Foodies BS Thread.

Agreed. I sprinkle on a bit of the Old Bay for a nice little kick without it being overpowering.

Pulling the water out with the paper towels makes a HUGE flavor difference. No water + a good salting + an hour for osmosis to work is unbelievable.

I'll take the pepsi challenge any time. Take two cuts of side-by-side steaks that are the same and do one this way, then do one whatever other way, and cook both.

I'd put cash money on mine any day. EVERYone I've served a steak to in the last year this way has RAVED. I mean 'asked for printed hard-copies of how I do it' raved.


It's like my pan-seared chicken recipe upthread a bit. Since posting, I've fiddled around and my wife goes APESHIT over the sauce now that I started using beef stock instead of chicken and using about half again more lemon juice, so that's how I make it now.

Cooking evolves, recipes evolve as tastes and preferences change and grow. It is the way of things.

 

Grow your own it isn't that hard just make sure you get heirloom seeds so that you only make that investment once. And I agree with the gettin the water out the steak I do that a lot and also put old bay on everything.

 

^^^I definitely have thought about starting a garden but with all this stuff going on I really dont have time. I think we just decided that we are not going to move so maybe we can start a garden and start the many other projects.

 

^^That was funny.

 

I got some pictures on my phone.its a new phone, fist smart phone. I have no idea how to get them out of my phone and into TW. I will try to figure it out later....sorry guys....mexican grilled steak with fresh salsa and guacamole........ nothing special

 

Email them to TW live

 

I send mine as email attachments either to my gmail address (if I need to manually edit them in some fashion) or directly to a photobucket account. Then I use the IMG tags to inline them in a post.

Pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Gimmie a holler if you want a quick walkthrough on it.

 

So, the wife is making chicken...something soupish in the crockpot today:



YAY!

However, there was a miscommunication someplace, and we have too much chicken; there's two leg quarters that won't fit in the crock. Now, since they've already been frozen and thawed, I gotta use 'em.

The GOOD news is, she's making her soup-thing today because she's gonna be GONE most of the afternoon. ANOTHER YAY!

The 'kitchen assistant' is in her proper manager's seat, to closely observe the goings-on.



So, I have some chicken quarters and some time. Hmm, what else do I have laying around to get rid of?

Some taters. A Vidalia onion, some mushrooms just about ready to go icky. Hmm.

OK, I have AN IDEA! (tm)

Get everything together...however the french guys say it, misen pious or something like that. Whatever:



Dice up the onions and 'shrooms. Store in used up mushroom container! Ha, no extra dirty tupperware! Cut up the taters...these are also borderline ready to ask for voting rights, so there's some soft spots to trim off:



Dice them up fairly small, so the cook time won't be measured in days:



Move that all aside. Now, take out a cold tablespoon of butter and dice it up real fine. Pop it back in the fridge for a couple minutes if your knife skills won't let you get this done before the heat from your hands starts melting the butter pieces...you'll get faster as you get more experience. Speed can kill with knives this sharp! (I used one return trip to the freezer to firm them back up).

Now, put those pieces of butter in a little bowl. Throw a couple hefty pinches of salt, a half-dozen grinds of pepper, and a couple teasopoons of italian seasoning in there. (Insert your favorite chicken spices here, if'n you prefer something else...thyme, rosemary, whatever). Toss them about a bit to get all the spices on some butter then pop back into the fridge. Your patience will be rewarded, I promise!



Let us turn our attention to the chicken itself. With quarters, if you flip them skin side down, you can use a paring knife to cut away a lot of the globby fat on the bottom easily. If you look, you can lift the skin between the drumstick and the ribcage very easily. (Since I'm home alone, I can't take pictures of this, as it takes both hands to do the operation. But, I'll descibe it as best I can, and if you try this with with a laptop open, you'll see exactly what I mean).

So, skin side down and the 'inside' of the drumstick elbow facing you, pull gently on the skin and raise it. Down on the bottom left, about a half-inch in, you'll find one or two little stringlets of tendon of some kind that you'll need to slice carefully through these with the tip of the paring knife.

Otherwise, just slowly work your way out with your finders, pulling the skin away from the meat. Go slowly and GENTLY, you don't want to put holes in that skin, we need it as intact as possible. That also means don't disconnect the back side edges, where the skin attaches to the edge of the chicken. You also don't need to go very far down past the knuckle of the drumstick joint...no more than an inch, maybe less.

It shouldn't take more than 20 or 30 seconds and you should be done....she skin pulls up easily.

Now, why do this? Well, skin does two things, by the wonderful design of ma nature. One, it keeps what is outside, out. And it keeps what is inside, in. We've talked about how chicken doesn't have a lot of flavor by itself, and we want to bring flavor to it. The skin is a damn stout barrier to liquid, and thus it will block our efforts to season the meat during cooking. SO!

Grab the bowl of butter you diced up and coated with spices earlier. Using one hand, shove little groups of the coated butter up under the skin, then you use the fingers of your OTHER hand on the outside to spread them around. Smoosh them down into the corners, and spread them out all over the place!

I use about a tablespoon for two full quarters. At the end, you'll have two funny looking pieces of meat and some seriously chickeny hands. Go wash those!



You've washed those hands, right? Remember, bleach and hot-soapy on ALL tools that touch raw poultry. Don't make me yell.

Now I put just enough white wine into a big pan that's oven-safe to cover the bottom. You can use a roasting pan or cast iron for this if you really want, but I don't like the acid on my iron. You can also use chicken stock, or even water for this step. But most of the wine will cook off and the taste left behind will mix with the drippings and flavor the aromatics, so I like using it.

Once the wine is in the pan, I put it on a burner over medium heat. The time it takes to assemble this gets the liquid up to nealy a simmer, which cuts the cooking time. If you put cold wine (even room temperature) into a cold pan and then slap it into the oven, you're adding at least 30 minutes to the total cooking times.

Toss the taters, shrooms, and onions into the pan. Stir around a bit, make them even. Put the chicken in skin side up...I use this opportunity to add a little more italian seasoning and salt & pepper to the outside of the chicken, and to the aromatics.



The final touch is a light broushing of olive oil. I like flavored olive oils personally, and keep several around the kitchen. But regular olive oil will work. So will melted butter, if you've got that handy instead.



Lid up and into a 350ish degree oven. Mine is an old piece of shit that doesn't heat very evenly, so I turn the pan every ten minutes or so.



Start checking the temperature at about 25-30 minutes. If you have quarters on the smaller side, pull the lid off at 160 degrees F and crank up the broiler. If you have larger, schwarzenegger-fowl quarters, leave them in place until 163 in the thickest part of the meat...this could take up to an hour, but 35-40 minutes is your most likely best cook time.



Jack the grate up a bit if necessary and got that uncovered meat up close to the heat! Depending of course on how brown you like it, this will take anywhere from 3 to 5ish minutes. Don't go anywhere and keep a close eye on it! I prop a wooden spoon in the door so that it stays open about two inches, rather than the five you get using the first 'notch'. Watch this CLOSELY. It is better to pull it out, and look, and put it back, then to overdo and blacken. (Unless that's what you want, then knock yourself out)

Now, get the browned meat out of the pan and let it rest. While that's resting, check the taters. Even though you cut them small, they might not be done enough for your tastes...I like mine with a bit of chunkiness to them, so I can drain the rest of the pan through a collander now. If you want them flakey-powdery-ready-to-be-mashed, slide the mess onto the rangetop for a couple minutes on medium-high until desired doneness, THEN you can drain them. Plate!



Dinner for one!



The skin is crunchy, crispy, full of flavor. The meat is drippy-tender and juicy and yummy....take a look at all the spices under the skin from our little butter trick earlier:





Instead of bland, chewy, dry, lifeless...this gives you flavor in every wonderful bite. The wine we cooked the taters and stuff in has made them bright and yummy. You MAY need to add a wee bit of salt to them, I did. But otherwise? Damn finger-lickin' goo..

Shit, trademarked. Well, its Good Ea...

Dammit.

You get the idea.

 

^^^good write up. It was very detailed..... good job

 

I think I will just have to learn how to send them to my email. I can get the pics from my email to TW, just have to figure out how to get them to my email. I will learn how to email pics to TW Live also just for those on the spot pics. That will be cool, I see alot of ppl doing that...

 

Dinner tonight

 

^^^that looks good..... lets see it plated.....

 

X2!!

 

I gotta figure out how to get these pics onto TW.. The wife is going to give me a quick lesson when she is done putting the kids to bed. I am interested to see if the pic looks any better from this phone to TW.

 

No plated pic, it didn't stay that way long enough to get a pic


Here is what went on the smoker afterwards

Beef Jerky

 

Nice...good job...

 

X2!

 

Not mine, and I don't know if I could eat one but....
Bacon hot dog turtle burgers.

 

That looks awesome!!

 

I don't know if I could eat one either...

...

But I'm DAMN sure gonna try to make them and give it a whirl!