The Sauce Thickens

The cooking done during this post all occurred two weeks ago. To continue the Week that Ate Normality I made Maki's Miso-peanut Udon, and tried the sesame sauce again too. Oh, and Kale chips. I made Kale chips. The highlight has to be the miso container though. It's so chic! I was a little worried because it's Korean and not Japanese, and because it was right next to the red pepper paste and in the exact same packaging (only brown, not red). I will be saving this container and, even if I decide I hate miso, I will probably be going back to the store to buy more. And red pepper paste, I wanna a red lid too.

Recipe Bibliography:

       The dinner, as previously mentioned, was courtesy of Maki's first foray into publishing, while the Kale chips were inspired by Popartichoke (don't you just love that name? And her banner! . . . oh yeah, food).

Recipe Breakdown:

              The Miso-Peanut Sauce:

        This was a lot of fun to make, especially since it required an extra outing to my local International grocery store. How lucky am I that there's one located not ten miles from my house? The exotic ingredients purchased were Dehydrated Dashi Stock, Mirin, and Miso. The recipe also called for sake, but I couldn't find that in the store and I'm not really comfortable going up to people and asking where they keep their liquor. But, since I love the idea of cooking with alcohol (It makes me think of Christmas . . . weird? Yup) I substituted it with some white wine my mom had on hand.
     The preparation for this dish was pretty easy and straight forward. Even with my haphazard way of doing things (not measuring, kinda measuring, throwing in purple onions for green, etc.) things came together really well. The sauce is really strong though. Really. Reeeeeeeeaaaaaally. I was surprised by how spicy it was, not hot, but with a definite kick. The effect of the ginger, I guess, since the miso didn't taste spicy (are you allowed to eat miso raw? I couldn't help it. Strangely, it reminded me of cheese. Is it fair to call it bean cheese?). On top of the spicy notes there was the overwhelming taste of miso. Not overwhelming in a bad way, but as an objective measurement. The sauce, as suggested by its name, tasted like miso It was a little much for me, but I loaded the sauce on my udon too. Because the miso flavor completely masked the peanuts (unless you bit right into one) I'm assuming this sauce was another victim of my slap-dash cooking. Since the miso came in (the cutest ever) 15 oz. container I didn't bother measuring it out, but just scooped what I thought was enough into my mixing bowl. Culinary reminder: less can be added too, but more cannot be taken away.
  
            The Sesame Sauce:

       This time I actually measured, and things turned out a lot better. My dad seems to like this sauce (it was he who asked me to retry it) so this will probably come up in my kitchen again. As a side note, I served it with kale this time.

           The Kale Chips

      Yum. Baked leaves. I've actually seen this on a few sites, but when I saw it on Popartichoke I caved and put it on my mental list. I made two batches of this. This first highlighted why klutzes should not be in the kitchen. I drowned half the kale in olive oil and put so much salt on the leaves that they looked like a kid's crystal growing experiment after it was done baking. Because they were unevenly oiled they cooked at different rates, and of course the majority of them were to salty too eat. The surviving few, though, were intriguing enough to try again, only this time I grabbed a handful of that kale and rolled it in bacon drippings. Oh yum! Because these were oiled – er, greased – evenly they baked at the same rate, resulting in a light, crispy chip that disappeared in your mouth (my dad ate one and assumed it had been fried. I'm taking this as a complement). They tasted slightly of kale, but mostly of nothing, with the second batch having faint bacon overtones. My mom, and my aunt, voted them a success, but I don't think I'll be making them very often. I did let my chips sit in the hot oven longer than the recommended ten minutes, but then, I probably had more grease to cook off.

Winter Squash "stuffing"

It's finally starting to warm up around here, after weeks of threatening to snow but never quite getting on with it. Inside the kitchen, however, warm, stomach southing,  dishes are still being made. Monday the marked the beginning of Dinner Gone Wild. Exotic ingredients and unusual flavor combinations will be the norm this week. The menu was Winter Squash Bread Pudding, Beef Tips with Onion and Sage, and Blanched Spinach with sesame sauce.

Recipe Bibliography:

The pudding was inspired by the guidelines found in Urban Pantry, the steak bites were completely winged, and the sesame sauce was courtesy of Maki's Just Bento Cookbook.

Recipe Breakdown;

               The Pudding
       The basic idea for this was "pudding texture, dinner taste." To achieve this I used a bag of seasoned stuffing bread cubes (found stuffed in the back of the pantry, score!), two Acorn squash, sage, eggs, and milk. I infused the milk with the sage, just 'cause I like making things more complicated. Since the crumbs I used were already heavily seasoned I doubt this really made an impact on the actual taste of the dish. But it made me feel like I was cooking. The squash was very work intensive. I scrapped out the seeds, cut it into eighths, and cut the shell off before cubing it. I would love to try either pureeing it or just grating it next time (if I had a mandolin, maybe a thin julienne) so that the squash would have more of a chance to meld with the other flavors. The dish as whole turned out really well, though, so I'm putting this in my files as "worth perfecting." The only thing that really stood out was the name, no one seemed to like the idea of eating bread pudding for dinner ( or at any other time, which is just insanity. Bread pudding is awesome. End plug for Bread pudding/) I found myself switching to "squash stuffing," just to avoid the wrinkled noses.

             The Beef Tips
       This was really simple. I chopped up a purple onion lengthwise (wait, aren't they supposed to be red?), let it cook with some minced sage for a few seconds with a teensy bit of olive oil, and then added two sirloin steaks cut into bite sized pieces and seasoned with salt and pepper (the smallest mouth in the house belongs to the three year-old, though you wouldn't know it to hear her talk). I splashed a little bit of rice wine vinegar and red wine vinegar into the pan and let the meat cook until rare before adding some milk and cornstarch for a bit of a gravy. Just a little though, it's still too cold to go swimming.

         The Spinach and Sesame
    The spinach was really easy to cook, nothing to talk about there, just stuck it in some water and boiled. But the sauce stymied me. I used Tahini, because that's what my ethnic grocery store sold (no nerigoma, oh well). The sauce ended up having a near-perfection fore-taste and a bitterly-off aftertaste. Yuck. Edible, enjoyable even, but not a success. Since I sept-tupled the recipe I am willing to blame it on my math. Maybe the bitterness was because I put into too much tahini, or not enough sugar?

Something to Chew on

All really good plans are either completely winged or well researched. We've chosen the third approach. Thursday we went to our local library and picked up cookbooks that seemed to line up with the kinds of meals we'd like to start serving, and whatever nutritional books we could find that weren't promising to help you loose weight in just ten days. We lugged them on home and started to read. So far I've skimmed  through The Flexitarian Table, which has gorgeous photography, and helpful links to places like Local Harvest. The author, Peter Berley, also organizes his recipes by season, which is something I love, and has his dishes grouped into meals. The idea of having meals in a cookbook is pretty radical, I think, because the essence of having a dinner versus any-old-thing-slapped-on-a-plate is that all the components go with each other. Another plus for Berkly is that, as his title implies, all of the meat/fish in his recipes have a vegetarian alternative provided right there, and quite a number of his dishes don't use that much meat anyway. Now, we are nowhere near vegetarians, but Theo and I both agree that too many of our meals rely heavily on meat to pull them through. Learning how to make delicious, filling combinations of rice, beans, vegetables, and nuts that don't leave us longing for steak is one of our many goals.
                  This position is echoed, if I may segue into another book, by Marion Nestle's What to Eat. While the title is a bit off putting, Nestle's basic philosophy is "If you eat less in quantity but more in variety you'll be healthy." Her writing style is superb, and she is open and un-defensive of her own stance on certain political, rather than economic or nutritional, decisions that must be made by the cook.
Her book is cleverly arranged like a supermarket, taking you from produce, and concepts like COOL (country of origin labels) and Organic, to dairy, meat, eggs, frozen foods, and so on.  Each section gives you things to think about – like the origins of certain foods (margarine was invented in France under Napoleon III's orders) and how they're made – and she provides explanations of the scientific mumbo-jumbo that often causes our eyes to twitch when we're shopping. It was very encouraging from an "eat healthy" perspective, since I know my family has a pretty varied diet already, and Nestle firmly believes that, apart from portion size, "it's the mix which is most beneficial and most protective"(pg. 54), not any single wonder food. The flip side of this is that there nothing in the grocery store is going to kill you as long as your overall diet is healthy. This was an interesting book to read (I'm only on page 180 of 500), and a nice follow up to Food Inc., which my dad had us watch a week ago. Between these two sources, and because, let's face it, I'm shopping with my parents money, I think I'm going to try and shop politically and then economically. After all, when it comes to eating, it's probably best to put your money where your mouth is.
       Also on the nutrition theme, my sister skimmed Feed Your Child Right and Nutrition for Dummies, and was unimpressed with either of them. She did enjoy the Redwall Cookbook however, and the wine guide in the back of Easy Menus for Dining In (though she thought that the overall effect of this book was a bit much). I haven't flipped through the latter two yet, but I'm looking forward to them. We have a week or two to read them, because half of the family is evacuating to Ocean City for a fortnight. It'll be interesting to see if we're motivated to cook when it's just us at home.

Where we've been

Hello, Theo here. As Sixer wrote yesterday, we actually did an experiment last month where we planned and cooked dinner for a week. There were a lot of factors involved in the decision but mainly, we wanted to eat on a regular schedule, and we wanted to feed 9 people. To that end we formed a working 'meal template' that looked like this:

Monday : Pasta ( With red sauce / Green spaghetti )

Tuesday : Meat with a veggie side

Wednesday: Pasta ( Green spaghetti/ White sauce )

Thursday : Meat with a veggie

Friday : New recipe

The idea was to have a set list of easy-to-prepare meals that everyone would eat. I personally don't cook much, and spaghetti is generally my go-to dinner option. I like the idea of having a set pasta day and spicing it up each week by simply changing out the type of sauce used. I'm hoping we'll continue to keep 'pasta day' in our new schedule this month, but I'm ready to admit that twice a week - while convenient - might not be too appealing on a long-term basis.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are 'meat and veggie' days, this way we can go down a list of meats and sides and mix and match to make an endless verity of meals. I'm partial to combinations of steak and mashed potatoes, chicken and steamed broccoli, and pork and corn, myself.

While continuing to cook a set rotation of meals that are tried-and-true, that we know will taste good and that every one will like, (or at least eat), We knew we wanted to constantly expand our repertoire of culinary feats, so we decided to make Friday 'experiment day', where we could try new things without having to worry about either completely failing, or making something so unusual that the kids refuse to touch it. The beauty of doing this on Friday's is that, if it turns out inedible, we can fall to our back-up plan: "leftovers."

For me, the highlight of our week of experiments was definitely Thursday. We had breaded pork and roasted vegetables. The vegetables were mostly a failed experiment. At the time our oven was broken, so I tried to roast turnips, potatoes, & sweet potatoes, on the stove in our cast iron skillet. In addition to salt & pepper, I also added in some chicken stock which turned out to be a mistake. The chicken stock made all of the vegetables soggy. The vegetables also didn't all cook at the same rate, and cutting them to be the same size didn't really help much with that. Even though they weren't perfect, they turned out well enough that I'll want to try them again for sure.

I didn't used a recipe for the breaded pork, or write down what I did, but it was very simple. Basically I just coated the pork chops with flour & salt and fried them in a skillet for 3-4 minutes on each side. Yum!

The other meal I wanted to mention was Wednesday's Green Spaghetti.

To make this dish, you put chopped spinach in a blender with some garlic, parmesan cheese, and 1 cup of either milk or stock. (I used chicken stock), and then pour it over the pasta. The family liked it, so I have to view it as a success, but I thought the flavor was very bland. I'm thinking about tweaking the recipe in the future, either adding more garlic, or maybe some vinegar or lemon juice to give it an extra twang.

The Mission

It started last month. Theo got this mad look in her eye and I knew I was in for something crazy. Theo is the oldest, which naturally makes her more insane, but this time her idea turned out to be pretty logical. We, being two recent college grads, are still used to having dinner – and the rest of the refrigerator – on our own terms, but living at home makes this rather difficult. However, my sister hypothesized, if we made dinner for the family we could serve whatever we wanted (well balanced meals) at whatever time we wanted (five-ish). I had to agree this sounded, well, sound, but it wasn't until my sister mentioned that this might make mom more understanding when we spent our mornings knitting and watching Doctor Who that I really saw the genius of her plan. We did one test week and it worked out great, now we're ready to try it for real.

The Goal: to plan and prepare a tasty, well balanced meal every weekday for nine people.

The Perpetrators: I, the English major with a love for division and a weakness for baked goods, and my sister, Theo, the knitting linguist who frequently forgets to eat – yes, even baked goods.