100 Things to Cook: What Should Ladygoat Add to Her List

Last year, Lead Paint Cookbook posted her bucket list of 100 things she wants to cook. I think this is a great idea - I'm always idly thinking I should make this or that, only to forget about it soon after.   But put it on a list, where I can cross it off and check it off, now that can motivate me.  She is trying to get through her 100 items in one year, an ambitious undertaking which I can't even consider trying right now, but the list?  I can work on putting together a list.

My list is mixture of dishes to cook or bake and ingredients that I'd like to make myself - hence things like cheese and vinegar are on the list.  There are things on here that I may have tried once or twice but never did well, and things that I've always wanted to make and never got to.  There are dishes I've witnessed and eaten many times, like Foodgoat's chicken paprikash, but never made by myself.  Most things I've eaten and always enjoyed (llike longuanisa) and others that I've never had but sounds fun to make.  I didn't put them in any particular order. 

But alas, I haven't come up with 100 yet.  I thought it would be pretty easy, but I seem to have reached a cooker's block at number 75. 

So I'm soliciting suggestions!  Surely I can come up with a few more to reach 100!


Ladygoat's Not-Quite-100

1. Vinegar
2. Sweet and sour pork
3. Pad thai (a non-peanut version for me)
4. Pretzels
5. Brownies from scratch
6. Fried chicken
7. Panzanella
8. Turducken
9. My mother-in-law's butter ring
10. My brother-in-law's cheesecake
11. My mother's chili
12. Sauerkraut
13. Bagels
14. Cheese
15. Quiche
16. Doughnuts 
17. Bacon
18. Root beer
19. Vanilla extract
20. Boiled cider
21. Cream soda 
22. Foodgoat's grandmother's chestnut rum cake
23. Pan de sal
24. Ginger ale
25. Longuanisa 
26. Banana cream pie (successfully)
27. Caramel
28. Foodgoat's chicken paprikash (I'm seen him make it a million times, but have never made it myself)
29. Foodgoat's vadas
    
30. Croissants 
31. Caramel apples
32. Cinnamon roasted almonds
33. Granola
34. Cassata cake, Cleveland-style
35. No-knead bread
36. Limoncello
37. Tocino
38. Lechon
39. Cinnamon rolls 
40. Liver sauce
41. Chicharon
42. Kare-kare
43. Lumpia wrappers
44. Filipino-style fruit salad
45. Empanadas
46. Siopao
47. Puto
48. Corn dogs
49. Leche flan
50. Jam
51. Jalapeno jelly
52. Spanokopita
53. Sourdough bread bowls
54. Apple strudel
55. Cultured butter
56. Buttermilk
57. Baguette 
58. Clarified butter
59. Ice cream (I've made this before, but it was never good enough that Foodgoat would eat it)
60. Hopia
61. Pastillas de leche 
62. Arroz caldo
63. Honey walnut prawns
64. Dinuguan
65. Crackers 
66. Hush puppies
67. Baked beans
68. Beef jerky
69. Cheese danish
70. Shortbread
71. Risotto
72. Tempura
73. Saag paneer
74. Pot stickers
75. Foie gras
76. ?
77. ? 
78. ? 
79. ? 
80. ? 
81. ? 
82. ? 
83. ? 
84. ? 
85. ? 
86. ? 
87. ? 
88. ? 
89. ? 
90. ? 
91. ?  
92. ? 
93. ?  
94. ? 
95. ?  
96. ? 
97. ?  
98. ? 
99. ?  
100. ?

The Kind of TV We Watch Now

We spend a lot of time watching Yo Gabba Gabba .... singing songs from Yo Gabba Gabba ... doing dances from Yo Gabba Gabba ...  wearing silly hats from Yo Gabba Gabba ...

So I'm especially excited to see the season 3 start next week, which will include a guest appearance by another of our favorites, Anthony Bourdain!

For the past couple of days, I have also had the very catchy Banana song (by the Aggrolites) stuck in my head. 

What is the Point of Light Beer?

The other day I was wondering ... why is there light beer?

I say this because I have had light beer maybe a handful of times in my entire life and Foodgoat never buys light beer.  In my limited experience, light beer is ... almost flavorless.

That's usually bad, right?

Yet light beers account for about 38% of the total beer market share.  So why do people drink light beer?

Is it for the taste?  Is it for the lower calories?

Foodgoat has a theory.

First, some history ...

I thought light beer was just watered down beer, but light beer started in 1964 with a biochemist working at Rheingold Breweries, then an industry leader, who found an enzyme that prompted yeast to digest all the starch found in malt, resulting in beer with no residual carbohydrates and with less calories. Rheingold came out in 1967 with Gablinger's Diet Beer but it was a flop:  the TV commercial featured a super fat guy shoveling spaghetti into his mouth and downing a Gablinger's.  Apparently the beer drinking population saw the diet beer as a "sissy" drink that no "real man" drank.

All that changed when Miller bought Gablinger's, and in 1973 slapped a new label on the same beer calling it Miller Lite. More importantly, they ditched the fat guy, used ex-athletes and other macho, macho men to promote it, and came up with the "Tastes great, less filling" slogan.  Instead of aiming towards people worried about their weight, the campaign targeted young men with blue-collar occupations - the typical beer drinker.

Of course, it worked.  Miller Lite was a big hit, Bud Light came out in 1982, and by 1992 light beer became the biggest domestic beer in America.  (Since light beer typically requires fewer and cheaper ingredients, it often has a bigger profit margin as well.)


So, why is light beer so popular?

Foodgoat doesn't think it's the low calories.  It was a flop as diet beer, and while light beers tend to have lower calories than regular beer, it isn't always the case, and the difference is pretty minimal.  In fact, it's a myth that dark beers are loaded with calories. The calories in beer come primarily from alcohol, so beers with less alcohol content, regardless of how dark it is, have less calories.

Foodgoat doesn't think it's the taste, either.  Light beers really only taste good when they're ice cold, and one's taste buds are kind of numb.

So what is it?  Foodgoat thinks light beer exists for ... binge drinking.

Light beer, by being "less filling," allows you to drink more beer than if you drank regular beer.  Regular beer might make you feel full after a few drinks or so, but light beer, you can keep on chugging.  So if your goal is just to drink a lot of beer, light beer would seem to be a good choice.

Since I first came across light beer at a keg on second base during a fraternity game of sloshball, I can't argue with his theory.

Keep Beer Around For When Your Money's No Good

This list from Populat Mechanics on Unusual Survival Checklist Staples suggests that one thing you might to keep in your emergency kit is ... beer.  Lots of beer. 

Why?  Because in a disaster situation you can use beer in lieu of money.  Pay people in beer to get the supplies or help you need.

I can't argue with that!  Yet another reason to keep up our stock of beer.

Hard-Boiled Eggs

Just so you know why it's a good thing that Foodgoat does all the cooking around here, when GoatSpawn was directed to eat eggs daily, I asked Foodgoat, "So, how do you cook a hard-boiled egg?" 

And then when I was by myself, I looked it up in a cookbook, too.  Just in case I remembered the instructions wrong.

I've now made hard-boiled eggs for GoatSpawn many times.  Foodgoat's method is to put in a pot of cold water, bring to a boil, and let boil for ... whenever.  Five to 10 minutes.  Cool it down with cold water

Others recommend against this, because if you boil it too long, the egg cracks.  So the method I've taken to using more is to put the egg in cold water, bring to a boil, then cover and turn off the heat for 15 minutes, then cool.  It takes a little longer, but it uses a little less energy, and if I end up getting distracted by, let's say, GoatSpawn covered head to toe in flour, and forget about the egg in the covered pan of hot water for a while, not much harm done.

Simple, right?

Well lately, I've been looking up ... how to cook a hard-boiled egg.  Because with either method, I sometimes end up with a perfectly cooked egg ... that is annoyingly hard to peel the shell off of.

One suggestion is to let the eggs age a few weeks before cooking them - old eggs are apparently much easier to peel than fresh eggs, since dehydration causes the egg to shrink a little from the shell. 

Well, I'm not going to use old eggs.  They might be easier to peel, but I can't imagine that the nutritional value is helped much.  Plus, we go through a dozen eggs in a week or less.  They just don't sit around that long here.

Another suggestion was to poke a small hole in the egg prior to boiling - a tiny hole just in the shell, not the inner membrane, to allow water to get in between.  So I tried it, just the sharp tip of a small knife.

 

Wait, what's that?

Hmm.  Looks like I poked through the membrane after all.  So a bit of egg white oozed out while cooking.  Yeah, that looks weird. 

 

But, it did turn out to be very easy to peel.