holy smokes that looks AAMAYZING
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that tortilla looks legit!
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and now that we’re home… BF made tacos campechanos with the leftover rib eye and the Basque sausage. guac from an avo that had seen better days. All very tasty and I’m apparently not “meated out” yet.
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I’m still calling it summer. A gorgeous evening here . Grilled pork tenderloin . With sides of , sliced peach , radish , potato salad , and slaw . Cheers .
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Tetra Pak food containers are actually very recyclable. See http://tetrapak.com/go-nature-go-carton/home . Here in Anne Arundel County Maryland Tetra Pak goes right into single stream recycling. We’re actually having problems finding markets for glass but the food containers are pretty easy. I am by no means an expert but I do follow the local news and have a Google feed that tracks the Public Works website for changes to what goes in our recycling bin.
We only buy a few things (chicken stock, milk, orange juice) in containers. I’d buy more if I could. It appears from my Google Fu that worldwide 26% of Tetra Paks are recycled. That number is disappointing but turns out to be higher than plastic bottles. That is really disappointing. Glass by the way is 26.6%.
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Yes, I have. Look at the nutrition information. Quick numbers run in my head (ounces to cups to quarts and dilution rates for the paste) it looks like FIVE TIMES as much salt in Better than Bouillon than Kitchen Basics. Health issues aside, food ends up oversalted.
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Looks like an amazing weekend. I’d love to pull that off. How long a drive was that for you? Congrats on the anniversary.
Not much cooking this weekend, which was nice.
Last night we had Cuban food, with friends over who taught us how to make congris and tostones with mojo, all of it delicious! Skirt steak (sous vide and grilled) was our contribution. Flan and assorted fruits for dessert.
Tonight was takeout from a family favorite Lebanese place, all the usuals - hummus, labneh, tabbouleh, various kababs, fatayer (my favorite). Baklava, walnut cookies, and ice cream for dessert.
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Tonight I grilled burgers served on beautiful challah rolls, along with COTC, grilled asparagus and tater tots. Forgot to get a pic before we dug in to what felt like a hanging-on-to-summer meal.
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I’m sorry for your loss. She sounds like a wonderful woman.
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Happy Anniversary! You two sure did it up right. Wonderful meals and libations in a gorgeous setting. Wishing you much more joy to come.
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Funny enough, I switched from Kitchen Basics to Better Than Bullion during the pandemic to save on pantry space. Though I’m not really trying to replace a given quantity of chicken stock as much as add a dash of chickeny something to a dish, such as certain risottos. (Mainly when I make risotto with three kinds of mushrooms.)
I tend to favor plain water over stock. Yet sometimes I feel that little extra flavor component helps. So I use way less BTB than called for, much the same way as I would dilute Kitchen Basics or any other stock packaged in a Tetra Pak.
The BTB turns out to be more economical and convenient for my use case because I can take a dollop out of the jar now and then. I have used the reduced sodium roasted chicken BTB so far.
I will guess I am an outlier but this is what’s been working better for me lately.
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This is where the Tetra Pak solution falls down. Once you open the container you should refrigerate the leftovers. If getting through a quart in a week or so is part of your routine there is more waste.
I drink the stuff like many people drink coffee or tea, especially in cooler weather.
The salt in bouillon and BTB is really overwhelming for me. I’ve found that many recipes derived from commercial cooking are written and “tested” (rant there) by people who smoke and whose taste is compromised. If you ween yourself off huge quantities of salt you begin to taste things you did not and could not before. Delicate flavors that truly blossom.
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While, I am very cynical about recycling, I left out an important part of my statement…I meant to write, “most MA municipalities…” Those plastic-coated cardboard milk/juice cartons are notoriously difficult to recycle so many towns, including my own, tell folks to chuck them in the regular trash. These cartons, though they seem recyclable, are often a source of recycling contamination. Your county’s recycling program (not far from my brother-in-law’s) sounds much more comprehensive than ours.
I clicked on the TetraPak link and it read to me like a whole lotta corporate mumbo-jumbo without actually saying anything substantive.
Not trying to be argumentative - discussion about sustainable cooking/food item shopping is an important one for me.
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No question. We do a lot of separation here in the county and ship things off to processors. Many places ship the mixed single stream material to China and China is not taking as much as they did. The reason is as you imply contamination. People especially Americans are not well behaved. Consider the whole pizza box problem. sigh My county has apparently found a Tetra Pak recycler in Mexico. Our stuff gets bailed and shipped.
The biggest problem with Tetra Pak is down-cycling of the polyaluminum. Regardless, that in the real world more gets recycled than plastic bottles and nearly as much as glass is attention-getting. Like elections, sometimes “least bad” is the best we can do.
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I’m with you on the salt thing. Since I use so little of any commercially prepared stock equivalent—whether BTB or Kitchen Basics—the BTB is more satisfactory of the two for me. I would only use part of the KB box and seldom got around to using the rest fast enough. My freezer space has been too limited to devote to storing stock.
P.S. I drink loads of loose leaf tea. Sipping broth/stock would put a crimp in my tea drinking schedule, LOL.
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I use the lower sodium version of Better than Bouillon, which has 500mg of sodium per teaspoon vs 120mg of sodium per cup of the Kitchen Basics product you mentioned. So if you assume a dilution rate of 1 teaspoon per cup of water, about four times more sodium. I don’t limit salt in my diet so this isn’t a concern for me, but I do keep in mind that if I am using BtB in a dish I probably won’t need to add additional salt.
Also, as @tomatotomato mentioned, I don’t typically use it as an actual stock replacement but rather as a flavoring agent where I want a concentrated hit of chickeny flavor. I have never had an issue with balancing the salt by reducing salt elsewhere in a recipe. However, I wouldn’t use BtB in a recipe where chicken stock was meant to be the star.
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BTB makes a very nice mushroom bouillon, which I didn’t know until very recently.
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Shrimp did get into a Stir Fry for Sunday Dinner! Overcame the blahs to get it done.
Only disappointment was that I could not get a nice fry on the noodles. Still, it was an indulgent meal.
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Sorry to hear Greg.
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