Dishwasher cooking? After you finish laughing, read on. I have always felt, the biggest challenge with cooking, IMHO, is not about flavor, it is all about texture/mouth feel. You can get pretty good flavor by follow T&T recipes measurements, but you will not get a good dish if you can't create the right texture. Warm ice cream and cold ice cream taste the same, and well cooked steak and overcooked steak taste the same, flavor-wise. Texture is mostly temperature dependent, and temperature behavior is governed by thermal conductivity. As it turned out, surprisingly the dishwasher may serve as a good cooking appliance. In general, a DW operates between 120F to 150F, depending on the brand. It vigorously circulates water (and detergent) at that temperature for the cycles. If you do some Googling, many foods give you the ideal texture if cooked between 120F to 150F. Scallops, Salmon, for instance has such wonderful juicy-ness cooked at 120F to 130F comparing the typical 212F way of cooking many people end up doing. The problem with cooking in a dishwasher is the non-compatibility of food and detergent and the wasteful use of hot water. However, let's say you would like to have scallops, you can vacuum bag the scallops, with you favorite seasonings, and put the bag in the WD with your dirty dishes. After the dishes have gone thru the cleaning, your scallops will be perfectly done and ready for that final searing on a hot pan. In effect, you have a giant sous vide cooker that is your DW, a water oven that circulates low temperature hot water to give you the perfect 100% uniform ideal texture. OK you can laugh again.:-) dcarch This post was edited by dcarch on Fri, Jan 17, 14 at 7:50

Wow; reading references to a tri-tip being tough is shocking to me! Undoubted it's our favorite cut of meat, overall, and the most tender! Hard to believe we're talking about the same piece of meat. I'm in California and have been making it for 30 years, probably. For the last 8 years, we have been buying it from Costco and still think it's an outstanding cut of meat. I just season it right out of the refrigerator (I don't warm it up on counter) and bbq it over medium heat in gas bbq to med. rare - maybe 40 min. or so, depending on thickness. Let it rest a few minutes and then slice it with an electric knife very thinly as we like it. But, we're also very careful to slice it ACROSS the grain and you have to look carefully as the grain is always slightly askew compared to the shape of the meat. Starting at the narrow tip to our right, we usually have to angle the knife further to the right (like '2:00 o'clock') and continue cutting it like that. IE, we never cut it straight across the tip but clearly at an angle and continue in the same manner all the way to the wide end. We find it to be fabulous and extremely tasty. I get RAVES each and every time I make it for company. (I use straight McCormick/Schilling 'Season All' as my only seasoning.)

No, we haven't changed anything and don't plan to. We live in one of the greatest "foodie" areas in the world - the San Francisco Bay Area - and enjoy taking advantage of it. Dining out is my hobby. But DH prefers my home cooking, so we compromise. Eat dinner out 1-2x/wk, and eat lunch out 2-3x/week. Sunday we had Eritrean food; we love injera and all the various meat and veggie combos. Monday/Tues was my linguine with meat sauce; doesn't excite me but DH and MIL who lives with us, adore it. Tomatoes are in season so caprese salad is a standard for DH on the nights we eat at home. Today's lunch was at a local Anatolian (Turkish) restaurant we're becoming very fond of. Not fancy as most of the places we go to, but quiet and comfortable with homestyle food, assuming your food at home is centered around lamb, eggplant, tomatoes, sumac and hot chiles! Dinner at home tonight was marinated boneless rib-eye steaks off the grill, with glazed carrots and sticky rice. Tomorrow it's going out for Peruvian ceviche and beef heart anticuchos with some of my family, who are also foodies. Friday...hmmm, haven't thought of anything yet. Saturday we are getting together with friends for a high tea and private tour of a local historical home, provided by volunteers, which should be fun! It's mid-afternoon so dinner will probably be something simple and light. I have a couple of bunches of asparagus in the frig, so maybe an asparagus bisque might be in order. We are fortunate to be able to buy whatever we like, and to live in an area with a wide choice of good-quality food providers. I'm probably one of the few people in the US who doesn't shop at her nearby Trader Joe's; if I'm buying specialty food I prefer a couple of local independent high-end grocery markets which carry specific items we prefer. Oherwise I go to the biggest Safeway; based in nearby Pleasanton, CA, they have made a tremendous effort to improve their produce and carry better quality. I have found their produce to be consistently fresher, cheaper, and better than the nearby Whole Foods and much-vaunted local Berkeley Bowl. We eat a fair amount of meat, but I don't obsess about where it's from, although we have many friends who do and a good number of vegetarians amongst them. I'm allergic to wheat, buckwheat, rice, and gluten - not violently, but they give me asthma which is uncomfortable, so I go lightly on the carbs.

I've always liked cauliflower with chickpeas and olives: Separate the cauliflower into florets, put in a pan with about the same amount of cooked or canned chickpeas, drizzle with olive oil, add sliced olives and some red pepper, maybe a little salt. Bake at 450º till the cauliflower starts to brown and get a little crispy. Stir after ten minutes or so in the oven.