Saturday, February 15, 2014 – So two things. One, I wanted to make chicken stock, because it’s oh so useful for making soups and sauces and stuff. Two, my friend Tina wanted to hang out, and she likes cooking too. So we have a guest chef today!
So where was I? Chicken stock. Now anyone who’s known me for a while knows I can’t stand dealing with raw poultry. So instead of getting a chicken and dissecting it, I just got about 5 lbs of chicken drumsticks. Yeah, it works. Somehow. And of course, the part we want for making chicken stock is the bones, so we cut out the perfectly good meat for, I dunno, meat purposes.
For those of you who haven’t studied the fine art of making chicken stock, the ingredients for stock are your bones (with a little meat and skin still stuck on them for more flavor), mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery, and in my book, garlic), and bouquet garni (which according to my cooking teacher is parsley stems, thyme, bay leaves, and chervil, but no one ever has chervil). Oh and spices. (Meaning salt and pepper.)
Speaking of herbs, I’ve always been buying my herbs from Safeway. But on Sunday, I discovered that Uwajimaya has herbs fresher and better than anything Safeway could possibly have. (Seriously, I should just buy all my produce from Uwajimaya.)
But yeah, back to stock. Simmer for 4 hours, strain, and then optionally reduce. (Because if I’m going to store this long term, reduced stock will take up less space.)
So when the stock was done cooking, I had somewhere between 3.5 quarts and 4 quarts. So I reduced it down to 1 quart. I thought the stock tasted good fully constituted, but it tasted amazing reduced by 3.5x. When I reconstitute this stuff, maybe I shouldn’t reconstitute it all the way. Concentrated flavors and all.
Anyway, bag, freeze, and move on to the next thing.
The next thing? (Which was really while the stock was simmering?) Tina had a brilliant idea for what to do with the chicken. And I hadn’t had dinner yet. So she made chicken teriyaki.
Tina was excited about my induction range and my cast iron pan. Mainly because the power output of induction range is so much better than any and all things electric. As it turns out, though, my cast iron grill pan is not particularly well-suited for stir fry. Shoulda just used the stainless steel saute pan.
But it was still delicious.
Sunday, February 16, 2014 – Guest Chef Tina returned today, inspired by the Chinese New Years dinner at Jon’s 2 weeks ago. We started with the turnip cake. And by “we”, I mean mostly Tina, because I was busy with cleanup duty, loading and unloading the dishwasher.
We made a few substitutions. Dried shrimp is really hard to find, and it doesn’t taste that great, so we substituted non-dried shrimp. And we added Chinese sausage because let’s be honest, Chinese sausage is awesome.
Mix, steam, cool, then mold into rectangles and fry. Unfortunately, we never made it that far. It’s been cooling in the fridge for 6 hours, but it’s still goopy. (As opposed to the stuff we made at Jon’s party, which solidified in less than an hour at room temperature.) Probably because we decided the turnip cake needed more water, so we added more water. Clearly next time I try a new recipe (that’s not a basic saute, braise, roast, or anything else I’ve done before), I should follow the recipe as closely as possible. (UPDATE: One alternative explanation is that we didn’t cover the turnip cakes when we steamed them, so all the water dripped into the turnip cakes. Besides, the whole point of an experiment is to learn something, and we learned something, so the experiment was a success.)
The other thing we made were some lamb dumplings.
We also made some substitutions here as well. Instead of red onions and garlic chives (I still don’t know what garlic chives are), we substituted leeks. And instead of following the recipe, Tina decided to marinate the lamb in the sauces and mix in all the vegetables without sauteing them off.
I was able to get my hands on the dumplings and make a bunch of them. They’re not the prettiest things in the world, but pretty good for my first time I think.
Note to future dumpling makers: This makes a little over 45 dumplings. Next time, we should get 2 packs of dumpling wrappers. Or maybe just fry the leftover meat into a lamb burger patty.
Tina also decided instead of steaming the dumplings, we’d pan fry them. So we did.
Except we made one flavor mistake. The cumin in my food closet is 2.5 years old, so I suggested we add extra cumin. As it turns out, cumin is so potent that even old cumin is still potent. The dumplings tasted very cumin-y. Still delicious though. (And they don’t need soy sauce.)