So corny, it’s fun(gi)

I was craving something familiar and decided to make egg drop corn soup with ham and shiitake mushrooms.  Wow. It’s been a while and just like I remembered as a kid, but maybe better because of the mushrooms and shallots. I have been in love with shallots lately. They are just so much more manageable than an onion. 

Here is the bowl of warm nostalgia with a twist:

Sauté shallots, ham, and mushrooms in oil until slightly caramelized. Add can of creamed corn, fill empty can with chicken broth. Add an of broth to pot. Beat two eggs in empty can.  Wait until soup is almost at a boil and slowly pour scrambled eggs into pot while stirring. Season with salt and white pepper.

Kettle Corn

 I wanted trying to make kettle corn from scratch with kernels and turns out, it’s super easy. Just don’t try making it in the microwave and you’re good. 

1/4 cup of kernels

3T coconut oil

2.5T sugar

1/2t salt

1. Put everything into a pot, cover with a lid and heat over med/high heat. 2. Shake the pan to keep everything moving and adjust the heat as needed to prevent burning 3. Let the corn do it’s thing and pop away!

Instant Pot Korean Beef Chuck

 I had some leftover beef chuck from a beef carnitas dish I made a couple weeks ago, so I made spicy Korean beef in the instant pot. I served it with brown rice and green beans.  Here’s the recipe: https://damndelicious.net/2018/02/21/instant-pot-korean-beef/  Not bad, but definitely not the best. Could not beat how easy it was to prep though! 

Thai Red Curry

 Continuing the meal prep plus microwave trend...I prepped one of my go-to order at Thai restaurants. 

I grabbed a recipe from McCormicks website and used it as a guide.

Marinate the chicken in the red curry paste and brown sugar. 

In serving container, put in chicken, snap peas, red pepper strips, and bamboo shoots.

Blend up coconut milk and pour into each serving, add 1t soy sauce and a splash of fish sauce.

Top with rice and microwave for four min. Top with fresh cilantro.  Yum!

Scallion Pancake for Chinese Lunar New Year

 Decided to try making some scallion pancakes after the kids raved about scallion pancakes that were delivered. Grabbed a recipe off the web, I feel like this is one of those dishes that is hard to mess up. That being said, I was a little lazy and I messed it up.

Letting the dough relax

Rolling out the dough

Fried and ready to eat. 

Fish Stew

 I tried a fish stew recipe this week and made the stew in the instant pot and ladled it on top of portions of raw cod. 

I haven’t had Old Bay seasoning in sooooo long, that when I went to pull it out of the pantry, I found it had expired in 2015.  I still used it, but increased the dosage. The recipe called for diced tomatoes and I used a can of diced tomatoes.  When the stew was completed, it was very watery.  I ended up fishing (haha) out most of the potato chunks and using an immersion blender to purée the tomatoes and shallot bits. I ended up with a nice, thick stew to ladle over the cod.  Prior to consuming, I microwaved it for 3 min and let is sit to allow the heat to thorough cook the cod.  There were a couple times where I had to pop it back into the microwave for 30s.

This is the second recipe I’ve tried from the book “Dinner in a DASH” by Nancy Hughes.  Pretty good and worth making again!

Rice and peas

I love the concept of Jamaican jerk chicken, but often fear the intense heat that comes with the dish. Well, I found Busha Browne’s jerk seasoning at the local grocery and use it very sparingly to marinate chicken breast tenderloins along with an Island breeze seasoning from my local grocery.  

After referencing a couple Jamaican menus on the web, I noticed that jerk chicken is often served with coleslaw.  Makes sense, the coolness of the slaw would cut back on some of the heat. So, I texted friend for a recipe and I typically hate coleslaw, but this recipe is worth repeating!  I also made up some slaw with Tzaziki sauce because I had some left over.  Wasn’t too bad, makes me wonder if I can make a slaw dressing subbing yogurt for Mayo to create a lower calorie slaw.

 A long time ago, a co-worker introduced me to a dish called rice and peas. It is phenomenal for such a simple concept. I scoured the web and never found a recipe that inspired me to make the dish.  Flash forward a decade and the same friend that sent me the slaw recipe sent me a recipe for rice and peas.  I subbed the pigeon peas for black eyed peas and cooked it all together in the pressure cooker.  It was a little fail in that I burned the rice on the bottom and it didn’t cook.  But my oh my the flavors!!! Here’s a photo of flavor building in process: shallots, tomato paste and bacon.

So, in conclusion, here’s how the meal gets put together and cooked: 1. Cook the rice and peas using rice setting 2. Marinate chicken in zip lock. 3. Make coleslaw dressing 4. Portion rice into meal containers 5. Put chicken on top of rice right before cooking in microwave for 4 minutes. 6. Mix coleslaw salad blend with dressing 7. Top chicken and rice with coleslaw 

Delicious and worth repeating!

Dry, so very dry

Chicken breast is one of the most dry meats ever. It is also ubiquitous in American dishes.  Through purchasing prepared deli dishes, I learned that you can meal prep with seasoned raw chicken and it will be juicy after microwaving the completed dish for 4-5 min. I’ve been doing the same thing with fish and it works great as well.  I’m too scared to try pork or beef for now.

Power Bowl Knock Off

There is a line of frozen power bowls that I've been obsessed with for years now. Because of the pandemic, I minimize trips inside the grocery store. Unfortunately, that means I haven't been able to buy the power bowls for a while. I've been making more food lately because of the meal prep I've been doing in lieu of purchasing the microwave meals from the deli. More about that later. 

 So, the bowl I made was a version of the sausage and barley bowl with sweet potatoes and a creamy garlic sauce. I bought chicken apple saussage and sliced it into coins. Then I cut up a sweet potato into quarters. Heh, this dish sounds rich, doesn't it? Anyway, I cooked barley in the instant pot with two cloves of garlic and chicken stock because I skipped on the creamy garlic sauce.  I put everything into a microwavable container and added a HUGE handful of pre-washed leafy greens.  When ready to eat, I just grab it out of the fridge and microwave for 3 min. 

 Learning for me was to precook the sweet potato. The quick 3 min zap doesn't do enough to cook the sweet potato.  It is still a rock hard hunk of rawness. 

Christmas Brioche

 Yay!!! It was successful. I am so happy after 10+ hours of working on this loaf, it turned out. I watched a video on how to make brioche with way more instructions than the visually aesthetic video from the Food Network. 

This video, although long and not produced well, was extremely informative.

https://youtu.be/RZBuJ4_LdDk

I used this recipe https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-brioche-recipe this time around.  A couple things I did differently from last time. First, I mixed the dough for more than 10 min before adding the butter to develop the gluten a little further.  I beat and slightly flattened the room temp butter before incorporating it into the dough 1 tablespoon at a time. The dough was super soft and goopy and I did not add extra flour. Then I divided the dough and colored it prior to refrigeration.  It was very difficult to mix the dye into the dough because the dough was so soft and sticky. I refrigerated the dough overnight and rolled out each ball of dough. It was still sticky after a night of cooling!  I didn’t work the dough too much, but I stacked the three layers and rolled it up.  I made sure to have the white dough on the outside, so that I could have a good read on the level of browning.  Last time, I put the purple dough on the exterior/ bottom of the stack and it was so hard to tell if the dough was browning or burning.

Then came more patience....Last time I proofed the dough for an hour and it didn’t seem to rise much.  This time, the new directions stated to let the dough rise an inch beyond the loaf pan.  That took about two hours in a very warm spot between 2 crockpots.   I pressed the dough to check to see if it had overproofed.   Nope, the dough sprung back!  This time I diluted the egg wash with water and it helped reduce the amount of browning and cracking in the final product.  Additionally, I baked the loaf at 375F in convection mode for 40 min without peeking.  That was unintentional, I was supposed to check after 20, but I read the directions incorrectly.  So, 40 min later and the timer went off and the top of my brioche was a dark brown. It was just like the picture in the recipe.  I temped the product to be sure and it was above 190F.  Success!!!

And for the cross section:

Yea, okay the big bubble that is in the middle of the loaf bothers me a little, but I’m never going to make this type of bread again (if I did, I would punch down the dough and do a double proof or add milk powder to help even out the cell structure).  What a pain in the butt it is to make.  The result is like eating a stick of flavorless butter. Not worth the effort...but I proved it could do it.  It also looks super cool.

Merry Christmas!

Gingerbread cookies

 I have yet to find the perfect gingerbread cookie recipe.  It is driving me crazy. My first attempt this year yielded a dry and crumbly “dough.” This was Alex’s recipe from forever ago. I had tried it once in the past but forgot what adjustments I made to make it workable. This time, it would not form and I ended up throwing it away. This was after I let it sit and let it hydrate, I added water to see if that would work.... It smelled lovely through. 

*went back and read an old blog post and apparently Alex’s recipe never worked for me. https://mmmpork.blogspot.com/2010/12/you-cant-catch-me.html

Second round was this week. I tried the King Arther gingerbread cookie recipe. The dough came together very nicely. Instead of dirtying a pot, I put everything in a microwaveable bowl and melted the butter using the microwave. I changed around some the spices to match the ratio of the first recipe. As with all the warnings plastered all over the reviews and recipe, the dough was incredibly sticky even after a night in the freezer. The cookies are soft and addictive, especially after some royal icing. I just need to find a recipe where the cookie is just as tasty, but the dough is easier to work with during the rolling process. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/gingerbread-cookies-recipe

Since the dough was so difficult to work, I rolled little balls and made thumbprint cookies.  Wetting my finger tips helped reduce sticking when pressing down the cookies.

Leftover royal icing

 I had a bunch of royal icing left over, so I tinted some colors and went back to decorating.

Ugly sweater snowmen.

Too much time spent on a gingerbread house.

I made these look goooood

 I made some failed sugar cookies for Halloween, so I went back to the Joy of Cooking recipe again. This is such a nice dough to work with, but quite bland. Definitely need to add lemon zest next time.  The shapes were super nice and the lines were crisp. I made royal icing for the first time in a while and this recipe from Sweetopia is amazing. Definitely a keeper. 

https://sweetopia.net/2012/01/royal-icing-recipe-free-illustrated-recipe/

It takes a while to make, but let the mixer do all the work.  I wanted to get vibrant colors and went crazy with the food coloring in the cookie dough and the icing. I am so very pleased with the results.  I’ll have to do this again when I have time/patience. 

Cookies are decorated and waiting to dry overnight.

One eyed snowman with my famous hot cocoa. I’ll have to put together a recipe in the future.