What Would Jen Do

Archive for February, 2010

This is a sous vide.  Technically it’s a sous vide cooking controller.

French for “under vacuum”^, sous-vide is a method of cooking that is intended to maintain the integrity of ingredients by heating them for an extended period at relatively low temperatures. Food is cooked for a long time, sometimes well over 24 hours. Unlike cooking in a slow cooker, sous-vide cooking uses airtight plastic bags placed in hot water well below boiling point (usually around 60°C or 140°F).

The gist of this is that you put your food into a vacuum sealed bag and cook it in a water bath.  The cooking controller we have works in conjunction with our crock pot.   We converted our crock pot, temporarily into a sous vide.

This is the type of vacuum bag we used.

look, the bags even say sous-vide!

These are ribs.  Two days before we made steak.  Which does sound weird, but stay with me.   Here is the vacuumed sealed meat inside the water in the crock pot.

The crock pot plugs into the sous vide controller and the temperature of the crock pot is controlled by the thermometer attached to the sous vide.   You set the sous vide for the precise temperature that the meat is supposed to be cooked at.  The sous vide’s job is to maintain that temperature over a long period of time.   I believe these ribs were in here for about a day and a half.  The steaks we made were in about 6 hours.

When the meat is done it will need to be ‘finished’.   the steaks went into the cast iron for a minute or two on each side and the ribs went into the oven with some more bbq sauce for about 10 minutes.

these ribs FELL off the bone and almost all the fat that had been on them had melted away.  The steaks were probably the best steaks I ever had.  The meat is tender, it’s perfectly and evenly cooked the whole way thru.

Happy Valentines Day!  We don’t celebrate valentines day in our house.  Which is probably obvious seeing the pictures below.

But I did buy a valentines cake from the grocery store, only because I love cake and it was cheap!

Day two of this awesome migraine I have.

I think every weekend should be mandatory three days.  There are so many things going on right now that i’ve forgotten what a proper weekend is like.  Yesterday we had the termites taken care of.  It took about 4 hours and it looked like a pretty easy process. It was just one guy who drilled holes about every 6 inches inside the garage and around the house.  then he filled them with poison and sealed them up and he was done.

Today we get to put the garage back together which is actually pretty exciting for me because i’ve been itching to organize and clean up that garage.    I’m going thru another phase where ‘omg i have to try and fix and clean and make things nice around here’, so the garage being such a big project should be enough to satisfy me for a while.

I think next we’re going to call around and get some people out for estimates on painting this house.  I sure they’d prefer doing that before summer.

Last night I had to get dressed in clothes that are not pajamas and go out in public with real live people.   Icey thinks it’s important for me to get out of the house once in a while and talk to people who are not my dogs.   Pffffft.    We went out to dinner for his little bro’s birthday and while it was nice to see everyone that showed up (Hi Erich) I was bummed that a lot of the people I would have liked to see on my one night out a month, couldn’t make it.