foodfluency.com

Have I ever mentioned I’m a Taurus? And therefore, stubborn as hell?

I’m still on a mission to master chipotle chicken. As in, duplicating the flavor you get at the fast food place. I knew my latest attempt wouldn’t be spot on, because it looks totally different, but, I was hoping to learn a little more about the flavors used in various chipotle chicken recipes. That’s the plan anyways.

There are certainly enough chipotle chicken recipes to learn from. My goodness. My boyfriend tells me that chipotles became quite “trendy” a few years back. That would certainly explain the 33 pages of chipotle chicken recipes found on epicurious.com. When I search for “chipotle” alone, I got a whopping 266 pages. Holy crap. Whadda think? Should I change this blog to a chipotle cooking blog? A recipe a day? Think I’ll get a movie deal?

The recipe I used comes from Gourmet magazine. I changed it up a teeny bit, by using chicken breasts instead of two whole chickens. My cat’s on a diet*, so, I was just cooking for me and the boyfriend. We don’t need a chicken apiece.

Therefore, I had to guess on the cooking time. I think, just by comparing pictures, that I cooked it less than they did in the magazine. But I’m cool with that. It came out really tasty.

That first night, we had it in tacos. Like the last time I mixed chicken with taco ingredients, the flavors were overwhelmed by the other taco ingredients. It was still tasty, but, it just tasted like ordinary (yet moist) chicken.

The next day at lunch, I had the leftovers with some mashed potatoes. That was delicious. I didn’t even care about the chicken actually, I was just sucking all the sauce off. That pretty much made it BBQ chicken, but, mmmmm. Tasty.

So yeah, it still tasted nothing like the stuff in the restaurant, but I was really happy I made it. I’ll be making it again. The directions were easy to follow, and we had all the non-fresh ingredients in the cupboard. I love it when that happens.

* She’s lost three pounds! I’m so proud.

I made such a mess of the kitchen the other night. I had help though. My trusty bf and I decided to go Asian and make spring rolls and wontons. With all the dipping sauces and marinades, it came to a grand total of five sauces. Ridiculous.

I’ll start with the food food, and then elaborate on the sauces, or mad science as I like to call it.

But yum, huh? Doesn’t that spring roll look good? I snagged the recipe from one of my “Foodbuzz Friends,” Filipinalovesfood. She recommended making them with pork, cucumber, noodles, mint, lettuce, and pineapple. I had never had a spring roll with pineapple in it before, but I loved it. Spring rolls are probably the “freshest” tasting food around. So that’s awesome right there. But when you add sweetness? I’m twice as sold.

And here’s the dumpling recipe. Also yum. We were so full from the spring rolls though, that we didn’t eat many dumplings. Most of them are sitting in my freezer right now, to be enjoyed for lunch later on this week.

Sauce, Sauce, Sauce, Sauce, Sauce

I’ve been quite interested in sauces, as of late. I actually have a copy of, “Sauces: Classic and Contemporary Sauce Making,” by James Peterson sitting on my coffee table. I’m curious about the structure of sauces - why they work like they do, what thickens and why, etc.

Like I said, we made a total of five sauces for this meal. Two were marinades - one from the spring roll recipe (for the spring roll pork) and one my bf just made up (for the dumplings). I liked them both a lot. Marinades are awesome. There are so many different possibilities. My favorite so far has been a lime-flavored marinade though. I was going to make that again this weekend actually. Anyhoo.

Then I made some peanut sauce for dipping. That was hilarious. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the recipe and I accidently used a tablespoon of sesame oil, instead of a teaspoon. Dammit. A little sesame oil goes a long way. So in an attempt to fix it, I just quadrupled the rest of the ingredients. I ended up with more peanut sauce than I would ever use in my life. My bf delicately suggested afterwards that sometimes it’s better to throw the mistake away and start over, instead of trying to fix what you have. Oh yeah. That would have been smart. I used about half a jar of peanut butter up! It’s a good thing I love it and have 2 1/2 jars left over in my cupboard still.

Also made a soy sauce-based dipping sauce. And a sauce to mix with the marinated pork for the dumplings.

I didn’t care for either of the dipping sauces, actually. Those are all personal preferences though. I’m not a big dipper. Or even a little dipper. I don’t use salad dressing. I eat chips plain. I’m just weird like that. My spring roll tasted perfect just as I had made it, I thought. I also don’t like soy sauce. I’m trying to like it, but it’s way too salty for me. I can put it in things, but when it’s the main ingredient, it’s nasty.

But, that’s fine. The science of a sauces is still fun for me. Here’s me playing with some corn starch and water. That s*it is crazy! Fun times, fun times.

Okay, I hearby promise that the rest of this entry will be devoid of rhyming.

Instead, I will tell you all about these awesome chicken nachos my boyfriend and I made.

We experimented with the chicken marinade/rubs, so there are actually three different flavors of chicken in there. Yum…

These were all the ingredients we used. As you can see, we just went nuts. It was fun.

Dish one was an ordinary dry rub. I forgot what was in it. I apologize. I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was much too excited about dish two, which is where we tried to recreate the chicken they use at Chipotle restaurant.

I’m from the Albany, New York area, and I live there now, but for some years in between I lived in Denver, Colorado. Chipotle stores are every three feet in Denver, so it was inevitable that I’d go in someday. Once I did, I was hooked.

It’s ridiculous. They have a ton of options, but I order the same, plain thing every time: chicken tacos with cheese. That’s it. No salsa. No guacamole. No nothing. Just the yummy, yummy chicken offset with some cheese. I’d get it a few times a week. Kinda sad really. But I have no shame, so I don’t care.

I went for years without it, once I moved away. It made me sad, but that’s life. I always kept an eye out though, to see if they would ever expand this way. And a few months ago, they finally did.

I’ve settled back into the old routine. We’ve reached the point where the folks behind the counter knew what I wanted without me telling them, just like their counterparts all over Denver, lol.

So, yeah. If I could create that flavoring on my own, I’d be so happy. It turns out I have some work to do though. That smokey flavor is hard to get! Seriously, if anyone reading this works there, or knows someone who works there, hook me up. We used hot sauce, dried chipotle and some balsamic vinegar. And cilantro and garlic. I think that’s it. I should have written it down, lol.

The third dish was my boyfriend’s special, make-it-up-as-he-goes-along concoction. I liked it the best out of the three, due to the lovely sweet and spicy mix he had going on. He used brown sugar and cocoa for the sweetness, cumin, oregano, and cilantro for the inbetween, and sriracha for the heat - that’s a Thai hot sauce for those of you (like me) not in the know. Plus some salt and pepper just for fun. The end result was really tasty all by itself, but the subtlety was overwhelmed by the rest of the nacho stuff, like the cheese and sour cream.

That was my common complaint actually. The nacho stuff tended to drown out a lot of the seasoning. I’m not sure if that means more seasoning or less other crap though, lol. Next time, we have plans to marinate them longer than two hours, baste while grilling, and to actually tenderize them and flatten them out to increase the surface area of the chicken. That all should help.

My boyfriend liked the dry rub the best, actually. I appreciated the crispy crust it made, I didn’t like that the chicken was dry compared to the marinades.

It was really weird to me how different each piece of chicken looked after marinating for a while. I should have been surprised by the different staining, but I was.

Ahh, Middle Eastern food. It really has a certain smell, doesn’t it?

When my boyfriend and I made these Persian Beef Kebabs the other day, that was the first thing we said. “Wow, these really smell Middle Eastern, don’t they?”

“Funny though,” I continued. “They aren’t garlicky at all.”

“Do you associate garlic with Middle Eastern food?”

“Yeah!”

I think he thought that was a little weird. But it all made sense later when we had five cloves of garlic left over.

“Where are these supposed to go?” he asks me, keeper of the recipe.

“Oh crap. They were supposed to go in the meat marinade.”

I also forgot to bring my saffron with me. I had been looking for ways to use it up, which was why I had that recipe in the first place. It was definitely an instance of “cooking while spaced out.” Ah well. It tasted good anyway. We had cumin as a saffron substitute, and just slapped the garlic over the meat at it was grilling. No harm done.

Except to the tomatoes. Have you ever just slapped a tomato on a grill? It’s frickin’ weird! “Cook until blistered and soft,” the recipe says. I should have taken a picture of the “blistered and soft” tomato. All the pics I’ve found on google don’t do the warpness justice.

Next time, next time.

Before I blather on for a bit about planning a complete meal, I have to share tonight’s dinner. One of my favorite food memories is eating crab cakes three ways. I don’t recall exactly how each crab cake differed from the next, but, I remember it they did, and it was delightful. So, I’ve slowly been trying to recreate that.

Not all at once. That’s too time-consuming and crab is freaking expensive! But, a new kind every few weeks or so sounds good to me. It’s my summer thing.

About two weeks ago I made some baked cajun crab cakes. It’s a weight watchers recipe, so I’m not sure if that link will work if you aren’t a member. They were quite tasty, but I had a hard time getting them into cake shape. They just kept falling apart and breading them was a nightmare.

Tonight, I made mini corn bread crab cakes, from Cooking Light. Again, baked, and again, delicious. And this time they stuck together pretty well.

The big deal here is that now I have some Tabasco-like product in my pantry. *curse you mini corn crab cakes, for turning me into one of those people* lol. I have no idea what I’m going to do with this jar of hot sauce in the future. I’m not a fan, generally speaking. I actually picked this particular bottle of hot sauce because it was the prettiest, and I thought it should have at least that going for it.

Food Pairing

I paired this with a Tri-Colore Orzo recipe from that Everyday Italian show. My logic in doing so? They both use lemon.

Now that I seem to have some cooking basics down, one of my biggest challenges seems to be planning a complete meal. I really have no clue what I’m doing there. I can pair together meat and potatoes, but that’s about it.

Tell me, how do you plan a meal?

Do you stick with a certain cuisine? Do you go one complicated dish, and two simple? A protein, starch, and veggie? Do you mix up colors? Tell me your approach.

It’s a goal of mine to be able to plan a meal of complementary foods, but I don’t know where to begin.

*help*

I need to get the disgusting picture off the top of my page, lol. So here’s what I had as a snack last night: Zucchini with oregano and parsley, with feta cheese.

It was my first time eating zucchini outside bread, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To me it tasted like a broccoli stalk. I like broccoli, but I wouldn’t want to just eat the stalks. meh. So I can’t say I’m super excited about zucchini, but, I do want to try it again in a fritter-type of way with different ingredients.

And one last thought for those of you who don’t follow my twitter: There is an evil conspiracy afoot regarding zucchini. All the recipes call for zucchini, but the grocery store refers to it as “green squash”. This little mix-up wasted about 10 minutes of my life yesterday, lol. I guess elsewhere in the world, they are called “courgettes.” Man, that’s annoying.

AKA: Loving Those Lemons, AKA: The Search for Saffron, AKA: Like Buying Condoms in Ireland

Which dish sounds more appealing to you?

• Wiener Schnitzel
• Cotoletta alla Milanese

What if I told you they were pretty much the same thing? Would you be surprised? Startled? Demand photographic evidence?

Which one is which? You tell me.

Loving Those Lemons

Allow me to back up a bit. When I started cooking, I quickly realized that I was a huge fan of lemons and lemon zest. I am a zesting fool. It tastes good, and I get a weird little thrill out of eating the part of the citrus fruit that normally isn’t ingested. It’s like cheating death, or, at least indigestion.

So I browsed through some recipes, all containing the ingredient “lemon.” To my complete and utter shock, wiener schnitzel came up.

Wiener schnitzel? Isn’t that supposed to be some German-esque dish with potatoes and saukraut and other forms of cabbage? Not that I had ever had it, but, that’s sure what it sounds like.

Boy, was I mistaken. It’s Austrian, for one thing — an Austrian breaded veal cutlet. Yum. Some food historians (lol, I don’t know what else you would call them) believe that it came to Austria via Milan, Italy, because of it’s similarities to Cotoletta alla Milanese. The only difference is that cotoletta means cutlet with the bone attached, and schnitzel just means cutlet.

Personally, I think “Wiener Schnitzel” is a lot more fun to say. In fact, if my employer monitors my internet usage, they may be a little confused at all the visits to the dictionary.com entry for wiener schnitzel today. I was constantly clicking on the little speaker icon, because then it would say “Wiener Schnitzel” into my headphones. I would have said it to myself, but, then my co-workers would think I was strange, and I don’t need that in this economy.

So, yeah. For a few weeks now I’ve been determined to make some wiener schnitzel. My bf is getting some dental surgery done tomorrow, so I figured this would be a good last meal. Except he prefers the term Cotoletta alla Milanese. I don’t know where to find veal with the bone attached. I hardly know where to find veal. So, I decided to Italian-it-up and serve it with Risotto Milanese instead of the traditional potatoes. We both win.

I didn’t use a particular recipe for the veal. Just breaded it up (well, double-breaded it for extra crunchy goodness), stuck it in the pan, and then coated it with a nice sauce that was really half a stick of melted butter with some lemon juice thrown in. But for the risotto milanese, I used this recipe by Mario Batali.

There were two new cooking things going on here for me.

1. Cooking with wine. That was fine. I took some of what I was drinking and dumped it in there. I can notch that one off the list.
2. Using saffron. Actually, a more accurate statement would be: tracking down some saffron to use, which brings us to our second AKA.

The Search for Saffron

This was an adventure. Saffron, a lovely spice historically used in medicine, dyes, perfumes, and food flavoring, is a bit hard to come by.

The first grocery store didn’t have any. Neither did the second. I did get a jolt out of actually looking in the “gourmet” section for the first time in my life, feeling both proud and like I was going to get kicked out any second.

I don’t know of an actual gourmet store in my town. I should look into that.

But we do have quite a few ethnic specialty grocery stores. I had already been on a few adventures to the asian market, but this was my first time in the middle eastern market. My bf and I pull up… and it’s closed on Mondays. But no need to panic, there’s an Indian/Pakistani one nearby. It was HUGE actually, which was cool. But it took us a good 15 minutes to go through each aisle. I swear, there was an aisle full of chile powder and curry alone. We’re looking around and around, but no saffron. Out of desperation, I ask the guy working if he has any saffron.

“Oh, sure,” he says, reaching behind him to pull out a small container.

Like Buying Condoms in Ireland

They kept it behind the counter. That’s hilarious.

Although saffron has been used as an aphrodisiac in the past, that’s not why it was back there. Allow me to present another picture:

Yep, that say $8.99. Saffron is one of the most expensive spices you can buy, because it’s a pain in the ass to extract.

Ironically, when I first made the joke about the condoms, I was just referring to the behind the counter bit. I have since heard that Ireland imposes a luxury tax on condoms, making them expensive. So then I did some internet sleuthing and, indeed, it costs about $14-16 (US dollars) over there for a box of 12. Interesting. Anyhoo.

Enough Already, How Did the Food Turn Out?

It was yum!

I was so excited to have wiener schnitzel that I forgot to add my greens to my plate, but you get the idea. I also forgot to save some lemon for a garnish, and used it all up in the sauce. Whoops.

Double breading the veal was def. the way to go, and I think you just can’t go wrong with a sauce made from butter and lemon juice.

The risotto actually tasted really good with some of the parsley mixed in. The saffron turned it yellow, but I couldn’t really taste it in the final product. When I was infusing it the chicken stock though, oh my god, did that smell wonderful.

So I’ve been thinking really hard about this food thing, right? While most of my thoughts has been forward-thinking (I hope), it struck me the other day that I should look backwards as well.

I’m actually a cancer survivor, about six years now. I can’t complain about the experience, because treatment worked very well for me and I’m quite healthy today. But I did start to remember how I ate during that time — ugh. I don’t mean that I ate crap leading up to cancer (even though that’s true too), but more the fact that during four months of chemotherapy, I pretty much lived on Ensure.

Not to rag on Ensure, because it’s designed specifically for folks with compromised immune systems and compromised digestive tracts. It certainly did its job. But day after day it seemed like my only choices were chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry.

I thought to myself, if only I knew then what I’m learning now… How great would it be to have a nice stack of chemo-friendly recipes?

For those of you who don’t know, chemo tends to wreck havoc with your eating habits. First of all, you are killing off all the fast-growing cells in your body - the pesky tumor, your hair, and also a good chunk of your stomach lining. So nausea is a common side-effect.

So is an increased, super powerful sense of smell. Trust me, there is nothing like it. One day, everything is normal, and the next you are able to pick out what’s hidden in your neighbor’s garbage can. Chemo treatment rooms generally ban the use of perfumes and scents for that very reason. What’s nice and subtle normally is gag inducing to a cancer patient. Again, this is due to killing off the fast-growing cells in your nose.

And everything just tastes funny. Ironically, a lot of food loses its flavor, so the first impulse is to add more spice and seasoning, which is the last thing your stomach wants.

Another problem is that certain chemo cocktails can cause severe allergic reactions in people. To prevent these reactions, patients are put on steroids. So you have nausea and the steroid munchies at the same time. It’s infuriating.

Eating well on chemotherapy is challenging, to say the least.

So one of my new missions is to come up with a bunch of recipes that are chemo-friendly. I’m currently surveying a bunch of folks to see what they could and couldn’t eat during chemo. The answers are sometime predictable, but sometimes surprising! Like the one girl who wanted everything pickled. I wasn’t expecting that!

I’m doing a lot of research and promise I’ll come up with some good stuff. Stay tuned.

So this weekend I learned what a frittata was. And that frittatas are great for leftovers. And that spellcheck hates the word frittata and thinks I should use Britanni or Brittanay instead.

And to think I was merely concerned about my personal lack of food fluency…

My bf and I tweaked this Bon Appetit/Epicurious recipe, substituting broccoli for the zucchini because they rhyme we wanted broccoli, adding prosciutto because we wanted some meat flavor, and leaving out the mushrooms because neither of us are a fan. Actually, that last bit went something like:

Him: “What about the mushrooms?”
Me: “I don’t like them.”
Him: “And I hate them.”
Me: “Then we won’t have them. What about the olives?” *makes disgusted face*
Him: “Hmmm” *thinking how much he likes olives, I’m sure*
Me: “Well, I’d rather have the mushrooms than the olives.”
Him: “Why don’t we both stretch ourselves? Have the mushrooms and the olives?”
Me: “That’s fine. I’ll eat them if they are chopped small enough.”
Him: “Okay”

So of course, we accidentally-on-purpose forgot all about the mushrooms at the grocery store. Alas.

So while the olives made the final cut, I was pleased to learn that I could not taste them, or any of the other stuff I didn’t like. I tend to have a weird texture thing with certain veggies, and especially fruits. But cutting them up into small bits helps. So does cooking them. And, evidently, drenching them with cheese.

I was impressed with the frittata from the beginning, as soon as I dumped 1 1/2 cups of parm/romano cheese into the egg mixture. I had a big bowl of tasty glue in front of me. Awesome!

The weird part of the recipe is the angel hair, but we found it helped the fritatta keep its shape. I guess it’s a southern Italian thing. I was skeptical, but it worked out really well. So it’s not just veggie/meat leftovers you can dump in there, pasta works too!

I began to wonder how a frittata differed from quiche, because they both seem like egg-pies to me. Quiche has an actual pastry crust, and uses a custard as its “glue.” Ahh. A project for another time.

I made two different kinds of chimichurri and tasted them on beef, pork, and chicken.

To sum up the video for all of you who have a good excuse not to watch it, like blindness or evil bosses who don’t understand the value of 8 minutes of youtube, the two chimmichuri recipes turned out quite different from one another.

Chimichurri is basically known as a garlicky sauce. It goes on pretty much everything, which is one of the reasons I wanted to try it. Think of the options you’d have with a mastered chimichurri sauce recipe!

The first, which I glibly refer to as the “Red Wine Vinegar” version, was flavored with cilantro, parsely, garlic, crushed red pepper, and cumin. The “White Wine Vinegar” version used green peppers, oregano, paprika, garlic, and parsley.

I have a lot to say about parsley in the video. You really should watch it.

Anyhoo, I enjoyed the first recipe over the second one. I could have predicted this, because I’m not too fond of green peppers, but, I wanted to try it anyway. You never know. Especially with sauces, right? It still blows my mind how you can reach the same “end” with different ingredients. That’s fascinating.

So it may have been the peppers, it may have been the vinegar, but it may have been the other spices. I’ll have to keep those combos in mind as I cook in the future. It also may have been the texture. I didn’t get the second sauce as smooth as the first, so those chunks of green pepper weren’t blended, but out there. Oh well.

But I really enjoyed the first recipe! I was especially happy how differently it worked with all the different meats. The chicken really allowed the flavor of the sauce to show. It built up nicely. The pork/sauce combo was probably my favorite, because the pork just seemed really tasty. And the steak/sauce was the most interesting, because it made the steak taste sweet! That was bizarre to me. Has anyone else ever encountered that, meat tasting sweet because of a spicy sauce?

Anyhoo, that’s chimichurri x6. Check behind the cut for the recipe links!

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