(Pictured: Migas Fried Rice, Tofu with Mint and Sauteed Bean Sprouts. See Bon Appetit Dinner Party below.)
My cooking was all over the place. (In a good way.) There is no coherent theme to today’s blog post. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened over the last few months of 2016.
Some of the cooking adventures were on-going over the course of a few weeks. In some cases, I would start a cooking project, and then loop back on it a month and a half later. (More on that later.) So today’s blog post is organized by dish, not by event.
Also, the title says November, but our story starts as late as late October. More after the cut!
Bon Appetit Dinner Party
(See picture above.)
Last month, I cooked some recipes out of the Bon Appetit magazine collection that I have. The migas fried rice (tex-mex Asian fusion) and the tofu with mint and sauteed bean sprouts were the runaway hit, so I decided to cook them for my friends.
Interestingly, there was a disagreement over whether the fried rice was over-seasoned or not. Apparently, it depends on whether people approached it as Mexican food or as Asian food. The seasoning was on-par for Mexican food and Tex-Mex food, but compared to Asian food, it was flavor overload.
Really, it’s my fault, because in my notes, I said to reduce the amount of cumin, and then I forgot to do so. Also, the recipe has a lot of chilis in it, so I dunno what I was expecting. Guests still enjoyed it though.
Strawberry Lemonade
Strawberry lemonade is my drink of choice. You’d think something as basic as this, I’d know how to make it already. Well, I didn’t but now I do. If you look carefully at the pic, you’ll see that I served this at the Bon Appetit dinner. Well, I also served this on a few other occasions, plus I wanted to break it out into its own section so I could give you the recipe.
Ingredients
12oz strawberries, sliced
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 cups fresh squeezed lemon juice (5-8 lemons), remove seeds but leave pulp
6-8 cups cold water (as desired)
2 Tbsp lemon zest (about 4 large lemons)
1 tsp kosher salt
sprigs of fresh rosemary, as needed
Instructions
1. In a pitcher (at least 12 cups), toss strawberries with 1/2 cup sugar and balsamic. Let sit 30-40 minutes to let the strawberries soften.
2. In a small saucepot, mix the remaining sugar and 1 cup of water and bring to a boil. Stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and let cool.
3. Add the lemon juice, sugar water, 6-8 cups of water, lemon zest, and kosher salt to the strawberries. Stir until mixed. Add 2 sprigs of rosemary. Chill in fridge.
4. Serve with a sprig of fresh rosemary.
Macerating the strawberries is, strictly speaking, optional. But you’re going to be zesting and juicing lemons anyway, so you might as well spend a minute tossing the strawberries with sugar and balsamic and just leave it there. Plus, the softened strawberries really improve the texture of the lemonade. And the balsamic really adds an I don’t know what quality to it. Plus, if you macerate in the same pitcher you’re serving the lemonade from, you’re not even using an extra bowl.
Dissolving the sugar in boiling water is also optional, but it really helps with the texture. For science reasons I won’t pretend to understand, sugar doesn’t dissolve well in cold water, and will leave your lemonade grainy. Dissolving your sugar in hot water and turning it into a syrup makes the sugar nice and smooth.
The zest is also optional. It adds a bit of lemony flavor to the lemonade, rather than just raw tartness. (Seriously, the lemon flavor you know and love comes from the zest, not the juice.) That said, the effect is subtle, and there’s a ton of sugar and other ingredients in the lemonade, so if you want to save some steps for a minor effect, feel free to skip this step.
Salt is also optional. But what kind of chef would you be if you didn’t add just a bit of salt to everything to enhance the flavor?
Lastly, the rosemary. I got the idea from Tipsy Cow. (Not just for the rosemary, but the balsamic as well.) The rosemary doesn’t add a whole lot of flavor, but it looks pretty as a garnish, and it smells nice if you keep it in the drink while you’re drinking it. If you have rosemary sitting around, definitely add a sprig. But it might not be worth it to get rosemary just to make lemonade.
Chicken Bacon Onion Stirfry and French Onion Soup
If you recall, the chicken bacon onion stirfry is basically one of signature dishes, and I wanted to keep practicing it. (Because, you know, I should be good at my signature dish.)
At the same time, I also wanted to practice being faster and more efficient at cooking in general. I got it in my head that I should practice planning out full meals, and that for the purpose of this exercise, a meal should include two dishes.
I also ended up tweaking the chicken bacon onion stirfry recipe. After 2 years, I’ve tweaked the recipe ever so slightly. First, it’s not worth getting sweet onions, so the recipe now uses regular yellow onions. Second, the sauce is pretty intense, so I lowered the balsamic from 2 Tbsp to 1 Tbsp.
I decided to pair up the chicken bacon onion stirfry with a french onion soup. (Both are pretty onion-y, so it made sense to me.)
Also, rice.
Pork Chop with Grape Sauce and Garlic Mashed Potatoes
This is my other signature dish (and a bit unorthodox at that). So naturally, I needed to practice making a meal with this too. It’s generally the same as before. The only real difference is plating it on a bigger plate and not oversaucing it, so it doesn’t just become a sea of sauce. (Seriously, an earlier iteration of this dish was just basically a pile or purple goo.)
You know what goes well with pork chops? mashed potatoes. So I paired them up, the pork chops and the mash. Except I didn’t use parsley this time, so the potatoes are less visually appealing. Still delicious though!
By the end of this exercise, I realized I was approaching cooking practice all wrong. I got good at baking cookies by baking essentially the same batch twice a month for 7 years. And now I bake cookies without even consulting a recipe. (In fact, I think my latest version of my recipe probably isn’t even written down in any conventional sense.)
Clearly, I need to spend two months making the same recipe(s) over and over again, until I can make that dish without consulting my notes. Maybe even get good enough to just make stuff on the fly based on first principles. Ask me again next year.
Pasta With Tomato Cream Sauce
For my last trick, I decided to make my chicken bacon tomato cream sauce again, which is very quickly becoming my third signature dish. (That and, I cooked it for Dr P at the end of October and for my family at the end of December.)
Last time we talked about this sauce, we decided that we’d use bowties or shells. If you look closely at the photo, you can see I decided on bowties. (It just felt right.) I also discovered that I can get away with simmering the tomatoes for as short as 20 min, and still have a nice sauce that was both thick and flavorful. (Not that there’s a problem with simmering for 25-30 min.)
I decided to pair this one with roasted potatoes. Roasted instead of mashed because I needed one burner for the pasta and one burner for the sauce, and I didn’t want to have to deal with another pot and burner for the potatoes. So using the oven was a must. It’s not the most elegant of pairings, but it’s functional. And if someone served me this (and someone did, where “someone” means “me”), I’d be happy with it.
Bonus: This is what thyme looks like in San Jose, California. (Specifically, I got it from Whole Foods. Safeway was sold it.) If you’re from San Jose, you might not think this is unusual. In Seattle, thyme looks different. I’ll have to take a picture and show a side-by-side comparison at some point.