Day 18: "moist"

In a continuation of this week's theme, more stir fry!  This time, with a salmon to top it off!

Notes

• It seems that this week is turning into an extended lesson in moisture, sources of it and the effects on heat transfer.  In today's stir fry, I threw in tomatoes right after sauteing the mushrooms.  This introduced a lot of moisture all at once, which mean that the mix, including the eggs, became sort of goopy, sweaty, and messy
• However, the moisture served to transfer heat much more regularly than with just the wok, and the overall mixture came out tasting more homogeneously flavored
• Drizzling the wet-ish mixture over the lettuce straight out of the pan and letting it sit for 5 minutes also ended up cooking the leaves a little, in a very pleasant way, that removed some of the inherent bitterness
• I still need to work on the salmon.  Despite the fact that I cooked it relatively quickly over lower heat, it was still slightly overcooked and the fats came oozing out
• I figured out what that white stuff was - it was the grease between the chunks of flesh and the way to avoid it is just to avoid overcooking the fish, it's that simple

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 17: resuming normal service

I'm back from my week of travels, and now, back to our plan!  We'll back fill the 3 meals I did prepare last week sometime later, but let's start with today's.

Something I want to start doing is themes.  That would allow me to focus in on one or two things and intensively work on them over a short period of time, which should hopefully improve the skill improvement curve.  The other thing is that I've decided to leave the exciting, interesting stuff to the weekends.  On the weekdays, I get back too late to experiment around too much, and I am perfectly comfortable living off stir fry variations on the weekday, and so that's where I think I'm settling.

Oh and I've also settled on sweet potatoes as my regular carb source, which should make things easier.

Notes:

• The spinach carried the flavor of the dish a lot better than the bak choy.  However, I am torn between two theories as to why.  One theory is that this is due to some specific aspect of the geometry of the vegetables, while the other theory is simply that the simplicity of the sweetness of the spinach did the work.
• Without the browning and surface caramelization, the chicken was not even close to as good as the last time I did this.  This time, the problem was that the marinade was too wet.  This would probably be alleviated with corn starch, or simply being more careful about how the chicken was thrown into the wok.
• The mushrooms didn't do a lot in concert with the dish.  I am curious why this is so - in the soup that I made, they came out very nicely, with strong, distinct flavors coming to the top. 

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 9: something old, and something new

To start the afternoon off, another omelet!  This tasted a lot better than it looked, truth be told.  A few things - the heat should have been much lower when I threw the eggs in at first, the peppers were a really good addition, the tomatoes were surprisingly delightful, and the bacon crumbs added a really nice texture.  Not adding the stem on the thyme was also a winning move - moving forward!

Dinner was stir fried vegetables, steamed chicken leg, and as a new addition, mushroom soup.  Lesson with the chicken leg, time spent steaming is not additive - you can't steam something for 10 minutes, take it off, and put it on for 5 minutes again, and expect it to be equivalent to 15 minutes of steaming.  This should have been obvious, the thing about cooking is heat transfer, and so taking the chicken out and letting it cool was basically a reset.

The mushroom soup was interesting, and pretty pleasant.  The trick, it seems is to saute the mushrooms and let it sweat for a bit, to get the flavors out before pouring in the chicken stock.  Also, it helped to have a good mixture of mushrooms in there.  I'll invest in a blender and do it properly next time to get a nice thick creamy soup.

Good sturdy, hearty stuff all round.


Cheers,
Hanchen

Day 8: winner, winner, chicken dinner

Breaking with the templates of the last week, the next couple of posts will be simpler and shorter, in particular because next week will be a significant travel week.

First, here's what I made on Friday: steamed fish, chicken scraps soup, and potato pancake things.  The potato pancake thing was my downfall.  In retrospect, it was slightly too ambitious for how late it was when I started with prep.  It required dicing ingredients, which I am not good at and get frustrated by, and the patty-like nature was closer to baking than cooking, which I am also hilariously bad at.  The thing was pretty tasty, but it took a stupid amount of time to prepare and wasn't quite worth the effort in the end.

To re-calibrate myself, I prepared something much simpler, going back to basics with a simple chicken stir fry.  For this - what I did was that I blanched the vegetables before throwing them into the wok for the stir fry, and it seemed to have done some good.  I also tossed the chicken chunks around in a very hot wok to add a nice char all round to kick it all off.  Pretty simple stuff, but  well enough, and so no complaints here.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 7: pride cometh before the fall

I guess what they say is true - the worst thing you can do is let hubris get to you.  It's 1:30am and I only just finished cleaning up.  That was a 2.5 hour long lesson in why you should not get over your skis.  I'll punt on the meal discussion today and come back to it tomorrow.


Cheers,
Hanchen

Day 6: a tiny step forward

I'd rate tonight's dinner as the most satisfying since we started on this adventure.  A couple of things went right, coming together in a confluence of positive outcomes.  

• Prep was easy and straightforward, and with fewer moving parts as well as no novelty in the process, there was less requirement for error allowance.  As a result, the execution felt much less like a chore and much more like warming up before exercise.  
• The flavour profiles of today's dishes were simple and interesting, but most importantly did not allow room for me to fall back on my standard crutch of "make it spicy".  The simplicity of it also allowed me to work on a couple of the points I had noted for day 4 and day 5, which was very gratifying.
• Simple set up = simple clean up.  I wrapped the whole affair in and hour and a half, which is much better than I have achieved previously.

Menu:

• Dinner: potato wedges, drunken chicken
• Time spent: ~45min prep, ~15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $6.31

Key lessons of the day:

• The whole "organic" movement is quite uneconomical and I am starting to develop a bias against it - mark ups are any where from 40-300% (!!), and I'm not sure that the marginal benefits are worth the cost.  
• Wholefoods tends to lay out the organic stuff as the default option, compelling you to search for the non-organic options - here, on the other hand, the dollar savings are well worth the fractional increases in search cost 
• A cold water bath really did help improve the texture of the chicken, especially the skin.  
• The advice someone in a video on youtube (maybe Gordon Ramsey?) gave to use wine good enough to drink on its own when cooking rather than pouring in your cheapest shit unsurprisingly also extends to other alcohols, in my case here, whiskey.

Open questions

• Why did the chicken skin shrink and shrivel up?
• My hypothesis here is that it was the fat underneath it propping it in place, which begs the question, how do we prevent it from shriveling up and staying nice and firm on the chicken?

Meal breakdowns

Dinner: potato wedges, steamed chicken

The results: the chicken was a touch tougher than it had to be, and so the lesson here is probably that it didn't need to sit in the steamer for that long after the initial cooking phase.  Otherwise, flavours were good all round.  I recognized that the plating for the wedges were a little silly, but I was hungry and in a rush to get to it. 

General prep scheme - chicken:

• Cut the chicken thigh up
• In retrospect, unnecessary
• Added half an ounce (half a shot glass) of whiskey, quarter ounce of sesame oil, sea salt, pepper, ginger shreds, garlic slices, and tossed the whole thing around in a bowl
• Put into a cold steamer and steamed for 10 mins after the water started to boil, then turned off the power and kept it there for another 5 minutes
• Will try 8 mins and 3 minutes next time
• Took the chicken out and placed into a ziploc bag, then submerged in an ice bath
• After the chicken was placed on the plate, poured the juices from the bowl in the steamer over the chicken, which worked to bring it back up in temperature a little
• For the sauce on top, fried the white part of a spring onion and some garlic in avocado oil for about 5 mins, and poured the oil at the end over the green bits of spring onion and finely diced garlic and ginger 

Other notes:

• Whiskey flavour came out very well - this was the right amount, I think.  Next time, worth leaving chicken in the mixture to marinate for half an hour.

General prep scheme - potato wedges:

• Olive oil, rosemary, salt, pepper, light touch of paprika on wedges
• Oven at 210 degrees Celsius - baked for 25 minutes, sat in over for 5 more minutes.  

Other notes:

• Could have used a touch more crisp, maybe oven at 210 for 20 minutes and then at 240 for 5 more, no sitting time?

This felt pretty good, kind of like when you level up.  Onwards!

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 5: waste not, want not

I have a thing where I am very uncomfortable about wasting food.  While that is good for economy of food prep, sometimes that result in dishes I prepare that are pretty ugly.  In my opinion working with leftover and scraps can make for some pretty compelling options, but I think I'll need to work on it a little more before I try to make my case in earnest.

Menu:

• Dinner: sauteed shrimp on bak choy, toasted sweet potato chips, chicken carcass soup
• Time spent: ~1.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $5.28

Key lessons of the day:

• I tend to cheat with spicy flavours: when in doubt, I tend to add peppers and chillis.  This results in flavour profiles that fit my preferences and tastes really well, but is still a cheat, and I need to diversify out a little more.
• That chicken carcass soup was surprisingly filling.  Two bowls of it, with scraps of chicken, celery, carrots, and onions made for a whole meal - the shrimp and chips actually kind of put me over the top.
• The chicken stock I made was 1) too watery and 2) too vegetable-y.  Needs more work and iteration for next week
• You know what would have made the soup better?  An egg.  Always remember the egg.

Open questions

• Why did my sweet potato chips cook differently on each side?  
• One side looked pale and dried out, while the other side developed a nice crisp while staying nice and golden.
• My hypothesis is that side that was initially put into the oven, which turned pale, lost its moisture while it was cooking, leaving a dry layer that crisped.
• If my hypothesis is correct, the solution to the problem is to cover the chips with another layer of foil, to cook both sides, before adding a char to it.

Meal breakdown

The result: the shrimp worked well, but could have been tended to better because some of the smaller bits ended up marginally tougher, and may have been over done.  I think the woodear worked here for this dish, because of the texture it adds, but it's probably not necessary.  The bak choy also ended slightly more rubbery than I would have wanted - I think it calls for even less time on the stove.

I'm going to skip on the prep description and notes, because it's late and I am very exhausted.  Suffice it to say, nothing really notable here, just rehashing stuff I've done before in the last few days.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 4: coming from good stock

I guess the highlight of the day today was less the dinner, which was relatively boring, and more the preparation of the chicken for the rest of this week.  This was something that I probably should have done yesterday, when I had significantly more time, but I clearly did not plan ahead of myself well enough.  

An important aspect improving the economics of prep is to use as much of what I buy as I possibly can.  As such, I am buying my chicken whole, and then using as much of the whole bird as I can.  I divide the bird into a pair of thigh and drumsticks, and two slabs of breast meat, making for four discrete serving portions.  This leaves the carcass which is used to prepare stock - I'll do a separate post on the stock tomorrow, after it's settled and chilled in the fridge.

Menu:

• Dinner: Stir fried chicken and bak choy (take 2), steamed sweet potatoes, mixed green salads from wholefoods.
• Time spent: ~0.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $13.41
• The wholefoods salad bar is pretty damn pricey

Key lessons of the day:

• Working with chicken can be pretty messy and annoying - I need to figure out a way to better set up my prep area.
• Probably should have used scissors to process the chicken shreds; the knife is not the solution to every problem.

Meal breakdowns

Dinner: stir fried chicken and bak choy (take 2), steamed sweet potatoes, mixed green salads from wholefoods

The results: much better than the first go!  In my opinion, this looked a little better put together, and the fact that it did not taste like an entirely prawn based dish was definitely helpful. 

General prep scheme - stir fried vegetables with chicken

• Fried up a slice of bacon, cut up to divide the lean from the fat
• Kept the bacon oil and fatty bits of bacon in the pan, threw in onions, garlic, and jalapeno peppers
• Threw the chicken in, entirely uncooked this time, and stir fried until color change was obvious
• Tossed in celery, then bak choy stems, then bak choy leaves, then wood ears last
• Tossed around a bit until bak choy started changing color
• Poured in 2oz of water, cooked until water was mostly dried up
• I determined this point by listening for a change from a bubbling sound to a sizzling sound.

Other notes:

• On the one hand, I think it was way too complicated as a dish.  There were too many flavours involved and it lacked distinctive character.  
• On the other hand, it was a very simple dish, it packed basically everything I wanted to have for dinner into a single that tied together pretty well, was simple to prepare, and importantly, was simple to clean up.

Holy shit the chicken stock took a lot of time to prepare and it is late.

Cheers,

Hanchen