Cal and Christa DeMercurio
On today’s episode, Chef Cal and Christa DeMercurio take you on a tasty journey, revealing their secrets for making cooking a delightful experience. In this episode, we’re exploring the versatility of spaghetti squash, mastering the art of roasting meat, and finding the perfect wine pairings to elevate your meals. Trust us, you don’t want to miss it!
RECIPE: How to Cook Spaghetti Squash
Here are **5 keys** you’ll learn from this episode:
1. **Spaghetti Squash Magic**: Discover multiple ways to prepare and utilize spaghetti squash as a delicious, low-carb alternative to pasta. Think piccata style!
2. **Meat Roasting Tips**: From prime rib to turkey, learn the essentials of searing, seasoning, and achieving the perfect tenderness with a dry rub.
3. **Wine Selection Savvy**: Dive into the fascinating world of the Cabernet wine varietal and learn how tannins and aging affect flavor.
4. **Kitchen Bonding Benefits**: Understand the importance of cooking together and the magic it creates in family relationships. Plus, get practical advice on communication and organization in the kitchen.
5. **Advanced Meal Prep**: Get tips on efficient grocery shopping, meal prepping, and the art of utilizing leftovers to minimize waste.
Mrs Chef Recommends from this Episode…
Long Probe Instant Read Thermometer
Buy Now →When you buy through any affiliate links on our site (i.e. Amazon), we may earn an affiliate commission. Happy shopping!
Timestamp Overview
00:00 Thank you for tuning in, we appreciate it.
06:03 Pasta flavor is determined by what it’s cooked in.
08:16 Microwave for 8-10 minutes, roast until tender.
12:26 Ask meat expert about cuts for cooking.
14:51 Seal in moisture, flavor and tenderness.
19:13 Cooked at 138 degrees in specialty oven.
21:37 French techniques impart aromatic flavor to recipes.
25:21 Cooking and eating together should unify families.
28:45 Diverse responsibilities and food experimentation bring joy.
30:11 Capers in pasta dish can add sodium.
33:48 Efficient list organization for grocery shopping.
37:34 Cabernet wine flavors depend on growing region.
42:33 Tannins in wine affect flavor and aging.
44:28 Pair wine flavors with complementary food ingredients.
47:18 Inexpensive blends can be good, try Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.
Transcript
Christa:
Hey food fans, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and me. Mrs Chef, his wife, Christa DeMercurio. We’re dishing out culinary intuition, insights and imagination to spice up your meals and make cooking more fun. On today’s episode, my Chef, husband and I discuss the versatility of spaghetti squash, searing and roasting meat, how we spend time together in the kitchen and enjoying a glass of cabernet. Let’s dig in. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello everyone. Yeah, welcome to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and Mrs Chef Christa. We appreciate you tuning in here at 1460 am and 96.5 fm. And if you’d like to call in with a cooking question. 530-605-4567 again, 605-4567 and if you’d like to just type in a question and send it to us. Cookinglike a pro podcast.net yep, cookinglikeapro podcast. Dot.net. so welcome folks.
Cal:
Thank you for tuning in. We appreciate it. We always just love to, to have people listening. And if you’d like to call in again, we’re actually going to start off talking about in our normal lead in and I guess we call it the a block where we have our, our fresh update and we’re going to be talking a little bit about community gardens. And I was, I was recently down in a community garden down in Sacramento with a friend of mine and it was just amazing. It was amazing. I think he said he paid around 40, $50 for the entire year and they got this plot and it was, I don’t even know, maybe 10ft by 10ft. But there was a bunch of them, so people could grow stuff and some people grow just to grow.
Cal:
So they would set stuff aside and people could take it if they want.
Christa:
Was it specific to their neighborhood?
Cal:
I don’t know. They’re in the central Sacramento area. But anyway, I remember because that’s where I got a spaghetti squash.
Christa:
That’s where all of our spaghetti squash.
Cal:
Has been coming from and, you know, spaghetti squash that we’re going to talk a little bit about. So if you have any questions you want to call in, and if you know anything about a local community garden here, we’d love to hear from you as well and get some information on that. But it was, I just thought it was really interesting, you know, especially if you’re a person and you don’t have a lot of land or in reading, you don’t have a lot of shade.
Christa:
It would be nice to share the work with other people. You wouldn’t be just you controlling everything and watering everything and getting rid of all the pests.
Cal:
Pests, yes. There’s a lot of our garden. We grow most everything we’ve moved to where it grows, literally, where it’s in the shade.
Christa:
Well, it has to be when we hit 119 around here.
Cal:
Well, when you get a tomato and it’s a. The end starts burning before it’s ripe. Then you got to start picking them before they’re completely ripe and allowing them to ripe on their own, which is fine, as opposed to letting them be eaten or having them become burnt. But the challenge is, you know, you want them to stay on the vine as long as whatever you’re growing, folks, it needs to. The longer it’s on the vine, the better shape it’s going to be when it comes to flavor.
Christa:
Well, I planted our tomatoes late because I kind of skipped through that heat wave we had, like, you know, 717 or 19. So now I’ve just got them planted. So by the time they’re ready to come into the fruiting season, it’ll be cooling down. We’ll be going into the September October months and get some nice fruit at the end of the summer.
Cal:
What was. What are those yellow ones coming up? I noticed yesterday. I know we grow the sunburst.
Christa:
Is that sungold sunburst? These were a yellow pear.
Cal:
Yeah. Okay. They were a little bit elongated. I noticed. So yellow pear.
Christa:
So those are our first ones to pop up.
Cal:
Something about the taste of a fresh tomato and the smell. But I know that mom and dad grow tomatoes, and they’ve been having the same challenge with needing to pick them a little bit early. And it’s still gonna be better than something that tastes like the cardboard box that comes from, you know, south of the border or from a long distance away.
Christa:
Well, hopefully, by the end of the year, we’ll have some nice beef steaks.
Cal:
There you go. Beefsteaks. Yep. Blt’s. That’s what they. That’s what the beast stands for, beef steak. But anyway, so this spaghetti squash is a wonderful vegetable. It’s one that I’ve always enjoyed and one that I’ve used in all of my restaurants at one point or another when it’s in season.
Cal:
And the thing is, it is a winter squash. The squash that falls in its season starts in the winter, but their shelf life is forever. Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve seen one go bade now. We generally use them up before, you know.
Christa:
Well, they have a hard shell, unlike summer squash, which is very soft skin. This has a very hard skin. Hard shell.
Cal:
They’re protected. Yeah, but it’s great. I’ll tell you, when you think about spaghetti squash, folks think about using it in the same way you do spaghetti. The pasta, or some people, like our son calls it noodles. So. But you. But think of using it that way. It makes.
Cal:
It’s literally in the name spaghetti squash. And it works great for spaghetti. And it’s not just if you’re looking for something that falls under the line of a vegetarian type of a diet. But the thing about spaghetti squash is the, just the carbs alone. I mean, one cup of spaghetti squash has one quarter of the carbs, as that one cup of pasta is going to have.
Christa:
Well, they’re a better carb. There’d be more fiber and the flavor.
Cal:
I mean, you know, what kind of flavor pasta has? Pasta tastes like, it’s like ascargo. You know, it tastes like what you cook it in. You know, you eat ascargo, it tastes like garlic and shallots and white wine and all this luscious butter and, well, it’s the same thing. You take it apart and you’re still eating a snail, you know, although snail’s gonna, I guess, more flavor than flour would. But yes, pasta is just flour and water. You know, sometimes maybe there’s some egg, but for the most part, what you get now. And plus, it’s all purpose flour, so it’s not the greatest for you. But I’ll tell you, just treat it as you would a spaghetti and you can use it as an entree.
Cal:
You know, I know we have a spaghetti squash that we’re going to have for, I think, tomorrow’s dinner and a couple different ways to cook that. Matter of fact, you don’t even need to be taking notes. If you are taking notes, you don’t need to take notes for the next five minutes or so because my wife spent quite a bit of time. Didn’t you, sweetheart? On the website. So that’s cookinglike a pro.
Christa:
Well, actually, I would prefer that they would go to the main cooking website, which is culinarilyyours.com dot culinaryyours. You can get there from the podcast also.
Cal:
Okay, so go ahead and tell us to tell our listeners what it is that you spent all your time on today.
Christa:
So instead of a traditional recipe, this is one thing that you’re going to create. These are the steps. These are the ingredients. I’m trying to create something that’s a little more of an overview type recipe that. These are all the possibilities that you could do with this ingredient, what type of sauces it could go with, what type of proteins, meat can it go with, what type of vegetables, what works best with the summer or the squash.
Cal:
And the processes of cooking it and preparing it. You know, it’s easy. You cut it lengthwise. Go ahead and scoop those seeds out. Plant them if you want. They will grow, but then you can roast it. I know that a lot of times what we do is we would steam it because steam is better than boiling. Boiling is going to be taking out some of that flavor.
Cal:
Sometimes we microwave it because it’s microwaving its own juice. Usually if I’m going to microwave it, I’m going to put it in a bowl and cover that with plastic.
Christa:
It also takes about a quarter of the time.
Cal:
Yeah, exactly. So you can microwave it in eight to ten minutes where, you know, if you’re going to boil it, might take, you know, three times that. And then if you’re going to roast it, it’s going to take about 40 minutes, maybe even a little bit more than that. But cut it width wise. So they’re, scoop the seeds out. Go ahead and do your butter and salt and pepper and set it facing up and just let it roast. And you want it to roast until what? There’s a term we use in cooking, we call it fork tender. So where it can be, you stick a fork in it and the fork comes out without yanking on it, without it being held at all.
Cal:
It’s fork tender. So when it’s fork tender, that means it’s, you know, it’s done, ready to go. And then you just use that same fork to kind of scrape it up. And now you have a, you know, a little, it actually comes with its own shell, its own bowl. It comes with its own eating vessel. It’s like an oyster comes with its own bowl or turtle soup. Right. Turtle soup comes with its own bowl.
Christa:
I don’t think so.
Cal:
You don’t think so? Okay. Well, anyway, so a variety of ways you can do it. And the thing is, it’s really high in fiber. You know, if you’re looking for fiber in your diet, that’s a great way to go. Vitamins, AC and then some, some pigments also. Was that carrot? Carrots. Keratin.
Christa:
Yeah.
Cal:
Okay. You see them a lot in, in carrots. Yes, I’ll have those in carrots. But you want to get them when they’re ripe. You don’t want any blemish. Blemishes on the outside and really the shell should be pretty hard. So again, use them for a site. You can use them.
Cal:
Use them. Make a ramen and just use them in place. The noodles, that’s going to take your carbs down to one quarter. So that’s 25%, 75% your savings. But treat yourself to some spaghetti squash, folks. And again, go to culinary yours. And you can go ahead and print off several pages of ideas on how to prepare and how to serve and everything you need to do spaghetti squash.
Christa:
So how to cook spaghetti squash.
Cal:
There you go. We’ll be back. Just a moment. You’re listening to cooking like a pro with Chef cow and Mrs Chef Christa. Veggie. Veggie tail. Veggie tail.
Christa:
Veggie tail.
Cal:
Look at the scars. They have scars in their eyes on this lovely. Welcome. Welcome back. Cooking like a pro. We appreciate you listening. And again, if you have a question, you can always give us a call. Or if you just, if you’re the kind of person that likes to type, which is not me, that’s more my wife, but she’s the typer.
Cal:
But cooking like a pro, podcast.net. so, but anyway, here you’ve got cooking like a pro here. And we are on to our next segment and we’re going to be talking about, like, we’ve been talking about cooking methods and skills and those kind of things in this 2nd, 2nd section that we have. So today I want to talk a little bit about roasting because roasting is something that a lot of people do. Okay, I’m trying to be okay. A lot of people do, but then a number of people do wrong, Lee. And so I want to talk a little bit about that. And we won’t talk about that first fight that we had.
Cal:
When, what was that? That was over 20 years ago about the pot roast.
Christa:
Pot roast or swiss steak, one of the two.
Cal:
Yeah, it was something. But you know, hey, you know, we, we were, we hadn’t gotten married yet, so it had to be over 20 years ago. And it was, yeah, you know, when, you know, you’ve got a couple of cooks, you know, a couple passionate kitchen people, when, you know, when the conversation goes sideways on how to cook something. But anyway, what we want to do is talk about roasting. Remember, roasting is going to be those what we call secondary cuts of meat. They’re going to be those cuts of meat that are going to be from the muscular parts of the animal. So again, like we’ve been talking about all along, you got to kind of picture that animal if you go up to the butcher store, got all that meat in front of you, picture that animal. Where does it come from? You know, if you don’t know, ask your, your meat monger.
Cal:
Monger is just a term we use for an expert. But whoever is the meat guy in the back or the meat gal in the back, just ask them. Say, hey, where does this come from on the animal? And again, if it’s from that front section where, like, your shoulder or your chuck roasts come from, or that back section where all of your sirloin and your, where your butt comes from, that’s where you pork butts or something you want to, you know, you wouldn’t take, like, a really nice center cut meat like a pork loin, like something you would cut like a pork chop out of, or maybe a pork medallion. And if you took that and used it as a, like for carne asada, you know, or carnitas, or rather, you would end up like a chile verde. You would end up with something really dry because the meat has no moisture. It’s a meat that needs to have a dry cooking method. Right? Saute it or char grill it, barbecue it. It’s barbecue season.
Christa:
So what meat do you roast? And so I’m not understanding what is the difference between roasting and baking? They both go in the oven, right?
Cal:
Excuse me. They both go in the oven. Well, or the crock pot. But the thing about roasting, and we’ll just walk quickly through the process, is you want to take your meat, and here’s one of the challenges that I see is people, first thing they’ll do is they’ll say, oh, I want this rub, or I make this really nice rub, or I purchase it and I put this rub on there. Well, you look at your rub and look at those ingredients, because the number one ingredient is salt.
Christa:
Salt.
Cal:
Yep. Yeah, you’re going to have a problem because salt dehydrates things, right? This is how they make jerky. This is how meat, back in the days before refrigeration, this is how they sustained it for lasting on the long, you know, trail ride here.
Christa:
So if you’re going to roast, don’t salt it.
Cal:
Don’t. Yeah, go ahead and rub it with a dry rub. I wouldn’t recommend a marinade, but what you want to do with the roast is you want to sear it. So you want to get that seasoning on there. Then you want a really hot surface. A cast iron pan works great. Any kind of a really heaven heavy bottom panasone, little bit of oil. Go ahead and take that seasoned meat and then sear on every side.
Christa:
And then you’re making like a crust, right?
Cal:
Exactly, exactly. It forms that barrier that helps the flavor actually stay into the meat so.
Christa:
It locks the moisture inside.
Cal:
Locks the moisture inside. And then also the flavor. Okay, so we’re gonna sear that all the way around and then we’re gonna roast that in the oven until it’s nice and tender. Now, depending on where the meat comes from, it might be something a little higher on the sirloin, like kind of the back end of the animal, but up high. So it might be something you’re going to do, like for roast beef. Because, you know, if I want a roast beef sandwich, I don’t want something that’s completely well done. But generally, when you’re roasting meat, you can do it that way. Same thing with, when you roast a turkey, you do the same thing when you roast a turkey.
Cal:
So you just put it in, you know, season it, put it in the oven. You know, generally with the turkey, you want to pull the skin back and put the seasoning right on the meat. That’s one of the things that a lot of people make mistakes on when they season poultry. If you season the top of the skin and as soon as it starts to cook, that skin gets, you know, the fat in this, in the skin starts melting off. Well, there goes your seasoning as well.
Christa:
Well, I’ve seen a lot of people seen them, but I’ve seen online where they’ll take the butter and pack it under the skin, too with the seasoning.
Cal:
Yeah, that’s a great way to go. Great way to go. Because you want that flavor to go in there. I mean, it’s butter, you know, I mean, you know, it took me a while to train. That came out wrong. It took me a while to, to convince my, my wife or teach her rather, of the, the top three french ingredients. Right. Okay, so do you remember what the top three french ingredients are?
Christa:
I think it’s butter. Butter and butter.
Cal:
Yes, it is butter. Butter. I. Butter. So butter is better. You can’t go wrong with butter. We’ll have to see if we can find a butter song, one of these.
Christa:
So if you’re going to be roasting in the oven, which cut would you go with first off? And then what internal temperature are you trying to get to?
Cal:
You want it to get to the point where the temperature itself is going to tenderize the meat. Alright. So when it starts to tenderize, you want all of the connective tissue. So basically, when we eat meat, we’re eating the muscle of the animal, the muscle fiber, right. The muscle fiber is connected together with what’s called connective tissue. The connective tissue along with, you know, gristle or a few other things. That’s what’s going to make it tough. That’s what’s going to make it chewy.
Cal:
So you want to, you want that to melt away. And the way to do that is just to get it up to well over. I take, you know, you’re looking at 180. A crock pot is at a simmer. So that’s 200, right. Boiling is 210. So you’re going to want it at a high temp and you’re going to want to go again. And we use this term, the last segment, which is fork tender.
Cal:
Take a large fork, what we would call a carving fork, and stick that fork in there. When that fork goes in and then comes out without any, any resistance, your meat is just beautiful. But remember, you’re looking at meat that’s going to be beautiful, flavorful, tender, but it isn’t going to be medium rare or medium anymore because that’s down in the, you know, 125 to 135 degree temperature. And that’s where we’re doing our dry mussels again, our filet mignon, our ribeye steak, our New York steak, and then all of our, even our top sirloin steaks.
Christa:
So do you roast like a prime rib, a rump roast?
Cal:
Just like a prime. Well, again, I think if you think about it as a turkey, you know, where you just roast a turkey, basically, it kind of does itself. You know, you truss it, meaning you get it to a point where it’s not going to move while it’s cooking. Not that it’s going to run away, but you don’t want, as it starts to cook, you want it tied up, in a sense, where it’s going to hold its form. You know, when you’re carving a turkey, you want it to look like a turkey. You don’t want one leg going left and one leg going up. And then it’s seasoned, then it’s just roasted, roasted until it’s done all the way through.
Christa:
Is it always a higher temperature? I know when you made the prime rib before, you did a super low temperature for a really long time.
Cal:
Yes. Now there’s a variety of ways of doing it. I know that one of our restaurants back in the late, I guess, 20 07, 20 08, 20 09, somewhere in that area, we did a prime rib and it was just so well received. But that prime rib cooked a total of 18 hours.
Christa:
Was it like 200 degrees or just a real low and no, we would.
Cal:
Cook it lower than that.
Christa:
Oh, really?
Cal:
I think we cooked it 138 degrees, but we’d put some smoke in there. A really low oven, actually, it’s kind of a specialty oven that we call it. It’s almost like a warmer or something. They call it an alto sham, but it’s kind of a warmer, and it’s just at a medium temperature. So anything you put in there, if it’s set at 138, cannot get higher than 138. It’s kind of the same idea sous vide, where they’ll submerge something in water and the water’s temperature is 100, whatever, 35 degrees. Whatever you’re submerging in there that’s wrapped in a heavy plastic to protect it. That meat, that protein, whatever it is, cannot get higher than the temperature of the actual liquid.
Cal:
So that’s kind of the same thing with the slow cooking on high. Cooking, yeah, you know, usually seven, eight minutes per pound. I always just check. You want a direct temperature gauge. There’s just a direct response. Thermometer is what’s called. It’s a long. We have those at home.
Christa:
Absolutely.
Cal:
Six inches long with a little gauge at the end of it that ranges between zero and 220. Your meat gets up to 220 or in serious trouble. But the key to that is the tip. The point of that. Imagine, like, a really thin pencil needs to be in the center of whatever you’re checking the temperature on. And that’s by far the best. That’s the best way to do it because, you know, you see things that are getting close. You can even turn the oven down.
Cal:
I use timers. A lot of people use timers. I also tie a rag on the oven door. I do a lot of things to remind me I’m getting older. We forget, right?
Christa:
Absolutely. I can’t remember.
Cal:
So temperature gauges are good. Bells and whistles are good. Remember, I started cooking way before anybody even thought about cell phones. So we didn’t have that. The advantage. Advantage to that. But again, you want to serum, you want to add your, your aromatics and your bouquet Garni. Now you.
Cal:
Now the mirror paw. Mirror paw. Something. That, that was one of the first things, I think, that we went over.
Christa:
Celery, onions and carrots, two parts onion.
Cal:
One part celery, one part carrot. And then how about the bouquet garnion? Ooh.
Christa:
Bay leaf, thyme and parsley. Parsley. Two out of three.
Cal:
You got it. Well, and the reality is these ingredients, this mirepoix bouquet. Garnier, remember, I was trained through a french apprenticeship, so that’s why we use these terms. The mirepoix and the bouquet Garnier are going to give whatever roast, whatever it is that you’re cooking, it’s going to give it what we call the aromatics. That’s going to be that, that aroma that comes up, that’s going to be that additional flavor. And that flavor is just going to penetrate all the way through. But it’s those basic ingredients that you pretty much put in just about everything. And it’s also real close to one pot cooking.
Cal:
So you can do it here, do it in a crock pot. I’ve got a lot of memories of my mom or dad putting something in the crock pot. We ate a lot of crock pot when I was younger.
Christa:
So a crock pot, you can roast also. It’s not strictly to an oven.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, now you with the Instapots. Yes. You can get those hot, you can sear and then just finish it off. That’s going to be even faster because it’s cooking by pressure and you can.
Christa:
Sear it in the same vessel.
Cal:
Yeah. So you put it in a crock pot and plus it makes the house smell better. Right. All right, so crock pots here on cooking like a pro. We’ll be right back after these breaks. I don’t want french fried potatoes, red, ripe tomatoes.
Christa:
I’m never satisfied.
Cal:
I want the rim french fries with.
Christa:
The r’s and they wish a bubble on the side.
Cal:
I don’t want pork chops and vegan. That won’t awaken my appetite inside. I want the rim fruit. What you got cooking? I’m about cooking something up with me. Good looking. There you go. Back. This is Chef cow.
Cal:
My beautiful wife Mrs Chef Christa. We are. You’re listening to cooking like a pro right here at KCNR. We appreciate you tuning in every Wednesday at 05:00 and. Yep. Hey, good looking, what you got cooking? So we’re going to be talking this segment about cooking in the kitchen. And this was one of the, one of the things that kind of came out of nowhere with me, to be honest with, when my wife maybe was six, seven years ago. Chris, remember you’d asked me to show you some professional cooking things?
Christa:
It was a New Year’s revolution. Yeah.
Cal:
Cooking like a pro things. And so we went through this process and there’s one thing that you cannot do without when you’re cooking in the kitchen with somebody. And I’ve known this because of my professional life, but we found it out at home, and that was communication. You got to be able to talk. If you’re not talking, something bad is going to happen. Someone’s going to get stabbed or something’s.
Christa:
Going to get dropped, somebody’s feelings are.
Cal:
Going to get hurt, something’s going to get burnt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Christa:
So somebody’s sleeping on the couch.
Cal:
Oh, okay. There you go. All right. She said it. She said it. But it was. What I enjoyed so much is that the communication component of this really had an added benefit just to our relationship of cooking together. It’s kind of like when we talk about families, you know, when families used to all eat together.
Cal:
When I was a kid, we ate together. If you didn’t. You know, I remember dad. I mean, if you weren’t at the table when dinner started, you didn’t eat, you know, and you ate what was on your plate. And dad and mom were pretty serious.
Christa:
More structured lives, it seems now it’s things like everybody’s going in different directions all at the same time.
Cal:
Yeah. You know, and that’s a great point. And I’ll tell you, it’s sad. It’s sad because cooking, especially cooking together and eating together, it should be unifying, you know, it should be something that we do and we have fun and there’s communication and we talk about this and we talk about that and we get the updates of what’s going on, and there’s just this great opportunity that unfortunately, in this day and time with, you know, cell phones and laptops and computers and everything under the sun, that it pulls away from that and it pulls away from the family structure. And I’ll tell you, I will tell you honestly that I’ve said this for a number of decades now, that this has been one of the biggest challenges to just the assault on families in our country. Remember, we talked about that in the past, that in America, we eat to live. We eat so we can have more energy. We eat so we can have fuel to do what’s next in our task.
Cal:
So we eat to live. Where in Europe? It’s the opposite.
Christa:
They live to eat.
Cal:
Yeah, they live to eat. They do their. Or they work. Yeah, they do their work, their job, whatever. But the eating is the benefit of that. It’s the blessing in the day of getting everyone together and just. And having a wonderful time.
Christa:
Well, when I was growing up, there wasn’t any one person in the kitchen. We had the entire family cooking. So my dad was a timber faller he would be out finishing up his workday, sharpening his chains. Grandma was on salad. I was always on bread, whether it be muffins, biscuits, garlic bread, and sides. My mom was usually on whatever the main dish was. And if it was the grilling night, dad was out on the grill. So literally, every single person contributes to every single dinner, every single night.
Cal:
You make it sound like a band. Like a band. Like you’re a band, you know, grandma, grandma’s on salad. You know, I’m gonna.
Christa:
Yeah, well, but it was. Everybody had. It was just like stations in a restaurant. You’ve got your hot station, you got your cold station, you got your dessert station, you had your specialty. And we focused on our specialties to bring a meal together. It wasn’t just one person trying to get it all done at the same time, you know?
Cal:
And the sadness of that is that you don’t see that very often.
Christa:
No, not anymore.
Cal:
You know, I mean, it’s just one of those. Those things that, unfortunately, we’ve evolved out of. But the one. It’s one thing, and I’m not, you know, that I’ve seen through my. My years, is that things come back around. You know, I will be very happy when that comes back around. Where people see the value in cooking together. I mean, it’s fun, it’s exciting.
Cal:
There’s all kinds of things you can do, but that communication is top of the line when you’re cooking in the kitchen together. Another, you know, one thing I see, it also is cooked as cleaning as you go.
Christa:
That’s a huge help, you know, so.
Cal:
You don’t end up with this big old mess, you know, clean as you go. Have the dishwasher empty. You know, maybe you can even have a little bit of soapy water in one of your sinks if you’re not using it. But. But clean as you go. So you don’t have this. Because one of the things that makes cooking together difficult is knowing you got a big mess to clean up.
Christa:
Well, you have no room to do anything. You can’t move. You can’t put anything down. You can’t find anything. You’re confused.
Cal:
So that’s. And then just a variety of things that I jotted down, spreading out the work, like, you had mentioned, having different people responsible for different things. Like, you met dad’s, generally on the grill and these other things that are happening, but it makes it fun. It also gives you extra time to experiment, and that’s something that we talk about a lot, something, you know, you can try different things like, we’re doing a spaghetti squash. Well, maybe want to do a different way. Maybe we want to roast it off with some chopped up rosemary on top or something else that might just take it a different direction. Because another thing I see is people kind of get their four or five things that they cook, and then that’s all they cook. It’s like, well, okay, I can do roasted chicken from Costco.
Cal:
I can do a meatloaf. You know, just do certain things that they do. There’s a certain rice dish, a pasta dish, and that’s kind of everything kind of goes around that menu. Now, remember, a menu can be as big or small as you want it. But the exciting part of this is when you’re able to experiment with new items and new products.
Christa:
I just had an idea. What if we took that picotta grass? Yes. I’m getting tongue tied here. The spaghetti swash and made it picotta style with capers and lemon, like a chicken piccata. Do you think something like that would work?
Cal:
I think, especially if you’re doing, like, a pasta dish. Yeah, I think that it would work. If you remember, if you’re using capers, the caper is the berry of a caper bush, and they put them in a brine, and that brine is really just vinegar and a bunch of salt. So if you’re using capers, like a chicken picado or trying something like you talked about, like spaghetti or the spaghetti squash and kind of a picado sauce, then just be careful with you sodium. But there’s a lot of things you can do to make it, to make it better. You know, having an extra set of eyes is always great in the kitchen. I do that, you know, quite a bit, especially when I was doing, like, ice carving or something. I.
Cal:
I do the majority of it, and I put it back in the freezer and then bring it out later because I wanted to get that, that fresh look. And you need that. So that second pair of eyes. A second pair of eyes is never going to not help you.
Christa:
Well, and another thing smells. So if you’re not in the kitchen, you’re in the kitchen, you constantly smell it. You kind of become kind of nose blind. Well, I’m out in the other room, and I come in and go, something’s burning, something’s cooked, something’s done. Something’s ready to be pulled, because I can smell it as soon as I walk in.
Cal:
Yeah, yeah. Sulfuric vegetables are that way, especially broccoli. I can walk in the door and I can tell if your broccoli is done cooking or not, I can tell you if it’s overcooked. I can tell you if it’s undercooked.
Christa:
Well, in most foods, they start to smell. That means they’re almost done. They don’t really have much of aroma until they’re cooked.
Cal:
So those are some of the things advanced prep. Another thing, prep things ahead of time. I know that we’re finished putting our finishing touches on a meal planning seminar that we’re going to do. So we’ll continue to remind you as that gets closer. That’ll be on your culinary yours website. There’s a lot of information on there. Also, I want to talk about when it comes to advanced prepping, having a grocery list is a big thing. And, hon, maybe you can talk a little bit about this grocery list that you made, because this is free, right?
Christa:
This is free. It is available.
Cal:
Anyone can get it.
Christa:
Culinaryyours.net. yes. Yes, it is free. But this is the exact one that we use. How do you keep track of your groceries? How do you remember what you’re out of? The second that we are almost out of something, we write it down and it’s in a central location hanging on the fridge. My son can write on it. I can write on it. Cal can write on it.
Christa:
Anybody can add to the grocery list. So when I go sit down and plan my run to either Walmart or Winco or target, wherever I’m going to be picking up groceries that day, I can look at the list and see what everybody is requesting. So it’s a great way to keep track of things.
Cal:
Yeah, I love the list. Especially there’s this little area that I write in and out burger, you know, because then you don’t need the list, right? Because you’ve got your meat, you got your bun. You know, burgers are pretty much well rounded. I think when it comes to the dietary needs, the nutritional, you know, needs that people have.
Christa:
But what about Chick fil a? What if you want to have a chicken?
Cal:
Chick fil a, too. Chick fil a too. We gotta give them all a chance, so. But having that grocery list, again, you can go to culinarily yours and get that and just print it off, make a couple copies, stick one on there with a magnet. And again, you know, you don’t. I guess it saves sticky pads or post it notes. Right. You know, those everywhere, like, oh, we need this.
Cal:
Oh, we’re out of chips or we’re out of.
Christa:
Well, this is organized.
Cal:
More vegetables.
Christa:
Yeah, this is organized to where you can have all of your meat together, all of your dairy together, all of your vegetables together. So you’re not running around between different aisles. If you’re on that aisle, that’s what you’re looking for is those items that you written down, you know?
Cal:
And that’s what I like about this list that you, you set it up kind of in the way most stores are kind of lined out very similar. You go in that front door and boom, the first thing you do is go left and you hit the produce. And then you just move yourself around. And then you’re maybe, you know, your frozen is towards the end. Your dairy is always in the back. Yeah, you gotta walk for the milk, folks. You gotta walk for the milk always. Yeah, but anyway, and if it’s possible, shop together, you know, I mean, this is a life that we have.
Cal:
Spend it with the ones that you love, whether you’re cooking in the kitchen, whether you’re going shopping together. Create those memories. You know, those memories, because first off, you never know what’s going to become a memory.
Christa:
Well, the things that I forget, you know, if Isaac’s with me, he’ll go, hey, I like this idea as he’s walking by. Well, then we’ll make that for dinner.
Cal:
Yeah. Especially if he wants to cook it. So. And then also some of the other things. As far as along the weekly meal prep is consider secondary use of items. Here’s a perfect example. Let’s say on Sunday, let’s say we’re a family, we’re gonna have a nice baked ham. Okay.
Cal:
And then maybe on cool it down, go through all those processes. We can talk about that in a different show and how to do it. Extremely important to cool your items down. And then maybe after that, on Tuesday, you have some nice ham sandwiches. And then towards the weekend, you’ve got, you dice up what’s left, and you got a beautiful split pea soup. So you’ve taken one item and you’ve got a total utilization.
Christa:
Or a Denver omelet.
Cal:
Denver almost. For breakfast. There’s so many things you can do with ham. You know, it’s not as versatile as bacon. Well, maybe it is more versatile and they do come from the same animal. So that’s always a good question. I just looked at that website, and that’s an amazing website. Culinaryly yours.
Cal:
Culinaryours.
Christa:
Spoken by the man behind the window.
Cal:
There’s our chief engineer. When the moon hits your eye like a bigger pizza pie, that’s morale. When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine that’s more air. Bells will ring tingling and you’ll sing.
Christa:
In so much.
Cal:
All right, welcome back again, cooking like a pro. And this last segment, it seemed to be kind of evolved into the segment.
Christa:
That we talk about wine, not white wine. Today it’s red wine.
Cal:
Today, red wine. You know, Dave, who sings that song? Is that Bob Marley? Someone like that. Ub 40. Never heard of him. The letter u, the letter b and then 40. Well, there you go.
Christa:
We all know the song.
Cal:
We know the song. We know the song. So. Yeah, so red wine again, remember that when it comes to wine, that the term we use for the type of wine is varietal. Varietal is the name of the grape. And whatever is mostly in that bottle is generally going to use that term that we call varietal, as in whether it’s a cabernet or sauvignon or a chardonnay or viognier. We talked about last week. My dear friend gave me a bottle of Syrah and Barbera.
Christa:
Oh, it is so good.
Cal:
It was so delicious. Thanks, John. Gotta give a shout out to John. That was. I finally drank and my birthday has been.
Christa:
You got any more?
Cal:
I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. But I was, you know, I guess I’m patient, getting patient when I get older, which is strange. But anyway, cabernet, just such a wonderful wine. But again, the thing you have, this varietal, it also depends on where it grows, you know, the growing region where it comes from. Does it come from a place down like napa or that Sonoma area where you got these cool, long summer evenings so those grapes can develop, because you need those grapes, those varietals, to do what they do, you know, to become more complex or not. It is the opposite. Then you’re going to get a wine that certainly has less characters in it. But on a cabernet, it is one of those things that probably the wine that I think you can get the most out of when it comes to just this massive variety of flavors and aromas from the legs and what we call the body or the viscosity.
Cal:
You know, the legs. Right. Why don’t you explain what the legs are? Busy legs. Wait a minute. My wine has legs. Is he going to walk away?
Christa:
Okay, so legs. So you pour the wine into the glass and you kind of swirl it around. And then as the wine settles, whatever wine has gone up to the top of the glass starts to kind of stream down inside of the glass. And that’s the legs.
Cal:
Yeah, that’s gonna. Again, we use the term sometimes viscosity. It’s gonna be a little bit thicker. And you’re gonna see that in these wines that are. That are made well. Yeah. So it’s one of the things you look at and then also the aroma. You know, you don’t just pop open a bottle and just, you know, start drinking it.
Cal:
Give it some time. First off, you might want to give it some time to breathe, you know, which I did with the wine that John had given me, you know, because it’s been cramped up in this bottle that was a 2019, so it’s been cramped up in this bottle for five years. Developing, breathing. Remember, that’s why we use the cork, so the wines can continue to breathe, they continue to evolve, and the different flavor characteristics that the grape has.
Christa:
Will a synthetic cork be different than a regular cork?
Cal:
You know, you see a lot more of those now. And yes, I think you’re always better going with the regular cork. But for a while there, there was cork shortage, a cork shortage. So they started going to some of the synthetic things and then even a twist off, you know, something that I wouldn’t get a wine, I wouldn’t expect a wine that had a twist off to be a wine that’s made to last very long, because maybe for earlier consumption, something you want a nice, light, fruity wine for, you know, lunch or dinner this weekend or something, then, you know, something like that. Because basically it’s not what we call laden. It’s not really being prepared to lay down and to take time developing the bottle. It’s made to made to drink quicker.
Christa:
So if I was to get one right now, what vintage, year? What I would try and go for something that’s a little bit older. Is that a younger wine, an older one?
Cal:
If you really wanted to research and you wanted a good wine, I would go straight to. Well, you go to the Internet now and go to the Internet and find out the best growing seasons because it’s determinant on the season itself. Other things, too, you know, the soil and the rain and a lot of things. But that’s one of the things I look at what are the best growing seasons? Because I know that, oh, 78, 79 were great, great years. 84, 80, 85 and 86 amazing years, 93. But I kind of quit. You know, I haven’t been had restaurants where I’ve been writing wine lists for a while, so I haven’t really kept up on it. But it’s certainly information you could get.
Cal:
And again, the best growing season is going to produce the best grapes, which is going to produce the best product.
Christa:
Now, can you forget a cab and leave it in the back of the cabinet for a while, for a few years and pull it out? Or is this something you don’t want to. You can pretty quickly.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, you notice that the red wines have a. They come in a bottle that’s shaded. Usually it’s a green bottle. And the reason for that is oxidation air. Getting to the wine is probably the biggest enemy of wine. It will oxidize. It will oxidize quickly.
Cal:
So you want to make sure that you keep it protected. The second thing, though, is also the light. You want to keep it in a dark place. If you have a cellar underneath your house or someplace where you can put it where the temperature kind of stays the same, you don’t want a lot of temperature change. You should be somewhere around the 60 65 area, but generally on 60 65, because that’s the serving temperature. And in France, that’s cave temperature. So the wine is in there and it’s dark, and the temperature doesn’t vary much. Those are two things that are going to help your wine be able to mature in the way that you want.
Christa:
And do the tannins help it have an extended shelf life?
Cal:
Yeah, the tannins come from the seeds in the skin, and that’s that. I like to describe it kind of as an aspirin kind of a taste, and that’s in the wine to help it with its longevity. So if you want a wine that you’re going to store for a while or lay it down, then you’re going to want to have tannins in there, and that’s going to keep the wine maturing. And once that tannin is gone, now that you don’t taste the tannin, you taste the fruit. And that when you get to that point, that’s when that wine is perfect. And a. A lot of things we look at, especially because it’s a cooking show, is we look at food pairings, food and wine pairings, and chocolate is just an amazing thing. I don’t know if a lot of people know that, but chocolate in a really good wine is just.
Cal:
You’re in heaven.
Christa:
So if you did a tasting and just fruit, cheese, nuts, if you’re doing just a cab night, what would you put with it?
Cal:
Well, I’d stay away from cheese, because the thing about dairy is dairy coats your tongue, so you’d want something acidic, like we talked about, the viognier or sauvignon blanc, something like that. Maybe even chardonnay without the butter in it that hasn’t seen any oak because you’d want to keep that, your tongue being cleansed. But I think chocolate is a great one. Beef, umami, lamb. And another thing is you can always use that wine product in your dish. Let’s say we’re making a stew and we’re going to go with this particular red wine, then maybe that wine would be something that we would either deglaze or put in that, the food dish. So that would help it be a marriage, you know, it would marry it together because you’re always looking for similar flavors or contrasts, opposite flavors.
Christa:
Maybe some dried cherries or some dried blueberries.
Cal:
Also, you know, if you’re tasting the wine and you’re getting those flavors out of it, then that’s exactly what you want to do to parrot. If you’re getting like cherries or currants out of something, then use those in the, in the preparation of the dish and you’re going to have, again, instead of just enjoying the food and enjoying the wine, now you’re enjoying the food and wine together. And if you’re going to do that, then, you know, why not? I mean, why not? Why not enjoy as much as you can? Again, I’m italian, we come from a family of wine drinkers, you know, and so it was something that was kind of cultural, I suppose, for us, but it was something that always kind of, you know, enhanced the dinner. And as I got older and, you know, developed restaurants and had to write wine lists, I learned more and more about that. But matching the food and wine is something that’s really good. And, you know, now that they have the Internet, go to the webpage, you know, the back of the bottle will generally have very helpful information. Sometimes they don’t put a lot of information on there. So go to the website.
Cal:
You know, every winery out there is going to have, you know, I don’t know how many cabernets are even made in California.
Christa:
Well, interesting. I was, I think Google was listening to us. You started talking about cabernets and Google popped up this article from Forbes today saying there’s almost 3000 wineries in California and over a thousand of them pushed to make Cabernet. Over a thousand in California, that’s a third of the wineries.
Cal:
I’m not sure if that, if the fact that there’s a thousand wineries making cab bothers me more or the fact that Google was listening to us. But either way, that’s kind of, you know, the way it is this day and age but again, go to the webpage, read the back of the bottle, and that will usually give you not just the flavors that you might expect. And just keep practicing and practicing. You’ll get better.
Christa:
Another question for you. So compared to, we’ve talked about Pinot Noir and we have talked about Merlot, how does it compare to those? Because they’re a pretty gentle.
Cal:
Yeah.
Christa:
Accessible wine. Is this a little stronger?
Cal:
They’re going to be a little more complex. Yeah, well, I would use the word. They’re going to have more. They’re going to be more complex. They’re going to offer more generally as a varietal itself, it’s going to offer more. And then you can even go further on to that, like a barbera or a Zinfandel, red Zinfandel. Or they’re going to have a, you know, going to be very more complexities, more different flavors. You’re going to, you know, be able to pick up in them.
Cal:
But a cab is, especially if you’re getting a cab from, from Napa Valley, you can’t go wrong. It’s an area where that, you know, the growing season is very advantageous to producing real, real high quality items.
Christa:
Would you lean to a bottle of wine that is a cab, strictly cab or one that’s a blend?
Cal:
It would depend. I mean, a blend is going to generally be inexpensive because that’s, might be less expensive. That’s why, you know, it’s being, using grapes from other areas. But I would go with one that’s just Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and something that maybe has the four or five years on it. I’ve drank them as much as well over 20 years old, and they are fantastic. So just, you know, have fun out there, folks. Whether you’re getting together in the kitchen with the family and having some dinner and whether there’s wine on the table or spaghetti squash or you’re roasting something or you’re cooking in the crock pot, just enjoy yourself. This is Chef Cal and Mrs.
Cal:
Chef Christa De Mercurio here on cooking like a pro, cookinglike a propodcast.net. if you want to send a question for next week, we appreciate you tuning in here.
Christa:
Thank you so much for spending time with us. Until next time, we hope you’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen. So we’ll be with you again next week with food, flavor and fun right here on cooking like a pro podcast.
