Home Alone: Jess’ Version

Sorry we haven’t posted in a while. Things have been a little crazy lately. Paul’s been busy at work, and Midterms, with a capital M, have happened for me at school. Hence, our cooking has been limited to easy things you can heat up and an extensive amount of leftover freezer food. I think we’ve had leftover curry four times since we made it last Sunday night a week and a half ago.

But, I figured that because Paul posted when he was home alone and had to cook alone, so should I. He’s gone to a conference for the next few days. Which, apart from being in deep dispair due to his absence, also means I have no dinner waiting for me when I come home on Wednesday nights after my late class. Sadness. So, what do I do for myself for dinner tonight? Chips and week-old guacamole.

When Paul’s left alone, he cooks himself a lovely tuna melt, complete with hot, oven french fries. I, on the other hand, take the first thing I see out of the fridge and start munching. But after finishing the guacamole – there was only a tablespoon or two left – I’m left throughly unsatisfied. But it’s late and after being at school for 11 hours, I’m tired, and in no mood to cook anything interesting.

Good thing Paul and I cooked for an army last weekend (that’s a whole ‘nother post for another time), so I just put a dipper into the big pot of vegetable soup in our fridge and pulled myself a bowl. Veggie soup with barley hits the spot when you’re tired and hungry. And hopefully, it will keep me re-charged for yet another night of studying for midterms, completing problem sets, and grading lab reports.

Speaking of which I had better go do…

Signing off,
Jess

Post script: I promise something more interesting next time. Perhaps we will regale you with the aforementioned tale of Paul and I cooking for an army. Or perhaps Paul will post about the cooking lessons he’s been doing with the kids at the Boys and Girls’ Club.

Epic Fail

We’ve been fairly busy in the cramped kitchen this week, and therefore, have lots of fodder for the blog. Including the following tale of woe:

I opened the freezer with a total lack of enthusiasm for the yesterday evening’s meal: pork chops. Pork chops are not Paul’s and my favorite, but we got a family pack of 8 of them for something like six bucks at the store a few weeks ago. When you’re on a budget, you gotta eat what’s on sale.

“What should we have with these?” I asked Paul, holding up two frozen pork chops in a Ziploc bag, looking nonplussed.

“Some sort of potatoes?” He questioned back.

“I guess,” I answered lethargically. “Now to look online for interesting potato recipes,” I finished as I broke out my computer.

Great. Potatoes. We both love potatoes, but we’ve been eating them a lot lately, and haven’t been very creative with what to do with them. We’ve had mashed, baked, roasted, oven-style fries and more over the past week. And, because we always have leftovers, I spent last weekend eating nothing but leftover potatoes from the fridge when Paul was away on a work retreat.

“I saw someone on Food Network making these chili fries the other week,” Paul said, in a much more optimistic tone of voice than I thought necessary when discussing potatoes.

“We don’t have any chili, Paul.”

“No, like with chili powder on them, to make them spicy fries.”

“Oh. Well that sounds alright,” I said. “At least it’s different.”

So, I got to work chopping potatoes for Paul’s chili fries and he set out to defrosting the meat. (Because of Paul’s mishaps, we’ve taken to dividing and conquering in the kitchen, meaning, I do all the chopping, and Paul does anything but.) After the potatoes, I started dicing up tomatoes for the bruschetta we had decided earlier on having, because we have a large bouquet of basil in our kitchen from the farmer’s market last week. The bruschetta, I was definitely looking forward to. As I was dicing, I began contemplating the looming specter of the meal: the pork chops.

“How on earth can we season these things to go with…italian bruschetta….and spicy potatoes…?” I trailed off.

Most of the seasoning combinations we’ve used in the past have been spice rubs or barbeque-based sauces: hearty flavors that don’t really go with the idea of light, tomato-basil bruschetta toasts.

I kept opening the fridge repeatedly for inspiration. But no matter how many times I looked, the only thing I saw was a tub of plain yogurt. Okay, I thought. This could be a start.

For some reason, I had in my mind that I’d seen somewhere before yogurt and herb sauces made to go over pork chops. I could do that. Right?

I grabbed the yogurt, a fresh cayenne pepper, a sauce pan, and, yup, pepperoni. I once again, set to chopping. Spicy pepperoni-basil-yogurt sauce. Yeah, that might be good over pork chops.

Meanwhile, Paul was seasoning and baking the potatoes, putting olive oil on bread for the toast for bruschetta, and watching me skeptically. He had a right to. Even I didn’t really know what I was doing.

Fast forward through a bunch of boring chopping, stirring, sauteeeing, and baking, to T minus two minutes before food time: Paul’s chili fries were done, the bread had just been put under the broiler, the bruschetta was on the table, the pork chops were sizzling in a pan. And I was still fretting over my sauce, which I had just tasted.

“It’s not too bad,” I lied to Paul. It was kinda funny-tasting, but I still had hope.

“Check the bread,” said Paul, as he was getting two glasses of ice water ready.

I opened the oven and determined that the bread was not crisp enough yet, deciding to wait another few minutes.

I dumped in a bunch of fresh ground black pepper into my sauce, put in some extra olive oil, hoping to save the consistency, and turned off the heat.

Then, I smelled burning. That’s definitely not my sauce, I thought.

Yikes! The bread! I yanked open the oven door to a flood of smoke. Paul rushed to open the windows, but the smoke alarm sounded anyway. My beautiful homemade bread toasts were black. Completely. Unsalvagable. And we had no more bread to start over.

“Oh well,” sighed Paul.

As we sat down to our dismal dinner, I was heartbroken. No bread for bruschetta and a sketchy-tasting sauce for the pork. The bruschetta was going to be my favorite part! We just stared at each other over the kitchen table, as we poured on dainty amounts of the sauce onto a corner of pork.

“You first,” I told Paul, who was looking at his pork curiously. He took a bite.

“That’s not so bad,” he said, chewing, and reached for the sauce pan.

I tried it.

It was at least edible, and didn’t make me feel like ralphing all over the table. It kind of tasted like warm ranch dressing…with pepperoni. Anyways, it was better than eating the pork plain. And, at least we had the chili fries. Paul’s portion of the meal was successful. My part, however, was an epic fail.

Well, maybe things didn’t turn out so bad. We decided to save the bruschetta to serve with new bread toasts tonight, to have with chicken and pepper alfredo. It goes better with pasta anyways. And after our failed dinner, I made yogurt and cream cheese apple dip, which was delicious. So that mostly made up for my kitchen fails.

The moral of the story: don’t let something you don’t think will taste very good distract you from making sure the best part of the meal turns out right.

The dangers of cooking

I never imagined myself writing a blog.  I always thought blogs were better suited for people who like to talk a lot so they have a forum to be heard, even if nobody is listening.  And as anyone who has met me can attest to, talking a lot does not really fit my personality.  However, I thought blogging might be fun, especially if I found a topic that really interested me.  I mean, if an NPR intern can do it, then so can I.  So I picked a topic, came up with a snazzy title, and created a sweet looking blog.

That all took place back in March 2009.  I never ended up writing anything for that blog.  Not one post.  I didn’t even fill out the “about me” section.  I will try harder for this one, but I’m just saying, don’t expect too much from me. I am off to a good start though, or at least a better start than my first blog.

Although this is a joint blog about food and cooking written by Jess and myself, it is almost like two seperate blogs because of our different levels of expertise in the kitchen.  She can write about about the amazing food she cooks, or how she creatively used two ingrediants together in a new way.  Me, I am more likely to write about how excited I was to cook pasta without ruining it, or how I was bested by the microwave and its numerous confounding settings.  And someday I even hope to be able to learn how to use the coffee maker.  I love eating food, and the Food Network channel is probably my second most watched behind ESPN, but my cooking skills are still being developed.  Perhaps a better title for my food blog woud be Life in a Cramped Kitchen: Basic Cooking from a Newbie On His Own for the First Time.  I suggested this, but it didn’t fit in the header.  Anyways, to all who read this, bear with me as I try to learn to cook.  And I would love to hear from any fellow rookies who are going through the same struggles as I am.  Or from grizzled vets who know the kitchen backwards and forwards and have some helpful pointers.  Or from anyone, just so I know someone is reading this.  Even you, Mommy.

So yesterday I tried cooking on my own without help from Jess.  I chose Chicken Pot Pie, because I remember making it back home with my parents and it was fairly easy, as I recalled.  So I got went online to get a recipe, and I realized the internet is not a place for beginners like me.  Seriously, it is impossible to find a normal recipe.  Everyone wants to post their own special recipe with bold and unusual flavors, and being that we are cooking on a budget, we don’t have most of those flavors.  So I did the best I could, combined a number of recipes, and ended up with a nice looking and good tasting final product.

I was pretty pleased with myself as I put it in the oven, so I wasn’t really paying attention while I was washing the dishes.  As a result, I cut my thumb pretty bad on the lid of the Cream of Mushroom can.  It feels ok now, but my ego is bruised.  This is the second time I have cut myself (once cutting onions for Jess) in the month that we have been here.  So the score to date is cuts – 2, completed meals – 1.  I feel like I belong at Wendy’s.

Jess’ note:  If you want the recipe for Paul’s Chicken Pot Pie, see my post tomorrow.

“Spicy you to death”

On Food Network’s show “Chefs vs. City,” in the San Francisco episode, one of the challenges was for the chefs to share a plateful of this Chinese dish called, roughly translated, “spicy you to death.” Well, without traveling all the way to San Francisco, I’m pretty sure that Paul and I inadvertently replicated it for dinner last night.

The official “spicy you to death” dish consisted of lots of different hot chili peppers chopped up, mixed with some sesame seeds and sauteed in oil. The idea is that it’s incredibly difficult to finish a plateful of it by yourself. They mentioned on the show that it usually takes one person a hour or more just to finish less than half of the dish, and that rarely does anyone finish the entire plate, no matter how much time they are given.

Our own, accidental version of “spicy you to death” started when we got these six small-ish green peppers at the farmer’s market – three “sweet” and three green chilis (can you tell where I’m going with this?). The week before, when we got the same peppers, we did in fact get small, sweet, non-spicy peppers along with the green chilis, and quite enjoyed all of them, in moderation. Well, last night, I got this idea to make a veggie stir fry to go with Paul’s pork chops for dinner. And because peppers were pretty much the only thing we had in the fridge (we had some italian sweet red peppers from the farmer’s market, too), I cut up all three “sweet” peppers, a few small red peppers, and two green chilis, and added them to some white onions and some leftover red cabbage, seasoning with minced garlic, and a shake of cayenne pepper.

Theoretically, this should have been tolerable; both Paul and I enjoy spicy food, and I’ve never come across anything so spicy I couldn’t finish it, or didn’t enjoy it at least on some level. That was, until last night. Oh. My. Lord. Those so-called “sweet” peppers, were not sweet. At all. They were HOT. And my stir fry was awful. Well, no, not quite that bad. The first few bites were okay. But the cabbage, with little taste of its own, acted like a sponge for all the hot pepper juices. And the shake of cayenne pepper we could have definitely done without. The entire thing was nearly inedible.

For me. Paul didn’t think it was so bad. While I was gulping down water like it was the beginning of a drought, sniffling, and running to the fridge for a glass of soy milk to calm my palate, Paul was having a second helping of my stir fry! He agreed it was spicy, but I guess the Korean in him can handle more heat than me. I used to pride myself on my ability to handle spicy foods, but this put me in shame. Between the heat of all the peppers in the stir fry and the bite from the black pepper in Paul’s pork rub, I was thanking God for the corn on the cob to cut the pain.

In the first lines, I said “Paul and I.” I take that back. I take full responsibility for the overwhelming heat in my own “spicy you to death.” Paul, for his part, made beautiful pork chops, rubbed with cumin, Montreal Steak Seasoning, and black pepper, seared in a pan and then baked in the oven for a few minutes. They were flavorful, moist, and just perfect. Despite the buzzing of my lips and mouth from my stir fry, I did enjoy the pork.

Throughout the meal, in between glasses of water (I think we each drank 3 or 4) and bites of spicy, Paul and I started musing about how long it would take us to finish a real plate of “spicy you to death” at that little Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. I guess if we ever go there, we’ll have to find out.