Peter's Cooking Diary #18

It has been a little while since my last entry, I have been a bit busy and haven't done as much cooking as I normally do or as much as I would like to do. Today I finally had the time to cook, and even though I have a shortened week at work I wanted to make something, but before we get into that, I had a product that I really like that I wanted to show off a little.

This is real hand made, locally produced butter that is hand rolled into a tube, it comes in a 2 pound roll that lasts me for a long, long time.

This is what the 2 lb roll looks like, and it comes wrapped in a few layers in wax paper.

So I used my  butter on some nice artisan bread with rosemary, cheese, and bacon in it. Because I don't have a toaster I used a pan on the stove top to brown the bead up.

Toasting the bread in a pan on one side, The other side was also buttered.

Toasty golden brown on the first side time for a flip to brown on the other side.

The next step was to slice the brie, which was going to go on top of the toasted bread.

The bread in the pan topped with some nice slices of brie, the pan was then put under the broiler to toast up and melt the brie.

Under the broiler the bread got nice and toasty, and the brie melted so nicely. I let it rest so as to not burn my mouth but it was very tempting. I sliced up a nice crisp and juicy apple to accompany this and it was quite delicious together.

Once again I started my main cooking for the day, as usual it had to start with bacon, I cooked off a whole pound, this amount got drained and then put in the fridge to get added to some eggs during the week.

This amount got added to the crock pot to start the recipe that I was making. I have made something similar to this with pork chops, but this week I made a pork loin roast because that was on sale.

The next step was to cook down some onions in some bacon grease. I added a little salt and started cooking the onions down.

After the onions had had some time to cook and picked up some bacon bits from the bottom of the pan, onions are a great way to deglaze the pan.

To the pan I added the garlic to the pan, and continued cooking the onions down. I cooked the onions and garlic down for a few minutes.

I added flour to the pan to thicken everything up, and stirred it in with the mixture of onions and garlic, and let it good for a few more minutes to get the flour taste out.

After the flour had been cooked in with the onions for a minutes. I then added chicken stock and scraped up all of the bits that remained in the pan.

Once the stock had helped me scraping up the bit in the pan, I added everything to the crock pot with the bacon, and stirred to combine.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake for additional seasoning to the pot.

I added some soy sauce and bay leaves as the final ingredients before the roast and stirred everything together once more.

I always season my meat before cooking it. Salt and pepper on both sides of the roast before putting it into the crock pot.

Once the roast had been seasoned I nestled it into the mixture in the crock pot. The mixture already smelled amazing in the crock pot!

The roast fell apart as I was taking it out of the crock pot showing me that it was definitely done cooking.

I went to remove the fat from the roast, but honestly most of it had melted into the sauce that remained in the pan.

This was the delicious mixture that remained in the crock pot after removing the roast. The recipe states to let it cool and use it as is, but I had other ideas.

I wanted to make a nice onion and mushroom gravy to go on top of the roast. So I heated up the sauce and added some mushrooms and just let it simmer.

The sauce reduced and thickened up nicely, I cooked it until the mushrooms were cooked to my liking and then poured the sauce into a container to cool.

To go with the roast and sauce I wanted to make some mashed potatoes, and to me the Tukon Gold variety is the best to use for mashed potatoes. I bought a 3 lb bag of smaller potatoes to use for this. I sliced them up, some potatoes were halved some were quartered, I just wanted to get them all to similar size so they would cook at the same speed.

I boiled the potatoes in salted water until they were fork tender. I then drained the potatoes.

I added the potatoes to a bowl and mashed them up with some of the same Amish butter that I showed earlier in the post. I like Yukon Golds because they can be mashed up easily and I actually like the texture that leaving the skins on adds to the mixture.

This was the final dish I made with this amount of cooking. Mashed potatoes topped with some roast pork and some onion and mushroom gravy with a side of steamed buttered broccoli. It was delicious and filling.

The Lego Movie

Well it has been a week and a half since I have seen the movie, I normally give myself only a few days to ponder something, my life has been hectic the past week plus so I am just now getting around to writing about the movie.

I really wanted to start by talking about my limited expectations for the movie originally. January and February is usually the dumping ground for movies that did not live up to their expectations, so even though I love Lego, it was something I had limited expectations for at best. The movie however got an enormous boost in my mind because of its elevated rating on RottenTomatoes.com, when I saw the movie it was sitting around 97% positive reviews. I don't go by ratings, but they can definitely make me more interested in a movie that I was on the fence about.

The movie really was everything I thought it would be and much much more. It had great casting of its characters, great imagination behind it, great jokes, great writing, and great twists involved in it. The Lego universe has greatly expanded since I was a kid with all sorts of branded merchandise including Star Wars and DC Comics. A lot of the things I grew up with were generic imitations of these things. The movie has characters that I definitely remember playing with as a kid as well as all sorts of newer additions.

I have to say that Chris Pratt has been on a roll with his movies, starting with being in Moneyball, he was also in Her (my favorite movie of 2013), and was now the leading role in The Lego Movie. I am also really looking forward to seeing him in The Guardians of the Galaxy this summer, which has a ridiculous cast in it!

This movie is honestly for anyone who like Lego or pop culture, its full of references, it has so many jokes, sometimes too many because the laughter has not yet subsided from the last joke, I am sure I missed a joke or two. I am an easy one to make laugh, but I still found this movie's jokes creative.

They honestly did a good job of creating a universe in this movie, as well as explaining how the universe works. The movie pays homage to all sorts of different generations of Lego builders and it even has some deeper cuts including numbers for certain parts that only the most in depth collectors would even get reference to.

I will be very honest and admit that I didn't think The Lego Movie would have a complex plot, but boy was I ever wrong. I did not see a lot of the different things and creative turns coming. My advice is that if you have somehow not seen the movie and still want to, do not read anything about it, I would hate it if any parts of the movie were spoiled for someone, because I really enjoyed some of the different reveals and twists in the movie.

I think that my favorite cameo in the movie would have to be Billy Dee Williams making a quick appearance in the movie as Lando himself. I mentioned liking the casting, and I really mean that, all the way down to the role that Jonah Hill plays in the movie. I could go down the entire cast list stating that everyone did a good job in the movie, but I won't do that. I just wanted to point out both Billy Dee Williams and Jonah Hill in the movie. Also what the movie did with Batman was quite amusing.

Well this is the first and only movie that I have seen so far in 2014, so of course it stands alone at #1:

1. The Lego Movie

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.