Surprisingly Good Chicken!

• A blurp of olive oil in a non-stick saucepan
• 2 air-dryed chicken breasts (or some such fancy folderol)
• Flour, in which the breasts were rubbed to cover them
• A splat of butter in the olive oil
• Salt and pepper

Saute the chicken until it is about 75-80% done - maybe starts to brown a bit on the outside, and the inside fluids come out clear if you skewer it. While cooking, turn frequently - doubly so if using a non-stick pan.

Set the chicken aside in a bowl at that point.

Add to your saucepan:

• 3 cloves of minced garlic (or else garlic powder as I apparently forgot to get garlic!)
• fresh cilantro (I used refrigerated paste, nearly as good)
• fresh oregano (I used the freeze dried stuff, nearly as good)
• more salt and pepper if you need it
• some parsley flakes
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup of white wine

Cook over a medium heat, turning the chicken fairly infrequently, until it is done. Reduce the sauce until it is a desired thickness - I went for less thick than gravy, more thick than wine - maybe salad dressing thickness.

Serve with some rice or a salad, dump the remainder of the reduced sauce over the chicken to get all the flavour explosion your taste buds could ask for!

Surprsingly good! Tangy, with a hint of sweet (from the wine, I used a white that was sweeter rather than dry), but infused with the melange of herbal flavours. And moist!

For a first try at 'basic chicken' (not in a khorma or butter chicken sauce or a soup), I'm pretty happy with the outcome. I don't usually eat much chicken as I find most of it flavourless and often dried out.

I think I'll be eating more chicken now that I know this easy, tasty, moist chicken recipe!

Recreating a 3,400 year old Mesoamerican Beer

Part food science, part archaeology, all excellent!


Beer from chocolate....

Burger Recipes: Lamburger, Porkburger, and other fun things

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/dining/26mini.html

Pairing Beer And Cheese - A Brief How To

http://www.slashfood.com/2010/03/23/cheese-and-beer-pairings-101-cheese-course/

Christmas: Count Your Blessings

 

I spent this Christmas with my parents - something that from time to time has seemed unlikely based on their various health challenges. We had Christmas dinner the evening of the 24th and invited my close friend Dan over for dinner as I hate to see friends spend a holiday by themselves.

I did a fair bit of the preparation and cooking. We had a 15-pound hormone free, free range, organic turkey that had never been frozen (although he was missing a wing - late purchase gets 'scratch and dent' bird I guess). I roasted it between 350 and 325, most of the duration with the lid on the broiling pan, with some added pilsner (two bottles) as lubricant and moisture source. The turkey turned out quite tasty.

With the turkey, we had my mom's signature stuffing: Bread 'chunks', some yellow onions, apple, raisins, a cup of melted butter, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, and poultry spice. At one point, I poured a bit of the turkey juice (beer) onto the mixture to keep it moister so it didn't get really crunchy while being baked at 275.

There was a salad - ontario greenhouse tomatos with some tomato balsamic dressing and some grated parmesan for Dad, tomato chunks with spring greens, tomato balsamic dressing and grated parmesan for the rest of us. Dad's new top plate isn't good for chewing field greens and won't be until he gets the bottom one.

And then there were sweet potatos mashed with some maple syrup, yellow potatos boiled then mashed with some butter and grated parmesan cheese, a steamed broccoli, some white buns warmed in the oven, and a lovely white wine.

The turkey was accompanied by a new discovery - a cranberry sauce made locally with whole cranberries, honey, and a bunch of spices to give it a little 'zing'! Very good stuff, I must say!

Dessert consisted of a sherry triffle with fruit, custard, raspberry jello, and some sherry, a layered dish, with whipped cream on top.

I made some raspberry ice cream for my mother in the Cuisinart ice-cream maker my friends Doug and Cathy got me for my birthday. It turned out well, but the freezer at home turned it rock hard so we settled for the whipped creme.

This was the first time I'd made a turkey. It was the first time I'd made the stuffing. It was the first time I'd made (or even peeled) sweet potatos. And it all came off rather without a hitch.

Dan was excellent company and seemed to enjoy himself, departing at around 9 pm as I was falling into a stupor of 'winter storm/sinus headache' misery that persisted for about 12 hours. Still, it held off starting until after dinner and the dinner was a special occasion for all of us, I hope.

On the 25th, I added some steamed asparagus to the leftovers to make another good feed, and then spent an hour or so carving up turkey to create materials for turkey sandwiches, turkey pot pies, and turkey soup. Another first for me was boiling the carcass and then straining off the liquid to make a turkey soup stock - we got about 7 quarts off of the big bird. I am looking forward to using that cooking, both to make some turkey vegetable soup and to use in place of chicken stock when roasting pork in the slow cooker.

I'm glad the food worked out. I learned a few useful things and convinced my mom she had bought too large of a broiling pan for me - which she hadn't believed - when it turned out to fit in neither her oven nor mine.

The important part was spending some time with my folks and with Dan. Life is about the connections we make with other humans and the way those connections help affix meaning to our few score passages around the sun....

Merry Christmas, I say to one and all. It is the season to find things to be thankful for and be happy about. The New Year can keep its concerns until we get there!

 
 

Belated Anniversary Celebration

My cousin Alan from Missouri (well, Scotland, but living in Missouri), me old Mum and me old Dad, and a couple of family friends (a lovely Irish couple who are my second family and very dear to me) joined me for a belated celebration of my parent's 41st anniversary.

It was an imperfect meal - I ran out of time to create the rosemary potatos and the waldorf salad with pear. But what was left went down well. The menu was:

• Phylo pastry filled with goat cheese and cranberries (tasty!).
• Phylo mini-quiches with smoked Gouda and ham (ditto).
• Round of drinks: Waterloo Dark, the Gerwurtztraminer wine, a Waterloo Dark, a Steam Whistle, a Rye and Ginger Ale, a Laphroig Quarter-Cask (cut with a small bit of Evian) and me drinking a Ginger Ale.
  
• A spinach salad (spinach and field greens, some orange bell pepper, some radish and alfalfa sprouts, tomato, some poppy seed, and a dressing of the users choice - creamy dijon, raspberry vinagrette, or zesty italian (made a separate salad with iceberg lettuce instead for Dad as he's no fan of spinach).
• Wine with Dinner: Pinot Noir and the Gerwurtztraminer.
• Main course was Beef - two outer eye of round roasts (no bones, trimmed of fat, each about 2-2.5 pounds) done in beef stock and Guinness, with Worcestershire, Browing Fluid, a hint of Tobasco, Montreal Steak Spice, powdered Garlic (lazy!), a touch of Cumin, fresh ground pepper, a touch of sea salt, and with half of a purple onion for the roasts to rest on in crock pot. Also made a lovely gravy from the juice.
  
• Long grain wild rice (microwave sort... but it was pretty good).
• Steamed carrots and broccoli.
  
• Irish Soda Bread and Becel (thanks Toni!)
• Pre-Dessert Course Drinks: More Laphroid and a nip of Evian, some Irish Breakfast Tea, more wine.
• Some date squares to hold the diners over until dessert was ready (from the Antrim Truck Stop bakery - good!)
  
• Dessert, about fifteen minutes later: Black forest cake (with candles notionally arranged to look like the number 41, although allegations of them looking like a 9 were made by certain cheeky cousins) and home-made Coconut Ice Cream (500 ml 18% table cream, 1.5 cups unsweetened coconut, one can (400mL) coconut milk, 250 ml of 3.25% homo milk, 3/4 cup of sugar (and 35-40 minutes in the new Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker).
  

It was generally agreed the home made ice cream was a success and that coconut was another worthy flavour (the first batch was vanilla with raspberries).

The clean up will take probably 3-4 dishwasher loads in my dinky little apartment dishwasher and there will be leftovers to recycle into new salads and other meals, but the result was overall a smashing success. Setting the Crock Pot probe cook mode to 140F was a good choice - it left the roast a bit pinkish with a wee bit of blood inside (I think it got a bit overcooked last time).

Over all, a good night. My cousin met my second family and vice versa. I got to hang out with some good people and the work was worth it since everyone seemed replete when they tottered out.

And then I took the weight off of my feet and killed some Zombies on Left 4 Dead for a couple of hours and had a beer myself. A good day.

Hot Day In Ottawa In The Kitchen

 

This promises to be an interesting day; The weather forecast is for 31 C and I'm making jam. For the uninitiated, that means boiling water to blanch peaches (the cinammon-peach jam lot), boiling water to sterilize the jars and sealers, boiling water to cook the jam, and boiling the jam itself briefly (but sugared fruit boils at a far higher temperature than water). The net effect of this is more humidity than you can shake a stick at and more heat in the already hot apartment.

On the other hand, the cinammon-peach batch looks like it went okay. The peach blanching wasn't a perfect success - I need a bigger bowl for icewater and I need to get the ice in further in advance. I also discovered some peaches rot from the inside and you discover that when you get down about 1/4" into the peach and find you don't like the look of it (and of course any such material didn't go into the jam).

I may try another batch of peach jam if I find more decent peaches - I want to try the ginger-peach recipe I read about. I also kind of wonder if currants, raisins or cranberries could not be usefully added to peach jam. I know you can use honey for sweetening instead of sugar, but honey's not cheap stuff. I'd have to be convinced it was clearly superior.

I still have a batch of raspberry to go. No twists on that one, I hope. Wanted to make the peach and raspberry because my batches of blasterine (blueberry-raspberry-nectarine with a hint of strawberry) and strawberry are not edible by me old Mum due to her drop-dead-fast strawberry allergy. I figured I'd like to make something she could have and I like peaches and raspberries.

Next on the line is making some homemade pizza (maybe tonight) and trying out my newly acquired marble pestle on the fresh oregano I bought for the pizza. If I don't do that tonight, I'll do it Sunday. I've also got a canning operation to produce some salsa, but I may need to buy some more fresh ingredients. I wonder if canning my own salsa is any cheaper? The jam probably isn't, but I know what went into it and I can get more experimental interesting recipes (peach jam recipe to try #3 involves hot peppers and lemon zest).

And somewhere along the line, I should make another cake. I've got some eggs I should use up. Or maybe a loaf of some kind - banana loaf or pound cake. I have to share this stuff out because I'm only one guy and no way I can eat it all myself, but that makes sharing food a social thing...

 
 

Beer Poached Jambalaya

Tonight was a first go of beer-poached jambalaya. The recipe is extracted from this excellent work - Cooking With Booze which I highly recommend as being worth the $20.

• Chorizo (well, I substituted Hot Italian due to supply issues) Sausages
• Shrimp
• Chicken Breasts
• Rice, Bell Peppers, Onions
• Minced Garlic, Thyme, Oregano, Bay Leaves, Chili Powder, Hot Pepper Seeds
• 24 oz. Dark Ale (Warsteiner in my case)
• Chicken Stock and Crushed Tomatos
• Instant Rice
  
• Jalapeno Pepper (my addition for heat)
  

The end result was a hearty tomato-based stew with lots of protein that was very tasty. Makes enough for six normal sized servings or 4 very hearty ones. Would be excellent accompanying a cold beer or a sparkling or white wine with some fruity flavour as a counterpoint.

Cooking time is around 40 minutes and you can try to do the prep as you go or ahead of time. I think the entirety would be about an hour or hour and ten minutes.

A good multigrain bread or flatbread would make a nice accompanyment. Something like a fruit pastry with some whipped cream or ice cream would make a good desert and cool the palate.

While it cooked, I had myself a drink I must thank Kevin for introducing me to:

• 341 mL (1 Can) Ginger Ale
• 150 - 200 mL of Ginger Beer (Soda)
  
• 1 to 2 oz. of Rum (your call on variety - I used Dark and it gave the whole a nice golden colour)

A slice of lime might have been a good garnish.

Don't Panic!

Some interesting recipes for a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and Vegan Rhino Cutlets. If you don't know who came up with these (Douglas Adams) or where they were from (The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy), then you need to read some more classic sci-fi.

PGGB and Rhino Cutlets

Beer and Lobster

Trying to move stocks of Lobster and other seafood and keep the maritime fisherman afloat, the novel idea of convincing beer consumers to buy Lobster via the mechanism of discount coupons is being tried.

Moosehead: Buy our beer, get cheaper Lobster!

Being generally in favour of lobster and seafood and in favour of beer, this is hard to see as anything but a winning combination!

A Passion For Pizza

This guy is serious about his pizza. The pictures of the pizzas are mouth watering and now I'm craving a good one. The instructions for production (especially the electric oven mod) are even more interesting, but not for the faint of heart.

Pizza done right!

MmmmmmM!

More Bacon! Bacon cheeseburger!

I don't know why this never occurred to me before. It's obvious, when you think about it.

Bacon Cheeseburger

Warning: Call the cardiologist before consumption.

No such thing as too much Bacon

Bacon Elemental (yikes!)

Canned Bacon

Bacon Salt