chef

Fried Tofu with Teriyaki Sauce

For this dish it is suggested that you have some cooked rice to pair it with. For this you will need the following ingredients.
Serves 5-7 with rice

101_0836

Flour for dusting and Oil for frying
A block of Extra Firm Tofu (16 oz)
1/4 C Dark Brown Sugar
1/4 C Soy Sauce
1/4 C Rice Wine Vinegar
Shredded sushi seaweed for garnish

Pour your oil in the narrowest pot you have as to save on the amount of oil needed put it on medium heat. It will take a couple moments to get to frying temperature. Next put a cup of flour in a wide bowl, and set aside. Press your tofu lightly with a paper towel so it will remove as much of the moisture as possible before cutting in to cubes at an inch squared. After cutting, check the oil by pinching a small amount of flour in to the oil if you get a fair reaction that looks just like a soup on a low simmer then you can begin. Dredge them in the flower in batches before dropping them in to the oil you don’t want to do it all at once because that will drop the temperature of the oil and for most stove top burners you will not be able to hold temp without splitting them in to at least two batches. I did mine in four batches total, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Let them fry until golden brown or a light manilla color for those who know their around an office better.

101_0837

The bubbles don’t have to be big you just want to make sure that when they come out they can drain. rinse and repeat with all batches until all the tofu is drying off. For the teriyaki sauce take a small pot and put your sugar, vinegar and soy in it before bringing it up to a simmer making sure to stir until the sugar has been dissolved and let simmer for a couple minutes until all the flavors meld together or about three or four minutes.

101_0841

I got a little impatient and cranked up to high which you can do if you want to watch it for a minute or two. You do not want the sugar to burn or else you will need to try again. After your tofu has dried appropriately you can use your sauce to dip into or pour over depending on how you like your sauces to be done. Some people are picky, no judging here.

101_0842

I got my tofu placed on cooked white rice and seaweed around it and from here I just poured the sauce over the top and dug in. The picture didn’t come so clear as I had hoped but its tofu blocks on rice. So I hope you enjoy this recipe and if you liked what you saw give some of my other dishes a chance their in the cooking category on my blog.

Have a good day everyone, oh and before I forget starting in December their will hopefully be more posts I am getting a little bit more comfortable doing this as well as the youtube videos if you watch those link is to the side. I am going to try to up my game to do two a week I feel like it can be done. Wish me luck.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Fried Rice –

Hey everyone, time for another simple recipe this time to use up any rice you may have this works best after the rice has cooled. You will need the following.

101_0828

3 large eggs
1/4 C chopped green onions
2 qt of long grain white rice

Of course you want to have your seasonings of choice on hand. In a non stick pan on medium high heat start by cracking your eggs in to the pan until they begin to get opaque. Next is to toss your rice mixing the two together until the eggs are almost completely cooked. Picture below for example. Make sure to keep your rice moving as to not get over cooked in places this dish from start to finish takes less then five minutes if the rice is already cooked.

101_0831

Last is to add your green onion as well as any seasonings you prefer, making sure to mix everything up with your spat of choice.From there just plate up Mine in the pic has a little bit of chili powder for color and a touch of heat. Shredded seaweed works well, and of course you can always just grab a spoon and dig in.

101_0834

If you do not want to use or do not have a non stick pan then just a drop of oil is needed before putting the eggs in. From there just go for it.

Next, two recipes on this blog will be a tofu dish fried and with sauce over rice once again. Rice was on sale so I got a big bag to last me for a while. The other recipe will be a dish I actually took as a challenge / idea from someone on twitter. Breakfast cupcakes. Me being a stickler for things got to be a problem there, but over all the dish tasted good and was actually very good for breakfast. If you

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Pork with Blackberry Cream

This dish pairs well with the apple onion salad from last week.

Here is what you need for this dish for a pair of servings. 4 thinly cut 3-4 oz pork chops, a cup of cream, 12 blackberries, an orange as well as a pair of rosemary sprigs. Garlic always matches with pork and S/p for seasoning is always good to get all the flavors to meet up on amiable terms.

101_0798

Begin cooking your pork on medium heat. After they are just cooked let them rest for a moment. Seeing my pan after the salad and pork their is a lot of bits stuck to the bottom. Using a high acid liquid like a citrus juice or vinegar we can use those bits to flavor our sauce in a technique called deglazing.

. 101_0800

After juicing your orange on medium heat let it simmer and mash your blackberries and rosemary making sure to scrape up the bits stuck to the bottom of the pan before continuing. Those bits are flavor particles ready to add to the arsenal of the sauce. When the juice is half reduced strain it before adding your cream.

101_0803

Let the strained juice and cream mix before reducing until the cream is half gone. As soon as it is thick enough that it holds to the back of the spoon for just a second before dripping completely off. Now this was actually made for a co worker who was leaving. She wanted a meal cooked by me on her last day. This paired up with the apple onion salad for a box lunch like 101_0804

This. The small containers are the blackberry sauce and the mustard dressing.

The pork was so thin I did not get the color I wanted on the outside, but it was still juicy without being pink. The sauce was a great compliment that was much more graceful then I originally thought it would. All in all it was a good thin and if you try it let me know if you do any of your own twists on it.

One thing I did not like was the color everything was kinda beige without the blackberry cream. After this I garnished with a couple pinches of fresh chopped rosemary before heading to work.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Apple onion salad with garlic mustard dressing

This is a nice dish that will work well with the pork dish for next week. If you are vegetarian no fear this works just as well as a light potluck dish. For two servings you will need the following.

Salad: One green apple, half a white or yellow onion, salt and black pepper to taste, one lemon to juice. In this picture the orange and lemon are already zested because I used the zest for making my own bath salts. Like put in the bath and make everything smell nice as you relax and mine is all natural. Salt, teas, extracts, zests, etc. So ya mine are already zested if you have a moment you can use the zest as a garnish on top.

101_0784

Dressing: A tablespoon mustard paired with one of honey or two tablespoons honey mustard, one teaspoon chopped garlic, a pinch of cocoa powder.

101_0788

So core your apple chop it in to quarters before slicing and toss it in a pan on low heat. Next you want to take your half onion and slice it up julienne style making sure to do it a little thicker then normal julienne. tossing it in the pan we will mix it together and let the flavors meet each other as the onion begins to sweeten. Sweating on medium low with a touch of butter or oil of your choice if you do not have a non stick pan.

101_0796

Mix up your dressing as everything is sweating just mixing it all up before tossing a portion in to toss with the reminder of the dressing on the side to taste.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Thoughts in the culinary world – Bobby Flay and James Beard

Now it seems that everyone worth their knives has something to say. The world of professional cooking is sometimes akin to the world of professional wrestling when larger then life personalities clash. Everyone has their own thing to say and everyone makes mistakes. When you do something you love so much, and someone makes you feel subpar some people are going to shoot off their mouths. From Top Chef to Paula Deen everyone seems to have their hand halfway in a boiling soup pot which is sad.

Bobby Flay is the most hated person in cooking. Which I can see as he seems very abrasive, almost disrespectful of other cultures and just sometimes acts like an ass. Seeing the food he makes and listening to him talk as well I really would not want to go to his restaurants. One thing no one can take away is he knows the business side enough that he has put himself in position on cooking shows for many years. Releasing books and through all the mistakes he has made one must give credit that he has used his business to back up where his cooking fails.

It is kinda sad he will be the most well known chef of the era because one of my cooking heroes is an Oregon born man by the name of James Beard. Cooking wise his recipes were never the absolute best, but across the board there was not a man who could boast the skill set he did. On top of that you would have to search to have someone say a bad word about him he always seemed to have a love of food that was only matched by the size of the man himself. The only thing you may find if you actually looked was how nearing the end of this life he decided to take endorsement deals to open more cooking schools. Which he even said made him feel like a “gastronomic whore”.

Sometimes we forget that the measure of a person is not just by popularity. A man can be the best without being the most well known. For the most part we as a culture bring much more infamy for all of our bad before allowing some to spotlight the good. Just some thoughts

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Chicken a la kiev

Chicken a la kiev is a dish I found a recipe to in the old cookbook. We will do some slight changes here is what you will need.
Chicken breasts (skinless and boneless)
Egg for breading
Breadcrumbs for breading
Seasoning for the breadcrumbs
I use a combination of parmesan cheese and old bay to season my breading

Compound butter –
A compound butter is a butter mixed with other things to add more flavor and has been used in kitchens as a form of sauce. In this recipe my compound butter was made with an addition of crushed garlic, green onion, and honey mustard with a splash of lemon juice.

After mixing it all together you want to put your butter in the freezer. If you like everything a certain shape you can fill up an ice tray half full so you get little squares of butter already setting up.

Butterfly your chicken and after the butter has frozen stuff in the middle of the chicken before breading it up and dumping it in a frypot already heated up. Let it cool and dress as you see fit. If you do not feel comfortable putting frozen butter in raw chicken then you can put the butter on top before plating. The butter will melt to form a sauce to match the chicken.

After plating garnish with what you want. I use a small little piece of muenster cheese to work with the small amount of butter.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Broth making

We will be going over stock and broth making. The major difference between the two is whether the addition of meat is included with the bones. When you get bones you want to get five times the amount of vegetables for the stock. Now in this case I will be using ham shanks for my broth and the basic stock mixture of vegetables of celery, carrot, and onion. You can use mushroom and bell peppers as well. Equipment wise you will want to get something called cheese cloth so you can do a final strain without getting a lot of chunks in the stock. If you have no bones from a recent roast then you can use something like in my case ham shanks. Roasting the bones, meat and vegetables would result in making the stock a brown stock. Now the color whether it is white or brown just signifies if things have been roasted.

Image

Using the ham shanks this will be a brown pork broth. Starting cooking the bones or shanks in this case in pot with a little oil to brown the meat and bones while you cut the vegetables. It does not need to be the best cutting if your a little self conscious about it.

Image

Image

After cutting your vegetables toss them in with the bones to give them some color. When some time passes you want to add your water to the amount of ten times of the mass of the bones. So if you add 1lb of bone you want 5 lb veg and 10 lb or 10 pints since a pint of water is equivalent to a pound. Get everything in the pot after your roasted what you want and let it simmer until two thirds of the liquid is left.

Image

As I was making the stock the roommates needed to eat so they decided to get something else going.

Line your strainer with the cheese cloth before draining the stock. The cheese cloth will catch the smaller pieces of matter left in the stock the strainer will miss. Let your stock cool and you should have a fat cap form on the after it cools down as well as the stock turning in to a bit more like jello. That means that the gelatin has been pulled from the bones and that is what gives the stock a quality that separates it from many things you can buy now a days.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Beef and bell peppers over rice

For this you will need the following for ten portions heaped over rice. This is a dish that holds well in the fridge and can be eaten as is or over rice or noodles. When my friends or myself are feeling a little under the weather we eat a bowl of this. It can cure what ails ya.

Image

Seven large peppers consisting of three red bell peppers, two yellow, a green bell pepper, and one poblano pepper.

One large white onion, one bunch of green onions, one shallot, and five or six good sized cloves of crushed garlic.

Meat wise you will need a half pound of each beef and pork chorizo and a pound and a half of 75/25 ground beef ( 25% fat)

Otherwise you will need a tablespoon of oil. (your choice) I had olive nearby but any will do.

Start by getting your oil in the pot before putting the pot on medium low heat.

Peel and smash your garlic before adding them to the pot. Dice your onion type items ( green, white, and shallot)  before dumping them in to the pot and giving them a good stir. You don’t want to hear a whole lot of sizzling.The pot will be there just to hold everything.

Image

Give it a good stir before dicing up your peppers. Make sure to remove the white ribs of pith (That’s the kind of soft stuff forming the ribs inside the pepper.) Dice your peppers up and toss them in. Even if you are not the fastest with a knife you should have very little effect on the food. We are letting all the guests know each other flavor wise. Once it is mixed up in a pot take it off to cool. If your doing rice with this you can dump the veggies in to the future rice pot while the meat cooks.

Image

Place your pot on medium high heat devoid of all vegetable matter before dumping in your chorizo. You want these to cook first because this will allow the spices in the fat to be released so that the beef can pick up the flavor. Once that has been rendered you can dump in your beef and let that cook up. While that is going in this is only going to have the spice of the chorizo which will be very mellow once it is all tossed together with the chopped offerings. This will be fairly mild overall.

Image

Now the main portion of cooking will be when you dump everything back in to the pot with the warm meat and let everything hit a low simmer. Doing this will draw some of the liquid out of the peppers giving you a very nice well rounded sauce made in pot with little effort to pair with our bell peppers and beef.

ImageImage

Cook some rice and cook an egg sunny side up and build your bowl. It follows very few diets but by portions it can be tweaked with adding more vegetables or less fat if you need to.

Image

This recipe was just a guess from the bell peppers and beef mentioned in the Cowboy Bebop anime. I would think that even a pair of bounty hunters could enjoy this. Thank you and see you all next time. Happy Easter.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Portland – Unnoticed in Tv food competition?

So I want to get some more experience in culinary competition. At first I thought I would try to toss my hat in on Chopped or Top Chef and give it a try. While doing this I thought I would look up some notable competitors to try and talk to, and get some tips or at least talk strategy. Doing my little research I looked up the past contestant list of both shows ( Chopped and Top Chef ). Not masters or teen of something or other until I realized something.

Between the two shows from their inception to the end of 2013 there has not been one single winner from Portland, Oregon. Now I have also found out the reason for this. Between the start of both seasons to the end of 2013 there has not been a single competitor from my fair little slice of the world. More then seven hundred people have tried between the two shows without a single one being from Oregon.

If I seem to be mistaken then please let me know. When every other state is represented by at least a half dozen only for one state to not have one seems a bit odd and a mistake by people who have to pick the people to go on their shows. I cannot say whether it is on purpose or on accident. It does not really matter to me, but where it does is that you cannot really say that it is truly in the spirit of competition.

Just something to think about.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Stuffed Chicken with cheddar and mustard sauce

So with this recipe your going to need the following for one plate

2 4oz portions of boned and skinned dark meat chicken, 2 oz cheddar, 3 slices of bacon, olive oil for pan frying. For the sauce add a tablespoon and a half of dijon mustard, a tsp of honey, and a quarter cup of heavy cream.

ImageImage

Image

So start out with your pan on medium heat and begin to cook your chicken after both sides have been flipped and cooked through. Stuff them with cheddar and let it sit for a moment while the bacon cooks. Drain the pan of your fry oil before dropping your bacon in to the pan. Cook your bacon through while making sure that it does not turn to glass. This will be the layer between your sauce and the chicken.

ImageImage

While this recipe is very rich the sauce should have a very refreshing bite. Either from the horse radish and acidity in the mustard or from additional seasoning. Other ways you can roll it is using addition of chives or cayenne pepper for additional color. The light heat of the seasoning or the fresh aroma of the chopped chives adds anew dimension to this. When you make the sauce all you have to do is put it all in a clean pan let it simmer after whisking together until the volume decreases by a third to a half.

Layer your bacon on top of your chicken and pour the sauce on top of the bacon gently then enjoy. So hope you enjoy and hopefully after eating this you get one step closer.

 

 

 

ImageImage

0 CommentsLeave a comment