America’s Test Kitchen did a bit about homemade chicken soup a while back, where they revealed the secret to great chicken soup is…chicken bouillon. Basically, even when you’re starting from scratch, it’s a great flavor booster.
Made Indian food for movie night with my best pals in the area. Butter paneer, a spinach and dal tadka, fresh parathas, and spiced basmati. It was a really nice night :-)
- My wife, a former vegetarian, is quite picky about the poultry and seafood she now eats (still doesn’t eat beef).
- I asked for a sous vide device for Christmas and Santa obliged.
- She has viewed the device with suspicion and clearly expected not to like the resulting dishes.
- Today I made sous vide chicken – treating a whole, cut up chicken with lemon juice, salt, pepper and a simple rub, then searing it when the cooking was done.
- When she tried her first taste, my wife’s eyes lit up and she uttered two words: "That’s delicious!"
- My work is done. She is won over.
Geezer Armando,
I just finished dinner and then saw your post. Now I am hungry again!
No kidding. I had a tomato and onion dal, and a bowl of noodles for dinner. His spread puts mine to shame.
Thanks, y’all! My friend M has a pretty crazy sensitivity / allergy to capsaicin, so Indian food is generally off limits for her, despite how much she likes it. And she’s also one of those “cilantro is green soap” people…
Well, turns out Indian food with paprika instead of chili powder and culantro instead of cilantro is still pretty excellent. So is cooking it for good friends, then watching Willow and collectively drooling over long haired Val Kilmer… :-)
Culantro?
It’s a fragrant cooking herb that same friend introduced me to common in a lot of Latin American cooking, including in Puerto Rico, where her mother hails from. I’ve also seen it called recao and sawtooth coriander. It has a similar herby, bright, citusy taste, albeit stronger, but doesn’t provoke the soap taste reaction in some people that cilantro does, so it makes for a handy substitute in addition to being tasty in its own right.
I’ve had it with pho at some Vietnamese restaurants but never knew what it was until I looked it up after your post. I must try it some time if I can find some.
Hmm, I’ll have to see if any of the Asian grocers near me have it. I’m one of the soap people.
That sounds right up my alley. Cool.
Yeah, it’s spread into Thai and Vietnamese cuisine as well; larger Asian grocers and Hispanic grocers should carry it. It’s pretty cool, although in my experience it wilts and goes bad at like twice the speed of the already short-lived cilantro, so make sure to buy it right when you need it :)
Thus my preferred form:
If you’re into puerto rican and southern american cooking, I strongly recommend this book. Great photography and recipes.
So tonight was new recipe night. A great Lebanese restaurant nearby called Oasis has this dish they call “Chicken Musuken” and I was really interested in trying to make it at home. Google results were not coming up. I finally found an alternate recipe name (M’SAKHAN) and it sounded about right, but it had a spice I’d never tried called Sumac and the recipe calls for 1/2 a cup!
So I found some on Amazon and tonight cooked it up - but instead of cooking the flatbread & chicken separately, I used pre-baked chicken from Costco, mixed it with herbs & onions, and let it marinate a few hours then I stretched out the flatbread and put a heaping mound of chicken on it, wrapped it up & baked it for 20 minutes.
Awesome. Will do again.
Sumac is a dark spice with a lemony flavor, so not as photogenic as other dishes.
Oh hell yes, that sounds awesome. Sumac is a very cool spice I’ve barely ever used, but that chicken sounds amazing. Nice!!
For our regular Monday night game (usually Adam, the host, running D&D, but he had a shitty work day, so we just fucked around and eventually played Azul), I made pav bhaji, a chunky, sweetly spiced mixed veggie curry, cooked with lots of butter and served with buttery toasted yeast rolls. My bhaji has carrots, cauliflower, peas, green bell pepper, onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and potatoes, plus a spice blend of paprika, turmeric, cumin, coriander, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg (in place of mace), and amchur–powdered sour mango–omitting the traditional heaps of red chili powder for the benefit of my spice allergic buddy.
On the side, I had lemon wedges, extra butter, cilantro, and a little mixed baggie of diced onions, chilies, and cilantro, plus a shaker of kashmiri red chili.
Tasty food, good friends, good games–that’s a good night in my book!
I told Armando not to eat burgers every day, and after getting into San Diego late after most restaurants weren’t serving food, I’m now eating the second of two animal style double doubles from an in-n-out.
It just occurred to me that I’m eating better than people in the Whitehouse.
I have recently unlocked the ability to bake a cheesecake, and I feel that this is a power that will eventually lead to my early demise.
I just made my first cheese cake not too long ago. It was just a plain cheesecake and didn’t crack, but the top did lightly brown. Didn’t seem to affect anything other than appearance though.
And that’s why I will not be making it again anytime soon. That and 7 layer bean dips are like weight gain kryptonite for me.
My wife got an Instant Pot for Christmas. I pointed her to some of the impressions here. Once we realized (as others here have) that you can cook frozen food in it, our reaction went from “This is a cool appliance, but I wonder what we can do with it that we can’t do with our other stuff” to “This is a magic bucket that I put frozen chicken and sauce into and then a perfectly-prepared meal comes out twenty-five minutes later.”
We’ve branched out a little bit since then, and my wife has cooked all of the following in it:
- Beef and broccoli
- Baked potatoes
- Cheesecake
- Pancakes
- Chicken (for tacos)
- Chicken (for teriyaki bowls)