Dancing Spoon

Thanksgiving Game Plan

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.

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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Seafood Summit 2010: Paris

Seafood Sustainable

by J. Michael Wheeler
Seafood Summit 2010:
Challenging Assumptions in a Changing World
I can't think of a better place to challenge assumptions in a changing world than Paris. The Seafood Summit 2010, is to be held in Paris, France, from January 31 - February 2, 2010. The Seafood Choices Alliance explains:

Seafood Summit brings together global representatives from the seafood industry and conservation community for in-depth discussions, presentations and networking with the goal of making the seafood marketplace environmentally, socially and economically sustainable.

While many industry events offer companies networking opportunities to showcase their products and services, Seafood Summit is different. It is the only venue that connects large and small companies from a diverse array of industries with leaders from the conservation community to bridge the gap between the latest science and the reality of the seafood marketplace. Summit attendees include international representatives with vested interest in the seafood industry, including: fishermen, fish farmers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers, food professionals (chefs, restaurateurs), conservation organizations, academic scientists, media, and policy makers.

Information about Seafood Summit 2010 will be updated regularly. For further questions, contact Seafood Summit. There are discounts for early registration. Discounts for early registration available until 30 November 2009.

Seafood Choices Alliance is an international program that provides leadership and creates opportunities for change across the seafood industry and ocean conservation community. Founded in the United States in 2001, Seafood Choices helps the seafood industry— from fishermen and fish farmers to processors, distributors, retailers, restaurants, and food service providers —to make the seafood marketplace environmentally, economically and socially sustainable.

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Recipe Roundup #1

Cooking What's

by J. Michael Wheeler
Tasty Tips
We'd like to welcome our newest columnist, Anna Tourkakis, to Dancing Spoon. Anna's column, Tasty Tips, combines nutrition, cooking tips, and great, healthy recipes. Anna is a nutrition counselor, a teacher, and an international expert in healthy eating habits. She has been teaching healthy eating and nutrition for over 20 years.

Check out Tasty Tips for About Mustard, Italian Style Potato Salad, and The Right Potato-Salad-Potato.

From PB & J to Truffles
Did you know that you can find recipes from PB & J Updated to Roasted Ambercup Chili to Steak and Truffles: Wow on Dancing Spoon? Pour a glass of wine and browse through our Recipes.

From Chef Gavan Murphy (The Healthy Irishman!) find Pistachio Pesto Roasted Rack of Lamb and Grilled Scallops with Saffron Butternut Squash Risotto.

Gloria Bakst treats us to Black Cod or Sable Grilled in Miso Marinade, Plank Grilled Snapper, and for next month's Turkey Fest, Smoked Turkey with Apples and Onions.

Kate Krukowski Gooding's Out of the Ordinary column, really is! Try her Spicy Buffalo Salami, Peppered Kangaroo Filets, Moose and Stout Chili, and tamer Provençal Goat & Bean Soup.

We've got recipes like O'Reilly's Most Excellent Scones, from Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media; Roast Fennel and It's a Piece of (Crab) Cake from David Shepherd; and recipes from our Dancing Spoon Members like Anthony Theobald's recipe for Braised Mustard Greens.

Got some great recipes you'd like to share? Join Dancing Spoon Community's Recipe Club.

Still Grilling
There's still some very tasty grilling recipes too. Kate Gooding's Grilled Wild Turkey with Apricot Glaze on Basmati Rice is from her Dancing Spoon column Out of the Ordinary.  Gloria Baskt is very much into cedar planked grilling. She's got several tasty recipes like Cedar Plank Grilled Snapper and Lime Ginger Marinade for Cedar Plank Grilled Chicken.

Steak lovers might want to try David Haley's Chimichurri Grilled Flank Steak. He has some great wine suggestions too. And for something really over the top check out Steak & Truffles: Wow. As part of his Super Bowl Shuffle, Chef Gavan Murphy gave us grilled Mini Beef Sliders and Asparagus Skewered Shrimp. More Grilling Recipes.

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Handcrafted Kitchen Knives

Kitchen Handcrafted

by J. Michael Wheeler
Kitchen Art That Starts in Your Hand
It doesn't matter what your passion is: when you've got it, you've got it. We recently had the pleasure of meeting Adam Simha, a master at handcrafting kitchen knives. He is very passionate about his craft. He makes superlative bench-made knives. We are honored to be one of the only venues where MKS Design knives are sold.

Knife designer Adam Simha designs and handcrafts absolutely superb bench-made high-performance steel blades for his knives. These designs feature body geometry influenced by the best of both Asian and Western traditions. His blades are tempered to a Rockwell 56 hardness to provide toughness, easy sharpening, and remarkable edge holding. Steels used in the different blades are 13C26, 440-C, 154CM, and SF77 stainless.

The unique grip: MKS knives come with an injection-molded bicycle grip that is tightly fitted over a naturally bacteria-resistant stainless steel tube. The bicycle grip, with its deep grooves for the fingers, provides a perfect balance of shock absorption and control.

Each knife is tuned precisely for weight, balance, and control. They are visually remarkable and functionally exquisite and have been featured in many publications including Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Globe, City, and Kitchenware News.

Foodie's Emporium is proud to be an exclusive online retailer of Adam's amazing knives.

MKS Design Knives are produced in limited quantities and are available at Foodies Emporium.

For a very limited time we are offering our readers
10% OFF any MKS Design Knife Selection or Knife Set.
Use Promo Code MKSPRCNT at check out.

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Garlic with Your Pesto?

Memories Taste

by J. Michael Wheeler
A Pesto to Remember
My most memorable pesto experience was in the tiny French fishing village of Villefranche Sur Mer just down the coast from Nice, heading towards Italy. (French and Italian cuisine tend to overlap down there.) We were at a tiny restaurant in the vielle ville, and our waitress, cook, and owner were all the same smiling French grandmother. We sat on a sunny little stone patio behind the restaurant and were her only customers for a late lunch. She didn't seem to mind. When we ordered her pesto, she smiled, turned to the big planter pots that surrounded the patio and plucked some basil from the plants growing right there. Then she asked us if we liked garlic.

“Oui, bien sur!” we answered. What’s pesto without garlic, we thought? Certainly Madame felt the same way. Our pesto arrived, sur commande, tossed over fresh pasta, was fragrantly bright green, shimmered with local olive oil, and was absolutely explosive with garlic! When Madame demandé if we liked garlic, she meant do we really like garlic! Well, we certainly did that day.

Pesto is one of those really simple magic sauces: some olive oil, a little garlic, fresh basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese. You mix it up in a blender, food processor, or, traditionally, using a mortal and pestle.

Pesto can be a sauce for pasta or it can top a nice piece of grilled fish, or a steak, or used in an omelet. Spread it on bruschetta or even whisk some in olive oil for a fresh tasty salad dressing. Make a bunch of it: it freezes really well. Use the ice cube tray trick: fill the tray with pesto, cover it, freeze it, then take out your pesto-cubes and bag ‘em. 

Coming up: Pesto with sautéed scallops (with a little tasty twist).

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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.

Julie & Julia: the Movie

On Film Cooking

by J. Michael Wheeler
What's for Dinner?
Julia Child has influenced so many of us: her recipes and TV shows were our first introduction to cooking and to French cooking (not the least of which was how to be brave in the kitchen). We would try this recipe and then cook that one. We could pretty much count the number of Childs' recipes we'd attempted. But it was certainly nowhere near all 524 of them.

Julie Powell did just that and wrote about it: Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. And now Director Nora Ephron combines Julie Powell's book on her quest to "be like Julia" and Child's own memoir of her years in France, My Life in France, in a new film (opening August 7, 2009) starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell.

Streep practically channels Julia Child as you can see in this trailer from the film. The cast also includes Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, and Linda Emond. Watch the trailer to the film, Julie & Julia.

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My Life in France
by Julia Child
Julie Child's memoir of her first embrace of France and cooking. Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. 

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
by Julie Powell
Julie & Julia, the bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer), is now a major motion picture. Julie Powell, nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, resolves to reclaim her life by cooking in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life-lived with gusto. The film is written and directed by Nora Ephron and stars Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia.

Hand selected Books for Foodies are at Foodie's Emporium! 

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Two Skewer Kebabs

Tips Grilling

by J. Michael Wheeler
Wrestling Skewers
Grilling shrimp, veggies, and other small tasty kebab items on skewers is a great technique: until you’re ready to flip the skewer. Then, often the skewer will turn but some, or all, of the those kebab-ers won’t budge. They just spin on the skewer or try to escape entirely. Here’s the secret: thread each piece of food with two parallel skewers. Then when it’s time to turn the food, you can use tongs to turn the skewers. The food stays put, cooks more evenly, and the kebabs are easy to handle.

Grilling Recipes
We've got some very tasty summer recipes at Dancing Spoon Magazine. Try Kate Gooding's Grilled Shitake Encrusted Buffalo Rib Steaks & Warm Black Fly Vinaigrette Salad, Smoked Duck in a Raspberry Sauce is from her new Dancing Spoon column Out of the Ordinary. Gloria Bakst brings us Black Cod or Sable Grilled in Miso Marinade and Nori Topped Summer Salad an inventive, refreshing salad using a world of ingredients.
Find more grilling recipes, Click here.

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EZ Smoke BBQ 3-pack (1 each: Hickory, Mesquite, Apple).

EZ Smoke BBQ 3-pack (1 each: Hickory, Mesquite, Apple)
Peel off the seal and put the flavor into your meal with EZ Smoke BBQ! Four varieties of natural wood chips flavors your meats, poultry, fish or vegetables with 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. Use on gas or charcoal grills. Ready to use in seconds, and can be used throughout the year. Compact and easy to transport, great for boat and RV owners, capers, tailgaters, hunters and fishermen. 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. Easy to store! One can of EZ smoke produces the same amount of smoking time as a 180 cubic inch bag of chips. EZ Smoke BBQ chips adds flavor to foods when gas grilling.

Hand selected grills and grill accessories are at Foodie's Emporium!
Click here.

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Château d'Yquem Video Interview

Wine About

by J. Michael Wheeler
They pick each individual grape by hand. They pick the ripest fruit; they pick the most rotten. If they are not ripe enough and not rotten enough they leave it for the next wave of picking. They are, of course, picking grapes for the legendary Château d'Yquem, the very best Sauternes, one of the most remarkable wines in the world. Château d'Yquem is located in Sauternes in Bordeaux and is one of the worlds most expensive sweet white wines. In fact, it's simply one of the world's most exclusive wines all categories.

Sandrine Garbay, Château d'Yquem's the chief winemaker and cellar master (maitre de chai) is interviewed by Dancing Spoon Community member Per Karlsson . She has been in charge of wine making since at Château d'Yquem 1998. More interview information.

Andre Simon, a wine writer, merchant, and gourmet, described Château d'Yquem as “distilled dew and honey with the fragrance of all of the fresh wild flowers of the field greeting the dawn.”

Those weren’t the words that flowed from my lips after tasting Château d'Yquem for the first time, but only because I lack the poetry. The 2001 vintage was rated 100 by both Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator.

Young Yquem is a beautiful brilliant golden color and the wine darkens to a deep tawny with age. And age it can do. The Antique Wine Company has a listing for an 1811 bottle priced at £41,000.00!   

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Aerates your wine while you pour it!

Soiree Bottle-top Wine Decanter
The Soiree is a wine accessory that fits into any standard corked wine bottle, and comes with an extra gasket that will work with any screw cap bottle; allowing you to pour, without dripping, directly through the Soiree. Once you place the Soiree in the wine bottle, the Soiree aerates your wine as you pour it. The Soiree allows you to decant just the portion of wine you want - a glass or a carafe. The Soiree can also be used to pour the wine into a decanter, further expediting the "opening" of your wine. Soiree fits securely into any wine bottle allowing you to pour, without dripping directly through the Soiree. In using the Soiree to aerate your wine, you will notice the subtleties and character of the wine emerge immediately upon entering your glass. Soiree delivers a truly open wine just by pouring through it!

Hand selected wine accessories are at Foodie's Emporium! Click here.

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