Butchering a tenderloin and others

To catch up first, a found a bunch of photos on the digicam that somehow escaped posting.

I had a small obsession with ceviche for a few weeks. I've always had some kind of love affair with ceviche, though for years I had been afraid to try it. After seeing an episode of Bobby Flays' grilling show that had a Peruvian ceviche recipe on it, I researched it endlessly for weeks. Ultimately, I made the same recipe that you see on Bobby's show (as pictured here). It was light and tasty. J didn't care for it that much, but I thought it was great. A week or so later, I made a Wolfgang Puck recipe with tuna but I thought the tuna was wasted on the partial cooking. I haven't made it since. I think it'll have to be something that I only have out.

I had always looked for clam chowder recipes to make and always felt that it was impossible to find a "good" one. We had purchased canned clams in anticipation of making this dish, but it just never felt right. One random afternoon, I opened the Joy of Cooking and make their recipe. It was good and fairly simple. It was only then that I noticed that it was a Jasper White recipe. Go figure.

Sometimes I'll whip this recipe together for a starter or a very light dinner. J loves it.

I love crab cakes and, for some unknown reason, I'm incredibly picky about them. I don't like my crab cakes with a lot of filler. I like them to be mainly crab and that's about it. At Costco, they have vacuum-packed lump crab that keeps for like three months for a good price so we buy that and then I make crab cakes (a boatload) whenever I feel like it.

I actually think that this recipe is also Joy of Cooking. It's all crab meat, with maybe an egg to hold it together, scallions, dijon, ... and a whole lot of tasty. It's been a while since I made these, but we do have a container in the fridge. That would make a good dinner. Yum.

Last weekend, I made a large pot of chili. I started off with a handful each of dried cannellini, pinto, and red kidney beans. I set them to lightly boil for two hours though perhaps they boiled a little too long since some of them broke. The recipe for boiling beans is typically 45 minutes, but I really felt that last time I did 45 minutes, they weren't soft enough. Add in 1 1/2 lbs ground chuck and like 4 tbsp bacon fat (way easier than frying bacon and then taking it out), and two large chopped onions. I also added a can tomatoes and trying to use up the rest of the Amstel Light by using two of those. This was the best damn chili I've ever made. J says it must be the beans. Maybe it was.

I fried up some chicken for Monday night's dinner. I used Alton Brown's recipe, which I may have mentioned that I messed up last time when I forgot the flour dredge, a horror to do to any fried chicken. I used far less Crisco than normal. The chicken gets a soak in buttermilk overnight, then is drained, then covered with a "chicken mix", then dredged in flour, then fried. I don't like it when the chicken gets this dark, though this is hard to avoid when it's in a skillet. The chicken was pretty good, though not my best.

This does remind me that I was watching Barefoot Contessa and she mentioned that she was making chicken caesar sandwiches. She chooses to roast chicken breasts on the bone, which yields a much more flavorful chicken. 35 min at 350. Well, I had to buy it on the rib, so mine was about an hour, but it was delicious. I used it to make chicken salad. I love Ina Garten's show. J mentioned recently that her recipes most resemble my cooking style.

So obviously, we've been watching a lot of food-related television. Our DVR recorded list always hovers around 95% full, probably 80% of which is food shows and 15% is J's UFC-related shows. We're pretty close to breaking down and just buying Good Eats and Barefoot Contessa, I think. Anyhow. One of Alton's shows about the tenderloin specifically mentions buying one of the uncut ones at Costco and breaking it down yourself. We took a trip to Costco and picked up about 6 lbs of meat for $50 and I broke it down one afternoon. That is really hard on your neck.

Certainly, Alton's cuts came out better than mine. That's the chateaubriand and the mignons up top in the long strip. Then working clockwise, a small pile of meat that I'll cook with the chain, a small roast that looks rather sad, another small roast that is typically good opened up and stuffed (ie with blue cheese), and then the chain, which is supposed to be very good pounded and used for philly steak sammiches. It probably took as long to clean up the chain as it took to clean up the rest of it. Here you see it in its pre-cleaned up form. We're waiting to see if we really like the filet before planning on doing this often. I really enjoyed butchering the meat, but I just don't find that filet really has any taste. (If I lived in NYC, by the way, there is a butchering class that I would totally take.). Also, I'm thinking about maybe getting a boning knife which is always nice to have, but particularly nice if you butcher. I used a sharpened paring knife which did its job.

Alton Brown featured a show on skirt steak and mentioned that most stores sell the piddly outside skirt that we are used to seeing, but you really want to buy the inside skirt, so when we were at Whole Foods and I saw that they had the fat (as in big, not as in fatty) inside skirt steak, we picked one up for dinner. Oh my. It was the best skirt steak we have ever made. As you can see in the photo, we used it for tacos. I also made a chimmichurri. J claims that was the best chimmichurri I ever made. I used the basil from my pots outside and a lot more red wine vinegar than usual, but otherwise, it was about the same as usual. It was very good...