Why did that take so long part2: Immersion Blender.

I met a new foodie friend, and when I told her, "OK, you have to get a pressure cooker, really it will change your life" She said to me, "OK, but do you have an immersion blender? No? Well you have to get one, because it will change you life." In Part 2 of, Why Did That Take So Long? Scott and Linda get an immersion blender. The immersion blender is one of those hand-held "stalk" blenders that look a little like the paint mixer that professional painters use. So far we've discovered three main uses, and they are big.

1) Many soups need to be blended or pureed at the end. Often the recipe says, puree in batches in a blender or food processor. We've done this several times, and after a while we just gave up unless the recipe looked too good to pass up. The problem is that you're ladling hot soup into the food processor, which doesn't hold that much before the soup goes above the blade shaft and starts to ooze out underneath the bowl. There are always spills and it takes many batches to get a good Puree. The Blender holds more and doesn't ooze, but instead, it can blow the lid off and spew hot soup (usually in some intense color) in all directions. Drum-roll..... enter the immersion blender. Right in the cooking pot you insert the blender to the bottom and turn it on. Because of the way the blades rotate, the blender pulls itself to the bottom, where it purees. If there are chunky ingredients you can slowly raise and lower the blender to get the bigger chunks. There is so much more control that you can do the thing where you puree say 1/3 or 1/2 the soup, to leave the integrity of the ingredients, while building a rich broth with the puree. Now we're talking, and a whole new set of great recipes are open to us.   This post will be followed by the cooking gadget 1-2 punch "Saturday Morning Black Bean Soup" cooked in the pressure cooker, and then 1/3 pureed with the immersion blender. Awesome.

2) Vinaigrettes: Many sound great, but to get a really nice emulsification you want to blend in the food processor or blender. Overkill for just a little vinaigrette. Most immersion blenders come with a beaker shaped cup that works perfectly for making vinaigrettes and dressings/marinades. Clean-up is simple and the results are excellent.

3) Smoothies. The beaker for ours (we got the red KitchenAid pictured here) is large enough to make smoothies for two. We usually make them out of frozen fruit, yogurt, milk and sometimes some protein shake powder. The ability to raise and lower the blender blades in the tumbler makes the process much more predictable than in a blender. My only caveat is that the blades are rather thin, so if I'm going to use ice in the smoothy, I think I'll crack it a little bit, rather than smashing the blades down on an intact ice-cube.

The stalk clicks off of the motor assembly and can be dishwasher washed, or easily hand cleaned (much easier than either a food processor bowl and blade, or the blender). Ours came with a food processor bowl that is allegedly good for small batches of salsa etc and I bet that's true, we just haven't tried it.

DRI-Moment: get an immersion blender!

Scott and Linda get a pressure cooker.

So why did that take so long? We invited Shilesh and Nupur over to teach us how to make Southern Indian food (more on that later, honest) and Nupur brought her pressure cooker to make the Dahl for Sahmbar. Very cool if you're a foody. The thing builds up pressure, and releases it in aloud rush. More than that, the Dahl is cooked perfectly in 10 or so minutes. Now if you've cooked Dahl (a cross between beans and lentils) before you know that it's impossible to cook it that quickly, and if you do cook it in a hurry, it is always grainy and disappointing. Not so with a pressure cooker. So we got this one (more to come).

It is a Kuhn Rikon 3.75Qt. model (Kuhn Rikon is the stylish pressure cooker that gadget geeks like me have to get, and I'm sure that just about any pressure cooker will have similar benefits. But, it is beautiful, no? (And it does not shoot loud burst of steam like Nupur's!)

The Second picture show the pressure cooker open, with a black-eyed pea recipe that we made (and cooked to perfection in 15 minutes).


Why are pressure cookers so great?
1) They use lots less energy. You bring the water up to a boil and put the lid on. The pressure builds (a little indicator in the top rises to tell you that its up to pressure) in about a minute, and then you turn the pot to the lowest setting to maintain that pressure. Now, you are in fact boiling the bejeezus out of what's inside but you have the burner set so low that it wouldn't even make a conventional pot simmer.
2) By cooking under pressure, you force the flavor into whatever you're cooking, so not only is the food done more quickly, but it is more tasty.
3) And this is counterintuitive, while you are cooking under hight heat, with pressure that forces flavor into the food, the cooking is much more gently than a full boil would be. Because of this ingredients maintain their integrity much better than they would under conventional boiling/simmering. This made a huge difference in the Back-Eyed pea recipe, where we added some Veggie-chipotle "sausage." Veggie sausages don't have a casing, so veggie sausage can just disintegrate in chilis, and other dishes that we cook by slow simmering. Not so in the pressure cooker. When we took off the lid, the beans were soft throughout, but still had a nice snap to the skin, and the veggie sausages were completely intact. Their chipotle flavor had been forced into the beans in a way that usually only happens after you've put a dish like this away over night, and reheated the following day.

Here's the DRI moment... GET A PRESSURE COOKER!!

If you are a Vegetarian or Eco Conscious, it is a no-brainer. If you eat meat, all I can say is, most of the recipes in the cookbook that comes with the cooker are for some really tasty looking chicken and beef dishes where you are either quick roasting, or making a stew. My guess is that the meat is cooked, and juicy, and absorbs the flavors just like beans and lentils.

We continue to experiment, and every time we need to boil potatoes, or beats (as we did the other night) we do it in far less time than boiling by PCing it. If you've ever wondered, just do it. I can't belive it took us this long.

Better Than Boullion

Master ingredient. Better Than Boullion Organic Vegetable broth base is a master ingredient for making stocks and sauces. It is not just salt, which most bullion is. It is a smooth paste in a jar, so it can be stored in the fridge, and you can spoon out as much or as little as you want to make a sauce. A good example of this is to dissolve 1/2 teaspoon in 1/2 cup of white wine, to add to foil wrapped fish.  It adds some moisture and a really nice flavor. If you've got a saute that's a little dry and not as tasty as it could be, just put a little in a tea cup with a little water, or wine, and add to the pan.  We use it all the time. Get some, put it in the fridge, and add a dash here and there for flavor. It's great!

Tip: Keeping Mashed Potatoes Warm

I love this tip, it allows me to make the mashed potatoes early, and keep them warm, without having keep such close eye so they don't scorch. It also doesn't make an extra dish to wash. You'll need two saucepans, one that will fit inside the other. Then, once you've made the mashers (in the smaller saucepan) to your preferred consistency, simply make an ad-hoc double boiler, by filling the larger saucepan with hot water, placing the smaller into it until the water comes up the sides, and bringing it to a boil, leaving the lid on the smaller pot (it have the lid off in the picture because it looks better, I put it back on later). It works great, keeping the potatoes at a nice temperature, and when you're done, just dump out the water, and put the larger saucepan back! Simple, why did it take so long to learn this one..

Fresh ground white pepper?

The Crab and Hearts of Palm Salad recipe calls for fresh ground white pepper. Fresh ground WHITE pepper? Of course, as a foodie we have pepper grinders with both black and green pepper. But for white pepper, which is a key ingredient in my home-fry recipe, I've always used that same old dusty can of Durkee white pepper. The 28 grams has lasted me a long time. So when this recipe called for fresh ground white pepper, and we didn't have another grinder to dedicate to a new kind of peppercorn, I just told Linda, "get me a fresh can, I must almost be out."
And then Linda came home with this. From Frontier Ppices, a bottle of organic white peppercorns, with a built-in grinder. The grinder even has two settings, fine and course. The fine is not as fine as the Durkee variety, but it's fresh and we don't have to buy a third pepper grinder. Now THAT is an excellent idea.

The Super 88

I love asian markets. The only problem is that I only understand what about 20% of the items really are. The more "authentic" the bigger the problem, since the labels have little or no english on them. While searching for dried anchovies for Andy J's Dashi recipe posted here, I remembered that the Super 88 is just down the street from Linda's studion in Boston's South end. So I figured I'd check it out.

We'd never visited after all this time in Boston, and boy was that ever a mistake. First, the store is HUGE, with aisle-upon-aisle of great looking stuff. Clean and bright, the produce is fresh, and their fish/seafood section has to be seen to be believed. Huge tanks with live fish swimming around, whole fish and filets/steaks laid out on ice, and bins of crabs and prawns etc etc. I walked down the first aisle and found 5 different kinds of dried anchovies. How did I know? Because everything in the store has a tag on the shelf that says in english, what it is. Small thing? No, HUGE thing! Now I know what all that fascinating stuff is. I picked out my dried anchovies, and got a cart. This was going to take a while.

The prices are great, and I'd be surpirsed if there's ever anything in a recipe that I couldn't find here. A definite find (though it's not like it was hidden).

Check them out at Super88Market.com