Peter's Cooking Blog #21

Well its still my birthday as I am writing this, I want to say thank you to all of those who wished me a happy birthday, I didn't do all that much on my actual birthday, other than some cooking and hanging out with a friend, but at this age I don't really need a whole big hoopla. I spent time with my mom, and also got some birthday deals at restaurants earlier in the week.

This is the cake that I made with my mom, homemade whole wheat chocolate cake and also homemade coconut pecan frosting. She did the baking of the cake, and I made the frosting, which I honestly had no idea how to make this specific type of frosting, but its just stirring everything together while making sure you don't cook the egg yolks. I actually really liked the whole wheat chocolate cake, I was raised eating whole wheat, but it added some depth of flavor that I really liked in the chocolate cake.

My friend that I hung out with this evening made me some coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut on top, they are just absolutely delicious and I am lucky to have a friend who would brinf me cupcakes on my birthday.

My cooking today started off wish some green beans, they weren't local or in season at all but I thought they would go really well with the peanut butter chicken that I was making so I created my own recipe to make with them. I cut the stems and any dry ends off of them, and the cut them into smaller pieces.

I put the beans into boiling water for about 3-4 minutes before i flashed them into some ice cold water to stop the cooking. I did this because I was going to cook them in a pan as well.

I let the beans cool off a bit, and then drained all of the water off the beans.

Some oil in the pan heating, and then I added some minced garlic and cooked the garlic for about 5 minutes before adding the beans.

I tossed the beans in the oil and mixed them around with the garlic and let a lot of the extra water cook out of them on medium high heat for about 5 minutes.

I splashed some soy sauce into the pan and covered them and cooked on medium high for about 5 more minutes.

This is the final result, it was kind of a Chinese food inspired recipe, the green beans are not cooked all the way though, but i like them with a little texture left in them.

I cubed up a few pounds of chicken breasts, and stirred them into some oil, soy sauce, and garlic chili sauce. I let them marinate together for about an hour.

This was the peanut butter sauce that I made for the chicken, it was water, soy sauce, and some chunky peanut butter. The recipe called for creamy, but I wanted chunky.

I whisked the ingredients together until they were smooth, or until they were as smooth as something containing chunky peanut butter could be.

I cooked some more garlic in the pan for about 5 minutes. I then added the chicken to the pan and cooked the chicken, stirring every few minutes.

I continued cooking the chicken until it had been cooked all of the way through, it already smelled really good before I added the sauce.

I covered the chicken in the peanut butter sauce, and simmered on medium high for about 10 minutes, I also added some red pepper flake to the pan as well which you can see in this picture.

This is how I served the food I made, I actually used the steamed broccoli to mop up the peanut butter sauce that was left on the plate and it all worked really well together.

Peter's Cooking Diary #20

well it was another week, and I made a few new recipes this week, one of them was very versatile, and they were all things that I grew up eating, so they are a bit of family recipes, although just my take on them more than anything.

Starting the recipe with some finely chopped green onions, I used most of the green and just about all of it but the white, which can be a bit too oniony for what I was using it for.

I am making some tzatziki, and when it comes to cucumbers that I was using I will almost always choose English cucumbers, or seedless cucumbers. They are a bit more expensive than normal cucumbers but I always feel the need to remove the seeds from them.

I chopped the cucumbers finely, and then squeezed some of the liquid out of them. I didn't want to have too much of the liquid in the mix to make everything too loose.

I actually saved the cucumber water/juice or whatever it is called. I drank it with some water and it was very refreshing.

I just used plain unsweetened yogurt. I bet some people would buy Greek yogurt for added thickness, or nonfat to lower the calories a little, but I have no problem with the regular fat plain yogurt.

So this is 2 chopped and squeezed cucumbers, chopped green onions, 2 cloves of garlic chopped as finely as I could, one 32 oz container of plan yogurt, and some salt and pepper.

I mixed all of the ingredients together, and placed it in the fridge overnight, it takes some time for all of the flavors to seep into the yogurt.

To go along with the tzatziki I bought some gyro meat, which is really easy to get in grocery stores these days.

I heated up the gyro meat in some butter, and let some of the liquid and fat in it cook out so it got a little bit more texture to it.

I chopped up some olives and added to the pan as well as a few eggs and scrambled it all together, and cooked it through.

The finished product was a gyro omelet that was amazingly delicious when topped with the tzatziki. My mouth just started watering seeing the picture and thinking about how delicious it was.

I also used my tzatziki as a salad dressing on a salad with some tuna and some olives in it and it was a great and also light dressing that was quite refreshing as well.

So the next recipe starts with some chicken breast that I marinated in some chili garlic sauce, soy sauce, and stir fry sauce that I bought from the store, mixed well and then I let it sit for just a few hours.

I added the chicken to a pan on medium high heat with a little oil and allowed it to cook all the way though, stirring occasionally. When I dumped the chicken in, I made sure to get all of the drops out of the container with it.

Once the chicken was done I removed it from the pan and set it aside and then added in my aromatics to the pan.

The aromatics I used were garlic, ginger and 3 shallots, I used shallots because the green onions I probably would have used did not look very good at the store, but I still wanted some subtle onion flavor.

After chopping all of them and adding them to a bowl together.

I added the aromatics to the pan to cook, and also scrape up and bits that were left in the pan by the chicken.

I cooked the aromatics down until everything was cooked through.

The main veggies I used in my stir fry were broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. I cut all of them to reasonably small size pieces that were about even.

The other veggie I added was some fresh green beans which I removed the ends from.

I added the large veggies to the pan before adding my sauce ingredients.

To create my sauce I added some chili garlic sauce.

One can of pineapple chunks in juice.

and a bottle of stir fry sauce, as well as some water used to rinse all of the sauce out of the bottle.

Once everything was added to the pan, it was a bit hard to stir together, but slowly I was able to combine everything and cooked the stir fry with its lid on over medium heat for about 20 minutes.

Once the stir fry was done this is what it looked like. I actually removed all of the solids from the pan and cooked the juices/sauce down a little bit. I was not serving this with rice so the sauce being thicker would be even better for just straight up eating.

Well I will say that the way I made the stir fry was delicious, it will be a bit too spicy for some, but the pineapple and the sauce all mixed together as a sweet and sour as well as salty and spicy combination that I really liked.

Peter's Cooking Diary #19

This was almost a bit of a request for the first recipe in this, so Kendall this post goes out to you! I told you I would show you how to make fish, and here it is. It really doesn't have much of a fishy smell to it.

This is the type of fish I tend to use, unless I am looking for something specific like salmon. Tilapia is usually available fairly cheap, these come with individually wrapped and frozen fillets, so if you want to cook just one you can.

I prefer to cook a bit more than just one fillet at a time and then I can just reheat something at a later time instead of needing to actually do the cooking. I cut open the individual fillets and then drain out any extra fluid in the package.

I season each fillet with salt and pepper, and then I happen to have some spice blends that I use for fish, but each person can have their own preference. You could just cook it up simply seasoned and eat it like that or with a squeeze of lemon to liven it up a little bit.

In a large pan over medium heat I melted about 4 tablespoons of butter. When cooking with butter absolutely make sure that you don't overheat it, or that butter will burn pretty quickly. I put the seasoned side down into the pan and then seasoned the opposite side in the pan as well.

I cook each side for about 2-3 minutes, and then i removed the fillets from the pan to drain and cool off. I cook them until they are cooked through, and will flake with a fork, but do not fall apart when lifted on its own.

This is 2 lbs of cooked tilapia fillets. I mentioned that I like to make a decent amount of food at once, this was 9 total fillets, 3 sets going through the pan. I wouldn't use the same butter for more than that as it definitely got quite brown by the end.

To do along with the fish I actually wanted to make a bit of an English side dish. I have heard it referred to as mushy peas, but this is my take on a Rachel Ray recipe for mashed peas. I believe the English version is actually made with with more of a split dried pea than a green pea. I used 2 lbs of frozen green peas which I then thawed and drained.

The next step in the process is to smash the peas of course. I use a potato masher, and I mash them until the majority of the peas appear to have broken. You could use a food processor to roughly chop them, but alas I don't have one of those to use.

To start the cooking of this dish I use shallots. Shallots are related to onions, but they are smaller, and have a much milder flavor to them. They would be good for someone who doesn't like too much onion flavor in their food, and they can be found in most grocery stores.

Chopped shallots were added to some melted butter and cooked in the pan over medium high heat until the shallots were translucent.

I added the smashed peas to the pan and stirred to combine, make sure you get all of the liquid with the peas out of the whatever you mashed them in. I cooked the peas and shallots together for about 5 minutes stirring regularly. The peas will start to give up a little of their liquid.

After cooking the mixture for a bit I added one can of chicken stock. I stirred everything together and brought it all to a simmer.

Stirring the peas every few minutes while simmering. I cook the peas until there is only a small amount of liquid left in the pan.

Once enough liquid has been cooked out of the peas, I added some chopped mint and chopped parsley to the pan and stirred it all in. I removed it from heat and let it cool together and made sure the herbs were nicely spread through the pea mixture.

As I have been doing lately, this is a sample meal and how I would put it in the refrigerator individually, I am not sure I will be daring enough to heat fish up at work this week!