Bourbon Chicken my way

Fun fact:  Bourbon Chicken is named for Bourbon Street.  I found out when The Girl asked me to find a way to use up the bottle of bourbon we had before the last time we moved.  I also found out that when you search the internet for Bourbon chicken recipes, most of them don't involve any bourbon.  I kept searching until I found one that did.  (I also made some bourbon chocolate chip cookies that day, and sampled the product before finishing either, thus saving us from packing that bottle when we moved.  I'm a hero!)

The first time I made it, I actually worked from a hodge-podge of a couple different recipes, and it's evolved a little since then.  What follows is unique enough from the source material(s) that I feel comfortable calling it:

Ryan's Bourbon Chicken
About 2 lbs cut-up chicken
1 t ground ginger
1/2 C soy sauce
2 T dried minced onion
1/2 C packed brown sugar
3/8 C bourbon
1/2 t garlic powder (or one clove garlic, finely minced)
10 oz package frozen broccoli
1 C cashews

Combine ginger, minced onion, brown sugar, and garlic powder in a bowl.

Add soy sauce and bourbon.  Mix well.  Add cut-up chicken, turning to coat, and marinate in the fridge for a couple hours.

Always make sure you are using quality ingredients.  Re-check as needed.

This is a good time to check your bourbon for quality, freshness, whatever bourbon is supposed to have.  I just know I drink a little every time I make it because I can't think of a good reason not to.

About 30 minutes before dinner, pour the chicken and marinade into a large skillet over medium-low heat and stir occasionally until chicken is cooked.

When the chicken is cooked, add the broccoli.  Stir it in well so it gets heat from all sides.  It needs to thaw and cook, but as long as there is sauce in the pan, the chicken won't get dry--but the broccoli can get mushy if it cooks too long.  Keep an eye on it.  Sample a couple pieces if you want.  It's a vegetable--that means it's healthy (even if it's swimming in booze and sugar).

When the broccoli is ready, stir in the cashews and let them simmer a minute or two--you really just want to get them in there.  They don't have to cook, but it's good to get them coated in the sauce.

Serve over rice.  This one's a winner.

Flantastic!

You've heard the expressions "piece of cake" or "easy as pie"?  Forget them.  Flan is easier.  I don't know how the International Flanmakers' Union has managed to keep it a secret for this long, but the word is OUT, people!

I needed to make something for dinner.  I chose chicken adobo, because "adobo" is fun to say.  Then, as I procrastinated the walk to the grocery, I figured I should make a dessert, too, and chose flan.  I thought it would fit well with the theme.  (Yes, I know that flan is Spanish/ Hispanic, and even though adobo is Spanish, I linked to a Filipino adobo recipe, and Filipino adobo isn't even true adobo, but I would like to argue that with two points.  First, maybe the theme was "things I don't know how to do yet."  Second, I just made you say "adobo" a whole lot, if you were reading out loud.  I was right, wasn't I?  It IS fun to say!)  I found two good contenders.  This one, and the one I used.  Why the second one?

1. I don't actually have ramekins, and I didn't have enough of the things I was going to use instead.
2. I've never made flan before.  I've never carmelized sugar before.  The second recipe uses one big dish instead of six little ones, so I don't have to work quite as quickly, which is nice if you're unfamiliar with the process, would like to avoid third-degree sugar burns, and have a tendency to take lots of pictures while you cook (you're welcome, food-porn enthusiasts).

I know I said it was super easy, but there was one part that intimidated me (a little) and one part that was really difficult.  The intimidating part was melting the sugar.  I'd never done it before, and the very first review on the recipe mentioned how difficult it was to clean the sugar off of everything when they finished making it. That caveat, coupled with my low confidence, made me pretty sure I was going to ruin the saucepan, so I used one of the Chief Taster's.  Don't tell her.  It was the only one she believes capable of boiling eggs.

I don't know whether you're supposed to stir sugar as it melts, but I did.  I was also preparing the custard portion at the same time, so I wasn't stirring constantly, and think that maybe I should have been.  You can see clumps here because it isn't melting evenly.

Luckily, I didn't ruin the pan, and it cleaned very easily (as soon as I poured the caramel glaze into the pie pan, I put some hot water in the pot.  That probably helped.).  It still takes a little time for the sugar to melt.  Don't sweat it.  Keep the heat low, and be patient.  Even the lumps you see in the picture above thinned out eventually.

one cup of sugar, melted.  Makes me wish I had some ice cream.

As the sugar becomes more liquid than solid, give it more of your attention.  Do not let it burn, and keep stirring it to get a nice, even consistency.  Then pour it in the baking dish, and tip the dish around to coat the sides a little.  I didn't have a 9" baking dish, so I used a 9.5" pie pan.  Close enough.

The sugar cools and solidifies quickly, so it's hard to get a coat of even thickness or  uniform height on the sides of the dish.  Call this "artistic license," and people will let you get away with it.  If they don't, then don't let them have any of your delicious flan.

I finished beating the filling ingredients together while the caramel glaze cooled a little in the dish.  That's fine.  The worrisome part is when you pour the filling into the dish and hear tiny crackling noises like fractures in glass.  More on that later.

Filled flan.  Cover it with foil, bake at 350F for an hour.

I had stirred the sugar with a normal metal tablespoon.  When I finished scraping the caramel into the dish, I looked at the spoon and thought, "mmmm, tasty," but instead of licking it, I set it aside and finished assembling the flan.  This provided two excellent benefits: I did not burn the ever-loving shit out of my mouth, and I got to witness something cool and science-y.  Remember before that last picture, when I mentioned the glass-breaking noises I heard when I added the filling?  It wasn't the glass*.  It was the sugar!  When I stuck the flan in the oven, I could still hear tiny cracking noises, like someone carefully stepping on tiny Christmas lights.  Then I saw the spoon I had used earlier, sitting on the counter with a thin glaze of sugar on it.  And I actually saw cracks form with those noises.  I was pretty excited about it, but I wasn't able to find a good, concise article explaining why it happened, so there's no link here, even though I wanted one.

Yes, after it had cooled sufficiently, I did chew on the spoon for  awhile.  I am not as ashamed of this as I probably should be.

Right out of the oven.  You can't tell, but some of the sugar was still bubbling a little at the edges.

I let the flan cool for a while before trying to remove it from the pan (it even spent some time in the fridge).  That's normal, but I wonder if I should have flipped it over a littler sooner, while it was still a little warm.  Tough call, since I don't know what I'm doing.

Thoroughly cooled, not as tectonically active.

I ran a knife around the edges of the pie pan to loosen things a bit (I was worried about the sugar gluing the whole damn mess inside), and turned the whole dish upside down over one of our biggest plates.  And waited.  A while.  I got worried, and a little annoyed, and went to go watch Futurama or something, and checked on it later to discover that it had mostly fallen clear.

works for me.

For a first effort, I was thrilled with that.  I scraped up what was still inside the pan and ate it straight, and cut a chunk of the flan out to have an actual serving.  Although the sugar glaze was crackling-hard when it went into the oven, it came out as a soft, syrupy caramel layer (it dripped off the pan and onto the counter--be aware).  The flan itself was rich in flavor, light in texture, and pretty damn good as far as I'm concerned.  Plus, I discovered that when I had it for breakfast, my morning run went really well.  Considering I had flan for breakfast, it's probably good that I went for a run an hour later.

adobo a go-go

This post is going to be light on content, but don't worry--next week is a dessert, and there are lots of pictures and WAY too much of my commentary.  First, though, can anyone explain this?

Who puts a shaker lid on a jar of bay leaves?  What purpose could this possibly serve??

I wanted to make chicken adobo.  I don't know why.  The name came to mind for reasons I no longer remember (I made it way back in May), and it was fun to say, so I looked up this recipe.  It's pretty straightforward, which is a great selling point for any recipe.  Mix everything but the chicken together, add the chicken, marinate a while, then dump the whole mess into a great big pot (wheeee, cast iron!) and cook it.  Serve with rice.  And in my case, flan (come back next week, you'll dig it).

cooking

The sauce is a whole lot of vinegar, but the vinegar taste cooks out along the way.  The final result tastes good, and the sauce can be dumped in the bowl for rice to sop.  It's easy, but it's pretty basic.  The most exciting part is saying "adobo," but as I learned along the way, Filipino adobo isn't even "true" adobo, so I may have to find another recipe to try to see what that's like.

cooked

protein power

When I lived in Oregon, I wanted to try making black beans and rice.  I had been introduced to the staple dish during a high school visit to Costa Rica (AMAZING), and I missed it.  I hadn't seen on menus anywhere, but I figured it had to be a pretty simple dish--after all, they serve it at every meal there.  It's as common as a glass of water.

It didn't go very well.  I cooked those damn beans for hours, and they still weren't as soft as they should have been.  Eventually, I gave up because I was hungry and tired and I wanted to eat and go to bed (thus solving two of my three problems; I haven't yet solved the Hard Bean Conundrum).  A couple weeks later, I just cooked a pot of rice, dumped in a (drained) can of black beans, reheated it, and ate it happily.  Much less effort, better results, but still somehow disappointing.

This year, I decided to try red beans and rice.  Maybe a different color softens better?  I used this recipe.  I couldn't find andouille sausage at the Chief Taster Approved farmers' market stall, but they had chorizo, and I'm happy to put that in almost any food.  Really, though, I think I just wanted an excuse to go buy the dry beans at a local Mexican market.  It entertains me to go there.  They have no carts because A: it's too small to bother, and B: there's no way a cart could make any of the turns between those aisles.  It's crowded when you're the only person in there, I can only barely read the labels, and it's filled with high, oddly-organized shelves of brightly colored packages, many of which are so completely foreign to me that I can't even guess what's inside them.  It's like going grocery shopping in Diagon Alley.  I love it.

Cooking beans.  The liquid level went down very slowly.

The good news is, I did a better job with the red beans than I did with the black beans.  The bad news is, that might just be the sausage talking.  The beans were still very firm, though edible.  I think next time I'd like to let them soak longer than just overnight.  Maybe overnight and most of a day, too.  That, or put them on the stove in the morning and let them spend all day cooking, but if I did that, it would have to be on a much colder day.  You don't want to cook anything that long in August.

I swear there's some rice under all those beans.  Really!

my word is slaw

After making the venison winter stew, I had most of a head of cabbage left.  I only know three uses for cabbage (besides that stew): foil dinners (a Boy Scout thing, in which the cabbage is there mainly to keep your food off the foil, and almost never finishes the cooking time in an edible state), sauerkraut, and coleslaw.  I chose coleslaw.

The Lodge "A Skillet Full" cast iron cookbook has a few slaw recipes, because it's sort of Southern food, and the cookbook likes to think it's all Southern food.  I object to that, if only because Southerners can get pretty uppity about their food, and are often quick to tell anyone else that they are doing it wrong.  Barbecue doesn't have to be from North Carolina to be "real" or "good."  Get over yourselves.

Moving on.

I made Coleslaw With Cooked Dressing.  I thought I would scale it down, but it turns out that after I shredded the cabbage, I had the required 8 cups, so I made a full batch.

I should have scaled it down anyway.

It's not a creamy slaw.  I should have realized that from the ingredients, but I didn't expect the tartness of what I made.  It's more like the misbegotten offspring of sauerkraut and coleslaw, with none of the assets of either.  And it's a HUGE batch.

all the veggies, with just enough room in the bowl for the dressing, once I cook it.

I was also cruelly reminded of something I usually manage to avoid.  If you chop onions, you might get away with it.  Shredding onion on a mandolin weaponizes it, and shoots it directly into your eyes.  It's like cooking while someone pepper sprays you, and since that stage of cooking involves racing your fingertips back and forth over a set of sharp edges, it's terrifying on top of painful.  I washed my hands when I finished with the onion, but only so I could safely wash my face and eyes.

Specific Gravity: gets me every time.

The dressing was easy.  Mix and cook, dump over veggies.  Let sit in fridge several hours before stirring (it didn't make any sense to me, either, but I follow directions like a good little nerd).

There is enough slaw here to bury a full-grown man alive.  I know, because I did.

Obviously, that's way too much "healthy veggie" for any reasonable meal, so I melted a stick of butter and oven-fried some chicken in it to round out the meal.

sesame oven-fried chicken, also from the Lodge book.