Adventures in cooking, volume 1
Adventures in cooking
1. I believe anyone can learn how to do anything. They just need time and dedication. The most limiting factor that you have as an adult, however, is time. I don't have a lot of it.
2. I have a stomach of steel. Also I can eat almost anything. Except maybe Durian or super spicy foods.
3. Cooking is a fabulous way to procrastinate. I mean, you have to eat to survive.
4. Aside from baking, I have no cooking skills whatsoever.
5. I shop based on what is on sale. So when I cook I often don't the right ingredients to make what a recipe wants. So I often improvise.
6. A lot times, I cook with whatever I have at the moment, often times inspired by the fact that the ingredients I bought are on the verge of spoiling.
The results are strange, experimental dishes.
My rating scale:
1 = I can't let anyone but myself eat it for fear they will die.
2 = Only I can eat it because no one else will like the way it tastes.
3 = I can eat it and let low-key non-cooks try it.
4 = I can eat it and let my friends who cook try it.
5 = I would actually make it again.
Adventures in Cooking, eps 1-3
EXPERIMENT 1
I decide that I want to make baked chicken with broccoli & cheese riceroni. How hard can that be, right? You just pre-cook the riceroni, throw in slabs of chicken, and toss it in the oven.
Unfortunately, I didn't cook the rice long enough before baking, so all I had was baked chicken with bits of dust. HY helped me try to save it by adding more water & chicken broth (so that the rice could absorb it), and baking it again. Then we tested it. Still not completely cooked.
All the extra liquid diluted the sauce, so then we tried adding more stuff for flavor: cheese, fried onions.
Bake. Test. More water. More broth. More cheese & fried onion. Bake. Test. Repeat.
This was a process that took OVER THREE HOURS.
The end result was this very thick cheese rice thing that clung to spoons and wouldn't fall off when you turned the spoon over. The texture was so thick that I decided against eating it the way it was.
I ended up using it to make fried cheese gyouza. They were actually not bad.
Ratings: 2.5. I actually liked them, and my low-key friend said they were good, but she might have just been polite as I did notice that no one who tried them touched more than one.
EXPERIMENT 2
My vegetables were getting old, so I decided to make stew.
I bought four potatoes, cut up all of them, and threw about half of them in a frying pan with onions and chicken. After frying them up, I threw them into a pot with a whole bag of spinach (also on the verge), a bag of frozen peas/carrots/corn, and one packet of Kroger's beef stew seasoning.
Unfortunately, I put way more ingredients than I should have. The sauce was bland.
So I added another packet.
HUGE MISTAKE. The stew was extremely salty. I poured in water, mixed it. Still salty.
Added milk. Creamy AND salty.
After stewing it for so long, the potatoes had started to dissolve, leaving the stew a bit gritty as well. The consistence now tasted like the inside of a frozen pot pie.
So I decided to make a pie. At first I was going to make a large pie, but I thought the liquid filling would make it hard to eat. Smaller mini pot pies would have been perfect, but I didn't have any tins.
What I DID have, was a cupcake tray.
So! I bought cupcake wraps and pie crust and went to work. I reshaped the pie crust to fit the cupcake tray. Then I spooned out some of the stew and baked it.
I quickly realized that 1) it took forever, 2) one 9 inch pie crust would only fit on 6 cupcakes and I had WAYYY more soup than that, therefore 3) I did not have the time nor enough pie crusts to make enough mini-pie/tart things to use up all of my stew.
So I made my own flour with bisquick after googling random recipes and haphazardly combining ingredients to make my own crust.
The result-- pie crust ones were GOOD.
Home made flour ones tasted like stew with biscuits! Not bad.
Rating: 4. I gave some to CC. She actually asked for another one, which made me happy.
(What happened to the other half of the potatoes, you ask? Well I left them out after having chopped them because I was late to class. When I returned, they were this grey/brown color. I fried them up with egg, cheese, chicken, and tons of spice. It was actually pretty good, but it looked like the vomit of someone in a black and white movie. I called it my Gray Slam. Rating: 3.5.)
EXPERIMENT 3, aka the one that inspired me to blog.
For a while, I've been wanting to try rolling chicken in oatmeal&flour and baking it. Google oatmeal-baked chicken and you'll see some pretty delicious looking recipes.
But I didn't have steel cut oatmeal. I had instant oatmeal.
Also, my computer was off, and I was too lazy to turn it on, so I improvised.
I put oatmeal powder with flour. I defrosted chicken and dipped it in egg.
I remembered milk was somehow involved, so I poured milk into my oatmeal flour powder mixture. I quickly realized this was a huge mistake, now it was chunky, so I poured milk until I had a batter. Then I poured it over chicken and threw it into the oven.
Rating: 1.5. This is something only I would eat. I think it's ok, but now after googling I have discovered that the milk was just a second thing to dip it in. You dip the chicken into egg THEN into milk, and THEN onto DRY OATMEAL/FLOUR, not into cold instant floured oatmeal. I also overbaked it since I couldn't tell if the chicken was done yet or not, since it was buried under slops of oatmeal-flour dough batter, leaving a pretty dry chicken underneath something that tasted suspiciously like an UBER BLAND oatmeal cookie.
(On the plus side, I had leftover oatmeal flour milk batter, so I combined it with the eggs and dipped in bread and made some pretty interesting french toast. It made it a bit gummy but not bad, especially when drenched in honey. Rating: 2.)
1. I believe anyone can learn how to do anything. They just need time and dedication. The most limiting factor that you have as an adult, however, is time. I don't have a lot of it.
2. I have a stomach of steel. Also I can eat almost anything. Except maybe Durian or super spicy foods.
3. Cooking is a fabulous way to procrastinate. I mean, you have to eat to survive.
4. Aside from baking, I have no cooking skills whatsoever.
5. I shop based on what is on sale. So when I cook I often don't the right ingredients to make what a recipe wants. So I often improvise.
6. A lot times, I cook with whatever I have at the moment, often times inspired by the fact that the ingredients I bought are on the verge of spoiling.
The results are strange, experimental dishes.
My rating scale:
1 = I can't let anyone but myself eat it for fear they will die.
2 = Only I can eat it because no one else will like the way it tastes.
3 = I can eat it and let low-key non-cooks try it.
4 = I can eat it and let my friends who cook try it.
5 = I would actually make it again.
Adventures in Cooking, eps 1-3
EXPERIMENT 1
I decide that I want to make baked chicken with broccoli & cheese riceroni. How hard can that be, right? You just pre-cook the riceroni, throw in slabs of chicken, and toss it in the oven.
Unfortunately, I didn't cook the rice long enough before baking, so all I had was baked chicken with bits of dust. HY helped me try to save it by adding more water & chicken broth (so that the rice could absorb it), and baking it again. Then we tested it. Still not completely cooked.
All the extra liquid diluted the sauce, so then we tried adding more stuff for flavor: cheese, fried onions.
Bake. Test. More water. More broth. More cheese & fried onion. Bake. Test. Repeat.
This was a process that took OVER THREE HOURS.
The end result was this very thick cheese rice thing that clung to spoons and wouldn't fall off when you turned the spoon over. The texture was so thick that I decided against eating it the way it was.
I ended up using it to make fried cheese gyouza. They were actually not bad.
Ratings: 2.5. I actually liked them, and my low-key friend said they were good, but she might have just been polite as I did notice that no one who tried them touched more than one.
EXPERIMENT 2
My vegetables were getting old, so I decided to make stew.
I bought four potatoes, cut up all of them, and threw about half of them in a frying pan with onions and chicken. After frying them up, I threw them into a pot with a whole bag of spinach (also on the verge), a bag of frozen peas/carrots/corn, and one packet of Kroger's beef stew seasoning.
Unfortunately, I put way more ingredients than I should have. The sauce was bland.
So I added another packet.
HUGE MISTAKE. The stew was extremely salty. I poured in water, mixed it. Still salty.
Added milk. Creamy AND salty.
After stewing it for so long, the potatoes had started to dissolve, leaving the stew a bit gritty as well. The consistence now tasted like the inside of a frozen pot pie.
So I decided to make a pie. At first I was going to make a large pie, but I thought the liquid filling would make it hard to eat. Smaller mini pot pies would have been perfect, but I didn't have any tins.
What I DID have, was a cupcake tray.
So! I bought cupcake wraps and pie crust and went to work. I reshaped the pie crust to fit the cupcake tray. Then I spooned out some of the stew and baked it.
I quickly realized that 1) it took forever, 2) one 9 inch pie crust would only fit on 6 cupcakes and I had WAYYY more soup than that, therefore 3) I did not have the time nor enough pie crusts to make enough mini-pie/tart things to use up all of my stew.
So I made my own flour with bisquick after googling random recipes and haphazardly combining ingredients to make my own crust.
The result-- pie crust ones were GOOD.
Home made flour ones tasted like stew with biscuits! Not bad.
Rating: 4. I gave some to CC. She actually asked for another one, which made me happy.
(What happened to the other half of the potatoes, you ask? Well I left them out after having chopped them because I was late to class. When I returned, they were this grey/brown color. I fried them up with egg, cheese, chicken, and tons of spice. It was actually pretty good, but it looked like the vomit of someone in a black and white movie. I called it my Gray Slam. Rating: 3.5.)
EXPERIMENT 3, aka the one that inspired me to blog.
For a while, I've been wanting to try rolling chicken in oatmeal&flour and baking it. Google oatmeal-baked chicken and you'll see some pretty delicious looking recipes.
But I didn't have steel cut oatmeal. I had instant oatmeal.
Also, my computer was off, and I was too lazy to turn it on, so I improvised.
I put oatmeal powder with flour. I defrosted chicken and dipped it in egg.
I remembered milk was somehow involved, so I poured milk into my oatmeal flour powder mixture. I quickly realized this was a huge mistake, now it was chunky, so I poured milk until I had a batter. Then I poured it over chicken and threw it into the oven.
Rating: 1.5. This is something only I would eat. I think it's ok, but now after googling I have discovered that the milk was just a second thing to dip it in. You dip the chicken into egg THEN into milk, and THEN onto DRY OATMEAL/FLOUR, not into cold instant floured oatmeal. I also overbaked it since I couldn't tell if the chicken was done yet or not, since it was buried under slops of oatmeal-flour dough batter, leaving a pretty dry chicken underneath something that tasted suspiciously like an UBER BLAND oatmeal cookie.
(On the plus side, I had leftover oatmeal flour milk batter, so I combined it with the eggs and dipped in bread and made some pretty interesting french toast. It made it a bit gummy but not bad, especially when drenched in honey. Rating: 2.)