Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook
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Home > 210
KitchenKatalog: Blog 210
Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 08:00 PM
Our original plan was to make fresh/spring rolls, but we spent much of the night packing and just didn't feel like dealing with the rolls. So we made this into a salad.
As you can see in the picture below, we made the salad out of:
For meat, we had two things:
Like I said, the plan was to roll it up but we decided to turn the sauce into dressing and make it a salad. Much easier and very good.
Meredith made the dressing inspired by The Food Network though we really only used that as inspiration so I am not copying it locally.
Meredith used the following to taste:
We also made a cucumber salad with this Will Cook For Friends recipe (local). Meredith has done this before and it was good so she did it again. The only real change was the use the vegetable peeler on the carrots instead of the spiralizer. Also, she went on the light side of the honey.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 12:00 AM
We made a meal heavily inspired by this Serious Eats Recipe (local), though we really didn't follow it at all except (sort-of) for the onions.
We used rotisserie chicken breast instead of cooking chicken. I just chopped it up into small pieces and then sautéed it a bit with some smoked paprika and garlic powder. Nothing special
Meredith made her regular Romesco Sauce1 except she made her life much easier and used canned roasted peppers. Honestly, when they are in the sauce, you can't tell a difference and these were so much less work!
And for the onions, we did them on a sauté pan and seared them since they didn't fit on the grill pan. Other than being a bit hard to chew, they were really good.
Note to self, I should make the romesco it's own recipe page ↩
Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 08:55 PM
We made our regular Lasagna Soup (which I finally made into its own recipe page). There wasn't much to it. We followed the general recipe. The only thing we did was to also throw in some tortellini Meredith had left over from when I was out of town.
It was great as usual. So easy and really good!
Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 12:00 AM
We made B acon, L ettuce, A vocado, and T omatoes (BLATs). There wasn't much to it. We used the rolls I talked about yesterday. This worked well since we had leftover bacon from the other day plus some in the freezer (and we're trying to use up what's in there). We did the bacon in the oven as usual.
Of course, while making it we had a problem: The bacon for the BLAT went SPLAT!
Oh well! That's why they may 5 second rules. And when you use that, it's why they may 30 seconds rules!
Anyway, there wasn't much more to it. They were good but kind of hard to eat since the rolls were pretty thick.
Monday, May 16, 2016, 09:31 PM
Meredith did most of the prep work on this so I may be missing some things, but we made grilled halloumi. We based the sauce and stuff on this The Kitchn recipe (local).
For the "Pesto", we used the recipe there at least as inspiration. Some of the changes we made were
It came out very lemony. As in too lemony. We read some things that said adding some baking soda would help temper that and sure enough, it did. Still lots of lemon flavor but it was less overpowering.
Rather than grill the eggplant, we seasoned the eggplant with salt and let it sit for a bit. After blotting it, we just roasted it.
I grilled the halloumi for about 2-3 minutes per side. We built the sandwiches open face. They were really good. The saltiness of the cheese was nicely accentuated with the eggplant and the bread. Any kind of grilled halloumi is a great spring-time meal.
The bread was sourdough rolls from Trader Joes. They say they are just 90 cal/roll but that seems too good to be true. It probably is given that it also says a serving is 1 roll at 49 grams but if you weigh them, they are 120-150 grams.
Grilling the cheese:
Grilled Eggplant Burgers with Halloumi Cheese (From The Kitchn)
Local Copy (U: guest, P: name of my dog, lower case)
Sunday, May 15, 2016, 08:32 PM
I have been continuing to have fun with the sous-vide cooker. It really just makes it so easy. Meredith made her cilantro dip. I took two pieces of chicken and scored it a bit with a knife and then put tons of the dip in the bag.
I followed the Serious Eats guide and did the chicken at 150°F for about 1.5 hours. True to what they said, it came out a lot like normal chicken texture but still really moist. Still, given the flexibility, Next time I think 145°F will be better (between this and Serious Eats' next temp range).
Flavor wise, this was ok. I really like the dip but the chicken could have been brined or something to get more flavor inside it. And/or, it may have been better with a longer (or any) marinate time. We were going to marinate it for a bit but based on the timing, we decided to just let it cook longer (the beauty of Sous Vide).
We also had Kohlrabi we needed to use up. I was going to stir fry it but Meredith wanted to do something different so she decided to Kohlrabi Gratin from this NYTimes recipe (local).
We did it the "gratin" style and halved it. Other changes/modifications were:
It was pretty good. It was very reminiscent of other greek pie dishes. That is probably from the feta and dill. We would make it again.
Greek-Style Kohlrabi Pie or Gratin With Dill and Feta (from NYTimes)
Local Copy (U: guest, P: name of my dog, lower case)
Saturday, May 14, 2016, 10:09 PM
While we've done sous vide before with my home-brew fridge controller but it was a pain in the ass and didn't work well. We recently bought a controller since it was on sale.
Anyway, we cooked two Delmonico cut steaks. We did it for about 1.5 hours at 136°F (easily exactly done with the controller). I then seared them on a super-hot pan.
They came out pretty good, but I was not really thinking it through when I bought the steaks. It was a really high-end cut but it was also very fatty. We spent most of the time eating it cutting away (or spitting out) fatty parts.
The sous vide process went well but the steak itself was just not for us. I am looking forward to doing more things with it (but leaner).
We also made calabacitas by just cooking some onions in butter, and then adding a chopped zucchini and two yellow squashes.
The only seasonings with used on both the steak and the calabacitas salt and pepper.
The sous vide set up. You can also see the fatty steak cuts.
Friday, May 13, 2016, 03:26 PM
Meredith did all of the work on this one. She used the normal Peanut Sesame Noodle recipe. She followed the recipe itself for the sauce (at least roughly) and used the rest for inspiration (pepper, etc). The noodles were from two zucchinis.
Then we added chopped rotisserie chicken.
Other than the chopping, this is a pretty easy and good meal. It is not exactly low in points but also isn't too high either (around 24 for the entire thing from the peanut butter).
We would consider it for lunches as long as it don't let it sit too long.