Cooking

[chipotle]

I'm trying to remind myself: Hey, self, you're actually unemployed now. My personal projects are keeping me busy enough that I feel employed, but my income says otherwise. (My bank account is healthy, although that's in no small part because I haven't been paying my estimated income taxes -- which I'd guess amounts to about two-thirds of what I have.)

So part of what I've been doing is trying to beat myself into eating in more often.

I have a love/hate relationship with cooking. I enjoy it, but it stresses me out. I'm good enough to analyze what I did wrong after the fact, but not usually good enough to keep from doing things wrong in the first place. I didn't pick up any measurable interest in cooking until years after I left home. It wasn't until I started going to good restaurants occasionally that I started thinking about cooking in a more than utilitarian fashion.

This proves to be a double-edged sword. Instead of having a mental library of "mom dishes," my mental library was built primarily by chefs at Disney's California Grill and Artist Point restaurants. This creates a low-level but constant fight in the kitchen against my inclination to make, well, canonical mom dishes -- simple one-dish meals that are filling, usually tasty, and manifestly non-gourmet. (My standard college meal was macaroni and cheese with a hot dog cut up in it; I didn't realize until after the fact that a meal of last week of mine was basically a variant on this -- a higher-cut "deluxe" macaroni and cheese turned into a skillet meal with chicken, diced red bell pepper and a green onion garnish. I should note that, on the chance my mom reads this: yes, I know these weren't your canonical mom dishes.)

Today for some reason I was possessed to wing a from-scratch dish, chicken with peaches and balsamic vinegar. I can think of what should have been done to improve it -- I left the skin on the deboned breast with the intent of leaving it crispy, but simmering with the lid on the pan steamed the crispness away; maybe I should have done a smaller dice for the peaches, or better yet for presentation's sake, had thin slices; it could have used a garnish, and a snazzier side than plain rice -- but for having an only marginal idea what I was doing, it came out pretty well.

I have one more chicken breast to play around with, although I'm expecting to do a tequila-lime grilled chicken with it.

Comments

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

What the heck, it beats peanut butter & jelly...

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

The very best cookbook in the universe, as far as I'm concerned (well, Joy of Cooking is a must), for quick, simple, but really good meals, is Fifty Ways to Cook Everything. I use the chapter on marinades a LOT. You just take your protein and pick an array of spices and cook it up, and it usually works beautifully. :)

David

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

My greatest problem with the 'cooking for myself' bug (which comes and goes) is how steadfastly the food industry seems to be arrayed against single-portions. If you want to buy a premade single-serve dinner, you have several hundred options available at your nearest supermarket; but ingredients always seem to come in serving sizes from four to dozens, and it's always been a pain for me to reuse the ingredients within the alloted time. (Admittedly, there are particular cases where it's mostly nature that's the problem; it's hard to sell a quarter of a cabbage.) There's nothing wrong with leftovers per se, but it assumes that within a couple of days you're going to be in the mood for whatever you were in for tonight, which doesn't always work out so well. Feh, I say.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

One notion is to, instead of leaving the skin on, to take the skin off and fry it separately, trying to get the oil to cook off. Then put the skin back on the cooked chicken. Actually, my mom does this with duck, which is very greasy by nature. Getting rid of the grease does wonders for the taste.

[dbcooper.livejournal.com]

argentee can do marvelous things with lime chicken--well, she cooks it well, anyhow. ;)