I found this at Grocery Outlet and it sounded great. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The cream cheese didn’t have much flavor at all, and couldn’t stand to the most insipid cracker. There was some sweetness from the blueberries, but the cashews didn’t add much. And the whole cheese just had no flavor. I wouldn’t buy again.
Category: Food Items (Page 12 of 27)
This year, I made a standing rib roast for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. The 2-rib Thanksgiving roast was bought at a local butcher. It was expensive, so much so that my husband hid the total price from me to not give me a heart attack. Still, we had had a similar roast from that butcher 16 years before and he had dreamt about it every since, the Pandemic Thanksgiving seemed like a good time to revisit it. We all loved it. My husband rated it a solid 8.5-9 in a 10 point scale.
When time came for making our Christmas menu, both of them requested a prime rib roast again. I wasn’t thrilled about cooking the same thing, and there was no way I was going to revisit that expense – but when I saw that Raley’s had the equivalent cut for $6/lb I decided to give it a go.
I will admit that I was apprehensive. These days you a chuck or eye of roast costs about that much. But Raley’s advertised the meat as being choice grade, so I figured why not? I was pleasantly surprised.
Even though I kept the meat in the fridge until its “sell by” date, the roast was very good, tasty and tender. Not as much as our uber-expensive Thanksgiving roast, but much more than it had any right to be for the price. My husband gave it a 7/10. I would not hesitate to serve it to guests.
And I just might, because it seems Raley’s has sales on prime rib every year around the holidays.
Finally, Raley’s advertised its roast as “Beef Ribeye Roast, Bone In” which confused me for a while. I knew that butchers call a prime rib roast devoid of bones “ribeye roast”, but I thought that if it had the bones it was called “prime rib” or “standing rib roast”. So I spent a fair amount of time researching this. You can do the same, but for all extents and purposes, if what you want to make is prime rib or a standing rib roast, this is the same thing by another name. Do remember that “prime” can refer both to this cut, but also to the grade of meat. Prime grade beef has greater fat marbling than choice grade meat, which has itself more marbling than “select”, a grade that seems to have disappeared from supermarkets in the last few years.
Plus what I learned about truffles & are the truffles sold at the Berkeley Bowl any good?
During a very brief stay in Barcelona, my daughter fell in love with a dish of truffle ravioli in a parmesan and truffle oil cream sauce at one of the Sensi tapas restaurants. So when she asked that I include a pasta dish for our Christmas dinner, I immediately thought of that dish – and started researching recipes and truffles.
Truffles, I knew, were very expensive and rare fungi that grows naturally in Italy and France and is only available at exorbitant prices for a few months of the year. What I didn’t know is that it’s extremely hard to preserve them – because it’s their aroma which actually gives dishes the ethereal earthy flavor that we so like. Infusing them in oil doesn’t really work, but food scientists were able to isolate its most prevalent odorant – a compound called 2,4-Dithiapentane – and replicate it. This is what is mixed with olive oil, butters or salt and sold as “truffle” whatever. That is to say, this is what most of us know as truffle flavor. The little pieces of truffle we see in commercial products are apparently there mostly for show.
There seems to be a revolt against truffle oil among some top chefs, who belief its fake flavor confuses diners and stops them from being able to appreciate the subtleties of real truffles. Thinking back to the truffle dishes I’ve had, I think this is likely to be the case. I still dream of Aquerello‘s ridged pasta with foie gras, scented with black truffles, which I believe is topped with real truffle, but most other truffle dishes I recall did seem to be rather one-dimentional. Years ago, my husband gave me expensive botles of black and white truffle oil for Christmas, so I know those flavors quite well. While I didn’t care much for the white truffle oil, the black truffle oil does impart a rather tasty flavor.
I found many recipes online for pasta in a truffle sauce, and at first my decision was on whether to use truffle oil or butter. While researching what was easily available to me, I found that the Berkeley Bowl was actually carrying fresh black truffles for about $160/lb (via instacart). Given that the page offered no information about these truffles, and that French black truffles are currently selling for $95/oz (a regular truffle weighs an ounce or less), I was quite doubtful of these – but I did learn that truffles are also grown in the West Coast – indeed, as close as Napa Valley – so I imagined they were domestic. My daughter suggests, however, that they might just be expired truffles – not fresh enough to retain much of their flavor. She might have been right.
Ultimately, I decided to give them a try – and so far I’ve had mixed results. I first used them the night I got them by shaving them on a dish of plain pasta served with vegan butter. The truffle shavings completely failed to impart any flavor on the dish. It was a total failure.
For my Christmas Eve dish I decided to do something different. I took part of a truffle and chopped it very finely and infused it in good quality melted butter early in the day – so that it was solid by the time I actually made the sauce for this dish. This, by itself, didn’t give the sauce much truffle flavor, but I think it helped it build, so by the time all the ingredients were combined – the truffle ravioli, the sauce and the shaved truffle on top – the results were delicious. The dish had a very earthy flavor, truffly but not as strong as truffle oil.
I was lucky enough that I was able to follow this recipe closely, as I was able to find the called-for taleggio cheese at the Berkeley Bowl as well. The recipe writer suggests that you can substitute this cheese with Fontina, Robiola or Brie, though to me its flavor was closer to camembert. Indeed, I added a couple of ounces of camembert, as I hadn’t gotten as much taleggio as the recipe called for. I’d probably had done better using less cheese, as the sauce was a tad too salty – I’m making this recommended adjustment in the recipe below.
I wanted to make ravioli in the first place, and was happy to find porcini & truffle ravioli from the Pasta Shop at the Berkeley Bowl. These are made with “truffle essence”, that is to say, the artificial aromatic compound. They were tasty by themselves, but they were really elevated by the sauce and the shaved truffle.
To store truffles before using them, dry the surface with a paper towel and then place in a bowl filled with uncooked rice (to help draw moisture away). Store in the fridge or a cool place in your house.
Ravioli in Truffle Sauce Recipe
Ingredients
- 12 oz fresh or frozen mushroom ravioli
- 2-3 Tbsp truffle butter
- 8 oz taleggio cheese, cut into 1/2″ cubes
- 3/4 cup heavy cream
- 1 truffle
- Parmesan cheese to taste
Instructions
Cook the ravioli according to package instructions, drain.
Meanwhile, melt the truffle butter, cheese and cream over medium heat – stirring frequently. Transfer the ravioli to the sauce and coat all over. Transfer to a serving dish or individual plates.
Shave truffle and Parmesan cheese to taste.
Based on Jacqui’s recipe at The Pasta Project.
I picked up these snacks at our local Asian market. They’re made in Malaysia, and they are sort of an Asian version of pirouline. They are much shorter, however, and a bit thinner. They come in many flavors, but I chose the coconut ones.
I was a little disappointed. They don’t have enough filling, so they’re pretty dry. The filling is fine, though maybe not as coconuty as I’d liked.
They were around $1.50, I believe, but they still felt overpriced given how few there were and how small they are. Still, if they hadn’t been as dried I might have given the other flavors a try.
Canelés are a specialty of the Bordeaux region of France. These small pastries are made from eggs, milk, flour, butter, sugar and rum in special molds that make them look like a tall mini bundt cake (but they don’t have a hole in the middle). I first came across them almost two decades ago when I started researching Bordelaise cuisine. For years, I considered making them until finally giving up on the idea – buying a mold for something I’d only make once seemed too wasteful. Still, my curiosity about them stayed.
Then a week ago, I found that Costco was selling these “Made in France” canelés. They were quite expensive, almost $10 for a package of 16 (each weighing a bit over 1 oz), but I had to see what they were like. Unfortunately, they weren’t very good.
The pastries are pretty dense, though I liked their airy, somewhat chewy consistency. They didn’t have much flavor, however. The rum masked whatever else was there, without really adding that much. And while I enjoyed the consistency, they were a bit too dry. All in all, I wouldn’t get them again. Now, if I ever find myself in Bordeaux, I might give a bakery-baked one a try.
As much as I love to cook, sometimes I fall off the cooking bandwagon and I then rely on frozen food. I’ll be honest, most frozen entrees suck – so I was pleasantly surprised to find this particular one. It actually tasted like something I’d want to eat. The beef was tender and looked like beef, the noodles were good and the sauce was tasty. The main problem was that the entree wasn’t very big – but maybe I was specially hungry.
I got this BBQ sauce at Grocery Outlet before the pandemic. I was intrigued by the very minimalist packaging and the small jar – I don’t use that much BBQ sauce at once. I finally got to use it one day when I was craving – of all things – meatloaf. OK, I was craving something sweet for dinner, and the only meat I had at home was ground beef, so the only thing I could think of was meatloaf. I was very happily surprised. The sauce is thick and tangy, with a slight alcoholic-like flavor (it doesn’t have any alcohol, I checked). While it has “natural” smoke flavor and artificial flavors added, it doesn’t seem to have any preservatives and has sugar rather than corn syrup.
The sauce is available at Walmart at $3 for the 15.5 oz jar, and while I try not to shop at Walmart, I’d buy it again.
Back in August we visited Las Vegas, where my daughter had the BEST VEGAN PIZZA EVER at Trattoria Reggiano at The Venetian’s Grand Canal Shoppes. It tasted so much like a real cheese pizza that we suspected it might be real cheese after all. After all, my daughter had had plenty of pizzas with Daiya cheese, including from great pizzerias like Zachary’s, and they’ve always tasted like vegan pizza.
The waitress at Trattoria Reggiano had suggested that their pizza was made with nut cheese, so when we saw packages of Parmela Creamery Mozzarella style nut cheese at our local Grocery Outlet, we had to try it. My daughter is very glad we did. While it didn’t work I tried to make an Alfredo sauce with it, it makes a mean vegan pizza.
Parmela Creamery’s cheeses are made with cashew milk, which is cultured and then aged – following a process similar to dairy cheesemaking. It’s not surprising that they taste considerably better than Daiya’s cheeses, whose main ingredient is tapioca flour.
A search online suggests that it’s not easy to find Daiya cheese in stores, though there are a couple of places that sell them online, so we need to stock up at Grocery Outlet and start looking for other nut cheeses to try. When available, a 7 oz package of Parmela Creamery shreds costs $6-7.
My daughter has been making her close-to-real pizzas by putting the cheese on frozen American Flatbread Farmers Tomato Pie. This is a thin pizza shell covered in tomato sauce with some veggies, basil and balsamic vinegar. She just covers it with the shreds and bakes it. I also found this product at Grocery Outlet, but it also seems hard to find in regular stores. Where available it should retail for about $8. I’m not sure why this product is not described as vegan – the only potentially non-vegan ingredient listed is yeast.
My husband went to Costco the other day and I asked him to get me a BBQ brisket sandwich for lunch. Unfortunately, our local Costco in San Leandro (at least) no longer carries them. Instead, they have added a burger to their menu and my husband figured he’d get me that instead. Bad, bad move.
He said he had an inkling that the burger wouldn’t be good when he saw the patties coming out of the steamer. And he was right. This has to be the worst burger I have ever eaten, bar none. And I’ve eaten many bad burgers in my time.
The meat (and I’m assuming it’s meat) was so incredibly dry, that I have to believe it’s mostly filling. It also tasted just like the burgers they used to serve in middle school when I was a kid – not a good memory. Except these were drier.
The patties are enormous, which in this case it’s just not a good thing. It only means you have more unappetizing food to get through.
I didn’t want to waste food, so I ate through almost half of it until I decided that I just couldn’t do this to myself. The dog ate the rest. She, at least, did not complain.
But you are warned: stay away from these burgers.
Yesterday I cut up some chicken and marinated it full fat yogurt and homemade tandoori massala. Today, when I went to cook it, I discovered that several pieces had bright aqua spots on them. Spots that I know for sure weren’t there when I cut the chicken up and put it to marinade.
What are they? One theory is that the garlic powder in the massala may have reacted with the yogurt to change colors. Garlic has been known to do that. Another, is that it’s “oxidation” or mold.
I’m posting this here in case it happens to someone else and they go around searching for answers in the internet. I may not have them, but at least they’ll know they are not alone.
BTW, I decided to cook the chicken and eat it. It’s been a few hours and so far, I haven’t dropped dead. I’ll update if I feel like I wish I was dead tonight or tomorrow.
Update: It’s now the next morning and I’ve felt no ill effects from making the chicken.
I used boneless, skinless chicken thighs (about a week old, but still under the expiration date – it didn’t smell at all), a homemade tandoori masala made from ground coriander, cumin, garlic powder, ginger, cloves, mace, fenugreek seeds, cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom and nutmeg, and Mountain High original plain yogurt (which contains
Cultured Pasteurized Milk – cultured with
S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus, L. acidophilus, B. bifidus, and L. casei -, Fruit Pectin, Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3) . The leftover yogurt shows no discoloration.
Foster Farms says they’ve never seen anything like this.
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