Dancing Spoon

Planning Thanksgiving Dinner

Planning Holiday

by J. Michael Wheeler
Thanksgiving Tips: Game Plan
There’s no question about it, for me, Thanksgiving is absolutely the best holiday: it’s all about getting together with friends and family and eating a great meal. No Christmas present stresses or New Year’s Eve anxiety. Cook a lot of good food and share it with friends and family. One of my favorite Thanksgivings was when I was in college in San Diego and I organized an “Orphan’s Thanksgiving” for my fellow college friends who wouldn’t be traveling home for the holiday. It was a bit less than traditional, but the spirit certainly was there.

Of course, for the host, Thanksgiving might not be all that stress-free. Still-frozen turkeys, wallpaper-paste gravies, and well, we’ve all got our stories (we’d love to yours). So in the interest of everyone enjoying our favorite holiday, we’re sharing with you some tips for a great Thanksgiving. We’ll start out with an overall game plan that we call, cleverly, T-Day Game Plan.

Break it Down
Sit down with paper and pen well before your first trip to the grocery store (yes, you’ll shop in phases) and starting with the menu, break the T-Day undertakings into steps. This will give you a bird’s eye view (couldn’t resist that one) of what needs to be done and when. As you accomplish each task you can check it off, giving you a measure of your progress, as well as what tasks remain to be done. Learn to love Lists.

Big Helpful Tip: Organize all of the recipes you plan to use ahead of time. Photocopy each recipe from your cookbook, recipe card, or torn out newspaper article and create your own personal T-Day Cookbook for that meal. With all of your recipes together, in one place, you won’t have to flip through several books and different pages.

How Hot Is that Grill?

Basics Grilling

by J. Michael Wheeler
Heat & Fuel
Cooking on an open fire goes all the way back to prehistoric Barbecue-Man. And while he probably wasn't clutching a can of Budweiser in one hand and a can of charcoal starter in the other, the basics of cooking over an open fire remain the same. And it doesn't get more basic than burning stuff and how hot it needs to get.

If you use a gas grill for your outdoor cooking your selection of fuels is, well, gas. But for those of us who prefer to cook on real fire, there are more choices. Here are some of them:

Lump Charcoal Usually made from softwood. It comes in a variety of sizes. Easy to light, but quick burning.

Charcoal Briquettes Slow burning, easy to find. Some claim they give food an unpleasant taste.

Self-igniting Charcoal Briquettes or lump charcoal treated with a flammable substance. Easy to light. Let all of that flammable substance burn away before cooking.

Wood Hardwoods like oak and olive burn slowly and the aromatic smoke imparts a great taste to the food. Wood fires must be tended carefully to keep an even and steady heat.

How Hot is Hot Enough?
"Heat your grill to medium-high and place the . . ." How do you determine the temperature of your grill? While some grills have built-in temperature gauges, and there are even infrared heat seekers to tell you how hot your grill is, you've got a couple of built-in thermometers yourself: your hands.

Place your hand, palm facing down, just above the grill where you'll be cooking. (Please don't wear long, loose-fitting clothing while grilling.) Without being too macho about it, hold your hand over that spot and count how many seconds it takes before you say "ouch" and have to take your hand away from the grill.

Here's a chart to help you determine your grill's temperature. If you can hold your hand above the grill for this long, the grill is that hot:

· Two seconds is high heat
· Three seconds is medium-high heat
· Four seconds is medium heat
· Five seconds is medium-low heat
· Six seconds is low heat
· Seven seconds or more means you have time to open another beer

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Cooking with Photoshop

Beyond Above &

by J. Michael Wheeler
Boot Up the Oven
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m both a foodie and a bit of a geek. Cooking with Photoshop...I can virtually smell it now! Enjoy.

Adobe Photoshop Cook from Lait Noir on Vimeo.

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Eat Your (Winter) Salad

Tips Tasty

by Anna Tourkakis
Eat Your (Winter) Salad
As temperatures remain in the chill zone for several more weeks, salads may not be on the menu. Instead soups, casseroles, and long braised stews are cooking. These typical winter comforts can be high in ‘energy density’ better known as calories. Unless you shovel all the snow in your street, that energy may be stored as fat on your body that will have to be ‘run off’ in the spring. One way to prevent storage of those sticky calories is to add a tasty light salad to a meal.

Salads can vary from just leafy greens to complete meals.

A green salad contains only green leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, arugula, mesculin, etc.). Simple salads have one main ingredient, raw or boiled, such as a tomato salad or a potato salad. When salads include grilled or roasted ingredients, they are referred to as warm salads. A complete meal salad offers elements typically expected in an entrée, such as a protein and a starch.

Lettuce is often the foundation of salads and you can usually find several varieties at your store. Here’s a Lettuce Rundown:

• Iceberg lettuce stays crispy after being cut or prepared.
• Bibb lettuce, also known as Boston lettuce, has pliable tender leaves with a velvety texture.
• Romaine lettuce has a strong green flavor and coarse deep green straight leaves.
• Leaf lettuce, red or green color is mild in flavor with crisp fluffy leaf edges.
• Mesculin is a mixture of baby greens.
• Arugula has a strong peppery taste and strong flavor, best used as an addition.

 A drizzle of dressing made with good quality oil and vinegar, herbs and spices embellishes salads’ unique flavors, textures and goodness. So, balance those wintry comfort foods with a light and refreshing salad.

For a great winter-time salad check out my Field of Greens with Black Grapes and Farmers Cheese!

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Anna Q. Tourkakis, DTR, MPA is a nutritional counselor. She teaches nutrition to food service professionals at North Shore Community College and does cooking demonstrations and healthy eating related presentations. Anna Q. Tourkakis, DTR, MPA is a nutritional counselor. She teaches nutrition to food service professionals at North Shore Community College and does cooking demonstrations and healthy eating related presentations.

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Keep Veggies Colorful

Tips Tasty

by Anna Tourkakis
How to Keep Color, Texture, and Nutrients in Cooked Vegetables
Fresh vegetables are the foundation of both nutrition and exceptional meals. They provide our bodies with valuable vitamins and minerals and add color and texture to our meals. Bright beautiful greens, reds, oranges, purples, and yellows are a taste-treat for the eyes and their crunchy texture adds interest to every bite. The basic guidelines for cooking vegetables are: quick cooking, minimum water, and use of a lid. These simple guides will help retain color, texture, and nutrients.

The common methods for cooking vegetables, boiling, steaming, stir-frying and sautéing are all suitable for quick cooking. When boiling vegetables the first questions are always, “how much water to use,” and “should I cover the pot?” Vegetables are added to just enough boiling water to cover them. Cook them to fork-tender. The use of a lid depends on the flavor of the vegetables. Mild flavored vegetables such as carrots, corn, winter squash and potatoes should be cooked with the lid on. Stronger flavored vegetables such as green beans, broccoli and zucchini are best cooked without a lid which allows volatile compounds to escape. These last veggies should be cooked in water one-half to one inch above the vegetables. This dilutes the volatile compounds and prevents discoloration. 

In steaming, stir-frying and sautéing methods, vegetables should be cut to a uniform small size for quick, even cooking. Typically, stir-fry vegetables are cut into thin strips. Sautéing is suitable for tender or thinly sliced vegetables. Steaming is best for retaining water soluble vitamins regardless of a longer cooking time. 

These basic procedures ensure bright colored and crunchy textured vegetables with its many nutrients retained.

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Anna Q. Tourkakis, DTR, MPA is a nutritional counselor. She teaches nutrition to food service professionals at North Shore Community College and does cooking demonstrations and healthy eating related presentations. Anna Q. Tourkakis, DTR, MPA is a nutritional counselor. She teaches nutrition to food service professionals at North Shore Community College and does cooking demonstrations and healthy eating related presentations.

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How to Smoke Cheese

Cheese Smokin'

by J. Michael Wheeler
How to Smoke Cheese
Don, a reader of Dancing Spoon, was browsing through Foodie’s Emporium (our online store) in the Grilling category when he came across EZ Smoke, our natural wood chip smoker in a can. He asked:

Can you cold smoke with ez smoker. I want to smoke cheese. Thanks Don

Yes, Don, you can. And it’s a simple process.

Just about any kind of cheese can be smoked. Most commonly known are smoked provolones, mozzarellas, cheddars, and goudas, but goat cheeses and even blue cheeses can be deliciously smoked. Because of it’s low melting temperature, cheese must be smoked using the cold smoked technique. Cold smoking takes place at temperatures of 90 degrees or less. Here's how to smoke cheese:

1. After selecting your cheeses (at least 8 oz each) for smoking, unwrap them and set on aluminum pans. Leave at room temperature for 1-2 hours. The cheese will form a slight skin that will protect it from melting while allowing the smoke to penetrate. 

2. When your cheese has set, prepare a grill with a lid. Place 3-4 pieces of charcoal on one side of the grill and light them. The goal is to produce smoke, but not heat. If you have a small grill you may need to use less charcoal at the onset and add a piece of charcoal if you want to smoke the cheese longer. Leave lid off initially, to prevent heat build up.

3. Select one of our EZ Smoke BBQ wood flavors, Apple, Mesquite, Pecan or Hickory. When the coals are hot, peel off the can’s seal and place on top of the coals. (You don’t need to soak the EZ Smoke chips.)

4. Place the aluminum pans on your grill on the opposite side of the charcoal and close the lid. Open the top and side vents to allow the smoke to circulate.

5. Check the cheeses after about a half hour to make sure they are not melting, and then every 15 to 20 minutes to taste the cheese. Remove the cheese when they have absorbed the smoky flavor you desire.

6. Remove the cheeses, let them cool, and enjoy. Store as you normally would.

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Peel off the seal and put the flavor into your meal with EZ Smoke BBQ! Four varieties of natural wood chips flavors to give your meats, poultry, fish or vegetables a unique smoky taste with no mess or fuss. Re-usable up to 3 times. Quick and easy! No soaking, no mess, no flying ash. Produces natural wood smoke in about 2 minutes. One can of EZ Smoke produces the same amount of smoking time as a 180 cubic inch bag of chips. Easy to use! Simply remove the label, place can on coals or lava rocks, and within minutes it begins to smoke. Grill as you normally would. Use on gas or charcoal grills.

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Stay Sharp: How to Use a Steel

Tips Kitchen

 by J. Michael Wheeler
How to Keep Your Knives Sharp
Did you ever notice that the chefs in their tall white toques at the banquets, brunches, and museum openings you’re always going to, seem to sharpen their knives a lot? They’ve got a knife in one hand and a sharpening steel (pictured here) in the other. But while they may be making their knives sharper using the sharpening steel, they’re not really sharpening their knives!

“Picky, picky, picky,” you say. Well, yes, but let me make a point. (Sorry.) To actually sharpen a knife you need to use a knife sharpening tool, an electric sharpener, or traditionally, a sharpening stone. Whichever tool you use, it reshapes the knife’s cutting edge by grinding away tiny amounts of the blade. If you’ve carefully sharpened the blade at a 20 degree angle, you’ve got a sharp knife.

But while your knife may be sharp, the edge of your knife will be left rough and uneven. A sharpening steel aligns the blade and tiny burrs. And just a few minutes of slicing can knock your knife’s delicate edge out of alignment, and even microscopically bend or fold the edge. Time, again, for the sharpening steel.

Knife designer Adam Simha has these tips on maintaining your knife’s sharpness by using a sharpening steel. And please, be careful.

Easier Grilling

Bites Quick

Grilling Tips
Time to uncover the grill, find the super-long tongs, and fill the beer tub with ice, beer, and maybe a nice Spanish Albarino: it's grilling season. And while we can all get over-the-top with complicated, time-consuming preparations and fussy ingredients, sometimes keep it simple is just the way to go.

Marcia Kiesel, in this month's Food and Wine (June '08), has four great tips to bring down the heat on grilling work:

Grill thin cuts of marinated meat. Marinating starts the cooking process for because the meat is so thin, it cooks quickly.

Grill foods that don’t need lots of testing. It’s easy to know when most shellfish is done: Shrimp curl and turn pink, and clams open.

Grill foods that are hard to under- or overcook. Salmon is fabulous served rare or medium.

Grill all the components of a dish at the same time. Plan all the ingredients in a meal the cook over the same temperature, so they can be grilled simultaneously.

To subscribe to  Food & Wine click here.

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Video: Chef's Scrambled Eggs

Cooks A Chef

Gordon Ramsey Scrambled Eggs Breakfast
Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity chef, has been awarded a total of twelve Michelin stars, he holds the record for swearing more times in a single hour of prime-time television than anyone in the history of British broadcasting, and is the host of FOX's Hell's Kitchen. But in this video you see a different side of the chef: making scrambled eggs at home. It is a tasty view.

Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food
Throw out the frozen dinners and takeout menus. Who better to show readers how to cook real food, real fast and make it really tasty than Gordon Ramsey, three-star chef and TV celebrity? Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food includes over 100 delicious recipes that are super-fast and easy to prepare.  The menus provided take 30-45 minutes from start to finish, each with a timing plan. There’s also advice on essential ingredients to keep in stock for speedy cooking, plus lots of great ideas for shortcuts.

For more details or to buy click here.

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Spin It Again, Baby

Techniques Tips and

by J. Michael Wheeler 

As I found to be equally true with my cell phone, there are a finite number of times that you can drop the top of an OXO Salad Spinner on a hard surface. Even a product of such high quality as the OXO Salad Spinner has its limits. (My cell phone had its limits too, but not quite as high.) For me, a salad spinner is a requirement of my kitchen: its uses go beyond merely making lettuce dizzy.

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. (The How To Use a Salad Spinner follows) So I really needed a new salad spinner.