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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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September/October 2016: Bon Appetit Month

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So I have about 3 years’ worth of Bon Appetit magazine. As the story goes, one day, these magazines started showing up in my mailbox. I didn’t know where they came from or why I was suddenly subscribed (and I still don’t). At the end of the first year, I got an offer to renew 3 years for something like $30, less than a dollar per issue. So I figured why not? So now I have 3 years’ worth of Bon Appetit magazine, and they’re still coming.

They’ve been sitting on my shelf, untouched all these years. Somehow, I just never got around to reading any of them. Most of them, I never even bothered taking them out of their plastic shipping wrappers. It’s not that they’re bad magazines. (I mean, they pale in comparison with Cook’s Illustrated, but they’re not bad.) I just had other fish to fry.

Until now. I decided to make my cooking project for this month (September and the start of October, actually) to actually cook something from Bon Appetit magazine. So I used a random number generator, randomly picked the September 2014 issue, and decided to cook as many dishes from the magazine as I could.

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Ingredient Challenge Dinner Party Two

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Saturday, May 7, 2016 – I’ve already told you the story of the ingredient challenges, so I won’t go into that again. Today, I had my second dinner party with the dishes from the ingredient challenges.

Today’s menu was

And for dessert, blood orange sorbet. (This wasn’t an ingredient challenge, but it was thematic with the rest of the dinner.)

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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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December 2015: Cooking In California

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It might be more accurate to call this Cooking For California, since the story starts in Seattle, as I try out a few new recipes and practice a few old ones.

Specifically, one of my friends specifically requested deep-fried stuffed jalapeno for our traditional New Years Eve party. (Which she calls “jalapeno poppers”, and I lovingly misinterpreted as “jalapeno popplers“.

Not only that, but it’s tradition for my to cook dinner for my family every time I visit, a tradition that was broken once only because… well, you know… And between my Chef Watson stuff and my Ingredient Challenges, I had a lot of new material I wanted to try on real people. (I ended up going with some Chef Watson winners for my family dinner.)

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Pi Day 2015

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(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.

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