{"id":712,"date":"2016-02-22T00:12:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T08:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/?p=712"},"modified":"2016-02-22T00:12:09","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T08:12:09","slug":"janfeb-2016-multitasking-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/2016\/02\/22\/janfeb-2016-multitasking-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Jan\/Feb 2016: Multitasking Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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.<\/p>\n

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Saturday, January 23, 2016 – The first thing I thought of for multitasking is eggs benedict. (Which I’ve made before<\/a>.) Timing the hollandaise sauce and the poached eggs to come off at the same time without messing up either is quite a feat. (Some chefs claim they can make hollandaise sauce and\/or poached eggs the day before, and then just reheat. Someone will need to fact check this.)<\/p>\n

Now, I didn’t quite succeed. The hollandaise sauce cooked up a lot faster than I expected, and while the eggs aren’t badly overcooked, I could have taken them off 30 seconds earlier for those nice runny yolks. Plus, the hollandaise sauce we too runny and not thick enough. I think I’ll have to go back to school for this.<\/p>\n

It was still delicious though. As it turns out, lemon juice is pretty potent stuff. It doesn’t take a whole lot of lemon to make hollandaise sauce taste lemon-y.<\/p>\n

\"20160214_200452\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday, February 14, 2016 – For my next trick, I decided to make both of my original<\/a> recipes<\/a> side-by-side. For those who didn’t click through to the links, this is my chicken bacon onion stirfry and my pork chops with grape sauce. And for good measure, a serving of rice.<\/p>\n

Now, I’ve made these recipes a bunch of times, and they’re my own, so I know how to not mess them up. The timing, however, is a different story. I mistakenly believed that, while the onions were cooking, I’d have time to chop some chicken and mix liquids to make the sauce. I was wrong. I don’t know why doing all that was so labor-intensive, but apparently it was. Lesson learned: Do all the prep before you do all the cooking, unless you’re sure<\/i> the cooking will be very hands off and take a long time. (See next week’s for more details.)<\/p>\n

Good news is, onions don’t overcook easily (as long as the pan’s not too hot). Cooking onions for a long time is pretty much just caramelized onions.<\/p>\n

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Saturday, February 20, 2016 – I decided to end with something that might make a reasonable meal (or close to one, anyway). Something with soup, and something with meat and sauce. For soup, I picked French onion soup (which I made during Knife Skills month<\/a>), and for the entree, I picked salmon with lemon caper sauce. The lemon caper sauce I made when I first started taking classes at Sizzleworks<\/a>, but before I started blogging.<\/p>\n

Now, I know I said last week to prep everything before you start cooking, but caramelizing onions takes a very long time (38 min on my stove) and is very hands-off. So I prepped the sauce and the salmon while the onions were cooking. And it worked. I managed to finish both at very near the same time. (Which is good for the French onion soup, because French onion soup is so much better when hot.)<\/p>\n

Overall, I think this was good practice. I mean, I know I have to multitask when I cook a whole meal for my friends, but it was still definitely worth taking the time to actually practice<\/i> it. Bonus points if, next time, I also buy a torch and put toast and cheese into my French onion soup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[74,54,42,81,62,14,70,37,47,18,15],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","tag-bacon","tag-chicken","tag-eggs","tag-fruit","tag-lemon","tag-onion","tag-pork","tag-sauce-making","tag-seafood","tag-soup","tag-stirfry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynejeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}