Blackened Chicken

Two weekends in a row.  Not the kind of trend I was looking for.

It was our first BBQ of the year.  I was obviously out of practice.  I lit the coals with the chimney starter, and once they were ready I spread them evenly in the grill and put some new coals on top.  I didn’t want them burning out before the chicken legs were cooked.  What happened next was predictable.  I put the burgers on first, while the new coals were still warming up.  Once they were cooked I started with the drumsticks and wings.  By that time the new coals were burning and the grill was about 5,000 degrees.  I did my best, but they were still horribly burned on the outside and, you guessed it, raw on the inside.

We finished it up in the microwave, and Karen assures me it’s good once you take the skin off.  Whatever.

“Honey, the kids can’t breathe…”

This was supposed to be my first official post blogging the CSA, its food, and how we cooked it.  Instead you get treated to a story actually living up to the name of my blog.

NOTE: While reading this story keep in mind that we had company in the house witnessing the horror unfold.

I don’t just cook dinner, I entertain.  And I’m fairly good at it.  So it was Mother’s Day weekend and Karen suggested going out to eat.  I’ve waited tables on Mother’s Day and I didn’t relish the idea of waiting two hours for a table with a screaming one year old.  That’s a celebration of motherhood, isn’t it?  So I decided to cook up some gourmet food  for my foodie wife instead.  That way she can enjoy a fine meal and appreciate my awesomeness at the same time.  My menu included Steak au Poivre, potatoes, CSA veggies, baguettes, and some creme brulee for dessert.    So the day before I made the desserts (they have to set in the fridge you know) and started the poolish for the baguettes.

What follows is proof that a little knowledge can be dangerous, and ignoring other knowledge can be very dangerous.  I’ve made Steak au Poivre before with success, so I figured that this was in the bag.  The steaks used before were filet mignon, about an inch and a half thick.  This time flatiron steaks were on sale, and these are very thin.  So I decided to increase the temperature in the skillet so that I can achieve a good sear on the outside before overcooking on the inside.  What I forgot is that I was still cooking with butter and olive oil in the pan and we don’t have a hood over our range to suck the smoke outside.

See it coming already, don’t you?  Yes, what you’re thinking is exactly what happened.  The skillet was, in fact, too hot, burning the outside without cooking the inside.  The fat in the pan burned completely off quickly, all the while filling the house with black-pepper-filled smoke that choked the lungs and stung the eyes.  So there I was, opening every door and window in the house to vent the smoke, and it was cold outside that day.

The vegetables used from the CSA on Mother’s Day included chives for the potatoes and broccoli raab cooked via a Mario Batali recipe.  In it you poach it over medium heat for 20 minutes in a little water, olive oil, red pepper flakes, and finish it off with sliced olives.  We didn’t have olives so we used capers.  It looked good, but we only had one third as much green as the recipe called for but I sill used the same amount of pepper.  What resulted was so spicy I couldn’t eat it.

Once the smoke had cleared we sat down in our now 55 degree dining room and I then realized that I hadn’t made anything that the kids would eat.  Jonathan doesn’t like potatoes, the broccoli raab was too spicy and the steaks were too raw rare.  I sliced up some pieces of steak, washed the peppercorns off, and cooked them through in a skillet for the boys.  Jonny had some grapes and they each had a few pieces of the baguettes that turned out well (even though they looked like femurs).

The only thing I hadn’t done is set the house on fire.  So, for an encore I got out the blowtorch and set to work on the creme brulee.

Sorry I didn’t have time to take pictures of the carnage as it was being ruined.  I was trying to keep my house from burning down at the time.

Blogging the CSA

Last year we bought a half share in a local farm through Community Supported Agriculture.  It was really neat going to the farm every Friday afternoon and seeing what had come in that week.  And there were vegetables (or varieties of staples) that we’d never heard of.  The produce was so beautiful that this year we bought a whole share.

This faces us with several challenges.  First, there’s no way Karen and I can eat all that food.  We’ve got to get the boys eating more veggies or we’ll waste a sizable portion of what we bring home.  The other challenge is us.  We realized quickly last year that there were lots of foods that we simply didn’t know how to cook.  It was an eye opening experience.

We’re really looking forward to our first harvest in May, so I asked myself “How could I make this a lot harder?”  My answer was this.  I’m going to blog about the CSA.  The kinds of foods, how we cook them, what goes with them.  It’s a true education about food.  My goals are simple: First, use everything.  No more hearty greens in the fridge to rot because I didn’t know how to prepare them.  Learn, do, consume.  Second, blog about it.  There’s going to be a lot of food, so this one may be as tough as getting the boys to eat their share.

Implicit in this goal is the fact that we’re going to be eating more vegetables this summer.  So we’ll be eating healthier, and hopefully that will also have a positive impact on all of us.

Wish us luck!

My first baguettes

We were committed.  We were making French onion soup.  The recipe called for baguette croutons, and that’s when Karen said the unthinkable.  “Great.  Panera is on the way home so I’ll pick up some baguettes and we’ll take it from there.”

Buy baguettes?

We were going through all this trouble to make this perfect broth from scratch, and she wanted to buy baguettes?  Clearly she’d had too much on her mind lately and she’d forgotten herself.  Good thing I am fearless, and although the only bread I’d ever made was pizza dough I said I’d make the baguettes for the soup.  And if they were terrible, at least I’d get an amusing blog post about how I not only ruined the bread but also the soup by association.  So I went to the authorities on making bread: The flour people.  The lovely folks at King Arthur Flour had this recipe to follow:

Baguette bread by the nice King Arthur Flour people

A great place to start.  Even better, I learned a new word immediately upon reading the recipe.  Poolish.  What’s a poolish?  Apparently it’s a mixture of flour, water, and yeast that’s set overnight on a very slow rise so that it can add lots of good flavor to the bread.  I learned from Alton Brown that slow rise = better flavor.  So how much yeast goes into a poolish?  A pinch.  That’s right, they actually called for a pinch of yeast.  That’s scientific. Fortunately I have the tools required:

So here was my poolish when I mixed it:

And here it was the next day:

Yeah.  I know.  Another couple days and I’d be bowing before it and doing its bidding.  After this part, the recipe is kind of self-directed.  Mix, knead, rise.  Standard stuff.  I found lots of very good instructions on how to roll and shape the loaves on Youtube.  This one was particularly useful:

You know what?  They weren’t as easy to roll as he made it seem.  This dough is sticky and as you peel it off the counter it gets longer and skinnier than you expect it to.  So here they were before they went into the oven:

And after:

I’ve heard people on the Food Network talk about baguettes.  Easy to learn but difficult to master, you know the type?  Well I’m no master, but these will do just fine.  And they were way better than Panera, and do you know why?  Because I made them myself, that’s why.

So, now you want to know about the soup, don’t you?  Well, it turned out great.  French onion soup is supposed to have melted cheese on top.  Notice that the only cheese is a little bit sprinkled on the baguette croutons.  This is, after all, from Cooking Light.  Next time I’ll add more cheese.  Karen found an awesome recipe for sandwiches to go on my awesome bread:

Baguette Cheese Tomato Sandwiches

And we had a perfect soup and sandwich night.

A lot of work? Heck yes.  Worth it?  Oh my, yes.

A labor of love

Karen loves French onion soup.  She always has.  She’s begged me to make some for over a year now.  I never have because I was intimidated by it.  Think of it.  It’s all about the broth.  There your broth stands, almost alone, with no one to hide behind.  And I don’t make my own stock that often.  So I was scared.  But finally I relented.  We found a recipe in Cooking Light’s Soups & Stews cookbook for the soup.

It calls for beef stock and beef consomme.  Beef stock sounds pretty straightforward, but you know me, I over think everything.  And everyone has their own idea for how to make beef stock.  Tom Colicchio doesn’t make beef stock; he makes veal stock.  No wonder his food is so expensive.   In the end I chose a recipe that called for roasting some bone-in meat before boiling it.  We chose beef shanks and oxtails.

Karen made the stock, and truthfully that’s probably why everything else turned out so well.  The next day I set about making the consomme.  This is the entertaining part, since I didn’t read the recipe before setting to work.  It said to blend ground beef, celery, carrots, onion, egg and beef stock well.  Now, when I read “blend” it means put it in the blender.  The mixture went from this:

to this:

It looked like vomit.  I was horrified at this point, so I read in some of my other books, and they say merely to mix everything together.  I can see how that would be better.  But I’ve reached the point of no return so I put the heat to it.  The egg white is supposed to congeal everything together at the top into what they call the raft, leaving clear broth below.  You’re supposed to disturb the raft as little as possible, but poke a hole in it so the bubbles can rise to the surface as it simmers.  Honestly, for a long time it still looked like vomit.  But I finally saw a glimmer of hope with as the raft took shape.

See some clear broth in there?  I was cautiously optimistic.  Now, getting the broth out without disturbing the raft is another issue.  I decided to use a turkey baster and it worked really well.  And to my surprise, a perfectly clear broth emerged.

Hope?  Now I’m excited to make the soup.  Karen takes it from here and makes the finished product.  I’m busy with other things, as you’ll see in the next post.  We were wondering how clear the broth is supposed to be in the finished product, but the recipe calls for corn meal so it’s not going to be crystal clear.  What you see is not the finished product, but merely the soup portion of the meal.  There are also croutons and cheese included in the recipe, but that’s another post.

...to be continued...

An embarrassment

When I’m cooking I talk like my favorite TV food personalities.  My top three are Padma Alton Brown, Mario Batali, and Gordon Ramsay.  So I’m one part food science, one part food history, and one part swearing.  This time it was mostly swearing.

I love soup.  Soup in the winter is an absolute must, and we tend to do it a lot.  Karen got me some soup cookbooks and we’d done a good bit of experimenting, but as is our habit we developed some favorites tended to stick with them.  One such dish is a cream of broccoli soup that even the kids like.  I’ve made it so much that I don’t even need the cookbook any more.  But this time I decided to make some changes to it.

My first change came when I asked myself “If this is a vegetable soup, why am I using chicken stock?”  Now, the answer to that question is simply that the recipe tells me to.  Also we found some very good store brand chicken stocks and we use them with great success.  But I wanted a vegetarian soup for some reason this week so I bought some store brand vegetable stock.  (It was College Inn, in case you were wondering.)

What I didn’t know was that Karen had a quart of homemade veggie stock in the freezer.

I knew I was in trouble the minute I started pouring the stock into the pot.  It seems that in making this stock they use some tomato trimmings or whatnot, giving the stock a red hue.  Doing some math in my head I came up with the following equation:

Red Vegetable Stock + Green Broccoli & Leeks = Brown Soup

I knew that the instant I put the stick blender in this soup I’d be witness to something very unappetizing.  And I wasn’t disappointed.

My next failure came when I went to add the dairy to the soup.  It is a cream soup after all, and the recipe calls for half and half.  And I had bought half and half especially for this soup.  Unfortunately I’d used it all up in my coffee that week.  So in went whole milk.

Yeah.  That’s what I said too.

I’m ashamed to say that I fed it to my kids and told them that it was the same as the nice green soup I usually make, except it’s brown and it’s still good.  They didn’t buy it.  It looked like swamp water and, what’s worse, it was gritty when you did try to eat it.  I still don’t know where all that grit came from; I washed those leeks thoroughly. I could only eat half a bowl, then I decided to strain the rest and “fix” it.  That only made it worse.  After straining it looked more vile than before.  You should be glad I didn’t take any pictures; it would ruin your appetite for days.

Just an excuse to make Jambalaya

I’ve never made Jambalaya before.  It looks very time consuming and labor intensive.  So that was probably why I wanted to see New Orleans in the Super Bowl.

Two years running I’ve successfully picked the Super Bowl winners using only my cooking as the deciding factor.  Don’t believe me?  Fine.  Go read THIS and THIS then come back to me.  Here’s how it works.  I pick a dish indicative of one of the participating cities and make it.  So far, they’ve been (in my estimation) fairly ambitious meals that I’d never made before.  If the dish is awesome, they win.  If it fails miserably they lose.  The goings on during the preparation directly reflect the flow of the game.  In the end we eat and see who has a big parade on Tuesday.  Bored yet?  Let’s get to it.

This year pits the Saints and the Colts.  So OF COURSE I chose Jambalaya.  How creative.  I will be playing the part of current Saints’ star quarterback and former Chargers “washed up” quarterback (remember that, ESPN?), Drew Brees.  My predictions for the game will be in bold, followed by a brief description of how things went in the kitchen.

OFF WEEK:  The Saints adopt an aggressive game plan.
I searched high and low for all kinds of recipes and in the end picked this one from Emeril.  No thanks to the Food Network, whose web search feature seemed to have been broken last week.  I chose it because of the duck.  Yes, I was enticed by the idea of cooking duck in with everything else because I figured it wasn’t enough work all by itself.  Karen wasn’t sure I could pull it off.  I don’t blame her.

SUPER BOWL WEEK: The Saints arrive in Miami and make a change to their offensive attack.
I live in central PA and andouille sausage is not something I can just go and buy.  Well, I can, but it’s frozen and mass produced.  On the other hand, the local butcher shop has homemade spicy Italian sausage.  No brainer.  I know it’s not authentic; I don’t care.

GAME TIME!  FIRST QUARTER: Drew Brees leaves the game and the Saints get behind early.
See, I was up very late the  night before painting the living room, so Karen suggested I take a nap with the baby.  I did and it pushed dinner back considerably.

FIRST QUARTER: Reggie Bush keeps the Saints within reach.
Why Reggie Bush?  Because he’s the superstar game changer who has mad skills.  In our kitchen this is Karen.  While I napped she did all the prep work.  Go look at that recipe and see how much there is.  She cut up the duck, prepped the peppers, onions, celery, garlic, sausage, and cleaned the kitchen.  Sounds like a punt return for a touchdown to me.

SECOND QUARTER: Brees gets back in the game and the Saints slowly start making progress.
I finally got out of bed and started cleaning the shrimp.  I was very pleasantly surprised at how much was already done.   It went very slowly.

SECOND QUARTER: The Saints’ stars score two quick touchdowns.
Dare I say they heat up?  Yes, in goes the duck to brown, followed by the sausage.

The kitchen smells great and the smoke alarm goes off.  There was still a good bit of fat on the duck so I actually drained a little before browning the sausage.  Then the onions, peppers, and celery join the sausage and I’m surrounded by the aroma of sizzling goodness.

HALFTIME: This part is painful.
Yes, the halftime show this year is The Who.  Maybe their walkers will be on stage with them?  No one learned their lessons from the Stones’ halftime show a few years ago or Springsteen last year.  Oh well.  In the kitchen the painful part was filling the pot with chicken stock and cooking the duck for an hour.  Waiting is so hard, but as Alton says “Your patience will be rewarded.”

THIRD QUARTER: The Saints shred the Colts’ defense and take the lead.
Actually this is the part where you shred the duck meat and cook the rice for 10 minutes.   It’s my blog, let me pick the metaphors okay?  Things are shaping up for a very exciting finish.

FOURTH QUARTER: The Colts take the field to tie the game.  All the Saints’ offense can do is watch and hope everything works out.
This is where it gets scary.  The recipe says to return the duck to the pot, add the shrimp, bring to a simmer, cover, and remove from the heat.  Do not open the lid for 15 minutes.   Karen starts to worry that the rice won’t cook.  But I remember Bobby Flay’s jambalaya throwdown and that guy did the same thing.  So I had faith.

FOURTH QUARTER: The Colts tie the game, sending it to overtime.
Now, you would say that this is bad for the Saints, but I say no.  Overtime would cement this as the greatest Super Bowl ever (except for every Super Bowl won by the Steelers).  So, that being said, I opened the lid and tested the rice.  Everything was cooked perfectly.

OVERTIME: The Saints get the ball and score a touchdown almost immediately.  Reggie Bush is named the MVP.
This is where Emeril tells me to add salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste.  I just added a bit of cayenne, and it was AWESOME.   A bit soupy, and we’ll probably use a cup less stock next time, but wow.

Now, why overtime?  It was 9:00pm, that’s why.  A little late for dinner, but it was a winner nonetheless.  And why a touchdown?  Because for the second time in my life Karen didn’t have to add any extra pepper sauce.  That’s my culinary yardstick folks.  And btw, had it not been for Karen doing all the prep work it would have been an epic failure; we’d have eaten dinner at midnight I’m sure.  So she gets the MVP for this one.

So there you have it.  Saints win 36-30 in overtime and Mardi Gras arrives a little early this year.  What about you?  Who ya got?

Three

Ben was three years old yesterday.  Like last year I’m going to talk about some of the things he can do this April that he couldn’t last April.  Benjamin seems much more aware of his surroundings now.  He really notices what’s going on, and most of it entertains him.

Ben is balancing better on his own, taking some steps in his gait trainer, and even balancing on the couch by himself for short periods of time.  

Benjamin is much more interactive with people now.  This started last August when he would sit on my lap and watch the Olympics all evening.  He really enjoys attention, and lets you know it.

Ben is crawling now, and rolling all over the floor to get to toys and other things left on the floor.  It’s become his favorite thing to do.  

 

Ben is doing a little better with feeding.  We’ve been working with the feeding clinic, and they’ve been advising us on how to introduce food, etc.  He’s started opening his mouth for food out of resignation.  It seems we are wearing through his defenses little by little.  

He did, however, like the frosting from his birthday cake.  

Happy Birthday Ben.

Sandlot Hero

Opening day for Major League Baseball is this weekend.  This post is not about that.  It’s about sandlot baseball, whose opening day isn’t until the last day of school.

A few years ago ESPN counted down the top 25 sports commercials of all time, and I’ll never understand how this one wasn’t even on the list:

An egregious oversight.  I identify a lot with that kid.  I loved playing baseball with the neighborhood kids, even though I was terrible at it.  When you’re the youngest they send you to deep right field like this:  “Keep going… keep going…. farther…” and after you cross the street they’ll say “Perfect!  Stay right there and don’t let anything past you!”   

Only four months left until the Little League World Series.

It’s as if you were there…

The school where Isaac takes his piano lessons had their annual performathon.  It’s always fun, we can sit for however long we want and listen to students of all ages and abilities performing on piano, violin, guitar, voice, etc.  We really enjoy it.  But Jonathan gets restless, so this time Karen handed him her point and shoot digital camera.  I always love seeing Jonny’s photographs; it’s like seeing into his brain and how it works.

So there you have it.  A peek inside Jonathan’s brain.  We hope you enjoyed the show.