No Saturday Supper tonight, I'm afraid, as I have been forbidding myself from getting ingredients in preparation for the move, which means that lately all I've been doing is getting rid of my old ingredients, which make for rather peculiar (though interesting) rehashes of "fry everything in oil and cover in cumin."
I would like, instead, to share some pearls of wisdom regarding the preparation of rice. Rice, in many ways, mirrors life. You can go about it haphazardly, and perhaps achieve satisfying results sporadically. Or you can go about it with a disciplined manner coupled with a passion sparked by creative drive, and you'll find satisfying results with consistency, and invigorating results sporadically. Here are some basic principles by which rice should be prepared.
1) If you haven't tried it before, measure first. You can cook rice fine by guesstimation once your eye's been trained, but until then your rice will most likely turn out just a little different each time. This, of course, is by no means a bad thing, but it's always good to have a reliable fallback point just in case your changes don't go right. Give yourself something to rely on when you start out; otherwise you'll keep finding yourself circling back to the beginning without the faintest idea of what you're doing.
2) Know your limiting factors. If you're planning on cooking lots of rice, be sure your pot can hold all the water you'll need, especially if you plan on preparing congee (which I happened to be cooking this morning). Know how much rice you have, how much you'll need, how long it'll last you. If you're planning on using the rice in another dish, know the amount of preparation time it'll take for the rice to be done. Formulate plans in your head with a focus on these limiting factors, and things will go more smoothly.
3) Constantly reevaluate. If you're using a rice cooker, then you don't have to worry about it. A lot of people don't worry about the rice even when they're using a stovetop pot, which I find leads to rice sticking onto the bottom of the pot. Stir the pot occasionally and check frequently. If something seems wrong, lift the lid and check. If everything seems fine, lift the lid and check anyways. You may find out things about your rice that you never would have noticed otherwise. Don't overdo it to the point of anxiety, but keep alert. It'll save you a sticky situation later on.
4) Experiment! And don't just experiment with the amount of rice or water you add. Experiment with how you stir, with the heat you apply, with washing beforehand, with the degree to which the lid covers the pot, etc. When you have yourself a solid foundation to fall back on, it's time to try exploring some uncharted regions. You might be setting yourself up for failure, but that's just cause to try again some other day, with a new piece of information nested solidly in your head.
5) Enjoy your rice. Some days, it's all you have.
And for those of you who only use rice cookers and never cook in pots, it's worthwhile to try your hand at it, if not as an culinary improvement, then perhaps as a form of meditation and self-reflection. Look into it sometime.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
"Food"
I need to start getting rid of my ingredients now as I move out of here, which means that a lot of the things I eat are going to be strange hodgepodges of things I have too much of. Like today's dish, except today's is arguably only exacerbating the problem...
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, am continually haunted by the spirits of those animals who have sacrificed their lives so that they could be reintroduced into the circle of life, only to wind up in my dishes of death instead. Today's dish is a high-density, high-calorie, efficient nutrient-giving foodstuff.
Some of you in the audience might be thinking that I've finally just given up on even trying to follow recipes. That's...that's chillingly accurate. I can't even claim that any thought of a recipe went into the making of this - I just had ingredients and threw them together into a pan using techniques that I've learned over the course of the summer.
If you can't tell what's in this dish (and honestly, there's no reason why anyone should expect you to), it's ground pork, beans in tomato paste, breading, spinach, and cheese. This covers a lot of ground, nutrient-wise, and can be condensed into a very very dense form. What is this good for? Honestly, I'm not too sure.
It actually looks much more appetizing when condensed. Rather like Romantic literature.
Do I have anything interesting to say about this...thing? Not really. Heck, I didn't even bother with a proper title for this entry. It is notable that this one round of cooking will be enough to last me for at least four meals, which is quite substantial considering how little it looks like there is. Funnily enough, I had a similar thought earlier today with my bacterial media, how making one stock is enough to last for several experiments, considering how little it looks like there is. I worry ever so slightly for my future as a living being.
All in all, this post, I'm sure you've realized, much resembles the dish for which it's dedicated. Hastily put together, very confused, and hardly satisfying from an aesthetic standpoint to any partaking in its essence. But in any case it fills up space and gets you through another week.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, am continually haunted by the spirits of those animals who have sacrificed their lives so that they could be reintroduced into the circle of life, only to wind up in my dishes of death instead. Today's dish is a high-density, high-calorie, efficient nutrient-giving foodstuff.
I'll let your reaction fill in the caption.
Some of you in the audience might be thinking that I've finally just given up on even trying to follow recipes. That's...that's chillingly accurate. I can't even claim that any thought of a recipe went into the making of this - I just had ingredients and threw them together into a pan using techniques that I've learned over the course of the summer.
If you can't tell what's in this dish (and honestly, there's no reason why anyone should expect you to), it's ground pork, beans in tomato paste, breading, spinach, and cheese. This covers a lot of ground, nutrient-wise, and can be condensed into a very very dense form. What is this good for? Honestly, I'm not too sure.
Do I have anything interesting to say about this...thing? Not really. Heck, I didn't even bother with a proper title for this entry. It is notable that this one round of cooking will be enough to last me for at least four meals, which is quite substantial considering how little it looks like there is. Funnily enough, I had a similar thought earlier today with my bacterial media, how making one stock is enough to last for several experiments, considering how little it looks like there is. I worry ever so slightly for my future as a living being.
All in all, this post, I'm sure you've realized, much resembles the dish for which it's dedicated. Hastily put together, very confused, and hardly satisfying from an aesthetic standpoint to any partaking in its essence. But in any case it fills up space and gets you through another week.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Creamy chicken casserole
I'm starting to realize that because I only post every Saturday, when I'm specifically trying out new recipes and new ways of cooking, nobody really knows what I'm cooking the rest of the week in which I'm experimenting with old recipes and tweaking things. Then again almost everything I make normally falls under the category of stir-fry over rice...
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, repeatedly need to remind myself that food is meant to be enjoyable from a gustatory standpoint and not merely "novel" or "interesting." Today's dish is a creamy chicken and spinach casserole.
You're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that it looked much better in real life.
So actually I didn't have dishwashing liquid when I started cooking, so I went into cooking this with the mindset of "have as few things to clean at the end as possible." This ultimately probably saved the dish, as otherwise I would've used my knife to cut all kinds of things to put in that would ruin it...
Spinach is like...I don't know, a really timid employee. You have high hopes and pay good money for it, but just give it some heat and you'll get very little return. And I guess it's also nutritious and a good source of iron and vitamin A, so more similarities for you. But I should've known all of this already. Anyways, stage one of this multipart monster was to pad the baking pan with sauteed spinach and mushrooms to stop the chicken from hurting itself while being baked. Or so that's what I'm told for humans anyways.
I don't know why there's a whitish glow there. Very well-illuminated. Rather like an asylum.
Next, the sauce. If I were a better cook (read: a cook), I would've tried to make my own sauce, but for the sake of laziness and expediency, I just tossed a can of soup in there instead. Probably worked out better. The mushroom soup I used fused nicely with the leftover mushroom juice from sauteeing and probably turned out better than the sum of its parts. I imagine that's because the mushroom essence excreted tears of happiness as they were given the opportunity to reunite with their long-lost kin before being mercilessly baked in a living hell. Bittersweet happiness is delicious.
Pretty simple after that. Put chicken in, layer on more sauce, powder on cheese, stick in oven, play the waiting game. There was a bit where I was supposed to sprinkle on bacon bits or something, but I didn't get bacon, so I tore up some pieces of turkey ham and used that instead (one of the more satisfying parts of the evening was knowing that due to my choice of not using my knife at the beginning, I could really make this dinner a more hands-on experience).
This made, suffice to say, a lot of servings. It's probably a classic dish to share with friends or family, you know, if I had anyone to share it with who didn't already eat dinner in anxious anticipation of what pathological terrorism I would force down their fearful throats otherwise. Anyway, maybe I can hunt down some unknowing strangers next time and study their reactions. It'll be interesting. And novel.
P.S. Guess what I didn't put in today's dish?
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, repeatedly need to remind myself that food is meant to be enjoyable from a gustatory standpoint and not merely "novel" or "interesting." Today's dish is a creamy chicken and spinach casserole.
So actually I didn't have dishwashing liquid when I started cooking, so I went into cooking this with the mindset of "have as few things to clean at the end as possible." This ultimately probably saved the dish, as otherwise I would've used my knife to cut all kinds of things to put in that would ruin it...
Spinach is like...I don't know, a really timid employee. You have high hopes and pay good money for it, but just give it some heat and you'll get very little return. And I guess it's also nutritious and a good source of iron and vitamin A, so more similarities for you. But I should've known all of this already. Anyways, stage one of this multipart monster was to pad the baking pan with sauteed spinach and mushrooms to stop the chicken from hurting itself while being baked. Or so that's what I'm told for humans anyways.
Next, the sauce. If I were a better cook (read: a cook), I would've tried to make my own sauce, but for the sake of laziness and expediency, I just tossed a can of soup in there instead. Probably worked out better. The mushroom soup I used fused nicely with the leftover mushroom juice from sauteeing and probably turned out better than the sum of its parts. I imagine that's because the mushroom essence excreted tears of happiness as they were given the opportunity to reunite with their long-lost kin before being mercilessly baked in a living hell. Bittersweet happiness is delicious.
Pretty simple after that. Put chicken in, layer on more sauce, powder on cheese, stick in oven, play the waiting game. There was a bit where I was supposed to sprinkle on bacon bits or something, but I didn't get bacon, so I tore up some pieces of turkey ham and used that instead (one of the more satisfying parts of the evening was knowing that due to my choice of not using my knife at the beginning, I could really make this dinner a more hands-on experience).
This made, suffice to say, a lot of servings. It's probably a classic dish to share with friends or family, you know, if I had anyone to share it with who didn't already eat dinner in anxious anticipation of what pathological terrorism I would force down their fearful throats otherwise. Anyway, maybe I can hunt down some unknowing strangers next time and study their reactions. It'll be interesting. And novel.
P.S. Guess what I didn't put in today's dish?
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Chicken with Lime Gravy
My roommate Darvin is leaving, so tonight's Saturday Supper is in some ways a farewell dinner to him. So, just for today, I've decided to stray from my philosophy of making only simple dishes and go for something more intricate, more gourmet, if you will. That's why today's dish looks much better than usual, even if it doesn't necessarily taste better. Well, that's why I have cumin.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will learn the alchemy of taking normal inert ingredients and making them potentially chemically reactive. Today's dish is seasoned breaded chicken with lime gravy.
As a callback to my very first Saturday Supper dish, I used the same concept to make the chicken, except with more oil, less oven, and less mess on my hands. Remember what I said about that dish's difficulty level though? Well this dish is a good deal harder. I'd say we're past "sheltered college student" well into "college student who thinks he knows what he's doing with his food but doesn't" now.
First of all, pounding the chicken is kind of a must to make this work right. I mean, that's not to say that this worked right, but in any case you still need to pound it. The chicken is best thin, so you know, those of you who have always wanted to pretend you could be Rocky or maybe E. Honda from Street Fighter will be glad to know that punching the chicken repeatedly is basically the best solution here. Then instead of covering my hands with mayonnaise and breadcrumbs and slathering it on the chicken like a barbarian, I put it all in a ziploc bag and proceeded to continue scoring ultra combos on a piece of dead meat.
Frying the chicken with mushrooms, breadcrumbs, and cumin yields...that monstrosity.
After summoning the dark one (pictured above) with your infernal fire and canola oil, it's time to make the gravy. So having never made gravy before (perfectly reasonable, given that I've never made anything before), this was a daunting task. Turns out you can easily just use chicken broth, flour, and whatever's left of the demonspawn that you just took out of the pan. I guess the trick is to whisk the gravy well before you put it in the pan, otherwise it gets more and more impossible to make smooth without forming little flour clumps that make it look like your gravy's recently risen from the grave. Or developed leprosy.
I thought to give the chicken an extra kick with some lime juice. Funny thing about limes: one lime is plenty of juice to cover a cup of chicken broth. Two limes? Overkill. So the gravy ended up being less "chicken gravy with lime flavor" and more "lime gravy," but that ended up okay when eaten with the chicken, actually, so I'm just going to go ahead and claim I did that on purpose, as usual. The flavor is pleasantly piquant, like a velociraptor using its teeth to gently graze your tongue.
So that's that for this week. On a side note, I'm finding that that fried rice trick I did last week is incredibly handy since I only need one pan to make it, so actually the next few dishes probably won't involve rice after all as I just keep making fried rice on weekdays. Everyone wins!
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will learn the alchemy of taking normal inert ingredients and making them potentially chemically reactive. Today's dish is seasoned breaded chicken with lime gravy.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold: probably the most advanced mess I'll ever attempt.
As a callback to my very first Saturday Supper dish, I used the same concept to make the chicken, except with more oil, less oven, and less mess on my hands. Remember what I said about that dish's difficulty level though? Well this dish is a good deal harder. I'd say we're past "sheltered college student" well into "college student who thinks he knows what he's doing with his food but doesn't" now.
First of all, pounding the chicken is kind of a must to make this work right. I mean, that's not to say that this worked right, but in any case you still need to pound it. The chicken is best thin, so you know, those of you who have always wanted to pretend you could be Rocky or maybe E. Honda from Street Fighter will be glad to know that punching the chicken repeatedly is basically the best solution here. Then instead of covering my hands with mayonnaise and breadcrumbs and slathering it on the chicken like a barbarian, I put it all in a ziploc bag and proceeded to continue scoring ultra combos on a piece of dead meat.
After summoning the dark one (pictured above) with your infernal fire and canola oil, it's time to make the gravy. So having never made gravy before (perfectly reasonable, given that I've never made anything before), this was a daunting task. Turns out you can easily just use chicken broth, flour, and whatever's left of the demonspawn that you just took out of the pan. I guess the trick is to whisk the gravy well before you put it in the pan, otherwise it gets more and more impossible to make smooth without forming little flour clumps that make it look like your gravy's recently risen from the grave. Or developed leprosy.
I thought to give the chicken an extra kick with some lime juice. Funny thing about limes: one lime is plenty of juice to cover a cup of chicken broth. Two limes? Overkill. So the gravy ended up being less "chicken gravy with lime flavor" and more "lime gravy," but that ended up okay when eaten with the chicken, actually, so I'm just going to go ahead and claim I did that on purpose, as usual. The flavor is pleasantly piquant, like a velociraptor using its teeth to gently graze your tongue.
So that's that for this week. On a side note, I'm finding that that fried rice trick I did last week is incredibly handy since I only need one pan to make it, so actually the next few dishes probably won't involve rice after all as I just keep making fried rice on weekdays. Everyone wins!
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Fried rice
Originally, I only wanted to try non Chinese-style dishes, the idea being that I've had quite enough of Chinese cuisine and I could experiment with that under actual Chinese supervision, whereas experimenting with other cuisines allows for a broader spectrum of foods. But I have five pounds of rice to get rid of, so I had to get rid of it by making "western-style" fried rice today. Loophole? Maybe.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will breach the frontiers of culinary science armed with a giant knife and a bottle of cumin. Today's dish is western-style fried rice.
Man, if I had added some shrimp, I could serve this stuff in fake Chinese restaurants.
"Fried rice?" I hear you cry in astonished disbelief. "Blasphemy! Travesty! Woe!" You hold your head and tear your hair wildly. You scream and rage against the heavens. Your very wrath shatters the trembling firmament. Centuries from now, the distant descendants of humanity will feel the echoes of your indignant fury. "Fried rice! Unacceptable!"
Now hear me out. I had a lot of rice to get rid of. Furthermore, this is no ordinary fried rice. This fried rice was made with uncooked rice. So traditionally, for those who are not "in the know," fried rice is made with leftover cooked rice. You steam the rice the night before, maybe refrigerate it, maybe leave it out, and then fry it the next day to make it taste better. It's a really easy recipe, but it requires steaming the rice, which is pretty annoying without a rice cooker.
So, I thought to myself, what's the goal of my mission with this Saturday Supper thing. Making delicious dishes? Making nutritious dishes? Making ambitious dishes? No. My goal is to make expeditious dishes, that is, fast and easy. (As a side-effect, they may also turn out to be pernicious dishes, but luckily I haven't had a problem with that yet). I thought, how can I make fried rice even easier? The answer is, of course, don't even cook the rice before frying it!
I found this trick online, and Feng and I both seriously doubted it would work. The idea is to fry the uncooked rice in oil until it's relatively well-fried, then cook it in liquid afterwards so that you're essentially cooking pre-fried rice. The rice absorbs in the liquid rather quickly, strangely (I was imagining the oil like a hydrophobic membrane, such that hydrophilic water couldn't penetrate it, but I guess not). Using some chicken broth in place of soy sauce or oyster sauce makes it sufficiently non-Chinese to allow me to stick to my "no Chinese food" rule. Then everything else is pretty standard.
There's really not much I can say about fried rice. It's basically the most standard full meal you can make with rice, so...that's that. I tried to spice it up a bit by pouring in copious amounts of cumin and garlic pepper. I wouldn't say it was spiced up so much as "made into fried cumin with rice flavor," not that there's anything wrong with that.
Well that's all for tonight. I've got some more recipes lined up for the next few weeks, and they should have some more variety, except, you know, they'll all be rice-based. Maybe, anyways. I might actually just make tons of more fried rice and get rid of it that way.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will breach the frontiers of culinary science armed with a giant knife and a bottle of cumin. Today's dish is western-style fried rice.
"Fried rice?" I hear you cry in astonished disbelief. "Blasphemy! Travesty! Woe!" You hold your head and tear your hair wildly. You scream and rage against the heavens. Your very wrath shatters the trembling firmament. Centuries from now, the distant descendants of humanity will feel the echoes of your indignant fury. "Fried rice! Unacceptable!"
Now hear me out. I had a lot of rice to get rid of. Furthermore, this is no ordinary fried rice. This fried rice was made with uncooked rice. So traditionally, for those who are not "in the know," fried rice is made with leftover cooked rice. You steam the rice the night before, maybe refrigerate it, maybe leave it out, and then fry it the next day to make it taste better. It's a really easy recipe, but it requires steaming the rice, which is pretty annoying without a rice cooker.
So, I thought to myself, what's the goal of my mission with this Saturday Supper thing. Making delicious dishes? Making nutritious dishes? Making ambitious dishes? No. My goal is to make expeditious dishes, that is, fast and easy. (As a side-effect, they may also turn out to be pernicious dishes, but luckily I haven't had a problem with that yet). I thought, how can I make fried rice even easier? The answer is, of course, don't even cook the rice before frying it!
I found this trick online, and Feng and I both seriously doubted it would work. The idea is to fry the uncooked rice in oil until it's relatively well-fried, then cook it in liquid afterwards so that you're essentially cooking pre-fried rice. The rice absorbs in the liquid rather quickly, strangely (I was imagining the oil like a hydrophobic membrane, such that hydrophilic water couldn't penetrate it, but I guess not). Using some chicken broth in place of soy sauce or oyster sauce makes it sufficiently non-Chinese to allow me to stick to my "no Chinese food" rule. Then everything else is pretty standard.
There's really not much I can say about fried rice. It's basically the most standard full meal you can make with rice, so...that's that. I tried to spice it up a bit by pouring in copious amounts of cumin and garlic pepper. I wouldn't say it was spiced up so much as "made into fried cumin with rice flavor," not that there's anything wrong with that.
Well that's all for tonight. I've got some more recipes lined up for the next few weeks, and they should have some more variety, except, you know, they'll all be rice-based. Maybe, anyways. I might actually just make tons of more fried rice and get rid of it that way.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Vegetarian Breakfast Dinner of SCIENCE
Given that it's Saturday Supper I do, I wouldn't get to show any traditionally breakfasty things like today's dish. That said, you shouldn't think that I intentionally made a breakfast special for today, because it was more like I had a vision for something else and it turned into a nice breakfast dish, and I just went with it...
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will attempt to coerce serendipity to grace my cooking by trying everything wrong and hoping something goes right. Today's dish is an egg-and-potato omelette pie, garnished with red peppers and spices.
Imagine my surprise when this thing actually held together upon cutting out a slice. It started off all oozy and then became all clumpy. Now it's solid? Frigging eggs, how do they work?
The vision was more or less something like the above, which has a rather doughy consistency due to pouring copious amounts of mashed potato powder into the egg batter. Turns out I was a bit too copious when I started off and that ended up with something more like scrambled eggs...
Turns out you can mess up any dish with eggs in it and turn it into scrambled eggs. Maybe. One of these days, I'm going to try to bake a cake and end up with scrambled eggs.
So another batch of eggs (a batch, by the way, is two eggs), and this time less potato. It almost worked out, except I got overzealous with the flipping and ended up with only half of it flipped over. So basically I got myself an omelette, which was about the right consistency but the wrong shape. I was about to consider that a success, but then I thought, well, that would be like making a gingerbread house with all the right textures but looking like Stonehenge. Gingerbread Stonehenge...I might consider that.
Again, you can't believe that I do these kinds of things intentionally. I might say I do, but most of the time it's probably safer to assume that I did it while trying to do something else.
And finally, in a spurt of inspiration (and mostly frustration), I decided to retire to my tried-and-true method of "toss everything into a bowl and mix semi-thoroughly before throwing into a pot of oil, leaving it on the stove, and poking at it curiously" and, sure enough, I got my pie, with the exception of a little messup towards the end.
All in all, it was a very familiar experience for me, intending to find something, finding something else, fiddling around and finding other things I wasn't intending to find...basically science in a nutshell. A nutshell that encases the nut of failure. The oil of which I used to cook my omelette pie. So in that sense I guess my pie is a pie of science.
One last thing about today's dish - it's vegetarian! I totally didn't notice that until just now, but I'm just going to pretend that I did it intentionally. So there you have our breakfast special and our vegetarian special in one night! Chalk it up to efficient thinking.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will attempt to coerce serendipity to grace my cooking by trying everything wrong and hoping something goes right. Today's dish is an egg-and-potato omelette pie, garnished with red peppers and spices.
The vision was more or less something like the above, which has a rather doughy consistency due to pouring copious amounts of mashed potato powder into the egg batter. Turns out I was a bit too copious when I started off and that ended up with something more like scrambled eggs...
So another batch of eggs (a batch, by the way, is two eggs), and this time less potato. It almost worked out, except I got overzealous with the flipping and ended up with only half of it flipped over. So basically I got myself an omelette, which was about the right consistency but the wrong shape. I was about to consider that a success, but then I thought, well, that would be like making a gingerbread house with all the right textures but looking like Stonehenge. Gingerbread Stonehenge...I might consider that.
And finally, in a spurt of inspiration (and mostly frustration), I decided to retire to my tried-and-true method of "toss everything into a bowl and mix semi-thoroughly before throwing into a pot of oil, leaving it on the stove, and poking at it curiously" and, sure enough, I got my pie, with the exception of a little messup towards the end.
Sweet, starchy success. And yes, there is cumin.
All in all, it was a very familiar experience for me, intending to find something, finding something else, fiddling around and finding other things I wasn't intending to find...basically science in a nutshell. A nutshell that encases the nut of failure. The oil of which I used to cook my omelette pie. So in that sense I guess my pie is a pie of science.
One last thing about today's dish - it's vegetarian! I totally didn't notice that until just now, but I'm just going to pretend that I did it intentionally. So there you have our breakfast special and our vegetarian special in one night! Chalk it up to efficient thinking.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
SUMMER CHALLENGE NUMBER 1!!!
DAY 1:
OKAY GUYS!
So yea... what I'm gonna do is tell you all about the FIRST EPIC SUMMER CHALLENGE!!!
OKAY GUYS!
So yea... what I'm gonna do is tell you all about the FIRST EPIC SUMMER CHALLENGE!!!
The challenge is simple: who can better devise a trap to ensnare a devilishly clever ragamuffin of a fly. I will now show the different set-ups.
Yifan's Set Up:
Basically, this sad sad set-up is simply nothing more than a cup filled with some blue soda and biscuit crumbs. No fly in his or her right mind would want to take a bath in this filth. It's utterly wretched swamplike features ward away any potential victims with its lack of comfortable ambiance and generally lackluster appearance. Simply looking at this trap makes you wonder if the trap's engineer put any thought into the contraption at all... I certainly wouldn't feed a fly this gunk... would you?
Darvin's Set Up:
Now, this here is a true beauty. You can see the strong effort that went into the making of this dish. Truly a gourmet meal prepared for any fly, this dish is the epitome of a good fly trap. Take notice of the even glaze of mouth-watering maple syrup, sprinkled with pure cocoa powder, topped with some candy extract. This meticulously constructed platter would entrap even the most ingenious of flies. Only with long months of deliberation would such a contraption be fully perfected to this extent. I almost feel envious of the fly that is to be soon trapped within this heavenly bait.
Control:
An empty plate.
Be sure to tune in to the results of my fantastic victory!
- Darvin
No post today
Hey guys,
Happy July 4th! In lieu of a Saturday Supper (I ate dinner with a family friend tonight), here are some easy ways to spice up your 4th of July recipes:
1. Cumin
Happy 4th, everyone!
-Yifan
Happy July 4th! In lieu of a Saturday Supper (I ate dinner with a family friend tonight), here are some easy ways to spice up your 4th of July recipes:
1. Cumin
Happy 4th, everyone!
-Yifan
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Potato lamb cakes
It occurs to me that I need to start coming up with more clever names for the stuff I make. I guess in one sense the name should correspond with the actual awesomeness of the dish...which is pretty low. I could theoretically name things classier or more exciting, but I find the short, blunt, straightforward approach a thing of personal endearment.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be simultaneously undergoing the experience of preparing royal poison and being the royal taste-tester first-hand. Today's dish is a plate of lamb patties fried in oil and mashed potatoes powder.
This picture pushes the limits of Yifan's aesthetic sense, which aptly demonstrates how very limited it was. It's all downhill from here, which means, quite literally, that it won't be pretty.
I did promise everyone that I'd make something unhealthy, and I did. Today's dish, by the way, is partly thanks to my roommate Feng's deft hands and love of oil. What you see above is a lot of oil. Quite a lot of oil. Worked out great though - turns out mashed potato powder absorbs oil like a kitten absorbs mental energy from everyone in a radius of sight.
The idea is, and I hesitate to drive in this point every post, simple. Shape ground lamb into patties, layer on some mayonnaise (yes, it's that idea again - Yifan has limited creativity), dunk the patties in mashed potato powder. There's the crux of this dish. Using mashed potato powder in conjunction with oil is basically delicious for your mouth and disastrous for your heart. Toss on spices (I know people might be tired of my cumin by now, but cumin on lamb is actually something of a necessity), and dunk in oil. Just watch that oil disappear and don't think too much about how it'll be disappearing into your arteries soon.
I want to make a point about the creation process. This thing looked disgusting while it was being made, and I had some serious doubts whether it would work. Mind, it didn't look that great even after being cooked, but at least I could taste it to check.
Covering lamb meat in white was meant to make it return to its lamb state and frolic around but instead it just looks like a dead piece of meat...covered in potato powder.
It also felt disgusting. When you're using your fingers to slather on the mayonnaise, the potato powder loves your fingers more than it loves the lamb, which means it'll stick on you like bloodthirsty leeches on a hemophiliac. Has anyone played with glue or starch so much that eventually you just get this dry, crusty white stuff all over your hands? Imagine that except now you're forced to rub it on your soft, gooey, mildly bloody food. I now know why people enjoy cooking.
The asparagus was a rather last-minute decision. It soaks up the rest of the flavor nicely though, and of course it offers a better aesthetic appeal than just the cooked murdered innocence on a plate that this dish would otherwise be (those poor innocent potatoes - rest in peace). Also it gives me an excuse to call this dish healthier than it should honestly be.
Well, that's today's meal. Eventually I'll have to move on to dishes that don't just involve me using my hands and a giant knife for everything, but until then I'm honestly quite happy pretending I'm a mad scientist working with carcasses while I cook up a succulent meal for myself and my friends (who, curiously, never eat more than a bite of my stuff). Look forward to probably not a change of pace next week!
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be simultaneously undergoing the experience of preparing royal poison and being the royal taste-tester first-hand. Today's dish is a plate of lamb patties fried in oil and mashed potatoes powder.
I did promise everyone that I'd make something unhealthy, and I did. Today's dish, by the way, is partly thanks to my roommate Feng's deft hands and love of oil. What you see above is a lot of oil. Quite a lot of oil. Worked out great though - turns out mashed potato powder absorbs oil like a kitten absorbs mental energy from everyone in a radius of sight.
The idea is, and I hesitate to drive in this point every post, simple. Shape ground lamb into patties, layer on some mayonnaise (yes, it's that idea again - Yifan has limited creativity), dunk the patties in mashed potato powder. There's the crux of this dish. Using mashed potato powder in conjunction with oil is basically delicious for your mouth and disastrous for your heart. Toss on spices (I know people might be tired of my cumin by now, but cumin on lamb is actually something of a necessity), and dunk in oil. Just watch that oil disappear and don't think too much about how it'll be disappearing into your arteries soon.
I want to make a point about the creation process. This thing looked disgusting while it was being made, and I had some serious doubts whether it would work. Mind, it didn't look that great even after being cooked, but at least I could taste it to check.
It also felt disgusting. When you're using your fingers to slather on the mayonnaise, the potato powder loves your fingers more than it loves the lamb, which means it'll stick on you like bloodthirsty leeches on a hemophiliac. Has anyone played with glue or starch so much that eventually you just get this dry, crusty white stuff all over your hands? Imagine that except now you're forced to rub it on your soft, gooey, mildly bloody food. I now know why people enjoy cooking.
The asparagus was a rather last-minute decision. It soaks up the rest of the flavor nicely though, and of course it offers a better aesthetic appeal than just the cooked murdered innocence on a plate that this dish would otherwise be (those poor innocent potatoes - rest in peace). Also it gives me an excuse to call this dish healthier than it should honestly be.
Well, that's today's meal. Eventually I'll have to move on to dishes that don't just involve me using my hands and a giant knife for everything, but until then I'm honestly quite happy pretending I'm a mad scientist working with carcasses while I cook up a succulent meal for myself and my friends (who, curiously, never eat more than a bite of my stuff). Look forward to probably not a change of pace next week!
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Chicken with pretty colors
Sometimes while doing odd things, I learn little life lessons. For instance, if you're going to cook meat, defrost it the day before! As a biologist working with bacteria, I know very well their resilience, and so I was in quite the panic as I improv'd my defrosting as quickly as I could in less-than-ideal temperatures. This translates to: procrastination is bad for you and possibly for your physical health. Three cheers for salmonella!
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be tossing ingredients into a pan wantonly and hoping they don't react, according to some protocol (or "recipe" as the experts say) I find online and invariably change due to laziness. Today's dish is a mix of chicken cooked with asparagus and red peppers.
Wait is Yifan using a camera here? Oh no, rather, Yifan discovered a cell phone camera that can take slightly better, and easier, pics than a laptop's webcam. Silly Yifan, get a camera.
This week's dish is a trifecta of vibrant color, healthfulness, and of course, simplicity. Cook the chicken in a fair amount of chicken broth, toss in garlic, asparagus, and red peppers, season to taste, serve over rice, and you're done! I honestly can't think of even a single step along this process that was troublesome, and the recipe doesn't even call for much in the way of fatty goodness. Very lean, very light. Turns out heart attacks are actually harder to cook well than, you know, normal food.
I should make a point about spices. I only have three - oregano, basil, and cumin. Furthermore, I intend to put all three in virtually everything. Originally I was going to see when people would notice, but now that it's the second week, I'm starting to realize that nobody is eating my cooking except myself. Oh well. I was extraordinarily disappointed tonight because in my rush to get the dish done, I didn't taste-test the spices enough. In other words, I could barely taste the cumin. That is basically unacceptable. The disappointment was tantamount to being informed that you did the puzzle on the back of a cereal box wrong. It's soul-crushing.
Also a word about colors. This dish would really have been only half as good as it was for me if it didn't feel like I was eating Christmas with every bite. As someone who eats pretty much brown stuff all the time (more on that in future posts), this was a refreshing change of scenery. How do I even describe it? The red was like the boldness of a weekly foray into the unknown, while the green was like the immense envy I have for people who can write better similes than mine. Something like that.
So that's that, a nice healthy dinner for this week. Maybe next week I'll finally get some bacon or something. And by the way, I don't really consider this a food blog as much as a blog blog, but if you're actually (mysteriously, inexplicably) interested in the specifics of the recipes I'm using, leave a comment and I'll reach deep into my memory to figure out what I was doing in my confused haze of culinary catastrophes.
Welcome to Saturday Supper, where your host, I, Yifan, will be tossing ingredients into a pan wantonly and hoping they don't react, according to some protocol (or "recipe" as the experts say) I find online and invariably change due to laziness. Today's dish is a mix of chicken cooked with asparagus and red peppers.
This week's dish is a trifecta of vibrant color, healthfulness, and of course, simplicity. Cook the chicken in a fair amount of chicken broth, toss in garlic, asparagus, and red peppers, season to taste, serve over rice, and you're done! I honestly can't think of even a single step along this process that was troublesome, and the recipe doesn't even call for much in the way of fatty goodness. Very lean, very light. Turns out heart attacks are actually harder to cook well than, you know, normal food.
I should make a point about spices. I only have three - oregano, basil, and cumin. Furthermore, I intend to put all three in virtually everything. Originally I was going to see when people would notice, but now that it's the second week, I'm starting to realize that nobody is eating my cooking except myself. Oh well. I was extraordinarily disappointed tonight because in my rush to get the dish done, I didn't taste-test the spices enough. In other words, I could barely taste the cumin. That is basically unacceptable. The disappointment was tantamount to being informed that you did the puzzle on the back of a cereal box wrong. It's soul-crushing.
Yeah, something like that...
Also a word about colors. This dish would really have been only half as good as it was for me if it didn't feel like I was eating Christmas with every bite. As someone who eats pretty much brown stuff all the time (more on that in future posts), this was a refreshing change of scenery. How do I even describe it? The red was like the boldness of a weekly foray into the unknown, while the green was like the immense envy I have for people who can write better similes than mine. Something like that.
So that's that, a nice healthy dinner for this week. Maybe next week I'll finally get some bacon or something. And by the way, I don't really consider this a food blog as much as a blog blog, but if you're actually (mysteriously, inexplicably) interested in the specifics of the recipes I'm using, leave a comment and I'll reach deep into my memory to figure out what I was doing in my confused haze of culinary catastrophes.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Yifan's Workout
Alright, so this is my first real blogpost, and it's going to be about working out.
So yea, I used to lift weights in my highschool, but I didn't really work out in a year. Thus, it's safe to say that I'm a bit rusty.
Yifan on the other hand is a MASSIVE body builder. He works out like EVERY SINGLE DAY. He's so strong, he has MUSCLES on his MUSCLES on his MUSCLES on his bones. The man knows his weight lifting techniques, from tension training to the ultimate super-set. So for a day, I decided to go under his tutelage.
With a general two hour work-out routine planned, we headed off to the local gym. Personally, I've never really done any research on weightlifting, so I only knew the basics. Yifan however, was the MASTER. He knew which exercises worked out pectoralis major/minor, surrounding balance muscles, and the optimal combinations to go from primary-secondary muscle training to isolation training.
On our way to the gym, Yifan told me we'd be doing a general upperbody push day. To me, this simply meant work the chest, shoulders, and triceps. Boy was I wrong. This man redefined the common workout. What started as a simple benchpress become something I couldn't even possibly dream of. After benching 3 sets of 8 reps of 225 lbs, Yifan claims he is done warming up. He then proceeds to resume benching, only now throwing the barbell up at the apex of the press, propelling the barbell inches away from hitting the ceiling of the weightroom. He continues to do this for several reps. I lost count at about 25. He then goes over and repeats this process, but on an incline, to work out his upper pectorals and front deltoids. He then proceeds to the shoulder press. Unamused by the dumbbells that have weights of only two digits, Yifan grabs hold of two 110 lbs dumbells and begins his shoulder press routine. One dumbbell per hand, he starts punching above him at speeds I had never seen before. This fantastic feat of superhuman strength was only topped when Yifan began to take these 110 lbs weights, and started to dance, rapidly fist pumping as if he were in an overly Italian rave party. With these exercises finished, Yifan then continued on to his triceps. Rather than the conventional tricep dips, Yifan took a very novel approach to this workout. He set up two benches, as if he was going to do a dip. He then asks me to stack on top of his abdoman all the 45lbs weights I can find in the weightroom. When I told him it was simply impossible to do a dip in such conditions, he told me "NO... It is only impossible if you don't believe. A true man believes in himself, and thus, in his own muscles." Moved by the words of a true man, teas began to swell in my eyes as I placed all the weights I could find in the weightroom on top of Yifan. Totaling to over 500 lbs, this meter high stack of weights would be enough to torture any man. However, Yifan takes it with ease, as he does dip after dip.
After reading this post, you may wish to ask if Yifan takes performance enhancing drugs. Now, as valid of a question this is, I must ask that all readers immediately strike this thought from their brains, for no performance enhancing drug could possibly enable a man to do this. Yifan is simply the powerhouse product that is the human product of superman fused with a bull fused with Chuck Norris.
I will leave you with one simple piece of advice. When you see Yifan, do high five him... but be careful, or he may just break your hand.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Chicken slathered in mayonnaise
I've more or less decided that every Saturday I'm going to try out a recipe that I've never tried before. Being a first-time cook, this will be extraordinarily easy the first few times. But regardless, since I'll especially be focusing on how easy it is to make the dish, rather than on pointless things like how good it is or how healthy it is, I'll still be mostly doing easy stuff that anyone could do. So be on the lookout for that.
Welcome to the first Saturday Supper, in which your host, yours truly, I, Yifan, will be making something entirely new and foreign to myself (but still childishly easy to make), and try it out. Today's dish is a three-part: baked chicken, spinach, and rice.
Taken with a low-res webcam because Yifan's a terrible planner and has no camera.
The chicken is by far the hardest part, which is to say, on a scale of skill levels from "world-renowned chef" up top down to "newborn foal," it's around the skill level of "sheltered college student," which might be somewhere above "newborn foal" and below "horse." You read the title right - chicken breasts are slathered in mayonnaise all over, and then covered in spices and breadcrumbs.
May I just take a quick paragraph here to extol the glories of my favorite spice: cumin. Cumin is like powdered joy. It's like taking true love and grinding it into a fine powder, roasting it, and stuffing it into a bottle before smoothing it all over raw bloody meat. It's like crushing the wings of a fairy and capturing the pure flavored essence from the fairy's cries of agony. Do I get my point across about how I feel about cumin? Cumin is delicious.
So I covered the chicken in copious amounts of cumin, some other spices, and breadcrumbs and baked it. About half an hour does pretty well. In a spurt of utterly poor planning, I didn't have any oven mitts on me, so Darvin pulled off some clever engineering in order to fulfill his duty of not letting me catch fire.
The spinach is much easier. Get some garlic, get some spinach (fun fact Yifan didn't know: a whole bag of spinach actually doesn't amount to much...), get some oil, get some salt, combine wantonly in a pan, taking care not to have hot oil splash all over you. The last part is important. Take note of that. The rice is even easier. Darvin prepared that part.
So this first Saturday Supper was much more successful than either of us could have imagined. As Darvin put it: "Sadly, this is probably the best Saturday we'll have." He's probably right. Look forward to it.
Welcome to the first Saturday Supper, in which your host, yours truly, I, Yifan, will be making something entirely new and foreign to myself (but still childishly easy to make), and try it out. Today's dish is a three-part: baked chicken, spinach, and rice.
Taken with a low-res webcam because Yifan's a terrible planner and has no camera.
The chicken is by far the hardest part, which is to say, on a scale of skill levels from "world-renowned chef" up top down to "newborn foal," it's around the skill level of "sheltered college student," which might be somewhere above "newborn foal" and below "horse." You read the title right - chicken breasts are slathered in mayonnaise all over, and then covered in spices and breadcrumbs.
May I just take a quick paragraph here to extol the glories of my favorite spice: cumin. Cumin is like powdered joy. It's like taking true love and grinding it into a fine powder, roasting it, and stuffing it into a bottle before smoothing it all over raw bloody meat. It's like crushing the wings of a fairy and capturing the pure flavored essence from the fairy's cries of agony. Do I get my point across about how I feel about cumin? Cumin is delicious.
So I covered the chicken in copious amounts of cumin, some other spices, and breadcrumbs and baked it. About half an hour does pretty well. In a spurt of utterly poor planning, I didn't have any oven mitts on me, so Darvin pulled off some clever engineering in order to fulfill his duty of not letting me catch fire.
The spinach is much easier. Get some garlic, get some spinach (fun fact Yifan didn't know: a whole bag of spinach actually doesn't amount to much...), get some oil, get some salt, combine wantonly in a pan, taking care not to have hot oil splash all over you. The last part is important. Take note of that. The rice is even easier. Darvin prepared that part.
So this first Saturday Supper was much more successful than either of us could have imagined. As Darvin put it: "Sadly, this is probably the best Saturday we'll have." He's probably right. Look forward to it.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Introduction
Y: FIRST!
D: Seriously dude? ... Seriously? Whatever... Anyhow, hey guys, my name is Darvin and this is my blog about my summer adventures! Be sure to check in every wee-
Y: ...
D: I don't think you understand the finer points of written humor. You were supposed to cut me off and mention how it's "our" blog... but you can't cut me off with an ellipsis... since... it makes no sound...
Y: But you never finished your sentence, so I did cut you off.
D: Okay, getting too meta for me...
Y: Dude everything I do I do meta. After like two days of blogging I will have deconstructed this entire thing into the skeletal framework of the futility of blogging.
D: ... Okay, well... this seems like a fun summer... Okay, well, basically this is going to be the blog of our adventures this summer. We're two college students who are summer roommates while we work in jobs on campus. We'll blog every week about some fun stuff we do and the food we make. Even though neither of us have cooked before, how hard could it be? We're both science-y people... we're used to measuring and mixing and whatnots... Right?
Y: So yeah look forward to loads of weekly adventures with us and our friends as we go through our lives. Fun! Friends! Fantastical failures that result in the loss of said friends!
D: ... I... don't know what to say to that... ... I like our friends, dude... Anyhow, tune in this Monday for our first non-introduction post. We're both going to move into our summer rooms on the 6th. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard of a move, so I'm sure everything will go just fine.
Y: Speaking of fine, how much do we get fined if we start a fire in the room?
D: Please... tell me you just wrote that for blog material... ...
Y: Well, I mean hypothetically, in a theoretical sense, some combustion event happening as a thermodynamic thought problem. Purely academic.
D: If you actually do damage... it'll be $300 PER OCCUPANT... plus other expenses... Well... with that covered and a lot to think about housing arrangements tonight... see you Monday!
Y: FIRST! Yeah that's right I got...hey where are you going?
-QED
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