Remember when I used to cook, remember when I used to be all hyped up about my cast iron skillet…
Well today I made use of both (the skillet and the cook) and made this.
It was pretty good. I forgot to add lemon juice to my portion…to be fair I was pretty hungry (haven’t eaten today) so I kinda dove in.
Should have heeded the comments and pan fried the halloumi ahead of time. Broiler didn’t get it there.
with the lemon juice to finish up with at the end
Continuing my “lemme find some easy recipes and try to make 'em” stint, I made this tonight.
The chicken made a mess…I should have used the lid, or found my little mesh thing that goes over the pan to catch the popping grease. I wasn’t sure about the “stir some sour cream into the spinach and shallots to make a sauce” but it worked!
Pretty good meal, pretty happy with it.
This sounds yummy. From the experience of my own cooking journey I highly recommend finding simple recipes like this and just doing them, same as you did. Rather than excruciating over minutia, just keep doing new stuff and you’ll learn lessons via experience.
BUT. If you want a couple tips…
At medium heat fats should not be popping off much, that’s more of a medium-high thing. This is a pretty good guide:
I wouldn’t expect much mess from this recipe. “Medium” on my biggest stove burners I use most often is like around 4, not 5-6 like the 1-10 dial would suggest.
One of the tells here is that the recipe recommends a nonstick pan - the heat at which oil gets active is the same heat where Teflon starts to smoke and you’d want to be using steel instead.
That said there are times when you will expect splatter, like if you’re pan frying at higher heats with more oil. In those cases you just commit yourself to cleaning up afterwards. You wouldn’t want to cover with the lid - that’s a technique that traps moisture and produces a certain result that’s often undesirable when cooking meat, it’s not just a neutral way to keep stuff from popping out.
Sorry if I’m yammering, mostly I’m just organizing my own thoughts in my head from learning this stuff over the past 2 years.
got a little coozy for my cast iron skillet that fucking RULES
god that skillet FUCKING RULES I’M TELLING YOU
MY MEATS
MY SEARS
THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL
sour cream / cream cheese / dijon are three little guys who I haven’t been paying enough attention to in my sauces. I know that mike guy said there’s a way to not taste dijon by not using it at all but USING IT AS AN EMULSIFIER IS THE SHIT DO NOT LISTEN TO MIKE THE FUNNY TWEET MAN. my sauces are so smooooth
Flippin’ this around a bit for “food I’ll cook in the future, maybe” but - my aunt gave me a gift card to Best Buy, which I appreciated but also I just don’t buy anything from there anymore. After digging through their mess of a website (seriously, go to it and try searching for stuff - you can hear the death rattle as it fails to load pages) I settled on getting an immersion blender, since I kinda wish I had one for when I was making black bean soup.
But! Now I gotta figure out what to make with an immersion blender…soups, sure. Sauces I guess. I saw someone say you can kinda toast some jalapenos over an open stove flame and throw it in the mixing cup with garlic and lime juice and cilantro and oil and make that kinda thick green sauce that’s real good on steak fajitas.
I’m kinda at a loss but I’m sure y’all have ideas!
hummus is the go-to. I make a lot of vegan pâté, which is blended walnuts and green lentils (mostly)
Decided to put that immersion blender to use today. Made some hummus today (not as smooth as I would have liked, maybe needed a little more oil, but it’s fine - if you like a lot of garlic, anyway…) and potato soup. I followed a recipe from some BBQ spice seller on Rednote, but didn’t buy the spice, so I winged it and added thyme and a lot of rosemary from the yard. Came out really well!
did you hull the chickpeas?
As best I could! I think I probably really needed to give it a few more minutes of blending.
Anzac biscuits. my wife used an English cooking book with a recipe for oat cookies that’s called Anzac biscuits and I griped so much I had to make something more authentic
right to left: first batch, adjusting for too much coconut by adding more butter, adjusting for too chewy from the butter by a few more minutes in the oven. the spreading is accidental but very traditional, but the first batch was great. will try to get it right again
Oat cookies of any variety are pretty much my favorite, so I’ll have to try one day.
No pictures yet but yesterday I started making some kkakdugi and I’m so excited about it.
I’ve been making a lot of banana bread lately and this is significant because I generally don’t bake very often, or like, at all. Mostly because I hate measuring ingredients
I browned some cabbage in a pot with some chicken fat off the top of some stock I had made and then deglazed it with sherry. I added some of the stock and cream and mustard and garlic powder and a little harissa and let it braise on low with the lid cracked while I fed the cats and wowow it was good
Made some of the for white folk style cashew chicken and i had to resist the urge to make the flavors bigger but this was pretty dang tasty, though it could have used more veggies
