Sunday Gravy with yeah right: A New Toy! Let’s Play!

Good morning all!

Nice to have you all back.

The draft has now wrapped up and unlike the rest of the goddamn internet I don’t do the draft projection thing because you need a good 3 years to figure out if these picks are worth a diddly shit.

Example: last year my team had a record number of picks, something like 14 goddamn draft picks and I’m not sure a single fucking one contributed in any meaningful way last year.

I didn’t panic – yet.

I’m going to wait this coming season and see if any of them were worth their draft slot. If they’re not, then it’s no fucking wonder that the Vikings fired our old GM and head coach last year.

Time will tell.

What I do know is that when you have high draft picks and trade back IN YOUR OWN DIVISION TO ALLOW YOUR DIVISION RIVALS TO DRAFT A PLAYER OF NEED, you’re GM ideology is going to be called into question.

Anyway.

After many long weeks of vegetarian or straight-up vegan recipes we are getting back to normal around here.

Not full blown carnivore yet, want to transition the digestive tract gradually. It would be rude to drop a double cheeseburger and an order of chili cheese fries on a system that I finally treated like I’m fucking supposed to.

I shudder to consider the outcome.

Now that I mention it a goddamn double cheeseburger and chili cheese fries sounds fucking awesome.

I’ll get fully back eventually but baby steps first.

Look!

I’ve got a new kitchen toy!

Imma sous vide up in this bitch!

The gift was in the box on the right and it was a very belated Christmas present from youngest right.

We were finally able to get together in February to celebrate the holidays because all three granddaughters are in school and there were COVID outbreaks constantly.

Eldest right also gifted me some lovely kitchen ware included an electric wine bottle opener and a new set of salt and pepper grinders – with pink Himalayan sea salt. Awesome.

The “Precision cooker” is just what it looks like. The water heater and it’s also like a mini wave machine.

Turned out there were…..other items to be purchased for the complete sous vide package. I also ended up purchasing the fucking bath tub you see right there along with a vacuum sealer and various plastic rolls used in the sous vide process.

To highlight my shitty fucking timing, this was handed to me on my last carnivorous day for what turned out to be almost 2 goddamn months.

I waited a long fucking time before getting to play around with this.

Boy, was I ready to fuck with this when it finally came about.

While still exercising caution I decided to start easy and decided to cook a lovely piece of fish rather than diving in whole hog and shit.

I shared the fish buying experience in the comment section a few weeks back. I bought the fish from a meat store here in Pedro. It’s Croatian owned so they have kabobs and chevapi and such but when I was buying the fish I noticed that I was starting to get nauseous. Then on the drive home I could smell blood on my clothes. After reflection I figured out it’s because all of their fresh meats are fully open and on display and not wrapped in plastic. Factor in the fact that I hadn’t eaten meat in many, many weeks and there you go.

Fucked up it was.

Having been keeping the vegetation gustation for two months I decided to go big on todays meal and bought only the best of ingredients.

Today we are making sous vide halibut, saffron rice and a lovely spinach salad.

Start with European style butter.

And since I was still leaning vegetarian-ish here is our nice piece of fish.

Definitely a true advantage living right next to the goddamn Pacific Ocean is having a delicious piece of fish like this swimming right in our backyard.

How expensive was this you ask?

If you can’t read that it says $38.72 for two halibut filets.

Since we’re spending all this money up in here, why the fuck not?

Yep.

Let’s take this fucking new toy for a test drive!

The water bucket I purchased has a slot that is made precisely for the heat stick dealie. Damn thing requires A LOT of water too. I figured out that watering the front garden with the cooled off cooking water was the right way to dispose of the copious amounts of water used.

Plug in the cooker and set your heat. It really doesn’t take that long to heat up. I wanted to use a cook temp of 130 degrees today.

Arrange some suitable counterspace. 

Let’s make a quick sauce for the fish before we vacuum seal it. Technically it wasn’t “vacuum” sealed – we’ll get to that.

Start by melting some of that nice fatty butter.

Then float a few saffron strands in there. Simple sauce today.

We’ll add the sauce into the cooking bag along with the fish filets.

Now let’s discuss the water displacement “shrink seal” technique as opposed to the vacuum seal technique.

Leave a slight edge open on the baggie and slowly lower it into the water tank allowing the water to displace the air, then seal the bag shut. Not sure yet why some recipes call for this technique instead of the vacuum seal technique. Something about marinades and cooking times.

I’m still a sous vide virgin at this point.

Learn on the fly motherfuckers.

We’ll be demonstrating the vacuum seal technique next week.

Set the controls.

and get the water to the desired temp.

Lower the baggie into the heated tank.

Let’s get another view for perspective.

It’s like I have a 2nd fish tank! Much less motion however. You get a better sense of the amount of water needed from this angle too.

We have this saffron on hand for a second reason.

 Yes. Real imported Spanish saffron. You can tell because it’s in “tendril” shape.

Here I’m blooming the saffron in about a tablespoon of warm water.

While the fish is “cooking” we’ll get after our side dishes.

We’re making herb seasoned rice, a familiar dish here at the Sunday Gravy test kitchen. In fact the last time I made halibut here I did a turmeric rice which was also a very goddamn dazzling yellow color.

We start by mincing up some onion. Pretty fine so it absorbs into the rice better. Not a bunch maybe a tablespoon and a half. Mince up a couple of cloves of garlic while you’re at it.

Get the onion into a pan along with a scant tablespoon of olive oil.

Sauté away.

When the onion has lightly browned add in the rice and give it a toast.

When the rice has toasted a few minutes add in the garlic and the saffron and give the rice a stir to fully coat it.

If you look close enough you can see the saffron strands. I’m excited because this shit was stupid fucking expensive. And it better be good dammit!

How about we make a quick spinach salad for our second side. Sound good?

Get some spinach.

Now let’s bang out a quick red wine vinaigrette .

I went 2:1 olive oil to red wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon of dijon (says the guy who’s using spicy brown mustard), 1/2 teaspoon of dried oregano and salt and pepper to taste.

Und now vie mix togesser!

You may now dress the spinach.

Let’s see how our fish is doing.

Still swimming away!

It appears to be about done. Let’s get a look at it.

Well shit!

It’s certainly fucking done. Shit just fell right the fuck apart.

Perhaps 45 minutes at 130 degrees was too long?

Perhaps my ass, it was way too fucking long.

First time remember?

Maybe 20 minutes for fish next time.

Dammit!

Now for the fun part; let’s see if we can get a nice sear on there.

One of the main complaints about cooking sous vide is while the food may be completely cooked, the color may be a little off putting and a very hot and fast sear is required to better the appearance.

Just a bit of salt and pepper at this point and give it a very careful turn.

That will do!

Plate it up already!

That saffron sure has that “Turn this shit insanely yellow” thing figured out, doesn’t it?

A bit monochromatic no? Good thing I didn’t serve this with corn.

Now for our close-ups.

The fish.

And the rice.

Delicious!

It really was. The butter/saffron thing is a subtle but nicely balanced sauce. The rice paired really well with the subtle onion and garlic notes and the meal was perfectly rounded out by the spinach salad.

I served with a lovely pinot grigio and it was a comforting, delightful and not at all too meaty dish for a first dive back into the meat thing.

Not bad for a first time sous vide effort.

It was around this time that I began to think of all of the many other things that could be tried using the sous vide technique.

My very first idea will be featured prominently next week.

THAT one was…

You’ll have to tune in and see won’t you?

I appreciate you people.

The nice thing about doing Sunday Gravy on draft day is that I know I’m already close to 3 months in and we just had a little small NFL-centric island in this long ass offseason.

I would wish that you all had a really good draft class but that wouldn’t be sincere at all.

I ain’t done by a damn site just yet.

Be well!

Tune in next week and see what I can next throw in the hot water fish tank.

Until then.

PEACE!