Mel's Daily Grub / January 3

8:30 AM -- Breakfast -- An orange that I brought from home with the last packet of hummus at work, plus four stale crackers.  No bad, for a completely unplanned meal.

Lunch never happened.  I had no food plan and didn't want to order another Jimmy John's sandwich. 

7:00 PM -- Dinner -- Personal naan pizza with the last of the jarred alfredo sauce from a few nights ago, five Tobasco-tossed shrimp, and mozzarella cheese.  Tasted outrageous, but I was starving by then and not very picky.

Mel's Daily Grub / January 2

Breakfast -- 8:30 AM at my desk at work -- Fruitcake.  No bread or English muffins at the house.  No time for an egg.  Bad planning.  I ended up grabbing the small tin of fruitcake and bringing it to work to eat with my coffee.  I like fruitcake, but not for breakfast, I guess.  Too sweet.  Intensely spiced--ginger and clove and cinnamon.  Lots of nuts.  Candied fruit.    

Lunch -- 1:00 PM at my desk -- Beach Club (turkey, provolone, veggies, avocado) sandwich from Jimmy John's on whole wheat bread.  And packed with so much lettuce, I had trouble getting it into my mouth!  Ended up deconstructing it, setting the sweet soft commercial bread and overly mayonnaised lettuce aside and just eating the meat, cheese, tomato, cucumber, and avocado spread.

Dinner -- 8:00  PM -- Rerun of Paprikash and Collards.  Enjoyed it.  I had made the paprikash with a mix of hot paprika and smoked paprika, which was great, and the addition of leeks and mushrooms was surprisingly perfect.

I need to create an actual recipe of this version of paprikash, and scale it down to feed just one or two people.  As it is, I've eaten it three times and have at least three, probably four, more servings left.  If it it weren't so deliciously unusual, I'd be tired of it by now.  

Mel's Daily Grub / January 1

New Year's Day 2019

9:00 AM Breakfast -- Blueberry Pound Cake with whipped cream.  I put too many blueberries in the batter, so of course it falls apart when you try to take it out of the pan.  Sad baking failure, but it tastes fine.  There's just too much of it.  It made about 12 servings, and this is only my second serving.

1:30 PM Lunch -- Toasted brie sandwich on Panera's sourdough bread.

9:30 PM Dinner -- Reheated Chicken-Leek-Mushroom Paprikash and spaetzle noodles and Southern-style Collard Greens.

My original plan for New Year's dinner included Hoppin' John, Cornbread, and Cajun spiced Shrimp Scampi, but for whatever reason, I couldn't get inspired to cook.  I made the Collard Greens but didn't make anything else, and in the late of the day, I just warmed up leftovers from a few days earlier.

It was a good meal nonetheless.

Mel's Daily Grub / Introduction

Part of an Edible Arrangement sent to the office in December 2018.

Since Thanksgiving 2018, I've been taking daily photos of the food I eat. Every day. I've been doing this for two reasons: 1) Documenting what I eat seems to keep me from grabbing fast food every chance I get, and 2) taking pictures makes me think about documenting my struggles as a single person trying to eat an interesting and basically healthy diet.

For decades, I cooked fresh food for my family, but now that I'm into my second decade of living alone, with fewer people to cook for and more and more difficulty finding quality ingredients in my food-desert neck of the woods, I've just about given up. Packaging is also a headache, with many things pre-packed for a family of four.  And then there's the problem of appetite.  Unless it's easy and interesting, I've noticed, I have trouble putting down the book or turning off the video stream to walk into the kitchen and rustle up some grub.  I have gone whole days without more than a cup of coffee and a few crackers.  Other days, I will eat nothing but chips and dip for all three meals.  That's not good.

I can't keep mismanaging my diet.  Or ... I guess I could, but I shouldn't.  My health depends on regular meals.  But even more important than that, my mental health suffers when I fail to feed myself and when I feed myself junk.  

So, for 2019, I'm challenging myself to take a photo of every meal I consume.  Sometimes I will write about it, but mostly I won't.  Just photos and food names and times of consumption.  Maybe a few excuses/explanations when I feel like it.  My hope is that the discipline of keeping tabs on what I eat will move me toward a better system for planning, shopping, and cooking for one.  

Adapt & Overcome, A Culinary Adventure

American society seems to admire originality, variety, and all things unique and individual.  But we surround ourselves with unrelenting sameness, especially when it comes to food.  Here in the Mahoning Valley, in the northeastern corner of Ohio, grocery stores are in a rut.  While the decorations change with every Hallmark holiday, the produce, poultry, seafood, and meats are UN-apologetically the same old, same old all year round.  

I find it depressing.  So depressing, in fact, that I basically gave up grocery shopping and cooking for myself about three years ago.  When you find yourself ordering boxed and canned meals from Amazon, you know you've really given up, and that's where I was just a few months ago, hobbling together a diet from convenience foods, Chinese carryout, and pre-sliced cheese. 

I recently joined the Lake-to-River food co-op, however, with a determination to get back into the fight for fresh food, real food, preferably locally-grown.  And that's where I found, on their website, a most extraordinary thing, a type of meat I've never seen or eaten:  beef cheeks!  So, naturally, I ordered some.

What Are Beef Cheeks?

Beef cheeks are thick, dense facial muscles.  They are a VERY tough meat, with lots of sinew and almost no fat.  Some sources on the Internet will tell you that beef cheeks are "tender," but they are talking about the meat's texture AFTER a long, slow, wet cooking.

As with all meats that are tough--tongue, hocks, brisket-- beef cheeks, I knew, would benefit from a method of cooking called braising.  


Braising is when you slow boil something in liquid for an extended period of time.  You can do it in the oven, on the stovetop, or in a slow cooker.  Armed with this information, I started thinking about what flavors I wanted.

Adapting A Recipe

The first beef cheek recipes to turn up on my Google search reminded me that tough meats used to be the dinner fare of the lower classes worldwide, showing up as stews or as stewed-then-grilled tidbits. 

I was tempted, for a few days, to use the beef cheeks to make a taco filling. I made beef tongue tacos a few years ago, and they were stunningly tasty (and lean!).  But in the end, I decided to turn to my memories of a Chinese beef brisket stew from '70s. 

I must have tracked down and read several dozen Chinese beef stew recipes before I settled on one to use as a basic model.  The one I chose is called "Cantonese Style Braised Beef Stew 炆牛腩 "  at one of my favorite Chinese recipe websites, Yi Reservation:   

Using Yi's recipe as a base, I made some alterations:  

• Replaced the 2 lbs. of beef brisket with 1 lb. of beef cheeks
• Replaced the Hou Chou sauce with Hoisin Sauce plus 4 cloves of garlic (in additional to the hoisin and garlic already in the recipe)
• Omitted the rock sugar because, hey, all that hoisin is bound to make things plenty sweet.
• Instead of "cooking wine," added a splash of dry white wine.
• Omitted "spice" (5-spice powder)
• Instead of 1 bay leaf, I used 4 bays leaves because other Chinese beef stew recipes I read that day used anywhere from 3 to 6 bay leaves, which I thought sounded interesting.

I also went to the grocery store to get vegetables for the stew.  Originally, I was thinking that greens would be good, or maybe baby carrots and green beans.  But when I was walking through the produce section, an amazing sight beheld my eyes:  daikon radishes!!  I ended up choosing one large daikon radish and a small bag of fresh green beans.

Mel's Recipe for Cantonese-style Beef Cheek Stew

After the adjustments, this is what my list of ingredients looked like: 

• 2 or 3 T cooking oil
• 1 lb. beef cheeks, cut into small pieces
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 7 clove garlic, minced
• 3 slices ginger, skin on 
• 1 T oyster sauce
• 2 T hoisin sauce
• 1/4 cup chardonney 
• 1 T low-sodium soy sauce
• 1 T dark soy sauce
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 T dried orange peel
• 1 star anise
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 large daikon radish, washed and cut into bite-sized chunks
• 8 oz. fresh greens beans, trimmed and cut in half
• chopped scallions for garnish

Beef cheek meat is TOUGH!  I had a hellava time cutting it up.  At first, I didn't have enough control with my regular, super-sharp butcher knife to get through the sinew; the knife kept slipping off.  I had to use two implements of destruction:  my short, Santoku-style knife and a pair of poultry sheers.  As I was cutting, I realized that this dense meat is probably going to be extremely delicious because of all the tendons, and it would take hours to become tender, but it would be well worth the effort and the wait.

The white is sinew, not fat.  This is some of the leanest meat I've ever seen!

Cutting beef cheeks into bite-sized chunks takes a lot of physical effort.

Method

In a dutch oven, saute the onion in the oil until it is translucent, then add the cut-up meat and saute until lightly cooked on all sides.  


Add the garlic and ginger and stir-fry for another few minutes. 

Add the liquids, then aromatics (orange peel, star anise, and bay leaves), bring to a boil, lower the heat to very low, put on the lid, and allow it to cook for two or three hours, until the meat is tender. 


Check on the stew periodically to make sure the liquid doesn't boil away.  If necessary, add water.

Add the daikon radish pieces and green beans and continue slow cooking for another hour.  


Remove and discard the bay leaves and the chunks of ginger root.

Success!

I served the stew over steamed basmati rice.

The diakon radish is an awesome vegetable.  It's a sturdy root, like a carrot or turnip or potato, but with an extremely mild radish flavor.  It went well with the sauce and meat, as did the green beans. The meat was downright sumptuous, very 'meaty' in flavor, tender, but with no obvious animal fat, so it wasn't 'heavy' tasting.  And the sauce was amazeballs.  

I had my doubts that a combination of 4 or 5 bottled sauces plus an overload of bay leaves and some orange peel was magic, but . . . 


Hey!  It is!