The Best of Senior Year

Cooking food at home is not meant to be difficult. With a limited supply of kitchenware at my hands – a few pots and pans, a blender, and some baking dishes, more or less – you quickly learn that the recipes you make have to be technically simple.

While I might not be able to cook sous vide or foray into molecular gastronomy until I’ve got a more complete kitchen (or at least a functioning stove top and oven), the most basic of kitchens can handle the food I make – pasta sauces and dishes, sautéing and pan-searing proteins, breakfast food¹, so on and so forth.

Not that you’d be able to tell by watching me cook – I manage to end up with about 16 different tasks I need to do within a five minute timeframe every time I cook. Let’s just say my timing when it comes to cooking is pretty terrible. That and I should probably prep my mise en place before I start, which I never do because that involves actual organization and forward thinking.

I like to think that my Mad Hatter approach makes me look like I’m cooking something with an Iron Chef level of difficulty, but sadly that is not true at all. You can tell because the issues I have involve finishing my pasta sauce one day and realizing the water hasn’t even started boiling yet for my pasta, and the next day having my pasta drained and ready to go only to realize everything else is still 20 minutes away from being done.

This might explain why some of my proudest kitchen accomplishments to date involve monitoring just a few things at a time – a pan, something in the oven, and not much more than that. Through the hubbub of it all, here are some of my favorites of the past year:

Best plate: Deconstructed BLT Caprese Sandwich

Kinda wish I'd wiped the crumbs off

This one involved almost no work whatsoever. I had to toast some sourdough squares with olive oil drizzled over it and then fry bacon. Then I tore some romaine leaves and bocconcini and plated it and called it a day.

Naturally, a dish that can be done in about five minutes is still the best-looking one I’ve ever made. The inspiration came from seeing caprese skewers on TasteSpotting and realizing that I didn’t have skewers. So instead I simply laid the dish out sans skewer. The caprese turned into a BLT caprese once I realized that I did not have basil – but like any good cook, I had plenty of bacon on hand.

Most gratifying: Thanksgiving dinner

Finished turkey!

I’m not sure why I thought having two people cook thanksgiving dinner would be a good idea. I’m also not sure why Ryan and I decided we’d cook enough to feed about 12 people. I’ve never had a home-cooked thanksgiving meal before, so in retrospect I think it felt like something that would really be in the holiday spirit. Plus everyone else had left Evanston², so I had a ton of free time.

The turkey was an absolute nightmare to deal with – the smallest one we could find was 12 lbs., which we bought on Wednesday at Dominick’s. I thought I was being way smart when I told Ryan we should just stick the turkey in the fridge to defrost so it would be ready to go the next day. 

If you have ever cooked a whole turkey or helped out with the family Thanksgiving dinner before, you might know that a 12-pound bird takes much, much longer than 18 hours to thaw. We had to thaw the bird in cold water for an additional three hours before we could even begin to prep the bird.

The next step was to remove the package of giblets. The directions on the packaging said to simply reach into the cavity and remove the bag of giblets. It did NOT mention that turkey novices like us wouldn’t even know where the cavity was, or be able to tell the head from the bottom, or possess any kind of basic common knowledge about prepping this colossal bird at all. It took a 45 minute game of giblet scavenger hunt and five calls to Ryan’s mom before we finally found the damn thing, after being 100% convinced that the giblets simply didn’t exist and that we’d grabbed a turkey with missing giblets.³

Thankfully the rest of the prep and cooking went much smoother after that. Five hours after we started cooking, at 10 pm, we had a beautiful roast turkey to go with some awesome mac n’ cheese⁴, sausage stuffing, green bean casserole, and creamed spinach. Sitting down and eating the food (as well as the leftovers with some friends the next day, and half my leftover turkey lunches for the coming week and a half) was a great closing to Thanksgiving since we’d put all that work into making the meal.

This meal serves two

Best dish: tie, Rib-eye Steak w/ Cauliflower Puree, Lamb Ragu w/ Mint

For entirely different reasons, these two are my favorites of the year. I love eating steak, and this was the first time I’d ever pan-seared steak – heated the skillet in the oven, a quick sear on each side of the rib-eye, and then back into the oven to finish it off. This method all but guarantees a juicy, medium rare steak. Add to that the cauliflower puree, which was creamy but not too heavy, and this had all the makings of a fantastic dish.

The lamb ragu was helped out by some unique flavors I don’t usually use in cooking – fresh mint, and red wine. Both contribute to the final flavor of the dish, with the mint giving the sauce a lighter note that contrasts the ricotta cheese and lamb which makes it a very hearty ragu. I think the balance is what made this so good – I made enough to bottle an entire jar of it, and polished off the jar in about a week afterwards.

⁵

I love the pink plate for this dish. I don’t put any thought into my food photography at all, but the close-up shot gave the macaroni a beautiful, vibrant look. Add the strips of bacon and the fresh ground pepper on top – and this is my favorite picture of the year.

So there you have it. It’s probably no surprise that bacon is prominently featured in three of the five award-winning⁶ dishes here. Bacon makes everything better. It takes no effort to make and the smell and taste that comes with it are absolutely addicting. Don’t be surprised if bacon continues to be a highlighted ingredient of my food in the next year!

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^{1. I make breakfast food all the time. However, I think the only time I’ve had breakfast at Northwestern in the last six months was on Dillo Day. My 11:30 wake-up call is way more precious than eating three balanced and healthy meals, that’s for sure.↩}

^{2. Except for the legions of Asians who, like me, don't go home for Thanksgiving break. Every year at Thanksgiving if you walk down Sheridan Rd. 95% of the people still on campus are Asian. I have no idea why Asians don't go home for Thanksgiving.">↩}

^{3. I am kind of intrigued to think about what would have happened if we had just roasted the entire turkey, giblets and all, and found the bag afterwards.↩}

^{4. The recipe called for an entire stick of butter for six servings. The fact of the matter is that good mac n’ cheese revolves around it being creamy, buttery, and full of cheesy goodness. Also the fat content of the dish obviously did not daunt us at all since we added bacon to the recipe.↩}

^{5. Different recipe from the Thanksgiving version. The Thanksgiving one was definitely better.↩}

^{6. Yes, I realize that I’m bestowing the award upon my own food. But it has a nice ring to it. Also now I can tell people I’ve made award-winning dishes. So what if the award is the “Om Nom Gastronomy Food Blog First Annual Best Dish Cooked By The Blogger Himself” award?↩}

Hell's Kitchen

I refer not to the reality TV cooking show on Fox starring the mercurial Gordon Ramsay¹, but rather to the kitchen situated on the first floor of 2034 Maple Ave., Evanston, Illinois.

In the rare months of summer, when the snow finally disappears from Chicago and the Lake Michigan beaches give you more suntan than frostbite, my kitchen turns into a sauna. Actually, the entire first floor clocks in at a nice balmy 140 degrees – at least, that’s what it feels like to me. I’m relatively certain that if I left a pan of pork shoulder out in the kitchen for a few hours, I’d end up with slow-cooked pork. I can’t imagine Hell being much hotter than this.

Cooking in the summer is unbearable – it’s bad enough that the entirety of the first floor feels like Heinola, Finland², but to be standing next to an open flame on the stove while the oven preheats at 400 degrees and the microwave hacks and wheezes its way into defrosting a brick of frozen chicken breasts makes it even worse. It’s a miracle my non-stick pans haven’t melted while cooking. If Jeff from Food Network Star were to cook in my kitchen, he would have generated enough sweat to dissolve his spring rolls into soup.

My complaints about the kitchen hardly stop there – our microwave is on the verge of self-destruction, our oven cooks at the preset temperature plus or minus about 150 degrees, we never have enough pots or pans, the stove creaks when it turns on and always bursts into flames, except for when there is no flame and you can smell the gas coming from the stove^{3. Yet despite all that, I’ve endured a whole year’s worth of cooking in that little bandbox of a kitchen. The bottom line is that it will always be the kitchen where I first started to really cook.}

With that said, I’ll spend the next couple posts recapping my last year of cooking and eating, as I’m home in Taipei now and won’t be trotting out any new dishes anytime soon. We’ll start with some of this year’s lowlights, for the sake of comedic relief.

Stupidest kitchen moment: Definitely the one time I put a metal fork in the microwave. I figured out something was wrong once the fork started sparking and the kitchen smelled like burnt metal. By the time I removed the plate and fork, there was a burnt hole in the fork handle and sprinklings of metal debris all over my plate of leftovers. Yum!

Worst dish: Pork Belly Confit

The dish is supposed to look like this:

Delicious, succulent, fatty pieces of pork

Instead, it looked like this:

Lumps of shit

This undertaking was a nightmare from the start – completely lacking any sort of a butcher knife (the house did, however, have many blunt knives that had been butchered through repeated mistreatment), I had to attempt to remove the skin of the pork belly, a Herculean endeavor that took almost an hour and ended with me snapping the blade of a knife clean from the hilt.

When it was all said and done, the pieces of pork looked like they had been coated in Vaseline and then left to crust into rock hard lumps. I put in about twice as much cloves as the recipe called for, and the result was it felt like biting into a brick that someone had sprinkled some Splenda on. All the makings of a gourmet meal!

Biggest kitchen debacle: Curried Cauliflower Soup

Flood catalyst

The debacle wasn’t in the making of the soup – it tasted pretty good. However, after boiling down the cauliflower and milk, the soup needed to be pureed smooth. Unable to find a ladle, I decided a solo cup would make a worthy substitute in transferring the soup from the stovetop to the blender. It was not. The cup began to warp and melt instantaneously the second the piping hot soup mixture was in there. Oops.

After finally transferring the soup into the blender and getting the right texture to it, I had to detach the blender from the base. However, the weight of the blender made it hard to turn and detach with all the soup in it. What I thought was jiggling the blender around to loosen and detach it actually served to unscrew the blender bottom from the rest of the blender. The result was after a couple of good hard twists the soup burst through the bottom of my blender and drowned the poor kitchen tiles in a sea of yellow soup. I ended up with about three bowls of soup from a recipe that supposedly made 6-8 servings.

Thankfully, no photographic evidence exists of my kitchen follies. But I might start documenting these in the coming year in hopes of putting together a second volume of my failures in the kitchen, of which there are plenty. That’s the great part about only presenting your finished, successful dishes on Facebook – no one knows about all the shit you have to go through in between to get there. Except my poor roommates, that is. Luckily, these disasters have come hand-in-hand with some dishes that have turned out quite well for me – a topic I’ll tackle in my next post.

Photo credits:


Pork belly confit
Charcoal⁴

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^{1. This can also be read as, “Gordon Ramsay, the batshit insane celebrity chef whose reality TV shows are as much about him screaming at the contestants as they are about cooking.”↩}

^{2. The site of the World Sauna Championships, which were discontinued in 2010 after a finalist died trying to endure the heat of the sauna.↩}

<sup>3. Also, within four days of moving in, the smoke detector in the kitchen had been dismantled because it beeped every time someone used the stove. It’s a minor miracle that the house didn’t burn down within the first month of us living there.↩

4. In conjunction with Rule 34, when I Google Image searched "Charcoal", there was a prominently featured charcoal drawing of boobs on the first page.↩</sup>

Welcome!

Inspired by my cooking travails from my senior year at Northwestern, I've decided to move to something more long-form than a Facebook photo album to document my kitchen journey. If you've enjoyed looking at photos of food I've cooked, I'm hoping you'll appreciate me serving you a side dish of inane rambling and general bullshit to go along with the food I'll be cooking, eating, and blogging about in the months to come.

(Months! Talk about a lofty goal. In all likelihood, six people will read each of my first three blog posts, whereupon I'll get really lazy and decide that blogging hasn't gotten any better since my use of Xanga led to me being suspended from 9th grade for two days. I'll then proceed to never post here again and we'll all agree to forget this blog ever existed. The entire process will probably take about two weeks or so).

To all of you who have dined, cooked, or talked food with me, here's a thank you for cultivating my love for food and cooking. And if I've drunkenly promised you a future cooking date and failed to deliver so far, here's to hoping I'll come through and cook you something edible in the near future. 

Thanks for reading, and look forward to my first real entry about food soon!

(This absolutely means that I'll forget to write something for the next six months).