Small Plates: A Dim Sum Approach to Blogging

I haven't done all that much cooking since I last posted, and much that I have done either didn't seem worth blogging about at all or I wasn't sure how to make a whole post about it. So, I'll give you a series of "small plates" (or "dim sum" if you prefer) to catch up a bit.

Making a Stand
After about two months after I decided to get one, I bought a KitchenAid stand mixer. This is actually fairly big news: I've never done a lot of baking, except for spates of making bread and cornbread a few years ago. So, I now find myself enrolled in Baking Kindergarten, taught by cookbooks, cooking shows, and my long-suffering friends. Baking is more technique-driven than the cooking I've done, and it's much less forgiving of my tendency to modify recipes as I go. Eventually I'll have enough understanding to modify recipes, but I'm not there yet.

The first thing I made was a loaf of whole-wheat bread - it was important to me that my mixer's 'maiden voyage' was for something healthy. It was pretty good - I didn't get all the rise I'd have wanted, but both flavor and texture were good.

The second project was peanut butter cookies, which were less successful. They were a little underdone, I think, but the biggest thing was that I used natural style peanut butter without thinking about the lower sugar content. Oh, well...

Last Monday before work I made a batch of muffins. The recipe was quite plain, like blueberry muffins without blueberries. They turned out well.

Yesterday, I made ginger snaps, following a recipe by Alton Brown. While making them, I discovered that even with a measured scoop I struggled to get uniformly sized cookies. Next time, I may try forming them into a log (as with icebox cookies) and cutting off slices. They are, by the way, delicious. I shared some with a friend and have some to go with lunches.

But it's my project today that I'm proud of. Roughly thirty years ago, I had dinner with some friend at the home of a friend of Lebanese ancestry. The dinner he made was amazing - I especially remember a soup that included short pieces of young zucchini stuffed with sausage. But what really blew me away was that he made pita bread - right there, as we watched, in his oven.  I found this amazing, and ever since I've wanted to try it.

Finally, today was the day. In reality, it couldn't have been simpler. I mixed the dough in my food processor, let it rise right there in the processor's bowl, formed them into balls, let them rise a bit more, then rolled them out and baked them on a griddle.  (I could have done it in the oven, but the griddle made more sense to me.)

 My pita is excellent! They're soft and subtly flavorful, and can even be made into pockets with a little bit of knife work. (I also looked at a recipe that called for an overnight rise in the refrigerator, and I wonder if the separation inside would be better with that method.)

Roast Chicken, and Mayo Clinic
One of the things on my culinary bucket list was to find a method for roast chicken that I wouldn't need to look up in a cookbook, and I think I can cross this off. The method I used is from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". Basically, you preheat a cast iron skillet in a 450 degree oven while drying off the bird and rubbing it with oil, salt, and pepper.  You put the chicken in the pan, breast side up, and roast until done.

Most of the chicken went for a chicken salad I improvised. I appear to be out of mayonnaise, however, so I decided to make some in my stand mixer. This stuff is not something to chat with your cardiologist about: while there are other ingredients, fundamentally I talked three egg yolks into playing host to two cups of oil. The flavor was good, but it's MUCH richer than store-bough mayo. Here's my lunch, composed of the chicken salad in a pita, some carrot sticks, and one of my ginger snaps:

 Get Me to a (Different) Greek
 Recently I saw a chef named Laura Calder make a Greek Salad on her Cooking Channel show "French Food at Home". (I categorically deny having a crush on Ms. Calder. Okay, maybe a little one.) I was intrigued by the recipe because she chopped most of the veggies into much smaller chunks than have been in the Greek Salads I've had, and it seemed worth trying. So I tried it, and the result was: meh. The salad seemed underflavored (though I may have made a mistake), but the biggest problem was that I sliced my onion in a mandolin without cutting it into wedges, and the circular pieces of onion made the salad annoying to eat.  I think I'll try a different recipe next time, though I did like the smaller cut on the veggies.

(By the way, the episode of "French Food at Home" was about picnic food. The host explained that while Greek Salad is obviously not French, she'd never been on a picnic in France that didn't include it. Go figure.)