Scott's Kitchen

Barley Soup With Mushrooms and Microgreens

Out of a can, a couple of my favorite soups are barley-based - either chicken or beef with barley, I'm not picky! Good flavor, good fiber - and there's something about barley that "beefs" up a soup in terms of chunkiness and flavor.

Recently, I came across this recipe in the New York Times for Barley Soup With Mushrooms and Kale - which I made in a modified form for dinner Monday evening last week - it was delicious!

Kale wasn't easy to find - and being a regular Trader Joe's shopper I had noticed they carry a small box of "microgreens" - so I substituted those for the kale.

Trader Joe's also sells a dried mushroom medley (which includes some porcini mushrooms) which I used to replace the dried porchini's ($1.99 for the medley vs $5.99 for the pure dried porcinis!) I also had a cup of beef broth left over so it went into the soup along with a quart of chicken broth instead of just chicken broth. Otherwise, I pretty much followed the rest of the recipe.

Scott's Sunday Afternoon Braised Short Ribs with Pasta

This is a perfect recipe for a lazy Sunday afternoon! The short ribs need about 3 hours to cook - so start around 2 PM and you'll be ready for a great dinner about 5:30 or 6 PM. Have a bottle of good Zinfandel handy - it's a perfect match to this dish!

The inspiration for this recipe came from Giada De Laurentiis - but I made a bunch of modifications - basically to make it simpler and easier. I really don't like recipes that use amounts that result in wasting portions of ingredients you buy in standard size packages. So, I adjusted - and simplified using some Trader Joe's items - and the result was great!

2009 Recession-Era Slow-Roasted Roast Beef

For some weird reason, earlier this week I happened across an old Cooks Illustrated article about Slow-Roasted Beef (link works for those with subscriptions to their online edition).

Perhaps because of the current state of the economy or who knows why, I found the recipe particularly interesting - as it described a cooking technique for cheap beef roast cuts (eye-round, etc.) that made these normally tough roast cuts of beef turn out tender and delicious.

Adjusting the Williams Sonoma Cooking Probe Thermometer

This post goes in the "notes to self" category. We have a Williams-Sonoma Cooking Probe Digital Thermometer - and lost the manual eons ago. This thermometer was apparently actually made by Polder and private labelled to Williams-Sonoma.

Anyway, it's the one with the 3 foot long cord to a probe that goes in the oven and into the meat. The problem I have with it is the somewhat arcane user interface it has for setting a different alarm temperature than the various defaults it comes pre-programmed with for the various types of meat. So, here's how you do it!

Using the Meat button, scroll to the UI page. Hold down the Memory button until the Alert temperature starts blinking. Then, using the up/down (+/-) keys, set the temperature you want for the alert. Hit the Memory button again to store the new value, turn on the Alert switch, and you're now set.

Happy cooking! ;-)