(Photo courtesy of Joy.)
Thursday, November 27, 2014 – It’s Thanksgiving. My friends know I bake epic-level desserts. They also know I have a knack for cookies. So of course, I revive the cookie crust pie. Except instead of a chocolate filling, I go for a pumpkin pie filling.
(Side note: cookie crusts were relatively obscure when I started making them in 2012. Now they’re pretty common. It kinda annoys me. I guess I’m a food hipster.)
Friday, November 7, 2014 – Last month was invent a simple recipe and practice it a few times. This month was pick a random Good Eats episode from season 1 and do a bunch of recipes in that episode.
So I randomly picked Season 1 Ep 11 – Pantry Raid 1: Use Your Noodle, which was an episode about how to cook dried pasta. Kinda boring actually, since anyone worth their salt knows how to cook dried pasta. There weren’t even any recipes in this episode, just Alton Brown doing a tutorial of how to cook dried pasta, followed by him tossing in whatever he had lying around.
Fortunately, I got a copy of Good Eats: The Early Years (aka, Volume 1 of the Good Eats book series that Alton wrote when Food Network initially refused to monetize the Good Eats TV show by releasing the episodes in any physical or online format). And in the chapter for Pantry Raid 1 (pp 60-63), there is a recipe for tossing noddles with melted butter and toasted crumbled saltine crackers.
I had 2 motivations for this project: One, I’ve cooked a lot of complex dishes, but I’m generally pretty slow at the cooking. (There’s a lot of organizing, gathering ingredients, chopping, figuring out what I’m doing, etc.) So I wanted to create something “simple”, something that I could internalize quickly and practice making quickly, without getting bogged down by all that “thinking”.
Two, I wanted to create something with a distinct flavor profile. Something that’s uniquely me. I’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth, so I decided to use some of the sweeter culinary ingredients, but still make it work as a savory dish. So I was drawn to sweet onions, Madeira, Balsamic vinegar, and of course, plain old sugar. Chicken was chosen a the meat of choice because of its versatility. And bacon was thrown in late in the planning phase because I couldn’t decide between olive oil and butter, and decided, what the hell, use bacon.
So what started as a simple dish ended up with a recipe with 10 ingredients and 7 steps. But let’s be honest, anyone with a lot of cooking experience ends up throwing in a lot of ingredients because we “just know” how the flavors come together. 10 ingredients, but they fit together pretty logically, and 7 steps, but they’re all part of the stirfry experience.
I promised you a recipe. I’ll give you the recipe after the cut, and then go into the writeup.
Saturday, November 1, 2014 – I went to a fencing tournament at Salle Auriol today. And today I realized that I exploit the weaknesses of others rather than rely on my own strengths.
It’s not all that surprising. I have my roots in gaming. (The most famous example is in FFTactics, when *spoiler*I broke Gafgarion’s sword rather than face him straight up*spoiler*.) Really, metagaming rather than gaming. But it’s interesting to see how deep it goes.