This 2022 holiday season I introduced a couple of new items to my kitchen tool box which is important as we grow as chefs.
The paella pan is made by Garcima from Valencia, Spain and is a traditional polished steel paella pan that I plan to use to prepare risotto. The pan seems well made and carries a 2 year guarantee. I look forward to cooking with it.
The Dutch Oven is called Pure Intentions ‘Ecolution’ by Epoca Int’l in Florida. This pan is also stainless steel with a tempered glass top. This item has a Limited Lifetime Warranty.
The wooden roller is an Everyday Living item distributed by Inter-American Products and was made in Taiwan. It has held up pretty well so far for helping to thin out homemade pasta for my noodle cutting machine. This item has a quality guarantee or receive a full refund. How can you go wrong?
Whatever your budget or skill level remember that joy comes from sharing and cooking is to be shared, so bring joy to the world and keep cooking. Happy holidays.
The Dude of Food grew up an only child with a working mom who disliked cooking. Her 3 motto’s in life to me were:
‘where there’s smoke, there’s dinner’
‘you can never be too rich or too thin’
‘go play on the freeway’
The refrigerator to me was something to go look in at someone else’s house. That is how I learned about food, by looking in other peoples fridges and lunch boxes to see what they ate like. It took me years to get over just casually opening and looking inside of someones fridge.
On special Saturday mornings as a kid I used to make a can of Spaghettios or Franco American Macaroni with cheese sauce as a treat.
One of the places I would wander over to visit was the house of the Italian family down the street. They had 3 older girls and a boy my age and they always had food. Their kitchen was the best. Something was always out on the table or on the stove top, warmed and ready to be eaten. Homemade pastas, sauces, pizzas, rapini and as we got older everything with onions in it so our lungs would stay healthier. This Italian mother even made liver taste good with thin slices and loads of onions.
When we would go back east to visit their Italian relatives I would be blown away that every Italian kitchen was the same, warm and full of food. We couldn’t go anywhere without eating a plate of food and sipping some homemade wine. By the third or fourth visit you’d be pretty full but the hosts would get offended if you didn’t eat their food and thought you liked the other family better so you had to eat, drink and be merry. It was great.
When I went to visit the youthful home of my buddies father in Italy I was blown away at the genuine love, hospitality and meals shared with me.
This love of family and food has never left me and recently I began preparing homemade pasta noodles after a lesson from my friends father’s sister, Aunt Mary, whom I’ve known since I was in 5th grade. I’m now 56 years old. In researching how to make a better noodle I was directed to Youtube and discovered the next best thing since beer was created. The name of this Angel is Grandma Gina Petitti. She has a food channel that you must see.
Grandma Gina is precious and I instantly fell in love with her. She speaks just like everyone in my buddies family and reminds me of the best of my childhood. If you are still reading this then you must go to visit Gina https://www.youtube.com/c/BuonAPetitti/videos and see for yourself.
Grandma Gina Petitti
Learn to make noodles, ravioli or whatever else you might be interested in preparing but be ready to get sucked in. You will learn to cook and have your heart warmed at the same time.
M & W Gourmet Foods of Oxnard, CA was begun in 2006 at 3 Farmers Markets with the desire to create “a healthy snack alternative.” Over the last 16 years these snack makers have grown into a really good thing keeping many people happily snacked up.
photos: P. Pearce
The Dude of Food discovered these tasty snack treats while being on set and finding his way to the craft service table. These roasted almond filled snack bags are a great replacement to donuts and potato chips. Over time more and more flavors became available with 11 roasted almond flavors currently available at their web page (https://www.mwgourmetfoods.com) including many creative tasty flavors. Some of the Dude of Foods favorites include Coconut Macaroon, Honey Cinnamon and Cappuccino.
Above you see pictured some of Mexico’s famous lager beers. Not pictured are Estrelle Jalisco, Corona Familiar, Montejo and Victoria.
It’s interesting because my German friends who visit the states choose Mexican lagers when they are here. They resemble Munich helles beer.
Another thing about Mexican lagers are that they are similar to Munich helles in the ABV. They both share a light roughly 5% count.
Bohemia Lt 5.3 %
Carte Blanca 4 %
Corona Extra 4.6 %
Corona Familiar 4.8%
Dos Equis Green 4.2 %
Estrelle Jalisco 4.5 %
Modelo Especial 4.5 %
Modelo Negro 5.4 %
Montejo 4.5 %
Pacifico 4.5 %
Sol 4.5 %
Tecate 3.9 %
Victoria 4 %
Now you see why you can drink so many while trying to hit the pinata.
In Munich three major breweries are Augustiner, Hacker – Schorr und Lowenbrau.
Augustiner Helles 5.2 %
Hacker-Schorr 5.5 %
Lowenbrau 5.2 %
Germans don’t put anything in their beers but in the Americas we do. In Mexico they make an awesome drink called a Michelada. Now the Dude of Food is making them here.
2 great michelada mixes. Both on Instagram
Next Sunday while waking up and letting the sun shine in try making some of these delicious day starters while planning what to BBQ.
If you love fish then you will certainly love adding these mixes to your favorite ceviches. I add the spicier, LA Pinche Mezcla, to mine and it is the best! Guaranteed satisfaction. It’ll make you wanna say Odele!
Remember the good old days, like 2 years ago, when beer was served in bottles and you could get a 12 pack for $9.99? Now beer is trendy and manufacturers have taken to following the coffee business model. If Starfunkx can pay less than $50 a ‘Free Trade’ ton of un-roasted beans and then charge $3 a cup for coffee then so will the gas station. Sadly, the Dude of Food has noticed the same thing is happening in the beer business. Some craft beer makers decided to charge a bunch of extra dough for some aged beer and now even the cheap lagers are expensive. This same trickle down for profit theory has gone into packaging too.
In the 1970’s aluminum cans caused Alzheimer’s disease. These days it’s cheaper to can beer than it is to bottle it so we are told and sold that cans are OK now.
Next let’s look at packaging.
As you can see from the image comparison above, the buyer is paying the same for a package containing 8 less ounces per purchase and put in a potentially health riskier but cheaper to produce package. The only bonus about cans is they don’t break when dropped and are lighter to recycle, but then again in California we pay for CRV to recycle but there is nowhere to take your recycling except to the trash so the state gets it back anyways but subsidizes itself by charging a pre-paid recycling fee. The fee was established by the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act of 1986 and since 2010 the program has been administered by the Cal/EPACalifornia Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) (previously administered by California Department of Conservation – Recycling Division)
In February 2016 RePlanet, the largest recycling center in California, closed 191 recycling centers and terminated nearly 300 employees in small communities across the state due to increases in operational costs. By August 2019 RePlanet announced the closing of its remaining 284 centers and termination of it’s last 750 employees. It began the process of liquidating assets to pay creditors which had backed up due to continued reduction in state fees, the depressed pricing of recycled aluminum, plastic and cardboard, the minimum wage increases and the rise in operating costs.
Write to your elected California senators, local newspapers and media services to ask more questions as to why nothing logical is getting done in California.
Ever wonder what’s in that delicious looking sausage. Well the Dude of Food has been and finally took the time to tear one down and see what’s in there. Above is your typical average sized sausage found in any US market. This is not a small breakfast sausage but a regular sausage. This one weighed in at 46 grams as shown.
The first thing I don’t like is eating the intestinal lining that sausage is held together with. There just doesn’t seem like any nutritional value to this stuff. The next thing I noticed was the amount of white fat speckles mixed in the meat so I began to pick them out with a corn holder.
You can see in the photo below that there was a good amount of those white fat particles in there. The other things that were hidden in there are what look like small gristle beads. They are rounded and look like little white nuggets. I am pretty sure these things are about as healthy for you as plastic. Anyhow, I weighed the pile of garbage that had accumulated on the tin foil and it weighed in at 10.6 grams including the intestinal wrapping but not the weight of the foil. That works out to be roughly 22% useless unhealthy waste in every sausage.
So for nearly every 5 sausages you eat 1 of them is all fat and nasty. Granted this was the first one I broke down and the brand was recorded but not given here as I want to test a few more brands and see what the averages are before names are named.
Think of the things that could be. Less food wasted. More people fed. More composting for better growth. Less waste dumped into the ocean. Not polluting our food & water sources. Do you pee in your pool or on your garden?
Think better built, longer lasting, reusable products. Litter free cities like Amsterdam. Public gardens growing herbs for local restaurants like in Santa Monica. Munich has great public gardens that house streams, trees, ducks, deer and serve beer. I mog di Minga!
This blend of cow, sheep and goat milk from Italy made by the fine folks at Caseificio Dell’Alta Langa is absolutely delicious. Soft enough to spread on crackers and easily melts into hot pasta. The flavor in this cheese is rich enough for cheese experts and lively enough to wake up a boring appetizer party.
The Dude of Food melted a good chunk of this cheese into some hot noodles the other day and was stoked I did. I can see myself craving this in the near future.
The Federal Aviation Administration has used its authority to shut down technology that helps people live better. The increased quality of life in small towns has been thwarted by ‘the system’ as the FAA grounds the Lakemaid Beer drone delivery program. Does this move say that capitalism is not for everyone?
You can read all about the perceived issues the FAA has but in reality it seems that Lakemaid Beer has a great idea and this program would be a good beta test for Amazon delivery development. Or maybe Amazon has something to do with the demise of the program? Some things to think about as the hands of the clock get closer to happy hour. Prost.
The famous beer author Pete Brown describes Lambic and Gueueze style beers, sometimes commonly called sours, in the following way – ‘Instead of adding laboratory-cultured yeasts to start the fermentation of sugar into alcohol, lambic brewers rely on the natural yeasts in the air around them.’ Pete would know. I love reading his books and he knows beer.
Making beer this way was is an old school way of fermenting your brew. Back in the early brewing day taste was partially dependent on what bacteria fell into your beer. That would start the fermentation process and affect the taste of your wort or alcohol stew. The luckiest brewers came up with something different and delicious.
Below are three brewers the Dude of Food recommends you should begin your sour beer journey by investigating first. Feel free to write to me at facebook.com/dudeoffood about your discoveries. Prost.
