New Blog!

I have started another project! If grilling isn't manly enough for you, check out my French Baking Blog! http://aguyandhisoven.blogspot.com

Total Awesome People Who Visited This

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Corey Taps Into a New Section

I can't believe it, but in all this time of writing this blog, there was a whole section that I haven't hit even once yet.  Not one time have I made a recipe from the dessert section!  Today I decided to remedy that situation, along with making something from the appetizer section, which I also have only been hitting sparingly at best as of late.  I also know that I have been slacking recently, not grilling at the pace I could be, so I rounded this meal off with a third recipe just for good measure.  Today's prep began with the appetizer recipe, the Hot, Sweet, and Sticky Chicken Wings on page 60.

 
Step one is to start making the marinade.  Step two, which is optional, is to sigh heavily while using the last of the homemade chile powder that you made from scratch (including growing your own peppers).  I guess I'll have to buy some chile powder, as I won't be able to make any more of my own until around January..


The wings, once tossed to coat themselves in the marinade, need to be left alone for four to six hours.


A couple of hours later I started in on the vegetable course today, which was the Provencal Sandwiches With Roasted Garlic Paste on page 335.   Having done a bit of Provencal cooking in the last half-year, I was rather excited to see Weber's take on this region.


You've seen me roast garlic a couple of times now (if you're new, just go back a couple of entries, you'll find it).  Otherwise, the only things that really get grilled in this recipe are the peppers and eggplant.


You add the some other ingredients to the roasted garlic in order to make a garlic paste.  The recipe instructs you to use a food processor, but I just couldn't picture some nice grandmother in the countryside of Provence using a food processor.  So I used my mortar and pestle.


Okay, so this isn't the most pleasant-looking stuff, but I promise you, it's super tasty.  It's like a southern French bruschetta. 


The vegetables came off the grill, and I also gave the canoed bread a bit of a toasting as well.


On one piece of bread I spread the garlic-tomato paste, and on the other I spread the goat cheese.


Next, the vegetables and lettuce leaves were put in place.


It's rather tough cooking for one from this book.  You can try to scale things down, but it doesn't always work.  To make a long story short, the guys next door got some sandwiches.


The chicken wings went on the grill next, and while I was munching on my sandwich I started making my first Weber dessert.  I kept it simple and went with the Strawberries Balsamico on page 383.


The strawberries have to macerate in the balsamic vinegar and sugar solution for about fifteen minutes.  This will soften them up and add flavor.


In they went!


I had timed this so that while the strawberries were getting their cells broken down, I could eat some wings.  Pretty clever of me, if I may say so.


Have you ever tried to keep a strawberry on a skewer?  As it turns out, it's rather hard.  While trying to turn over the skewer at the midpoint of grilling them, they all fell off.  I'll have to come up with a different strategy if I ever do this again.  Still, I manged to turn them one by one, and they ended up looking just fine.


Half of the strawberries went back into the balsamic sauce...


where they were introduced to Mr. Immersion Blender!


The remaining strawberries were sliced up and added to the sauce.  This sauce was then spooned over the ice cream.  I then sat on the couch and thoroughly enjoyed my first Weber dessert.


So let's take this one at a time.  The sandwich was rather decent.  It does a good imitation of Provencal food, but almost uses too many ingredients.  Most of the recipes I've seen keep it amazingly simple.  I've been surprised over and over again while cooking Provencal food by just how far some ingredients will go on their own.  I feel that in a lot of American cooking, we use too many ingredients and make some meals overly and unnecessarily complex. Still, the sandwiches are tasty, healthy, and use many of the ingredients that are home to that region.  This recipe is rather versatile in that it can be used as a side, appetizer, or even a vegetarian meal.   I'd make it again, if I wasn't so bent on getting this blog over and done with (still a ways off, mind you).

The wings were average.  I like slower cooked wings, where the meat is more tender.  The marinade was tasty, but fell short of its title and description.  It just lacked a certain punch that I have come to expect from wings.  Wings should have a ton of flavor, and this was more subtle than anything else.  The wings certainly weren't Hot, Sweet, and Sticky.

Finally, the dessert was awesome.  Then again, how could any combination of vanilla ice cream, sugary balsamic vinegar, strawberries, and orange liqueur be bad?  At first I wasn't a big fan of the orange flavors.  Plain strawberry ice cream is one of my all-time favorite desserts, and I felt that while I like orange, it was acting like an intruder.  But then I noticed that I wasn't slowing down at all while eating it, and saw that it was actually pretty balanced and really rounded out the dessert.  I'd make this again!

Sunday, July 24, 2011

No Matter How Much You Dress It Up....

Tonight confirmed something that has been bothering me for a fair amount of time.  I really just don't like chicken breasts.  I have made perfectly cooked, juicy, and flavorful chicken breasts, but I just don't like the texture anymore.  There are now only a few recipes left that concern chicken breasts, so I'm doing my best to just pound my way through them to get them out of the way.  Thus, for tonight it was the Citrus-Avocado Chicken Breasts on page 247.


I liked this recipe for its complexity, though.  The first step was to zest all of the citrus.  Luckily, I acquired a microplaner a few years ago.


The trick is to get the zest from just the very outermost layer of the fruit.  Do not get any of the white pith that lies just underneath, as it is rather bitter.


With all of the citrus zested I had the required two tablespoons of mixed zest for the marinade.


A number of posts ago, I struggled with sectioning citrus fruit.  Today I was much more successful.  I think the biggest difference maker was to use the paring knife to remove the skin and pith instead of trying to peel the fruit.


See?  It looks much cleaner and the membranes that separate the sections are even more visible.


This makes cutting out the wedges rather easy and neat, especially compared to that first disaster.


From this point all I had to do was to cut the sections into salsa-sized bits.


I cruised through all of the fruit, making sure to reserve some of the juice for the marinade.


I did make a minor substitution, using a New Mexico chile pepper and small jalapeno from my garden instead of the serrano pepper that is listed in the recipe.


I now combined all but the last two ingredients for the salsa.


I skinned and boned the chicken and prepared the marinade, and set both bowls (salsa and marinating chicken) in the fridge for a couple of hours.


An hour before dinner, I pulled the salsa out of the fridge, diced up the avocados, and added them and the currants to the salsa.


I made another executive decision; I grilled up a leftover pita shell.  Otherwise, I would just have chicken breast and salsa, which I didn't find all that appealing.


First, add some salsa.


Then add some chicken.


 Some more salsa covered the chicken as a third layer.


 Finally, some more chicken topped it all off!


Never before have I had a meal that had such a broad and interesting flavor spectrum that I did not enjoy.  This was spicy, tangy, sweet, well-textured, and I still didn't like it.  The herbs played interestingly in the background, the honey perfectly balanced the grapefruit, the pita was a terrific call, and yet, I didn't like it.  The overall effect of the dish was refreshing and is simply an ideal meal on a hot summer day, but again, I just didn't like it.  Blame the chicken breast, I guess.  Perhaps if this was done with chicken thighs I would have enjoyed it.  So, overall I highly recommend this recipe, but I it just wasn't for me.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Back To Cooking For One

The Bride has returned to China for another month of business kicking butt.  Meanwhile, that leaves me cooking for just myself again.  I wasn't going to be home until after seven o' clock, which didn't leave me much time for marinating or prep.  So the recipe needed to be simple, quick, and quickly flavored.  The first recipe I came across that met such criteria was the Yakitori Chicken on page 254.


Sure enough, I wasn't home until well after 7:30.  While at Kroger I made an executive decision that worked out quite well, but more on that later.  Naturally, the first step was to make the marinade.  I was excited because I was able to use mirin, which is an ingredient that has laid dormant since the last time I used it for this blog (a long time ago).


I set to work on the vegetables first.  After work I only wanted to make one stop as I knew the dog was probably at home doing her best not to make a mess.  I stopped by my neighborhood Kroger, and was rather disappointed to learn that they no longer carried pearl onions.  In a hurry, I decided to use a big onion and cut it into wedges to simulate the size of pearl onions.


Boneless, skinless chicken breast (which is hard to buy at Kroger for just one person for one meal) was around six or seven dollars.  Whole chicken breast - skin, bone, and all - was $2.12.   I was going to cut it into cubes for kabobs anyway, so I went the cheaper route, removed the skin and bones (which took all of ten seconds), and then cut the now-boneless, skinless chicken breast into skewer-sized pieces.


 I set them in the marinade and took the dog for a walk.


About an hour later I drained the marinade into a saucepan.  The recipe calls for you to boil this for a minute (to remove those pesky prokaryotic nasties), but I boiled it for about ten minutes in order to reduce the marinade into a thicker sauce/dressing.


While the grill was warming up, I took my time and skewered the onions, bell pepper, and chicken.


Off the grill they smelled quite pleasant and delicious.


Remember my executive decision at Kroger?  Here it is!  I knew that I wanted to plate this over a bed of rice or something, but when I saw Kroger's salad bar, I realized that it would be nutritionally better to plate the final result over fresh greens.  So I assembled a small salad for about two dollars and went about my business.


After removing the pieces from the skewers, I just placed them on top of the salad in the container that it came in.  This meant I would have one less dish to wash, and because I was eating alone, what difference did it make that I was plating it?


I poured the dressing over the salad and was ready for my meal-for-one.


I am going to file this into the It Was Cool, I Liked It, But I Probably Won't Make It Again category.  It was healthy, tasty, and interesting, but the most notable aspect of the meal was the dressing.  I REALLY liked the dressing, but it was easily the most unhealthy part of the meal.  It was basically everything that is wrong for you...a truckload of sodium, alcohol (the mirin), and oil.  It was quite delicious, but not good for you.  Otherwise, it was grilled boneless, skinless chicken breast, which can only get you so far on the excite-o-meter of life.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

My First Grillout As A Visitor

Today is a landmark event for this blog.  For the first time I am conducting a grill session outside the comfort of my own home (which was an adventure in an of its own).  I am at my parents' house in the Washington, D.C. area for my nephew's baptism, and The Bride and I wanted to cook dinner for the family.  We had initially decided to make a couple of lasagnas and to keep everything low-key.  When we learned that one of our guests was a vegetarian, I saw an opportunity to try a vegetarian recipe from The Guide.  I had been eyeballing the Portabello Burgers With Roasted Peppers on page 329 for some time, and today it seemed appropriate.  


Another first for me was to be able to use a food processor.  I have one (sort of), but I don't use it very often because it is a pain to clean and I like my immersion blender so much.    In went most of the tapenade ingredients.


A few seconds later I had a finely-chopped start to my tapenade, and was able to add the remaining ingredients.  I did choose to omit the anchovy fillets as I wanted to be respectful of the vegetarian.


Portobello mushroom caps have a serious set of gills on the underside, but if you gently scrape them with a spoon they will come right off.  This will help with taste, texture, and appearance.


You have have seen me roast peppers before on this blog, and this was no different.  Here they are, fresh off the grill, covered in plastic wrap so that the blistered skins are steamed off for easy removal.


At this point I am nearly completed.  The caps came off the grill, I had peeled and cut the peppers, and put the final touches on the tapenade.  At this point I was also trying to turn four different directions at once as I had many other things I was trying to pull together for the rest of the dinner.


I'll be honest...I never tried it.  I had two pieces of lasagna, mac and cheese, and grilled garlic bread.  I was far too full to assemble a "burger" and try it.  The vegetarian, however, did tell me that it was truly delicious.  I'll take her word for it.  I apologize for not being able to go into much detail, but tonight was a little exhausting.

Think of this as Julie and Julia, but for dudes.

Followers

About Me

My photo
Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Just a regular dude...now learning to bake