Cooking with (and without) Joy - Update #6

It's been a few weeks since my last post and it all started, or rather stopped, with SFIT. As I had guessed, I was beat that Sunday. Even though I did cook a meal, I most definitely did not do it with joy. My lack of joy, and sleep, had me go to bed early and not write my usual article. We find ourselves Almost a month and several meals later. While I will mention the meals from the past, I'll probably rush past them because my memory is a bit fuzzy. Along with weeks off, I also (mostly) finished the first section of the book labeled the domestic. Rather than move onto the wild, I moved out of The 4-Hour Chef and moved into cooking from a different cookbook this weekend. Time to see if I learned anything useful in the weeks before. However, before we talk about that let's discuss the last 3 recipes I made in the book.

Sous-Vide Chicken Breast

This was made the Sunday after my long day at SFIT and I was beat. I was in a miserable mood and while I was cooking I was cursing under my breath constantly. Despite this bad attitude the meal turned out great. The two skills I was suppose to learn from this lesson were sous-vide and multi-tasking. If you have been following my cooking with joy updates thus far you'll realize I've already done quite a bit of multitasking. However, I've never cooked sous-vide style before. I probably won't do it much but I wouldn't be afraid to do it in the future if I felt there was a good reason.

Seared Scallops

This was a crazy meal to try with the kids. Not because of the scallops wrapped in prosciutto, because that was quite delicious. Right up there with the eel I made before. No, the reason this was crazy to try with the kids was that one of the skills was loving bitterness. Let's just say none of us fell for bitterness in this meal. I will say I enjoyed learning about the bitter taste a little though. i might even be able to get used to it if I ate bitter foods more often.

MLBJ - The ML stands for Meatloaf

Let's start of with the name of this silly recipe - MLBJ. Tim Ferriss writes this book a bit like an annoying frat boy and while the ML stands for meat loaf the BJ stands for blow job due to some anecdote he wanted to tell in the intro to this recipe. Anyway, just had to get that out of my head because it has annoyed me since I read the anecdote way back in November. All bad opinions about writing style aside, this is a good recipe for meatloaf. It came out well and I will probably make this or something similar in the future. This meatloaf did not come across as the usual gut busting hung o' ground beef that meat loaves can some times be. Thanks to the many mix ins and the center of goat cheese and spinach we had some wonderful flavor. With this, and many other meals over the weeks, I've been making the arugula, avocaado and roma tomato salad I made many weeks back. Its a good salad and I'm getting pretty quick at throwing it together.

Leaving the guidebook - Old recipes made new

There are a couple reasons I decided not to keep pushing my way through the recipes in the book. The first reason is, it felt like I was pushing my way through the book and my resolution is cooking with joy. Another reason is that the recipes keep teaching new things and I wanted to see if I was actually learning anything by trying other recipes. Finally, I want to start making meals and the book doesn't do a great job of pairing the foods up together by themselves. This lead me to my choice in a cookbook called Vegan Express which has pairings with each of the recipes inside of it. You may have noticed from the fact that I have made meat loaf, scallops, and chicken that I am not a vegan. It's okay! Non-vegans can eat vegan/vegetarian food and enjoy it. In fact I love the chain restaurant Veggie Delight. Anyhow, I made Golden Tofu in a peanut sauce along with an accompanying salad recommended in the book. I've made this recipe before so I knew I would enjoy it. However it was a good test to see if I could use any lessons learned.

Notes

• Wash the dishes beforehand, especially if you've got a small kitchen. I've been meaning to say this in almost all my updates. For the most enjoyment in preparing your food have a clean work space. I didn't do this tonight and I was kicking myself. Also, if you have a small kitchen you may want to wash dishes as you go.
• Don't be a stirrer. He talks about this in the book, don't stir or shake unless it is actually necessary. I got a better golden result on my tofu this way than in the past.
• Tool selection: Peltex is good for turning over soft foods like tofu. In the past I've had trouble making this recipe (which probably stemmed from stirring/shaking that had me end up with less triangle shapes and a bit more tofu crumble. The Peltex spatula did well in this roll.
• I should have made the salad the same way I make the arugula, avocado, roma tomato salad. When you toss a salad with all the parts together, the non lettuce ends up on the bottom. Better to toss each of the ingredients in the salad separately and put together a better presentation in each persons' salad bowl.
• Be prepared and split up your meal. I got a little overwhelmed multi-tasking in this meal. In the 4-Hour Chef he splits it up into prep and cooking. In no other cookbook I own does this split exist. There is definitely some work I could have done ahead of time to make my space less cramped and my cooking more relaxing. Gotta be relaxed to cook with joy.

Conclusion

I needs must remember to keep cooking with joy. This will keep me cooking and this will keep me writing about it. Hopefully, inspiring others. If you would like any more details on any of the recipes above please leave comments. I will do my best to get back to them. I still am enjoying cooking, even if my kids aren't enjoying eating my little experiments. Until next time, take care.

Cooking With Joy: Update #4

For my fourth update in the adventures of my 2013 resolution, I made 2 new recipes from The 4-Hour Chef and would like to revisit a couple things from the past. The two recipes I did from the book were Sexy-Time Steak and Gazpacho. They are split up in the book by a dinner party, but since I have already done that (and successfully I might add) I skipped it here. I did however use a note from the section on throwing a dinner party to help with preparing the steak for my whole family. Before we get to the main recipes I'd like to talk about my scrambled eggs experiments and revisit last week's Bittman Chinese Chicken with Bok Choy.

Scramble Eggs and Flavor Combinations

At this point I've pretty much come to the end of the flavor combinations that I'm going to try at the moment. I haven't tried all of them, but the ones in bold are all taken care of. I just thought I would share some of my favorites that I have already come back to often.

France, Italy, Greece flavorings - These olive oil based flavorings are all very similar and very light flavorings compared to some of the others. As I said in last week's post, this helped me get past boring pasta noodles with the kids.

Vietnam flavoring was a surprise win for me. A simple mix of fish sauce (which I had never used before) and lemon. Not only does this make the eggs I've been experimenting taste good, but they make the color of the eggs, if you make them as recommended in this book, an amazing yellow that just makes you want to eat them.

Some other win flavorings that I'm a fan of are, in no particular order; Chinese, Nepal and Mexican. Let me know if you'd like the very simple combinations to make these flavorings. I'd be happy to share.

Leftovers and Bittman Chinese Chicken

I still had some leftover fake confit sauce from last week and I had to cook dinner for just me and my son who loved the chicken dinner we had then. That was an easy enough dinner to do so I did it again and this time used regular bok choy instead of baby bok choy. First off, not having to make the sauce again made this dinner extremely simple. My recommendation for anyone else following in my footsteps, make too much fake confit so that you have to make it again soon. The chicken was just as good as I remembered. The regular bok choy did make a difference though. It was still a decent looking garnish to make the dish look good but it wasn't something I found very edible. The baby bok choy was.

On a side note with more info to come later, I a little more chicken than I needed for just the two of us. I also, still had a little extra fake confit sauce left over. I just put the chicken and the sauce together in a Lock & Lock container with plan to have that for myself. I'll let you know how that turns out in a future post. If you'd like to find out sooner, watch my twitter feed.

The new meals

Before I get to notes on the new meals a couple important notes. I knew the steak would be a major undertaking as there were many importantly timed steps. The only reason I decided to go with 2 recipes is because gazpacho is served cold and could easily be made the night before. With this I got to do the early prep for the steak at the same time as all the work for the gazpacho.

Gazpacho

In The 4-Hour Chef this is paired with roasted garlic, which I didn't do. Because of this, I only got to do one of the 2 skills in this section. It was a good skill though, immersion blender. My newest kitchen toy needed to be put to use and that was probably the bigger push for me to do this recipe this week. Though the immersion blender is the biggest part of this recipe there is more than that which I got out of it.

First of all, my knife speed and accuracy is improving. For this recipe I had to cut up the cucumber and bell pepper. I was pleasantly surprised at my ability at both. I have been focusing a lot on proper technique when I've been cutting things with a knife all week. I also got a chance to teach my six year old about what a garlic press is for. It was interesting to him, but he didn't want to taste the garlic by itself.

Before I start with the immersion blender bit I'm going to write something up front that I wish was written up front in the book. Do this in batches, don't make the whole recipe at once. Make half the recipe at a time. I made the recipe as written and my chopper attachment was just a bit too small, even with my ultra precise measuring, and I made a mess. This led to the following twitter post and a response by the twitter account of an immersion hand blender.

First time using my immersion blender. Attempting to make gazpacho soup. Made a mess. Must be the @reddwarfhq fan in me. #gazpachoSoup

— Daryl Ducharme (@diacre) February 3, 2013

It gets better! MT @diacre First time using my immersion blender. Attempting to make gazpacho soup. Made a mess. #gazpachoSoup

— CSB-76SmartStick (@CSB76SmartStick) February 3, 2013

Okay, so making a mistake is a great way to learn. So achievement unlocked in that area. The immersion blender worked like a charm and had no problem blending the diced tomatoes, sliced cucumber and chopped bell pepper. I've got a good idea on how far to fill the chopper attachment for future soups and sauces. Fun note about this recipe, it calls for the use of the kitchen scale to get about half the weight of tomatoes for your bell pepper and cucumber. I was very proud of myself for getting exactly half of both ingredients. All that pride went away with the leaking all over the counter that I had to clean, and clean, then clean some more because of the oil in the recipe.

Not surprisingly, gazpacho didn't play wonderfully with the family. Both kids tried it and stopped eating it after that. The flavor was strong so I can't completely fault them on that. My wife did find it interesting and ate quite a bit more than I expected. She abhors bell peppers so I didn't let her know the ingredients right away. Not a big deal, its a back pocket recipe that doesn't take much to put together. I could make it in a pinch for something different.

Sexy-Time Steak

This recipe was there to teach the skills of dry brining and using the probe thermometer. Dry brining is nice for 2 reasons. The first, it allows you to brine your meat without the chance of it getting water logged. Second, I was able to do this step without even touching the meat by using the 3 fingered pinch of salt method to put salt on the meat. I still washed my hands though because I did touch the steak wrapping.

Dry brining is pretty cool, however this might have led to me nicknaming this salty-time steak instead of sexy-time steak. Probably not the brining steps fault, but there is a pickup step where you rub the steak with half a garlic clove then put some pepper and salt on the steak. In the part about putting salt and pepper on the steak he writes, "If you want to get all sciency, use 0.5%...Personally, I just coat the sucker. It's hard to overdo it." He's wrong. It is easy to overdo the salt. Next time I make this recipe I'll leave out the salt on this step and see if that solves my problem.

The next part of this steak recipe has you elevating the steak on plates. He recommends using a cake rack(which you might have from a previous recipe) or pencils. I had one cake rack and I wasn't going to use pencils under raw meat (I like pencils, they are useful) so I looked around and came up with a good idea if you've ever been to an Chinese or fast food restaurant. Chopsticks and strong, thick straws work just as well as pencils for this step. If you've been collecting them when you've gone out, now is the time to use them.

The recipe in the book really talks about making just one steak. Probably to be split between you and your date from the way the chapter is written. However, I have a wife and 2 kids so I had to be creative and cook 4 steaks. For the kids I got thin sliced steaks. I probably could have just done 3 and and cut the one for them in half and timing the meat would have been easier. I used a throwaway sentence from the section on throwing the dinner party to help manage it all though. I ended up using the two parts of my dutch oven for double the surface area to make the extra steaks all at the same time.

Final note on the recipe related to the skill of probe thermometer. For my experience, the temp he says to cook it at has the meat extremely rare. Probably too rare. He does write that it is best to plan on under cooking the meat as you can always cook it longer. That's what I ended up doing so that mindset worked well. Overcooked steak is very unsatisfying.

Conclusions

Despite the length of my writing and the amount of time it takes to dry brine the meat, this steak technique is still fairly simple. I was easily able to adapt it to feed more than 1 or 2 people. I wouldn't do much more though. I will definitely be making steak again in the future. Hopefully reducing the amount of salt used in the brining and freezer drying steps will help the saltiness factor. Gazpacho is a strongly flavored dish that I probably won't make too often. However, I did learn a valuable lesson about using my immersion blender and that's what I was supposed to learn in that section.

I missed a couple things I wanted to make this week: Roasted garlic and The Eggocado. I hope to make these during the week and will write about them in my next update. If you can't wait, follow me on twitter as I'll probably say something about it between now and then.

Cooking With Joy: Update #3

For this, my 3rd update on my 2013 resolution I've title Cooking With Joy, I continue working through The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss. For this update I will discuss one of the catalysts for my resolution was affected this week by earlier scrambled egg flavor experiments. After that I will get to my Sunday dinner meal which consisted of two different recipes from the book. Once again there was a consequence to doing 2 different recipes in one meal and I'll discuss that in my notes on the meal overall. The overall meal notes will also discuss main catalyst for my resolution and how it has been affected with all the meals I have done so far.

Flavor Experiments tried elsewhere

The second recipe of The 4-Hour Chef is scrambled eggs. It is shown to practice different flavor combinations. The point is not to learn lots of flavor combinations for eggs but to learn the different flavor combinations you might want to try in other dishes. There was something I wanted to try new flavor on all right...noodles! My kids have the same thing for lunch almost every day they are at home. Noodles, hot dogs (no nitrates or nitrites) and baby carrots. Making this for them on the weekends and eating with them has driven me to try to find a sauce to put on the noodles (other than spaghetti sauce, as we might be having that for dinner) that the kids will eat and makes the noodles interesting. This quest was one of the big factors in me taking on the resolution of Cooking With Joy. In fact it was probably the main reason. I wanted to learn how to make food I would enjoy again while at the same time have the kids expand their palettes.

Last week I had a spicy(ish) mexican inspired flavor combination I tried on the noodles. Not really a sauce but I had to see how it would work out. I learned a few things from this.

1. I don't have to make a sauce to put on the noodles, I can just add flavors.
2. My pasta eating child, who will eat 3 plates of pasta, can be made to not want pasta if it is spicy.
3. My finicky child, who finds ways not to eat his food, likes spicy food.

This made the experiment a 2/3rds win in my book and gave me the idea to move forward. This week I stayed away from spicy food and kept it simpler while still adding flavor. It seemed that I eyeballed all the ingredients (there were 3) in perfect amounts because both kids enjoyed the flavor combination this week and the noodles actually tasted like something to me. No Velveeta cheese sauce in sight (which I had done but was never entirely satisfied with). Instead I just added extra virgin olive oil, garlic powder , and basil - basic Italian flavoring. There it was, a nice easy way to make noodles good without a lot of extra work. Lunch was now tasty again. On to dinner.

A two plate dinner

The dinner I made consisted of the next 2 recipes in The 4-Hour Chef. The main dish I cooked was titled "Bittman Chinese Chicken with Bok Choy." The side dish I made was an arugula, avocado, and roma tomato salad. Both went over well enough to do again. Both also taught me lessons on what I would do different next time.

Bittman Chinese Checken with Bok Choy

The chicken part of this was a hit. My wife specifically commented that I should make it again. The bok choy was good too but not great for kids. The cool thing about the baby bok choy is it could act as a visual garnish to the dish so if no one eats it no big deal. For that dinner party, a good looking dish makes you look like a pro. This dish was dead simple as well. It taught the two skills it was supposed to and made me feel quite good about using these in the future.

The two skills it was labeled with were steaming and fake confit. These two together are what made this dish so simple. First there was steaming. The chicken breasts and the baby bok choy were steamed together (though they could have been steamed separately). Chicken breasts are usually quite dry when you cook them and this method kept them nice and moist. Chicken breasts are also pretty tasteless (which is why so many people like dark meat) and that's where the fake confit came it. Honestly, I have no sense of what real confit is or tastes like. The sauce I made and put on this chicken, however, made the chicken taste like it had been marinating in goodness overnight. 'Twas good and I have leftover sauce (because once again I overestimated) so I'm guessing we'll be having this again soon. Even if I didn't have sauce though, it was simple to make the night before (or in this case the morning before) so can do it again. One added note, the sauce needed green onions so I had to practice my cutting skills and I am getting much quicker.

Arugula, Avocado, and Roma Salad

I may have mentioned that one of my sons (surprisingly the food finicky one) has taken to salads lately - or more to the point salad dressing. He's been taking lettuce and dipping it in different dressings and had yet to find one he didn't like so I thought this would be a fairly safe test with the kids. Well, safe for one of them anyway. The recipe recommended baby arugula (or Rocket in the land of Posh Spice) but we could find any at our two grocery stores so we used regular arugula. This worked but next time I'll put in a bit more prep and trim many of the stems. If you are making this for the first time and can only find arugula, I recommend removing most of the stems. My salad eater liked the arugula lettuce and even though the salad was tossed with the dressing I gave him a side dish of the dressing so he could enjoy dipping it. My other son ate the avocado. I finished the remainders of both their salads. From an adult perspective, the salad was good and the dressing was perfect for the strong flavor of the arugula. I'll likely try this recipe again for other adults. Now that I've read the notes on how to properly toss the salad with the dressing I hope I'll get that better next time as well.

The skill this recipe was supposed to teach was semi-composed salads. I'm not entirely sure that is a skill per se but I did make a decent salad. Achievement unlocked?

Notes on the meal

On the whole this was a good meal that I've already mentioned I'll do again. Unlike last week's multi-recipe experiment, these dishes could work together in a meal. The salad could go with any of the main dishes I made so far though so that's not a surprise. Doing 2 new dishes in one meal though wasn't a great idea. If I were truly learning how to cook by this process I would have gotten more overwhelmed trying to do them both at the same time. Now that I have a better sense of what both dishes are, I could prepare better before hand and have less work to do at the same time. This is especially true with the salad which was not well laid out with this in mind. The tomatoes and avocados could have been more prepared before I started making the salad and in the future I will set up my "meez" properly.

Other than the food itself I was happy with a few aspects of making the meal. Steaming the chicken and bok choy, in the method described was super simple and I love that. I've tried boiling chicken in the past with mixed results and this (not boiling) just worked. The salad taught me some cool techniques for working with an avocado. Avocados are great but have always been a mess when I've used them before. The skills I learned here reduced the mess greatly and feel a bit like cool party tricks. Okay, probably just good pieces of small talk to pass along to others asking about my salad.

Cooking with Joy so far

Almost a month into the year and more than a month since I decided to go down this path, it's a good time to check in and see how things are going. I was truly skeptical in the beginning, My first update even had a tinge of that skepticism in a sentence about the price of the book. The book is worth $10 if you want to pick up some quality cooking skills. I thought I'd only be learning some recipes and not be able to apply the lessons elsewhere. I already have applied the lessons though, especially with the flavor combinations but other skills are being used as well. The first recipes in this book are difficult to mess up and yet are recipes most people don't make. Look good making good food for your friends, or at the very least eat good meals by yourself. This is just the first (well technically second) part of this book - and I'm only about half way through that. While you're at it, you could also be learning about how to break down other things you want to learn in life, for instance playing the guitar is goal you might want to get good at after you master this cooking thing.

The other thing I like about this year's resolution is that it has me writing. Not only am I writing, but I'm feeling good about my writing. I like the voice I'm writing in and the direction it is going in. I'm a developer, and I love doing that, but I haven't written many articles on that which I've been as happy with. Even the ones I put together into an e-book a long while back. Also, I like to think I'm making a difference in the sales of The 4-Hour Chef. It's nice to fantasize that there are invisible readers of my blog who then go out and buy a book I had nothing to do with.

It's easy to do when you see a tweet like this after you've written about a book a couple of times.

The 4-Hour Chef is back to #1 on Amazon, 2 months after pub date. Thank you, all! amzn.to/LQjLlm

— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) January 24, 2013

I jest. I know that I'm having minuscule, if any, effect on the book sales. In fact, I don't care that much at all. I just hope that I can help to inspire someone else or, at the very least, help someone who is making their way through this book as well. I'd love to hear from you if you are inspired or helped by any of my posts.