Random Ramblings

It all started when Marc left town for two weeks. There I was on a Sunday night, opening and closing the fridge, asking myself, "What do I want to make?" and coming up with the inevitable answer, "Nothing." Eventually I took myself out to dinner to a Vietnamese place around the corner and vowed that I wouldn't let it happen again.

Monday I woke up with a plan. I had to go groceries anyway, and I'd just seen a lovely crock-pot recipe for lamb korma. I found some chicken thighs I decided to use instead of the lamb, but it seemed like the recipe would work regardless. From there, I found myself in a spiral of, "Well, if I'm doing it anyway..."

See, the chicken korma uses half a can of coconut milk. So what to do with the other half? There's a recipe in The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss that I've been meaning to try for a while: coconut cauliflower curry mash. It's sort of like the cauliflower version of mashed potatoes. It uses half a can of coconut milk. So I picked up a (rather overpriced) cauliflower at the grocery store too.

Of course, the recipe only used about half the cauliflower. So what to do with the other half? Roasting is always a safe bet, so I did that, along with a little garam masala, because I figured I had a theme going.

I also had a bunch of leftover root vegetables from a pot roast stew I made last week, and I figured I really should use them up before they started going bad on me. So I roasted up about two pounds of carrots, also with garam masala, and about a pound and a half of baby white-fleshed potatoes. (This time with thyme, because I like to be contrarian.)

I had about three cups of cut-up butternut squash that I had to use also, and I'd found a nifty recipe for that too. (Hence why I had the thyme on hand for the potatoes.) It wasn't quite Indian, but what the heck, I felt like trying out the recipe and nothing as obvious as a themed dinner was gonna stop me.

Since I was doing all this work in the kitchen, I figured I might as well fry up the 3/4 of a package of bacon I had lying around, so I cut it into lardons and spent some time pushing it around the pan and draining it when there was too much grease at the bottom. (Probably about four times -- there was a lot of grease!)

And, finally, some rice. I had one last tupperware of home made vegetable stock that I used instead of water, and I figured that since I was on an Indian kick anyway, I'd try to add some Indian spices and see how it went. Into the pot went a cinnamon stick, some ground cardamom, a few cloves, and about a half-tablespoon of cumin seeds.

The crock pot chicken korma happened on Monday night and got packaged up around midnight, and all the rest I did over about three hours on Tuesday. (Not counting the 45 minutes of making up my chart of what spices needed to go with which dish, what appliances needed to be in action at what time, and so forth. I may be a geek.) I'd also bought a pumpkin pie at my grocery store on Monday, because I'd never had pumpkin pie before and couldn't find anywhere to buy just a single slice. So I had about 3/4 of that left.

Suffice it to say, there was a lot of food.

Tuesday morning, I put out the call to my friends, begging them to come over and eat dinner with me. I got four RSVPs, and one of them even brought wine, so we had an absolutely lovely time. The chicken korma was a big hit, and most of the vegetables were gone as well. (Mmm... roast vegetables.) The cauliflower mash was surprisingly tasty, definitely something I'd make again. My only sadness about the veggies is that the potatoes were nice and crispy out of the oven, but had gotten soggy by the time we ate them. So sad...

In any case, a good time was had by all, and I've got enough korma and rice leftovers to last me the rest of the week, I think. So... yay! Not sure if I'll do a big cooking job again before Marc gets home, but you never know.

The latest in my Rouxbe lessons involved steaming. Today in particular was steamed lemon-garlic chicken with thyme and steamed broccoli with soy and sesame oil.

Since the steamer basket I have is actually kind of dangerous to use -- it's the kind that opens up like a flower, but there's no easy way of removing it from the steaming pot without risk of burn -- I decided to buy myself a present of a new steamer insert for my pots. This involved a bit of running around and a mishap at the store where they'd set aside the wrong thing for me (steamer basket =/= double boiler), but it all worked out in the end. Conveniently, the "universal" steamer basket from Lagostina actually fits two of my pots. This means that I could, say, make rice in my big saucepan and steam the meal in a smaller saucepan. Except that I need the same lid for both jobs. So... pasta it is! Pasta doesn't need a lid! Yay!

Surprisingly, this was a remarkably simple meal. Prep everything in the steamer basket, put over the water, cover, wait for a while, eat. I put the chicken breasts on top of sliced pieces of lemon (a trick I learned from the Rouxbe lesson on steaming) and then did the shorter broccoli after the chicken was done. I lost quite a bit of steam as it was going, but the steamer basket sits very high above the water, so I could put a lot in and not worry about it all boiling off.

I was worried about the timing for this, but in the end it all worked out. I turned on the burner for the pasta water the same time the chicken started steaming. It boiled around the time the chicken was done (remember how I needed the lid for the steamer?) and the pasta was done right around the same time as the broccoli. I was able to do the broccoli prep while the chicken was steaming and the plating while the broccoli was steaming. Yay for timing!

In this end this was a very tasty meal. Marc and I both enjoyed it very much. Definitely a keeper.

Now that I'm getting back into my Rouxbe cooking lessons, it was time for some more tasty practice. Today's lesson: submersion cooking techniques (poaching, simmering, and boiling), as demonstrated by making a soup. There were a number of soups to choose from, but I settled on the red lentil coconut soup. (For those not on Rouxbe, you can see the slightly-modified recipe here.)

( How I fared with the new recipe )
( Bonus feature: submersion cooking activity )

Perhaps it was a stupid decision to make my first meal plan the same week I had an intermittent high fever for the first four days. But I was feeling okay when I made it (for certain definitions of "okay"), and I'd been tired of getting to 6 pm, looking around my kitchen, and saying, "There's nothing here to eat," so I figured it was the time.

My first meal plan is up on my Facebook for posterity (link here). I had plans, people. Big plans. That were mostly completely FUBARed after about Wednesday.

( The week in more detail )

So that's where things stand. Even though I'd planned on cooking Thursday and maybe Saturday, that didn't happen. We have enough chicken left over for one or two servings, and enough vegetable leftovers for maybe four. (The crock pot chicken makes a lot of leftover vegetables.) We've got some leftover rice and about 2-3 cups of leftover cooking liquid from the chicken, effectively a chicken broth, that I'd really like to do something with in the next day or two. No idea what, though.

I never got around to making the vegetable stock from all the vegetable scraps I've accumulated in my cooking for the last week or two, but I'd really like to do that soon-ish, if only so that the vegetable scraps aren't taking up space in my tiny freezer.

The good news is that there was always food in the house to eat, which I suppose is the point of meal planning. The bad news is that plans went completely out the window by Wednesday, and the things we had in the house to eat were not always the things I wanted to eat. (Hence eating out Friday and Saturday evenings.)

Will I do it again? Maybe. Probably. But with the firm knowledge that meal plans, like all plans, rarely survive contact with reality.

This was my latest Rouxbe recipe, as I've started a unit on chicken. For those who have access to Rouxbe, the recipe is here. For those that don't, the short version is that you marinate chicken legs in olive oil, lemon zest, and red pepper flakes. Then you make a short stock with the backbones from the chicken legs and a bunch of vegetables. When you're ready to cook, you caramelize the skin side of the chicken in a hot pan, then finish it up in the oven, and then use the sucs (caramelized bits), onion, ginger, garlic, lemon juice, stock, toasted pine nuts, honey, and cilantro to make a pan sauce. (In the original recipe, there's supposed to be olives, but I don't really like olives, so I left them out.)

The end result is extremely tasty, but also takes quite a lot of time, especially making the stock.

A picture of my tasty, tasty lunch can be seen here.

( More reflections behind here )

In any event, very tasty. Not sure I'd do a pan sauce again, or at least not one as involved as this one, but the marinated chicken was super-moist and tender, and I could definitely see myself using the pan-to-oven technique in the future. Mmm... food.

Friends, I think tonight may have been the first time in my entire life where I walked into the kitchen and felt confident at every single step of the way when I was cooking. This is a major milestone for me.

As I mentioned before, my next Rouxbe lesson was on pan frying. And with my brand-new All-Clad 12" stainless steel frying pan, I was up for the challenge.

First up: the water test to tell when the pan is ready for the oil. This is probably the coolest thing ever. The idea is that you add a small amount of water (maybe 1/8 tsp) every 15 seconds or so, and it'll behave differently as the pan heats up. In a cold pan, it'll just sit there. Eventually, it starts bubbling and evaporating. Sooner or later, it'll bubble but spawn off tiny beads. And when it's the perfect temperature, the water will form one mercury-like bead and bounce around the edge of the pan. Fun fact: my new pan takes about 7-8 minutes to heat up on medium heat, using my large burner. Which is much longer than I would have guessed, had I not known about the water test.

I got to feel knowledgeable when Marc was standing next to me and I was doing the water test on the heating-up pan. He saw the water evaporating and said, "I guess that means it's too hot?" And I was able to say, "Nope! Much too cold!"

I was also able to inform him that, assuming the pan is hot enough, a sticking ingredient will eventually un-stick itself once it's cooked for a few minutes, which he did not know and which I had not known before I took this module.

I had a few moments where I was worried my chicken breast medallions weren't cooked through enough, but it all worked out very well in the end. If I do anything differently, it might be to leave them just a little bit longer so they brown more. They were nicely caramelized, but they could have been even more nicely caramelized. Also, one of these days I'll have to learn how to make a pan sauce.

Supper was simple but delicious: the last of the couscous-with-vegetables I made for my knife skills practice, the roast carrots I made this afternoon (yes, this means that between the two of us, we've eaten almost an entire 2-lb bag of carrots just today), and the pan-fried chicken breast with a little lemon juice squeezed over top. Look, I made MEAT (tm) for my man! Now he won't need to die from eating only vegetables! Next lesson: pan-fried BEEF (tm), which is even more meat-like than MEAT (tm). Because I care.

Tonight was another practice night from Rouxbe. Today's lesson: minestrone soup. Ostensibly, this was more knife skills practice, the last of the knife skills lessons before moving on to other stuff. (Next up: pan frying.)

The short version: Very tasty, but too finicky and long for me to make again.

( The long version )

( Bonus 1 and 2: Knife honing and buying a stainless steel pan )

So that's it. Next time... pan frying!