Chicken

Navigation Menu

Home
Blog
Cookbook
Music
My Cats
About

November/December 2016: Misc Cooking Adventures

1022161828

(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!

(more)

Jan/Feb 2016: Multitasking Practice

20160123_192646

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.

(more)

June 2015: Cooking Adventures

20150606_205934

So the original plan was to cook fried chicken wings for the traditional July 4 party, and also to cook omelets for my family for July 4 breakfast (which would have happened on July 3). That of course didn’t pan out, because my cat sitter lost Missy. But I figured I’d post pics from my practice runs and write up my notes and thoughts.

(more)

Pi Day 2015

IMGP7464

(Photo courtesy of Joy)

For those of you who don’t know about Pi Day, March 14 can be written as 3.14, which is pi. Therefore, March 14 is Pi Day. Also, pi sounds like pie, so we celebrate Pi Day by eating pie. But wait, there’s more. This year, Pi Day falls on a Saturday. So I figured, all the stars are aligned, and this year, I’m going to bake a pie and have a pie eating party at my place. Fruit pie or savory pie? Why not both? It’ll be a Double Pie Pi Day, a Pi Day Pie-thon, if you will.

For the apple pie, I started with the crust and filling recipe from Sizzleworks, and eventually, I made enough tweaks to the apple pie filling that I’m willing to call it my own. The chicken pot pie recipe, though, I was inspired by an Emeril recipe from a long time ago, but I re-wrote the recipe from first principles and my own preferences. The only thing it has in common with Emeril’s recipe is they both have shiitake mushrooms.

In the traditional manner, I’ll show you the recipe(s) first, after the cut, then jump into the write-up.

(more)

Dwayne’s Chicken Bacon Sweet Onion Stirfry

20141029_205413_Android

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.

(more)

Mexican Dinner, Practice Run

DSC02341

April 5-6, 2014 – Some backstory: My friends know I’m really into cooking, that I’m a chocoholic, and that I frequently combine strange flavors. (The famous example being the burger with chocolate sauce. But that’s a story for another day.) At least 2 different friends indepdendently told me I should check out mole and learn how to make mole. (The Mexican food, not the furry animal.) So I did.

(more)