Monday, December 29, 2014 – It’s a tradition now. Twice a year, every year, when I visit my family in California, I cook them dinner.
October was invent a new recipe month. November was random Good Eats episode month. December is… back to inventing a new recipe. Another simple recipe that I can practice getting quick on, and maybe incorporate it into a meal (with the chicken bacon sweet onion stirfry).
Since I made a stirfry last time, I didn’t want to do a stirfry again. But I wanted to do something else that was simple and quick, something that I could do at the same time as the stirfry. So a pan-roasted pork chop with a sauce seemed like a good fit. I wanted to keep the same flavor profiles, so balsamic vinegar and Madeira are in. But I didn’t want a complete repeat, and onions aren’t the best flavor profile for a pork chop sauce, and I wanted to try something with grapes (grapes are really versatile), so I decided to saute some grapes. And of course, adding rosemary and thyme (which are the best and second best herbs, respectively) for a complete flavor profile.
So, without further ado, the recipe, after the cut…
Wait, why is November fish month? It’s clearly turkey month! Well, remember when I said earlier this month that November would be random Good Eats episode month? And how I rolled the dried pasta episode, which is really recipe light? Well, I re-rolled and got Hook, Line, and Dinner, which was the fish episode. So I did a few fish dishes.
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.
Friday, October 17, 2014 – I first got the idea about a week ago when I was reading wikipedia articles about sandwiches (probably because I just watched an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen where they were making sandwiches). And I came across the wikipedia article for peanut butter, banana, bacon sandwiches. And I thought to myself, I have to make that. I mean, peanut butter goes well with bananas and peanut butter goes well with bacon. It’s just too perfect! (Really, peanut butter goes well with everything.)
So I did.
Saturday, September 6, 2014 – So the Mid-Autumn Festival, also called the Mooncake Festival, is actually on Monday. But Monday is, for some reason, a terrible day for dinner parties. So I through a dinner party on Saturday instead.
Saturday, August 16, 2014 – So one of my mother’s most popular recipes is her secret potato salad recipe. (I call it a secret recipe, but if you’ve ever eaten it, you’ll realize it’s not so secret.) So I figure I’d prolly learn it and keep the family recipe going.
Saturday, August 2, 2014 – So the Mid-Autumn Festival is coming up again, and of course, I want to do another dinner party. But what do I make?
On a completely unrelated note, about a month ago, my friend Abhi asks me if I’ve done any “soy-boiled pork”. To which I respond, “I haven’t done it recently, but know that I’ve taken cooking classes, I can make it better before.”
Hmm… I wonder where I’m going with this…
