That is excellent. Its awesome that your are doing this for your kid. So many go into adulthood and dont even know how to make boxed Mac and Cheese. Its a great way to bond with your son and it gives him an important adulting skill.
High praise from me too, man. Seriously, I had to learn just about everything I know on cooking well after leaving for college and further into adulthood. Secondly, chicken roasting is also such an awesome dish as it is frequently something that feeds the whole family for dinner. Great work, Christien.
Can I recommend a next step? Use those roasting juices. You can make it into a very easy second training for him, “sauce 101.”
Drain off excess fat
Add some aromatics if you have them (would be a good introduction to thyme and rosemary)
Warm the juices back up in the pan
Deglaze with something (a little stock, some dry white wine, a touch of lemon juice, even a little extra water)
Scrape that roasting pan
Reduce
Take off heat
Add a pat of butter and stir, stir, stir
Check the taste for seasoning, add salt/pepper if needed
Then drizzle it over the roasted chicken or serve in a small dish on the side.
Sauces are so flavorful it’s like magic when someone first makes one and tastes it. Like a lightbulb going off in their head, they will wonder why they can’t have sauce with -everything-. And honestly, why can’t we?
I freaking LOVE that you brought this up, and that you provide an easy-to-follow set of instructions. The making of a proper sauce is sometimes a weak area in my cooking.
As we were doing the resting phase with the chicken breasts, and juices accumulated, and we started to clean out the pan while the meat rested, I explained how you can use these juices to make a sauce to go with the chicken. His eyes grew a little wide at the possibilities. I told him about the rosemary bushes in the front and back yard and how we could use them to give the sauce some flavor.
I figure it will take a few more rounds for a lot of this to really land–he is a teenager after all–but I love sharing this with him. He prefers to bake dessert stuff with me, but I like teaching the dinner stuff as well, because like you I taught myself most of this after leaving home.
I’ve made this chicken for him many times, but his reaction was wholly different this time. He tasted the first slice and went, “Oh my god that’s so good!”
Well, yeah. Dude. That’s because you made it.
Thanks for the advice, Skipper!
-xtien
This is actually a really good point, and one I find surprising from this vantage point. You’re totally right.
People don’t read directions. And by “read directions” I mean they don’t take them in. They can look at a box of Mac and Cheese, to use your example, and then turn to you and say…“What do we do next? Do I leave the heat all the way up?”
So the other thing I’m doing is slowly teaching him how to read recipes. How to pay attention to them the way a gamer pays attention to the rules. Because the steps are important. Even on a box of Mac and Cheese.
He’s getting it, it just takes some repitition.
-xtien
“Son, when you start dating, there is no better way to win someone’s heart that cooking them a fantastic meal. Remember that.”
Hey, a pan sauce is super easy and adds soooooo much to a dish. And as things go, it isn’t far off from understanding other sauces that can be added later on.
I’m being completely serious, I wouldn’t doubt he may ask if he can -drink- a roast chicken pan sauce after tasting it.
You know what goes great in mac and cheese? Diced roasted chicken. :)
This made me smile.
My first waiting job was at a country club with a very well-regarded restaurant for the area. I started in what they called the Mixed Grille, which was the less formal bar/restaurant space, and worked my way over to the Big Deal Dining Space, first as a back waiter, then as a lead waiter. It was a good experience.
One of the things that happened was I started to see this weird division in how the front of the house and the kitchen staff dealt with each other, and how this affected service on many levels. So, being who I am, I started making friends with the kitchen staff as a waiter, which helped me in so many ways. I eventually became really good friends with the sous-chef, and eventually moved into an extra room in his condo that he shared with his fiancee. I thought, “Man, I am going to eat like a king now!”
Nope.
What happened was I’d get home after a closing shift and make Mac and Cheese with fried up hot dog slices. I’d put the leftovers in the fridge for another meal.
And my sous-chef friend, this guy who could cook the most amazing dishes ever, who was highly trained and had tons of experience, would come home later and eat my Mac and Cheese with fried hot dog slices.
-xtien
I think that falls under the same thing for everyone. The last thing I want to do when I come home is troubleshoot family PC or internet issues, or anything else technically related.
You have to catch a chef on a day when they want to impress someone or a group for a home meal event. Then I’m sure they would bust out the magic.
That’s exactly right. It’s the old, “The cobbler’s children are always the worst shod,” thing. My stepdad owned a construction company, and we constantly needed work done on our home.
There were a couple of those wonderful meals. Just balls-out, crazy meals with friends from the restaurant. My friend’s next-in-command had a method for dealing with eating too much at these meals. His method was to lie down on his stomach on the floor (it had to be on the floor) with his arms to his sides and his palms face up. He insisted this helped when he ate too much.
One time as a bonus the wait staff got gift certificates to the Big Deal Dining Space and my friend made sure he was on shift for this. He said to me, “I am going to kill you with food.” And he smiled, in a loving and menacing way. I’d never heard that phrase before. “Kill you with food.”
This was the first time I ever tasted foie gras. That was the first course. Of about twelve. I believe I crawled home.
-xtien
Just finished another game night. I bought a fair amount of meat and cheese and hummus just so I wouldn’t have to cook this busy weekend and then I purchased rhubarb.
Good rhubarb is hard to get around here. It’s not very popular and is usually found old, read limp, in the store. Next time I’d buy about twice as much rhubarb and probably keep around the same amount of sugar but… there isn’t any left so it was liked. A few hadn’t had rhubarb or rhubarb cobbler before too.
Rhubarb is cheap and very easy to grow. If you really like it fresh, plant some. It will be way better than anything you can get in store.
When we bought our house, we were not aware it had rhubarb. So we have two massive rhubarb plants growing.
I was thinking of making a rhubarb cheesecake this week actually.
I thought rhubarb would struggle here, even under expert care, due to our triple digit summers. We get the cold it wants in the winter, in fact we probably get too cold here in the winter for it. I’ve also raid that it hates clay like soil which is what I have.
I could try it but I wouldn’t be overly optimistic. It sounds like if I lived maybe in Portland it would do well though.
I was going to tell you when I was growing up, my mom grew lots of rhubarb - in Salt Lake City. And for some reason I thought SLC was the desert (we moved away when I was 8), but then I looked at the daily avg temps and it’s actually quite pleasant.
I just remember spending the summers at the local neighborhood pool.
My wife just made a rhubarb custard pie with fresh rhubarb from our garden. It was quite yummy.
I’ll apologize in advance for this one. It’s super tardy, and as per usual, I just couldn’t get pictures of everything. It turns out that catering for 25 with a dozen different recipes is really goddamned hard. But overall, I am extremely pleased with how this year’s Cabin Party Foodstravaganza went!
First of all, the tentative/proposed menu:
Miso soup (left)–about a gallon’s worth, with a pound of tofu and a ton of wakame seaweed in it. Plus the tonkotsu-shoyu hybrid ramen on the right side. 2lbs of pork back bones, 2lbs of pork trotters, a whole chicken carcass, green onions, ginger, and regular onions simmered in a gallon of water for 8 hours, then triple-strained and cooled into a gorgeous gelatinous mass of meat-flavor before being combined with the pork chashu braising liquid. What pork chashu braising liquid, you ask? Well in the middle there are the remnants of 4.5lbs of pork chashu–pork shoulder slow simmered in a bath of sake, mirin, soy sauce, sugar, ginger, green onions, and garlic for 3 hours, then cooled and sliced. The remaining liquid, skimmed of fat, was added to the tonkatsu broth until it was perfectly seasoned ramen. The ramen noodles are in cups because the cabin didn’t have bowls. Off to the far right you can see some of my dozen+ soy-marinated soft-boiled eggs, perfect jelly-like consistency achieved (the salt in the soy helps solidify the previously mostly liquidous yolks). Not pictured are the green onions and nori. I forgot to microwave the corn topping, and no one used the pickled ginger.
Vegetable yakisoba–soba noodles stir fried with carrots, mushrooms, snow peas, and onions, then tossed with a tangy-salty-sweet yakisoba sauce. I actually forgot I was steaming the fresh yakisoba noodles (NOT handmade) in my favorite big stainless steel stockpot and managed to burn a layer of them onto the bottom, making this the second year in a row that I’ve burnt a Bartender’s Friend-level carbonized mess onto that pot. D’oh. The surviving noodles were delicious, though.
Top-left: beef gyudon (thinly sliced ribeye simmered with sliced onions in a sake-mirin-soy-ginger sauce until tender, served over rice traditionally); that’s about halfway gone at that point from the original batch made with 2lb of onions and 3.5lb of beef. Going clockwise from there, we’ve got the ~2 gallons of medium-heat Japanese vegetable curry with caramelized onions, red potatoes, and sliced carrots in a thick and creamy curry sauce. Then there’s the hibachi vegetables–onions, zucchini, and mushrooms cooked in butter, soy, and lemon juice with a bit of sesame oil at the end. Then there’s the fried rice–a rice-cooker-full of day-old white sushi rice fried in butter and soy sauce with mixed veggies and onions, plus some sesame, white pepper, and black pepper.
Okonomiyaki, as photographed by my friend Megan. A savory cabbage pancake with pickled ginger, green onions, fried bits of tenkasu (tempura batter), and sliced green cabbage in a thick dashi-stock-based batter leavened with shredded nagaimo Japanese mountain yam, fried on top of bacon, because the thin-sliced pork belly Megan was able to get at the Asian market in TN was NOT thin at all, lol. Covered in salty-sweet okonomiyaki sauce, Japanese mayo, and shredded ao-nori seaweed, with optional green onions, shredded kasuobushi (smoked dried tuna), and pickled ginger as toppings. I had a second batch with chopped shrimp in the batter ready to go, but we ran out of empty stomachs.
The final remnants of our 4lbs of teriyaki chicken breasts, simmered in a sweet-and-salty soy-sake-mirin blend and our 5lbs of pork tonkatsu–thin-sliced pork chops breaded in panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried, with the salty-tangy-sweet tonkatsu sauce on the side.
The next morning, we baked and fried up 5lbs of bacon and 3lbs of sausage; the remnants of that is pictured here. Oh god, so much bacon/sausage.
Breakfast assembly line across the cabin’s twin ranges. My friend Heather and I pumped out design-your-own pancakes (with chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, chopped pecans, dried cranberries, and chopped bacon as possible toppings) and design-your-own omelets (with onions, green onions, parsley, mushrooms, bell peppers, spam, bacon, sausage, cheddar, and mozzarella as possible fillings). We went through a quadruple-batch of BA’s Best Buttermilk Pancakes recipe (modified to include extra butter and a ton of vanilla extract) and about 25 eggs for the omelets. . .
The very last breakfast fare to come off the range was my own–an “everything” omelet covered in tonkatsu sauce, plus an everything pancake slathered in butter and maple syrup.
Finally, some highly satisfied “customers”
Well, I put “customers” in quotes, but the total donations to my cooking this year was around $150, and considering I spent about $180 on ingredients, that comes dangerously close to breaking even.
I did end up cooking the tempura veggies the second night (sweet potatoes, broccoli, zucchini, and mushrooms), plus making a dipping sauce, but that’s not pictured. I didn’t make the tempura shrimp at all–I just never had time, and Megan forgot to bring the basket for her deep fryer, so we were HEAVILY restricted on how much food we could fry at any one time (the pork tonkatsu won out the first night). I also didn’t spy the 3 bags of frozen edamame where they were hidden underneath the bacon until it was too late to cook them, oops.
Overall, reactions were insanely positive. The dude in blue and the hat up there followed me around, drunk and shirtless, for the entire first night begging me for cooking tips and just going nuts on how good it was. Most people were just a little floored by the sheer variety and quality of it all, and I am not gonna lie–the effusive and constant praise was a pretty fabulous little ego boost!
All in all, I’d call it a successful experiment, though goddamn I was tired after the fact!!!
So when can I Kickstart your food truck?
Looks great, but how is it a steakhouse spread with no steak?
I’ve been to Ikinari Steak a number of times, it’s basically a decent but not spectacular wet-aged steak served with weird canned corn on a Mordor-hot iron plate alongside a hot (as in temperature) thermos of steak sauce. It’s a nice change of pace.
I WILL END YOU
But hey, there’s ribeye there. It’s just sliced and boiled, like any proper steak should be, duh.
We’ve gotta work on your business model before you pitch to the bank for the food truck loan.
But …
You deserve that ego boost, man. That is one hell of a spread and variety. Fantastic work, man!
This is starting to feel like Stockholm syndrome or something. You keep abusing me by showing me all this awesome food that I can’t have and I keep asking for more.
I can quit at any time, I swear.
Amazing, my man.