How to make tonight’s dinner:
- Previous evening, make a pea soup based on chicken stock with roasted chicken bones. You must roast the bones. This is Key.
- Take the chicken meat you just tore off the bones and chill it overnight.
- Overnight, get up at 3 a.m., feel nauseated, go to bathroom, think “pork jowl!” and puke up Pea Soup with Pork Jowl and Without Amaranth. Put the rest of the Pea Soup down the garbage disposer.
- In the early evening, season your cast iron skillet by searing some steaks. Delmonico steaks. (As an aside, top off those steaks with a delightful sauce of mirin, ginger, garlic, butter and shiitake mushrooms. Your husband will complain it is too rich.)
- Take the iron skillet, wipe it out with a paper towel and set it aside.
- Take two pounds new potatoes so you can make the german potato salad with proscuitto ham.
- Boil the potatoes and while they cool prepare the sauce with the garlic and two types of oil. Feel proud you already had the sesame oil.
- Peel by hand each blessed tiny little hot red potato.
- Toss the potatoes and garlic oil and vinegar dressing with toasted cashews and ham and leftover chicken. (Thats where the reserved chicken comes in.)
- Feed some to husband, who complains it is too oily. Try some yourself and realize the recipe is seriously wrong. It is too oily! Retire to your room in high dudgeon.
- Watch the Daily Show.
- Return to the kitchen reinspired.
- Take half the oily potatoes and push them down the garbage disposer. Take the remaining potatoes and put them in the recently oiled and Delmonico-steak-seasoned cast iron skillet.
- Take your pastry blender and use it to mash up the potatoes because you can’t find your potato masher. (This is also key.)
- Turn on the heat and let the mashed potato / proscuitto / garlic / chicken / cashew / vinegar / oil mixture simmer for half an hour. Turn it every half an hour after that until you have been cooking this damn thing for seven hours.
Then, you will have this:
Which, I would like to say, are finely nuanced tasty hash browns with cashews, chicken, and proscuitto. I would like to say that but I can’t. It’s really awful. It’s oil suspended in a potato emulsification.
So, three dishes. Pea Soup: one chuck up. Steak with Sake and Shiitake: great, seriously great but yes, fatty. Potato Salad (“A Great Light Dish for a Summer Evening,” ha) unspeakably bad.
12 responses to “Food Blog, You Say?”
And this is why I don’t cook! I am vindicated. Salad and cut-up fruit, and a roasted chicken from the corner deli. Anything else is frustration incarnate.
Hopefully tomorrow night you are making reservations for dinner.
Potatoes, proscuitto, cashews, and chicken have to combine in some good way. How willing are you to discover it?
Why did you toss half the potatoes? I would have added more potatoes to soak up the oil.
Or maybe rinse the potato mixture in hot water, then saute dry.
Yes, I too am intrigued by the Toss Half approach. If it’s gross enough to toss, toss it all. If it can be rescued, rescue it all. It’s an odd situation to cover your bets in.And such a waste of time and ingredients! Grieving.
Note to food bloggers: it is more appetizing if you leave out how you puked up what you made in the previous entry. Just sayin’.
~Silk – All hobbies are frustration.Candy – Nope, I took a frozen “Steamer” bag of brown rice out of the freezer, nuked it, and added butter. Simple!Caroline – I thought it would, but potatoes and cashews do not “match” as they say on Iron Chef.Tami – Since I wanted to make hash browns, I had to load up only the bottom of the skillet. ~~Silk – Oh … ugh. No. The oil was saturating the potatoes anyway.Big Dot – Well, I confess I did consider the cost, and it was mainly potatoes, and they were cheap. I think they were, anyway. And the time was not really wasted, since a) it was spent in the vicinity of Gary and b) I learned something. gaoo – This is Not a Happy Food Blog. This is the darker more sarcastic food blog. Actually, it isnt a food blog, I just have a bored tongue.
Ellen, that looks like puke minus pea soup. You ate that?
Hot Mom – only a bite or two to convince meyself it was no better than before.
Yeah, okay. Call for take out pizza.
Magpie – yeah, especially since tonight’s scallops and sea bass. Not good.