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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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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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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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Taiwanese-Style Soy-Braised Pork

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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…

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