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November/December 2016: Misc Cooking Adventures

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(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!

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Ingredient Challenge Dinner Party!

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Saturday, February 27, 2016 – So when I first started doing ingredient challenges, the rule was that the people who issued the challenges had to eat whatever I cooked for them. (This was to prevent people from choosing the most ridiculous ingredients and make sure they picked things that people would actually eat.) That and, whatever I came up with, I wanted to share with my friends. So naturally, it’s dinner party time!

Today’s menu was

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Jan/Feb 2016: Multitasking Practice

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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.

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Ingredient Challenge #1: BBQ Rouladen

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Saturday, October 3, 2015 – So a little bit of backstory: As far as cooking practice goes, I’ve invented my own recipes, cooked random episodes from Good Eats, cooked a chapter from Chef Watson, and practiced my knife skills. But what do these all have in common? I decided all those things. So I decided it was time to push myself out of my comfort zone and do things that I wouldn’t otherwise do.

I took some inspiration Chopped and pantry challenges. The game was my friends would pick 5 ingredients, and then I would pick 5 ingredients, and then I’d see what I can make with all of those ingredients and only those ingredients.

JJ got first pick (by being the first person to respond), and he picked bacon, sausage, beef, cheese, and BBQ sauce. My first thought was one of the “crustless pizzas” he’d been making, but I didn’t want to copy him. My second thought was to choose bread as one of my ingredients and make a sandwich, but that was too obvious. So I took a page from bacon mania and decided to make something crazy, but prolly wasn’t all that crazy.

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Pork Chop with Grape Sauce

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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…

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Dwayne’s Chicken Bacon Sweet Onion Stirfry

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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.

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Peanut Butter, Banana, Bacon Sandwich

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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.

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