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.