So as we all know, I make good-looking food, but I’m slow in the kitchen. One of my issues is I tend to serialize everything (laymen’s terms: I do everything one at a time). If I really want to work on my kitchen speed, I need to get comfortable multitasking things. And the biggest opportunity for improvement is to have more than 1 thing going on the stove at the same time.
Saturday, January 23, 2016 – The first thing I thought of for multitasking is eggs benedict. (Which I’ve made before.) Timing the hollandaise sauce and the poached eggs to come off at the same time without messing up either is quite a feat. (Some chefs claim they can make hollandaise sauce and/or poached eggs the day before, and then just reheat. Someone will need to fact check this.)
Now, I didn’t quite succeed. The hollandaise sauce cooked up a lot faster than I expected, and while the eggs aren’t badly overcooked, I could have taken them off 30 seconds earlier for those nice runny yolks. Plus, the hollandaise sauce we too runny and not thick enough. I think I’ll have to go back to school for this.
It was still delicious though. As it turns out, lemon juice is pretty potent stuff. It doesn’t take a whole lot of lemon to make hollandaise sauce taste lemon-y.
Sunday, February 14, 2016 – For my next trick, I decided to make both of my original recipes side-by-side. For those who didn’t click through to the links, this is my chicken bacon onion stirfry and my pork chops with grape sauce. And for good measure, a serving of rice.
Now, I’ve made these recipes a bunch of times, and they’re my own, so I know how to not mess them up. The timing, however, is a different story. I mistakenly believed that, while the onions were cooking, I’d have time to chop some chicken and mix liquids to make the sauce. I was wrong. I don’t know why doing all that was so labor-intensive, but apparently it was. Lesson learned: Do all the prep before you do all the cooking, unless you’re sure the cooking will be very hands off and take a long time. (See next week’s for more details.)
Good news is, onions don’t overcook easily (as long as the pan’s not too hot). Cooking onions for a long time is pretty much just caramelized onions.
Saturday, February 20, 2016 – I decided to end with something that might make a reasonable meal (or close to one, anyway). Something with soup, and something with meat and sauce. For soup, I picked French onion soup (which I made during Knife Skills month), and for the entree, I picked salmon with lemon caper sauce. The lemon caper sauce I made when I first started taking classes at Sizzleworks, but before I started blogging.
Now, I know I said last week to prep everything before you start cooking, but caramelizing onions takes a very long time (38 min on my stove) and is very hands-off. So I prepped the sauce and the salmon while the onions were cooking. And it worked. I managed to finish both at very near the same time. (Which is good for the French onion soup, because French onion soup is so much better when hot.)
Overall, I think this was good practice. I mean, I know I have to multitask when I cook a whole meal for my friends, but it was still definitely worth taking the time to actually practice it. Bonus points if, next time, I also buy a torch and put toast and cheese into my French onion soup.