The Drowning Meal vs The Goopy Inferno

For roughly the past week and a half I've been jonesing for some curry.  This started last Saturday when one of the dishes at a wedding I was at was some Thai red curry.  I'd wanted to get more of the curry, but I felt like if I tried to eat anything more I would explode, so I opted against seconds.  I would have made some sooner, but on Tuesday I was invited over to help polish of leftovers from said wedding and I'd built up my hopes for more of the curry.  Upon arrival and discovery that the curry hadn't made it that long I realized I needed to take matters into my own hands.  Luckily I still had a box of S&B Golden Curry sauce mix left over from when I'd made curry chicken dip earlier in the summer.  

This meal almost didn't make it.  Between some overzealous shopping, some inattentive shopping, and some poor pan picks, the curry almost turned out both too thick and too thin.  A couple of pieces of advice before the recipe proper: If you have to ask if you can get more ingredients into the pan, the answer is no.  If you're looking to simmer something, be sure that said thing is in the water and the water doesn't come to the top of the pan.  Split chicken breasts contain both skin and bones.  If you put different amounts of water into two 

pans, you should also put different amounts of sauce mixes into the pans, particularly if it contains a thickening agent.  This recipe is intended to be served over rice, but I've yet to figure out a good way to do rice quickly and consistently, so if you have a preferred method, use it.

Ingredients:

2-3 lbs chicken breast

1 8.4 oz package of S&B Golden Curry Sauce Mix (pick heat level based on personal preference/gastrointestinal strength) NOTE: contains MSG, so if you think that bothers you either suck it up or skip this recipe

2 onions

2 bell peppers

20ish baby carrots

1 package sliced mushrooms

1 potato

6 cups of water

Instructions:

Oil Pan(s)

Cut chicken into chunks (this is considerably easier if you buy boneless skinless chicken breasts rather than split chicken breasts)

Dice onions (or long dice if you're lazy like me)

Begin pan frying the chicken and onions while you finish crying

Stir occasionally while preparing carrots and peppers

Cut baby carrots either in half or into thirds based on size and add to holding bowl(s)

Cut peppers in half, then into strips and add to holding bowl(s)

When onions have browned (or bowl{s} are ready) stir contents of bowl(s) into the pan(s)

Add water to pan(s)

Bring pan(s) to a simmer, then simmer for 5 minutes while preparing mushrooms and potatoes

Rinse mushrooms

Clean and dice potato

Stir mushrooms and potatoes into pan(s)

Simmer an additional 10 minutes

Remove from heat and stir in curry mix until dissolved

Simmer for 5 minutes (I assume this means to return to heat, so that's what I did)

If you're rocking two pans, compare the consistency of the mix between the two pans.  If there's a noticeable difference, consider doing what I did and combining the pans into one pot

As you might be able to tell from my pre-recipe tips, a lot of things didn't go correctly for this meal.  While I was shopping I got a little ahead of myself and wound up picking up one more potato and pepper than I wound up using (I have no idea yet how I'm going to utilize both of these into one meal yet but I'm sure I'll figure something out) and split chicken breasts instead of boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  On the bright side I now know something to look for while shopping, in addition to the fact that deboning chicken breasts before cooking them is more effort than I want to put for for a meal.

After my questionable shopping choices I proceeded to make matters worse with my pan choices and my refusal to compensate for the pans I had picked.  I own a fairly large frying pan, that could have probably fit either most, or all of these ingredients into it.  However, I'd forgotten about this pan until I was searching for lids to use on the pans I'd picked (you're supposed to cover the pan while simmering.  I'd opted not to both because I didn't have correct sized lids and because I wanted to get rid of some water).  Since I didn't realize I had that pan (which does have a lid) I instead decided to split the recipe in half and do half in my deeper pan (which will now be referred to as lefty) and my shallower pan (which will now be referred to as righty).  The problem with this is that lefty has more volume than righty, and this fact will come center stage shortly.

After doing a terrible job of deboning and chunking the chicken breasts and adding the chicken and onions to the pans I saw that one pan had more room left (heh) than the other, so I allocated more carrots and peppers for lefty than for righty.  Unfortunately, when I went to divvy up water between the two pans I didn't take the volume discrepancy into account initially.  So I attempted to put 3 cups of water into righty, but I realized that this wasn't going to work and put some of what was intended for righty into lefty, and scooped some more out to ensure a safer simmer level.

At this point lefty has more vegetables, water, and empty space than righty.  So when I add the potatoes and mushrooms I put more into lefty, which makes sense.  Unfortunately, the 8.4 oz packages of curry are separated into two individual trays.  So I put one tray into each pan, totally forgetting the discrepancy I'd been building in every step since step 2.  This resulted in lefty being both thinner in texture and lighter in color than righty.  In fact, looking at them in this entry's initial picture, they hardly seem like they have all of the same ingredients in them.

At this point I knew that something had to be done.  One pan had far too much water and was nearly drowning in excess fluids while the other was overly thick and would have had the texture of eating sludge, which is exactly as unappetizing as it sounds.  Luckily, the solution to this conundrum was present on my stove.  By pouring both pans into my pot, then stirring the mixture together and allowing it to use the residual heat from the pans to accelerate the merging of the two curries I was able to end with a single, delicious curry.

Sriacha Honey Pot

Welcome to the first Slowcooker Sunday post.  On account of the fact that I'm super paranoid about burning down my apartment building, I typically will only use my crockpot on days when I'm home.  This has led to me typically using it on Sundays, which has the added benefit of providing several meals for the rest of the week.  I wound up working from home this Thursday, so this will be Slowcooker Sunday Took ill on Thursday edition.  Maybe it's not the best idea to use Solomon Grundy as the naming convention for this, particularly for days past Wednesday.

Anyhoo, since I was going to be around for most of the day I decided that there was no time like the present to try a slowcooker recipe that had been on my list of things to try for a few weeks.  The recipe in question is Honey Sriracha Chicken.  

To start things off is the chicken itself.  You'll want to get this started firs, and since it's the main component of the meal I figured it'd be best to start here, moving on to the drizzle later.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lb chicken breasts

1/4-1/2 cup sriracha

1/4-1/2 cup honey

1 tablespoon lime juice

1 tablespoon soy sauce

Instructions:

Cut the chicken into chunks and place in pot

Mix everything else together

NOTE: I say 1/4-1/2 because the measuring cup I was using has at some point lost it's lines and my attempt at eyeballing it resulted in the cup being mostly full by the time I was done)

Cook on Low for 5-7 hours

The Drizzle

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of Greek yogurt

The remainder of a bottle of sweet chili sauce

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons hot sauce

Instructions:

Stir until evenly mixed

NOTE: You can apparently replace half or all of the Greek yogurt with mayo, but I didn't feel like buying two things for this

NOTE 2: It's supposed to use 1/4 cup of the sweet chili sauce, but I knew I had an indeterminate amount in my fridge so I skipped buying any and went all in to get rid of it

NOTE 3: It's supposed to take 2 teaspoons of hot sauce, but I either wasn't paying attention or wanted more heat (I shouldn't wait so long to write these)

I have mixed feelings about this recipe.  On the one hand, the flavor of this was very good.  The honey-sriracha-lime flavor works incredibly well.  I'd been hesitant about it before eating this, but combination works better than I'd been expecting.  The combination in the drizzle also works out better than I'd been expecting, providing a sweet heat that also can work as either an impromptu salad dressing or sandwich spread (see below).

On the other hand, the chicken was dry.  Really dry.  I had to double check that there were still juices in the pot (there were) after I tried it.  I'm not sure if this was due to me using flash frozen chicken breasts, or if it's just that the breast meat doesn't have enough fat on it to survive for extended periods in a crockpot without drying out.

I would like to try this again, but if I do I'd do one of several things differently:
Option A: Use leg meat instead of breast meat.  Dark meat tends to be a bit fattier which might keep it from drying out quite so much.  

Option B: Increase the amount of meat and sauce.  After I'd added everything to the pot it was probably less than a third of the way full.  I have no evidence for this but I feel like slowcookers work better when they are more full.

Option C: Instead of chunking the chicken breasts, leave them whole, then shred them and return them to the sauce.  Even with the rather dry chunks this already works decently for sandwiches, especially with the sauce as a spread.  Shredding it might both draw attention away from the dryness (I've never noticed other meals I've made with chicken breasts in the crockpot to be dry after I've shredded them) and make it easier to put on a sandwich.  This can be combined with Option B.

Option D: Cook this on the stove rather than in a crockpot.  Cooking this on the stove (potentially marinating in the sauce before starting) should keep the chicken from drying out so drastically.  It also has the advantage of taking less time to cook if you either run out of time or don't trust leaving a crockpot running while you're away.

Two Meals One Pork (part 2)

It's been several days since I made this meal, and I keep putting off writing this because I don't really know how I feel about this meal.  I keep going back and forth in my head about whether it's any good or not, which is probably a sign that it's probably not for public consumption.

If you remember back to the previous post, you may recall that I felt that half of the items I'd picked up were fairly hodgepodgey.  This is largely due to my habit of impulse buying things that either look interesting or I was recently thinking about while grocery shopping.  Of the two ingredients that fell into the impulse buys category, one was something that had looked interesting, the other was something that I'd brought up in a conversation earlier in the day.

The first item was a packet of McCormick Sweet Mesquite & Caramelized Onion burger mix-in.  As I was looking at the various seasoning blends, this one stood out to me as something that I'd like to try on pork.  I don't know why it is, and had I looked at it more I would have realized that this is intended to be mixed into raw hamburger and then formed into patties, not something that necessarily is intended to be used for an over the stove mix.

The other item is a small can of sauerkraut.  I'd had a conversation earlier in the day about Rubens, so when I saw it in the store I picked it up, figuring that I could use it at some point on either a sandwich or brats.  That was not the fate intended for this can.

As I was cooking my pork tacos I was struggling with if I should should go all in with the extra ingredients, or if I should try to work something out something more sensible.  In the end I decided against sensibility which resulted in:

Sweet Mesquite Pork with Broccoli & Kraut

Ingredients:

1/2 Pork Sirloin Roast

1 14.5oz bag of frozen broccoli cutlets
1 packet McCormick Sweet Mesquite & Caramelized Onion Burger Mix-in

1 8oz can of Sauerkraut

Instructions:

Cut the pork into chunks.

Oil pan and set to medium heat.

Add the pork, brocoli, and kraut.

Stir in the mix-in.

Cook until broccoli isn't frozen and pork is cooked, stirring occasionally.

Plate and eat.

As I mentioned before I am still unsure how I feel about this meal.  The ingredients don't really mesh well, so there isn't a consistent flavor to the meal.  One bite will prominently feature the smokiness from the mix-in and the next will have the sourness of the kraut.  The mesquite was more noticeable in the pork itself, while the broccoli and the kraut gravitated more towards the kraut.  While I do personally enjoy the conflict of favor that this creates, I don't really think that it's a good meal.  Combined with the realization that the mix-in contains high fructose corn syrup, which I hadn't anticipating from a seasoning mix (I really should have looked into that some more before I bought it) I don't think I will be trying this again.

Two Meal One Pork (part 1)

After camping this weekend and being super lazy after getting back on Sunday, I realized that I was running low on prepared meals.  Not wanting to have to break into my "Ain't got time to cook" reserves of prepackaged meals and soups I opted to head to the store.

My plan was to pick up a thing of pork, some vegetables, and potentially a seasoning pack if anything stood out to me, with a backup of a mix of  garlic and herb, olive oil, and water.  However, when I got to the store my tendency to pick up things I found interesting got the better of me, and when I was checking out I realized that the items in my cart didn't match the pseudo-Italian pork I'd been intending to make.  Roughly half of the items made sense with each other, but the rest were, for the most part, totally unrelated and heavily at odds with the first half.

By the time I'd gotten home I'd realize that my normal strategy of meat in the non-stick pan and the veggies in the can-stick pan then portioning the two together wouldn't work with the hodgepodge of ingredients I'd picked up.  So instead I opted to use the two pans for two meals instead of two halves of one larger meal.  The meal I had a general plan is in the pan on the right and will be covered in the rest of this post, and the meal I made up as I went along went in the pan on the left, and will be covered in a later post.  Which leads us to:

Tacos de Cerdo

The first impulse buy I'd made was a box of taco shells that was on sale.  This must have stayed on my mind since I also picked up 2 cans out of the Hispanic section.  So by the time I'd hit the freezer section it only made sense to pick up a bag of onions and peppers.  Sidenote: I love peppers and onions and will probably add them to a large number of recipes in the future.  So the obvious choice for the first half of the meat was pork tacos.

Ingredients:

1/2 Pork Sirloin Roast

1 16oz bag of frozen peppers and onions
1 10oz can of Diced Tomatoes w/ Green Chiles

1 7oz can of Diced Green Chiles

A sprinkling of cheese

Instructions:

Dice the pork into as small of pieces as you think can reasonably fit in a taco shell.

Oil pan and set to medium heat.

Add pork, peppers, and onions to pan.

Stir.

Add cans of tomatoes and chiles.

Stir contents of cans into the mix.

Let cook, uncovered for a while, stirring occasionally (time unspecified due to being distracted prepping another meal).

Drain excess juices.

Add to taco shell, sprinkle with shredded cheese if so desired.

Overall this turned out fairly well.  Both tacos I had tasted good.  While the flavor that the chiles provide adds to the dish, when I'm having Mexican-ish I'm usually going for a bit more heat.  If you're like me it might be worth replacing the can of chiles with something that provides more heat, such as a can of diced jalapenos or another pepper you enjoy the flavor of, but if you have a more mild palette the chiles will add more flavor without being overbearing.
The general ease of the recipe, combined with the fact that added liquid of the cans of tomatoes and chiles minimize risk of burning or sticking, so I can easily recommend the recipe to anyone who can use a knife and a stove.  

Stuff and Things

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my voyage through cooking.  Along the way I'm sure I'll make a large number of mistakes and try recipes that in hind sight will be obvious that it wasn't something that should have ever been attempted in the first place.  Hopefully over time there will be less terrible things and more good things, but whether or not that happens is yet to be seen.