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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!!!

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