Day 2 (retrospective post): fastly fastly

I wasn't particularly timed constrained, but I was lazy, and so for today's meal prep, I focused on being more time efficient than I was on day 1.

Menu:

• Brunch: Bacon and eggs over medium
• Time spent: ~0.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $7.47
• Dinner: Stemmed whole pomfret, stir fried vegetables with chicken, sweet potatoes with bacon bits
• Time spent: ~1 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $13.93
• The estimate is slightly inflated by the fact that I had a lot of fruits to go with the meal, which ended up being almost a quarter of the cost

Key lessons of the day:

• The bacon on the sweet potatoes was a game changer.  They were incredibly tasty.
• Stock made with prawn shells may look thin and clear, but they are in fact very intensely strong, to the extend that they can completely overpower everything else.

Open questions:

• What is the right amount of water for a stir fry?
• Two of two times that I have made stir fry, it has finished off too wet.

Meal breakdowns

Brunch: Bacon and eggs over medium

The results: I mean, how complicated can it be, it's just bacon and eggs.  This ended exactly the way I expected - well.  Now the real question is, what could I do to make this more interesting?

General prep scheme (included for the sake of consistency):

• Made bacon
• Using bacon oil, made eggs

Other notes:

• Worth trying eggs over easy next time - my bias towards over medium or over hard with eggs seem hardly warranted.

Dinner: Stemmed whole pomfret, stir fried vegetables with chicken, sweet potatoes with bacon bits

The results: this was a very fishy meal.  The prawn stock completely over powered all other flavours in the stir-fry.  That wasn't really a problem, I enjoyed the flavour.  However, this really wasn't what I had intended with the dish.

General prep scheme - stemmed pomfret

• Gutted, cleaned, and then scored the fish on both sides
• Bought the fish from Chinatown market so it required cleaning
• Rubbed brandy into the guts and belly and up and thorough over sides of the fish
• Inserted garlic pieces, ginger slices, and lemon peel into gut, and inserted sliced garlic and a sliver of ginger into the fish where it was scored
• Drizzled sesame oil over both sides.
• Steamed for 15 minutes

Other notes:

• The fish ended up tougher than expected and so I guess the moral of the story here is that it could probably be steamed for less time.

General prep scheme - stir fried vegetables with chicken

• Heated up a pan to temperature and drizzled in some olive oil
• Seared the chicken on both sides and cut up into thin-ish slices
• Fried a slice of bacon
• Poured the bacon oil through a sieve into a pan heated up to temperature
• Threw the chicken in and stir fry until white on all sides
• Tossed in peppers, carrots, bak choy, and then wood ears last
• Tossed around a bit until bak choy started changing color
• Poured in 4oz of prawn stock

Other notes:

• That prawn sauce looked like clear and had the consistency water but it packed a mighty mighty punch; next time, it would be wise to use sparingly instead

The point of day 2 was to try to keep things simpler - in that respect, it was pretty successful.  Unfortunately, this meant that clean up took a disproportionate amount of total time spent and as a result, the ratio between total time spent prepping and cleaning and actually eating remained pretty piss poor.  But I guess, such is life.

Cheers,

Hanchen