Sous vide (something other than politics!)

 A little over a year ago I bought a sous vide* bath, sous vide machine, vacuum sealer, and vacuum sealer bag rolls. (The machine is essential, they're about $140-200; the bath, essentially a plastic box with a lid, is not, you can use a stock pot. I recommend the vacuum sealer; the immersion method with ziploc bags is a pain and tends to leak, with bad results). 

At first I only used it to cook perfectly medium rare steaks, to be seared afterwards. (It actually works to sear them before, and is easier). 1 hour at 143°F and perfect color straight through. So I didn't use it that much. But I've discovered cooking  brisket or chuck for 7 or 8 hours at 145° creates perfect meat for pot roast; tender but actually still slightly rare; mix it into already cooked pot roast gravy and vegetables, which take much less time, and it's the best pot roast ever. 

And then there's turkey. We're just two people, so cooking a whole turkey, even the smallest ones you can get, is kind of impractical. So I buy the frozen bone-in breasts, which sometimes cost as little as $8 or $9 and make several meals or a whole bunch of sandwiches. And here's the thing. You can cook it for 3 hours at 165° and then put it in a very hot oven or broiler for 15 min., or you can even just skip that step; remove the skin, and just eat the meat, which is PERFECTLY cooked, moist, tender, and delicious. And the bones make excellent real turkey soup. 

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* Not italicized, it's now a two-word syntactical unit in English, like coup d'etat (without the acute accent, since we don't use diacritics in English). Pronounced "soo veed."