The Kitchen: all things delicious and disastrous

I have my parents' good old copper-bottoms from when they got married. Those things are a good sixty years old now. My sister thumbs her nose at them, but I think it's out of jealousy since she has one of those induction stoves and had to buy special stuff for it. The thing's a giant money sink.

...gotta admit I totally went and spent way too much on a Le Creuset though. I'd wanted a dutch oven for forever, and it was on sale...

...and had a floral pattern...

My best friend's bridal shower is coming up. For food, the organizer helpfully suggested buying cheese and crackers or sushi plates. *tuts*

They haven't met me, so they don't know I was a line cook and also that I have cooked for parties of 20-30 people. I could do this by myself. But I'm just going to bring crepes with accompanying sweet and savory fillings, and some Pinoy food. Lumpia and pancit are the strongest possibilities.

edited 30th Apr '17 11:24:07 PM by Leradny

Sounds good. I love catering events. Since cooking is an art, having a large group of people all eating my food feels like I'm having an art gallery opening

Recently I've found breading meats with panko breadcrumbs adhered with egg and cooked in vegetable oil/olive oil mixtures has made for a hell of a tasty recipe. Crunchy, tasty, moist in the meat, and not very expensive! Even the cheap panko bread crumbs work well!

And all I mix into the panko is salt and pepper.

Lerad: You had me at Lumpia and Pancit. Damn now I am hungry. :p

Tuefel's next set of cooking adventures will be with Tilapia and Cod. The missus and I are cutting out most of the red meat from our diet for a couple months and adding in more veggies and eating more lean meats. So that puts lean chicken and fish at the top of the menu.

I am leaning towards variations of Asian Fusion for the fish and assorted slow cooker oriented stuff for the chicken like soups, stews, and shredded meat dinners.

An amusing channel that does video game food recipes. Altered for reality and safety sake.

edited 19th May '17 8:56:22 PM by TuefelHundenIV

See also Cooking With Mama, which tries to cook real dishes exactly the way Cooking Mama has you make virtual food and rates the results.

Neat.

I think for my first white fish dinner I am going for a yellow coconut curry. Just need the veggies, sans peppers of any variety, maybe something like bean sprouts and bamboo shoots or even carrots. Yes I know potatoes go pretty well with curry but I am not a huge fan of potatoes and fish out side of fish and chips. Even then I tend to dowse everything in a good strong vinegar.

Fish pie with the potatoes on top and veggies as sides works.

Dare you to hate it (and Ocean Pie or Admiral's Pie).

i've been packing and i completely forgot about my best friend's bridal shower. if i can make it, i will try to have kutchinta and if all else fails i can buy store bought lumpia. it won't be the same but it's what i can do in a day's notice with everything i own in a state of disarray. :(

Euo: Speaking of pies. I do in fact have some pie crusts that need using.

Late lunch for today: stuffed artichokes◊

Hmm. I really want to get more adventurous with my cooking. Try combining some unorthodox ingredients and flavors. But I don't want to waste all this money on ingredients if there's a chance it'll taste bad, you know?

Yeah, I've done that. It's super diappointing to think you've found recipe gold, but that one spice you've never used before is just.... ugh. And now there's a pile of ugh. And it feels terrible to waste the ugh, but who wants to eat ugh.

So scale it down and just make 1 serving.

That's still stretching it a bit. My food budget (and budget in general) is really tight

In my experience, when cooking for one, if you have the chance to buy a single serving amount of an ingredient, it's usually three times the unit price of the larger quantities.

Then go to supercook and find something you haven't made before with ingredients you already have.

Whoa I've never heard of that site before. Looks awesome!

I am experimenting with my leftovers right now. I have a bunch of zucchini leftover from my soup yesterday, and I'm combining it with all sorts of other stuff in my fridge

Speaking of experiments...

Recently I've read an article (in Russian) about the main meat dishes of Game Of Thrones, and decided to cook a baked chicken in (relative) accordance with one of the recipes^note I guess it was taken from ASOIAF cookbook.

Ingredients:

• 1 whole chicken.
• 3 table spoons of honey.
• Butter.
• 1 orange.
• Half tea spoon of ground fennel seeds.
• Parsley.
• Salt and pepper.

First step was, naturally, to unfreeze the chicken and dry it with paper towels. Then comes the marinade: mixed orange zest, juice of half of the orange^note kept the peels for later and honey^note didn't have the fennel seeds. Then rubbed the butter into the chicken, including putting a large amount of it under the chicken's skin. Seasoned with salt^note without the pepper, over and under the chicken's skin. Covered it with the marinade^note I was a bit suspicious about the presence of orange juice and honey in it, so I covered only a half of the chicken with it, again, under the skin, too. And pour it into the chicken's cavity. Put the orange peels and a handful of parsley there, too^note I crumpled the parsley a bit before I did that, to make the juices flow. Put it into the oven heated to 190 degrees Celsius. The recipe said to bake it until inner temperature reaches 74 degrees Celsius, but I didn't have a thermometer, so I waited 2 hours, just to be sure. Oh, and I cooked the potato garnish simultaneously with the chicken^note they were in the same baking tray, the recipe didn't mention the garnish, FYI.

The results: 2 hours is too long a time to bake a chicken at 190 degrees. It burned to black in some places, but not much, really. Despite the rest of the chicken taking a nice brown-ish colour, the skin wasn't crispy. My fears of orange juice and honey spoiling the taste were unfounded: the meat was soft and succulent and had nice herbal smoky fruit feel and aftertaste to it^note although the "smoky" part could be explained in half by the fact that I overcooked the chicken. The other half is honey, it was a very characteristic feeling that I can't really describe and didn't taste sweet at all, despite the fact that oranges themselves were more on the sugary side, not sour. Although it wasn't salty enough for my taste^note I used half a table spoon of salt. The potatoes were really tasty, too, having absorbed the chicken juice. So keep that in mind when you salt the garnish.

Conclusions: I need to buy a goddamn meat thermometer. Or bake the chicken for 1.5 hour at most. And season with full table spoon of salt. And it's better to mix the salt and pepper with the marinade for them to be distributed over the chicken more evenly.

edited 25th Jul '17 12:11:26 PM by Millership

Another tip: use a knife or skewer to pierce through the skin and into the meat in multiple places before hitting the marinating bit. It helps the tasty stuff really hit deep, as well as gets the butter to the meat itself upon roasting.

With chicken, using the cavity to add taste is easy enough if you take something like a buttered onion, orange or lemon stabbed with cloves, cinnamon slivers, garlic, various herbs (tarragon is always good) and bay to place in there, rather than going for stuffing or wall-to-wall fat route.

edited 25th Jul '17 2:02:49 PM by Euodiachloris

Thanks for the tip! Is there a difference between making the cuts across or along the general direction of muscle tissue?

Personal choice, mainly. My rule of thumb is "the direction that gives minimal resistance against the knife". But, since you're mainly just after piercing the skin, going too deep isn't usually a big deal.

Now, going full Psycho shower scene on a tough bit of mutton or goat you're going to have to tenderise for days of fridge flipping? Any direction: knock yourself out.

Ahh roasted chicken. It can be delicious done right, and ridiculous otherwise.

Start with a rub of salt and pepper. Dry the chicken COMPLETELY, then lightly oil the skin and rub the salt and pepper all over the outside of the chicken. This will make your skin deliciously crispy. i would add honey only to the inner joints and all over the inside of the chicken...it will still give you the taste without taking away your crispy skin. either that or soak it in a honey marinade for a few hours BEFORE patting dry and oil/salting. That might b e your best option, it'll get the honey taste soaked in.

Roast it at 375 for about an hour. this will lock the juices in and result in even tastier chicken.

Or...you could always spatchcock it. http://www.marthastewart.com/891288/how-spatchcock-chicken.

Edit: misread your post, thought you were attempting to roast chicken at 190F

edited 25th Jul '17 6:13:46 PM by OriDoodle

A spatchcock works best on the BBQ. Lime, chilli, coriander (leaf and seed), thyme, loads of pepper, a good amount of salt and oil of choice (peanut for me). /South African

Ok my next experiment and cooking challenge is goat stew. The Indian grocery down the block carries goat and lamb regularly and at a good price so I am going to be making some stew with the goat. Never cooked with goat before so this should be interesting.