Appetizer!

Steamed artichoke and "aioli" tonight on the deck with a taste of Cabernet ...yum, and different!

Operation: Secret Falafel - update!

She's on to me...apparently my lovely wife DOES occasionally check in on the food blog. Not to be deterred,  I pressed on with my plan, albeit on a modified schedule.

Since she's in the know, I decided to slow things down. The pic shows most of the gathered ingredients (I have not found fresh chickpeas yet and so am using canned); I suspect I will make a first run at this dish Monday or Tuesday afternoon. 

Stay tuned!

chicken experiment!

I defrosted chicken to cook tonight, but life got in the way and we had leftover sausage sauce and pasta (still good!)...but I felt the clock ticking on that chicken.

So I did what any mediocre suburban chef would do, and wound myself up for some chixperimenting...chickementaion...experimenting with chicken?

 I started with cold, raw, thawed chicken thighs and some Adobo...my plan was to steam the chicken with beer, but not with a can-in-butt grill style; no, this was going to be something new (at least, new to me.  And a quick Googling did not turn up any precedents).  I shook on a good bit of Adobo, assuming that beer steaming could leave the chicken a little bland.

 I poured a couple of cans of Miller Lite into my steamer pot (a dark beer like Negro Modelo might have been preferable for this application, but ML is my cheap, light beer of choice and in my recent carb-drought was the only beer I had around the house.)  Beer boils at a significantly lower temp than water, and since I had no guidance from the web about how long to steam chicken to doneness, I knew I would be doing some spot checking.

 I guessed that it was going to take ~ 20 minutes to get the chicken cooked through...when frying in oil, it can take 8 minutes per side (or more, in a pan), or about 20 minutes in a deep fryer to cook thoroughly.  I left the lid on tight, without so much as a peek, for 15 minutes, and then stuck in my supposedly-instant read thermometer (quick aside: I do not have good luck with food thermometers...I can never get one to read the desired, target temp, and I refuse to believe that this is user error...).  At 15 minutes, the temp showed ~ 175 F, while the guard on the thermometer suggested 180 would be a safe temp for chicken thighs.

 Even before beginning this experiment (fowl lab?) I had planned on finishing the chicken in a pan, at least a little, to provide a little crispness to the outside.  The thighs I buy are "skin-on", and crisp chicken skin is a Geburtstag gift from above.  So when I checked the in-steam temp at 20 minutes and it still registered a little below the 180 target, I did not fret but went ahead and removed the thighs to a preheated and slightly oiled pan.

 The pan may have been too hot (or maybe too cool...) - I was not paying as much attention to the finishing pan as I was to the steam pan (and the glass of Bacardi and Mexi-Coke by my work station) and the freakin' skin stuck a bit to the pan.  When I flipped the thighs over (just 2 minutes skin down), I had to pull the skin away from the pan separately.  Then, 2 minutes on the other side, and I removed to a plate.

My temp reading showed lower than before, but I cut into the chicken anyway.  The juices ran clear, and the meat looked more white than not ("dark" meat like thighs often will show some read near the bone anyway...it's a struggle if you are serving to sensitive people who don't relish the thought of salmonella poisoning...), and it tasted pretty nice!

I ended up eating a whole thigh there in the tasting station, and saved one for tomorrow.  There was not a whole lot of beer flavor (Miller Lite vs something heavier?), but I could definitely taste some beer and the chicken was tender.  Next time, I might let it go another 4 - 5 minutes, and will be more careful with the finishing pan.  But overall, I would consider this a worthwhile experiment, especially when one considers how boring chicken can become when featured often in a menu rotation.

"Pissaladière: funky French pizza"

Head over to SaltandFat.com to check out this recipe that my household will be trying as soon as I can find some nice puff pastry and anchovies.

Guest chef!

My lovely wife made an awesome spicy Italian sausage pasta sauce, built up from a shallot and pancetta base, which she then baked with some penne shells under a layer of mozzarella ...it was fantastic. 

She promised to cook again in another 7-8 weeks!

Oh, the things we eat!

announcing: top secret project!

FALAFEL

FOR

MY BABY

Of course I realize it doesn't seem like a secret when posted to the WWW, but I suspect that my sweetie (the "baby" referenced; another point of possible confusion, I know, given that I have an actual baby now, but my special lady friend will always be my baby too...) doesn't actually read the DRW FOOD blog often, so we may have a few days to operate in secrecy.

Before we left Chicago for the open embrace of Tennessee, my lovely wife became obsessed with falafel, in particular the sandwiches on offer at this store front in Lincoln Park:

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Now, I should interject that Chattanooga is not a food wasteland, devoid of any interesting restaurants...we have found some decent Thai, an Indian place nearby with good food, and a quick service place run by a Mediterranean family that sells, alone among hamburgers and cheesesteaks, a falafel sandwich!  But this falafel is not the same as that we left behind, and it's my super secret plan to attempt a recreation of that Chicago falafel here, in our own kitchen, and to surprise the wife with my efforts.

I'll be pulling together resources in this space over the coming days, and will begin to outline my approach.  We can all learn about falafel making together!

5 food rules from Slate

This article caught my eye this morning, in particular one of the "5 Rules":

Eat beans! They are one of the least expensive, most nutritious foods out there. Per capita Americans eat about 7.5 pounds of beans each year, compared with more than 200 pounds of meat.

Ugh - eating beans was not all bad, but the quantity I consumed for those weeks was challenging.  The other rules are interesting as well.

Bacon hack

I have long thought my grill pan mostly useless, as many things that I _could_ cook on it would be better on a different pan, the grill, the panini press, etc...but Bacon? Brilliant. There's room to lay it out flat, and the grill ridges allow the fat to move away more easily.

The W in DRW

Trying a new flavor...