This is another quick and easy recipe. This time for a salad dressing. Now I'm not usually a fan of oil and vinegar dressings; I prefer gobs of blue cheese on my greens. However, when I don't have gobs of the bleu, and when I need to watch the cholesterol (most of the time) it's my dressing of choice--oil and vinegar.

Alton's recipe is a standard concoction of oil and vinegar, but he uses a red wine vinegar. The only red vinegar I had on hand was a pomegranate Ted wine which smells and tastes of the red fruit. Alton also adds in some Dijon mustard and crushed cloves of garlic. My gut feeling (apart from hunger) was that crushing the garlic wasn't going to be enough to infuse the dressing with it's garlicky goodness. So I crushed and then minced it. Shake and serve.

No I don't feel steel ball bearings are a valid way to emulsify the dressing--especially when using a glass carafe. I would suggest a milk frother ;)

An underlayment of mixed greens, tomato, and avocado are a great choice for the vinaigrette. (Use lots of fresh avocado if you don't like sharp/spicy dressings to cut and smooth the flavor)

Served with a grilled steak and a good beer and you have a meal.

That's what summer is about.

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Sometimes the easiest things turn out to be the hardest.  How hard can eggs over easy be?  Well as it turns out pretty hard.

The way I've done it before:  break some eggs into a pan, wait for the egg to whiten, flip, wait, serve.

The Good Eats way has you warm a plate that the eggs will go on--this turns out to make a big difference between eggs and eggs as roofing tile.  The next difference is that you cook the eggs over low heat, I'm not sure about this.  What is "low" heat?  On my stove low is apparenly too low as is the next 2 lowest settings.  So when I cooked the eggs they didn't do anything until I cranked things up to halfway to medium.  Next, you have to flip the pan to flip the eggs.  Now, I can flip veggies, and other things but apparenly my non-stick pan is no longer non-stick.  So between the heat and pan, my eggs weren't so much over easy as partially scrambled and torn.  I guess I need a new Calphalon, oh well. It works great with most things.  Finally, the recipe calls for timed cooking.  I've never timed anything but the boiled variety.  Needless to say, but I'll say it, the heat/time ratio was way off, soni gave up on it and went by how it looked.

Despite all the obstacles, the eggs are good.  Warming the plate kept the eggs from cooling off and hardening too quickly, and is definitely worth the time it takes in the microwave. I'll have to try the recipe again with a new pan.

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Episode: This Spuds For You
Page: 19
Rating: 4/5

So what do you do with more mashers than you can stuff in a burger?  You make masher cakes, which is the next recipe in the book.

This is a really simple recipe and can be used with any form of mashed potato.  It turns out it's very good with the salty full of garlic recipe for mashers.

If you are expecting latkes or potato pancakes, you'll be disappointed.  Potato mashers are basically fried up mashed potatoes.  You add an egg, some thyme, and coat in panko (or other) breadcrumbs.

The recipe, as is, tastes great--not too salty, but I would still mince the garlic.  The crustiness mixed with the smooth interior is a good contrast.  And finally, masher cakes are surprisingly good cold, unlike cold mashers/mashed potatoes.  Top them with salsa or guacamole, add some protein, and you have a meal.

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Episode: This Spud's For You
Page: 18
Rating: 4/5

After the smoky excitement of the rib-eye it was good to find that the next recipe in the book was one for mashed potatoes.  Something safe, but I've been making mashed potatoes for years, what could Alton possibly teach me?  Apparently a few important things.

The interesting point about the masher recipe calls for a combination of potatoes.  Obvious when you think about it.  I was aware of the starchy differences between potatoes, and I'd made my mashed potatoes using every kind from red to gold, but it had never dawned on me to combine them to get a combination of properties--brilliant!  To me a potato was a potato and each was pretty much interchangeable with another, although I prefer the red ones for boiling and russets for baking.  I'd never thought of combining them.

Does it make a difference?  Well, from the standpont of masher manufacture, no.  It takes the same amount of effort to clean a red potato as a russet or any other kind.  So it's not harder to make.  You do have to have them though.  In my case a bag lasts a long time so I don't tend to have a bunch on hand.  A trip to the store was in order.

I loaded up on enough loose red and russets for the recipe, got cream--I tend toward milk for cholesterolic reasons and went home to make mashers.

The process itself is easy.  Peel, boil, etc.  When I make mashed potatoes, I add milk and an egg whisked together into the potatoes at the end.  Sometimes I toss in some herbs and minced garlic.

Alron's recipe calls for a bunch of  smashed garlic infused into the cream over heat.  This is then mashed into the potatoes. The other main ingredient is two teaspoons of salt.

Infusing the garlic in the cream more evenly distributes the garlicky goodness.

So is there a difference in the final product when combining the two potatoes?  Definitely, first you end up with two textures, a creaminess from the reds which tend to fall apart and a chunkiness from the russets which survive the mashing better.  Flavor-wise, it's hard to tell with the cream and garlic.  I should have tasted the potatoes prior to the flavor injection.

So how was it overall?  Two things to be aware of with the recipe you may want to adjust.  First two teaspoons of salt is a lot of salt and the final mashers are a bit salty.  Next time I'll cut it in half and maybe add a half teaspoon of white pepper to compensate. Second, the recipe says to infuse the smashed garlic in the cream and then add the mixture to the potatoes.  So what ends up happening is that you end up eating cloves if smashed garlic every few bites.  I love garlic, but this would scare most people.  I would recommend smashing then chopping or mincing the garlic and infusing that.  It would make the cream and potatoes more garlicky without causing you to eat chunks of garlic.

Overall, however,  this is a great recipe for potatoes and smashed potatoes.  It can be easily adapted and adjusted.

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Who says cooking isn't exciting or dangerous? My foray into trying this recipe was fraught with both.

I got the ingredients out and got the prime rib to room temperature. Strangely, the food store I go to doesn't normally carry prime rib, and so I had to get it from the butcher counter. The portion I got looked fresh and well marbled. Slicing the cut right then and there I guess helped. It didn't have the normal semi-faded look of the pre- packaged meats. On the other hand it sort of makes me wander about the carcass lying around in the back room.

Be that as it may, I got things set and heated up the iron skillet. The book warns about smoke so I made sure the fan was in high gear and I had a lot of windows open. I also had the bathroom fans going just in case.

I trimmed the little bit of excess fat off the steak and dropped the steak into the now hot pan. A nice sizzle greeted me, promising a good sear.

Three seconds later a solid plume of white smoke erupted from the pan! The kitchen was quickly filling with smoke. My exhaust fan (the person who thought recycling smoke was a good idea should be fried for inventing the self-contained "exhaust" hood.).

The smoke quickly began to take over the neighboring rooms. Sensing a critical situation I tranferred the pan to the hot oven to contain the smoke and turned the oven off.

At that moment all the smoke alarms in the house went off--and this with a LOT of windows open to the winter cold and all the fans going. I scrambled to open more windows and the door to the garage.

The alarms screamed (all 5 of them), the pets hid, terrified and I rushed to kill the smoke alarms. The phone rang--the security company! They wanted to know if I was ok. I quickly reassured them there was no fire, merely a recipe gone astray.

The alarms screamed as I hung up and pulled more windows open. Then I remembered the steak which should have been flipped. I rushed back to the oven and pulled out the pan. Luckily, I had cut the heat off and the steak was not a burnt cinder. It has survived.

The alarms finally silenced themselves as the smoke cleared to the cold weather outside and the garage.

A few minutes later, all was quiet and the smoke cleared. I closed all the windows, everything now under control. Elapsed total time: ten minutes.

Things now calmer, I turned my attention back to the recipe. I made the sauce but discovered I lacked cognac, so I substituted some bourbon. It felt like the right thing to do.

I pulled together a salad, poured a glass of Cabernet and sat down to dinner.

The steak had turned out surprisingly well despite not being turned and being in the oven longer than the recope's four minutes. It was, however, closer to medium than medium-rare.

It was, however, one of the best prime-ribs I've had. The sauce was very good even though the bourbon gave it more of a sharp-bite than I think the cognac would have.

So, what did I learn? This is a great recipe for rib-eye. Also, have a real exhaust fan, or short of that, have EVERYTHING open and be ready to take the smoking pan outside at the first sign of smoke. The food was worth the effort and excitement.

I'm sure few of the other recope's in the book are as exciting. Certainly, the potatoes which are next won't be, I hope.

As a side note, the smoke that went into the garage hung in the air for about a day; the garage smelled nice for a few days after it settled.

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