Recipe #4: Crispy Braised Chicken Thighs

I cooked this two or three weeks ago, but kept putting off blogging about it because I was so "meh" about the result. It was the first recipe I attempted that I have no desire to repeat, which makes me sad, as it's from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home cookbook. I sort of expected to be the most awesome thing I'd ever cooked just because of the Keller magic.

I don't think I cooked it wrong. I don't think the recipe is bad. I just think that Crispy Braised Chicken Thighs with Olives, Lemon, and Fennel isn't quite my thing. I'd never eaten fennel before. At least, I'd never cooked with it, and can't recall eating it in a restaurant. I'm glad I've tried it, but I'm not wild about the flavor. The overall effect of the recipe was both bland and bitter, though my husband did say the house smelled like a fine French restaurant when he came downstairs for dinner that night.

Anyway, here are the ingredients:



And here's the final result:



It looks kind of pretty, at least.

Recipe #3: Beans

A brief post this time, since I forgot to take pictures and this was a pretty simple recipe anyway.

My attempts to work with dried beans have historically gone poorly. Cooking the beans isn't hard, but the recipes I've tried have typically involved long lists of ingredients with endless chopping and rooting through the spice cabinet...only to turn out bland, not worth half the trouble.

One of my vows with this project was to actually use the cookbooks I've bought or received as presents the past few years. This weekend I decided it was time to break in The Pioneer Woman Cookbook, which is very much a home cook's cookbook. I'm still working up the courage to try Keller or Bourdain for myself.

I was going to try one of the cubed steak recipes, but I was sufficiently daunted by what Amazon Fresh was charging for the 2 lbs the recipes called for that I decided to try beans instead. And they were very basic beans. I just simmered four cups of pinto beans with some bacon, and during the last 20 minutes stirred in salt, pepper, chili powder, cayenne pepper, and garlic powder until it tasted good. I then served it with cornbread and salad, with assorted additional toppings--salsa, sour cream, cilantro, red onions, cheese. And it tasted better than any of the elaborate bean recipes I've attempted in the past.

Recipe #2: Pork Wellington

My husband and I have long been fans of Alton Brown and Good Eats for his geeky approach to food and cooking. Most of his recipes are too labor-intensive for everyday use in a busy two-career family, but they're fine for a weekend, or even the occasional evening when the cook has a lot of energy and neither of us has to bolt off to an evening activity.

But I am not a fan of Beef Wellington. At least, the one time I had it, at a local English restaurant, I thought it was heavy, too rich, and kinda gross. And really, now that I think about it, I only really love beef when it's grilled or pan-seared rather than roasted.

Roast pork, however, is delicious when done well. It may just be the Southerner in me, but I think pork is the best meat out there. (OK, maybe it's second to venison, but how often can you even get that?) Good bacon and proper Southern pulled pork barbecue with tangy red sauce are pork at its finest, IMHO, but it's all good. So when a recent Good Eats episode featured Pork Wellington, I knew I had to try it despite how dauntingly complex it looked for a pasta, soup, and grilled sandwiches cook like me.

Here are the ingredients, except for the egg for the egg wash:



Not a long list, but as you'll see if you follow the recipe link, it's multi-step and complicated. At least, it's time-consuming and superficially complicated. But if you clear plenty of work space, lay out your ingredients beforehand, and follow the recipe methodically, it's actually kinda easy. Here's what it looked like when I pulled it from the oven:



And here it is sliced on a plate (unfortunately the pastry fell apart on me--I should've cut bigger pieces), alongside mashed sweet potatoes:



It's absolutely delicious. Like, easily in the top ten tastiest things I've ever cooked in all my 39 years on this planet. I'll definitely try it again. Because I am a great big geek, I might even have a Waterloo dinner on June 18 and serve this as the main course and get a Napoleon from Le Fournil for dessert.

Which reminds me, I did throw together a dessert this time around. I had an extra sheet of puff pastry thawed, since I wasn't sure just one would be big enough. So I just laid it on some parchment paper on a baking sheet, sliced some apples onto it, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and baked for 15 minutes:



And it was delicious! If this keeps up, I may have to stop saying I'm a bad cook.

Recipe #1: Braised Vegetables with Prosciutto, Bacon, or Ham

I've decided to revive this blog to track one of my New Year's resolutions: to try 24 recipes outside of my comfort zone in 2010.

Why the resolution? Because I realized I keep buying cookbooks that I never cook from and watching cooking shows without trying any of the recipes and techniques I see on TV. I've always liked to cook without being all that good at it, but lately busyness and trying to please my 5-year-old has limited what and when I cook. It's not hard for me to find recipes outside my comfort zone because it's down to pasta (at least I do tasty homemade sauces), grilled cheese, baked potatoes, and assorted convenience foods.

Hence, 24 recipes outside my comfort zone, focused on but not limited to cookbooks I've acquired in the past two years. They can be main dishes, desserts, side dishes, whatever, just as long as they use techniques or ingredients that stretch my limited culinary skills and repertoire.

I picked 24 because it's a manageable number. When I cook on weeknights I rarely have time to experiment (or even spend more than 30 minutes getting dinner on the table), but I also cook on Saturdays. So two Saturdays of each month, I'll try something new.

Recipe #1 was Braised Vegetables with Prosciutto, Bacon, or Ham from Mark Bittman's Food Matters cookbook. It's a flexible recipe, allowing you to choose any smoked pork product or leave out the meat altogether, to select two pounds of any vegetables that strike your fancy, and to use stock, wine, beer, or water for the braising liquid. Here are the ingredients I used:



(I borrowed the cast of characters shot from the Pioneer Woman, and I'm going to continue using it, since it puts your mise en place in place.)

That's roughly half a pound each of green beans, kale, sweet potato, and carrots (yes, I used pre-cut baby carrots, so sue me), bacon, onion, red pepper flakes, rosemary, olive oil, and an inexpensive Washington riesling for the braise. (I do try to support the local wine industry.)

From start to finish, the recipe took about an hour, most of it spent either chopping or waiting for the veggies to soften enough to eat. Up until I took the first bite, I wasn't expecting much, since it didn't have that much of a smell. Happily, I was wrong. The riesling braise tasted like a sweet, tangy vinaigrette, and the vegetables I chose complemented each other well. My husband agreed, so this one is a keeper. The only fault I can find is that some of the carrots were a little too crunchy, but if I'd let it go any longer the other veggies would've been overcooked.

The 5-year-old, however, took one bite apiece of carrot and green bean and made a disgusted face. Kid has become entirely too finicky.

Here's the finished, plated product:



(I'm also working on some health and fitness resolutions, but they don't currently involve following Mark Bittman's Food Matters program, as I'd intended when I started this blog before assorted health and personal issues drove me off course. I may blog about them, too, if I feel so inclined. But they're all about making incremental changes, and I don't think they're interesting enough to write about yet.)

8/11/09 - A Bad Day

One of the challenges of this eating plan is taking enough food to work to keep myself from getting hungry, going down to the gift shop, and getting potato chips. I go in every day with my messenger bag bulging with tupperware containers, and, frankly, it gets annoying. I feel so bulky. It'd be fine if I drove to work and parked right by the building, but I'm a good environmentalist and I take the bus, doing my best not to take more than one person's space.

I keep experimenting with how to time lunch to minimize the need to snack. Lately I've been pushing it later and later, around 1:00 or 1:30, hoping that'll keep me from getting hungry around 3:00, like I usually do. Problem is, it's not working. Apparently I'm just wired to get hungry then no matter what or when I ate earlier. And now that I'm eating a smaller, less fatty breakfast, I can't go till 1:00 or 1:30 without getting hungry. So I eat the snack I'd planned to eat in the afternoon around 11:00 or 11:30, and then try to do without an afternoon snack, or just eat fruit. And it doesn't work, and I end up with potato chips. Ugh.

So, just to keep myself honest, here's what I ate today, plus my probable dinner:

Breakfast
Muesli with almond milk
Dr Pepper

Snack
peanut butter crackers

Lunch
Leftover pasta
Cucumber slices
Coke (I meant to get a Diet Coke, but none of them were cold, and nothing tastes more disgusting than warm diet soda. And yes, I could and should have just drunk water from the office cooler.)

Snack
Blueberries (which didn't cut into my hunger AT ALL)
potato chips
Butterfinger Bar

Sigh. Fail. They didn't even taste that good

Dinner
Macaroni & cheese
Banana

August 10

So I've decided to get back to this blog. I'm due for my annual physical in about two months, so I'm going to track what I'm eating to keep myself on the plan. I want to see if two months of improved eating is enough to make at least a tiny dent in my triglyceride and cholesterol numbers.

Don't know how much I'll comment beyond listing what I eat, because that's why this blog grew cobwebs in the first place--when I'm already spending more time preparing food and cleaning up, blogging in detail was too much of an added burden. But maybe I'll list good quick recipes as I discover them. That could be useful to someone other than me.

Breakfast
- Bowl of homemade muesli with almond milk
- Dr Pepper

Morning snack
- Peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat

Lunch
- Pasta w/ salami and cherry tomatoes
- Carrots
- Banana
- Diet Coke

Afternoon snack
- Brown bag popcorn with a little butter and salt

Dinner
- Salad with Italian sausage, red onion, and bell peppers
- Bread

Starbucks
- Tall Earl Grey Tea Latte
- Coffee Cake

Two more days, and thinking of rewards

So, the last two days haven't been quite so busy. Sunday was a Church of Baseball day (i.e. we had tickets to the Mariners and therefore skipped out on the Church of Presbyterians). We slept pretty late--the one thing a cloudy summer day is good for, IMHO--and I experimented with a smoothie. I used farmers market blueberries and nectarines, strawberries from our Amazon Fresh delivery, vanilla yogurt, a few chunks of ice, and a smidge of maple syrup to up the sweetness, since the nectarines were tart and the strawberries from California. Nothing against CA, but to me strawberries need a little sweetening unless they're local. It was OK. I need to dig out the blender instead of using the food processor, because the nectarines were a little too chunky, and food processor bowls aren't designed for pouring into a glass. I then made some toast with the honey oat bread from the farmers market, because I just don't feel like I've had a meal unless I have something to chew.

There's really no way to stay on this eating plan at Safeco Field. Not in the 300 level, at least. But since the Food Matters plan isn't meant to be absolutist, I got my Polish dog and french fries and enjoyed them thoroughly. Kidd Valley makes some tasty fries.

Last night was my husband's turn to cook dinner, and since the basil from our container garden has grown lavishly this year, he made pasta with chicken and homemade pesto. The basil was tagged as sweet basil, but we think it had to have been mislabeled and was really lemon basil based on the flavor. Very delicate and lemony compared to other homemade pesto I've eaten, but good.

At 10 PM, after I'd finished the laundry and written my 1000 words on my novel for the day, I got back in the kitchen and prepped breakfast for Monday and Tuesday--a whole wheat blend couscous with raisins, almonds, dried cranberries, and a bit of maple syrup--and Monday's dinner of broccoli salad, your basic Southern potluck recipe but with 1/3 the bacon the recipe called for. I knew I wouldn't have time to cook after I got home from work tonight. My critique group meets on Mondays, and this week we met at a member's house instead of our usual Starbucks, so I had to drive farther than normal.

Today was the first day I really got hungry. The breakfast couscous and banana had worn off by 10:30, despite my not eating them till 8:30, so at noon when I stopped for my lunch of weekend leftovers, I was desperate enough to go ahead and buy my one junk food snack for the week, a bag of potato chips. Sigh. I was hoping to hold out till Friday and make it a treat. But now I know to either bring more food or to go to the cafeteria for some fruit or wholegrain cereal or something. Taking food along can be a challenge, since I commute by bus and have limited fridge space at the office. That said, my afternoon snack of a peanut butter sandwich (I used unsweetened peanut butter and whole wheat bread) and a nectarine proved satisfying, and the broccoli salad was delicious at dinner. We had snacks at writers group, reasonably healthy ones, and I ate them...in moderation. What a concept!

I've decided that if I stick with this plan for a month, I'm going to buy myself enough writing and research books to have a full bookshelf devoted to my writing. (I'm about 1/3 of a shelf away, so that's reasonable if I go bargain hunting.) I've been trying to get to that full bookshelf all summer, and I really thought my Powell's run when we were in Portland last week would put me over the top, but I came up just short.

Yes, I'm a geek. I accept that about myself.

Watch this space in the next few days for thoughts on healthy convenience foods and maybe a few more pictures.