Ray's Food Place is the best supermarket ever.

So, I've been working a lot, and largely exhausted, and had sort of neglected the blog and the writing. It started with just the move distracting me, and then all the hours in the kitchen, but lately, it's been a bit intimidating coming back, because for once, I actually have things to write about.

Too many things, in fact. I've had some time to experiment since my last entry, with a whole bunch of things, and produced some really excellent food, and learned a few things. So look for more blog entries to come as I try and catch up and all the back log of new recipes.

However, for the moment, there's just one thing I want to talk about: Ray's Food Place. This is, hands down, the best goddamn supermarket I've ever been to, and I love it with all my heart.

Why is it so wonderful? Well, here's my menu for today. For lunch, a fresh comice pear, smoked gouda, jalapeno cheese bread, and Mexican grapefruit soda. For dinner, I've got a lovely pork sirloin chop, rubbed liberally with the house porketta spice, and a Nappa Valley sangiovese.

And how much did I pay for all this bounty? $10.70. No, I'm not joking. And all of it, except possibly the wine as I've not tasted it yet, and WineSpectator.com is no help at all, is positively lovely.

Largely, this is all a result, oddly enough actually, not of a relentless focus on quantity and cheapness, but seemingly paradoxically, on quality and freshness. Ray's policy, as best I can figure out, is that everything must be absolutely, gloriously, fresh, and great quality.

So that pear? On sale, got it for about 50 cents, because while it is still perfectly delicious, and in fact, just the right ripeness, it's just barely too ripe, and they'd rather just sell it off.

The pork chop was only a buck and 50 cents, for exactly the same reason. It only just got cut two days ago tops, and is probably fresh enough still that if it were beef, you could make a carpaccio with it.

I've yet to buy anything from their meat department that wasn't absolutely awesome, in fact. I never get that feeling I get walking into most grocery stores and being genuinely nervous about the meat, or realizing the butcher doesn't actually know what the fuck he's doing, or that half this meat's probably already been frozen once, and looks about like it.

Generally speaking, when I walk in through those doors, I know I'm going to be able to get something really good, for not a whole lot of money. I have lived like a king since moving here, because of that store.

I still live.

I have been away from the Internet for a while, but have managed to grab some time at a local internet shop with which to update matters.

I have a new job now. The Mexican restaurant turned out to not have enough money to pay me, so I have instead found a new, and much better home, as the head cook at a little Japanese/Korean restaurant here in town, and have even finally found my own home in town for a reasonable amount of money.

I love my new job very much, I feel like I'm at home again, and I look forward to going to work every day. My first real culinary experience was at a Japanese restaurant, so while the techniques we use at the new place are a little different, all in all, it's all like old hat to me. My employer has been very impressed with my skills, and I've even gotten to flex my creative muscle a bit and really show of what I'm capable of. I'm thinking I might talk the owner into running weekly specials, to give me the opportunity to try some new dishes, and I've already added a few tweaks and one new item to the sushi menu.

All in all, it's going very well indeed, though the last week was a bit exhausting, as our lunch cook was out with illness, leaving me to run two all day shifts in a row.

I also finally got another opportunity to try my hand at barbecue this weekend, this time with a nice pork shoulder roast. It came out not so hot, it got a little burnt on the outside, a little dried out, but all in all the end result, shredded and put in a corn tortilla with some fresh avacado salsa and homemade sweet hot sauce, was amazingly tasty, and I've learned a lot about how this damnable smoker works best and how to get it just perfect next time.

Recipe Recall.

So, some of our readers may recall a recipe I posted for a mock BBQ chicken sandwich.

I'm going to now recommend strongly that no one actually make that recipe, and intend to do the same.

I'm not sure what exactly is the problem, I suspect the simmering process may not be hot enough to ensure proper food safety, or maybe it's the heating up of the ranch dressing from the addition of warm meat mixture, but I believe I may've contracted food poisoning of some variety after preparing a similar dish (though this time with my homemade BBQ sauce and some baked chicken) for my lunch recently.

I had previously suspected this may be the case when after I made the big batch for the whole family some time ago when the recipe was posted, I came down with an awful fever/diarrhea thing, but I dismissed it as a fluke or a coincidence. I must now suggest that this is likely not the case at all.

I spent most of last night with a raging fever so bad I was having dreams about using my body as a human heat source.

On the good news front though, after finally getting a straight answer out of my former employer at the Mexican restaurant, I was able to, with in a couple of days, acquire a new job at a Japanese/Korean place as a cook. After one night there, I am already quite pleased with my new job, I like my coworkers, the recipes are dead simple, and it's all really quite familiar territory in many ways, so I'm happy.

I just hope I can survive tonight's shift while still recovering from my very poorly times illness.

I finally did it. I made real barbecue.

After finally managing to wrestle some money out of the hands of my erstwhile employer, I broke down and bought an electric smoker.

Well, technically, I bought two. My initial intent was to build my own, inspired by Alton Brown's hotplate and pie pan technique, but after my second store and a total failure to find any suitable materials that would actually fit together, I broke down and bought an electric water smoker on sale at Lowe's, a Brinkmann.

Unfortunately, it was a piece of garbage. The smoker body came in three sections, a base, a center section with a side door, and a lid. The problem was, the center section was completely bent out of shape, so badly in fact that initially the center wouldn't even fit properly on the base, and even after an attempt at evening it out, the lid wouldn't actually fit right on the top. there were huge gaps all around the lid, essentially ruining it's utility as a smoker.

So I went back, returned the thing, and went out again hunting for suitable body and grill bits to try again at building my own. After a considerable amoutn of running around, I again gave up, went back to Home Depot, and bought the Char-Broil electric smoker I'd seen the day before. I was immediately impressed with it. It was simply a more well constructed thing, and more well equipped. The design was actually closer to Alton's designs, and could be used for both dry and water smoking, it had an integrated thermometer in the lid, and the electric element was actually mounted to the body, and included an adjustable thermostat.

My smoker finally acquired after two days hunting, I got it put together the night prior, in preparation for my intention to smoke some beef spareribs I'd acquired on Friday.

Come game day, I hemmed and hawed a bit over when to start the whole process, and wound up starting a bit too late. But not for the reasons one would necessarily expect, but rather due to the fact that it turned out that no one had told me the fact that the fridge I had chosen to store the ribs in, didn't actually work. So I got to soaking the hickory chips, and about an hour or so later, I broke out the ribs to prep for smoking, only to find they weren't any good.

The result of course was that I had to run to town to get more ribs, which took a considerable amount of time given that I'd planned on some very tight timing, perhaps a bit unrealistically. As a result, my wood chips smoked too long, which ended up making the smoker much slower to heat up to the right temp for ribs.

I prepared the ribs with the same dry rub base I used for the oven baked ribs I'd made previously, with the sole addition of some cinnamon, and got those in the smoker, and fired it up. It got up to about 180 degrees, but seemed to halt there, which was a problem because I was shooting for at least 200 to about 220. I wound up solving the problem by tossing a small handful of dry, unsoaked chips into the smoker, after which it quickly got up to where I wanted it at.

The sauce was a pretty traditional recipe, with a few of my own tweaks and a touch of a local ingredient: fresh juniper berries. Adds a nice touch that goes wonderfully in a barbecue sauce, gives it a nice peppery note that's just fantastic. If anything I think I did not use enough, which is wonderful, because I had my doubts at first.

I added the sauce in the last half hour of cooking, a relatively light basting, just enough to jazz up the flavor.

In the end, the ribs were not perfect. I discovered that the smoker cooks rather unevenly between the two racks. The top rack seems to be a bit cooler, so the ribs up there came out a bit on the tough side. The bottom rack was hotter, and came out much better. The meat had pulled away from the bone the way it should, the meat was incredibly tender, the fat on the underside had actually crisped up a bit, creating this delicious crust on the underside, infused with the rub.

It was not perfect. I clearly need more practice, and more time to work out the peculiarities of my smoker. Next time I think I'll try using the water basin for the liquid, and but the chips in the base by the element, either dry or only lightly soaked. I'm not sure how it will turn out with the addition of the water vapor exactly. Alton Brown made a toss off reference in "Q", about how the water vapor from propane burning can inhibit smoke penetration, which would seem to be even more of a problem with an entire basin full of liquid. At the same time though, I do know some smoker designs I've seen in competitions do use water reservoirs. One thing I do thing is that the water vapor and the basin itself may help to hold more heat in the smoker, which would certainly not be unwelcome.

We shall see. I have a great desire to master the art of barbecue. I envy the Southern states their preponderance of delicious smoky goodness, and I harbor certain dreams of trying to create a new regional variation of barbecue right here in Central Oregon. In addition to the juniper berries, I'd really like to get hold of some manzanita, for another nice local flair.

And weirdly, I'm even finding myself almost instinctively wanting to take on that weird sense of secrecy that surrounds so many barbecue recipes. I actually found myself questioning whether to make this post, and just how much info to share. I wonder what it is about this particular culinary art that leads to such secrecy, in such stark contrast to the foodie movements, the Iron Chefs, and the trendier restaurants, which seem to revel in bragging about every last detail.

It's a curious thing really.

Let's all pretend it's winter already!

I discovered the other day whilst acquiring sausage and bacon for biscuits and gravy, that my favorite local market's butcher counter has smoked pork hocks. Thus, it became an immediate and perfectly natural desire, to make soup with them.

So this evening, I acquired a 1 lb bag of lentils, and two of their fine pork hocks. Sprinkled the hocks with a little salt and seared them in a pan with some olive oil. Sweat off a mirepoix in the big stock pot, added about 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, toss the hocks in there, and then filled it up with water. From there, in went some fresh chopped sage, oregano, and cilantro, some Worcestershire and soy sauces, salt, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, and a single beef boullion cube. For a little extra touch, I added a healthy splash of Black Butte Porter.

Brought that to a boil, tossed in the lentils, put a lid on it, and reduced the heat to low, and let that stew for 2 hours. Once that was done, I pulled out the hocks, pried all the meat off the bones and copped that up and added it back into the pot, and also pulled out the marrow and added that too. Stir that all up, and serve, with a pint or two of Black Butte Porter of course.

Wonderful meal. Good and hearty, and pairs well with the dark beer. Makes me feel like it's wintertime again. Can't want until it actually is winter.

Adventures in ribs.

Thanks to Ray's Food Place, I finally got the opportunity to actually experiment with a real cut for barbecue: beef spare ribs. They were running some kind of sale, two racks of spare ribs, bagged up, and sold for about a buck a pound. We were in a bit of a hurry, and needed something to pick up for dinner, and they caught my eye.

Thanks to their cheapness, I actually got two goes at making ribs, once the first night, and again on my brother's birthday the next night, a suggestion of my mother's as a substitute for the pizza they had planned to order.

This proved to be good, because I rather botched the first batch, on two fronts, mainly due to my own ignorance. The first mistake turned out to be in the butchering, namely, that I didn't realize any was required. The back side of the ribs has an outer membrane that is completely inedible, cooking up into a tough layer of unchewable gristle. The second was that I cooked the ribs for about half as long as they needed to be, mainly because I was impatient, but also out of a certain ignorance as to what a good cooked rib is supposed to look like.

The part I did hit just right though, was in the seasoning. My initial plan had been to go with a dry rub only, and serve the sauce either on the ribs afterwards, or even on the side. So I went about building a spice mixture, on the fly, of salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. But then I hemmed a bit, concerned my ribs were going to be too dry, and decided to baste on a fair amount of cheap hickory BBQ sauce anyway. The end result wound up being the best tasting part of the whole thing.

Now, for cooking method, my original plan had been charcoal grill, but it turned out the only grill I had was so small that not even one of the racks of ribs would fit. So I had to go with the oven. The first time around, I cooked them at 350 for 45 minutes, which was way too underdone. The meat was rare, and to safe temp and everything, but not a texture you want for ribs. So for the next night, I cooked it at 325, for a good hour and a half or so.

The second batch was, of course, much, much better, and in fact, downright delicious. The texture was great, the flavor of the meat and the combination between the sweet sauce and the slightly spicy dry rub was perfect.

I want to make more. Maybe experiment some more with actually making my own sauce. And maybe refurbishing the bigger grill I found in the backyard. Or maybe trying to replicate the Army surplus Swiss box smoker Alton Brown demonstrated at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival.

I really want to experiment with smoked meat and things, but have so far lacked the equipment. With some money coming in, perhaps I can do a little Alton-esque improvisation of my own and make a nice smokebox.

Of course, the money is proving to be an issue still, because now my damn employer won't give me my check. I was supposed to meet my boss at the restaurant at 1 PM yesterday, and instead spent all day sitting around waiting for him to call, which so far, now 36 hours later, has yet to happen, and my own attempts to call there have all somehow missed him. This, plus some of the other behaviors and things hinted at, are making me exceedingly doubtful about my job security, and it seems I am again in the market for another cooking job.

A real Iron Chef challenge.

So, I do enjoy the Iron Chef America show, especially when Mario Batali's on, but really, could you get any more softball than a lot of the ingredients they choose? Tonight's battle is parmigiano reggiano. How can you not think of like, a billion things to use that for? I'm a total hack, and I could handle that.

There are occasional surprises, like the Battle Opa Opa, in which I don't think Mario Batali had even ever seen that fish before, let alone cooked with it. But it's still a pretty damn nice looking fish.

I wanna see some secret ingredients that really give the chef a challenge. I'm talking nasty bits and crummy processed food products. I wanna see Battle Spam, Battle Chipped Beef, and Battle Potted Meat Food Product. I wanna see Battle Trotters, Battle Chitlins, and Battle That Funky Dangly Bit in the Back of the Throat.

Mix things up a bit, and really put the heat on 'em.