Suzi’s Blog
Supercharged Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise is almost as important to sandwiches as bread. It’s automatic that we spread mayo on that bread, or incorporate it into a salad filling: chicken salad, tuna salad, ham salad, …
Mayo from the store is a good product. It’s nothing like home-made mayo. Nothing. But, if you are whisk-challenged, or simply do not have the time, then there is an easy and delicious way to step up that store product.
Adding some vinegar and sugar — it’s all about balance — can transform that mayo. Here’s the basic recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1/4 cup mayo
- 1-3 tablespoons of vinegar
- 1-2 teaspoons of sugar
Preparation:
Put everything in a bowl and stir to mix. Actually, this is a place where that whisk would be handy.
Discussion:
What kind of vinegar? Any kind. I first saw this idea in The Texas Cowboy Kitchen cookbook, where mayo and malt vinegar are combined in these proportions for a cole slaw dressing. That’s just the beginning. Today, I used honey vinegar, with only a teaspoon of sugar, to create the spread for a ham sandwich on toasted bread. Ham and honey are a natural pairing. Doing it via honey vinegar was culinary fun.
You’ve got a shelf with more than one bottle of vinegar, and that means you have several ways to apply this technique: for sandwiches, for salad dressings, for dips. It’s rare to find something so deliciously easy and tasteful.
How We Recommend Cookbooks
The past year has been a bountiful one for cookbook authors. Oh, you’ve heard that publishing is declining, but cookbook publishing is actually up and quality books abound.
Suzen and I love to review cookbooks and recommend them based on recipes we’ve personally tried. Right now, we are backed up. We have some wonderful books we know that you will love, but we have not yet been able to personally test them.
So, here’s what we are going to do. If we present you with an actual recipe here, it means we have really, really tested it. And, the recipe works and it is something quite good that we urge you to try. Often we’ll include a list of other recipes from the book that impress us, although we probably have not tested all of them.
Sometimes we know just as you may, without testing, that a book is good. If we go through a book, see the quality we want, we will recommend it to you with a list of the recipes that have intrigued us. We’re going to say that Suzen and I like these recipes ideas and that we will be testing one or more of them down the line. With this policy, you’ll get the heads up on great books as soon as we can alert you.
Do we blog every book we get? No. We don’t. There are books, some of them very beautiful with interesting pedigrees, that are bad. The recipes simply do not work. It’s not that the results are just a little off. No, these are culinary disasters squatting on our table, things we won’t or can’t eat. We’ve seen it with baked goods that simply won’t bake — after an extra 20 minutes in the oven! — or that come out looking like the building material for a base on Mars.
No matter how pretty the picture is, if we attempt to make that recipe and it fails, well, our radar is up. We’ll try a second recipe from that book to see if the failure was “us” and not the “book.” If the second recipe fails, then Suzen and I will say it is the “book” and not “us.” We won’t be recommending the book. We won’t mention the book.
So, if you see a recipe here, we hope you make it. It will be yummy. If we present you with a list of recipes from a book, it’s a book that you want to go examine and perhaps start cooking from. Of course, if you beat us to the punch and find a wonderful recipe or book, please let us know. We’d love to share you discoveries with all our readers.
Suzen and Brian
