Tonight we dine in Hell

Bad movie tie-in, I know. But the smoke from this one was so caustic that maybe it’s not too far off.

I started with the typical inspiration: The Soup. I’m getting pretty cocky these days with soup, adding and replacing ingredients as I please. It hasn’t ended in disaster so far. This time I took the recipe in the book as just a general outline to follow since I obviously know more than those hacks at the Culinary Institute of America. Sorry, but when you hear the words potato and sour cream what do you think? Chives. It’s not rocket surgery.

So I had a good idea for the soup, but what about the sandwich? We’ve got chicken breast, but how many different kinds of chicken sandwiches can you come up with? Well, I had this recipe from Mario Batali’s cookbook for a whole roast chicken called The Devil’s Chicken (Pollo al Diavolvo). It involved rubbing the almost-cooked chicken down with a paste of dijon mustard and crushed black peppercorns. But the true beauty of this recipe was the “salad” side that he included. It used flat leaf parsley, halved cherry tomatoes, and red onions sliced thin. We’ve made this with lots of different dishes, and even used it in sandwiches before. Karen has added sliced baby cucumbers into the mix somewhere along the way as well. So I took this idea and turned that paste into a marinade for the chicken breast. Way cool, Mark’s the hero.

I’ve said it before. When I’m cooking meat on the stove top I use high heat. I don’t know why, so don’t ask. The end result tends to be smoke. The dinner isn’t always ruined, but sometimes the windows get opened in January. And it’s worse on the second floor. You see, we’ve got this set of stairs from the kitchen to the second floor so all the smoke goes straight up. Add a quarter cup of black pepper to the fog and you’ve got something that’s near impossible to breathe.

The chicken was scorched past recognition cooked perfectly, and the soup was also a hit. The compliments sounded something like this:

“Good *cough* dinner, hon. I really like *choke* the *cough* chicken. *hack* “

For the second time ever in her life in my cooking career, Karen didn’t need to add pepper sauce. A quarter cup of black pepper will do that. I, however, needed a half gallon of milk to make it through the meal. And some eye drops.

Filling the house with smoke….again

I like my cast iron skillets, they make me feel so frontier-ly. That’s a lie. I like them because Alton Brown says I should. He’s always right, you know.

I had this idea for acorn squash risotto from my Mario Batali cookbook. But what to serve with it? I searched the Food Network for roasted chicken recipes, and there it was on the third page of results: Lemon and sage roasted chicken. It sounded good, and it sounded easy, which is better. I wanted to be able to focus my attention on the risotto, which I’ve heard is easy to ruin if you don’t mind it well. Gordon Ramsay is always screaming at those idiots on Hell’s Kitchen because they invariably ruin the risotto at least once each night. And I can understand it now, because to have four or five things going at once, including one or two risotto skillets, would be very hard to keep track of. Here’s how mine looked when I was done:

Anyway, as it turned out the chicken recipe I found was from Michael Symon, Food Network’s new Iron Chef who hails from Cleveland, OH. Go Cleveland! First the Cavs go to the finals, the Indians make the ALCS, it looks like the Browns are playoff bound, and now this. An Iron Chef. How is it that I can bring football into anything?

I was talking about something, wasn’t I? Oh yes, my cast iron skillet. I quartered the chicken and heated both pans but good, put some olive oil and butter in, and dropped in the chicken, skin side down.

SMOKE! Lots of it, too. Around that time Karen came home and asked if we have fire insurance. “Don’t worry,” explained Mark, “I’ve got the fire extinguisher right here.”

This seems to happen any time I’m searing a piece of meat; the house fills with smoke. I’ve stopped trying to make burgers inside because of this. That and I did almost burn the house down last year making burgers on the electric grill on our now deceased Jenn-Air range. Maybe the pans are too hot, or perhaps I need a real hood to take the smoke out of the house. If I knew the answer I wouldn’t still be doing it, would I?

Here’s the chicken after it was done. In this particularly dramatic image of the chicken thigh one of the sage leaves breaks through the skin in a manner reminiscent of the Alien movies:

It came out okay. The flavor was good, but I brought the chicken out too soon. We had to finish off some of the bigger pieces in the microwave. Once again I was faced with the paradox of almost burning the chicken while undercooking it.  Maybe next time I’ll actually use my digital thermometer.

Another thing. If you look at the recipe it calls for 6oz. of butter for 6 chicken breasts. That’s a stick and a half of butter, folks. I used about 2 Tablespoons of olive oil and 1 Tablespoon of butter in each pan, and that even seemed like too much fat. If chef Symon continues cooking like this he’ll be rivaling Mario’s girth in about a year.

Daddy, why does my dinner glow in the dark?

I’ve made Mario Batali’s tomato sauce before.  Actually I’m pleased with how easy it is, and it tastes really good.  These days I’ll make a batch and what I don’t use I’ll freeze into little tomato-sicles for easy parceling later.

One of the steps in making the tomato sauce is to add half of a medium sized carrot, finely grated.  And you’re supposed to saute it with the onions and garlic.  The carrot is supposed to combat the acidity of the tomatoes.  Well, on Saturday I made a double recipe.  So I doubled everything in the recipe.  Maybe I didn’t let it brown long enough, maybe I shouldn’t have put in a whole carrot, maybe the carrot was just too big.  Sunday night Karen made a casserole with my tomato sauce, and it was orange.

Doesn’t that one piece of penne look like a finger? It wasn’t just any orange, though.  This looked inspired by the 1988 Denver Broncos’ uniforms.   We’ll call it “Elway Orange.”  It sounds better than “Uranium 238 Orange.”

And in case you’re wondering why the Steelers won this week, you’ll find out on Karen’s blog.  Ben’s support for the team was pivotal, and he’ll be wearing that for every game from here on out.

Pizza lesson #1: circles!

Yes, here it is. My moment of triumph, my shining glory.

Karen did most of the work.

Karen and I made pizza together Friday night so she could show me what dough is supposed to look and feel like. Karen thinks I’ve been pushing too hard when I knead the dough. I mixed the batter and kneaded the dough. Karen sliced the toppings, rolled the dough into CIRCLES for pizza and assembled the pizzas. I put the boys in their aprons so they could top their own pizza.

I also put the pizzas in the oven and monitored their cooking. Yes I’m making it sound like I did more than just stand there watching Karen work. Here’s the dough after I kneaded it.

Did I tell you I hate my oven? It doesn’t self-clean any more, and it shut off again while cooking pizza #2. We really need to have it repaired / replaced. Karen loves the downdraft and convection though.

We used a different dough recipe this time (from Mario Batali of course). Karen suggested using bread flour instead of all purpose flour and it was the best dough we’ve ever made. Plus there’s wine in it. A wine that drew the attention of the guy at the liquor store such that he complemented my taste. I didn’t have the heart to tell him “I only need a quarter cup, it’s going in pizza dough.”

Next we decided that while we’re making Mario’s dough we may as well make a pizza from the same show. Plus we had the fresh mozzarella in the fridge. He called it Classic Pizza Napolitana and it’s got slices of fresh mozzarella and basil leaves on it. Karen suggested adding some tomatoes on top. It was close to being the best pizza I’d ever had.

Remember the soup nazi from Seinfeld? They’d taste his soup and then say “Oooo, that’s good. I gotta sit down.” That’s how good this pizza was. It’s only Friday and already it felt like Father’s day.

Below I’ll put our recipe adapted from Mario’s.

Turkey is chicken, right?

Karen told me at the outset that I was doomed.  Nonsense.  You can do anything with turkey that you can do with chicken.

Almost.

The recipe was called “Stuffed chicken legs.”  It called for de-boned leg quarters, left whole, stuffed, and rolled up.  When I was at the butcher’s and saw boneless turkey legs I thought “I can make that work.”  Okay, that’s not what I thought.  It was more like “That’s perfect!”  I bought two.

So I made the filling and then got the turkey legs out onto the cutting board.  Holy cow, there is a lot of meat on a turkey leg.  I had to do lots of trimming just so I’d be able to roll them.  Then I was supposed to tie them up with butcher’s twine.  When am I going to remember to buy that at the store?  Karen says “I use yarn.”  I don’t think yarn would work in this case.  You see, these rolled and tied turkey leg thingies were to then be placed on a roasting rack in a roasting pan and shoved inside a NASA hot 450 degree oven.  I’m pretty sure the yarn would have caught fire at that point.  I don’t have a roasting rack so I found a multitasker; I put a cooling rack inside a 12 inch iron skillet.  Surprise surprise, they unrolled a bit.  I’m stupid, I know.  I thought it was cool how the hot oven browned the turkey, even with no skin. 

At 450 degrees it still took an hour to cook, and thank God I had that programmable thermometer.  While I was waiting for it to reach 160F I realized something.  Something horrible.  Every time I watch a cooking show, every time I read a recipe it tells me to do the same thing: Season The Meat.  First thing.  Ick, I can’t believe I forgot again.  That may explain the result, I don’t know.

When the chicken was almost done Oh wait, I used turkey didn’t I?  Okay, when the turkey was almost done I put the penne in some salted boiling water.  Then I made the pesto, and it literally took 3 minutes to do.  Way cool.  I was glad I found this recipe from Giada because I think it saved the dish. 

In this picture you can even see my lack of slicing skills.  When all was said and done the boys didn’t eat much except for the pasta with some parmesean sprinkled on top.  The turkey was tough, and Karen says that it’s like that unless cooked long and slow.  At least it wasn’t “I told you so.”  It was also tasteless except for the filling, and I wasn’t too crazy about the filling.  By eating turkey and penne in the same bite I managed to make it edible.  I would make the pesto again, especially in the summer, but not the turkey, or chicken, or whatever.

Jonathan painted his ear so he would look like Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Look how great I can boil water!!

See, I don’t ruin everything.  In fact, I’m very good at boiling water.  Here’s a picture of me boiling some potatoes, and I even peeled them!

See?  I can do two things.  Here are some things that I can totally do with boiling water:

• make mashed potatoes
• cook pasta
• peel wallpaper
• steam vegetables
• make soup
• steep tea
• sterilize baby bottles
• burn myself

Okay, I don’t do the last one on purpose, but I do burn myself on occasion, so I suppose it counts.  I did make dinner on Saturday and Karen liked it: 

Thanks Mario for the dinner and the wine.

Don’t laugh or your pizza will look like this too.

I was excited about pizza night on Friday.  This time I started singing the Molto Mario music at about 3:00.  And for all you people looking for the theme music, I’ll find it I promise. 

Not content to ruin just one kind of pizza dough, I wanted to use a different recipe.  I found this one from my friend Mario.  Anybody that puts wine in the pizza dough is cool in my book.  I didn’t have the wine, though.  When a recipe calls for a specific wine from Italy, I probably shouldn’t use cooking wine from the grocery store.  So I brought out my Pizza Margherita recipe from before, and the results were about the same.  I used Mario’s pizza sauce though, and it was yummy.  To recap:

What I used:
Pizza Dough
Pizza Sauce

What I wanted to make:
Pizza, Mario style

 What I made:

Let’s get a good discussion going.  What states do these pizza outlines look like?  And here’s a map to get you started.  And why are pizzas supposed to be round anyway?

If you’re interested in what went wrong, keep reading.

I’m #1 for Trinidad cooking

I’ve seen some blogs where they list interesting search strings that bring people to their site from google or yahoo or somewhere else.  Some of those are very entertaining, and it makes me think that my blog must be kind of boring.  But yesterday I got my first hits from people looking for doubles recipes.  And when I went to Google to investigate I found out some interesting things.  Here are some search strings that I’ve noticed, followed by my ranking on Google for them:

The top 10 returns are on the first page.

“How to make Trinidad food”  - #1
“How to ruin a dinner”  - #6
“Farting shampoo bottle”  - #2
“Invisible pizza”  - #10
“How do you get the burned taste out of soup”  - #3
“Farting daddy”  - #3
“Gordon Ramsay rabbit recipe”  - #2
“Mario Batali pizza peel”  - #7
“Invisible string”  - #8
“Bara recipe for doubles”  - #8
“Invisible string trick”  - #5
“Bara for doubles”  - #13

I included two variations on “invisible string” because I get more hits from that search string and its variations by far.

Karen is offended that I am the #1 google hit for “how to make Trinidad food” since I’m not from Trinidad and I’ve only made one Trini dish, and even that I’ve only made once.  Maybe if she posted about making channa and potato roti, or perhaps how to caramelize brown sugar to make Trini stewed chicken she’d be #1.

I’m making pizza this Friday again.  Let’s see what state I can make it look like this time.

How I impressed myself, it isn’t too hard to do.

I didn’t sleep too well on Sunday night.  The idea of ruining a very expensive cut of meat was weighing heavily on my mind.  I mentioned to Karen my idea for Valentines day Monday morning and (as usual) she suggested some improvements.  How unlike her.  They were actually good ideas, and I implemented them grudgingly.

Thanks to old man winter, Karen had Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday off, so we decided to have V-day dinner Tuesday night after the kids went to bed.  That way could enjoy a leisurely dinner without worrying about bedtime.  Which was good, since dinner started at 9:30. 

Let it first be said that Karen trimmed the roast for me.  I don’t want to take credit for everything.

Have I told you Alton Brown is king?  He presented an impossible-to-ruin tenderloin roast recipe on “Tender is the Loin 2,” and I followed it with one minor alteration.  Instead of seasoning the roast with cumin, I used thyme (at Karen’s suggestion).  There are only three main parts to this method: Season, Sear, Roast.  And you must eat tenderloin medium-rare, it’s the law.  Here’s me searing the meat:

Alton and I disagree on so few things, but final roasting temperature is one of them.  He says pull from the oven at 135, we do it at 140-143 and we like it better that way.  It does carry over a bit, and the results were pleasantly pink.

Remember that soup from my first post?  Well I made it again with some modifications.  I didn’t use the crostini and I changed the mushrooms from creminis to morels.  Thank you to Mario Batali for the soup, it went perfectly with dinner.

Who really cares about dinner when there’s a dessert with Bailey’s in the ice cream, Kahlua in the brownies, and chocolate sprinkled on top?  Please visit Pinch my Salt for this wonderful recipe, the results were stellar.

One word: Wow.

 Click more for the soup recipe.

Pizza Markarita

I like pizza.  Making homemade pizza looks like a lot of fun.  And making pizza is something you can do with your kids.  If kids help make food they are more likely to eat it, but seriously, my kids would eat pizza three times a day if I made it.  However, some problems arise with pizza making:  (1) I know nothing about making dough, and (2) I know nothing about making sauce.  These are kind of important parts of the pizza, aren’t they?  So where do I look when I am totally and utterly lost?  That’s right, the internet.  So I look online and find a relatively simple pizza sauce recipe, and it turns out to be so ridiculously easy that I’m ashamed that I waited this long to try making it.  Fine. Then I start looking for a dough recipe.If I’m looking for recipes online I primarily look at two places: Cooking Light and the Food Network (Alton Brown is King).  I’ve seen Alton Brown talk about yeast and gluten and I’ve watched those awesome belching yeast puppets from “Dr. Strageloaf” and “House of the Rising Bun.”  (You know it’s a good cooking show if six- and three-year-old boys will watch it saying “Play that again!”)  So I suppose I understand the basic physics behind it. But often baking is subjective, and that’s where I tend to have problems.  Here, I’ll give you a good example:

THANK YOU Alton Brown for showing me the difference between SOFT PEAKS and STIFF PEAKS.  For all you foodies out there, you can stop laughing at me now, there are certain subjects in cooking and baking where it is assumed you know what you’re doing, and nobody actually shows you what they mean.  Now let’s talk about the dough.

 I found a good (I suppose, but what do I know?) recipe for a basic pizza dough from (who else?) Mario Batali.  Mario and I understand each other, and I feel like we have a good working relationship.  After watching “Molto Mario” I always leave thinking “Wow, I can do that, but LARD?  REALLY, Mario!”  (I never knew just how important pork fat was to italian cooking.)  Wow, that’s great.  I made the pizza and it turned out great.  The dough was very yeasty and the sauce was too acidy for me, but it was still very good.  I filed it away and planned on doing it again.

The NEXT time I made the recipe I looked for a different brand of canned tomatoes, and the sauce came out PERFECT.  I would choose this sauce over takeout any day.  I was completely stoked.  “Great!  Let’s make the dough!”

I make the dough.  I knead the dough.  HOW LONG SHOULD YOU KNEAD DOUGH?  Apparently the amount of time listed in the recipe is, well,  kind of a rough estimate.  Well, I really don’t know what I’m doing and after the dough rises I decide to have some fun with it.  Karen was working late so there I am in the kitchen spinning the dough up in the air like an idiot, all the while  humming the theme music to “Molto Mario.”  But immediately I know something is wrong.  It’s not stretching out like it should, and I know what the problem is.  I didn’t knead it long enough.  The recipe makes three pizzas, 12 inches or so each.  Let’s take a look at them one by one:

Pizza #1.  Very nice, the boys helped put on the cheese and pineapple, very nice, we assemble it on the pizza peel and I slide it into the oven and it bakes until (at least some of) the cheese is golden brown and delicious.  There is a problem.  After three bites the boys stop eating.  I taste some, and I really can’t blame them.  They get spaghetti-o’s instead.

Pizza #2.  At this point I was getting very cocky, even though I knew something was wrong.  After pizza #1 was in the oven I decided to assemble the pizza on the counter and then slide the pizza peel under it like “real italians” do.  You can see the results.  A round pizza ends up looking like New Hampshire (or is it Vermont?).

While I was cursing and trying to make pizza #2 edible, the remaining ball of dough siezed up into a rock and I couldn’t save it for the life of me.  I ate pizza #2 to destroy the evidence before Karen came home from work.