Even when it’s bad, it’s good

Sunday Night Dinner Menu:

• Spring Mix salad topped with crushed walnuts and dried cranberries tossed with oil, apple cider vinegar, and salt and pepper.
• Coconut Risotto with sautéed onion
• Braised Beef Roast served with sweet potatoes and carrots
• Pillsbury Grands! Biscuits
• Torta al Vino made with red wine and blueberries (based on Lidia Bastianich’s recipe from Lidia’s Italy)

Translation:

• Salad with stuff in it
• Fancy Rice
• Pot Roast
• Pillsbury Grands! Biscuits
• Blueberry Cake

We had a very nice dinner Sunday and we had Malcolm and Mary over; it was really nice to get to catch up with them. Life gets busy and it is entirely too easy to let things slip until you are counting the number of times you see your friends in a per year manner instead of a per month manner. We’re drifting that way, and we’re trying to remedy that.

I got a dutch oven for my birthday present this year, and hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. So this weekend I cooked a roast. We were still getting ready when Malcolm and Mary showed up. They were nice enough to pitch in so Mary helped Amon with the cake and Malcolm offered a hand putting the risotto together. He did a great job and the flavor and texture were great. You could notice the individual grains of the risotto, but it definitely had a creamy texture. We used coconut milk as the liquid, which is a bit of a guilty pleasure, and then the sautéed onions, garlic, salt and pepper finished the flavors.

I made a bid to time the ingredients as they went into the dutch oven to make sure they didn't get too mushy. The roast started off in the dutch oven by itself with the vegetables added in the end. I had shocked the carrots to make sure they stayed nice and bright orange.

Unfortunately, the potatoes weren't done at the same time as the roast and carrots. I had timed the carrots right, but should have put the potatoes in earlier. My fault.

I took the carrots out and let the roast rest while the potatoes finished up in the oven. Things could have been salvaged if I had served everything here. My final mistake was when I put the roast and carrots back in with the potatoes to make sure everything was good and warm, and left them in while we ate the salad.

I had taken the roast out initially when it reached 160 degrees internal temperature. After resting, my roast had this beautiful light red center surrounded by a blush/pink fading to a wonderfully caramelized exterior. After going back in the oven to warm up, it had turned into a dull medium well with a uniform brown all the way through. Worst of all, the potatoes were now soft. It was very frustrating. The only thing that ended up just as I wanted them to were the carrots.

This was just one more in a long string of lessons about the importance of not only Mise en Place, but timing your cooking to make sure the right ingredients are added at the right time. Good food tastes delicious, great food has good taste, appearance, and texture. On a scale of 1-10, I’d give last nights dinner a 9 for taste, an 8 for appearance, and a 7 for texture. It’s a work in progress.

It is equally true that we are our own harshest critics in cooking as in other aspects of life. We know what we were going for, even when other's don't. Also, unless you're a professional chef it's likely that the people you are cooking for are more concerned with spending time with you than eating a perfect meal. Even when I felt that the dinner could have been better, it was delicious food and more importantly it was good time spent catching up with great friends.

I mean, how bad can pot roast with roasted vegetables and biscuits be?

Cooking Healthier

Audio quote of the day:
“Because I like to eat, is that such a crime?” – School of Rock (click above for audio)

Yeah, I’m sorta on a diet. I really want to go on a diet, but unfortunately, I’m at this point where I’ve really started loving to cook. I sit at work and when I’m not drafting in Autocad, writing up meeting minutes, or walking around the US Capitol, all I can think about or talk about is cooking. I just read Soul of a Chef, which was probably not the best book to read if you're wanting to stop cooking so much.

For the first time in my life I actually have good things to cook with AND someone to cook for. I had to have the basics of oven cooking and sautéing down from when I cooked for 50 guys every week in college. Now that I’m scaling back the cooking though, I’m learning about pan frying, starting things on the stove and finishing them in the oven, broiling, making pan sauces and gravies, seasoning, and all sorts of other fun activities.

Cooking is actually relaxing for me, assuming I’m not trying a recipe I made up for the first time with 20 people eating. I like that when I’m cooking my brain doesn’t start thinking about work, bills, or any of life’s other little attention grabbers. I’m focused on the done-ness of the meat, whether the water is boiling yet, when I should start steaming the vegetables and making sure the pasta isn’t going past al dente. The kitchen is full of the fragrance of onion, garlic, oregano, chilli powder, or whichever other aromatics are being used in the nights meal.

And absolutely best of all, when it's over I get to enjoy a nice meal and the satisfaction that “I made this.” Honestly, it’s a great feeling knowing that the meal your eating might cost you 20 or 30 bucks in a restaurant.

However, it’s also a great way to NOT lose weight. Originally, I would make too much, and then it would all get eaten because it tasted good and was there. The last few weeks though, I’ve started portioning out the “left overs” before I even plate up the meal, this makes it less tempting to eat too much.

Now, I’m trying to come up with recipes that are fun to cook (lots of chopping, cooking, seasoning, etc.) but are healthier. Amon isn’t a big fan of fish, which would be one easy method for making things healthier, but she does like quite a few vegetables so I’m going to start trying to feature the vegetables more prominently with the carbs as more of an accent and make sure to use chicken and turkey more than fatty cuts of beef. I noticed that ground turkey seems to be much cheaper than ground beef so we’ve been using more of that recently.

So now you all know, my evil secret’s out. I like to cook, is that such a crime? Now I just need to balance loving to cook, with cooking healthier.

Cold Weather, Hot Turkey

Amon and I spent Thanksgiving at her Aunt and Uncle’s house in Omena (Michigan), and had a really wonderful time. We both took Wednesday off so we could leisurely drive up to the Detroit area and stay with her cousin Jenny and family. Thursday morning we ate cinnamon rolls at Jenny and Dustin’s house before heading out for Omena.

By 2:30pm we were in Omena and ready to eat Turkey. Amon’s Aunt Julie and other relatives did not disappoint with a beautifully set table and delicious foods. I couldn’t decide between turkey and duck so I had a bit of each. After Thanksgiving proper we sat around the table and talked. All told it was a pretty nice evening talking with various aunts, uncles, cousins, and even Amon’s Grandma Krist. I forgot to get the recipe for the sweet potato rolls.

Amon had agreed to show me around the area so on Friday Amon, her cousin Shannon, and I went out for some site seeing. There was a light snow the entire time we were there so the ground had a pretty even cover of snow, though not too deep. We saw a light house, the world’s largest pop bottle collection, bought some heirloom apples, went wine tasting and bought some great cheese.

Saturday we drove back to Ypsilani to stay with some of Amon’s friends who graciously put us up for the night. Sunday we drove back home along with the rest of the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. It was a long slow drive about which I won’t speak.

All in all it was a wonderful holiday weekend with much good food, great company, and wonderful scenery. Pictures will be posted soon, hopefully.

Cheers!