Chicken goes to spa and pears visit coconut milk

Spa chicken and barley casserole 

Pear and caramel cream sauce 

Yesterday I cooked a simple meal from the cookbook, my cooking every recipe plan.  This was called Spa Chicken, although I have no idea why.  My first thought was that the chicken was treated well, like it had visited a spa.  If so, the visit ends poorly because the chicken became dinner.  Maybe this meal was once served at a spa.  Basically chicken is simmered in a liquid with whole crushed garlic cloves and fresh thyme.  I cut the chicken into strips and squeezed lemon juice over the meat.  After simmering in the flavorful broth, all we tasted was lemon juice.  That was fine by me, because I actually don’t like chicken.  The side dish was from a Frugal Gourmet cookbook written to celebrate Christmas.  It was a barley casserole, and I loved it although everyone else found it plain.  I melted butter in my serving, and, well, I am the person who prefers vanilla ice cream to any other flavor, so plain is good by me.

 

My first dessert from the cookbook was pear halves cooked in caramel.  I rushed this one, I suppose, and it was plain also.  First I cooked sugar in water, once dissolved I added the pears. When the sugar water turns dark and caramel colored I add cream.  My substitution was coconut cream.  My problem was, the sugar water never turned dark, and I finally decided to add the cream and move on.  I imagine I will try again sometime.  The day before I saw a recipe cooked on PBS with pears covered in melted chocolate and pistachios.  I really want to try that one, but I can’t find the recipe online.  I have searched online with keywords such as pears with chocolate, pears with pistachio; pears cooked by Scottish Accent Man, and have had no luck yet.  This would be so much easier if I had a better memory.  

 

Next week I will be at my dad’s house, and he will be the lucky victim of my cooking experiments.  

Cooking the pears in the sugar water, above, and after adding the cream, below

another cooking school week

From curry to dust bowl

 

I’m learning a lot from the exercise of cooking through one single cookbook.  One thing I have learned is how to create a sauce with simple ingredients.  Mixing butter into a liquid that has wine in it makes a sharp flavor that is wonderful.  When cooking onion and garlic, always cook the onion completely before adding the garlic, because garlic burns easily.  In this book it always states I should cook the onion till done, then add the garlic and cook for only 30 seconds more.  I cooked a vegetable curry, and the directions had me cook all the seasonings first, then add the veggies and cook in the seasonings without any liquid.  This was to bond the flavors into the veggies.  Then I added the broth, cooked until the veggies were tender, then added coconut milk.  The curry was my favorite meal so far.

 

Chicken Saltimbocca before cooking.  

My next meal was something called Chicken Saltimbocca.  I have never even eaten a meal that tasted like this one.  This is a Roman dish, usually made with veal wrapped in prosciutto and seasoned with sage.  As usual when I cook I only skim the information, so I missed that I was supposed to have whole sage leaves.  I only had the typical powdered herb, but I still really loved the dish.  Saltimbocca means “jump into your mouth” in Italian, and that is a perfect description of the meal.   To show how much I have to learn, I first had to look up Saltimbocca, because I had never heard of this dish or that word.  Next I had to look up prosciutto, because I wasn’t sure what that was.  Prosciutto is salt cured uncooked ham, specifically a cut from the hind leg of a pig.  The meat is covered in salt and allowed to dry for several weeks, then hung in a humid room for months.  The flavor of the ham depends on the breezes that flow around the meat as it cures.  Prosciutto can be eaten as is, raw, or it can be cooked.  In this recipe the prosciutto is wrapped around the sage covered chicken cutlets and then cooked in a pan.  My plan for the rest of the prosciutto is to eat it the way it was mentioned in the article I read, raw with cheese and melon.

Completed cooked meal

I don’t think I ever really enjoyed cooking until now.  I fixed countless meals for my family over the years, and I certainly enjoyed the feeling of taking care of the people I love, feeding my children healthy and nutritious meals, but it seemed like I was always cooking under a deadline.  We had to eat and clean up before scouts, or church, or sports, or whatever activity was on the list.  Cooking was just the chore to complete; food was just the stuff to eat, before running out the door for the other parts of life.  I am so much happier now, not being busy, not cooking with one eye on the clock, and so I am really able to enjoy preparing the meal.  I savor the smells, the sounds and of course, the taste.  

 

America’s Test Kitchen is so far a joy to cook through, although not ever meal has been a winner.  Last night I fixed chickpea patties, kind of like a salmon patty with ground chickpeas.  Flavor was to come with a cucumber yogurt mix on top.  I thought the meal was fair, but my husband said it was like eating dust.  My son scraped the cucumber topping off, covered it with ketchup and declared it, passable.  The rest of the night those two men joked about dust bowl meals and eating dirt.  Needless to say, we won’t repeat that one.

 

Pandemic cooking school part 3

 Meatloaf and beans 

I looked at the cover of the cookbook I am working my way through, and noticed that it claims to have “650 recipes for EVERYTHING you’ll ever want to make.”  I am pretty sure I will never be able to cook 650 different recipes even if I follow the recipe for every meal we eat every day for a year.  Even so, I am continuing with my plan to cook my way through the book.  I will have to eliminate some of the ideas if the meal has more tomato than I can avoid, like spaghetti sauces and pizzas with red sauce.  That is fine.  I am going to do what I can do, and no more.  And I will eat what I can eat, and no more.

 

This week I made meatloaf from the cookbook.  They had me shape two smaller loafs to speed up cooking, and since I have three of us eating right now I shaped three.  The only other difference from how I have cooked meatloaf in the past was the cookbook had me brown each meatloaf in a pan before baking them in the oven.  We all liked the meal, but I didn’t see it as much different than things I have made in the past.  

 

I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and I had a bag of dried beans, so I looked through the book for any recipe that would work with them.  I found White bean rosemary Gratin with Parmesan cheese croutons, and glancing through the ingredients list I thought I had everything.  The recipe calls for canned beans so I had to go ahead and soak then cook the beans before starting the meal.  Then I assembled, and as I was preparing I noticed I needed fresh kale.  I have no fresh kale.  Back in the pantry I found a can of cooked turnip greens, and opened that.  I substituted banana ketchup, again, for the tomato paste, and fixed the meal.  I almost never follow a recipe perfectly, even when that is my actual goal. The beans were my favorite meal of the week, but the guys preferred the meatloaf.  And my son reminded me that cooking an entire book would include dessert.  Next week, sweets with the meals.  

Cooking School Barley Soup

 Pandemic Cooking School Part 2

In my home school culinary education of fixing every recipe in a huge cookbook, something that will probably take the entire year or more, I have found meals we all like.  Two days ago I decided to try a beef stew recipe.  For some reason I had it in my mind that this cookbook was one of those 30 minute recipe books.  It was not.  I pulled the stew meat out of the refrigerator and opened the cookbook.  I scanned the recipe and saw that I was to preheat the oven, and to brown the meat in a pot on the stove.  Once the meat chunks were browned I would remove them to a bowl and cook the veggies, add the liquid and the meat back, and simmer for an hour.  I looked at the clock and decided to fix something else and do the stew the next day.

 

Next day arrived and I pulled the meat out again, and opened the cookbook.  This time I had an hour to fix the meal and still eat at a decent time.  I turned on the oven to preheat, and pulled out the pot for the stove.  Then I scanned the directions again.  I poured the oil into the pot and started browning the meat. Then I began to wonder, why was I told to turn the oven on?  I looked over the directions again.  It turns out I simmer the stew for an hour on the top of the stove, and then bake it for an hour in the oven.  Once again, I did not have time for this.  

 

I remembered that I wanted to make a beef barley soup and had bought the ingredients before but not the meat.  The recipe called for blade steak, and every time I had searched for blade steak in the store, I couldn’t find any such thing.  So, last night I made barley soup with stew meat, whatever cut that might be.  It turned out very good, and will be repeated again. The only problem I had was the meat wasn’t as tender as we like.  It was good, just not as tender as expected for soup.

 

 I cooked the stew meat, added carrots and onions, garlic and thyme, and banana ketchup instead of tomato paste.  This is my usual substitution since my husband is allergic to tomatoes.  I added two cups of beef broth, two cups of chicken broth and four tablespoons of soy sauce.  When the meat and veggies were cooked I added the barley, which looked like oatmeal to me.  We all three enjoyed the soup.  The cookbook says that this meal isn’t good as leftovers because the barley reheated turns mushy.  We won’t know as we ate it all.

I have since learned what a blade steak is.  This is a flavorful cut of the shoulder section of beef.  This cut has a thick piece of cartilage running through the middle, and if the cartilage is removed it is called a flat iron steak.  The flat iron is full of flavor but more expensive, so if you can find the blade steak and cut away the chewy cartilage yourself, you have a good cut of meat.  The beef sold already cut for stewing is usually chuck, and it is tougher and needs to be cooked for a longer time.  I have never known much about steaks, cuts of meat or how to cook them, but I hope to be more educated as I go through this homeschool cooking school working through a single book exercise.