Cal and Christa DeMercurio
Hey Food Fans!
This is our best episode yet. We’re thrilled to bring you a fresh episode of “Cooking Like a Pro” – the podcast where we explore all things food with a dash of nostalgia and a sprinkle of culinary wisdom. Hosted by the ever-lively Chef Cal and joined by Mrs Chef, his wife Christa, this episode is a delightful blend of home-cooked memories and practical kitchen tips that’ll inspire your next meal.
- Growing and using beef steak and heirloom tomatoes for the perfect BLT sandwich.
- Exploring the history and modern preparation of beef stroganoff.
- Creative ways to use leftover meatloaf for manicotti bolognese.
- Tips for preparing crudités and the importance of vegetable texture.
- Culinary uses of beer in recipes like beer batter and beer cheddar soup.
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Timestamp Overview
00:00 Cal and Christa talk food, starting with fruits, veggies.
03:23 Celery turns bitter if cooked too long.
06:45 Various vegetables, blanched for desired texture.
12:47 Balancing flavors in meals using a BLT.
14:39 Fresh BLT with heirloom tomatoes and bacon.
17:25 Use inexpensive meat with working muscle for shredding.
20:20 Gradually incorporate ingredients to avoid overwhelming mixtures.
23:36 Fish and pasta combine into cost-effective dishes.
28:29 Thawed, drained spinach mixes well with ricotta.
29:48 Stuffed pasta dish with cost-saving cooking tips.
34:47 Event supports Operation Christmas Child with gifts worldwide.
36:59 Use highly flavored beer for deep-fried fish.
40:36 Favorite muffin: Guinness stout, balance sugar.
43:54 Creating meals featuring beer in various forms.
45:29 Experimenting leads to finding what works well.
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. Today’s episode was broadcast and recorded live on AM FM radio.
Cal:
Hello. Hello, good afternoon and welcome to cooking like a pro. This is Chef Cal and my wife Christa.
Christa:
Hello, good evening.
Cal:
Yep, you found us at KCNR 1460 AM and 96 Five FM. We always appreciate you. You listening? Because we know it’s a food thing. So we just, you know, enjoy talking about food. And as we normally do, we start the section off or show off. We’re talking about fruits and vegetables, something, you know, stuff that’s good for you. You know, one of the things we haven’t talked about yet is what the French call crudite. And what in America we just call vegetable tray kind of rhyme.
Christa:
Just a veggie plate.
Cal:
Veggie plate.
Christa:
Like there’s things you get at Costco that’s got the multiple veggies with the dip in the middle of it.
Cal:
Yeah. With, you know, the celery and the carrots and all that. And anyway, it’s just a great way to get your vegetables in. I know that a lot of people may not have a wide variety of ways of preparing them or cooking them rather than, you know, this way they can just have them. Have them sitting there.
Christa:
Now, should accrutite be blanched at times or should it always just be raw vegetables?
Cal:
Well, crudite itself means raw actually means raw things. So, you know, I think that could. You can kind of do whatever you want. I think. I think if you start adding stuff to it, I mean, it might eventually get. If you’re doing meats and cheese or something, you know, and bread, then you’re leaning towards a charcuterie. But for crudite is just raw vegetables and some kind of a dip. You know, kind of the traditional dip is kind of like a ranch thing.
Cal:
But we used to have a crudite that people could. Well, the great thing about it is it’s great for sharing. It’s easy to do, it’s great for sharing. It’s not going to go bad and. But you know, you do need to peel your celery. That’s one of the things people just miss. You got to peel your celery and it’s easy enough to do. It’s just the back of the celery.
Cal:
The rib itself has string on the outside. Yeah, it has strings. I mean, you can floss, I guess.
Christa:
Yeah. It’s really stringing. Really, really tough stuff.
Cal:
Yes. You need to pull that out, and you need to pull it out if you’re using it for something else, too, because, I mean, that, that stringiness that so strings, that fiber is only going to get in whatever it is you, you cook. If it ends up coming off or getting, you know, torn off, I don’t know that it necessarily would, but, you.
Christa:
Know, well, I’m talking about celery. You want a younger celery, right? Because older, woodier celery just becomes bitter and not palatable.
Cal:
Yeah, it becomes bitter, and it also becomes bitter when you cook it too long. Celery is one of those things that even when we’re making, you know, stalks and soups, for example, a carrot, let’s say you’re doing a vegetable soup and you’ve got carrots and onion and celery going in there. Well, the carrots are by far the most dense. It’s going to take the longest. So maybe you start off with some carrots and some garlic and a little bit of oil, and you cook that up and then you add maybe some chicken pieces and get that cooking. And then go ahead and add your onions, and then you can wait, you know, to add your celery. Cause again, celery might take four or five minutes where, you know, diced up carrots, depending on the size, could take anywhere between, you know, I don’t know, eight to ten to more. But, you know, one thing about when you’re cutting your vegetables, and I know how, where we got off on soup here, but it is important that everything’s cut the same size.
Christa:
I was just gonna ask you about that because you get those big old pieces, or they’ll take a whole piece of celery is tapered at the top, it’s wider at the bottom. And I notice some of the vegetable trays, they’ll have just a big old hunk of celery. The full curb is not even cut down. It’s very hard to eat.
Cal:
Well, hard to eat. And again, it’s going to get more bitter as far as cutting in the right. Similar sizing. Extremely important because when I take a bite of soup, if I’m eating clam chowder, for example, I don’t want to take a bite of soup. And the only thing on my spoon is a potato because, you know, the potato is maybe an inch by an inch and a half or something. So you think about cutting things the right size. But crudite is really just going to be finger size, you know, I mean, if you were to look at your, your pointer finger, your index finger, I suppose just something like that, like a stick, like a matchstick. Something you can pick up.
Cal:
But then again, it’s healthy. And we used to do ours with that raspberry dressing, a great raspberry. It was a salad dressing that we do with beef, blue cheese and pine nut salad. That was a good one. That was a good one. But, you know, just anything to dip it in, something. I mean, yogurt is a great accompaniment. You can get so many different flavored yogurts, and then you can also use yogurt as a base.
Christa:
And hummus. Hummus is a good dip.
Cal:
Hummus is something that’s good to dip it in. So all these things are falling into the, the healthier category. So it’s basically just a different way of eating vegetables because some people are like, well, how do I cook them? Well, we cook them all the same. We steam them or we saute them or we microwave them. But there are wide variety of ways of cooking vegetables, too. I know that in the wintertime, carrots will generally get a little more bitter from being in the ground longer, and I just saute mine. And then when we talk about deglazing, adding the liquid to it, we would do ours and end up, like, hitting it with a little bit of seven up, you know, so it’s still seven up in with your carrots and adds a little sweetness back to it.
Christa:
Now I’m curious. So a vegetable plate usually has carrots, celery, a lot of times broccoli, sometimes cauliflower. Are there some other vegetables? I mean, when I was growing up, we used to do a lot of Jerusalem artichokes.
Cal:
Yeah. You know, just about anything. Like you said, jerusalem artichokes. Which reminds me of things like turnip or rutabaga. There’s any variety of things that you can put on there. And you mentioned earlier, or you asked about just whether they should be blanched or not. And that kind of just depends on the person. I mean, some things like broccoli, cauliflower, you know, cauliflower maybe not so much, but even if you blanched it for 60 seconds, it, you know, it’s still going to be crunchy.
Cal:
It’s still going to have all the vitamins and minerals in it. We’re not trying to, you know, squeeze all the flavor out of it, but, you know, broccoli can be a little more trying, you know, to chew through.
Christa:
Okay, now I have another beef.
Cal:
Another beef. We’re talking about vegetables.
Christa:
I know. Cherry tomatoes. You know, those cherry tomatoes, they’ll give you the big old one that you pop in your mouth and you bite on it. And because it’s not cut, it goes squirt everywhere.
Cal:
Yeah, those are great. Well, that’s something that I always used to bother me in, in restaurants. So I made sure if we were ever using cherry tomatoes on a salad. Yeah, as a salad, we would cut them in half because, you know, you know, hitting the person across this table from you is not the goal of eating a cherry tomato. But I picked some of those sunbursts today. I was outside and I was hungry, so I grabbed a couple of those people.
Christa:
My tomatoes are finally ripening.
Cal:
They are getting close to September. Well, the ones the deer haven’t got are ripening. You know, it’s still deer season, so we live outside the city limits. We might need to give dad a call.
Christa:
But besides tomatoes, those. What are they called? Goji? No, not goji bears. Those little pineapple husk tomatoes.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, there’s a variety of names for them. Some of them come stone fruit. I’ve always. I always called them pineapple husk tomatoes because for one, they have that husk on them kind of like a chinese lantern. Other name they’re known by is gooseberry.
Christa:
Gooseberries.
Cal:
But the pineapple husk tomatoes or gooseberries or stone. No, it’s ground cherries.
Christa:
Ground cherries. Yeah.
Cal:
Yeah. The thing about them is they just taste like pineapple. They’re so delicious. If you can get them, if you see them, you know, in the store, a little basket of them.
Christa:
Trader Joe’s almost always has them.
Cal:
You know, I’m wondering if we had to hit up Trader Joe’s on some kind of a, you know, commercial contracts as much as you bring them up? Well, you shop there more than I do. I go there for my pork belly, but that’s generally, I mean, not my pork belly. I go there to buy pork belly.
Christa:
Well, they can. They have some unique things that you can’t get in other stores. And that’s why I like to go there to see what’s new and what we can try from other cultures.
Cal:
And they have less things that are wrapped in plastic.
Christa:
Right.
Cal:
We’ve been talking about that lately. Things are wrapped in plastic, so. But we’re gonna go ahead and take our quick first break here again, cooking like a pro here with Chef tal and Mrs. Chef Christa. And you have found us on KCNR 1460 am and 96 five fm. I like it smoked and I like it fried. I like it with eggs on the side. My love for bacon will never die.
Cal:
I want bacon, bacon, bacon. It’s great for breakfast. Bacon, bacon, bacon. You have found us here on KCNR 1460 am 96. Five FM and bacon. You know, actually I was reading something that my. That our son. Our son wrote the other day.
Cal:
He’s 15 now. But I was looking at something that he had written back in his grade school days. Yeah, grade school days. And he said it was something to do with God creating bacon. You know, I mean, and he’s a bacon kid. The kid loves bacon. Yeah, he loves bacon. And you know, especially his Grammy bacon.
Cal:
Grammy bacon. Because when he goes to Grammy’s house, Grammy gives him the big thick bacon.
Christa:
Good bacon.
Cal:
There’s a difference. Yeah. And I know that, you know, I worked for a couple years black bear diner as their corporate Chef. And bacon was a big thing. Bacon’s one of those things that it’s pieces per pound. So there’s 16oz in a pound. So if you get a pound of bacon, then it should be 1oz per piece. If it’s a 16 count.
Cal:
16 count. 16oz in a pound. One of the things that I seen where they really. The bacon industry really trying to kind of trip us up here is that remember every. You would buy bacon and you would get one pound of bacon. You know, get. When you go to the store, grab me a pound of bacon. Well, when you grab that box that you are just assuming more often than not that it’s a pound of bacon.
Cal:
It’s not. Look at it. Because quite often it will say 12oz. So it’s only three quarters of a pound. So they’re saying they’re, oh, this bacon pack of bacon is only costing you x. Maybe it’s costing you what, you know, $8 or something, but you’re not getting a full pound of bacon.
Christa:
The packages are getting smaller.
Cal:
The prices are going up. Yeah, I mean, there’s less Doritos in a bag. I mean, less cheerios in a box. It’s. I don’t know, it’s a half empty. Well, it’s these marketing people. You know, I think we have to blame it on the marketing people that are out there trying to say, okay, well, how are we going to save money on. On this? But yes, check your bacon and make sure that you are getting a pound.
Cal:
I would recommend going to a place where they sell bacon by the pound. A lot of places do. It’s generally what we call a ten to twelve. So it’s ten to twelve count. So it’s a little over an ounce per piece. And, you know, 50% of it’s fat. It’s going to cook off, it’s going to shrink. I like bacon that you can chew.
Christa:
I don’t even bother buying uncooked bake anymore. I get the Kirkland.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, you’re again. Back to Costco. Yes, back to Costco.
Christa:
Costco is my friend. Trader Joe’s is my friend.
Cal:
Well, anyway, we started talking about bacon because I wanted to talk about, we’ll figure out a way to make this connection here, but enjoying flavors more and looking for a balance of flavor. And I thought one of the easier ways to kind of describe my thoughts on this were a BLT. If you eat bacon, you undoubtedly had, you know, a BLT, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. But when you take a bite of that bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, are you tasting just the bacon? Are you tasting the tomato? Are you tasting the lettuce? Are you tasting the bread? So basically what we’re looking at is when we prepare a meal, we want the flavors to be balanced enough where we taste all of them. Because if you don’t have, then what’s the reason for that ingredient even being in there? You know, I mean, if I, if I eat something and I can’t taste the mushrooms, then why are the mushrooms in there? So you kind of have to look at that balance. Like, do you need to go a little more of this, a little less of this? But on a BLT especially, it’s pretty easy to really just taste the bacon.
Christa:
Unless you’ve got a really nice homegrown tomato that makes easy.
Cal:
Okay, well, that leads me to the next nice segue. And I remember when the tomato season first came out and mom and dad were, had their, their garden out back this, this year, it wasn’t that long ago, maybe a month or so ago, and they had this tomato, and they were letting it grow. They’re picking things around it, but not this one tomato. I said, what are you doing with that one tomato? And dad goes, that’s my BLT tomato. That’s my blt tomato for me and mom for their sandwich. So they literally just grew one tomato for himself. They were waiting on it. Well, they had a lot of different tomatoes, but this one particular nice large tomato.
Cal:
And I know that we got a, I don’t know if it was a mortgage lifter or something, beef steaks growing out there, couple beef steaks, and it was you know, you get the slice effect. I think I picked up a heirloom. But you put a slice maybe like a. Yeah, I don’t know, a quarter, little over a quarter, maybe three, eight of an inch thicken, slice of tomato on there, a little salt and pepper, a little bit of bacon, October. And then a nice crisp lettuce. Crisp. Great BLT. And moving on to something else that we just did was dinner last night, and that was stroganoff, something that, you know, you don’t see it on a restaurant menu.
Cal:
You just don’t.
Christa:
It seems like it’s a pastime type food. People don’t eat it anymore.
Cal:
Yeah, it’s just. Well, brunch is kind of a dead thing, right? I mean, I remember brunch being so fun. I remember back in the late seventies, me and my friend Howard, man, we would set brunch line up at the red line, and we would have all kinds of heights and tables and rocks and bushes, and I always did the ice carvings, and. And then we just set up the chafing dishes, and we would have, you know, you’d have all the eggs Benedict and I. The beef stroganoff and the seafood, Newburgh, and you. And you had all those. But they’re just, you know, I don’t even know. There’s a place that really does a plate down brunch.
Christa:
The place up by the Shasta lake, I think. Still doing it.
Cal:
Oh, the old. I don’t know if they still call that tail of the whale. I worked there in Bridge Bay.
Christa:
Yeah, bridge. I can’t remember what it’s called now.
Cal:
I was working there with my second son. My second son, Joshua, was born while I worked there. So CJ was just a year old. So that was back in the mid eighties. That’ll give you an idea of how old. Old I am. But Stroganoff, actually, doing a little research on that. It came from a russian gentleman, Count Stroganoff, spelled S T e r o g n o V.
Cal:
Stroganov. He was from a russian family, and this came, is attributed to his Chef. This is back in the 18 hundreds. And it said that he. The count had no teeth, so he needed something soft. So you cook Stroganoff all the way to the point where, you know, it kind of falls apart, which, of course, you can. I mean, it’s like shredded beef. Then.
Cal:
Personally, I think I like a little chew. I don’t mind. I mean, I don’t mind buying something and chewing something. That’s kind of like pasta being authentic.
Christa:
One you made the other night. So we had a ribeye. Is that what you brought home a ribeye on, I think, Monday? And then leftover, you cubed that up, and then you add it to the brown sauce, and it was the most tender ribeye I’ve ever had in my life.
Cal:
Yeah. Tender and delicious. But not shredded.
Christa:
No, it was not.
Cal:
You know, if you’re gonna shred something, you might as well just get the least expensive meat you can, because that’s kind of what it’s there for. You’re. It’s a. It’s a working muscle, so it’s a part of the animal that, you know, does some moving around. Maybe in the shoulder where you get your chuck or towards the butt end, you know, or you get your. Your sirloin and your round, you know, where the meat forms. You know, the muscle fibers are held together by connective tissue. So once you get more connective tissue involved, because it’s more of a working muscle, then you have something where the cooking process needs to break it down.
Cal:
So then you’re stewing it, then you’re throwing it in the crock pot, then you’re simmering in on the back of the stove and just letting it do its thing. But I wasn’t going to cook that. You know, the ribeye that was left over, all you had to do is kind of throw it in there and bring it up to temp. But a lot of mushrooms.
Christa:
So a stroganoff, it comes from a brown sauce.
Cal:
It’s a Brett. Well, it’s a sour cream sauce. So it’s a brown sauce with sour cream and mushrooms. And mushrooms. And mushrooms are something that we’ve always done here. That’s how I was trained, taught do back in the seventies, and I. And that’s traditional. But, you know, you can certainly, obviously do without.
Cal:
You could add other things as well. Well, again, that’s a wonderful thing about food, is it is just fun and exciting and, you know, to do things with it. But you add the sour cream, and sometimes you’re actually better off putting a dollop, a dollop being a. Let’s just say a scoop. If you don’t know what a dollop is, this is a scoop. A little plop, plop of sour cream on top. So you got your noodles or your pasta. You got your beef stroganoff with your brown sauce, with your, you know, mushrooms if you’re gonna have.
Cal:
And then you have to throw the sour cream on top. But traditionally, what they did was they mix the sour cream in with the beef. And the way you do that, you just have to do a little bit of time, and you have to whisk it continuously until it’s completely whipped in, because you’re adding dairy to, you know, a simmering sauce, which if it’s simmering, then it’s, you know, a little bit over 200 degrees, and then you’re gonna have a problem with.
Christa:
Now, I actually grew up, we didn’t make true stroganoff. There was, you know, there’s Lipton sauce packets. It’s the sauce with the noodles in it. So there is a stroganoff version of it. I don’t think they’re called Lipton anymore, but you would have the meat and the sour cream, but then we put in a little bit of canned tomatoes with it, adding the acid to it. So it was a knockoff stroganoff. And I love, that’s what I grew up with.
Cal:
You can add anything to it. And again, it’s just the thing with the whipped cream is whipped cream. They use sour cream is you don’t want to curdle because it’s dairy. So if you add it too early, then there is a chance of it curdling. But again, a little bit of time, whisk it in. A little bit of time, whisk it in. Most of the time when you’re adding ingredients, especially if you’re making emulsions, you know, where you have egg yolks going, where you’re adding oil to it, you just. You really want to go just a little bit at a time.
Cal:
It incorporates well, that’ll get incorporated and mixed before you just add, you know, half the volume in whatever you’re making. If you’re making, you know, merengue and all of a sudden, you know, you’re throwing a pound of granulated sugar. Well, maybe the whites can’t handle that. Or if you’re making a hollandaise, maybe can’t handle, you know, an entire cup of butter at the same time. Or if you’re doing dairy, same thing with using dairy with soups. You know, you got to be. Just be a little bit careful if you’re making a, you know, I maybe like a cream of butternut squash. I know that there’s a butternut squash and ginger soup that I.
Cal:
That I really enjoy that. It’s a good soup, too.
Christa:
As far as the garnish, back on the stroganoff, you put some green onion tops on them. Would you? Is it traditional to have an herb like a parsley or green onion or something on top.
Cal:
Yeah, I think traditionally from the french standpoint is parsley that, you know, they do use a lot of parsley and everything. You don’t see parsley in anything now, really, I don’t. I just, you know, you might once in a while seem to see some chopped up and put on something.
Christa:
Well, most of the herb blends from France had parsley in them in some way.
Cal:
Well, parsley again, parsley is a huge ingredient and so is its flavor. And originally it was just used as a, you know, something that you would eat your meal and then you take your parsley sprig and you’d eat it. And literally. Yeah, just something to freshen your breath up so you didn’t walk around smelling like, you know, salmon for the rest.
Christa:
Of the garlic, onions.
Cal:
There you go. So. But stroganoff, there you go. It’s a great dish. Very traditional. Good stewie dish. I know as we’re going to at some point here, the weather’s going to get cooler and you’re going to be looking for those things. So gets me good helpful information there.
Cal:
And it’s Chef Cal. We’re going to take a quick break. Cooking like a pro. You have found us. KCNR 1460 am welcome back again. Here is Chef Cal and my beautiful wife, Miss Chef Christa. And we are talking about food. You have found us on cooking like a pro.
Cal:
So thanks for joining us. I wanted to say thank you to David, who called, texted me and said that, okay, so it’s not called tale of the whale out of bridge Bay, which it was when I was there back in the eighties, and that was in the 19th century, huh? Yeah. And, um, but it’s called huffs. Huffs.
Christa:
Oh, that’s right. It was. It’s actually named after somebody.
Cal:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a, there’s a story there. So go on up and get the story. I know they do. They did brunch because we went there for brunch a number of months ago.
Christa:
For your son’s birth.
Cal:
It’s such a beautiful, beautiful view. You, you know, right there on the, on the lake, especially when the lake is full. Well, I think we’re doing okay. It always kind of refills itself. But one of the things I wanted to chat about in this segment here was a restaurant that I, I really enjoyed. I believe it was one of my, one of my favorite restaurants that we opened up. And it was called pesce e pasta pesce, italian for fish e. The letter e means end.
Cal:
And then, of course, pasta. So it was fish and pasta. So it was kind of nice just to be able to have that. That variance of being able to mix these things together, where you take a seafood item and a pasta item, and you can really come up with a dish that’s much more, you know, cost effective. If you’re making seafood fettuccine, you know, and you got the pasta or maybe a seafood risotto. We talked about last. Last week a little bit. It’s just a great combination.
Christa:
Well, it’s traditional in Italy and the Mediterranean to have fish, because they’re right on the water, and you can have those flavors.
Cal:
That’s what the Italians do. And. But we had a lot of stuff on the Pesce pasta menu that I really enjoyed. Deep fried lasagna. Very weird. I wouldn’t do that ever again. I mean, that’s weird so much. It was just like a three day process to make it and cut it, bait, make it, bake it, cut it, freeze it, bread it, fry it, roast it.
Cal:
I mean, it was. I mean, it was a great dish.
Christa:
I hope you charged a lot of money for it.
Cal:
Yeah, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of fun. So we had a good. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t find a menu. And you think, I’ve opened about a dozen restaurants, only four that we’ve owned. But for some reason, the menu just never got. I don’t know if that was back before computers.
Cal:
That was when we still had d materials. Our flagship restaurant that we started off with back in.
Christa:
This is before my time. I never got to go there. Yeah, I never went to that restaurant.
Cal:
A lot of people say that was my. Their. Their favorite restaurant that we did.
Christa:
And mom called. And what did she find?
Cal:
Mom found the menu. Yep. Thanks, mother. Thanks, mother. Mo good job. We found the menu for me, so I was looking through there because I want to, you know, add these things to the. To the cookbook we’re working on. And one of the couple things that kind of stuck out to me was the crab manicotti, and a lot of people that have manicotti, and they confused with between the difference between manicotti and cannelloni.
Cal:
A cannelloni is rolled up in a crepe, generally a canneloni. Like, if you had seafood crepes, it’d be rolled up in a crepe, which, of course, is a super light, you know, wrapper. It’s just made out of milk and water or. Yeah, milk, water, flour, I guess, or egg.
Christa:
Egg, yeah.
Cal:
And then it was. And it’s just like a really super thin pancake. Crepe is french for a pancake. And then you just roll it up in there. But if it’s pasta, then it’s a manicotti and you can. Manicotti. There’s no end to it. You can pretty much stuff it with anything that will fit in it.
Christa:
Okay, so at the beginning of the week, you made meatloaf, and then the next meal, you took that meatloaf and you ground it up and you put it into a tomato sauce and made it into a bolognese.
Cal:
Bolognese.
Christa:
And now we’re going to take that bolognese and we’re going to make a third meal out of it. And you are going to stuff the manicotti with.
Cal:
Yeah, we’re just gonna add some spinach and some ricotta cheese, which would be traditional, and stuff that inside. Now you want to. Well, if you’re gonna bake it for an hour, then you don’t even have to blanch the pasta.
Christa:
That was my question. Do you fill it because, you know, how do you blanch something that big round tube and have it being floppy around? How do you fill it?
Cal:
Yeah, generous for me is just use a, you know, grime. Everything is chopped up enough where you can pipe a pastry bag. So you just get a tube on a pipe into a pastry bag.
Christa:
But, but you don’t have to boil it if you’re baking it.
Cal:
Not if you’re gonna bake it for an hour. There’s enough moisture in the dish. It’s kind of like lasagna. A lot of times people will cook their lasagna noodles ahead of time.
Christa:
But you don’t have to.
Cal:
No, you don’t have to because they’re going to be cooking in this liquid and they’re going to be cooking in there for an hour. Pasta only takes, what, twelve minutes to cook.
Christa:
So whatever moisture is in your sauce is enough moisture to cook the pasta from a dry state?
Cal:
Yes, it is. And, yeah, I didn’t actually learn that until fairly well along in my career. I don’t know, it was a couple decades ago that I was someplace and I see him do that and I’m like, that’s not going to get cooked. Well, it did. It cooked and came out nice.
Christa:
Did you cook that in like a 300, 5400 degree oven?
Cal:
Yeah, most things are going to be, the average temperature is just 350 degrees for just about anything. If it’s something, if you want to brown something or sear it, maybe it’s a little higher. If you want to cook something like allow it to stew, then maybe go down to three and a quarter.
Christa:
So when you take the spinach. So you have me pick up fresh or, excuse me, frozen spinach today? Yes. And are you going to drain that? Defrost it? What’s the technique for taking that meatloaf that you turn into a sauce, adding the spinach and the ricotta. How are you going to do that?
Cal:
Well, you’re going to find out when you’re home, but they’re not going to.
Christa:
Be here to watch you do it tomorrow.
Cal:
So you want to tell people. Okay. So, yes, when drained spinach, chopped spinach is one of the few vegetables that I think you can, you know, work pretty well out of, out of a freezer because it’s a block and it’s solid. But allow it to thaw overnight, let it drain, and then go ahead and mix it in with the ricotta. I’m going to use a little bit of that sauce to flavor it well. And with that kind of a thick meatloaf, tomato sauce and put a little sauce on top, little mozzarella. I mean, I like mozzarella. Parmesan for flavor, things like Parmesan Romano, you know, asiago, I guess those, those are great cheeses.
Cal:
But a lot of times what I look for is the melt, you know, or, and a lot of times, actually, they call it the pole in pizza competitions. They call it, you know, that the pull, like when you pull that pizza and you see how long that cheese, that cheese strings out and then. Yeah, that’s, well, it’s important. I like your cheese, but Manicotti man, meaning hand, cottie, meaning coach. So it’s, it’s coated. It’s like a hand coated. Originated, of course, in Italy on this one. A lot of pasta came from, originally from China, but this one came from Italy.
Cal:
And just basically like a tube. And the one we had at Pesce pasta, we actually stuffed with crab also. It was a crab spinach, sauteed mushroom and a mixture mixed with the ricotta. And then it got a nice, I think you could get it with either a pesto sauce or a tomato sauce. But yeah, it’s a great, easy dish. I mean, again, one of the things that we need to consider when we’re cooking these days is as costs go up on things, we have less money to work with. You want to utilize your leftovers. If you got two slices of meatloaf left and you don’t have anything to do with it, then you don’t want to make a meatloaf sandwich or something out of it, then wrap it, freeze it, throw it in the freezer, label it, always label it, and then pull it out down the road and do something else with it.
Cal:
But we’re not in a position where, you know, financially we can prepare more, have food going to waste. I mean, in a restaurant, it’s a killer. It’s one, you know, food going to waste in a restaurant is not a good thing.
Christa:
Well, in french cooking, it’s all about total utilization of the product.
Cal:
Well, total utilization of it. And again, just making sure nothing goes to waste. And even if you wanted something simple like you’ve got your pasta and you, and you’ve got some leftover pasta, just cool it down and then just, you know, a little bit of olive oil when you want to heat it up, a little bit of garlic. That, that garlic just start to turn, throw in your pasta. It’s actually called aglio diolio. Aglio is just italian for garlic and olio’s italian for oil. So it’s aglio e with the e and oil. Garlic and oil.
Cal:
And I know that one of the ways that I did this pesce pasta was with a mezithra. Mezithra cheese. There’s a chain, I don’t know if they’re still around. I think they are. They were called spaghetti factory and they had this dish and was just like ugly odioli oddheaddeh but they added this mezithra cheese. And mezithra is, it’s a sheep cheese. It’s hard. It’s got, you know, a salty component to it.
Cal:
It’s almost kind of, I don’t know, chocolate, but, oh, it’s so delicious.
Christa:
Dry and nutty kind of flavor.
Cal:
Yep. It’s going to get you some nuttiness as well. It’s r I t h I a. But yeah, it’s a, don’t spell that in spelling competition. I don’t think so. And really, when you start that off, you really want to use a brown butter for something like that. So it’s where you put your butter in your pan and allow it to melt, and then you reduce the heat and allow it to start to brown and you’ll get a really nice nutty flavor, flavor and even nutty aroma out of it.
Christa:
So mazetra is not really a melting cheese. It’s more of a garnish cheese.
Cal:
Definitely not a melting cheese. No, it would be an ingredient. It’d be just, you know, one more component that would go in there. So it’d be a flavoring ingredient. It is something you put on top to allow it to melt. But it was just a great dish. It was simple brown butter, which gives a very distinctive flavor. And then you throw in your pasta, which has been pre blanched, you know, and your garlic, and it’s just something simple, you know, and, you know, being italian, pasta, just, you know, they might say pasta’s, you know, no good for you.
Cal:
I don’t know, the flour and all. I mean, I think that the flour these days, of course, for the most part, has no, zero nutritional value. And it’s probably not even good for you with the things that they, that they add into it. But get yourself a good flour. Get yourself a good flour from Italy. I know we used to Caputo, when I make my pizza, I used to Caputo and the double O. Yeah. Yeah.
Cal:
I mean, you get yourself a flour that has not been processed to death. Right. Not something that’s just been, you know, mistreated. And, and the whole idea was just to get longevity on the, on the product. So they added preservatives and byproducts and stuff. So start off with some good flour. Go out to Moore’s flour mill. Yeah, out there on Airport Road.
Cal:
We’ll be talking more about that down the road here, but cook like a pro. We’ll be right back in a moment with our last segment. Thank you for listening. Here we are, almost done with another show. Almost another show in the can. And, you know, I wanted to bring something up quickly. I did an event last week. It was just a, you know, a fundraising event.
Cal:
Well, actually wasn’t so much a fundraising event. It was more of a, an event to help with Operation Christmas Child. And if you’re unfamiliar with it, there was a variety of churches that were there. And what they did is they, they fill these shoe boxes full of toys and they go, I mean, hundreds of thousands, they go all around the world. This is something that’s done, you know, across the United States in a variety of places where they, you know, they want to make sure that every kid on Christmas, regardless of whether you’re in Sudan or you’re in Vietnam or wherever you happen to be, that they’re going to get Christmas present.
Christa:
And we even include things like toothpaste, socks.
Cal:
Yep. So many things. Essentials. And, and again, just, you know, a gift. Think about it. You know, you’re in a place where certainly there’s no snow on the ground. But one of the things we did there, though. And I want to put a shout out to Christina, who just our engineer here, and she made some wonderful chocolate dip strawberries.
Cal:
Those are great. Those are great. Yeah. Yeah. So just. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate your advertising and actually ordering them. It was a bless to make them.
Cal:
Yeah. So a. If you’re looking for a strawberry, you can reach out to the station or you can reach out to us. We’ll make sure to get you in contact. But they. She made a little shoebox out of chocolate and had it on each strawberry, and then the strawberry was dipped in chocolate and had some green and drizzle and some white gold fleck on it and some. What was the. What was the gold on it was on there? It was just a powder.
Cal:
Gold powder. I just. When it has, like, this gold blue sketch, it makes it, like, more tasty, richer. It was beautiful. It was beautiful and lovely and tasty. It tastes. Boxes. Yeah.
Cal:
The boxes are great people, you know, especially with the event being with the box. So thank you to Christina for. For helping us be able to put that on. And we started with a tear in my beer. And the reason was, is my wife just said, I want to talk about beer, which is strange because I don’t drink beer. She doesn’t drink beer. Yeah. But, you know, beer is used a lot.
Cal:
It is used a lot in food. Something that. That I remember back very, very fond of that in my earlier days where we used to. Beer batter, you know, it generally just something like a beer batter. You’re gonna want that flavor. So you might use a particular, highly flavored beer, a beer that has a lot of maybe hops in it or something that’s going to come across, because when you eat this nice golden brown, deep fried cod or whatever the firm fish is that you’re doing, you want a fish that’s firm, that can hold up to the temperature, because remember, you always want to deep fry at 375. Do not deep fry at any other temperature. 375.
Cal:
Get yourself a candy thermometer, put it on the edge of your deep fryer, your pot, and then just bring it up slowly. Get it up to around 375. Just cook a little bit. Oh, I love. I have, you know, texture. I think it’s a textural component. I mean, I like fish. I like the crispness of the batter.
Cal:
But, you know, fish and chips, I pretty much judge, if I go into a pub type of an atmosphere, I almost always get fish chips, and I judge the place by their. Their batter. And a beer batter is just. It’s a simple batter, you know, a little bit of butter in there as well with the beer and the flour and some eggs and.
Christa:
Well, I’ve used beer to make bread as the liquid component.
Cal:
Beer. Bread. Beer fondue is another one. You know, you can melt some cheese down, use some beer to kind of give it a little. I mean, if you were, say you were doing like, soft pretzels, you know, like the big giant plant, and you needed to dip it into something and you’re watching the game and we’re not gonna. Not the 49 eR game, at least not the one from last week, but, you know, then you have something to dip it into. So anhe nice soft pretzel baked off to dip into a beer fondue. And the other thing is, I always add beer to my barbecue sauce.
Cal:
Always. Now, on something like that, I use a cheap beer, you know, inexpensive beer, because there’s. It’s just. I just want that beer flavor. Right. And it’s not going to really come through in a barbecue sauce with all that sugar that’s in there. So I always kind of thin it out. You know, barbecue sauces are so thick.
Cal:
Thick that they’re just going to kind of stick on there and next thing you know, your grill’s a mess.
Christa:
So what’s different? That’s interesting. Okay, so we have, we talk about wine. We’ve got white wine and we’ve got red wine, and there’s a gamut of, you know, low acidity and high acidity. And there’s so many different things. But also in beer, there’s light beers and there’s dark beers. And whereas I like white wine, if I’m going to do a beer, I want a dark one, like a porter or a stout. I don’t like the lighter beers, you.
Cal:
Know, and someplace to go is go down. See our friends Charlie, Charlie and Kathy down at Charlie’s down in the Anderson tap wall factory outlet. Yeah. Because they got that. They got the tap wall. And you could. So you can just try 1oz, you know, you can just try a little bit to see before you get yourself a whole glass. And that’s fun because you’re trying more things.
Cal:
It’s always fun.
Christa:
Well, that’s actually how I started drinking beer, because I tasted each one. I went, oh, I don’t like that. Oh, okay. So I’m finding out I like the.
Cal:
Darker beers and they’ve got ales on there, which is. It’s kind of nice. And I know they’ve got that. I don’t know what that chocolate brownie, something I can’t remember. That’s the one I like was the chocolate brownie beer.
Christa:
I think it’s stout.
Cal:
Stout.
Christa:
It might be a porter. I can’t remember which one it is.
Cal:
Something you can sip on.
Christa:
But can you cook with a dark beer? You know, we used to put a lot of. What’s the orange one? The moon one.
Cal:
Oh, the Belgium.
Christa:
Yeah, the Belgian. Yeah. So you use that one in a lot of cooking. Can you use a darken beer and cooking?
Cal:
Yeah. Matter of fact, the, one of the, my favorite muffins is the Guinness stout muffin. Now, Guinness stout is going to be bitter, so you’re going to have to make sure to balance the sugar. But it makes a great muffin. And again, it just depends on the flavor you want to get. I know that I make a beer cheddar soup, which is a really nice soup you don’t want, just like everything else we. And in the second segment this evening, we talked about BLT because of the balance of flavor. Same thing.
Cal:
You know, if I, if I have a sharp cheddar and beer soup, I want to be able to, I don’t want the beer to overpower the cheddar or, or vice versa. So the, the balance of ingredients, the balance of the flavor. Taste it. You know, always have your tasting spoons, those, you know, ready to go. But, but beer is something that, a yemenite we cook a lot with.
Christa:
Okay. Now something else. I remember when you used to do the fish and chips, you would come out and get off, tap the beer fresh to make your beer batter with. You would not let your beer sit there for an hour on the counter. You would come out and do it fresh right before you were going to dip it and throw it in the fryer.
Cal:
Yeah. Just the more carbonation that’s in there, you know, the lighter the batter is going to be. And again, the pet doesn’t really matter what your view. Deep frying shrimp or cod or, or anything else, you know, chicken nuggets, you know, those kind of things. Well, you get into that. Actually. Normally that would be something that we would say is breaded, you know, not so much.
Christa:
So is there any use for a flat beer?
Cal:
A flat beer? Yeah, I mean, a flat beer, you could use it certainly in your soup. You know, it’d be great in soup. Because if I’m making, you know, five gallons of, of beer, cheddar soup, I’m going to need a gallon of beer. So that would work, too. But remember, beer is not meant to lay down. Lay down, meaning, you know, give it a break. You know, let it just kind of hang out and get better because it’s not going to get better. Beer is made.
Cal:
Beer is cooking. You know, you do cook beer. That’s the process of making beer includes cooking it with the ingredients. And that’s just, you know, something that you’re making. You cool it down, but it’s made for quick consumption. When you look at wines, most wines are made for fairly quick consumption. They’re made ready, you know, to enjoy again, some things aren’t, you know, you can get, you know, of course, certain, certain, you know, red wines, generally it’s a red wine that can lay down and it’s something that’s a little bit heavier or something. Something there where the grapes a little more complex, like a.
Cal:
Maybe a syrah cabernet. Of course, Zinfandel, especially from. From Paso robles. You can get a turley. A turley? Yeah, just. It’ll bring a tear to your eye. Seriously.
Christa:
Seriously.
Cal:
Get yourself a tur lady. I mean, you get a little tear in your eye. Or, Williams, tell them.
Christa:
I have a little of a weird question. Okay. If you’re cooking with beer, are you going to serve wine at your meal? I mean, do the two play nice or should you just have a wine directed dinner or a beer directed dinner?
Cal:
Well, I think that, you know, when it comes to the idea of matching flavors, then the whole idea would be to, you know, if I’m going to have a beer dinner, which we did, you know, countless, you know, numerous beer dinners in the past, I’d have everything from, you know, maybe a beer battered here and then, you know, some, maybe a beer cheddar soup. And, I mean, you could even have a beer ice cream. I mean, you know, a beer ice cream, of course, would be, you know, where you’d reduce the beer down and just get that essence of the beer and then add that to, basically, it’s just a custard. It’s just a french custard. And then you freeze it. You know, it’s pretty, pretty simple to make ice cream. But, you know, that would be something where we just want to kind of really show off, you know, the product of beer. I know that we did an event with our Olympic team over in Arcata with, I’m forgetting the name of the.
Cal:
I won’t say aetna, maybe, but just an amazing beer. It’s a wonderful gentleman that owned it. And we did an event here, a beer tasting here. Then the next day we did the same beer tasting over there. It was a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. I mean, again, it’s all about, you know, matching foods, pairing them up, then coming up with a flavor balance that’s going to work and, you know, just practice, play around. I mean, you know, that’s where I think most of my ideas that have been the most successful.
Cal:
It certainly come from just trying, trying things. Try that. Does it work? No, no, it didn’t work this time. Oh, hey, I like that. That worked. So, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got, you know, but again, you don’t know if you don’t try, you know. And, you know, beer is one of those things that, that, uh, you know, I think probably the beer batter would be the best, the better way.
Christa:
And if it doesn’t work out, you can just go cry in your beer.
Cal:
If it doesn’t, then you can do the Hank Williams thing and the next thing you know, you got a tear in your beer. So. But anyway, what I wanted to mention just quickly, I forgot to mention that spring mix that you got. It was a mixture of green leaf and red leaf. I thought that was kind of cool. Where did you get that at?
Christa:
Okay, so today I stopped by Winco and at the end of the where they usually have the butter lettuce and they have the fresh growing ones, they had a spring mix style of three different lettuces growing out of the same little root ball.
Cal:
Yeah, it looked like, kind of like when you get the butter lettuce. Yeah, looks like that.
Christa:
So why don’t you decide to try that?
Cal:
I haven’t tried it yet, so we’ll try that. Maybe we’ll talk about that next week. But again, we always appreciate you tuning in to cooking like a pro with Chef Cal and my wife Mrs Chef Christa. We will have a wonderful week, great weekend and we look forward to talking to you next Wednesday here at KCNR 1460 am 96 five FM.
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.
