2 dozen eggs and several pounds of meat

This week I made:

• Seared Salmon with Jalapeño Ponzu, Cooking Light May 2010
• Taiwanese Sesame Cucumbers, Food & Wine Magazine November 2010
• Spicy Tomato-Poached Eggs, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Fried Chickpea & Fresh Vegetable Salad, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Beef & Broccoli Ramen, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Salted Caramel Brownies, Cooking Light September 2011
• Pan-Roasted Chicken with Cauliflower, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013
• Kuku Sabzi (Leek and Herb Frittata), Saveur March 2012
• Rachael's BBQ Pulled Pork Tacos, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Sautéed Corn, Greens, Bacon, and Scallions, New York Times July 18 2012
• And a breakfast that gets its own post

We had this Asiany salmon with cucumbers and udon. Everything was pretty easy and quick. The cucumbers are pickled, but they're not called pickles so G liked it ;) The salmon came out really nice and crispy (cooked on our grill pan).

Rachael Ray had a little feature on the "new" Mediterranean diet. Not sure what's new about it-- I thought that being old and traditional was part of the point-- but okay. We made two recipes from it. 

We've made shakshuka before (this is what this is, despite Rachael Ray's name). It's hard to remember which is better. But I think I remember something being a bit off about the previous recipe, whereas this one was just fine. It has a lot of jalapeños in it, and also this gremolata made of jalapeños (with cilantro, parsley, garlic, and lemon), but since they were all seeded, it wasn't too spicy after all. Just enough to kind of make me blush. The gremolata would probably be an interesting by itself on crostini or something.

We had this chickpea salad alongside the shakshuka. It was good, although kind of just tastes as you would expect, like a Greek salad or something. The chickpeas are just canned chickpeas rolled in some spices (allspice, cardamom, cumin) and then heated briefly in a pan. We made this too thinking that either dish might be too light on its own, but actually the shakshuka was filling enough on its own and we didn't really need this :-P

 Rachael Ray always has something you can make with your kids. This was it this month. Um, it's exactly what it looks like -- Top Ramen noodles with some vegetables and steak on top. For some reason, you throw away the spice packets and make your own broth, that ends up tasting pretty much the same. What was the point? We had kind of wanted to get real ramen noodles, but were too lazy to go to the Korean store, so oh well. I haven't had Top Ramen in a long time, but this wasn't as comfort-foody as something like the-first-Top-Ramen-in-a-long-time should have been. I guess I'm not really into steak, and the bell pepper seemed out of place. I do remember my dad making ramen with broccoli in it when I was a kid, and so I've always been pretty partial to soups with broccoli. But this recipe seemed kind of stupidly complicated for what still is just instant ramen.

We also wanted to make some brownies. Here's what the picture in the magazine looked like:

And here's what my brownies looked like:

Nailed it!

Again, being impatient while making layered brownies is not a good move. The brownies were supposed to cool completely, the caramel topping was supposed to cool completely, and then the chocolate was supposed to be drizzled on. But the brownies required a lot more baking time than recommended, so my timing got off, and the topping was ready before the brownies. I kind of worried it might solidify in the pan, so I poured it over the hot brownies. It started boiling when it hit the pyrex pan! Then, the chocolate was drizzled while the caramel was still wet (apparently, it doesn't set up that fast after all), so it all just mooshed together. if you look carefully you can see weird oil spill slick looking patterns in it. Erm, oh well. It tastes pretty good anyway, but G says "not worth it." Mostly I am the one eating them each night, heated up (this makes the toppings melt into the cake part and makes it super fudgey) with some ice cream.

This roasted chicken recipe is nice. For the first time in ever, our grocery store actually stocked 3.5 lb chickens! So I was able to make this as suggested. It's very simple to make. You just brown a quartered chicken, then add some lemon, rosemary, and garlic, and roast 25 minutes. Meanwhile, you sauté/steam some cauliflower, and serve the chicken on top. It's nice and comforting. We served it along side baked potatoes from the recipe we loved before, but it didn't turn out quite the same for some reason... too much moisture from incomplete draining? Less time? Different variety? For whatever reason, the potatoes weren't quite so crunchy and nice. They were just like normal baked potatoes or something. This is a really good recipe for fall/winter.

We meant to make this Iranian frittata with some Iranian pilaf, but when it was time to start cooking, we only had like 1/2 cup of rice left :-/ So just the frittata. It had a whole dozen eggs in it along with a huge quantity of dill, parlsey, and cilantro; a grated potato; and a leek. I don't really like dill, but it's kind of cool to have a frittata with so many different flavors to it. It was pretty straightforward to make, except that I got distracted during the 16 minutes of cooking and left the kitchen, so it started smoking a lot and kind of charred on one side :( We just peeled that off, but while eating the leftovers I noticed a distinct smokey flavor. Oh well.

 These BBQ pork tacos are supposed to be served with pickled onions, pickled jalapeños, and queso fresco, but we didn't have any of that, so ... plain meat on corn tortillas it is! We should have just gotten some nice buns and had a normal pulled pork sandwich instead. I really drastically changed this recipe because we kept running out of things or having problems. Like, I thought we had lime juice and were out of lemon, so I bought lemon-- but that was the opposite. We also had run out of paprika just a bit earlier, our chiles all went bad in a really gross way (so the Chile BBQ sauce became BBQ sauce), and I didn't want to use beer. Anyway, the pork is just slow-braised in a broth with some onion, carrot and celery-- deosn't seem too TexMexy. But then it's shredded and mixed with a homemade BBQ sauce. The sauce smelled suuuuper vinegary while cooking, but ended up tasting just fine. I think I prefer Bull's Eye sauce though? Is that bad? And I was kind of just confused about why we used carrot and celery in the cooking broth. 

On the side was this quickly sautéed mix of summer vegetables. I thought we had enough meat for the day so left out the bacon, but otherwise followed it. There weren't too many spices, so it wasn't that special. Maybe that's the bacon difference!

Eggplant-Parm sandwiches, Curry, Salad, Cajun chicken, and Blintz Hotcakes

This week I made:

• Eggplant-Parm Grilled Cheese, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• Thai Pork Chops, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• Butternut Squash & Arugula Salad, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• served with steak
• Blackened Chicken with Broccoli Slaw, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• served with black beans and rice from a package that was G's favorite when we made it a few months ago, but he didn't remember it :(
• Cheese Blintz Hotcakes, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

We got to the end of Sunday and were suddenly really hungry! I had planned to make the butternut squash salad, but we didn't want to wait for the squash to bake, so we looked for a fast recipe instead. This one sounded like it would be good, and G always likes to put his George Foreman grill to use with hot sandwiches. In this recipe, the eggplant is broiled in the oven. You cook up some garlic until golden-crispy too. But other than that, it's just cutting up some cheese, tomatoes, and basil, so it's pretty simple. 

The only annoying thing is that it calls for pressing the buttered bread into 1.5 c grated Parmigiano-Reggiano before grilling. First, that's a waste of $, since that amount is uncalled for. Second, it basically all falls off anyway. Or maybe that's because I used no-name parmesan cheese and it knew it didn't fit in?? Anyway, I guess she had to put it so that it would really be eggplant-parm, but it didn't seem to work that well. The recipe was also funny because it calls for a whole eggplant, sliced very thin. And yet each sandwich (makes 4-6) only has a single slice?? It could use some more (and we did, for leftovers).

On Monday we have ceramics, so we always need to cook a quick recipe. (And even then, we are usually late! :-/) This curry was pretty fast, starting with jarred red curry paste. The recipe called for bell peppers, but we had some sweet peas so I put that in too. I guess there's not too much to say about this, because it really depends on the red curry that you choose-- ours was a little more spicy than I would have preferred!

 On Wednesday we had a bit more time, so we made the butternut squash salad. Actually, since I used frozen butternut squash (cut pretty small, too), it didn't take as long as it called for. I left it in for a while anyway though (and forgot about it until some of the smaller pieces burnt and the rest were nice and crispy #overlyhonestmethods). Meanwhile, we made some steak. When I asked G what he wanted to eat with the salad, he chose steak and talked as if he knew exactly how to make it, but then when it came time to cook it he said he didn't want to do it because he didn't know how! We sauteed it in the cast iron skillet and then stuck the pan in the oven for a while after, since we (I?) like steak to be cooked all the way through. It was pretty good-- I sometimes don't like beef that much, but every once in a while I'm hungry or iron-deficient or something and it tastes amazing. I think there was a lot of fat. Oh, and we put a pat of butter on top when we put it in the oven too.
The salad was good too. We didn't have any dijon, so the dressing was just vinegar, brown sugar, and EVOO. It was really thick!

This blackened chicken is super fast and easy, because it's just rubbed with Cajun seasoning and pan-fried. The slaw is just a bagged slaw tossed with lemon juice and mayo. We don't really like mayo that much, so I guess we should've done something else for the side. But the chicken was good! I think this was our first time using the Cajun seasoning that came with the set of spices G has had for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I know that spices aren't supposed to be as good after a while, but they all seem pretty fragrant still!

These pancakes were so good! They're really easy, because it's just mixed in a blender, and can then be poured straight into the pan (another #overlyhonestmethod-- I made big pancakes instead of small ones because the lid of the blender fell off while I was pouring and smushed my nice small batter puddles into a big pond). It's a mix of eggs, flour, milk, sugar, baking powder, and cottage cheese. It's moist and the cottage cheese gives it a good texture. We didn't have any jams except ones so old the caps are stuck on, so we topped them with fresh mango instead. Yum! This is such a simple and great breakfast recipe-- definitely keeping :)

One Grocery Bag, 3 Great Meals

This week I made:
Chicken Turkey Meatball & Vegetable Soup, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Chicken Turkey & Broccoli Stromboli, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
Asian Chicken Turkey Lettuce Cups, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

These three recipes were grouped as 3 great meals that could be made with one grocery bag. It kind of seems like most three meals could probably fit in one bag, but I guess this is special because you should be able to pass through the express lane since it's just 10 unique items (although I feel like 2 cans would count as 2 items for express lane purposes. And the express line doesn't let you get your Monopoly tickets to participate in this year's edition of the frustratingly-never-even-win-$2 promotion).

The shopping list:

We had an incredibly cold, windy, snowy, rainy day on Thursday, so it was great to follow up with a warm bowl of soup.

This soup was very fast and easy. A lot of the seasoning just comes from the Italian-style canned tomatoes. The onion and carrot are sauteed a little first, but then the broccoli, orzo, and meatballs are just cooked in the broth so it simmers for a little while. I don't usually use Italian-style tomatoes, but it's nice to think that with that and some random vegetables you could make a soup almost any time. I guess that sprinkling in some Italian seasoning isn't the time-consuming step, though :-P And don't seasoned tomatoes probably have more sodium or something bad like that? Oh well.

For Valentine's Day we ate in and I made stromboli:

I don't know if this is really a stromboli though. I guess it's more like a calzone except it's log-shaped. A stromboli (according to Google) seems more like a roll. Like a cinnamon roll with salami and cheese instead of cinnamon. But this one was just closed up (and barely... I didn't do a good job rolling out the dough and so it got a lot of hole) as a tube, not a pinwheel. The filling was onion, broccoli, ground turkey, and cheese, and it was topped with more Italian-style tomatoes. So... a lot more of the same flavors as the previous dish. But I guess if it tasted good the first time, it's not bad to have it a second time? I used a pillsbury can of whole wheat pizza dough, and it tasted better than I expected it to.

On Monday we finished up the trio of meals with these lettuce cups:

The problem is that butter lettuce really doesn't want to make cups. This was the super messiest meal to eat. It tasted fine, although it wasn't anything too extremely compelling.

Month 11 day 16: Korean BBQ (for the third time?)

Today I made:
Korean Short Ribs, Food & Wine Magazine December 2010
Gingered Green Beans, Food & Wine Magazine December 2010

G likes short ribs, so we've done a few recipes over the year. Here was one more, by Food & Wine. It was sort of a peculiar recipe, with daikon and an Asian pear (although G went grocery shopping, and could only find western pears) in the marinade. It seemed like a waste! These were good, but not spectacularly better than the ones we've had so far, so we're not keeping this recipe.

I served it with rice and these gingered green beans. Although they refer to ginger in their name, the real dominant flavor is spice! They have a good helping of red pepper in them. You could barely taste the ginger at all. They were good, but I don't think we'll keep that recipe either. I like green beans that are sautéed with a lot of garlic though, yum!

Month 11 day 13: Curry breakfast and spaghetti dinner

Today I made:
Eggs Poached in Curried Tomato Sauce, Cooking Light December 2010
Spaghetti with Sunday Sauce, Food and Wine December 2010

I made this flavorful dish for brunch today. It's got garlic, ginger, jalapeño, curry powder, coconut milk, and cilantro and tastes really good. It reminded us of an Asian version of shakshuka, which I made a while back. I liked this one more, and so did G.

For dinner I made this slow-cooked meat sauce and pasta. I've heard a lot about Italian-American traditional Sunday sauces, but had never taken the time to make one before. It was different than I expected-- it's less a sauce than it is a bunch of shredded meat with a little bit of tomato puree. Not surprisingly, G really liked it, saying it reminded him of this hearty rigatoni from a couple months ago. This didn't have that much flavor, though. It was just seasoned with some rosemary and thyme. It seems overly long and time-intensive for what it is, but G liked it a lot so I guess we'll be keeping the recipe!

Month 11 day 11: Thai fish chowder

Today I made:
Thai Fish Chowder, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2011

Mom saw this recipe on my list and thought it sounded really good. It was a really fast, one-pot recipe, so I think it had that appeal too after yesterday's multi-hour, multi-dirty-dish, pokey croquembouche adventure. It has very few ingredients (it's in the $12 dinner section of the magazine), with no prep since it uses coleslaw mix. We couldn't get green curry paste at Trader Joe's, so we used about a third of a bottle of their green curry simmer sauce. It did end up costing just about $12 and 10-20 minutes. It tasted great, too! Nice and fresh. This recipe is definitely a keeper.

Today we also assembled a yule log (of sorts) from the extra cream filling from the croquembouche. Mom made a cake from one of her cookbooks, since the recipe I had in mind from Saveur had pretty poor reviews. Since we used filling and not normal frosting, it came out pretty terrible looking and the "branch" on top slipped off! Oh well, it tasted good. Luckily we had some plastic decorations that made it look more deliberate.

Nailed it!

Month 10 day 11: Beef & Kale Stir-Fry

Today I made:
Beef & Kale Stir-Fry, Every Day with Rachael Ray November 2011

Here was another fast recipe while my parents are visiting. Can't spend the whole time cooking! In this, the beef gets browned, then the aromatics are added for 30 seconds. The kale gets simmered for 5 minutes, and then the sauce gets added and warmed through. Pretty quick! The rice is the part that takes the longest.

I think it's unusual to have kale in an Asiany dish (not that this is authentic), so this was kind of interesting. I liked the water chestnuts a lot and think I should add them to things more. When I went to Vietnam a couple of years ago, we took a boat tour of the Mekong Delta, including a visit to one of those floating markets. Our guides asked us what we wanted, and for some reason we chose water chestnuts, which they bought for us and opened fresh with a knife. I guess in America they're always canned, though. Maybe the demand is too low? Anyway, they have a good texture.

Month 10 day 5: Japanese-flavored scallops and carrots

Today I made:
Scallops with Green Tea Cream, Cooking Light November 2010
Red-Miso-Glazed Carrots, Food & Wine November 2010

I wanted to roast a turkey today, but it was still partially frozen! So I turned to the only other quick recipe we had the ingredients for. These scallops and carrots both are paired with a traditional Japanese ingredient to make two dishes that don't seem Japanese at all.

The scallops are really supposed to be the large ones, but we didn't think it was worth $6 extra per pound for a larger size. They're sprinkled with ginger and matcha before getting seared in the pan. The sauce was supposed to be creme fraiche, but Shaws didn't have any. I looked online and people said to substitute sour cream, so that's what I did, and I didn't beat it as prescribed. It is mixed with more matcha, lemon juice, salt, and paprika.

The carrots are blanched, coated in a mixture of miso and butter, then roasted. It seemed like there should have been more liquid, because things just got very charred-- not that that's a bad thing for vegetables. But it was hard for G to wash :-/

These were both interesting, but not spectacular. If I'm going to use miso, I'd rather make miso soup or mackerel or something more traditional.

Month 10 day 4: In which I realize that "puff pastry" doesn't mean "phyllo dough" but it turns out it doesn't matter

Today I made:
Mushroom pies with pear salad, Food Network Magazine November 2009
Served with sautéed mung bean sprouts, Satomi Hara-style

These mushroom pies are each a large portobello mushroom cap filled with a copious amount of cheese and breadcrumbs, wrapped in puff pastry-- that's it. (Ok, they're supposed to have a bit of mustard too, but I left it out because G doesn't like mustard.) It's kind of a weird idea. They each have 1/2 cup shredded cheese. Doesn't that seem excessive?? But, it ends up melting down so I guess it doesn't seem like so much in the end. But these do end up being more filling than you might expect (despite the pastry just flaking away everywhere and being impossible to eat)

When I first looked over the recipe, I saw the frozen puff pastry in the ingredient list and passed over it thinking of the phyllo dough we've had leftover from a [delicious] brunch pie a while back. But tonight when I looked again, I realized you're supposed to use one sheet, which is rolled out to get to the right size... whoops. So instead, I just subbed the amount of phyllo dough by weight and cut out the approximately right sized stack of sheets. I didn't layer them with butter or anything because I didn't want to spend that much time, so I just figured it would be an experiment to see what would happen. It ended up being fine. Although the sheets weren't quite large enough to wrap all the way around and seal up, they got crispy and golden-brown as the puff pastry was meant to. I didn't think G would enjoy it, meatless as it is, but actually he really liked it. I thought it was a bit meh, because there was just too much dough. I think if I made it again I would use sliced mushrooms as many of the reviewers suggest, because large portobello caps are just so unreasonably expensive and it doesn't really matter for this dish anyway.

The salad is just a normal vinaigrette over salad with some pear slices. Straightforward, but tasty.

When I studied abroad in Japan, one of the favorite things my host mom made was sautéed bean sprouts. She thought it was funny that I liked them so much, because they were just sautéed with some black pepper and soy sauce. But it's always what I think of when I have leftover sprouts. They were a bit too salty-- I'm used to low-sodium soy sauce but we have the normal kind right now. But it was fun while I was cooking to think of my 4th grade host brother as being a high schooler now! I wonder if he has a JET teacher in his English class.

Month 9 day 20: Asian chicken and veggie lettuce cups

Today I made:
Dirty P's Garlic-Ginger Chicken Thighs, Food Network Magazine October 2010
Asian Chicken Lettuce Cups, Food Network Magazine October 2010

These were both recipes from Guy Fieri's tailgating guide. We will never host a tailgating party I'm sure, but they are good for normal dinners too. I halved the recipes for the chicken and the lettuce cups because they were meant to serve 6-8 each.

The veggie cups had a lot of chopping, and used many different kinds of vegetables, but only a very small amount of each :-P So now I need to think of some way to use the rest before they go bad! These are supposed to have some chicken inside, but since I was serving with chicken I left it out and made it vegetarian. Normally we have some dried shiitake, but we were out so I threw in some daikon radish instead. We also are out of sesame oil (>_<) so these might not have been as flavorful as they were supposed to be... but the sauce packs a punch! It is really salty and strong, I guess from the soy sauce mostly. These seemed healthy and had good crunchy texture from the wontons and lettuce, but I wish I had made more instead of halving it! We can always use extra servings vegetables in our diet (not in our fridge).

The chicken was pretty good too, and it's so fast and easy to cook boneless chicken thighs. I think we should keep both of these recipes.

That's it for October! Time is going fast. G couldn't believe that it was already time to pick our favorite recipes from the month, because it feels like we just did. I guess we didn't start October recipes until about a week in.
G's pick: the manly rigatoni! Rachael Ray sure knows her way to a man's heart.
My pick: the chimichangas. Not as crunchily delightful on the second day, but so good the first. Just watch those portion sizes!

Month 9 day 7: Korean BBQ

Today I made:
Grilled Korean-Style Skirt Steak, Food Network Magazine
served with bacon fried rice and grilled acorn squash

I made Korean BBQ before once too (have I run through all the recipe categories now?), but I think this one was better.
The magazine version of this recipe calls for a half-pound of bacon to be added to the marinade, which are then supposed to be used for kimchi fried rice. It was taken out in the online version of the recipe, after many reviewers were confused about what to do with it, haha. I didn't follow the kimchi fried rice recipe, but I just cooked the bacon up with some grated ginger, scallions, and then pushed that to the side and scrambled an egg before adding the rice and some soy sauce. It turned out really good I thought, probably because it was all cooked in the grease from a half-pound of bacon...
The marinade is interesting, with some soda in it. Wedges of onions get to soak too, and then they're grilled first-- they taste pretty good. You're also supposed to grill some banana or Cubanelle peppers too. I thought that's what I was getting, but when I took a big bite (expecting it to be mild), I was very surprised-- we might have gotten the much spicier, but similarly colored, hungarian wax pepper. Ouch!

The flavors were very bold all around, and it was good. G thought it was pretty good too. The grilled squash was a nice, mild contrast to everything else.

Month 8 day 21: Corn fritters and caramel-lacquered pork belly

I spent a lot of today cooking! Both of these recipes are from restaurants, so they were a little involved but very impressive.

Today I made:
Corn Fritters with Roasted Tomatoes and Lime Aioli, Cooking Light September 2010
Caramel-Lacquered Pork Belly with Quick-Pickled Honeydew, Food & Wine September 2010

Can you see the corn fritters and roasted tomatoes under all that arugula?? The picture in the magazine had just a few sprigs, but the recipe called for a half-cup each layer!
The main downside of this recipe is just that the tomatoes roast in the oven for 1.5 hours. Ours might have been in a little longer (1.5 hours is enough time to get distracted!), and in the end they tasted like sun-dried tomatoes but with some juice still. We liked the roasted tomatoes and think they added some good flavor, but I wonder if this recipe could be turned into a just-as-good quick recipe by using fresh tomatoes or cutting up some sun-dried ones for inside of the corn fritters or something like that.
The corn fritters are kind of like a pancake batter with scallions and fresh corn inside. They're quite small, but they cook quickly and are straightforward.
On top is a piece of prosciutto and a lime (and lemon in our case, since I ran out of lime juice) aioli.
I think if I were going to make (and photograph) this again, instead of making a tower, I would put a bed of arugula on the dish and then alternate the fritters and tomatoes overlapping (like a Caprese salad). It is sort of intimidating and difficult to eat something that is towering anyway!
This recipe is almost vegetarian, and I think it could easily work for breakfast, lunch, brunch, or as an appetizer.

Not too long after lunch it was already time to start on dinner, which takes 4 hours in addition to overnight curing :-P Although, it was a little faster for us because we could only buy pre-sliced pork belly instead of one two-pound slab and I didn't wait for it to cool down fully (I didn't understand the logic of this step, unless it was supposed to slow down cooking in the second roast, but given our thin slices I figured it was a lost cause anyway, so no point in waiting).

Although this recipe takes a long time, there aren't really that many steps-- they just each take a while. It's rubbed with some sugar and an excessive amount of salt, which is supposed to get washed off later but didn't! This was super fatty and super salty-- I am pretty thirsty now. But since I've been getting dizzy every time I stood up today, it's probably good to have eaten this! Raise the blood pressure up a bit.

Then the pork is roasted (braised? There's some water in the dish), and it leaked out sooo much extra liquid. I'm not sure if that was juices from the meat or fat that was getting liquified. Then it's supposed to just cool completely. Meanwhile, you heat some sugar until it caramelizes, then stop the cooking with some water and then add a bit of flavors-- fish sauce, tamarind paste, chile, and lime juice. Then the pork is added back in and roasted again until everything gets coated, concentrated, and crunchy.

During one of these long waits, the honeydew is just cut up and mixed with some flavors and "pickled" for about an hour.

This was our first use of the Dutch oven!! It did a great job. I wish I had taken a picture when it came out of the oven! It was completely covered in solidified caramel, but after heating up some water everything scrubbed off perfectly. So much nicer than our cast iron skillet :)

We liked this, but I hope in the future I can wash off more of the salt-- it definitely required a lot of white rice and honeydew to balance it out. The flavors were rich and good-- it did seem like a restaurant recipe! The honeydew scent reminded me of something I used to get at a restaurant as a kid maybe, but I think it used to be with cucumber instead of honeydew. I only used half the melon thinking that we might not like this, but it was pretty good after all.

Month 8 day 18: Thai Beef Salad

Today I made:
Thai Beef Salad, Cooking Light September 2010

Although this is a "superfast 20-minute recipe," I'm not sure they counted washing and cutting things. I didn't have much time to make this before ceramics, so I ended up making the salad and sauce before class and cooking the steak and eating after. The steak was pretty rare when I first took it off as you can see, so I put it back on the stove while I ate... and then it burnt. Oh well.
I'm not really that excited about steak, and the salad was just too copius. The sauce was really good though! I will keep the sauce recipe.

Month 8 day 15: Steamed fish and braised kale

Today I made:
Steamed Wild Striped Bass Bluefish with Ginger and Scallions, Food & Wine September 2010
Braised Greens with Tomatoes, Food & Wine September 2010

I've been cooking from F&W a lot lately! In addition to the feature on Southern cooking, there is also a feature on "An Indie Chef's Greatest Hits," which was the source of yesterday's chicken recipe, today's fish recipe, and this weekend's pork belly recipe (if we can find pork belly and tamarind concentrate). This steamed fish is very easy and fast, yet is flavorful from all of the fragrant ingredients. I would definitely make this again. There was no bass at Shaw's, and I asked the lady at the fish counter which would be the most similar. She called over someone else, who called over someone else, who called over someone else, who "likes fish" and was actually incredibly knowledgable. He suggested to use bluefish. It looks dark and purplish when raw, but it ends up very light when cooked. It was moist yet flakey.

The braised kale was meh. I'm just not that into cooked tomatoes, I guess. I would prefer fresh ones, especially when they are sunburst tomatoes, nature's popcorn.

Month 8 day 14: Tea-smoked (?) Chicken

Today I made:
Tea-Smoked Roast Chicken, Food & Wine September 2010
Sautéed Greens with Ginger and Sesame, Food & Wine September 2010

Roast chicken isn't normally a good week-night meal, and we didn't end up eating dinner until about 10 tonight. We had planned to make this earlier but had a hard time finding some of the spices-- star anise and Sichuan peppercorns I ended up getting, dried red chiles I ended up omitting and using red pepper flakes instead-- so we kept being unable to make it until now.
This recipe is a bit involved. It brines for 24 hours (although as a reviewer pointed out, can it be considered a brine without salt?), then is smoked for ~10 minutes over a bed of tea leaves, dry rice, and spices (our second chicken of the week flavored with sugary tea!), then it is finally roasted for a couple hours. Brining went fine, but I don't think I really smoked it. After the allotted time, there was no smoke when I opened it, although the sugar had melted into a gooey, sticky mess.
Smoke came later, while roasting-- the high temperature specified browned the skin quite a bit, and since the pan wasn't completely flat, the drippings were thin in one corner and burned, setting off our room's fire alarm (luckily, the room fire alarm is independent of the dorm fire alarm, so as long as you fan the detector and open the windows it turns off promptly).

G said it was good, but said that a Costco rotisserie chicken is just as good and much easier (>_<) This wasn't particularly *hard*, but starting a roast chicken at 7 pm is just never a good idea-- G was already hungry right when we got home and he didn't like waiting. Plus we couldn't find any chickens smaller than 7 lbs (the recipe was for two 3-pounders), so we had to cook for longer. It did have a distinct flavor that is common at Chinese restaurants (but we couldn't quite put our fingers on it), and the skin was really flavorful. I think the flavor mostly came from the brining though, not the smoking. If I make this again I will try to smoke for longer. I think it just isn't that successful on an electric stove.

The greens smelled really good while cooking, but were just fine-- nothing too special. I used a combination of watercress and spinach. It was a little bitter.

Month 8 day 11: Asian-seasoned drumsticks and mushroom salad

Today I made:
Thai Chicken Drumsticks (and cucumber with lime and cilantro), Every Day with Rachael Ray September 2011
Teriyaki Mushroom, Spinach, and Chicken Salad, Cooking Light September 2010

This was a slow dinner, since I forgot to set up the marinade this morning, so I wanted to let the chicken rest for a while before cooking. But then it needed to bake for almost an hour! Meanwhile, the mushroom and spinach salad was delayed because we were out of soy sauce and tried to find someone around the dorm to give us some. Eventually we just used diluted oyster sauce instead.

G really liked the drumsticks, so we'll be keeping the recipe. Other than the long wait times, it was an easy recipe. The mushroom salad seemed like it would be good with some soba or udon or something.

Month 7 day 16: Leftovers reworked

Today I made:
Chicken and Glass Noodle Salad, Cooking Light August 2010

(no picture of my own, so enjoy the official picture instead)

Yesterday when I was filing away the extra August recipes I noticed this one, with ingredients uncannily similar to yesterday's meal: cellophane noodles, rotisserie chicken, carrot, bell pepper, cilantro, and mint. Since I had extras of all of this already (ok, with some lettuce and mung beans too), I decided to add some onion, peanuts, and the dressing from this recipe and liven up the leftovers as a new salad.

Yeah, it's kind of similar to yesterday's food, but it's got vinegar and more lime juice, so it gets a little flavor boost from that. This would be a good recipe for a hot summer day when you don't want to turn on the stove. G doesn't like these noodles though I think :(

Month 7 day 15: Asian-inspired sandwiches and spring rolls

Today I wanted to make Saveur's Jiyou Jun Bao Ji. But Shaw's didn't have four of the ingredients, so I realized that was a no go (ok, so they did have dried chanterelle mushrooms, but 1 lb fresh ~ 3 oz dried which would have cost over $20. So, no).

Instead, today I made:
Asian-style veggie rolls, Cooking Light August 2010
Peanut-sauced chicken pitas, Cooking Light August 2011

These two recipes go well together, because they both contain a lot of the same fresh vegetables. So it takes a while to wash and cut everything, but once you do it's just mixing-and-matching, and no cooking.

When I was in Japan, a few of my friends and I made the "Shimizu Cooking Club." If I recall correctly, it was because our friend Mark was hopeless in the kitchen, and we wanted to help him learn a thing or two. Basically, we each took turns planning a 3-course menu, and then we'd gather at someone's house and make it and eat it together. It was a lot of fun. One of the members can make some great, authentic Vietnamese food, so among other things she taught us how to make spring rolls, with either shrimp or boiled pork in them. Spring rolls are great, but they're always so expensive to buy, so I thought I would make them again.

But Linna would be so disappointed in these...

I think I got a little too greedy with the amount of stuffing. The wrappers ripped and the ends couldn't even fold in to contain everything!

Halfway through, these rolls decided they would become a salad instead.

 Fine, have it your way. Tomorrow I guess I will have the leftovers as a salad too, since I don't think a premade one would hold up overnight and it might be a little obnoxious to be rolling spring rolls in the lunch room :-P

These were fine, but I do think spring rolls are better with some shrimp or pork in them! Or I needed to be a little more heavy-handed with the dipping sauce. As it was, there wasn't a whole lot of flavor, just the mint and cilantro basically. But still, they are very fresh and have good crunch.

These pitas were easy to make, as they started with precooked rotisserie chicken and are flavored by jarred peanut satay sauce. Other than that, they essentially have the same cut vegetables as the spring rolls.
This was good, but the peanut satay sauce jar costs like $4 and apparently is only good for 3 days after opening! I guess I will try to freeze it or something.

Month 1 day 11: Lemongrass-Cilantro Chicken with Honey Dipping Sauce

Today I made
Lemongrass-Cilantro Chicken with Honey Dipping Sauce, Food and Wine February 2011

I won't be making this dish again. It needed to marinate overnight, but despite this it was basically unflavored. And, the chicken breasts were pretty thick, so they took much longer than the suggested 13 minutes to cook on our grill pan. By the time they were cooked through, they were kind of tough and dry. The only good thing is just that all the cutting was done yesterday, so today it was just grilling. But that would've been true of the fines herbes chicken too, without any time for marinating, plus it was way more flavorful, AND I now actually own fines herbes. So this recipe is in the recycling bin.

Today I read Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, or most of it anyway. I was about a quarter of the way in and finished it today. This was helped because while I was eating delicious leftover Beef Tagine for lunch, I all of the sudden got hot and weak-- like I was going to pass out minus the black vision. Which is weird, because on a fairly regular basis (like this morning a few times, for example) I get the black vision minus the rest of the sensations you get from fainting. So I figured it would be best to just stay in my PJs on the sofa all day, dozing and getting excited for food blogging.
There are some similarities and differences. Her recipes are much more complicated than mine, and also more comprehensive. But at the same time they are highly repetitive-- in particular because she follows one chapter at a time, she can get stuck on one type of meat for a while. And everything calls for butter. I do intend (intend...) to try recipes that will push the edge a bit, although unlike Julie I can't cook for hours everyday, and so more complicated recipes are already getting overlooked in favor of <40 minute ones. My recipes are selected from a preapproved short list of recipes that look awesome-- no aspic or offal for me. I like to think that I am nicer, although I do have a tendency to get angry while cooking, especially when cutting teargas onions. But, for example, I would never write that I sometimes want to slam [my husband's] head into a sharp rock. Or write a book about having an affair, after said husband had put up with a year of kitchen tantrums. Along that line, the book is probably only half about actually cooking, and another half about her dramatic life. My life is (thankfully) not so dramatic, and I don't think people would want to read about me watching worms grow up and counting green dots in the dark. Although that's another difference-- Julie, starting when blogs were still scarce and novel, immediately was followed by non-family/friend fans who somehow found her blog. Anyway, it did make me think that G and I should probably weigh-in before moving on to the second month, to see how we do against Julie's 20 lbs of butter weight. It will be a contest to see who wins out-- Cooking Light or Food Network? It also made me think that a year is a very long time to stay true to a blog. But, we'll see how it goes. Jokingly, I pulled out my two huge editions of The Gourmet Cookbook from the sixties and threatened to work my way through those after the magazines. These things are beasts, and filled with the contemporary sentiments that make me so fascinated by vintage cookbooks. G thought something more modern would be better-- The Good Housekeeping Cookbook maybe? And we each pulled out our editions, 38 years apart. They're pretty different in most ways, but they both have boeuf bourguignon.

Month 1 day 8: Basil Chicken Meatballs with Ponzu Sauce

Today we made:
Basil Chicken Meatballs with Ponzu Sauce, Cooking Light January/February 2011

Remembering last Thursday, when I had to eat very quickly so I wouldn't be late to tutoring, I decided to give myself a full hour to cook and eat tonight. This was supposed to take just 19 minutes according to the recipe, so I would have a leisurely 20 minutes to eat and a 20 minute buffer just in case.

It didn't quite work out that way though. 19 minutes includes 13 minutes of cooking time, so you only have 6 minutes to actually put things together? But our chicken was in the freezer and took a while to defrost in the microwave. And you actually have to cut things, because no one budgets time to cook starting the timer once they have already mise en placed everything. We couldn't buy ground chicken in non-integer weights, so we scaled up the recipe, and by the end we were making forming many more little meatballs than we were supposed to. So that's why today's blog is in the first-person plural, because G was interrupted from reading his paperwork for his summer internship and forced to come saute a batch of meatballs while I formed the other ones. Also problematic: the bag of dried coconut from Shaws had a hole in it! Gross! But there was no time to buy more so I just had to use it from the other end! Hopefully we don't die.

Other than that though, it was pretty easy, and it is still quick, but probably closer to 30-40 minutes than 20. So I still had to eat really quickly :( G liked them-- there were many different flavors, but they didn't overwhelm each other. They were just a bit spicy, but then there was a bit of sweet coconut. The serving size says 2 meatballs, but I think we ate 6 servings between the two of us... which was probaby a full pound of ground chicken :-P I thought it would've been cool, with more foresight while grocery shopping, to serve this on rice noodles, so it would be the total Asian version of spaghetti and meatballs.