Peter's Cooking Diary #17

Well it was another week of delicious cooking for me. The first thing that I cooked is a recipe that I have done before with just one addition. The other thing that I cooked was the first recipe that I used out of my brand new copy of The Joy Of Cooking.

The first thing I cooked this week was my pasta sauce that I cooked back on Christmas with the addition of some cooked ground turkey. Growing up a lot of the time my mom would substitute ground  turkey for ground beef, and to be honest, I like the turkey better than the beef in some recipes because of how much lighter it is.

Added the turkey to a hot pan, with some vegetable oil, I always cook this kind of ground turkey with some oil, because it is very lean and the oil will help it cook through quicker as well as preventing it from burning.

As it hit the pan I used a spatula to chop it up into small pieces, you can chop it into different sized pieces depending on the uses, if this was going to go into a soup, I would leave it a little bit bigger, but for my sauce I want smaller pieces.

As the turkey cooks I chopped the turkey up finer and finer, as well as flipping it over to make sure every piece cooks all the way through.

In this picture you can see even more of the pink cooking out with just a little bit of it remaining at this point.

The last shot of the turkey, cooked all the way though, what I did was I pull it from the heat and I drained off any remaining liquid, as I don't need any additional liquids being added to my sauce.

While the turkey was cooking I was able to prepare the other other ingredients, I like to get the prep work done ahead of time or if I know I will have down time while something is cooking, I will do it then. This is one medium onion, one head of garlic, and one package of basil with the stems removed. I minced the onion finer than normal as I did not want bigger chunks of onion in the sauce, I also sliced the basil into small ribbons.

A few tablespoons of olive oil heated in a pan and then I added the onion to sweat a little bit.

Adding salt when sweating vegetables helps them release more of the liquid within them, it also helps make sure that the dish is well seasoned.

After the onion had been sweating a little while, I added all of the garlic to the pan as well and allow that an the onion to meld together.

The onion and garlic after it had finished cooking. translucent with just the lightest hint of color to it.

I added the cooked and drained the onion and garlic mixture, and stirred to combine everything together.

Added one 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes to the mixture and stirred everything together.

After all of the ingredients had been combined.

Added my fresh basil and some dried oregano to the pot and cooked everything together to for about half an hour to let the flavors combine, I also added a little more salt and some red pepper flake. The cooking would also cook off just a little bit of the water in the tomatoes to thicken the sauce some.

After the sauce had a chance to simmer together and cook down a little, I added some mixed Italian cheeses to the sauce and stirred til it all melted together.

The sauce when it was finished cooking and everything had melted together.

To go under the sauce I boiled up some thin spaghetti, although a tube or corkscrew pasta would have been preferable, the thing spaghetti just happened to be on sale this week.

To go along with the pasta and the sauce I also bought some grocery store garlic bread, it might not be the best, but it is cheap and I enjoy it quite a lot.

So from The Joy of Cooking I had selected to cook was 40 clove chicken, which is something that I had never gotten around to making, but had wanted to for some time. The first thing I did with my whole chickens was to thaw them, drain them, and rinse them to get a little bit more of the salt out of them.

I chopped up some fresh rosemary and mixed it with some Italian seasoning to go onto the chickens.

Per the recipe, I sliced up some lemons and stuffed the chickens with quartered lemons, I was actually surprised that each chicken could take a whole lemon inside.

I rubbed each chicken down with butter and massaged the herbs into the chickens, then I wrapped the whole an in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight, for about 16 hours total, the recipe said anywhere between 2-24 hours.

After cooling for a while, I pulled the chickens out, drained any juices that had accumulated, and and lined the bottom of the pan with a lot of cloves of garlic.

Added chicken stock to the pan per the recipe.

Added a few remaining sprigs of rosemary, and started heating on the stovetop. Once the stock boiled, I covered the pan in foil and baked for 25 minutes.

After removing the foil, I increased the temperature and baked for about 45 minutes uncovered to get the skin nice and crispy.

This was the finished chicken, it was perfectly cooked through with crispy skin. I let it cool down before doing anything with it.

I removed the chickens from the pan and set them aside, I then ran the juices in the bottom through a sieve, the pan has the juices and the bowl has all of the roasted garlic that was made in the process.

It was a bit of a sticky job, but I squeezed this much of the garlic out of the skin. It was quite a bit, but what I did was I mashed it up in with the drippings and made a great roasted garlic sauce.

This is what would remain after I picked both chickens apart, It was a lot of meat that I pulled right from the bone, it was all perfectly cooked through. This was my first time working with whole chickens so I had a fear of somehow undercooking the birds.

I didn't feel like boring everyone with going through the other recipes again, but this is smashed cauliflower, topped with pieces of the chicken, topped with some of the garlic sauce, along with some over roasted broccoli.

I will say this is the best chicken I have ever prepared, although I haven't done all that many things with chicken in the past. I will say the roasted garlic and my digestive system have combined to create one of the most horrific smells known to man, so if you make something like this, beware of what might happen.

Peter's Cooking Diary #16

Well it was another good week of cooking. I made 2 different things this week, the first was a semi-homemade item, and the second was a recipe that I have made before, but being me I made some new adjustments to the recipe and added more things than I had in the past.

So this is one of the few semi-homemade pizzas that I make. I usually tend to start of with a decent quality frozen pizza, this was some type of new diggiorno pizza that was on sale, it was definitely pretty well seasoned to begin with. I have used garlic bread pizzas for this recipe as well, but those can be a little bit salty for people who much not be able to handle that.

I always get weird looks when I talk about liking tuna pizza, but thats what this is going to be a tuna pizza. I used on big can of tuna, drained and flaked over the pizza. This is something that I first tried when my family lived in Austria, but my dad would make it for me even when we had moved back, so now this is my own version of it. 

I sprinkled the tuna pizza with oregano, sliced kalamata olives, and some minced garlic, plus a little sprinkle of red pepper flake for just a little bit of heat.

As I tend to do with frozen pizzas, I added some shredded cheese, and also a little bit of Parmesan cheese for some added flavor as well.

This is the finished product, the pizza is so nice and crispy, I love the briny olives with the tuna and the garlic. This is one of my favorite pizzas to make for a reason.

The next recipe is the chicken enchilada tamale bake from my slow cooker cookbook, the recipe needs 4 cups of cooked and shredded chicken breast, so I used the recipe in the book for making that chicken. Salt and pepper on both sides and then cooking over high heat for 5-7 minutes on each side. After the first side is nicely browned, flip the chicken, add a cup of water and cover. The chicken will get less brown on the second side but will cook through nicely in the pan and stay nice and moist as well.

This is the finished chicken, I always let it rest before cutting into it. I then took the chicken and shredded it with 2 forks, it will increase in volume after shredding and 2 lbs of chicken can go a long way when shredded.

This is the beginning of the base of the recipe, my normal onion and garlic combination, sweating down with a little salt, some cumin, Mexican chili powder, oregano, and some paprika.

Stirred all of the seasonings in and cooked more, also added 2 small cans of mild fire-roasted green chiles with the liquid from the cans as well. I love the flavor that gets added from the peppers they are a much in anything Mexican that I make.

This is my slow cooker with the veggies and spices, corn, creamed corn, black beans, and enchilada sauce. I will probably try this same recipe with some green enchilada sauce at some point in the future. Because I am who I am I had to expand the recipe a little bit so I had to add more sauce, when I wanted more corn and more black beans.

Added the chicken and stirred it all to combine and let it cook away while I prepared the topping for this dish. I wanted to see if I could get the mixture to cook down a little before I added the topping.

This is instant polenta and it is incredibly hard to find for my cooking. The only place that I know of in the area that carries it is Wal-Mart and I like to avoid shopping there as much as I can, but this recipe is so good and I was craving it so I had to bite the bullet and go in to buy it.

Added water and salt to the polenta, and then microwaved it while covered. The polenta isn't quite instant but it does cook up really quickly.

Once the polenta had cooked long enough to thicken, then I added butter and cheese to complete the polenta topping.

Added the polenta topping to the top of the mixture and I covered for 4 hours. The final product didn't look pretty enough for a picture, but to be honest, I don't care what something looks like as long as it tastes good.

It was a little soupier because of my tampering with the levels of everything in the pot, but it tasted amazing.

In the next edition I will be cooking my first recipe out of The Joy of Cooking, and it is also a recipe that I have been wanting to make for a long time.

Food Adventures: S.A.L.T. in De Pere Brunch Edition

Well I wrote about my previous trip to S.A.L.T. here, but my friend discovered but they also have a brunch menu, so we decided to go back and try the brunch menu as well.

This time I was able to get a pretty good picture of the menu that if you click on will get larger and is pretty readable. We decided to order a few different things and to share. I will say that I enjoyed that there are 2 dishes that are references from The Lord of the Rings in them, and there was also poutine, but I somehow didn't get poutine, this time.

This was the truffle fries on the menu. I have had some things with truffles in the past that, so I wasn't too eager to try them, but my friend wanted to get them, and its hard to not want to at least try fries of any kind. I liked them quite a bit although I made sure not to fill up on them. The fries were nice and crispy and were more of shoestring fries, which probably helped get that level of crispy. There was a little Parmesan cheese, parsley, truffle oil, and a poached egg on top. The truffle oil was not overpowering, it was more just the essence of truffle. The best fries were the one that got some of the yolk on them.

This was my main dish, chilaquiles. It is a dish that I have seen on all sorts of different shows on tv and always looks so good, but it was something I had never seen on a menu before. I know a low of what I had seen on tv was done with a green chile pork, but this dish was cheese grits on the bottom, seasoned tortilla chips that had a little kick to them, slow roasted pork, queso sauce, minced onion, cilantro, and a poached egg. I didn't mention the tomatoes because I am not a big fan.

This is a shot after removing the tomatoes, and popping the yolk on my egg that made all of the other elements of the dish even more enjoyable. I actually said during the meal something along the lines of "Egg yolk is the best sauce."

A shot that has a bit of the grits in it, they added such a nice creamy element to the dish along with the spice, the slight sweetness, and the richness of the egg. I really enjoyed all of this dish, as I have pretty much everything at S.A.L.T.

Evidence of how much I enjoyed the dish, I have definitely made a habit of doing that at this restaurant.

The other dish we shared was the pastrami hash, the eggs on top are actually duck eggs, I actually didn't notice any flavor difference while eating, but looking at them now, they are bigger, with really big yolks in them. I think I have definitely broken the record for uses of the word yolk in a blog post here. The salad was good, it was mixed greens with a little bit of beet in it too, the salad was good as was the hash. The potatoes had a good crunch on them, and the pastrami was in good sized chunks also with a good crisp on them. It was another. great trip to S.A.L.T.