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My Calphalon Commercial 9-piece set showed up today. To make some good use out of it, I decided to roast a chicken and make a meal out of it.

I was really hoping to get a nice, free-range chicken, but the local market only had Foster Farms in whole roasters. Here it is, posing for the camera in its bag and some of its new roommates.

I removed the innards and neck and threw them in the sink. Technically I could have used them, but I still consider them gross. I noticed the chicken’s nuts were still attached up in the cavity so I had to pull them out. Awesome and appetizing, huh?

Here he is all dried and ready to go!

And a mirepoix with garlic all chopped and ready as well.

That, along with some rosemary and bay leaf, were about all that went into this. I should have added some sage, in retrospect.

Everything went into a hot casserole/dutch oven with some good olive oil.

I flipped him over, after it was a little browned. I will continue to refer to the chicken as a “he” since I had to actually handle his balls, out of respect.

A little butter , then into the oven.

A little while later, things got pretty cluttered. I made a salad and put it in the fridge, then I boiled some potatoes, blanched some green beans, and got everything ready for the next step.

The camera died at this point, so I charged the battery while I finished up. I chopped up the boiled potatoes, tossed them with olive oil and minced garlic, and pan fried them for a while until they were golden brown. I sauteed the green beens with some butter and tossed them with pepper and feta. The juices from the chicken were strained, half-assedly de-fatted and then thickened with some corn starch.

The chicken rested during some of that, and then I “carved” it. I butchered the fuck out of it. I did manage to get the drumsticks off intact and separated the breast nicely into two good looking pieces.

Here’s the whole meal, everything dumped on a plate. I wanted to make bread but didn’t have time, so it’s fresh but store bought.

and that’s my chicken story the end

A few days ago I was experimenting with chocolate chip cookies. I added some molasses, which added much more flavor than I intended, and I also (accidentally) used jumbo eggs instead of large eggs. I completely neglected to account for the extra moisture and ended up with very thin, almost crunchy wafers instead of normal cookies.

Today I decided to make proper, by-the-book chocolate chip cookies to negate the fucked up batch. They turned out pretty good. King Arthur flour, cage-free eggs (I suppose it was the chickens were cage free, really), organic vanilla and brown sugar and plain old C&H cane sugar, plus baking soda and salt. The chips are Ghirardelli.

I made 40, and here’s a picture of 39 of them:

Meanwhile the cat helped by doing nothing while I played Rock Band between batches. Lazy slut.

I had a pretty long day and week, and missed lunch today, so I made myself a ton of food. The weather’s been great, so the grill was the clear choice tonight.

My meal included pork tenderloin, locally made andouille sausage, organic onion, green beans, tomato and yellow potato. Everything was grilled except the beans, which were sauteed with olive oil and a tiny bit of European style butter (85% butterfat). The grilled foods were seasoned with only kosher salt, and the pork also got a little pepper. The onion was cooked directly above the pork, so that some of the juices would drip down and add some mild flavor to the meat.

I have leftovers that will feed me all week, and I’ll be making some tasty sandwiches.

I’ve continued to work on my pizza, and tonight’s result was worth mentioning. I focused on controlling the moisture in the toppings so the crust would have a chance to develop a nice “snap” to it. I pressed the mozzarella and tomato slices between papers towels, with my large cutting board on top. This squeezed a lot of extra moisture out. I also chilled the sausage after I cooked it to keep it firm.

Fresh out of the oven:

And a side view of a slice. The crust is very thin and crispy, yet not hard or cracker-like.

I realize all of my pizza pictures probably look the same. This pizza was the best one so far, even if it’s not clear from the pictures.

A while ago I watched a video of Gordon Ramsay making scrambled eggs. He was pretty adamant that most scrambled eggs are overcooked, whether we realize it or not. I wasn’t convinced initially, because it just looked like he made runny, undercooked eggs.

It didn’t take too long before I decided to give it a try, with some slight modifications based on available ingredients. The texture was much less offensive than I expected, and the taste was amazing. For being so simple I was very surprised. I’ve been making them about once a week ever since, and actually look forward to making breakfast these days.

The trick is to keep the heat reasonably low, and to keep the eggs from coagulating into large blobs by constantly stirring. The eggs spend about the same amount of time on the burner as off the burner, to ensure they cook slowly and evenly. No salt is added until they are on the plate. At the end, just before they are done, some dairy is added to cool them off and halt the cooking. The video specifies crème fraîche.

Today I didn’t have any crème fraîche, so I used mascarpone (which is made from crème fraîche). Instead of sourdough bread, I used a freshly baked French boule. Instead of cherry tomatoes and mushrooms, I used a mix of tomato, green beans, baby yellow potatoes and sweet onion. The beans were blanched and the potatoes were par-cooked in advance. Everything was roughly chopped, tossed with olive oil and kosher salt, and spread evenly in a large skillet while the eggs were prepared.

Again, they are supposed to look runny and undercooked, but they aren’t. They just have a very uniform consistency that makes them look that way. The bread was pretty damn good too, I have to say.

My baking stone came on Wednesday, but unfortunately was cracked in half. My replacement showed up today.

Here’s version 2 of the tomato/onion/prosciutto pizza from the other night. The crust was much thinner and was nice and crispy. I was able to make it thinner and larger because I wasn’t trying to cook it on the back of a sheet pan.

I made my first pizza dough tonight, and it turned out pretty good. The sauce was made from scratch as well.

I ordered a baking stone, which should be here Wednesday. I plan to use it this weekend, and will document the whole process. I skipped the pictures this time (until the end) because I didn’t know if they would turn out.

This one was topped with a very thin layer of tomato sauce, organic tomato, mozzarella, proscuitto, red onion, sea salt and olive oil. I added some fresh basil at the last second.

This one had some nice local Italian sausage, browned and drained, bell pepper, tomato, mozzarella and a little sauce. There was also a little olive oil and black pepper involved here.

They turned out great, and I can’t wait to make some again this weekend using an actual baking stone instead of a sheetpan.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here – long enough that I had forgotten my password – and I’m starting to feel like I might be wasting a small portion of the internet. To remedy the obvious fact that I have nothing interesting to say, I’ve decided to start tracking my current hobby, which is cooking.

Some of the images are cut off a little. This is the internet’s fault, not mine. I will work on the layout.

I would say that baking is particularly grabbing my interest, so there may be a focus on that particular aspect of the culinary universe. I’ve started small with simple French breads, with the occasional batch of pretzel bites (more on this later) and a semi-successful batch of sourdough starter filling in the gaps. I also have been baking cookies on a fairly regular basis.

There is something pleasant about thinking “I would like to put a cookie in my mouth” and then having a fuckton of warm, fresh cookies in a reasonably short time and without having to go to the store. Yesterday I decided to experiment and used some mascarpone cheese in a batch of chocolate chip cookies, which was a happy success. On Saturday I made cookies with mini peppermint patties.

My baking appreciation started about 6 months ago when I had a craving for those cheddar cheese biscuits they serve at Red Lobster. By no means a pinnacle of culinary excellence and unfortunately requiring a trip to Red Lobster, they seemed like they would be hard to reproduce with my basic skillset. After less than a minute on the internet, I came across this recipe:

• 2 cups Bisquick
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2/3 cup grated cheddar cheese

Combine well in a large bowl, avoiding overmixing. Spoon into large globs onto a baking sheet. Bake at 400 for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, combine about 1/4 cup butter with a large pinch of garlic salt over low heat. Brush over the biscuits when they come out of the oven and remove the biscuits to a cooling rack.

My first attempt turned out pretty close to what I was expecting – a product that looked similar to the target at a glance, but had some major flaws. The bottoms were burnt, the insides were undercooked and the tops were blackened slightly. I could see that I needed to make some modifications, and I now had a ton of Bisquick to play with.

I tried using a Pyrex casserole to keep the bottoms from burning, and it worked. I made them slightly smaller and mixed the less, and they came out fully cooked. I lowered the temperature slightly and paid more attention while they cooked and they came out golden brown on top. And I added some dried parsley to the butter/garlic mixture and got some much needed color.

This process took about a month, but I enjoyed the experimenting and the fact that I could eat whatever I made. It took me another month to realize I had to start working out – at least a little – to offset this. I’ve been running at least a mile about 5 days a week, which also made me happy I stopped smoking (13 months ago already!).

Before I got too carried away, I attempted to make an alfredo sauce specifically for dipping biscuits in. My entire concept of something as ubiquitous as alfredo sauce was shattered when I did some research. It turns out that what I had always called alfredo was most definitely a sauce in its own right, but was not actually what I thought it was. True alfredo sauce is made from butter, cream, parmesan cheese, white pepper and nutmeg, all mixed directly over hot pasta. Fake alfredo sauce is what’s called a Mornay sauce – bechamel with cheese, which is itself a roux with milk or cream, and that is butter and flour cooked together as a thickening agent.

I decided that it was important to understand these things so that I could ask for help when I needed it, without sounding like too much of a moron.

I had to make actual food to go with my chain restaurant knockoff biscuits, so I started cooking more and eating more meals at home. At this point in time I eat out less than once every two weeks, and as a side-effect, I’m much more aware of what I eat and my portions have become much more realistic. This is a nice bonus.

Before I post any pictures, I’ll be very clear that I repeatedly use similar ingredients and techniques, and I have only one set of plates that I consider “nice”. You will frequently see onions, potatoes, cucumber salads, the same black plates and a lot of throwaway side dishes throughout all of my food related posts. In order to get better and learn, I have to repeat a lot of things, make minor corrections or variations, and try again.

Here is a shot of one of my cheddar cheese biscuits, at what was probably the peak of biscuit making:

Actually, the little pile of shit next to the biscuit was a pretty tasty item itself. I chopped up a bunch of vegetables, grilled some shrimp, and marinated the whole deal in lime juice, vinegar and olive oil. I called it a shrimp ceviche. I think the coolest part was that I served it in a peeled tomato (which was a son of a bitch):

I imagine the observant reader will also spot a glass of whiskey (The Glenlivet Nadurra, in this case) in many pictures.

Random ceviche experiment aside, I still wasn’t producing actual meals. That would change because I was starting to get sick of biscuits.

At first I focused on steaks, and dabbled a bit in sauces. My early achievement was something I referred to simply as steak an potatoes. It was based around a reduction of chicken stock and red wine vinegar prepared in the same pan in which the steak was cooked. The sauce contained a lot of butter as well. My love of shallots probably started here too.

My first attempt turned out extremely good as a steak, but not very impressive as a meal. However, the sauce itself was incredible and asked to be soaked up by some sort of bread. I don’t recall saying this post would be done in strictly chronological order, so here’s the first and last versions of my steak and potatoes separated by several months. I’ll fill in the gaps later.

Salted cucumber and pan fried potatoes. I don’t think I even par-cooked the taters, so they were probably raw in the middle.

A few attempts later, I made a much better overall meal, and even took a chance with some interesting plating:

I served it on a cutting board, to myself, just for fun. The dinner roll there is one of my early ones, but I recall it being part of a pretty good batch. The potatoes are fully cooked, crispy, and topped with diced proscuitto. The sauce isn’t quite as prominent, and the pointless diced cucumber pile is gone.

While I was working on learning to cook a good steak, I also made my first loaf of bread:

I was immediately interested in baking bread. It turned out great, and it was only my first attempt. I suddenly felt a little embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm for biscuits from a box.

While the bread turned out excellent in its own right, I really wanted to make a loaf of rustic ciabatta. I liked the idea of huge, uneven bubbles and a chewier texture. I soon learned that the secret was a very wet or slack dough, which came with a recommendation of a stand mixer. I could think of plenty of things to do with a stand mixer, and when I found an amazing deal on a KitchenAid Professional 600, I had to grab it.

The mixer made ciabatta a walk-away experience. I made my first loaf entirely by weight and was careful to follow the directions exactly. What I got was a pretty nice loaf, but it was lacking the huge bubbles I was expecting. It would take me months to get it right, making adjustments to the moisture content, type of flour and the proofing environment as I went. Switching to a high quality unbleached bread flour helped quite a bit (King Arthur, specifically), as the dough needs some serious gluten to hold any shape whatsoever.

Here is a shot of ciabatta number 1:

And a picture of its guts:

I ended up making a few loaves for a small party and people liked them, so I kept at it.

I also used ciabatta as an accompaniment to my first attempt at roast chicken. I brined the chicken carefully, roasted it carefully and carved it carefully, all resulting in what might have been the best chicken I will ever have. I haven’t tried again because I don’t think it’ll be as good. Huge success.

The starch was provided by some mashed potatoes I made using a play on a twice baked potato. The potatoes were boiled as usual for soon-to-be-mashed tubers, but I then roasted them in the oven with olive oil until they were crispy, and then pan fried them with garlic. Once mashed, the skin on potatoes were mixed with cream and European style butter (higher fat content). They were fucking ridiculous.

Oh yeah, and the gravy was great too. I am so proud of this meal, and it’s a shame that nobody ever saw it.

Not too long after the chicken experiment, I decided to make some seared tuna. I love seared tuna at Japanese restaurants, and it seems simple enough. My first try wasn’t bad, but it’s pretty obvious that the fish wasn’t really the type that got good grades in “looking good raw” school.

This time served with Jameson. As you can see, it’s very pale, and also sitting on top of way, way too many noodles.

I picked up a rice cooker (I have never been good at cooking rice), and the ingredients needed to make peoprly seasoned sushi rice. Before I tried the tuna again, I went for a sushi-bar staple:

The lack of variety in my plates is probably pretty obvious by now. You don’t have to eat the plate so I consider it slightly less important. Anyway, they looked and tasted like sushi shrimp, albeit slightly rough around the edges. I was happy enough to move on to tuna #2:

It was clearly a modified version of my previous tuna dish, but this time with much happier looking fish and a bed of sushi rice. The (pretentiously applied) sauce is a miso/ginger/soy reduction.

I’m getting pretty sick of typing but already resized and uploaded some additional images, so I’ll just post them with short descriptions:

Breaking in my new grill pan with a ribeye. Believe it or not, I got sick of the ribeye cut and moved on to the flat iron. Easily my favorite cut right now, flat iron steaks are reasonably priced, extremely tender and almost devoid of large fat deposits. This is a pleasant change compared to the giant ring of fat on a rib eye. Here’s a flat iron with some garlic and cayenne bread stick action:

Eventually I’ll go through a bean/chili phase, but what you see there is from a can. The steak is topped with some crumbled feta.

On a whim one day, my roommate suggested I make pretzels. I had a pre-ferment (flour, yeast, water left to bubble and develop for a while) that I didn’t have a plan for, and that was perfect. It turns out pretzels are very easy to make, aside from the shaping part. I fucked them up pretty bad, but they tasted great. I made a batch of pretzel bites and have made a shitload of them since. They are great for parties (with a cheese dipping sauce).

Bagels are a procedural cousin of pretzels, so I will be attempting them soon. I also tried stuffing pretzels with cheese, which worked pretty well.

Here’s a shot of chicken tacos, and I will offer no further explanation:

And finally, here is a cameraphone shot of my barbeque chicken from tonight. I resurrected the old biscuit recipe (part of the inspiration for posting this tonight), but replaced the cheddar with pepper-jack. The beans are from a can again, but everything else is fresh. The image quality is terrible, and in fact the food itself wasn’t anything mind-blowing. The only interesting part of this, I think, is that the image is tagged with my exact GPS coordinates at the time I took the picture.

(You are looking at, clockwise from the lower left, a napa cabbage salad with fresh mozzarella and a light vinaigrette, pepper-jack “lobster” biscuit, chili con carne, potato and onion fry with 4 kinds of pepper, and a chicken breast brined with brown sugar and dried chilis and basted with Sweet Baby Ray’s barbeque sauce)

This post is meant to be an introduction to what I intend to focus in regards to this website. As such, it should help catch up to where I am right now, in anticipation of posts oriented toward specific food items in the near future. I will mix what I’ve learned with occasional how-to posts and recipes. Soon I should be able to document my experiences with home-made sourdough starters, and maybe I’ll finally expand my cookie making skills with help from my brand new copy of the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion.

Thanks for reading!