Welcome back! Summer has arrived again, bringing along beautiful weather, long days, summer jobs, and summer cooking. I (Kevin) am as excited as ever to start cooking again, and this time, I've brought on a few friends to write and hopefully show you a meal that goes correctly. Enough with the pleasantries: what's been happening in my kitchen?
So far, not a lot, but I've only been in 3 days, and one was eating out (where I forgot to take a picture and therefore will not review). Even so, I'm very optimistic about this kitchen. It's not any larger than the kitchens of past summers, but this time, I'm blessed to have the resources of the sublessors to work with. I think that in itself will deserve a post soon, but I am again derailing myself.
Tonight, I knew I needed to tackle some of the chicken I had sitting in the fridge. Because I don't have the skill of my grandma, the patience of my mom, the healthy drive of my sister, or the desire for top quality meats of my former roommate, I ended up with thigh meat, which I think was ultimately a better purchase than breast meat. Breat meat is super-dry, right?
I also mentioned that a ton of friends are also going to be around this summer, and we've talked very excitedly about spending lots of time together and doing potlucks and dinner parties. Even though most of them aren't back yet, I figured I wouldn't start the summer slowly and invited KevBaum and Steph (2 potential contributors to the blog) for dinner. Since I'm still waiting on a few supplies from my sister, I decided to do a simple chicken pasta dish in the spirit of perhaps one of the best meals of last summer.
While KevBaum put together a salad and vinaigrette, I chopped up some onions, garlic, red bell pepper, and tomatoes. The first lesson of the summer was a quick look on the always reliable internet to see what I was doing wrong with garlic in the past. I've never had a garlic press, and chopped garlic never quite got me the results I was looking for. If you're too lazy to check out the website, here are the 2 big things I learned: 1) don't refrigerate garlic and 2) you can crush garlic by pressing down with the flat of the blade after chopping. It works!
The chicken was a slightly more complicated process, but also very easy. The night before, I took out the chicken to season it some. I looked up what the right Italian seasonings are, and ended up using some olive oil, basil, oregano, rosemary, red pepper flakes, ground rainbow pepper, and coarse sea salt. When I put it that way, it sounds a lot classier than my former method of just using the premixed Italian seasoning. I fried it with the onions and garlic. Thankfully, I remembered fairly early to cover it, and when I pulled it to chop it up, I think it slightly undercooked as desired.
Fortunately, my main technique in cooking is stir frying, which is somewhat difficult to completely screw up. It also transfers nicely to other cuisines: when I use bok choy and soy sauce and put it over white rice, that's Chinese stir fry; when I use zucchini and olive oil and put it over pasta, that's Italian saute. I guess I'm just naturally talented at cutting up everything in the kitchen, throwing in arbitrary amounts of random spices, and pushing around everything in a pan.
Unfortunately, I forgot about how important timing is. While KevBaum is trucking along with the salad and has enough time to wash dishes as well, I forget to boil the water and end up waiting forever for the pasta. Because that went slowly, I decide to wait on frying anything, forgetting that it does also take time to cook chicken all of the way through. Because of that, KevBaum takes over the pasta, which ends up sitting on the counter for a few minutes as I wait to have the chicken cooked and chopped and the vegetables sauteed to mix together.
The timing ends up being unintentionally perfect as we decide to sit down and eat just as Steph arrives. Dinner goes great as I remember how much better meals are when you have company instead of, say, eating alone, watching a youtube video of a Starcraft 2 replay. That's just a hypothetical, completely made-up, non-factual, imaginary event. Of course.
Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. Because the post-mortem is necessary, I probably would've added a little more salt and pepper to the mix after adding the pasta. Although the saute went well, a light coat of olive oil doesn't quite give the same flavor as a real sauce. Moreover, the chicken was just a little bit drier than I had hoped. When I pulled the pieces off the pan the first time, they looked and tasted fantastic. Unfortunately, I think cutting it up afterwards, throwing it back on the pan, and letting it sit while we ate salad let some of the juice out. I'll probably try cutting up the chicken before frying it up the first time to see if that goes better. If anyone has an expert opinion on the topic, feel free to chime in.
So that's about it. Pictures will come shortly when Steph gets around to emailing me the pictures she took with her iPhone. I'm excited to get more adventurous in my cooking this summer. Particularly, I have one food project/goal that should hopefully be a reliable source of stories throughout the summer, though you'll have to wait on that one.
Here's to a new summer.
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