Vyxxan's Virtual Venture

Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category

For the sick boyfriend. Ron has not been feeling good since last Thursday.

It’s maybe a cold, maybe the flu, he felt like he was running a fever. I felt so lousy yesterday and nose stuffing up that I started right in on Zicam. I have the stuff they took off the shelves… the nasal swabs. So far, so good… my symptoms have pretty much gone away. I don’t remember why they quit selling the nasal swabs, but I decided that I’d risk it.

Sick people need chicken soup, so yesterday I went and got a chicken and some veggies and boiled it all up until the chicken started falling apart. Cooled it, fridged it, and let it sit overnight.

Today it’s spooning the fat off, deboning and removing gunky stuff from the chicken. And straining the carrots, celery, onion and garlic out. Sometimes I put more (fresh) veggies back in, not doing that this time.

The cats are having a feast… I put about 1/2 of the chicken into the freezer, but the cats got all the skin, fat, gristle, and bones. And the carrots. :)

Had to add water to the broth, it was a large chicken and a lot of veggies to boil up with it for flavor. Put in a couple boullion cubes to make up for that… and was happy I rarely use salt while food is cooking. I also put in a few drops of yellow food coloring, which I normally don’t do. I don’t care if it’s as yellow as canned soup…. and I’m not into boiling up chicken feet for the color, either. (not that I shop anywhere that they even SELL chicken feet!) Another option is tumeric, but didn’t see any in the cupboard, so I went with the food color.

Right now matzo balls are boiling in the soup… and the matzo ball mix I used made soooo many matzo balls that I’m having to boil up another pot of water to cook them all. This was a different brand of matzo meal that I usually find, normally I have to make 2 batches of matzo balls because 1 isn’t enough. Instructions were different, too… Usually I mix, form the balls, and then chill for an hour. This recipe said to mix, chill, then form the balls… and that’s what I did, as the mixture was too runny at first to do anything with!

Manhattan style matzo balls is what it says on the recipe on the box. I wouldn’t know the difference, myself… being from California and having San Francisco style matzo balls, lol! Solomons Deli, wonderful place. No idea if they are still open….

Anyhow. I don’t normally cook Matzo Ball Soup in the fall… to me it’s a Springtime food. I normally put all kinds of root veggies into the pot while boiling up the chicken, too… and this time it was slim pickings at the grocery store. No parsnips, no turnips, no rutabagas. I did see rutabagas today at WM, but turnips were only sold in a bag… and they had no parsnips either. Hmm. I don’t want those things in my finished soup… but I do like them in the cooking of the broth.

Well, the results are in. 30 min has gone by since I dropped the matzo balls into the boiling soup. It looks like someone opened the lid, but I know that no one has. AUGH! Hard lumpy matzo balls instead of light fluffy matzo balls. Another few min until the ones boiled in plain water will be done… I am going to be very unhappy if those also look like hard lumps.

Here is a picture of what I got with the ones boiled in the soup….

As you can see, my soup isn’t yellow… and I didn’t get all the fat off of it, either!

See how small those matzo balls look? They are only a bit bigger than they started out, not light and fluffy and doubled in size like normal. I don’t think I care for Manhattan style matzo balls! They are plenty cooked, but a bit dense in the middle… more like matzo balls that have had the lid opened partway thru the cooking time. It’s like dumplings. (which matzo balls are) If you open the lid during the cooking time, they collapse back on themselves and turn into hard doughy lumps. Phooey!

I’ve had this happen ONCE before… and it was because I peeked and let the steam out. The plain water boiled are the same, only with even less flavor. They are in the soup now, soaking it up. Which ain’t gonna be much when they are hard doughy lumps.

But the broth is excellent, so all is not lost… I may fish all those matzo balls out and try again with a different recipe… a recipe like I’m used to.

hugs,
Vyx

and I suddenly realize… hmm, I don’t have a cooking category. That’s okay, this isn’t a cooking blog.

When my daughter was here visiting recently, I made Sweet Lime Pickles. Sarah loved them until she realized they had so much sugar in them. Heh.

There are no limes involved. Instead, you soak your sliced cukes in a mixture of pickling lime and water over night. I first made these when an online friend asked me to. Had no idea what they were like. I’m not from the south, and had never even heard of them.

Well, I really like them. I also like how the pickles come out brilliantly crisp, unlike most home canned pickles which are just soggy yuck. Anyhow, I had to search for pickling lime, and found it at a smaller grocery store. WallyWorld for sure didn’t have it. I didn’t like the recipe on the jar of lime, tho… it didn’t call for pickling spice and I =knew= that the pickles I’d made before had that.

Some hunting online for recipes and an email to my friend… and I had a recipe that contained pickling spice. All was well, and I made 4 quart jars and 2 pint jars, plus had enough syrup left to do 2 more quarts of “fresh” pickles. Those are just freshly sliced cukes with the boiling syrup poured over, and then put in the fridge. (and I haven’t tasted them yet, they look very different)

Anyhow. I’m in WallyWorld the other day by the canning supplies and what do I see? Pickling Lime. Not in a jar, in a bag. Same brand (Mrs. Wages) and the recipe on the back is DIFFERENT than the one on the jar. It contains pickling spice. HUH. But I didn’t buy any. One big jar should last me for 3 major pickle sessions.

Which brings us to today. Tuesday I got a bucket nearly full of cukes from my neighbor. Wednesday I washed, sliced, and put them into their bucket of pickling lime and water. Today I rinsed them a bunch, then set them to soak for a few hours.

On the agenda: make bread and butter pickles which are one of my favorites. Ron asked me to make some, his grandma used to make them and he loved em.

Had to make a trip to the store, I needed vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, celery seed, new lids, onions, and maybe some dill seed and garlic to make dill pickles.

I looked at the shelf where the pickling lime had been earlier this week… and it’s gone. Shoot, and I was going to buy some more, just in case.

(BTW, I am still boiling up sliced cukes…. I didn’t have enough room in the pot even with extra syrup and have already put up 4 quart jars)

There are as many Bread and Butter pickle recipes out there as there are any other recipes. I modified what I found to leave out the tumeric and exchanged some white sugar for brown sugar for the color.

Here is a recipe for the syrup I did:

8 cups white vinegar (5%)
6 cups sugar
2 cups brown sugar
3 tablespoons mustard seed
1.5 tablespoons celery seed
1 tablespoon pickling or kosher salt
.5 tablespoon pickling spice

For the cukes… Well, I mix up my solution of 2 gallons of water and 1 cup of pickling lime, then I start slicing cukes and mixing them in. One thing I did this time was to not dump the slices in all stuck to each other. Easier to mix them if they aren’t stuck in clumps, plus it’s easier for the lime water to penetrate. When it starts looking too full, I quit adding cukes. I didn’t have room in the pot for all of them this time, even with extra syrup made. If you have too many cukes, just set them aside OR make a bit more syrup. There is ALWAYS syrup left over, so you can add more cukes after you pack some into jars and fill them with syrup.

For a ballpark guess, I’d say about 6 lbs of cukes for that much syrup.

Plus, I put in a bunch of sliced onions. I used 4 onions, halved and then slices as thin as I could.

I’m not processing pickles this year, I’m doing hot pack. With that much sugar and vinegar the chance of getting food poisoning is about as likely as winning the lottery.

So, I use a slotted spoon to put the pickles into the jars. Then I bring the syrup back to a rolling boil before filling the jars. Get the bubbles out, and put the lids and rings on. Then turn upside down for 5 min. or so to heat those seals.

With the last quart and a half of cuke slices, I added a big heaping teaspoon of minced garlic to the syrup while they were cooking. All the onions were pretty much gone into the first 4 jars. I am thinking that garlic might taste good, too… We’ll see. I only got a jar and part of a jar. The partial jar will go in the fridge and tasted first.

Next up is dill pickles. But not today. Maybe over the weekend… I will probably do dill spears as I prefer my dill pickles that way. Widemouth quarts… I can do some looong pickles! (all the cukes I use are slicers, I prefer them to pickling cukes) Unfortunately I had to buy dill seed at the store… couldn’t find any dill seed heads at the big farmers market in town. Some day I will grow it and keep the caterpillars off of it and save it to make pickles with. Dills just look so much nicer with that sprig of seed head in there. Dill seed will work, and perhaps this winter I will prepare a spot for some dill, get the seeds in the ground early enough, not forget and mow it down… keep the bugs off… and then save it until cuke season arrives. That’s the problem, why it’s not at the farmers market. Dill has done it’s thing by the time anyone is getting cukes. And if you don’t cut those seed heads at the right time, all the seeds fall off.

Well, this was a nice long post. Just as rambling as usual for me, lol! I’ll take a photo of the jars of pickles perhaps tomorrow. Not to mention I want to pull out all my bags of berries to show how overloaded I am this year! Need better light for pictures, however.

Happily done with pickles for the night,
Vyx

I love Chicken Kiev, always have. When I was a kid, Mom would make it once in a while. I’ve even had it in a restaurant once or twice.

Well, I can’t be bothered with pounding the chicken out and rolling up a pat of butter and some parsley and then breading it and frying it. Every time I’ve tried it, all the butter just melted right out of the chicken into the oil and I didn’t get the flavor or that nice little gush of melted butter when I cut into it. So, what’s the point?

Well, I decided to go about it a different way. I took boneless skinless chicken breasts halves, cut them in half, and dipped them in egg and then seasoned bread crumbs. Seasoned with dried parsley, and a bunch of fresh ground pepper.

Then I cooked them in nothing but butter. Salted butter. Cooked them fairly hot on the first side, then lowered the heat and put a lid on for the second side. I’m always worried about undercooking chicken. Took the lid back off the last bit, to make sure the coating stayed crispy.

Well, it tasted JUST like Chicken Kiev to me. Without the little gush of butter I could never get. Just perfectly moist inside, with the wonderful taste of butter all over the outside.

1 pkg boneless skinless chicken breast halves, each piece cut in half again
1 egg
1 cup bread crumbs seasoned with
1 tsp black pepper and
2 tsp dried parsley
1/2 stick butter, maybe more

Wash chicken well, drain. Beat egg, and put chicken pieces in to coat well. Heat butter in skillet over medium low heat. Roll chicken in seasoned bread crumbs and place in pan, cooking slowly until brown on one side.

Carefully turn chicken over, turn heat to low, cover and cook for 3 min. Remove lid and continue to cook until nice and brown and fragrant. Check for doneness!

Butter fried crumbs, yum. :)

Yeah, yeah, not paper or fabric arts. But I do like to cook so today I’m posting a recipe. With winter-like weather back on us, I decided we needed soup for dinner. I especially like cream soups… like potato soup, or cauliflower soup.

What I did today was make potato cauliflower soup. Here are the ingredients and how I made it, you may want to adjust as this made a REALLY full pot of soup.

• 1 stick butter
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 ribs of celery, diced
• 1 onion chopped
• 1 heaping teaspoon minced garlic

Melt butter in dutch oven over low heat, add carrots. As the carrots start cooking, chop the celery, adding and mixing it up as you go. Do the same with the onion. When the onion is changing color, raise the heat a little and add the garlic. Continue to cook until you can see the garlic change color a bit. Or until you can smell it. Don’t let it brown.

Add in:

• 1 head cauliflower, diced
• 1 can of chicken or beef broth

You might also want to add a bit of water, I added about 1/2 a broth can full, just until all of the cauliflower is in contact with moisture. At this point I also added some dried parsley, fresh ground pepper, and a bay leaf. Cook this mixture, covered, oh, for 20 or 30 minutes, until the cauliflower is no longer crunchy. You can probably go longer, cauliflower doesn’t fall apart as much as you’d expect.

Next add:

• 1 lb potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
• 1 can chicken or beef broth

Mix everything up in the pot, and try to find the bay leaf you added earlier… it will be easier to find it about now. Probably better to find it before you add the potatoes, actually. Remove it, that 20 or 30 minutes should be enough bay leaf flavor for this soup.

Cook the soup just until the potatoes are done. After this point, unless you like mashed potato soup, try to stir gently. Pour in:

• 1 can evaporated milk

Now, to me this soup would be ready to finish, but since I have Ron to feed I added a package of diced ham. So, add in:

• 1 lb diced ham

(Then, if you are like me, suddenly remember that you bought mushrooms to go into the soup, but forgot to add them when you were sauteing everything in the butter. So go ahead and cook those in another pan if you are inclined. I have left them out of the recipe, as they didn’t add that much to the soup.)

Let that all come back up to a simmer while you are mixing in a shaker jar:

• 1/3 cup flour
• 2/3 cup milk

(add more milk or a bit of water if needed, I didn’t actually measure the thickener, just eyeballed it)

When the soup is back at a simmer or low boil, pour in the flour and milk mixture while stirring gently. If this is done right, the flour will actually absorb all that butter that has been floating on top all thru the cooking process. Cook, stirring as needed to keep from sticking, for at least another 2 minutes. You don’t want the taste of raw flour to ruin all your hard work!

I let this sit, after turning off the heat, for at least 30 min. before serving. Added more ground pepper, too. Never added any salt, as 2 cans of broth were plenty salty for me.

List of ingredients to follow, just because I know I can be confusing. :)

• 1 stick butter
• 4 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 ribs of celery, diced
• 1 onion chopped
• 1 heaping teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 head cauliflower, diced
• 2 cans of chicken or beef broth, I used one of each
• 1 teaspoon dried parsley
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1 lb potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
• 1 can evaporated milk
• 1 lb diced ham
• 1/3 cup flour
• 2/3 cup milk

This was a massive amount of soup. Very filling, and also very tasty. We’ll be eating it for days unless I freeze some of it.

Any questions, ask away… I’m not a cooking blog, so you don’t get photos. :)

hugs,
Vyx