I’ve been slacking on my good eats recipies, so here’s another easy one, Vinaigrette from S1E4 - Salad Daze. It’s a basic vinaigrette that’s a solid baseline for modification. Even as-is it’s pretty damn tasty. I made it with Sous Vide strip steaks, 131 for 2 hours then a sear in the cast iron.

The steaks were good, but this is a salad dressing recipe. So here goes. First, some red wine vinegar. (I was actually almost totally out, so I halved the recipe, but kept all the ratios the same) The only special equipment I used was a food service squeeze bottle, like these, though you totally could make this in any container with a tight fitting lid, like a mason jar.

Next we add olive oil and Dijon mustard

Then garlic

Shake it like it owes you money until it reaches a nice creamy consistency, then let it sit at room temp for an hour. It will look like this after said shaking.

After an hour, strain out the garlic and put it back into the container, it’s ready to serve.

I made a salad with baby spinach, red onion, and goat cheese. The dressing was a solid basic dressing. Much like a lot of the other recipes in the first season, it’s not anything fancy and it doesn’t require any special equipment or skills. It’s a great easy dressing to have in your arsenal, and I imagine it would be a great baseline for coming up with something you really like. Try different kinds of mustard, different vinegar, add some spices, whatever. Overall, a very good start.

I’m on a roll this weekend, so I decided to knock out another episode of Good Eats. I was at Season 1, Episode 3 - The Egg Files. I made the scrambled eggs from this episode. Like the last two, it’s a very simple recipe, it differs from standard scrambled eggs slightly in that he adds some milk to the eggs before beating them, and starts them low and then cranks the heat to finish. It goes like this.

Put some eggs in a bowl

Add one tablespoon of milk per egg. In this case 5 tablespoons. Then mix with a fork.

Then start in a low pan with some melted butter and stir until curds form, once they do, crank the heat and shake the pan while folding the eggs until there’s no liquid in the pan. You can watch the video at the link above to see what I’m talking about.

The eggs came out pretty good. This is basically how I scramble eggs anyway except I’ve never bothered adding milk. I think the milk does add some fluffiness, and I might start adding it to my eggs in the future. The method is basically the opposite of what I do, I start in a relatively hot pan and then pretty much immediately drop the temp to low. I didn’t really see any difference between my way and this cold first way, both work fine. I seasoned with salt, fresh ground pepper, and smoked paprika.

Ava seemed to be a fan.

I’m reasonably sure some of them even made it into her mouth.

So there you have it, Alton Brown’s scrambled eggs (at least the season one version), pretty tasty and super easy. It looks like the entire episode is available on FoodNetwork.com, so check it out if you want to make this.

I have a 15 month old daughter, so I no longer get out to dinner all that often. You would think this would make me cook more and better stuff, but between working 45 hours a week and dealing with a crazy ass child, I often fall back to takeout or super simple recipes. It’s time to change that, so I immediately thought of the best cooking show ever created, Alton Brown’s Good Eats. Tonight I’m doing the first two episodes at once since they are insanely simple. From Season 1 Episode 1 - Steak Your Claim, I’m doing the pan seared Ribeye. Actually it’s a pan seared New York Strip since it was on sale and they’re similar enough that it doesn’t at all effect the recipe. I’m also doing a baked potato from Season 1 Episode 2 - This Spud’s for You. These are both really simple recipes and they go naturally with one another, so I decided to knock out both episodes in one go.

I preheated the oven to 350 for the potatoes and poked them up with holes like a crazy person.

They got tossed in oil and salted, then popped into the 350 oven for an hour.

Once they were done, I cranked the oven to 500 and preheated both it and my cast iron pan. In the meantime, I got the steaks up to room temp, or at least closer to it, on the counter, then rubbed them with salt, pepper, and canola oil.

They get 30 seconds per side in a searing hot cast iron pan, then 2 minutes per side in the same cast iron pan in a 500 degree oven. They came out looking great.

I ended up doing salt, pepper, butter, and cheese on the baked potatoes.

Also did some canned green beans so I at least had some kind of vegetable on my plate.

The steak came out a perfect medium rare, and had an amazing crust on it. I’ve gone to sous vide for my steaks and just searing them on the stove, but I think I’ll be stealing the 500 degree cast iron method for my sear at least, though it did generate a ton of smoke. That’s probably more an issue of me needing to clean my oven than anything else though.

The potato was a baked potato, it was fine. The recipe got a very nicely cooked baked potato, so it’s likely great for someone just learning to cook.

Like I said in the beginning, these are the first two episodes of the show and some very basic recipes, so I didn’t really do much in terms of taking pictures or videos, but as I go through the series and do some more complex recipes, I will definitely document it more thoroughly. I’ll be out of town next weekend but normally I plan on doing at least one recipe a week.