a penny slot. Or if Dad's not a gambler and you've got extra time to kill, the course is about five miles from the Natchez Trace Parkway. You can have breakfast at the Loveless Cafe and be in Madison, MS in time for the Early Bird dinner special.

The best news is that if you ever get lost driving anywhere in Mississippi, you can just stop your car, stand on the bumper and see the next town from there.

Nikon Coolpix

An exposure from the new camera, shot in a dark room by candlelight

The quality of photos from cellular telephone cameras is surprisingly good, as I've learned over the last couple of months after the compact family Olympus up and died. Still, cell phone pictures were just a stop-gap measure, and for my birthday, Big Fella gift-wrapped a mighty little Nikon Coolpix, Nearly New In Box, bought from a gearhead upgrading to more video capacity.

The owner's manual is 117 pages long, and I am working my way through it. So far it seems that the camera can do everything but order pizza.

Pizza shortcomings aside, the Nikon does so much more than I need, but I hope to become worthy of it. My first big achievement was to set the default mode to close-up shots in dark rooms without flash. In other words, plated food inside dim restaurants. There's also a mode called Best Shot Selector. In BSS mode, the camera continues to shoot so long as the shutter button is depressed, up to 10 exposures, then selects the best one based on number or density of pixels. I KNOW  -- IT'S PRACTICALLY EINSTEIN!

The Nikon is half the size of the deceased Olympus and one-quarter the size of the big Canon, which we call The Tank. The Tank takes great photos, but is so big that it causes anxiety in restaurant proprietors and made me look like a tourist.
The Nikon and I are in honeymoon phase, and I'm still learning about it. If you have tips, experience or wisdom (with the Nikon, I mean) pass them on.

For the past month a militia of well-armed Visigoths has been carrying out a systematic demolition of most of the innards of our 1920's Craftsman bungalow in Hillsboro Village. During the great deluge of May of Aught-Niner, it was certainly better to work inside rather than outside, so their efficiency has been remarkable.

We've now reached the point where there's really nothing else left to rip out and throw in the Dumpster. The structural planning and interior design elements have been meticulously planned with a careful eye toward historical appropriateness. Until we reached the kitchen.

Nowadays, nobody wants an actual icebox and an authentic coal stove anymore, so my girlfriend and I find ourselves buried under a pile of appliance catalogs filled with devices that Rosie the Robot Maid would be very comfortable using to fix George Jetson a nice meal. But I think we all know what happened when Jane tried to use the Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle. What? We don't all remember that? Only me? OK, trust me when I tell you that it went badly when an inexperienced cook found herself confronted with too much technology in the kitchen.

Which is where we find ourselves now. Cooktops, rangetops, Advantium nuclear 220 volt multipurpose ovens, infrared grills, griddles and deep-fryers embedded in the counter, vents, retractable downdrafts. It's a bit overwhelming. That's before the arguments, er, discussions begin about brand names. Viking vs. Wolf vs. Five Star vs. Kitchenaid vs. GE (Monogram AND Profile) vs. Sub-Zero vs. Kenmore. There are no winners in an appliance war. I think the new Christian Bale vehicle, Terminator: Salvation will prove that out.

So what do you think, Bitesters? I'm not expecting clarity or certainty, but what are your recommendations for a couple who likes to work in the kitchen and isn't afraid to spend a few extra bucks for quality? Because what I really need is a few more things to consider while I hook this sucking nozzle up to my checking account.

Of course, the main purpose of this posting is to use the above headline, and for that I almost apologize. Still, I recently pulled my mandoline out from behind the waffle iron and ice cream maker--I don't know how it got lost in the cabinet-cave of neglected wedding gift appliances--and sliced up some cucumbers. It took about .25 seconds to shave the cuke down to a nub--approximately the same amount of time it took Google to search the pun "Mandoline Reign," which, yes, has been used, and usually in reference to something Ron Popeil made.

I added some olive oil, apple cider vinegar and kosher salt to the cucumber disks, and voilà: a salad to make my family utter the blessed words "Mommy, you are a genius."

Something about slicing things really thin makes them great. I have this same epiphany every time I come across a salad of thinly shaved apples and fennel or a pile of paper-thin pickled ginger. Or potatoes chips.

In fact, after the cucumber triumph, I mandolined some red potatoes that I had on hand and tried to deep-fry them. This did not work. They sizzled for, like, eight minutes in peanut oil (Paula Deen recommends two to three minutes for homemade potato chips) and were still flaccid. I researched the matter and learned that red potatoes are too sugary to deep fry with success. So I'll stick with sweet potatoes, which work like a charm. Huh?

In any case, what are some other good uses for a mandoline?