Here’s how to prepare “Grilled Cheesedogs”

Ingredients:

1 k Swift’s Mighty Meaty Jumbo Hotdogs
2 tbsps. Butterfresh Margarine
2 cups frozen mixed vegetables (carrots, corn, peas)
lemon slices & fresh green for garnishing
For the cheese sauce:
2 tbsps. Butterfresh Margarine

1 tbsp. White King All Purpose Flour
1 cup evaporated milk
1/4 tsp. dry mustard
1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, grated
dash of cayenne pepper

Directions:

* Makes slashes on hotdogs, brush with margarine and put under broiler for 2 minutes.

* Heat margarine on a skillet and sauté mixed vegetables; set aside.

To prepare cheese sauce:

* Heat margarine in a medium-size saucepan until melted; stir in flour, salt & pepper.

* Gradually add milk, stirring constantly until thick; reduce heat.

* Add the dry mustard, cheddar cheese and cayenne; stir over low heat until cheese melts and sauce is smooth.

* Arrange hotdogs and mixed vegetables on a platter.

* Pour cheese sauce over hotdogs; garnish with lemon slices and vegetables.

* Serve hot with potatoes, roll or pasta.

Here’s how to prepare “Grilled Cheesedogs”

Ingredients:

1 k Swift’s Mighty Meaty Jumbo Hotdogs
2 tbsps. Butterfresh Margarine
2 cups frozen mixed vegetables (carrots, corn, peas)
lemon slices & fresh green for garnishing
For the cheese sauce:
2 tbsps. Butterfresh Margarine

1 tbsp. White King All Purpose Flour
1 cup evaporated milk
1/4 tsp. dry mustard
1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, grated
dash of cayenne pepper

Directions:

* Makes slashes on hotdogs, brush with margarine and put under broiler for 2 minutes.

* Heat margarine on a skillet and sauté mixed vegetables; set aside.

To prepare cheese sauce:

* Heat margarine in a medium-size saucepan until melted; stir in flour, salt & pepper.

* Gradually add milk, stirring constantly until thick; reduce heat.

* Add the dry mustard, cheddar cheese and cayenne; stir over low heat until cheese melts and sauce is smooth.

* Arrange hotdogs and mixed vegetables on a platter.

* Pour cheese sauce over hotdogs; garnish with lemon slices and vegetables.

* Serve hot with potatoes, roll or pasta.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

Last Tuesday we discussed a few ways of preparing beef heart, a versatile organ that can be slow-cooked, quickly grilled or seared, or even ground up for heart burgers. There was, however, one application that I didn’t cover due to an unfortunate shortage of heart in the kitchen. This week, there was more than enough of the organ to serve in what is certainly its most primal form: raw and unadorned, save for a bit of liquid and seasoning.

Tartare is a preparation most commonly applied to beef or fish flesh, but the idea of eating offal in its completely raw state has always appealed to me. Oftentimes I’ve held a brain, liver, or heart in my hands, inhaled the sweet smell of an organ that’s so wonderfully pungent and perfect on its own, and felt compelled to eat it as is.

Tartare is an opportunity to do just that, to really get a feel for the texture and taste of the protein without the application of heat. Feeling inclined to check off another species of animal in my list of offal consumption, I met with chef Sebastiaan Zijp of New York City’s Bar Blanc on a sunny afternoon to talk about venison hearts, which he’d just gotten into his kitchen for use in tartare.

My initial impression was that of surprise: venison hearts are only half the size of beef hearts. What the game hearts lack in size, they compensate for in smell. A whiff of the venison hearts called to mind the feeling of something wild and even a bit rank. Gamey, an amorphous term that’s applied too casually to any protein that doesn’t taste like chicken, pork, or beef, would inadequately describe the slightly sour aroma emanating from the raw hearts.

The venison hearts surprised me again when we tried the tartare of heart preparation on crostini. The taste was exceedingly mild, with just a hint of its mammalian origin. Still, it was the texture that made the heart worth eating raw: tender with much less of a chew than cooked heart, the tiny cubes of the chopped up organ were good enough to eat alone without the crostini accompaniment.

A classic French preparation of tartare would include some acidic elements, like lemon, vinegar, or diced capers paired with mustard, and something with a bit of kick like Worcestershire. On the Asian side of your pantry, try pairing the raw heart with yuzu, ginger, or wasabi for a change from the workhorse French flavors. The next time you with yourself with a really fresh beef or venison heart, save a few of the choicest chunks to eat raw – a fine appetizer for a second course of seared or grilled hearts.

Venison Heart Tartare

- serves 4 as an appetizer -

Ingredients

A few chunks impeccably fresh heart, beef of venison, about 4 ounces
A squeeze of lemon
1 tablespoon diced capers
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste

Procedure

1. Trim the heart for use: remove the tissue and the sinew, as well as the fat around the edges of the heart and inside the separate chambers. Use the majority of the heart for a cooked preparation, if you so desire, and reserve about 4 ounces for the tartare.

2. Very finely dice the chunks of heart. Add the seasonings, adjusting the flavors to taste. Serve as is, or with rounds of crostini on the side.

About the author: Chichi Wang took her degree in philosophy, but decided that writing about food would be much more fun than writing about Plato. She firmly believes in all things offal, the importance of reading great books, and the necessity of three-hour meals. If she were ever to get a tattoo, it would say “Fat is flavor.” Visit her blog, The Offal Cook.

No, it doesn’t simply tell you it comes from cows. Or goats or sheep. Simply plug in the numeric code found on the milk container and Where Is My Milk From? names and maps the dairy it came from. Also works with yogurt, chocolate milk, soy and organic milk, coffee creamer, cottage cheese, and ice cream. Only works for U.S. dairy products, though. [via The Presurfer]

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Sandwiched at the Whitney: Chefs, Lunch, Art, and You

[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

I was fascinated when I heard that Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group was going to open a sandwich joint in the Whitney Museum featuring items designed by its chefs and pastry chefs. Why? Because it raised so many questions.

Are chefs necessarily the best sandwich architects? Would the people making the food be able to effectively execute those sandwiches? Would the food be influenced by the museum setting? And how would the USHG bridge offer delicious food at fair prices, given the markups that museum settings inevitably entail?

So many questions, so many sandwiches, and so little time to waste—it’s just a limited-time operation, after all. So last week we headed up to the Whitney to figure things out.

What happened next answered all the above questions, and then some.

We walked through the doors of the Whitney. “General admission tickets?” asked the security guard.

We shook our heads. “Sandwiches.” And he pointed us to the right, down the stairs. As we walked down the staircase to Sandwiched, we found ourselves staring down a formidable line. Though I’d ordered and paid the check after ten minutes, the first sandwiches arrived more than half an hour later (served with a smile, we should say). Points for the friendly service, but don’t expect a quick lunch.

The sandwiches arrived in oversized plastic baskets that cried out for something else —pickles, cole slaw, some chips, something, anything that would distract you from the fact that some of the sandwiches looked quite dainty, given their hefty, museum-fueled price tags.

Clockwise from top left: Smoked turkey, egg, PB&J, cured salmon.

But I’ve eaten enough sandwiches in my day to realize that there’s often an inverse relationship between sandwich size and quality. You can hide a multitude of sins in a big old five dollar sandwich—who’s going to complain about a five-dollar sandwich? But in this case, the smallest sandwich of the bunch—a ham and sharp cheddar cheese sandwich on a potato onion roll, designed by Michael Anthony of Gramercy Tavern—was a perfect creation. Slightly heftier but just as serious is Blue Smoke chef Kenny Callahan’s applewood-smoked turkey and gouda; and Carmine Quagliata of the Union Square Cafe came up with a killer cured (not smoked) salmon sandwich with avocado cream cheese on sourdough rye. All three of these sandwiches hit the often-hard-to-find happy medium between dainty and hefty.

Other sandwiches ran somewhere between tasty and fairly priced, and egregiously pricey and forgettable. We polished off a beefy onion soup in minutes; a chicken soup, however, was devoid of salt and herbs and seasoning. And desserts suffer from another price-value conundrum—ranging from a delicious, but three-bite s’more ($3.75) to a much better-valued lemon whoopie pie that I’d come back for.

View more of the menu »

The USHG folks have so many things to balance here. So many balls in the air—they’re trying to showcase their chefs; trying to serve great sandwiches quickly and easily; trying to cater to both museum-goers and neighborhood residents; and trying to make all of the above simultaneously affordable and special enough to befit the chef-anointed status.

As it is, they’re a good bit of the way there, and tweaking things every day. Some prices need to be rethought and brought down, even if others go up to compensate; and it may be worth considering whether frying items to order is feasible in what is, for many, just a quick stop between exhibitions. But order right, and it’s possible to have a fantastic and filling meal at Sandwiched for less than $10—something the neighborhood sorely needs.

View more of the menu »

[Photograph: denisema4 on Flickr]

Most of us are by now familiar with the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, just in case) model: Pay a lump sum up front, receive packages of vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, flowers, etc. for a number of months. But the infinite permutations on these food-by-subscription plans have now arrived in a form that’s close to my heart: cheese CSAs. A recent article at Foodworthy rounded up that site’s knowledge of extant cheese CSAs, state by state, with an exhortation to readers to add their own.

Periodic shares are a great way of experiencing cheese. The taste, aroma, and even texture of cheese can change greatly as the animals move to different feeds or as the available plants in their grazing change with the seasons, making cheese a truly seasonal food.

By signing up to get portions of the same cheese (although hopefully there will be some rotation among your particular cheesemaker’s products), you’ll learn exactly how small changes—the shift from pasture to feed over the winter, for example—can dramatically affect the taste of the cheese (which is why the wheels of Comté made from the summer milkings are most prized).

It’s an amazing show of anti-homogeneity and a great reminder of how disconnected we’ve become from the natural rhythms of the food system. Of course, CSAs are also great for the farmers: CSAs help subsidize their costs up front, removing some of the uncertainty and risk surrounding food production, and help foster a strong bond between producers and consumers.

If you’re interested in finding your own cheese CSA, here are a couple of other great online resources that will help you get started. Unfortunately, these online sources take a little mining, but they have a lot of great noncheese-related information that you’ll probably be glad to have learned. Or, of course, you can go to your local farmers’ market, find the people with the cheese, and ask if they have a CSA, but talking to actual people is so old-fashioned. Here’s how to do it from the comfort of your computer cave.

• LocalHarvest is the granddaddy of web-based local-food resources. They’ve got a number of helpful pages, including a listing of CSAs that is searchable by state or ZIP code. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have an option to search by type of product, but, once you drill down to the individual CSA’s page (here, for example, is one of my local CSAs), they list the types of produce and other consumables that each offers
• EatWild is another directory of local farms, with a focus on farms that raise animals without cruelty, on pasture. Like LocalHarvest, they don’t actually offer a way to search by product, but they do offer a page dedicated to grass-fed dairies. I can’t say that their site is easy to use, but it offers really great information on small farms that otherwise have a hard time advertising

Do you know of any great sources for cheese CSA information? Know of a great cheese CSA in your area? Have an awesome farm that sends cheese by express FedEx? Please, share in the comments!

About the author: Jake Lahne is a graduate student in Food Science because he’s too much of a wuss to actually work in restaurants anymore. He nevertheless is willing to offer his opinion on any number of food-related topics and specializes in cocktail culture at his own blog, Liquor Is Quicker.

[Photograph: burgermanmarathon.com]

If you want to stand out from the crowd of marathon runners raising money for charity, you have to kick it up a notch. Such as by running a marathon in a burger suit.

22-year-old Sam Novey, aka Burgerman, aims to raise $100,000 for nonprofit afterschool program Citizen Schools by running the Boston Marathon (April 19) in a custom-made burger suit. For the next six weeks, you can join him on his burger suited practice runs around Cambridge on Saturday mornings by meeting up at local burger chain b.good at 24 Dunster Street at 11 a.m. Your reward at the end of the run: a free burger from b.good!

Citizen Schools brings in community members, businesses, and college students to teach middle schoolers real life and job skills (last year, for instance, Sam taught a section on how to run a presidential campaign). Sam’s $100,000 would help expand the program into 20 additional classrooms. You can donate online at firstgiving.com.

America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe comes with 80 calories and 6 grams of fat.  H-U-G-E savings!!!  They noted on the show that you must use part-skim ricotta as a non-fat version will give a dry and gummy pesto.  Good to know!

Another thing I love about pesto is how versatile it is!  Toss it with pasta, use it in place of a tomato sauce on a homemade pizza, or even swirl it into mashed potatoes.  I’ve been known to use it as a baked potato topper as well.  Additionally, I sometimes us this in place of mayo on a bacon sandwich or BLT.  It’s also a great base for other sandwiches.

My family loves to have a fresh, simple salad dressed with a ranch dressing and garlic bread to round out this meal.

Basil Pesto Linguine

• 1 lb linguine, cooked to package directions
• 4 cloves of garlic, grated or put through garlic press
• 3 bunches of fresh basil leaves, no stems
• 1 C parmesan cheese grated
• 1/4 C part-skim ricotta cheese
• 1 small shallot, minced
• 3 Tbsp olive oil
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Get a large pot of water boiling and cook linguine to package directions.

Bruise the 3 bunches of basil leaves.  (Put the leaves in a large Ziploc bag and pound with rolling pin until all the leaves are bruised.)  Add the bruised basil leaves to a food processor bowl.

Grate or put 4 large garlic cloves through a garlic press directly into food processor bowl.  Add all other ingredients and pulse pesto until smooth – about 30 seconds – stopping to scrape the pesto down from the sides as needed.

Taste pesto for seasonings and set aside.  Once linguine is cooked al dente and drained, return to the cooking pan and add pesto.  Using tongs gently toss pesto throughout the linguine.

Top each serving with shredded parmesan cheese.

[Photographs: NCR]

I believe that the issue of those automated self-checkout lanes has come up before on Serious Eats, but often as asides in larger discussions, but I figured this one might be ripe for the pseudo-science that is the Serious Eats Poll.

Why now? Because I had two instances this week where I was both grateful for the self-check and where it drove me insane. I know the arguments for and against them, but I won’t get into them here. Let’s just vote and see where this thing goes.