Spice-Braised Chicken Legs with Red Wine and Tomato, Food and Wine April 2011
Cabbage with Apples, Onions and Caraway, New York Times (November 15, 2011)
Coconut Tapioca, Food Network Magazine April 2010
This dinner was a long haul, and G notices that his work is cut out for him with the cleanup too. We were both tired after work, so we took a nap, so cooking didn't even start until 8:30 or so, and the braised chicken is an hour-long recipe. Turns out though, brown rice takes even longer in G's super-intelligent Japanese rice cooker, which can't display the expected end time because it doesn't know the expected end time, which it calculates using a fuzzy logic neural network along the way. So, dinner was finally ready around 10:30. Which was fine for me, because I went to a post-lecture happy hour at 5 that served enchiladas and quesadillas.
It's a little monotone, but the flavors and ingredients were certainly varied.
The chicken recipe was straightforward, though dirtied up a lot of dishes. We bought 6 chicken quarters, which were kind of a pain to de-skin and cut into their components. But I think it's good for meat eaters to be confronted with cutting through joints every once in a while. G liked this dish a lot. It wasn't super flavorful, but you could definitely pick up the cinnamon and spicy flavors. The chicken was moist and the tomatoes and onions were nice and soft.
The cabbage recipe is not from any of my magazines and is also not from April. But, last weekend I was organizing a new recipe filing folder and putting all the recipes in (now separated into recipe type instead of in a big jumble), and I spotted this one. G had just chosen a cabbage for a side dish, so I kept it out. I don't like caraway though, so I replaced it with powdered coriander, which I do like. I would say that this recipe takes longer than 25 minutes, but it's a little longer. It also dirtied up a lot of dishes (there is a trend tonight). This was a good dish too. The caramelized apples were nice and sweet.
So, the tapioca was a little difficult. We couldn't find big tapioca pearls. We figured we could maybe just use normal tapioca. But, the only kind at the supermarket near us was "Minute Tapioca," which seems even smaller than normal tapioca and is parboiled. This made the recipe tricky: obviously we weren't going to boil the minute tapioca for 40 minutes, but what about the ratio of water to tapioca? Would that be fine? So we kind of made it up as we went along. Some of the tapioca made huge clumps that were impossible to break up. And it kind of didn't have that much flavor-- it could've used more coconut milk and less water. But anyway, it had a lot of mango, which was good. We didn't have mango nectar, so we melted a little mango sorbet to put on top, and that was good.
We're keeping the chicken and cabbage recipes, but not the tapioca. Although that might be worth trying again sometime if we can actually find the pearls.
we enjoyed the title
ReplyDelete