Standing Rib Roast? Seriously?

No, that wasn't tonight's evening sky, it was a couple weeks ago. But the feeling you get when you see a rainbow arch across your winter sky is like the feeling I had when I bit into my first nibble of my first attempt at a standing rib roast this afternoon.

Number One, I couldn't afford a standing rib roast. Number Two, I didn't know how to cook one. Number Three, wasn't about to ruin an expensive cut of meat with a culinary mishap.

But this year, things were different. Our Save Mart supermarket has been introducing a line of beef called Angus 43. It was heartbreaking when they stopped carrying Harris Ranch Beef (which is incredibly tasty) and I kind of sneered at the Angus 43 when they began advertising it. But when they offered boneless New York strip steak for the absurd price of $5.99/lb, I sprang for a couple ... and was pleasantly surprised. Tender, good flavor, okay. They've gradually reeled me in, and when they put standing rib roasts on sale for $6.99/lb, I began salivating and researching.

As it turns out, it is so dang simple to make that there is simply no reason to take the family out for a luxury dinner of prime rib.

We scored a little-ish 5-pound standing rib roast, let it sit on the counter for a couple hours to come to room temperature. I rubbed it with extra virgin olive oil, then seasoned the fat cap with salt, pepper, and finely ground garlic powder. It was already tied at the store, so I shoved it into the oven, ribs-side down in a shallow baking pan, for 25 minutes at 450 degrees. After that, with its now gorgeously browned exterior, it gets the temp taken back to 350 until the interior reaches 120 degrees. Then out it comes, gets wrapped in heavy duty aluminum foil, and "rests" for about 20 minutes while you get the rest of the meal finished.

PERFECTION!!!!

Was that Christmas dinner? No, this is Christmas Eve Eve, and we're making a big homemade taco spread for Christmas. This was just for fun, a continuation of the kitchen experimentation of the weekend.

One last thing, about the internal temperature of the meat. We use a Taylor Meat Thermometer with a probe whose cord comes conveniently out the side of the oven door. Good for roasts, good for chickens in the oven, only about $20. An alarm sounds when the temp approaches 20 degrees of the desired temp, again (a bit more frantically) when the temp is 10 degrees off, and then beeps like a banshee when it gets to the proper temperature.

No, that wasn't the last thing. We got the roast with ribs attached, the whole thing tied up with cotton cooking string. Without the string, the ribs fall off. Without the ribs, you have to use a rack.

If you use a rack, you have to wash the rack, and you don't have the bones to gnaw as a snack the next day.

For your next birthday, ask for a standing rib roast to cook.

Merry Christmas!

November and Nandina

Ah, November.

We needed long sleeves today, the high being a cool 67 degrees. Clouds were moving in by the time we set off on our shopping spree, but we were still glad to have an insulated bag in which to carry meat groceries.

A shopping spree of groceries? Oh, yes.

With our now-limited income, shopping for food has become an interesting puzzle of how to best feed ourselves and preserve our bank account. Fortunately, Modesto is actually closer to us than Manteca, and Modesto has some interesting places for food procurement.

Now it is a fact that we're within walking distance (albeit a stretch) of our city's supermarket. However...

Proximity does not always equal savings.

Our local SaveMart does have tomatoes "on-the-vine" -- but at $2.99/pound. Sprouts Farmers' Market had them at $1.88/pound, and since we had to go there for white American cheese (local SM stopped carrying a tasty brand) we got the superior-tasting-sourced tomatoes for less, and stumbled into a great sale on green bell peppers, too. And cranberries, for less than half the price at our market here in town.

We were in Modesto for a doctor's appointment, so why not use the gas for shopping?

Proximity does not always equal taste.

While our local SM does have some decent meat, I cannot deny that -- Winco in Modesto carries Hormel brand pork, which is so flavorful and tender that you can just about faint from the first bite of it ... and it's cheaper, which, I guess sounds like an irresistible force. We bought pork chops for two dollars less a pound, and ground pork, which Bernie will mix up with spices into a superb sausage blend. Also, Winco carries beef heart at $1.68/pound, and you would not believe how rich and delicious beef heart stew is, especially with Bernie's home-made pasta noodles (which also save us some $$).

Oh, and then there was the Harris Ranch Beef issue. We were introduced to Harris Ranch beef through a sweepstakes by our local SM -- I won $50 in coupons for the stuff -- and we never looked back. By and large, we don't eat any beef unless it is Harris Ranch. We even took a HR Choice New York strip steak and matched it against a USDA Prime NY strip steak -- not even close. The Harris Ranch steak was incredibly better, for $9 less a pound. Sadly, our local SaveMart has stopped carrying HR beef, so we had to go source it elsewhere. Grocery Outlet in Modesto at least carries the ground beef, so we went there for our opportunity for hamburgers later this week.

Proximity does not equal value.

We bought eggs for years at the place out the road, Den Dulk Poultry, because the eggs were super-fresh, super-tasty, and cheap. Six bucks got us five dozen eggs. Then something happened out there, and suddenly, the eggs were ... not so good. Thin shells, watery whites, flabby yolks. Also, customer service went downhill like a speed slalom. Today's shopping included Trader Joe's, where the eggs have been a little more expensive, but a lot better in quality. And when we mentioned that we'd had some cracked eggs in our first dozen from them a couple of weeks ago, Trader Joe's practically threw an extra carton of free eggs into our shopping bag in apology. Wow. Sharp contrast compared to Den Dulk, who, when we once had a couple damaged eggs in a flat, said we'd have had to bring the rotten eggs (have you ever smelled a rotten egg, and if you have, would you ride in the same car with it? No.) back to get replacement eggs. Trader Joe's wins; plus, their lettuce and bagged greens last longer in the fridge than the local supermarket's do. Unspoiled goods means more bang for the buck.

That said, I still love shopping for the everyday stuff at our SaveMart. I really like the employees there, and we were able to pick up sale beef for canning at about $2.50/pound, which is nothing to sneer at. And I like their store brand stuff better than brand name stuff.

So, Nandina, pictured above. Winter color in its berries, and evergreen grace in its foliage. I really like Central California in the fall.

But Can She Make Bread?

The grocery store we most often frequent makes the best French bread I've ever tasted.

They churn out loaves all day long, and recently have even begun slicing it, which makes for some heavenly sandwiches. Of note, it is only this local store that makes the bread so perfectly. Other stores in the chain just ... can't do it so well.

How difficult can it be, I asked myself. Especially when Bernie has a lovely Kitchen Aid stand mixer to do the kneading for me.

I found an easy recipe, and had at it. The loaves are beautiful, and it is indeed bread. So the answer to the title of this post is "Yes, she can."

The texture is nice, the smell is nice, the taste is ... nice.

But it's not as good as our Savemart store's bread, and while the older folks in the household all say my bread is good, Joan the Ba-Ba (18 months old makes for an impartial judge) agrees with me. She saw the loaves of French bread and begged for some, just as she does when we take her to Savemart with us. I cut her a slice, she bit into it.

She handed me the slice back and walked away.

Oh well.

Orange Is Not Yellow

Pumpkins. We all know what color jack o'lantern pumpkins are. They're orange. Any little kid with a box of crayons knows this. Orange, orange, orange.

If you had gone into your local supermarket in October, and asked the produce manager why he put out all those yellow pumpkins, he'd have squinted at you with please-go-the-bakery-and-bother-someone-else eyes, and tried to appease you by telling you that the pumpkins were not yellow, that summer squash over there is yellow, those onions in that bin are yellow, the lemons are yellow, the Yellow Delicious apples in the apple display are yellow, but the pumpkins are not. They are orange.

And he would be right.

Now it is true, that in olden days, in Gloucester, the cattle in pasture ingested a flower known as "Lady's Bedstraw" (galium verum) and that their milk was a sometimes a dark yellow because of it. But you'd think that pretending that darker-colored cheese was superior to lighter-colored cheese was something we'd have grown past after 500 years.

But no, we haven't. At the bottom is Nob Hill white sharp cheddar cheese. I've loved it and used it for more than 20 years, when I couldn't get SaveMart's New York sharp cheddar cheese. They were comparable, good cheeses which made my homemade macaroni and cheese a family favorite. SaveMart stopped offering the white cheddar a few years ago, so I went to Raley's to get the Nob Hill white cheddar, buying it 4 pounds at a time.

Not just for the mac and cheese, but also for tacos, enchiladas, nachos, football game noshes, and puffy cheese croissant appetizers. Not to mention putting it in refried beans and black bean chili -- so very yummy.

Well, time passes and the powers that be in Raley's marketing department dumped the white cheddar staple, going exclusively to cheddar cheese the color of the pumpkins in the first picture. I bought the last two packages of the white cheddar last week.

It's billed as "yellow" cheddar, but it's not yellow, it's ORANGE. A vegetable dye called annatto is added to it to make it orange.

Does it taste the same? I suppose it does, mostly. I'm reminded of an experiment I did with purple potatoes, making them into mashed potatoes. I put a pat of butter on the lavender mound of mash, and my stomach did a quick turnover. It wasn't nasty, it was just ... not what mashed potatoes should look like. I closed my eyes and I tasted potato, for sure, but I've never tried to serve that to the family again. So the orange cheddar may taste approximately the same, but it isn't THE SAME.

To get annatto into the cheese, do you sprinkle it on top? Do you feed the annatto to the cows who are producing the milk to make the cheese? Of course not, it would ruin the milk, and certainly wouldn't turn out that orange.  And sprinkling it on top would do nothing but color the top. So instead of letting your cheddar sit and cure and sharpen, you MIX -- you PROCESS -- the annatto into the cheese. The result is a rubbery feel, almost like Velveeta.

To their credit, both Raley's and SaveMart offer some top-shelf sharp cheddar cheeses that are white, imported from Ireland and Australia -- but are just a bit pricey for heavy duty use. Fortunately Trader Joe's carries a sharp cheddar called Cabot, from Canada, white, not heavily processed, delicious and crumbly at the edges. That's the cheese at the top of the picture, my new go-to cheese.

I'm waiting to see if the next phase of Annattization produces orange brie, or orange gouda, or what would you think of orange bleu cheese? Orange mozzarella? Orange pecorino romano?

Makes as much sense as orange cheddar.