Foodgeek Blog

I’ve started making dinner for my brother, sister-in-law, niece, and myself on Monday nights.  I’ve tried to vary the menu up from week to week, and last Monday my brother gave me an easy opportunity to continue to do so.  We were sitting, eating a fairly rockin’ pork roast I had made, even if I say so myself, and he said, “Next Sunday I’m going to give you four random ingredients, like they do on Chopped.”

I was thrilled, as this was what I’d been trying to get them to do all along.  It’s fun for me, because I’m an improviser, and it works out because I don’t do great with giving them ingredient lists far enough in advance for the shopping to be convenient for them.  Anyway, Sunday night I got my ingredients:

• Tomatillos
• Duck sauce
• Rice pudding
• Cinnamon pita chips

I crushed the pita chips, seasoned them with cumin, garlic powder, and black pepper, and used them to make a crusted chicken breast dish.  It came out pretty well, although if I make it again I’ll use a food processor to crush the chips rather than a meat mallet.  The large chunks didn’t stick extremely well. I’ll also use less cumin, and move the oven rack upward a notch halfway through the baking to get a crunchier crust.

I made some garlic mashed potatoes.  No magic there, other than simmering the garlic in the milk and butter before adding it to the taters.

I used the rice pudding to make some drop biscuits.  I found a basic drop biscuit recipe and used a combination of the pudding and milk to make the batter.  They were ok, but if I make them again I’ll add some sugar.  I left it out because the pudding itself was sweet, but the biscuits came out a little salty tasting.

I had been going to use the duck sauce and tomatillos to make a sort of tapenade for the mashed potatoes.  I chopped the tomatillos and simmered them in the duck sauce, and found it to be a little too tart.  Once I added brown sugar, though, it swung to the other end of the flavor spectrum and became too sweet for the potatoes.  Instead I used it as a glaze for some carrots I cooked in the microwave.

All in all, I’d say it came out pretty well.

I had made stir fry before with a group of friends, but this was my first solo-flyin’, stir-fryin’ experience.

Zucchini, onion, mushroom, green pepper, carrots, blah di blah veggies blah blah blah.  Julienne, stir-fry, no magic here.  I was really excited about the sauce, though.  See, the problem I have with a lot of home stir-fries is that it’s just veggies and rice, with no sauce to tie it all together.

I didn’t measure, sorry:

     Honey dijon salad dressing

     Water

     Lemon juice

     Vernors (trust me)

     Minced garlic

     Cornstarch to thicken

Mix it up.  Heat it up.  I used the same pan I’d been stir-frying in, so it had some of the veggie-flavored olive oil in it as well.  I had added everything but the Vernors, and I could tell it needed something.  I opened the fridge, and inspiration struck.  The ginger ale works great because it added some sweetness as well as a gingery flavor.  Very nice.

After that I added the shrimp and simmered the whole thing until the rice was done.

This one ended somewhere entirely different than I intended it to go, but it was tasty nonetheless.

I just some sauteed veggies (zucchini, mushroom, tomato, onion, garlic), and then simmered them in a cream sauce (roux, half and half, garlic powder, and a little cumin), and I served the whole shebang over rice.

The rice thing was a miscalculation on my part.  Cream sauce is white, white rice is white.  It made for a boring-looking (albeit good-tasting) meal.  In retrospect I should have used some green linguine or one of the more colorful rices.

I said in one of my first entries on this blog that a rice cooker was the only contraption that could truly deliver on reheating rice without turning each grain into an impenetrable fortress of non-yummy food crappiness.  (Ok, not in so many words, but you get the idea.) I was just rereading it and I thought I’d share my more commonly used method of reheating rice:

First put the rice on a plate or bowl (a bowl works best,) and add some water to it.  Then completely saturate a paper towel.  (If it’s not dripping, it’s not wet enough.  Don’t wring it out.)  Cover the rice with the paper towel and tuck it under the rice around the sides forming a pouch.  Microwave as you would anything else.

When the water you added turns to steam it is trapped by the saturated paper towel (which is largely moisture-tight.)

This works well with fried as well as plain rice.

Originally posted July 4, 2007

Seriously. Delicious.

I recently bought a rice cooker, because I’m really bad at making rice. (Go ahead, get your scoffs in now. “Ha ha ha!!” you might say, “Silly man and his know-it-all blogs, and he can’t even make rice without some new-fangled hoity-toity rice cooking contraption!!” Are you done now? Good, let’s move on.)

Not only does it make perfect rice every time, but it will also reheat rice (and I’m pretty sure it’s the only appliance that can truly deliver on that claim), steam vegetables, and apparently it makes soup, too.

Oh, and it MAKES PERFECT RICE EVERY TIME.

Besides, it’s an appliance made specifically for cooking rice. Who am I to rob it of it’s purpose, in favor of some run-of-the-mill saucepan?

I knew you’d see it my way.

As for rice itself, I can’t adequately describe just how much I love it. Next time you have rice, try this little formula I’ve been working on: Rice + bowl + butter + pepper + parmesan cheese (trust me) = DELICIOUS.

Got some gravy? It goes over rice. Got some chili? It mixes with rice.

I’ve recently discovered my love of Basmati. I like white rice just fine, but it has very little flavor of its own. Not like Basmati. Next time you have Basmati, try this: Add some sugar to the rice cooker (or if you’re stuck in the stone age, add it to the pot) — Again, trust me.

So yeah. Rice is teh awesome.