My Current Obsession: MacGourmet

Don't you love it when you're not even looking and a great tool falls right into your life? The other day I was searching for some killer writing software, and MacGourmet Deluxe politely waved to me from my Google Search window. Of course I had to go check it out. And since it was designed for Mac, I really had to check it out. And since there's a 20 session full-version free trial, I had to really, really check it out.

Downloading is easy. The learning curve is gentle. Within just a few minutes, with the help of Safari, I was importing recipes from Time to Cook as well as many of my other favorite food blogs.

This is a fabulous find for me because one of my life's goals is to collect all of my recipes in one place, create a cookbook, and give a copy to each of my five children. MacGourmet makes that very easy and even pretty fun.

From the Mariner website, creator of MacGourmet and MacGourment Deluxe, you can:

• Build, print, and share your own cookbook from your recipe collection.

• Use the Mealplan feature to plan and organize meals. Since this is a Mac program, you can Sync your plans with iCal.

• Easily calculate the nutritional content of your recipes.

• Publish your recipes to your .mac account or to your web site.

• Manage your wine collection by recording notes about your favorite wines.

• Import recipes from your favorite online source.

• Create shopping lists from the Weekly Meal Planner or from one or more recipes.

• Store and manage all your cooking notes.

• Organize your collection with SmartLists.

• Plan a meal using the Cupboard find or Potluck find features.

There are a few things about the software that I don't care for, like the inability to customize the layout before creating PDF files, or to customize the preparation, course or categories lists (I'd like to add courses, equipment and categories) and the limited "help" files, but it's definitely miles above my current system of throwing my recipes in a ring binder or in a drawer in the kitchen. Plus, the "Clippings" feature, which allows you to go to any website, select the recipe and import it into the recipe editor, is simply killer and in itself is worth the $44.95 purchase price (you can only do five clippings per session with the trial version). This feature only works with Safari, Camino and Opera web browsers.

When I've entered all of my favorite recipes, I'll print them on cardstock, laminate them, and put them together with a single binder ring. They can even be color-coded according to category, like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Kids' Recipes, etc. I have a few recipes like this from years ago and they've held up perfectly.

I also plan to create a cookbook which can then be sent to self-publishing services like Lulu, CreateSpace and CafePress and then given as gifts to friends and family.

If you have a Mac, you really must give MacGourmet Deluxe a try.

Fettucine with Carmelized Onions and White Wine Sauce and A New Kitchen Tool

There are times when chaos rules all around me and I just don't care. Today was one of those days.

We'd just returned from morning service at church and I'd decided to experiment with a new pasta and a couple of sauces. The kitchen was still in a state of limited functionality after my previous day's venture into cleaning the spice drawer and reorganizing the pantry and cupboards. Everything hadn't been put back into place yet, but I didn't care. A clean washcloth to make a clear surface on my butcher block, my food processor and a couple of pots and pans were all I needed. Everything else could tumble down around me.

And it practically did.

Kids were tracking snow through the house. Other kids were scattering toys. Other kids were playing board games on the floor of the piano room. There was delightful chaos everywhere, and I was embracing it.

After sixteen-year-old Bard finished the Simple Hot Cocoa, I enlisted her help to make the two sauces I'd be tossing the fresh egg noodles in. She did all of it but chop the onions. The food processor did that.

She even used the best cheese grater in the world to turn a block of Pecorino into a bowl of light, fluffy flakes. If you regularly grate hard cheeses, the Microplane Classic Zester/Grater is the only way to go. It runs about $13.00 at the MegaKitchenType store and is totally worth it. Microplane originally began as a woodworking tool until the wife of a hardware salesman picked up a rasp to zest an orange for a cake after her other zesters just didn't cut it. She was pleasantly surprised by the results and made the Microplane Grater a regular kitchen tool. After trying rotary cheese graters and not being impressed, I'm thrilled to have added the Microplane to my list of favorite kitchen tools. I hope to soon add the Medium Ribbon Grater for soft cheeses, butters, chocolates and apples. It may even give my Cuisinart a run for its money!

Both of the sauces were good, but the one that follows was delicious and proved the favorite of my seven testers. I'm not sure it was quite enough sauce for one pound of fresh egg noodles, and I did have to add some cream during the last stage, but it was still quite tasty. It even stopped the chaos long enough for the masses to be fed.

It takes a good bit of time to make fresh egg pasta, so be sure to set aside an hour for a pound and another twenty minutes or more for the sauce, depending on how quickly your onions brown.

For a bit of variation, try browning a 1/2 pound of bacon, removing the bacon and leaving 1/4 cup of grease, omitting the olive oil and browning the onions in the bacon grease instead. Continue with the recipe from there.

For best results, serve the pasta in warmed bowls. It loses heat fairly quickly.

Enjoy!

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After making your egg pasta into one pound of fettucine, bring four quarts of water to a boil.

Grate 1/2 cup of Pecorino Romano very fine, maybe a bit more if you like to sprinkle the cheese on top of your pasta. Maybe even more, because you must sample it after you've grated it. It's just too light and fluffy to resist. Don't use pre-grated. It doesn't melt as nicely. It's better to just invest in a good grater and buy fresh wedges of cheese. Often, the pregrated cheeses are of lower quality and have anti-caking agents and other preservatives added to them. If you can't find the Pecorino Romano, you can substitute a good-quality parmesan, like Parmigiano Reggiano but you still need to fresh-grate it.

While the water is boiling and the egg pasta is resting, chop four onions very fine.

Heat 1/4 cup of extra-virgin olive oil in a saucepan that will be big enough to accomodate the noodles and the sauce. Saute the onions in the oil (or use the bacon variation suggested above) until well browned but not black.

When the onions are just about done, add two cloves of minced garlic and saute until onions are finished and garlic is lightly sauted.

Turn the heat up to medium and add 1/2 cup of white wine. Bring this to a simmer and make sure all of the onion bits are scraped off the bottom of the pan. Simmer it for about three minutes.

Add 1/4 cup of heavy cream to the pan and heat just until warm. Taste it and add salt to taste.

When your water comes to a boil, add one tablespoon of salt, then add your egg noodles. Cook them just until al dente, then quickly drain them and add them to the sauce, along with the 1/2 cup grated cheese.

Serve it warm with some more cheese on the side. A nice dish of steamed broccoli would go really well with this.

It will be worth the chaos, I assure you. Dishes, after all, can wait until tomorrow.

Ode to My Redi-Check

It's the classic situation. I have a basic need. I have a few dollars. I see a killer application. I must have it. Budget? What budget?

That's about the story behind my acquisition of the bestest gadget I have in my kitchen. Yes, I love my KitchenAid mixer, and my Cuisinart is always at hand, but they are only shadows of themselves without my RediCheck remote kitchen thermometer.

It's true. I didn't have the money to spend on the RediCheck, since it was going for about $40 and I had, roughly...uh, nothing. But I was preparing to make something fabulous and yummy on the grill, and when I saw this beauty, I knew it had to be mine.

Now, it wasn't an impulse buy. Oh, no. I stood in the aisle of the Kitchen, Bath and Bedroom Superstore and really, truly considered whether or not I needed such an extravagance when I could have spent a measly couple of dollars on yet another cheap meat thermometer that would go through the dishwasher after I've said five million times that food thermometers and dishwashers are not friends. My husband, waiting for me in the car, would likely not understand how amazing this little device was, how often I would use it, or how I could justify spending $40 on it. But I knew it would be worth it. And I knew that, eventually, the love of my life would see the wisdom of my ways and thank me for it.

Because, see, I'm very terrible about knowing when meat is done, or when candy has reached the soft ball or the hard ball stage, or when the yogurt is precisesly 110 degrees farenheit. A tool like this could improve my cooking 150%. Who could put a price on that?

So I bought it. And then I started explaining. Fast. My spiel probably went a little something like this:

The RediCheck has so many great features, I almost don't know where to start. I guess I'll begin with the fact that you can stick the probe into your food and then walk away. Literally. There's a cool remote unit that you can clip to your belt and then you're off. Go do some laundry, make potato salad, take a nap, and the signal will beep when your food has reached the appropriate temperature, either using the mode for meat doneness, or the temperature you set manually.

The next great feature is that it's very accurate. I've been using it for everything from grilled thanksgiving turkey to homemade vanilla caramels and have had very good success with it.

Finally--and this might be my favorite feature--the temperature probe is attached to the main unit by a heatproof cord, allowing the probe to be placed into the cooking item--in the grill, or in the oven, or on the stovetop--and left there while the unit itself sits on the countertop or near the grill, safely and happily displaying the temperature of the roasting bird or bubbling candy.

Yes, it stretched my budget to buy this gadget, and yes, it does have its problems, like the fact that you have to turn on both the send unit and the remote unit at just the right time to allow them to synchronize, but, all in all, this is one gadget I don't think I could live without.

My husband does see the wisdom of my ways, and now even he uses the RediCheck to do his grilling.

RediCheck. The kitchen gadget even a husband could love.