Drum roll please

[cjsmith]

I am now the proud owner of a second nonstick skillet* large enough to brown a pound of ground turkey. Being able to run two of those at once during a cook-for-the-week session is going to be a real win for my tender feetsies.

So far I have learned two lessons with my new skillet:

1: It takes a lot longer to cook stuff if the pan takes a lot longer to heat up.

2: Scraping the meat to one side of the pan and tilting the pan to drain off the fat is downright awkward if your skillet is slicker'n black ice. The meat keeps sliding around!

I am also the proud owner of a garlic press. I am getting more frou-frou by the day. A garlic press! *eyeroll* But by golly I am going to get over my fear of using stuff that grows in the ground as opposed to stuff that comes in jars. (I reserve the right, however, to go back to jars due to the economics imposed by waste. How fast do I have to use up a bulb of garlic?)

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*Those of you who wish to argue that my first large skillet is no longer nonstick will get a fair hearing. I've clearly eaten a lot of Teflon over the years.

Comments

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

(I reserve the right, however, to go back to jars due to the economics imposed by waste. How fast do I have to use up a bulb of garlic?)

Garlic lasts a pretty long time. When little green shoots appear it has lost some of its flavor but it is still quite edible.

There's also always the "put stuff in jars yourself" route... I have yet to tackle that one myself. I keep thinking canning would be fun sometime. So far I've managed blanching and freezing greens for later use, and making large batches of soup and freezing that (note: rice noodles do NOT freeze well! Leave the noodles out and make fresh ones when you unfreeze it) but no canning.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I seriously don't know basic things like how long garlic lasts.

The only thing I've ever put in jars myself was jelly made from Mountain Dew. Somehow I suspect anything beyond jelly would need quite a bit more sophistication! :-)

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

That was really good stuff, too! On hot toast with butter? So yum.

[iridium.livejournal.com]

jelly made from Mountain Dew

...that's terrifying. Brilliant, but terrifying.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

My absolute favorite cookware is Le Cruesette (sp?) they've got an outlet in Gilroy. It is enameled cast iron. Nearly as non-stick as teflon, easier to clean, nearly as tough as cast iron, with the even heating characteristics of cast iron, and easier to clean.

The outlet store has really good prices, with progressive discounts for each piece (including lids) that you buy. If you get one of the "seconds" with good discounts, you can end up getting a $150-200 skillet for $70.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. Mine isn't Le Creuset, but then, I spent $22. At Safeway. :-)

What I do want to do, though, is get a couple of decent knives. That's even higher priority than the skillet (the skillet was just there, and easy). Working with my knives is like trying to slice an onion with the edge of my hand. I'm hoping for something that could chop chicken or lettuce with equal ease, dishwasher-safe, and in the low two digits.

[brooksmoses]

I've been very happy with my Tramontina knives; they're a bit less expensive than the German ones (they come from Brazil), but no less high-quality. The first one I bought came from a cooking store where I could try out several different brands and see which one fit my hands right and felt like it was naturally balanced. The second one came from ... some mail-order place that sells only a handful of brands, but which came up on Google when I searched from Tramontina.

I'm not sure there's such a thing as a dishwasher-safe cook-quality cooking knife, though. (But, then, really you don't want to leave them dirty that long anyway.)

[lrc.livejournal.com]

I might be able to help you there too.

I literally have a drawer full of decent knives. The short story is that I'm a packrat with an eye for steel.

I also just bought a kickass electric knife sharpener.

We should have you and Rob come over for dinner some evening.

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

Knives! I have some Globals. They are great, if you exercise proper knifely care (e.g. clean and dry them promptly after use): they hold an edge extremely well, they're very light, and they balance very nicely, at least to my hand. The price range is probably $50-$100. This is more than your stated budget, but my chef's knife is almost a decade old and still in great shape....

[tattermuffin.livejournal.com]

I got rid of all my teflon - if it burns the fumes released can kill birds in 10 minutes flat ... and really, the birds' health aside, do I want something like that in my home, my food, my kids?

Have you considered getting a stool, maybe one with wheels, that you could sit on while in the kitchen so you can stay off your feet? With a little engenouity (however that's spelled, too lazy to go look it up) you could get from counter to cook-top using ropes to pull on or something.

And wouldn't your cats LOVE that?! :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm not honestly sure those old skillets of mine are Teflon itself, although given their age, they might well be.

I do have a tall chair I could sit on to chop. I use it sometimes. The annoying part is that nobody makes a space for knees underneath a kitchen counter!

My cats *adore* the smell of cooking meat. When I pulled out a pot roast a few days ago, they about went nuts. :-)

[abz6598.livejournal.com]

I just suck the grease out of the pan with a turkey baster and then squirt it into empty pop cans for disposal.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm REALLY glad my eyes kept going long enough to read "with a turkey baster".

So far, I soak it up with a paper towel. Ground turkey is quite lean, and I need only one; often I don't need one at all.

Speaking of grease and the handling thereof, I'm seriously tempted to get a George Foreman. I'm defecting to the frou-frou side! AAaaaaaa! It's too late for me! Save yourselves!

[gdmusumeci.livejournal.com]

Garlic should last at least a few weeks, kept in the fridge. When it sprouts, just discard the green bits from the middle... and fresh garlic tastes about a billion times better than that stuff from a jar.

[nosrednayduj]

Heck, I just eat the green bits, no matter how tall they've grown. Even soft and bouncy garlic. I only toss it if it's obviously dark brown and gross.

[just-cyd.livejournal.com]

i keep meaning to tell you that i use my big pot (6qt?) for doing multiple pounds of ground meat. takes a while, yes, but it will easily do 3lb meat at once.

i think a george foreman grill is a good idea, if you have the space. do you have anyone local who could give you a demo, just to be sure?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

What, you brown ground meat in a big tall pot? Do you stir it and flip it over until you can't find any pink? Doesn't it all fuse together? (It always seems to fuse together when I'm browning it, unless I stir a lot or thwack it repeatedly with the edge of a spatula.)

My office owns a George Foreman, so I've used one. It is indeed easy. Space, along with just how much budget I'm willing to throw at specialty tools, are the bigger issues.

[makarov.livejournal.com]

only complaint i have about garlic presses is that they're a pain in the ASS to clean

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Mine has a detachable bit at the business end, which I'm hoping will be cleaned well by a normal dishwasher run. "Hoping" is the operative word. I'm clueless here.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

I really should send you and Randy off to a kitchen implements store and wait for the explosion as you both overload their point of sale system.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

By "overload their point of sale system" do you mean we'd be buying a lot? On the contrary, I'd probably pester the salespeople ("what do you mean I can't put it in the dishwasher? Who's serving whom in this picture, human or knife?") until they kicked me out of the place.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

I hear you on the frou-frou-ness that new diets can bring... I never thought that I'd be buying products that contained ingredients like raw sprouted seeds, spelt, flaxseeds, or (today's latest) rye grass powder (???). Goodness, that sounds like Sparrow's shopping list from D2WO4! But, these are what's gonna keep my spinal cord happy, so... there we go.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It's like I'm joining the Insane Yuppie Club, made up mostly of healthy gullible young white people with lots of money and time on their hands. "Oh, I can't eat THAT ridiculously common food; it's POISON. All of YOU are RUINING your bodies." (Said, of course, by and to people with no health concerns.) A fight erupts over which ridiculously common foods are "killing us all" versus which weird berry grown only in one square meter on earth is "a miracle food", and then the young healthy yuppies with opposite frou-frou diets storm off to their respective SUVs filled with various kinds of extreme sports equipment.

I wouldn't mind so much if I were imagining all my problems and could still use the extreme sports equipment, yanno? :-/

[mapache]

We used to have a garlic press. At two different points in time, I think. They both broke, even the metal one. (I guess garlic is tougher than it looks.) Aside from the breakage, we decided we didn't really like pressed garlic. It pulps and makes a mess, and the garlic juice with all the tasty flavor dribbles down the garlic press instead of into the food, so we just went back to mincing it with a knife. As to how long garlic lasts, it's a long time even without any refrigeration, but it's not like we ever let it sit around long enough to find out. In our opinion, garlic is a vegetable, not a spice. ;)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I'm not as massively fond of garlic as some folks are, probably due to an ugly "overdose" in college. 'SOK. If I break a garlic press I'll buy another. I was going to say I'm probably not strong enough to break a steel garlic press, but I just broke my spatula, so I'm not placing any bets!