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