Butchering a chicken, part two (as in not really)

I never got around to butchering the chicken, and it's currently resting in its entirety in the freezer.  I will definitely try to record the process - although it may be too embarrassing to want to share.

I was recently gifted an iPhone as a belated birthday/Christmas gift, and let me tell you - I am pretty amazed at the photo quality/video.  That being said, I did record a video of a sitting potato au gratin.  Listen to the beautiful soundtrack of steaks sizzling!

p.s. did you know Le Creuset calls this casserole dish an Oval Au Gratin?  So fancy.  Thanks, Marshall's!

Butchering a chicken

I'm going to butcher my first chicken in the next few days.  In the past year or two, I feel like I have conquered roasting a chicken and using the carcass to make chicken stock, so it's only appropriate.

Who's done it?  I'm going to rely on a Bon Appetit pictorial, as well as youtube.

I should quit my job and become a butcher or a fishmonger.

:(

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/dining/26mini.html?ref=style

Late Night Pizza

I made the Master Recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day on Sunday, and it's been proofing in a bowl in the fridge since then.  I put the grill pan on high, turned the broiler on high, and rolled out a mini-pie for myself.  I grilled both sides of the dough, slathered on some homemade tomato sauce (which is one of those things that will never taste better from a jar), tossed on fresh mozz, and then let it finish in the broiler for a minute.

Took about the same time as your average frozen tv dinner.  And much faster than making a loaf of bread from a book that is the ultimate lie.

This has been posted in The Pineapple Spoon Rest too.

p.s. You know there is a specific line in my lease about NOT using knives directly on the counters?  Because there is.

Pasta and Bread

I've been in sort of a cooking funk recently, but two of my friends were coming over tonight and I knew I needed to come up with something.  I don't typically do pasta dishes for guests, but like I said, cooking funk, so I made Mark Bittman's multi-grain pasta with butternut squash and ground lamb.

The recipe calls for packaged cubed butternut squash, which baffles me for a lot of reasons.  Can't someone just do some of the tedious prep work the night before instead of wasting money?  Cripes.  Order take out or cook for real.  Anyway, I didn't take any pictures, but my friend Chris did so maybe I will post those another time.  The dish was pretty delicious and hearty, and the flavors were described as "subtle."  I could tell with Adam's first bite he was wishing it was covered in a heap of tomato sauce.  This is not that kind of pasta dish - how could it be with cinnamon and cumin?

I served it with some homemade bread from the Master Recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which is a recent addition to my culinary library.

After Meredith asked me to start blogging here, I realized I liked writing about food a lot and started my own blog called The Pineapple Spoon Rest.  I recently wrote a very brief entry about the sham that is bread in five minutes a day. After baking and eating mini-boules three nights in a row, I can say it's delicious, but five minutes?  PLEASE. I read the introduction for the book after I got in the mail, and already forgot what it said (oops), so maybe it described what they actually meant by five minutes (the ease in having fresh bread once you make the initial recipe and can lob off chunks of dough while you're prepping the real dinner), but I don't get how twenty minutes of preheating/dough resting and half an hour of baking equal five minutes.  They should rename the book Easy Artisan Bread and call it a day, and then I would be a lot less agitated.

Oh It's Good to be Sixty

My birthday present from my scuba-diving brother was seven succulent tails of lobsters he caught in the ocean off the coast near San Diego. He sent them via Fed-Ex on dry ice with the dates and locations they were caught. We are going to feast on every one. Tonight, a beauty caught a few hundred yards off the shore at about 35-40 feet was sauteed with vegetables and a black bean ginger sauce and eaten with fresh Chinese noodles in front of the fire. The roses were a present from my husband Larry, the chopsticks were a gift from the Benders and the Gifts of the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh was from my colleague, Jocelyn. It's good to be sixty. You have something to look forward to.

This was supposed to be about Indian food.

I try to bring lunch to work every day, and I try to cook dinner Monday through Thursday and Sunday. I do not often cook from a box or bag, and I try to make everything relatively healthy. But Friday and Saturday are no holds barred, and I love my local Chinese take-out spots. Like, love them. I guess that's how some people love pizza - in all its disgusting, congealed mozzarella glory. I like pizza enough, but I only really love it when it's grilled. There was this place in New Brunswick called Jack 'N Grill, and they used to make really awesome grilled pizza. The problem is they only ever made this awesome grilled pizza once, and every other time it sucked so bad that until Adam and I finally gave up and moved on to Tido's (note to self: discuss Tido 'n His Junkyard Dogs at another point in time).

Al Forno in Providence, RI has the most amazing grilled pizza, which is what the restaurant is famous for. It's topped with strands of scallions, and it's BANANAS. I celebrated my 27th birthday there, and now that I'm heading deeper into my late 20's, I realize how important it is to mark your birthdays with memorable food experiences.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about bringing lunches, cooking dinners, and how I've cooked Indian food twice in the past week and how much I love it, but then I got distracted by pizza. I'll save my green chicken masala for another time.

New Year's Day Party

These are pictures of our 2nd Annual New Year's Day party. Everyone seems to like the menu, so we will probably make the same things every year. This should make Meredith and Ben very happy because they like to bring home leftovers.

We always have little bowls of nuts and olives and lots of fresh flowers

I made a Gateau Semoline (semolina cake), center, that has raisins and is flavored with vanilla and nutmeg with a caramel glaze.

I also made gravlax, which is salmon cured in vodka for three days. It has a similar texture to lox. We also had crab cakes and french toast casserole. Dieting starts tomorrow!

Samosas are very time consuming.

Samosas are not worth my time, or yours, during the work week. Letting the dough sit, prepping, cooking and cooling down the vegetables, rolling the dough out, cutting, stuffing and baking (or frying) = too much time, especially when you have to make the rest of the meal and have to do laundry.

I used a recipe from the Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook, which is probably my favorite and most used cookbook, and omitted the peas because I hate them (that texture? bursting in my mouth? gross). They also suggest cutting the dough into squares, which I did and will not do again. They turn out looking like dumplings, as they did the last time I made them, and it leaves you confused as to why you are eating samosas shaped like dumplings when they should be like big, fluffy clouds.

For the main dish, I made a curried lentil soup and was able to christen my most beloved 2010 Christmas present: the 14-cup Cuisinart food processor. I had to double the recipe and did not use a large enough pot, so it was filled to the brim, which makes it difficult to stir and adjust with more water when needed.

Aside from being inaccurately shaped and a bit too spicy, the samosas and soup were delicious. Brown and ugly, but nutritious and hearty.

Also, Meredith and I made dinner tonight! A pretty simple stir-fry with tofu, onions, kale and white button mushrooms and brown basmati rice on the side. I made a sauce with gochuchang, a Korean hot pepper paste, sesame oil, soy sauce, garlic and ginger. I've used a similar sauce for a pork dish, and it came out more flavorful - maybe next time we will let some of the flavors marinate more, but still a proud accomplishment for a joint dinner venture.

A slice of the future

As the title suggests this is my first post but it certainly won't be my last. This is the first pizza I made, I won't get into the specifics of the dough (as my recipe is quite unique and employs a rare blend of flour, water and yeast). The cheese is a combination of part-skim mozzarella and some shredded Monterrey jack, also as soon as I removed the pizza from the oven I used a carrot peeler to shred off some chunks of romano cheese. I look forward to my second attempt at this as on the first go around I didn't have a pizza paddle and was relegated to rolling the dough out on the counter, placing it on a deformed cookie sheet, and then used a combination of a large spatula and my hands to pull it from the sheet onto the stone in the oven.

Hopefully within the next several weeks and months I'll have some new dishes to post and perhaps a more detailed pizza post (as I do consider myself something of an aficionado). With that being said it's good to be on the blog and I look forward to showing ya'll the simpler side of collegiate cooking.

Bacon Cornmeal Waffles

My Christmas traditions are better than yours.

Please post for Mom: sometimes its good to just go easy!

Pasta!

Since the last of my frozen summer tomato sauce was used up, I haven't eaten a lot of pasta. I don't typically cook or eat pasta all that often, to Adam's dismay, but if I don't have any sauce or when I'm not in the mood for red, I use garlic, olive oil and throw in some tuna. I had no tuna and only clove of garlic, which is always kind of sad and you always wonder how you let that happen.

Anyway, I rehydrated a few sun-dried tomatoes tomatoes in hot water while the pasta started cooking. I sauteed the lone garlic clove, some shallots and sun-dried tomatoes with olive oil and threw in the pasta when it was done, along with some of its water.

I added a tiny bit of butter to thicken it up and topped it with breadcrumbs and freshly grated parmigiano reggiano. I eat cheese even more infrequently than I eat pasta, but a good wedge of parm is worth every single penny.

Happy holidays from my pasta plate to yours.

Hi & Thanksgiving Part two

Hi, I'm Jennifer, and Meredith made me do this. I like to cook and bake, and I like to follow recipes. I tend to make something once and never again, because what is the point when there is so much food to go around?

On Thanksgiving, my boyfriend Adam and I were gifted a free twenty two pound turkey, along with an eight pound turkey breast. We have always done our own Thanksgiving, in addition to the one with his family, but since the turkey was so big this year, it became a bit of a production. I usually keep it pretty simple when roasting anything - just salt, pepper and butter, sometimes lemon - but again, since the turkey was so big, I turned to Martha Stewart and her recipe for Perfect Roast Turkey this past Saturday. It is definitely a rich recipe, calling for a cup and a half of butter, and time consuming, having to baste every half hour for four hours.

You will never have a more moist or beautiful looking turkey in your life. Ever.

I served this with pan gravy, buttermilk garlic mashed yukon gold potatoes, wheat/white bread stuffing with sage, caramelized corn with mint, pomegranate cranberry relish, a sweet potato casserole with marshmallows, and roasted Brussels sprouts with mushrooms and cream (I wasn't kidding about loving recipes).

The key to serving a feast of any kind is obviously to do as much prep work before dooms day. I made vegetable stock for the stuffing a week and a half ago and froze it. I toasted the breadcrumbs a week ago and bagged it. I seeded and juiced the pomegranate and made the relish three days prior, so on and so forth. Do you know a good tip for mashed potatoes? Make them the night before and let them warm up the day of in a slow cooker. Thanks, internet!

Tomorrow I'm going to use some of the leftover turkey for enchiladas, but I will be cheating and using canned enchilada sauce. We can't all be Martha Stewart.

Chops

We were going to make ton katsu don, but by the time we got back from a long, hard day of abuse from teenagers and staff meetings and fellowship meetings, it just wasn't in the cards.

This was a super quick recipe for chops. Pork chops were about an inch thick, so not too big. Lots of salt and pepper, oregano, allspice on both sides, brown, then roast until the thermometer says 145 in the middle. Perched atop some wilted watercress and crispy chopped bacon. Everything gets done in one pan: first brown the chops, then brown the bacon while those are in the oven, add the greens and garlic, a little vinegar, salt/pepp. Take everything out and reduce some chicken stock, mustard, vinegar, salt/pepper/oregano in the same pan and make a little puddle there on the side of the plate. Brown rice too.

Maybe 30 mins cooking time -- not bad for a Monday night.

ref