Ginger Apple 3.14159

Since I need the motivation to get off my computer and actually start baking, I'm going to work on this post while working on the pie.

Yes, pie.

You know what's worse than finding a worm in your apple? Discovering that all the apples you've been buying at the farmers market with dreams of baking delicious apple baked things... are going bad. Any of y'all who have been following this blog know how much I love my apple baked goods. You may also know how much I hate waste. This situation is seriously heartbreaking.

But the thought of peeling all those apples, and cutting off all the rotten bits and what not isn't really motivating me. Instead I'm chatting with a friend about how I want to go to the farmer's market on Saturday to buy more apples. I have a problem, and its time to fix it. So here goes.

Step 1: Turn on music. Then post a screenshot of the music to my blog, because obviously y'all need to see what I'm listening to.

I'm going to take a moment to wonder whether I started saying y'all before or after I started listening to too much country music.

Step 2: Sort all the apples. Discover that most of my eating apples, and the newest apples are fine enough to save for later. Sigh with relief, since this means I have the right number of (slightly too old) apples for a pie - 9. Throw out one apple that's too far gone and cry a little bit. Wash all the fine apples so they don't have anything nasty on them.

See? These apples all look good and aren't mushy! They've since been joined by a lot more apples from the banged and bruised rack at the grocery store.

Step 3: Realize this might be a good time to find a pie pan. Unsure if I've ever seen a pie pan in my kitchen, I go digging in the drawer under my oven. I find 3. None are labeled with a size, so I pick one at random.

The pie crusts need to warm up so, after checking the size, I leave them on the counter. It'll probably take me 3 hours to peel the darn apples anyways. I guess I'll go do that now. Hopefully my knife is sharp.

Testing the knife on the pie crust box reveals that it's still very sharp. It's seriously a joy to work with. For the first time ever, I peeled an apple in once piece.

Unfortunately, one spot was a little thin and broke while I was trying to take a picture.

My hands are sore from spending almost 11 hours typing today, so I'm not quite as successful at peeling the others in one piece. I decide to throw out another apple because it smells like mold. More sadness ensues.

Step 4: Finish peeling the apples. It only took 20 minutes. So far so good.

Step 5: Begin slicing the apples. The one thing my mom taught me about pie is that the apple slices need to all be around the same size, so they cook evenly. Given the varying sizes of apples, however, this proves to be impossible.


(Apparently I didn't take enough pictures for all the writing I did.)

My dad would probably have some things to say about my knife form, but for now I figure, as long as the apples are being cut and I'm not, it's fine.

I take that back. Slightly ashamed, I fix my knife form per my dad's voice in my head - leave the tip of the knife on the cutting board and rock it instead of picking it up and pushing it back down. (If I had a second pair of hands I'd take a picture to demonstrate, but you'll have to trust my description for now.) Unsurprisingly, this is much easier. It also leads to even less uniform slices. I still need practice. Even so, the last three apples take about half the time to slice that the first two thirds do.

In the process of mixing up the other ingredients for the filling, I remember that I needed to feed my sourdough starter 2 weeks ago. I'm really failing at this kitchen thing. I also find a hole in my bag of flour, after flour gets dumped all over me from the side of the bag. Never a recipe without a mess...

Step 6: The recipe I'm following suggests adding cloves. I have an unopened container of cloves in my spice pile, somehow. They're whole cloves, which doesn't sound very nice to bite into, so I go about slicing them. This is harder in some ways than slicing apples. The cloves don't take favorably to remaining on the cutting board.

I also find some dried ginger in my spice pile. Screw that, I have fresh ginger. I decide to add some fresh ginger to the pie. Chopping the ginger (see right) is much easier than chopping cloves.

Step 7: Realize that I should turn on the oven. Discover that my recipe doesn't have baking directions. I guess they're on the box of pie crusts. Using premade pie crusts reminds me of the time I  bought premade Korean bbq marinade, and some Korean grandmother tsk tsk'd me for not doing it myself.

Korean bbq marinade is easier than pie crust. It just needs a blender, it isn't picky.

As it turns out, both the pie crusts and the pie filling recipe say "bake as directed". I have been given no directions. Thankfully there's a recipe on the box, I'm not sure how I didn't notice that before when I was looking for an apple pie recipe to follow. I've found my baking directions.

Step 8: Mix apples with seasoning.

Step 9: Dump apples into pie pan.

I'm a touch concerned by the volume of apples, but almost all of them get nicely piled into/onto the pie pan. One slice ends up on the floor. I'm distracted, because someone is asking me for help with things and I'm bad at saying no to friends.

I somehow manage to cover the entire pile of apples with the top pie crust. I know from experience that the apples will shrink when baking so the sheer size of my pie doesn't concern me just yet. Unfortunately, I forget to add butter or lemon juice, so hopefully the apples are nice and juicy and tasty on their own. I slice a pretty pattern of slits on the top and open the oven only to discover that I forgot to remove my cast iron pan from the oven. As usual.

Once the pie has been in the oven 15 minutes, I try to put foil around the edges, per directions, but the pan is hot and the foil isn't sticking, so we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll have some slightly burnt edges.

I check the directions one more time to make sure I have the cooking time correct. It appears the pie has to sit for 2 hours before being eaten. I decide to stay up past my bedtime to eat pie, rather than deprive myself of pie until morning (which inevitably meant until I got home from work the next day, because there's no way I was spending that first delicious bite of pie on my half-asleep morning brain.

The pie was, in fact delicious. I ate it all week. The variety of apple breeds and the failure to homogenize the ginger/apple mixture meant that every bite tasted slightly different.

The roommate and the one friend I shared with also approved.

Roar. I'm a pie.

Ginger Apple Pie

Ingredients
8ish apples (sliced evenly)
2/3 cups sugar
1/3 cup flour
1 pinch salt
4ish cloves (chopped)
1 tablespoon fresh ginger (chopped)
Pie crust (store bought or homemade)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2. Arrange bottom pie crust in pie pan
3. Mix apple slices, sugar, flour, salt, cloves and ginger
4. Arrange apples in pie pan on top of crust
5. Cover apples with upper pie crust
6. Seal the edges between the two crusts and cut slits in the upper pie crust
7. Bake for 15-20 minutes
8. Cover edges of pie with foil to prevent browning
9. Bake for another 20-30 minutes
10. Cool for a few hours before serving

I've gan coco-nutty for you

A couple of weeks ago, I became obsessed with the idea of vegan chocolate chip cookies. I'm not really sure what got me the idea. I wasn't even sure if vegan chocolate existed or how much I would have to pay for it. But I wasn't going to let the idea go without at least a little Googling.

In the Googling, I encountered a recipe titled "The BEST Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies" and I thought that might be a good place to start. As it turns out, Trader Joes chocolate chips are vegan, and vegan chocolate chip cookies are really not all that difficult.

With that knowledge in hand, and also the knowledge that I could get coconut oil and possibly almond milk at Trader Joe's, I went on a shopping trip.

The Baker Josef's flour was already in my cupboard. I have a serious Trader Joe's thing going, apparently.

I am not ashamed.

It starts like most cookies, by creaming together the sugar and the fat. In this case, however, the fat is coconut oil instead of butter.

Usually, when baking, this is a dangerous stage for me. Butter and sugar is delicious. So I naturally wanted to try the coconut oil and butter and see how it was and... well... delicious. A bit coconutty, and still pure fat and sugar. This recipe was off to a very good start.

The coconut oil was a lot harder to cream into the sugar than butter usually is, partly because I'd been keeping it in the fridge so it wasn't very soft.

However, it got there eventually. And I munched on a bit more. And it continued to be delicious.

About this point I realized that no raw eggs = edible cookie dough. This made me very excited.

Duly excited, I went on to add the rest of the ingredients. I dumped both full bags of chocolate chips into the cookies, even though that was something like 3 times what the recipe called for, because seriously... chocolate.

I mean, look at this. Does that look like too many chocolate chips? It is pretty darn crumbly. But its not the chocolate chips that make it crumbly...

However, lots of squishing and warming it up with my hands made it into reasonable balls of dough. Most of them, anyways...

And, then when I'd filled 3 pans with cookies, I ate the rest of the dough.

It was delicious, and it didn't carry a risk of salmonella!

I probably could have stood to flatten the balls out a bit, but who really cares what shape their cookies are as long as they taste good, right?

These cookies tasted great. I took a bunch to a party and didn't tell anyone they were vegan until about half had been eaten, and then when I spilled the beans, nobody believed me. Someone gave me a specific line that I was supposed to quote in here about how good they are, but it was almost 2 weeks ago and I don't remember anymore.

Not only were they just as good as non-vegan cookies, they also kept really well. I had one sit out on the counter for a week before I ate it, and it was maybe slightly stale, but not terribly so. Another bunch got mailed across a couple of states and... well, it sounds like they were well received. And as for me, well, I'm glad I made a double batch.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe found on Daily Rebecca, ingredients doubled, instructions rewritten to be my own.

Ingredients
1 cup coconut oil
2 cups brown sugar
½ cup almond milk
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
4 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 bags vegan chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Cream coconut oil and sugar together
3. Add almond milk and vanilla, mix thoroughly.
4. Add flour, then salt, then baking soda and baking powder. Mix periodically while adding.
5. Stir in the chocolate chips.
6. Form balls of dough, arrange on baking sheet.
7. Bake until done, around 10 minutes.

I bean wanting to dip into hummus

It's been surprisingly hot in Seattle lately. Hot enough that, for a couple days, turning on the stove or the oven to cook anything just seems irresponsible. Of course, I still need to eat, so the best plan I could think of was to make a bunch of something I could keep eating for a while, without needing to reheat. Hummus seemed like a good choice.

Somehow, I managed to get my heart set on roasted garlic hummus. Because, I don't know, taking a recipe that usually just involves blending things and adding an element of baking just seemed like the best idea in the heat.

And roasting garlic correctly, meh. I grabbed a couple cloves, doused them in olive oil, and stuck them in the toaster oven for a while. That thing still produced a surprising amount of heat.

One hummus recipe I found said that the best way to make the best hummus was to add the ingredients one at a time and then blend for about a minute in between. Since this one website said that was the best way, I figured I'd try it.

First, tahini. Tahini is surprisingly liquid, and surprisingly easy to spill all over the place. I was expecting it to be the consistency of peanut butter, but no.

After tahini was the lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and some basil.

I found basil in the freezer that was bought and forgotten last time hummus was made at my house. Basil freezes surprisingly well... just saying.

The problem was, well, the volume of all these ingredients just wasn't enough for my blender.

Everything got sprayed up on the side of the blender and had to be scraped back down every 10 seconds or so in order to keep them blending. So I figured I'd just add the chickpeas.

The recipe also suggested skinning the chickpeas was helpful, though a bit of a waste of time. I just shook them and removed obvious skins from the strainer before adding them to the blender.

Unfortunately, adding the chickpeas didn't really help. The solid to liquid proportions were off, and the blender continued to choke. I added some more olive oil to help it along, but it kept making weird blooping noises (see video).

I eventually got enough olive oil in to make it blend smoothly, but that was a bit too much olive oil for the hummus. I had some issues with separation in the following days.

At first I wasn't a huge fan of the hummus, it was a bit too tart and grainy.

However, the next day, when I pulled the hummus out for lunch, it was amazing. The flavors all settled overnight and suddenly I had hummus better than any hummus I've ever bought.

Totally worth the effort. Would be worth even more if I doubled the recipe so I didn't have to scrape the darn blender walls constantly.

Hummus

Ingredients

1 can of chickpeas / garbanzo beans

1/4 cup of lemon juice, or one lemon's worth

1/4 cup of tahini

Some cloves of garlic - roasting optional

2+ tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon salt

1. Dump all ingredients in blender
2. Blend until smooth
3. Eat, or refrigerate overnight for best flavory goodness

From Ductile to Brittle

Every Friday night, I go to the local yarn shop and knit.  I do it mostly for the community (because God knows some days I don't feel like knitting and I go anyways).  The friends I've made at this place are the solid kind of friends that you know will be happy to spend time with you even if you just want to curl up in a corner and face the wall and not talk to anyone... and usually, if I show up in that kind of mood, I still leave the happiest I've been all week.

Sometimes, people show up with food to share.  (I should probably do this sometime...)  One week, the food was a candy-like concoction from a local bakery.  The best way to describe it would be a granola brittle, that was far more granola than brittle.  Since buying it online was very expensive (the cheapest option cost around $40 plus shipping) and I didn't know where to go to buy it, I decided to try to replicate it.

The basic process for each of these was the same.  Make a brittle, add granola, cool, eat.  However, the results were somehow very different.

Attempt 1:
This was my first attempt at making brittle ever.  I didn't imagine it would be too hard, and it wasn't... in both senses of the word.
After reading a ton of brittle recipes and the ingredients list on the product, I came up with a seemingly simple process: heat sugar and honey until it reached hard crack stage, stir in butter and cream, stir in granola.

Problem: not only was I completely guessing with my proportions, I also discovered that nobody agreed on what "hard crack stage" was.  The temperature associated with it ranged about 75 degrees, which is a lot when you're working with something this finicky.

I trusted my candy thermometer.  My thermometer was wrong.  I also probably added too much butter and cream.  Needless to say, my brittle was one of the most ductile candies I've eaten.  However, it was quite delicious.

Attempt 2:
Not sure why I don't have a picture of this... this one really didn't turn out well.  It was very... grainy.  This could either be my attempt at adding oatmeal (instant oats), but more likely is because not all the sugar had melted when part of it had reached a much higher temperature than hard crack stage.  So... even though it was hard, and tasted fine, the texture was just... disappointing.

Attempt 3:
After guessing that the strange texture of the previous round was due to improper amounts of stirring, I decided to try something different this time: remove the thermometer.  After realizing that it not only didn't really help me understand what hard crack stage was, but it also was a major obstruction to the stirring process, I decided that maybe I would do better without it.

Unfortunately, this batch also included sunflower seeds, which, while in the original product, somehow took away from the taste of the brittle when I made it.








(One year later)

Soooo my plan had been to keep experimenting and keep posting until I had finally obtained a good brittle, but at some point this plan lost steam. I made one more batch after this, which crystallized but never hardened, and ended up being trail mix and sugar mush with the texture of a caramel gone bad. This was, for obvious reasons, very difficult to eat.

I had a successful run with a bacon brittle a while later, but haven't gone back to trying to make the granola brittle that I wanted. In the interest of keeping the blog posts flowing, I'm retiring this project for a while and letting y'all know how the first 4 attempts went. When I'm more experienced in candy making, I'll come back to this, I'm sure. I have better equipment now, so the candy experiments should be coming soon.

Since this whole post is kind of depressing an unfunny, I'll finish with a joke:
Two fish were in a tank. One said "You drive, I'll man the guns."

Setting kale for a new era of eating

I've been struggling with stomachaches for the last several years. Nothing debilitating, most of the time, but definitely not something I want to live with for the rest of my life. The pattern was random - I could go a week or two and be fine, and then the next week would be terrible. I long suspected some sort of food intolerance was at stake, but I didn't know what. A few gluten and/or lactose free friends encouraged me to try an elimination diet, or just try eliminating one thing at a time until I found it. However, not wanting to give up my favorite foods, and not liking the prospect of randomly eliminating things for a couple weeks a at a time until something changed, I decided to get a blood food allergy test. While not 100% accurate, these tests look for antibodies in the blood specific to foods, and can offer a good starting point for anyone wishing to locate food intolerances.

The results that came back were not altogether surprising, but also weren't things I would have thought to pinpoint on my own. While I had figured I had a problem with eggs, I hadn't suspected bananas, cranberries, pineapple, mushrooms or broccoli - nor would most of these be eliminated in a standard elimination diet. I've since stopped eating any of these things and am feeling a good deal better. At some point I'll try them all again to look for false positives, but that's beside the point.

The point is, knowing I had some foods I needed to avoid gave me the motivation to really start rethinking how and what I eat. I wanted to start eating better food (healthier, more delicious, better quality, all of the above). Where better to start than with the stereotypical superfood, kale? I mean, they're putting it in everything these days!

(Credit to Theo's Chocolate for this image)

Okay, my thought process was less intentional than that. It started with "Oh, I should get produce from the farmer's market". A delicious bag of mixed greens from a stand I didn't know led me to go back to that stand to buy more greens. But alas, they didn't have any mixed greens.

What did they have? Kale. Lots and lots of kale.

It was cheap and plentiful, so I decided to try it. After listening to a long list of ideas for how to eat kale (from the seller and a loving customer who happened to walk up at the time), and a description of the different kinds of kale - because apparently such a thing exists - I bought a bundle of White Russian Kale to try.

Sadly, White Russian Kale isn't nearly as tasty on its own as the standard White Russian drink, but it's probably a good deal healthier, and there's nothing wrong with consuming white russian kale at work.

So there's that.

Per instructions, I put the kale in some water to freshen it up - in this case, a pyrex pan of water.

It eventually came time to inspect the kale, and I quickly discovered that kale is a very strange plant. Here you see leaves growing out of the leaves.

Go home, kale, you're drunk.

It was probably all the White Russians.

Since I didn't really feel like cooking things, I decided to make a kale salad for lunch. One of the suggestions was kale and strawberries, and there were some strawberries lying around my apartment that needed to get eaten (thanks roommate), so, well, perfect.

Kale slicing was easy with a sharp knife. You slice down the edge of the stalk to get the leafy bits.

Insert a few strawberries, slightly bruised, but otherwise delicious.

I also have to throw in a mention of my beautiful bento box. It's beautiful, I love it, and at some point I'll do a spotlight on things I'm doing with it. But right now, just enjoy its beauty.

Sliced strawberries, inserted into bento box, stuck it all in the fridge and brought it for work the next day.

Fun fact: kale is very tough. Its not so tough to eat, because teeth are awesome, but I did manage to break my beloved plastic travel spork while trying to eat this salad. So use caution.

It was, however, delicious.

About a week later, I realized that the kale was still hanging out on my counter, in its pyrex pan. It was a little less green at this point, and I figured it needed using, so I decided to use the rest for a food I'd heard all too much about at this point: kale chips.

Again with the kale slicing. This time I added a bunch of olive oil and some salt.

Spread it out on the cast iron pan that currently lives in my oven, and roasted it for about half an hour at 350 degrees F.

It tasted a little bland, so I added a little garlic powder, and then the chips were fantastic. My intention had been to save them for a snack for the camping trip I was leaving for the next morning...

But I made the mistake of making them before making dinner (at about 8pm). A few still got saved, but a lot got eaten. They were delicious.

I did decide, though, that they probably would have been better with kale that wasn't mostly wilted. The really green chips were the best, the yellow and brown ones weren't as good.

I mean, really, don't you just want to eat all of that?

Random thought: one of my pet peeves when looking for recipes is food blogs that have tons of random pictures that I have to scroll through before I can see the recipe.

Look! Look! I made a food!

It was soon decided that what I needed to do was buy more kale, and just make a lot of chips out of it that night.

This time, when I went to the farmer's market, I got curly kale. The market vendor told me she prefers curly kale to White Russian kale for kale chips because the leaves hold their shape better instead of going kaput in the oven. I'm pretty sure those were her words.

As you can see, curly kale is even crazier looking than White Russian kale. It's just all... curls all over the place.

Same procedure, though. This time I just piled all the kale on the pan, and poured olive oil over it. Fatal error, I think. I ended up with way too much olive oil... but it was fine.

Holy reduction, Batman! I may have taken a few nibbles before taking this picture, but not *that* many.

The vendor was right - curly kale held its shape better. However, I think I still prefer White Russians.

Erm, kale. That's what I mean. It had a more pleasant flavor to it, and honestly, shape isn't as important to me as flavor.

Take what you will of that sentence.

As you may have guessed from the title and intro to this post, my diet is changing at the moment. Hopefully this means more blog posts and more adventurous blog posts, as I try to navigate baking without chicken eggs, and snacking without bananas. And, you know, figuring out how to pack a lunch for myself every day without getting bored or ending up with a really weird lunch.

Kale Chips

Ingredients
Kale
Olive Oil
Seasonings

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Slice kale into smaller bits, removing the large stalk in the middle
3. Pile on a pan
4. Drizzle olive oil and top with seasonings
5. Bake until crispy, approximately 20 minutes, turning periodically (tongs are useful for this)
6. Eat, share, crumple up and sprinkle on popcorn, whatever your heart desires

I, for one, am going to go look for chocolate to eat with my chips. Sounds delicious.

State of the Chicken Address

So from the title of this, you might have some idea of how long its been since I actually made this food. But we're going to ignore the fact that the State of the Union Address is something that happened in January, because, you know, its only been 5 months, to the day. That's not too long, right? I'd say something about how I'm going to get better at posting, but I think I say that all the time. To myself, if not publicly on my blog. Anyways, enough shaming myself for not being a good blogger. Onward, to food!

I remember last year, for the State of the Union, I was in college, and it was the first time I really put effort forth into watching the talk (rather than not watching, or just watching it with my parents). I'd made potstickers... I don't know why I remember that I'd made potstickers, but I had, and I sat down on the couch with my laptop on the table, eating my potstickers and watching the address, when my Chinese roommate walked in and wanted to know what we were watching. It was a fun moment, explaining it all to her, and I think she sat and watched with us for a bit, but that might be wishful thinking.

... right before I wrote about having made potstickers, I decided I was hungry for potstickers and put some rice in the rice cooker to eat with them potstickers when I'm done writing this. I swear it isn't correlated.

Anyways, this time around, I had similar thoughts about food. I had thawed a couple of chicken breasts, and I wanted to do something with chicken. Having no idea what to do with the chicken, I headed to Fridge Food and started looking for ideas. I found some truly terrible ones, including "teriyaki sauce" made only from mayonnaise and soy sauce. Seriously, if you venture into random recipe websites, use caution. And maybe common sense.

I did find a recipe that looked good eventually. It was a basic soy sauce, ginger and brown sugar marinade, fried and served with rice. With about an hour before the State of the Union was about to start, I mixed up the marinade with a tablespoon, because, well, why dirty more than one spoon?

Okay, 5 months later, I don't know why I took this picture. Look! Chicken!

I really hate handling raw chicken, but something that's made it way better is having kitchen scissors. It's way easier to cut chicken into bite sized chunks with kitchen scissors than with a knife, and the added benefit that you can cut it over a ceramic plate and then pop that right in the dishwasher...

... because salmonella is scary. And raw chicken / raw chicken juice smells really bad if you leave it out. I wish I could say I don't know this from experience.

Oh, also, I didn't have bowls in my new kitchen at this point. So everything was getting mixed in tupperware containers. That situation has since been rectified.

Once the chicken was marinading, it was time to start the rice, since the rice cooker takes around 20 minutes. I'm not sure exactly how long it takes, actually, I just know that right now, I'm hungry, and the rice cooker is taking way too long (by which I mean, my apartment smells deliciously of rice, but the rice isn't ready to eat yet).

As if to taunt myself further, here's a beautiful picture of cooked rice.

Growing up, I always cooked rice on the stove. Rice cookers felt like cheating (but mostly, I just didn't own one). Then sometime, not long before this rice cooker got purchased, a couple of Asian friends were saying that they don't know any Asians who don't use rice cookers.

Now... now I have a rice cooker and 2 crockpots. All the easy cooking can happen!

Once the chicken had been marinading for a while, I popped it on the stove, sauce and all. Since I haven't said it enough yet, Salmonella is scary. Cook your chicken until there's no pink in the middle. Cook all your meats thoroughly and make sure to wash anything that's touched raw meat really well. K?

I know you all need to see my beautiful bamboo rice paddle. I love it. I can't/shouldn't wash it in the dishwasher, but the feel of bamboo in my hands is worth it. (I also prefer bamboo knitting needles, I'm sure its related.)

I'm slowly curating a bamboo and red kitchen. It wasn't on purpose at first. It's starting to get more purposeful.

See, wasn't that easy? I made a food! It could use a little more color if it wants to look pretty, but I didn't need pretty, I needed food in my belly while I watched the president tell us how the Union is doing.

Oh wait, it was missing something. Meat and carbs isn't really a balanced meal, and all that salty needs some sweet to balance it out.

 So, obviously, the solution is to eat pinapple straight out of the can with chopsticks, right?

Right.

Seriously, try it sometime, it's fun!

I didn't get to explain the State of the Union to anyone this time, but I did get to enjoy chatting about our thoughts on it with some knitting friends I met on the internet.

Hey! My rice is done! What timing!

State of the Chicken

Ingredients
4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

1. Cut chicken into ~1 inch cubes (I recommend kitchen scissors!)
2. Combine all non-chicken ingredients, add chicken
3. Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour
4. Heat frying pan on high
5. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan, cook thoroughly (5-8 minutes)
6. Serve over rice

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.
Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Directions

Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour. Heat frying pan on high. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan. (add veggies if you like) Cooks in 5 to 8 minutes. Serve over rice.

Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Directions

Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour. Heat frying pan on high. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan. (add veggies if you like) Cooks in 5 to 8 minutes. Serve over rice.

Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Directions

Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour. Heat frying pan on high. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan. (add veggies if you like) Cooks in 5 to 8 minutes. Serve over rice.

Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Directions

Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour. Heat frying pan on high. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan. (add veggies if you like) Cooks in 5 to 8 minutes. Serve over rice.

Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Ingredients

4 to 5 boneless skinless Chicken Breasts, diced into 1 inch cubes
1/4 c. oil
4 tbsp brown sugar
1 1/4 to 1 1/2 tbsp. ground ginger
1/4 c. soy sauce.

Directions

Marinate 30 min. to 1 hour. Heat frying pan on high. Pour marinated chicken into heated pan. (add veggies if you like) Cooks in 5 to 8 minutes. Serve over rice.

Read more at http://myfridgefood.com/viewrecipe.aspx?recipe=20846#VkTZxieJXAcsjRFI.99

Mystery Soup

Sometime last week, I realized I haven't seen one of my best friends in 6 months. It'd be one thing if this was someone who lived far away, but it isn't, and that's just unacceptable. Especially considering the amount of life we've both been through in the past six months.

After a few texts, we decided to get together and make dinner. But we didn't want to make plans, so the plan was to see what was in my fridge and make food with it. The final text warned me that she would bring "mystery ingredients".

Those mystery ingredients turned out to be a pepper, some tomatoes, and a box of pasta. After some panicked running around, we finally got to cooking. Protip: don't leave your debit card in the ATM. Thankfully, ATMs tend to eat forgotten debit cards these days. So its just an inconvenience and not actually a problem.

First, we removed a bunch of things from my fridge. Apologies for the mess. Not really, I'm human.

With a lot of food and a hungry sourdough starter sitting out on the counter, we set about figuring out what to make.

No worries, we weren't going to put sourdough starter in anything. It just needed feeding - that thick dark layer on top of it is alcohol because the yeast has started fermenting instead of ... feeding, I guess. More on that some other time, or in this older post.

We threw out the idea of pasta sauce right away. It just seemed too obvious. The next thought was to find something to do with soba noodles - that package in the back left of the photo? Its about 3 pounds of soba noodles. I'm set for a while.

I'm also not that familiar with things to do with soba noodles, except putting them in soup. So we decided to make a soba noodle soup.

After a consideration of the ingredients at hand, we decided to start it like a chowder or bisque - with a roux. And what's the best way to start a roux?

Bacon!

I started cooking bacon while my friend prepared the peppers and tomatoes for roasting on my lovely cast iron pan.

Once the bacon was done, I pulled out the bacon, left the grease, and added some flour to start the roux. Added the rest of a carton of milk and the rest of a carton of heavy cream, and started selecting things at random to add to the soup. Well, not entirely at random, we went based on things we thought would taste good with the soup.

Around this point, I also forgot to take any more pictures, apparently. This may or may not have had something to do with the fact that soup turned out so good, for such a random soup. In fact, I believe the exact words when we first tasted the soup was "shut the fun bus!" or maybe it was "shut the full cup!"

I know, that wasn't very descriptive, but I should really just let the recipe speak for itself. All measurements are approximate.

Mystery Soup

Ingredients:

1 bell pepper

2 tomatoes

Olive oil

Coarse sea salt

1/2 pound of bacon

4 tablespoons flour

2 cups milk

1/4 cup heavy cream

1 cup Trader Joes boxed tomato soup

1/2 cup Kirkland Signature (Costco) lobster bisque

1 sprig of thyme

2 anchovies

1 scoop dijon mustard

Dash of garlic powder

1. Turn oven on to 400 degrees. It doesn't need to preheat, persay, but may as well get it started.
2. Slice tomato and pepper into long thin strips. Arrange in a single layer on an oven-safe pan - cast iron preferred. Drizzle with olive oil and sea salt.
3. Put pan in oven, allow to roast through the rest of the cooking process. The peppers and tomatoes should be soft and browned in spots when they are removed.
4. Put a large pot on the stove on medium heat. Slice bacon into bite-sized pieces or smaller, and fry on the bottom of the pot until cooked to your preference.
5. Remove bacon, leave grease in pot. Feel free to nibble on the bacon while cooking. Yes, you probably should have cooked more bacon.
6. Add flour to the pot and stir until combined. Add milk and heavy cream, keep stirring, until thickened. (It doesn't make sense, I know, but suddenly it will be a lot thicker than it was.)
7. Stir in the rest of the ingredients, including the bacon. Stir until well heated, well combined, anchovies have disappeared, etc.
8. Remove the now roasted tomatoes and peppers from the oven and add to soup.
9. Serve with bread. Yum!

Feel free to add or subtract ingredients as you see fit. The point of this for us was experimentation, a stone soup sort of thing. No reason you can't try that too!

And congratulations to those of you who noticed that the soba noodles didn't make it in to the final recipe.