Posts Tagged "cooking"
In the Kitchen: Orange-Glazed Salmon
And it returns! It’s been almost a full year my last weekend foray into the kitchen but since I put this back on my list of new year’s resolutions, I’m hoping to get more in the groove of cooking. I’m pretty much on the clock in terms of living at home and I’m going to have to cook for myself and the bf and eventually our kids. I might as well get more comfortable in the kitchen where I can still ask my mom for help if I need it. I did make a couple other dishes before this but nothing really to write home about. Okay, so there could potentially be a story. I’ll work on it.
Anywho, we had some salmon that my mom was going to cook so I decided to find a recipe and make it myself. I’m not sure what made me look for an orange glazed recipe but I suddenly wanted some. I found this recipe through the wonders of Google and it’s delicious. I’d definitely make it again. Not only is it super easy but you can essentially use this marinade for other meats. Mmm, meat.
Asian Crispy Orange-Glazed Salmon
via Tastebook
2/3 cup orange juice
3 tbsp rice wine vinegar
2 tbsp lite soy sauce
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 (1″ piece) fresh ginger grated
4 (4-6 ounce) salmon fillets
2 tbs olive oil
salt, to taste
freshly ground pepper
2 tbs honey
1) Stir together orange juice, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, crushed red pepper flakes, and ginger in a bowl.
2) Drizzle 1 tbs olive oil into a baking pan. Add salmon and turn to coat.
3) Pour liquid mixture over salmon and let marinade for 30 minutes or more.
4) Remove salmon from dish and reserve marinade. Season salmon with salt and pepper.
5) Heat a large nonstick skillet over Medium High heat and add remaining 1 tbsp olive oil. Cook salmon 3-4 minutes per side and remove from pan.
6) Pour reserved marinade into skillet and add honey. Heat for 3 minutes or until syrupy. Serve over salmon.
Read MoreWe’re not in Kansas anymore…
This weekend was a pretty fun and busy weekend, as are most of my weekends lately. On Saturday I was able to meet up with my former college roommate and her husband for lunch in Petaluma at Dempsey’s [which, as a side note was pretty good - she had read an online review that said the food was good though the service was a little confused...which summed things up perfectly]. We had a lot of fun catching up. Every time we get the chance to hang out I always feel bad that we don’t do that more often. Especially since we live within a hour or so drive of one another.
While we were enjoying lunch, another patron came by with her dog, a boxer, and tied the dog to the fence across the way. During the course of our time there, probably about an hour and a half, this dog lunged and barked at every single dog that walked by, coming close to grabbing a small dog. It took the owner some time to make it over to quiet and calm the dog after each dog walked by even though she was seated on the patio near us. And after one such incident, I noticed that one of the straps of the harness the dog was in was not around one of its leg.
This is what we call “foreshadowing.”
We had just finished eating and sat around talking when all of the sudden we hear this commotion. A couple walking their little terrier by had incited the boxer who started barking and lunging [as it had done ALL DAY] when it broke loose of its harness/leash and went after the little dog. I’m not sure if it actually bit the terrier, but at one point the owner had to lift the dog in the air to get it away from the boxer. And it still seemed to take the boxer’s owner FOREVER to come get her dog.
This being Petaluma, someone from the patio increased the already tense scene by demanding the owners of the terrier to make sure they get the boxer’s owner’s name and number “in case of vet bills” and kept repeating it until the boxer’s owner finally snapped at her.
The manager of the restaurant had to ask them to take their dog away, which they did for a little bit before bringing it back. Oh goodness. Then the owner of the dog returned to her table and cried. Why? Because you were wrong? You had plenty of opportunity to remove your dog before it escalated. We all saw how it tried to go after the four or five dogs that walked by, including a very unimpressed Great Dane. Yet you did nothing. And then your dog got loose and people are mad. Well, no duh lady. No duh.
This was probably the most exciting thing to happen in Petaluma all day.
This is whole incident reaffirmed the idea of NOT getting a dog. I know I waffle back and forth between getting one but now I don’t think I have the intestinal fortitude to take care of it. I’m perfectly happy dealing with my Nintendog and sometimes even that is too much for me.
Read MoreI need red turtle shells, not banana peels!
While I was writing up yesterday’s post on my chicken dinner, I was thinking how absurd my whole aversion to cleaning a chicken is. I mean, I’m not the most squeamish when it comes to stuff like that [now gory movies are a horse of a different color!]. I’ll practically fight you for the scalpel on dissection days in Biology class but you tell me to stick my hand into the cavity of a chicken and clean it out and I shrivel faster than a salted slug.
Suddenly I’m all, “EEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW GROOOOOOOSSSSSSS!” I don’t know why exactly. It’s not terribly horrendous of a job but I find myself needing to talk myself through the entire ordeal. “It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad. It’snothatbadit’snotthatbad. IT’S NOT THAT BAD.”
It’s all so odd. I’m hoping to wean myself off that gross out reaction because I’ll have to do it several more times, and you know, again at Thanksgiving with the turkey. Though I think the innards are all handily contained in a bag. Is that so? Because if so, someone needs to start doing that for the chickens.
I also realized that I may need to take a break from playing Mario Kart DS. I’ve played it before with no problems but suddenly I have to actually play the game and hope I at least make it to third place. Before I had no trouble working my way through and ended up sweeping all of the races. I think the game got smarter. Or maybe it’s this new version I have. Either way it’s FRUSTATING. Oh so frustrating.
I’m way more competitive than I should be which is why I find losing to suck infinitely hard. I can feel my frustrating flowing through my body and I want to shake my DS whenever that stupid Princess comes sliding in to beat me out of first place. And if it weren’t for me being in public, I would absolutely be yelling at the game.
In fact, I came thisclose to yelling, “You damn dirty ape!” out loud after being knocked off the track by Donkey Kong this morning.
It takes a lot of self control to keep from yelling in anger or celebration [for the times that I manage to win] but I’m sure anyone watching me could tell how I’m doing just by looking at my face.
Sheer comedy.
I will not be the one teaching our kids how to lose gracefully.
Read MoreWeekend Dinner #6: Roasted Chile-Lime Chicken
My return to the kitchen had me meeting with an old foe: the roasting/fryer chicken. You know the whole chicken where you have to clean it out? Yeah, that one. I’ve tried to do it once before and eventually girl’d out and had my mom take care of it for me. This time she offered from the get go but I wanted to do it so I just had her stand nearby to supervise.
I tried. I really did. I was doing well until I realized that the bird was still a little frozen on the inside and that would require me to dig my nails into it to loosen the little bits and pieces and the thought of having chicken organs underneath my nails grossed me out. That and the water was ice cold since, you know, it was frozen.
But I switched on and off with my mom and eventually got the whole bird cleaned out. Ugh. Maybe next time I’ll just skip the whole bird and just use chicken pieces. That seems a whole lot easier.
Anywho, it took longer than the recipe said to roast all the way through but it was delicious. I got a little fancy and made garlic-parmesan smashed potatoes [no need for a recipe…just some potatoes, a teaspoon for minced garlic, some shredded parmesan and milk to the appropriate consistency] and roasted asparagus with a balsalmic browned butter sauce.
Yeah I got even fancier. But even that is ridiculously easy to make: two tablespoons butter melted until it turns a golden brown [and there you have browned butter. Seriously]. Then you take it off the stove and add two teaspoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar and some salt and pepper to taste. It’s slightly sweet but good.
Roasted Chile-Lime Chicken
by Aida Mollenkamp
1 (5 pound) chicken
5 medium serrano chiles, seeded and finely chopped [I used two serrano and two jalapeno peppers]
5 medium garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
5 teaspoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon freshly grated lime zest
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1) Heat oven to 400 degrees F and arrange a rack in the middle. Pat chicken dry with paper towels. Remove necks and any innards from the cavities and discard.
2) To spatchcock, use a sharp pair of poultry shears or kitchen scissors to cut along the backbone; remove and discard. Place chicken, breast-side up, and press down to flatten it to it is lying completely flat.
3) Combine remaining ingredients in a small bowl and mix until evenly combined. Season and adjust flavor as desired. Loosen the skin from the breast and legs of the chicken and, using your clean hands, spread 1/2 of the mixture underneath. Rub the remaining mixture all over the outside of the chicken. Set aside while oven heats up, at least 20 minutes.
4) Lay chicken in a roasting pan or baking dish fitted with a rack and roast until cooked an instant read thermometer inserted into the thigh registers 165 degrees F, about 50 to 60 minutes; let sit at least 10 minutes before carving. Quick note: the recipe says 50 – 60 minutes but its usually taken me longer than 60 minutes to reach 165 degrees so I highly suggest relying on temperature to determine doneness. It doesn’t have to be at 165 on the dot since the internal temp will continue to rise a little bit while it’s resting.
We had some leftovers which I used to make a killer chicken with spaghetti. And instead of using a marinara sauce, which would have been way too heavy with the flavors of the chicken, I made a lemon garlic olive oil sauce. No recipe here either, besides tossing in about a ½ cup of olive oil [which should have been a ¼ cup], one clove of minced garlic [we use a lot of garlic so my mom minces everything up, freezes and cuts into cubes that are roughly a teaspoon of garlic]. Delicious.
But I’m definitely making this again. In fact, I want to make it again since I figured this would be a great dish to make the next time the bf tells me he told his mom we’d cook for her next time I’m visiting.
Ace up the sleeve!
Read MoreThat Cloris Leachman sure gets around
There’s only two weeks left in this quarter so we’re hitting things pretty hard; especially with finals being next week [eep!].
So guess what I did this weekend.
Don’t you know all the cool kids stay home to do homework? I actually got a fair amount of work done this weekend. Knocked out three out of five homework assignments while catching up on some of The Office [I only have three more eps to catch up with…that is until they start airing new ones]. Oh how I’ve missed The Office!
But in between the homework I made an awesome dinner that I’ll be writing about this week: roasted chili-lime chicken with roasted asparagus with a basalmic brown butter sauce and parmesan-garlic smashed potatoes [because, in addition to my love of basil is an equal amount of love of garlic – so maybe I don’t need to worry about the vampire neighbors after all].
Though I did wish I could have been up at Tahoe snowboarding. I heard it was supposed to be a great weekend to go up too. Oh well. Maybe next season.
Sunday was just as interesting. No really, it was. I taught Sunday School and even though they fed the kids pancakes with the special sugared syrup [seriously, every time they have something with syrup those kids come upstairs and are super rowdy – their blood flowing with all those sugar crystals of hyperactivity] they were actually pretty laid back and we even had an interesting discussion in which we tried to explain the concept of “mercy” to a bunch of 8-10 year olds. Which ended with the ever eloquent: it means being nicer than you could be when someone does something wrong.
After church, I made my way to Walnut Creek for a group meeting, with a stop at the mall in Concord to kill some time. It was there I realized what Hell would be for me: having to relive my teenaged years. Ugh. Not that I had a horrible teenage experience; it was actually fairly pleasant but still something I don’t want to go back to. I discussed it with one of my group members later and we came to the conclusion that when you’re a teenager, everything is SUCH A BIG DEAL. And it’s quite mentally exhausting. It’s a miracle any of us managed to get our homework done when we were too busy overanalyzing and agonizing over whether or not my “crush of the semester” liked me or not. Seriously people. These discussions were like hostage negotiations. THEY WERE THAT SERIOUS.
And I can’t live like that anymore. It takes way more sleep which I’m not getting on a regular basis. Besides, I like being comfortable in my own skin.
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