Dancing Spoon

Best Tips: Clean Pans With Wine

2007 Best of...

A Simple Pan Sauce Will Do
All of those crispy bits that remain on the bottom of your pans and pots after sautéing or browning are called the fond, from the French, to mean the base. And on that foundation great sauces are made. The first step is to remove the accumulated fat and then deglaze the hot pan with a little liquid: water, broth, tequila, wine. When the liquid boils, scrape the bits off the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon and they’ll add incredibly concentrated flavors to your soon-to-be sauce. Add a dollop of butter or crème fraîche and you’re in business. Of course, you could get more elaborate by adding minced shallots, or sautéed mushrooms, or capers, or…well that’s another story.

You may be saying to yourself, “Hey, wasn’t I promised a clever tip that would help me solve one of the biggest hindrances to the enjoyment of home-cooked-meals: home-cooked-meal-cleanup and instead I got a discussion of pan sauces?”

Indeed you were, and the clever tip was cleverly interwoven into that discussion of a simple pan sauce. If you decide that, for unknowable reasons, you don’t want a rich and tasty mushroom/shallot sauce with your beautifully pan-seared rib eye steak, a sauce you could make in the short time your steak rests before serving, if you decide you don’t want the sauce, well then, deglaze the pan anyway!

Please refer to the first paragraph where I advised, and I quote, “When the liquid boils, scrape those bits off the bottom of the pan…” You see, now you have a pan without crispy bits sticking to it. When the pan cools, pour out that could-have-been-a-sauce. A simple soap and water washing will finish the clean-up. No soaking, no scrubbing.

But no sauce.

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Best Tips: Bakin' Bacon

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler

Bacon tastes sooooooo good. It’s great with eggs in the morning of course, and crumbled in salads it adds a nice contrasting layer to the greens. Cooked bacon adds flavors to quiches, stews, and soups. (I just made a potato soup and the added bacon took it to a new level.) 

But standing over the stove with those pork slices spitting up at me, feeling guilty about pouring the bacon fat down the drain, and scraping all those bits off the pan and soaking it and washing it had me thinking about the soy alternative again.

And then, that wacky pork lover himself, Alton Brown, showed me the light. Well, actually, he showed me the oven and the joys of bakin’ bacon.

Best Trends: Eat Your City

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler

The Urban SkyFarmer
Want to be a farmer, but don’t want to give up the city life? Well, if the city can’t come to the farm, the farm just might make it to the city soon. We’re not talking balcony gardens here; we’re talking skyscrapers filled with green.

Imagine a 21-story circular greenhouse with rooftop solar panels powering 24-hour grow lights and irrigated by advanced evaporation-capture technology. Dickson Despommier, an environmental science professor at Columbia University, imagined just that. He called it Vertical Farming. Despommier’s 21-story vertical farm could be as productive as 588 acres of land, enough to grow 12 million heads of lettuce a year! (The Vertical Farm Project was established in 2001, and is an on-going activity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City.)

Best Recipes: Roasted Yellowtail

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler 

Pan Roasted Kona Kampachi® (Yellowtail) with Swiss Chard and Garlic Fingerling Potatoes

As part of our series on Sustainable Agriculture we featured Kona Blue Water Farms (see Fish Farm No. Two). Their fish, Kona Kampachi®, a sushi-grade Hawaiian yellowtail, is sustainably raised in the pristine open ocean off the coast of Hawaii.

Like hamachi (yellowtail), Kona Kampachi® is at home at a sushi bar and it’s firm flesh and a high-fat content make it suitable for virtually any cooking method, from gentle steaming to high-heat searing. Its subtly rich, pure flavor complements a variety of different culinary styles, simple and straightforward or spicy and complex.

Chef Roy Yamaguchi
Widely acknowledged as "the father of modern East-West cooking," chef and cookbook author Roy Yamaguchi is the founder and owner of Roy's Restaurants, serving Hawaiian fusion cuisine in 34 locations around the world. The recipes in this series have been provided courtesy of Roy’s Restaurant, Honolulu and Kona Blue Water Farms. You may use yellowtail (amberjack) fish if you are unable to find Kona Kampachi®.

Best Beauty: Skin Spa

2007 Best of...

by Fiona Barrett

A Spa for Your Skin 
If we think of our skin as our body’s protective layer (it is our “outer covering” after all) and as one of the major organs in our body, then what we eat to feed and nourish our skin is critical to creating “beautiful skin.”

Our skin helps regulate our body's temperature by increasing perspiration when our body gets too hot. As the perspiration evaporates it cools our skin, and our bodies. Our skin also helps eliminate toxins from our body. Did you know that over one pound of waste products from our body is excreted through our skin each day!

Best Tips: Spin It Baby

2007 Best of...

by J. Michael Wheeler 

I use my salad spinner for cleaning and drying lettuce, parsley, sage leaves, green beans, brussel sprouts, and any other herb or vegetable that needs cleaning and drying before using.

Here's how to keep lettuce, parsley, and other leafy (but not too delicate) vegetables and herbs fresh and crispy for a long while (in lettuce-years anyway).

The sooner you do this after coming home from the market with that great head of lettuce or bunch of herbs the better. Do it right away. (Sure. How about just soon.)