Ah, yes. The Humble Pork Chop. #zach

 

Humble, but #loveable

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zach Neal

 

Ah, yes, the humble pork chop, unsung hero of many a working-class meal.

My old man loved pork chops, because they were cheap—but that was then and this is now.

There ain't nothing cheap no mo'

Also, your health comes at some cost sometimes. Big Frank had his first and only heart attack at about the age of 69. That was when, as part of his recovery, he took his old cane out the front door and started off just by walking up and down the street. It was a big thing when he made it to the end of the block and back again without having to sit down on someone’s porch for a rest. Luckily, he had Porky ten or twelve houses down, and Big Dick three doors down, and somehow, he always made it home, for a total distance of about three hundred metres. I have to admit to keeping an eye on him from the front porch or the kitchen window…it was Dick who called me that day, telling me the old man was in the hospital and I'd better get down there.

I guess he'd seen the ambulance and wondered what was up.

From there, he graduated to driving at 40 kph up Bright St. and Lochiel St. to the former Bayside Mall, (in his 200-kph turbo Volvo), where plenty of folks walked laps all year round and in any weather. He got up to four kilometres a day, and oh, yeah, we put him on a diet. (Briefly mentioned in a previous post.) We alternated cooking, which meant that we had spaghetti once a week, but Big Frank just loved cooking spaghetti. He also had a beef soup recipe, with noodles and vegetables. The basic stock came from a large can of stewed tomatoes.

I have tried to recreate that recipe once or twice. Hell, I even came close once or twice, and for that we have to thank my observational skills and a large tin of stewed tomatoes from a local food bank…

But that, is a story for some other time.

As for Big Frank, he lived to be about 80—and no more heart attacks, although he did suffer other ailments.

***

When your wallet's fucked, buy a fucking duck...how fucked-up is that duck, and how much fucking duck do you get for your buck???

After checking the flyers, I was sort of curious as to what a whole duck at $2.86/lb. actually looked like. I've never cooked a duck, and that is also a consideration. One has to admit, it might look pretty good on a food blog, also, one hears that it's oily. One wonders just exactly how one would go about cooking that, (and make it look pretty), and of course when I got there, there were no fucking two-buck ducks to be had.

Okay, so I got three fresh pork chops from Food Basics for $6.22, along with six fresh, not frozen chicken legs. I got a tub of deli-style coleslaw, ($2.99), a head of Romaine, ($2.99), and a 150-gram bag of salt and vinegar chips for a buck. Total cost, $18.90 approx. including the price of a fresh plastic bag. I put the chicken flat in the bottom of the bag, first thing, as I don’t really like chicken juice gooping all over the fresh lettuce.

We did rinse the leaves. Lettuce, tomato, onion and green pepper.

 

***

 Also, I did rinse off at least the exterior as soon as I got it home.

I have been known to rinse individual leaves as well, in any case I have tomato, onion, bits of (frozen) bell peppers, and have been known to make a salad once in a while.

The pork chop was treated with Shake & Bake, a bit of black pepper. I got a ten-pound bag of potatoes in late December and this is one of the last three. The other two are smaller. The carrots have been around since maybe even longer than that, thanks to a Christmas Hamper from Dunlop United Church. You can get potatoes for five bucks and carrots for two bucks on sale. They do keep quite a while. We shook just a faint hint of garlic powder over the mashed potatoes just before consumption. It did make up for the lack of butter or margarine in some small way.

Other than that, I keep forgetting margarine. #fuck 

(And tinfoil. - ed.)

That really won’t take much more than half an hour at 375 F, which means we set stuff on to boil, snap a few pics for the food blog and maybe write a quick blog post.

We'll sip at our beer and let our imagination and our appetite work on us.

 

#zach

 

END

 

Zach Neal has books and stories available from Kobo. (Why he's writing blog posts now, we just don't know. Possibly just bored. - ed.)

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Crunching the Numbers. What Exactly Is In #superdough. #mike

This #Subway sandwich had three meats, Swiss cheese, red onion, tomato, lettuce, mayo and mustard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What exactly is in our pizza dough?

 

A load of pizza dough is approximately 37.5 lbs., or thirty dough-balls at twenty ounces each. One and a quarter pounds times thirty is 37.5 lbs.

A pound is sixteen ounces. 37.5 x 16 = 600 ounces. I only made four batches today, which is not really the focus of this story, but we do slow down in winter.

We are using four ounces of sugar, (more in winter, which helps in the rise) and two ounces of salt in a batch of dough.

4 divided by 600 equals: 0.006666666 etc. Now, according to the classic mathematical formula, you are supposed to multiply by 100, = 0.66.

If you do this calculation on a machine, you will see a couple of extra decimal places in there. It’s pretty simple just to take them out.

This means our dough is 0.666 (or 0.67) % sugar, on average, using the summer recipe. That last decimal place, anything five or over is rounded up. Anything four or less is rounded down. Zero does not need to be rounded off.

In Ireland, Subway’s buns were deemed by the government to be a confectionery, i.e., a candy product. That is because the bread was found to be ten percent or more in terms of sugar content. Bread is a staple product of the people’s diet, candy is a luxury and therefore subject to a ‘sin’ tax. As for myself, I like their sandwiches, and you can send me a gift card at any time, also, their food science techs are obviously looking for that dopamine ‘hit’, even if we can’t really taste all that sugar when we’re eating the actual submarine sandwich. They're trying to make fast food addictive, which only works if the people have the money to indulge such addictions...that, as they say, is a story for another day.

I bought an assorted cold cuts sandwich, 12”, the other day for $9.80 CDN, just to put that in perspective. I had half for lunch and the other half a bit later on... #snork

2 divided by 600 equals: 0.00333333 etc. Take out them decimal places…

Our dough is 0.33 % salt on average. Rounded off, that’s 0.3 % salt, on average.

This next bit is a little tough and I needed to think about it…

Two cups of oil is sixteen ounces, in liquid measurement, i.e., by volume. Divide that by 600 ounces of pizza dough. That being said, we could say that a typical batch of pizza dough is 02.66 % cooking oil—only problem here is that the dough is by weight and the oil is by volume.

Now, in terms of size, one ounce of pizza dough is roughly comparable to one cubic inch of volume. It's sort of meaningless, but I just thought I would throw that in there.

In order to properly convert, we would put a clean, empty measuring cup on the scales and zero the scales. Put two cups of oil in the cup, and then weigh it. This number is now converted from liquid volume to weight, and then you would do the math in the usual manner.

Any kid that took Grade 10 science class can do it. Nowadays, you don’t even have to.

That’s because we have the internet.

Using an online conversion, sixteen ounces of cooking oil weighs 14.7 ounces. 14.7 divided by 600 = 0.0245. We push the decimal point two spaces to the right.

Our pizza dough is 2.45 % cooking oil by weight.

My math is pretty basic, but there are online tools and our own instincts can tell us a lot. I know damned well that two cups of oil in thirty-five pounds is not a minute fraction beginning in the third decimal place. It is, after all, one pound (approx.), out of 35. In other words, another mental check on the math.

The question is, how does one prove it to one’s own satisfaction.

Another question, how many calories per 100 grams? Assuming one has the time to crunch the numbers, we could probably come up with some kind of a number.

Our secret ingredient is love, ladies and gentlemen, otherwise it would hardly be worth doing, would it... 

And love doesn't weigh anything at all, does it.

 

#mike

 

Notes.

 

In winter, our customer’s premises are colder. They’re pulling bins of dough and letting them thaw and rise overnight in a separate room, which is not warm like the kitchen. Hence, the summer and winter recipe. (The yeast eats the sugar, which creates the bubbles which make it rise. By bumping up the sugar and yes, the yeast, we're merely speeding up the biochemical reaction, due to the factor of heat, which is reduced in winter.)

There are no milk and no dairy products in our pizza dough, which is also used for bread and buns, etc. The only other ingredients are water, electricity, rent, transportation...you get the idea. Oh, yeah, labour.

#superdough uses Strong Baker’s Flour by P & H Milling Group.

We are using Messina, a 50/50 % mix of soy and canola oil from Costco.

Red Star Dry Active Yeast in 2-lb. vacuum packs are our preferred choice.

#superdough is a frozen dough produced in some quantities.

 

END

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

The Perfect Chicken Breast is a Fresh Chicken Breast. #fritz

It's not dry, and it's not under-cooked, and it is, in fact, #perfect

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

#fritz

 

 

The perfect chicken breast begins with a fresh breast.

I used to call them ‘chicken-tits’ and my old man would always laugh, although he ate them anyways.

Back then, they were frozen bags of chicken breasts from M & M meats, (skinless and boneless), and combined with one hell of a lot of frozen broccoli, and a few other substitutions, including sweet potatoes in place of white potatoes, (and one pork chop rather than two pork chops sort of thing), we managed to bring the man down from 278 lbs to a more reasonable 235 lbs. I ate that right alongside of him, incidentally. It took about a year, and his doctor was pretty impressed...I looked after Big Frank for the last few years of his life, ladies and gentlemen and I have absolutely no fucking regrets about that. It was, quite frankly, (no pun intended), one of the best things I ever did in my life and I probably owed it to the man anyways.

As for myself--

The author is 62 years old, six-five-and-three-quarters tall, and about 214 lbs. Surely some of that stems from the habitual diet, which borders on monotonously healthy even at the worst of times…

This one has the bone in and the skin on. You’ll have to decide if I’m saving any money on labour or not.

The coating mix begins with Shake & Bake, Southern Style, Extra Crispy and then we go on from there. Today I used lemon pepper seasoning, seasoning salt, black pepper, and a little shake of dried parsley flakes.

The oven was set and pre-heated for a few minutes at 375 F. We cook using non-stick spray and on tinfoil which helps with the clean-up, although the pans will inevitably get blackened over time.

This is the (much) larger of two chicken breasts from Food Basics, which we got this morning for $8.51 CDN. We saw the squash in the flyer, at $1.88/lb or kg or something like that. The grocery receipt reveals that we saved $0.75 on the #squarsh as I like to call it.

Frankly, the first thing you do with squash is to sharpen up that paring knife, maybe even a good sized knife. I cut one end off to make it sit flat, and then, carefully controlling it, cut down, away and on the side away from my soft white underbelly.

By the time you have cubed that up, and put it in a good-sized pot, you will realize that it is, in fact, a shit-load of squash for one guy and you sure as hell wish you had freezer bags around the house but you don’t.

As long as we were using up a few of the carrot sticks, we stuck that in the sink and did a change of the cold water in that there plastic tub…

Yeah. We got the pickles for like $2.49, (again, we probably saw that in the flyers a few days or weeks ago), and if I don’t mind saying so myself, and after about an hour in the oven, turning it once or twice to properly scorch up the skin on top a bit, that is literally the perfect roasted chicken breast. In terms of bachelor survival, maybe even just scruffy old man survival, it's all good.

Admittedly, a shit-load of squarsh.

***
 

I still have half of that left, and at least two or three more servings of the squash.

Leftovers is good, and one could always slap that chicken on a bun with mayo, tomato, that last leaf of Romaine, a dash of mustard, and oh, yeah, that fucking cheese that disappears and reappears, apparently on some kind of schedule of its own.

 

#fritz

 

END

 

Our staff photographer Zach Neal has books and stories available from Google Play.

 

 

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.