Cooking: Week 7 - Slow Cooking - Cilantro Lime Chicken

Week: 7
Theme: Slow Cooking
Dish: Cilantro Lime Chicken

We love our crock pot. I usually use it to make oatmeal, but we've made roasts and other stuff in it. For this week, we tried this recipe.

Cooking in a slow cooker isn't very exciting to photograph. Moreover, I didn't actually prep the food, Ofer made it while I was in class so I didn't take pictures of the process. So all I have are the end results.

There's not much for me to say. I didn't love this recipe. We left it in the crockpot for longer than 6 hours and the chicken came out dry. The sauce wasn't very delicious, though I think that would depend on what salsa you get (We got a Pace one). I didn't find the flavor of the chicken particularly good and the sauce was too pasta saucey. I'm not sure if I wanna make this recipe again. I have the leftovers sitting in my fridge but I haven't really touched them and it doesn't make me excited to eat.

On another note, we used a crockpot liner and they work wonderfully. We have a tiny shallow sink so washing the ceramic pot is super difficult. With the liner, we can just throw it out, wipe it down and it's clean. It's awesome.

Cooking: Week 6 - Love - Broiled Grass-fed Rib Eye Steak

Week: 6
Theme: Love Inspired
Dish: Broiled Grass-fed Rib Eye Steak

Ofer and I go rock climbing at Rocknasium, a local gym in Davis. One of the owners, Mark, is a super cool dude and is also a cattle farmer. He takes his cows to graze on plots of land in the area and they just basically eat grass at day. We decided to buy two steaks from him for our Valentine's Day dinner; it's become somewhat a tradition to have steak for Valentines. :)

This was actually a really stressful meal. We had originally planned to pan sear the steaks and cook it in our cast iron, which had been our pan of choice for meats, but we had heated up the pan much too hot. When we tried pouring some oil into the pan, it immediately burst into flames. Sorry for not having pictures of the fire as I was trying really hard not to freak the fuck off. Ofer was able to remain calm and made me fetch the baking soda to put it out. Phew. We did manage to salvage our pan and it still works fine, but now we know not to just put oil into a super hot pan.

With the cast iron plan nixed, we decided to just broil the meats. We got them nice and oiled up since grass-fed beef doesn't have as much fat as corn fed beef. We only seasoned with salt and pepper cause we had never had grass fed beef before and really wanted to taste the beefy-ness of it.

I didn't take any pictures of the cooking process because we were just broiling it and there was nothing exciting happening. We cooked the first side for 4 mins then the other side for 3. It didn't have as much of a crust, but we didn't want to overcook it.

We also made a quinoa salad. Quinoa has been really growing on me. I really like it.

It was really delicious! A bit chewier than the other steaks I've had, but the flavor is really up there. There was hardly any fat in this cut, but I didn't think it took away from the experience at all. Ofer says "It was super tasty."

Baking: Week 6 - Love - Chocolate Pudding

Week: 6

Theme: Love

Dish: Chocolate Pudding

I got the idea of making pudding while we were shopping in the grocery store and Ofer said that he wanted to try a pudding, but couldn't find an indulgent one. (ie, one that was full flavored and not marketed as trying to be healthy or less guilty) So I scoured the internet (well, I googled and clicked the first link) and found this recipe from Smitten Kitchen.

It's supposed to be a super simple recipe, but I messed up pretty badly. The end result was still really good, but now I know how to measure correctly.

From Smitten Kitchen:

Silky Chocolate Pudding Adapted from John Scharffenberger, via Wednesday Chef
Serves 6
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 cups whole milk
6 ounces 62% semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped (I used good quality semisweet chocolate chips; use 70% bittersweet if you want more of a dark chocolate kick)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Combine the cornstarch, sugar and salt in the top of a double boiler. Slowly whisk in the milk, scraping the bottom and sides with a heatproof spatula to incorporate the dry ingredients. Place over gently simmering water and stir occasionally, scraping the bottom and sides. Use a whisk as necessary should lumps begin to form. After 15 to 20 minutes, when the mixture begins to thicken and coats the back of the spoon, add the chocolate. Continue stirring for about 2 to 4 minutes, or until the pudding is smooth and thickened. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla.

2. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer (or skip this step if you’re a slacker like me who is absolutely certain that there is nary a lump her puddin’) into a serving bowl or into a large measuring cup with a spout and pour into individual serving dishes.

3. If you like pudding skin, pull plastic wrap over the top of the serving dish(es) before refrigerating. If you dislike pudding skin, place plastic wrap on top of the pudding and smooth it gently against the surface before refrigerating. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes and up to 3 days (ahem, good luck with that).

You're not actually supposed to mix in the milk while on the double broiler. Just mix it up on the counter. I misread it so that's why I have a picture of my bowl on top of the pot. I took it down after I reread it, but forgot to snap a new picture. At least this way, you know where I messed up, lol.

3 cups of milk.

Whisked it in.

This is where I found all sorts of problems. I was only supposed to heat the milk for 15-20 minutes before it's supposed to start thickening up, but it was still super liquidy. So I kept boiling it down for 10 more minutes. After 30 minutes, it was ridiculous as to why it wasn't thickening up. Ofer looked into the sink and saw that I had a 1/8 cup measuring cup in the sink and asked if I only added in 1/8 cup. Sure enough, I did. That's why it didn't thicken enough. I added a bit more corn starch and it thickened up right away.

Added the chocolate chips.

Mmmm, looked pretty good. I didn't bother running it through a sieve because I only had fine meshed sieves and wasn't sure if it was gonna be able to go through. And I was lazy. There was a lot of spoon licking to be done.

This isn't the prettiest picture, but it's hard to make pudding look glamourous. We fridged them for an hour (since we were busy eating dinner) and it came out okay. There were some chunks in it, but I wasn't sure if that was because I wasn't diligent enough in scraping the sides, if I boiled down too much milk, or if the sieve really would have been worth it.

Cooking: Week 5 - Alcohol - Flattened Chicken Breasts with White Wine Sauce

Hi everyone. Long time no update. I've just been super lazy about getting things done lately. :( And motivation to update the blog kind of petered away. Anyways, it's not week 5 this week; it's actually week 7. But we had cooked this dish on week 5 and I just never got around to posting this because I'm a lazy butt.

Week: 5
Theme: Alcohol
Dish: Flattened Chicken Breasts with White Wine Sauce

We took this recipe. Unfortunately we don't have any pictures of the pounding of the chicken, but Ofer actually pounded it out with his fists, lol. I don't know why he decided to do that, but it was quite entertaining to watch. We've been loving our cast iron, but we actually set it on fire the other day (post on that should be coming up!) but it seems okay. Cast iron is pretty resilient.

Mmmmmm, little chicken breasts, cook!

After pouring the white wine, it started bubbling like crazy. Felt like a witch with a cauldron. It steamed pretty heavily.

Stirring action!

More stirring! Our tongs are actually really hard to keep closed. They are just a cheap pair from ikea, but I think when we have more disposable income (or a good price comes around), we're gonna invest in a better pair of tongs that don't need that much force to close it. It really cramped my hand!

We served it with tortellini that we got from costco and made a simple homemade pesto sauce with it. It was really good. The chicken was super tender without being dry and the sauce really made it come alive. I'm not too big on white wine, but with the sauce, it was really good. It had the hint of white wine without it being too overpowering. We actually made a recipe like this again a few nights later.

Baking: Week 4 - Filling - Scones

Week: 4
Theme: Filling
Dish: Scones

This was a failed attempt. I had originally wanted to make clotted cream for my filling, but it's quite labor intensive. Then I thought I would just fall back on whipped cream, but then I realized that my cream had gone bad -- it was chunky! :( So I just filled it with jam.

Here's the recipe from Jamie Oliver's Jaime's Food Revolution:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup mixture of raisins and/or dried cherries (I used raisins)
• Orange juice for soaking
• 4 cups of self-rising flour, plus a little for dusting
• I made my own rising flour with this mixture: 1 cup flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 large eggs
• 1/3 cup milk
• Jam
• 2/3 clotted cream or heavy cream, whipped (failed on my part. :( )

Steps

To Make the Dough

• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
• Soak the cherries and raisins in a little bowl with just enough orange juice to cover them
• While they're soaking, you can either pulse the flour, baking powder, and butter in a food processor just until the mixture starts to look like breadcrumbs, or you can blend them together by hand.
• Transfer to a mixing bowl and make a well in the middle
• In another bowl, beat the eggs and milk with a fork
• Drain your cherries and raisins in a strainer and add them to the beaten eggs and milk with a good pinch of salt
• Then pour your beaten eggs.milk, cherrie and raisin into the well in the flour mixture and stir well, adding a splash more milk of necessary, until you have a soft dry dough
• If your dough feels a little dry and doesn't come together, add an extra splash of milk

To Make the Scones

• Dust a clean work surface and your rolling pin with flour
• Roll out the dough until it's 3/4 in thick
• Using a 2 1/2 in round biscuit cutter or the rim of a glass, cut out 10 circles from the dough and place these on a non-stick cookie sheet
• You may have to roll your dough out again in order to get all 10 rounds out of it, but try not to knead it too much
• Dip a pastry brush into some milk and brush the top of each scone
• Bake in a preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes, until risin and brown
• Take them out of the oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool

To Serve the Scones

• Cut each scone in half across the middle
• Spoon a dollop of jam on the bottom half of each one followed by a dollop of clotted or whipped cream and put the tops back on
• Don't forget the tea!

I didn't have a food processor so I just broke things up with a wooden spoon and when I realized things weren't working out with the spoon I just broke up the big pieces of butter with my hands.

I didn't get a picture of me mixing the flour, but I found that mixing it a bit with a spoon and then following it up with mixing by hand the most useful method. Also try to get a huge mixing bowl. Mine was way too small and it made mixing a real pain. 

After I pulled it out, I realized that I should have added a bit more milk. My dough didn't have a smooth texture and was prone to crumble. Next time I will definitely mix in more milk. I think I also had a bit too much dough because I didn't account of the extra amount of baking powder and salt when I made my self-rising flour.

My glass ended up being a bit too big and my 10th scone had to be smaller and formed by hand. I put it on parchment paper to keep clean up easy.

I didn't have a pastry brush, hence the messy milk splatter. Time to put it on my to buy list.

I ended up cooking these longer than 15 minutes because they didn't seem brown enough.

Of course, who eats scones without some tea? I made some English Breakfast. :)

In the end, the scones came out crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. It's a bit crumbly, but very good. I've only had scones like once so it's hard for me to say if this was a tasty scone, but it's certainly a tasty something!

I don't know if the jam counts as a filling since I didn't make the jam, but I really tried to make the clotted cream. Sometimes you just have to deal with what you have.

Cooking: Week 4 - Pan Fry - Panfried Pork Shoulder Steaks

Week: 4
Theme: Pan fry
Dish: Panfried pork shoulder steaks

We really like panfrying. I bought Ofer a cast iron skillet as a belated Christmas present and we knew we wanted to break it in with this challenge. Whenever we have a good piece of meat, we try to minimize what spices we use. For this, we only used a generous helping of salt and pepper. And the basically cooked it on each side till it was done. We check the temperature using a meat thermometer before serving.

I didn't expect to like this as much as I did. It kind of felt like I was eating a steak with a different flavor profile. It was really satisfying eating it with a fork and knife. They were really cheap too, only a couple of bucks each. Very good.

We also made a homemade tomato sauce. It was a pretty simple recipe. We just eye balled the amount of ingredients.

We used:

• 1 onion
• 1 head of garlic
• A few handfuls of mushrooms
• 2 spicy peppers
• 2 cans of whole tomatoes
• 1 can of tomato sauce
• 1 small can of tomato paste
• A few stalks of celery
• A bunch of parsley
• Two bay leaves
• A bunch of basil
• Some smoked cayenne
• Salt and pepper

We just browned the onions and then added the other veggies. Then we just dumped everything else in. We took out the basil and bay leaves in the end and just left the sauce chunky.

We missed week 3.

So early in the game and we already missed a week. Last week we were really not too motivated with the themes: soups and white chocolate. Don't get me wrong, I love soups, but we just didn't have a good idea as to what kind of soup we wanted. Also, our pantry was kind of barebones last week and we were lazy about buying new groceries.

We don't make soups very often so we didn't really know what kind of soup we would want. Also Ofer doesn't like white chocolate and didn't seem very excited to eat any of my possible white chocolate creations.

Eventually, we would like to make a soup and maybe we'll post it up here when that happens.

Baking: Week 2 - Miniature - Irish Creme Liquor Balls

Mmm, balls.

Week: 2
Theme: Miniatures
Dish: Irish Creme Liquor Balls

Hi again! I have to admit, I feel like we cheated this week. After last week, we had a ton of brownies left over and because we don't have friends (FOREVER ALONE TOGETHER) we weren't able to finish them all. So I decided to repurpose the brownies into Chef John's Rum Ball recipe!

We looked at our sizable college stash of booze, but we realized that we didn't have enough rum to do this recipe, so we opened up our new bottle of Bailey's Irish Creme (Costco sized!) and went to work.

I may or may not have added more alcohol than what was needed. :)

We didn't follow the recipe very exactly, but it was a fun template to follow. I added about 6 brownies into the mix and mixed in a couple of swigs of Baileys till it looked like paste. Then, I used a tablespoon measuring spoon and scooped out the contents, using a chopstick to help maneuver it out. It smelled nice and alcoholic! I ended up scooping them beforehand and placing it in the freezer, but I wonder if I could just place the whole thing in...

 I didn't have good dark chocolate like he had suggested so I went back to the Costco sized bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips. I swear I'll start buying the good stuff once I finish this bag! I feel like learning how to melt the chocolate via the steaming method was my real learning point of this week. I've never been able to successfully do it -- well, I've done it twice -- so having it work is quite nice.

My kitchen seems inadequately equipped because I couldn't find a heat-resistant (i.e. not plastic) bowl that would fit over a pot without it touching the bottom so I had to fashion one out of a deep metal bowl and a stock pot. Thank god that it was just wide enough to fit.

Here are the rolled balls. I took them out a little early and rolled them and it looked like I smeared poop all over my hands.

Our chocolate didn't melt as nicely as Chef John's. It was thicker and didn't coat the balls as nice, but it was still really tasty and I had a hard time forcing myself not to stick my face into the concoction. Because the consistency of my chocolate was thicker, our balls didn't come out nice a smooth. But, it's okay, I want to say that it has character.

In the end, the ball was actually more mushy than I would have expected. I may have been heavy handed with the alcohol. But they were still quite tasty! You feel the kick after you finish it and after a few, it's gets nice. :)

Cooking: Week 2 - Chinese - Chinese Steamed Trout

Week: 2
Theme: Chinese
Dish: Chinese Steamed Trout

Hi everyone! This week's theme is Chinese. I'm Chinese so this theme has a special place in my heart. I had a lot of ideas on what I should make, wontons, congee, spare ribs, but I decided to go with something that I always crave when I go back to my mom's house: steamed fish. I think steaming gets a lot of flack in the US because people think it doesn't add any flavor, but Chinese people take steaming to a whole new level.

Anyways, I used Steamy Kitchen's Chinese Steamed Fish recipe. I didn't follow it exactly, but Chinese food is usually made without exact measurements. I also used a steamer that Ofer's sister had given us (thank you Aya!) but we hadn't had a chance to use it. It's perfect because I don't have any pots big enough to steam my fish in.

I also took out the cooking wine part because the steamer wouldn't be able to hold that liquid. I think it turned out fine without it and my mom doesn't use it either.

They smelled heavenly already at this point!

The prep was relatively easy. We bought our trout at Costco and it came in a pack of 4. They had already been cleaned, gutted, and descaled. Luckily, our steamer was able to fit two fish perfectly.

Steaming in action!

At this point, we were super excited.

Fish after the steam bath.

We had to move the fish into a baking dish because we didn't steam it in a pan. I think because of the shape of the baking dish, the soy sauce didn't nicely penetrate the fish as well. Also, I didn't double the sauce recipe, which I should have done since I was making two fish.

Saucy fishes!

Microwaving the sauce was pretty quick and easy. It smelled oh so good!

After the hot oil bath!

In the original recipe, she said that you should able to hear the sizzle on the fish after dumping the oil on it, but I didn't get that. Not sure why. It did sizzle like crazy in the wok though. Maybe I need a different oil (I used canola) or heat it up a bit more.

Sorry for the blurry pic, but you can see how flaky the fish is!

I couldn't resist showing you guys how flaky the fish was. It wasn't dry at all.

We ate it with rice! Naturally.

Verdict: It was really tasty! Pretty close to what my mom does with her fish. We made two fish for two people but one was enough to fill us up. My mom usually cooks one fish for a family of 6, but we have some other dishes along side it. I think one fish is good for just a meal with two if you don't plan on having other meat dishes. I wish we had made a vegetable dish, but I didn't feel like making more food that wouldn't be eaten.

The trout is more firm than some of the other fishes that my mom makes. But I found the meat to still be sweet and flavorful. It's not too "fishy". I really liked this recipe and even though it was my first time make it, it came out really well. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to try it.