Recipe: Roasted Chicken & Vegan Stir-Fry w/ Rice (A Not So Vegan Meal)

So tonight was the big night! I don't know how much Jen actually learned from me about cooking, but I had a lot of fun and it was so super delicious. I kind of forgot that I was supposed to be teaching her how to cook and just acted like the chief like I normally do. Oh well, maybe she'll read foodgawker and tastespotting like I told her to and figure stuff out. Or whatever, you know.

That being said, here's the write up for the night! The total meal was as follows

1. Rosemary Sundried Tomato Roasted Chicken with Stuffing
2. Stir-Fry!
3. RICE!

Here's some recipes!


Rosemary Sundried Tomato Roasted Chicken with Stuffing
Chicken:

• Two 3-5lb chickens
• At least 6 pieces of sun dried tomatoes
  
• A lot of fresh rosemary

Stuffing:

• Veggie oil
• 1 small-medium yellow onion
• 1/2 green bell pepper
• 2 celery stalks
• 2 one inch thick slices of challah (As in, two pieces of bread that are each one inch in thickness or width)
  
• 3 button mushrooms
  
• small handful of craisins
• 1 egg
• S&P
• Thyme and/or Sage

Directions:

1. Heat up some oil (not too much! Less than you think you need!!!) in a pan on mediumish heat.
   
2. Dice up the onion, pepper and celery. Here is an example of some foreign workers doing it for me!
   
3. Sauté onion for 1-2 minutes and then add in pepper and celery and sauté for about 5 minutes, stirring a good bit.
4. Toast the challah. Set that timer thing between light and medium, leaning more towards medium.
5. Dice up the mushrooms.
   
6. Wash the craisins to get the added sugar off.
7. Take the veggies out of the pan and add to a mixing bowl with the mushrooms and craisins.
8. Take the challah out of the toaster and dice it pretty finely, but not too finely!
9. Add the challah and the egg to the bowl and mix everything together.
10. Season as much as you like and then let sit until you're ready to stuff your birds. MMMM it looks so good!
    

CHICKEN:

1. Preheat the oven to about 350F.
   
2. Put the tomatoes in a little bowl and put some hot water over them, covering them to rehydrate them as much as is possible.
   
3. Unwrap the birds and, if necessary, take the neck, heart, gibs, etc... out of the cavity and then rinse the inside and out of the birds off. Look it's me!
   
4. Pat the chickens dry and then work your hand under the skin on the breasts.
5. Tear the tomatoes in half and stuff them and the rosemary under the breast skin. Put in as much as you like, cooking (not baking generally) recipes (especially mine) are best used as guidelines!
   Here, the one on the left definitely has stuff under the skin, but I'm not so sure that the one on the right does yet. Pretty sure it doesn't in fact.
   
6. If you haven't yet, put your birds on foil on your baking sheet. Important step: Make sure the tray you're baking it on fits in your oven! If it doesn't, then use a smaller one.
   


• NOTE: Don't use a baking sheet, use some kind of deeper roasting dish! Also if want you can place the chickens on a bed of veggies, any kind!


7. Stuff in the stuffing! It's OK if you have extra, just bake it separately! Also, some people say to not pack it in too tight because it expands but this has never happened to me, so stuff it in well!
   
8. Put birds in the oven for about 60 minutes covered in foil, and then take the Internal foil off for at least another 20-30 minutes. This allows the skin to crisp up at the end!


• The temperature should be about 180F. I used italics because that's what the case on the cooking thermometer I bought said. I'd recommend it to you but you're better off getting an instant digital one honestly. I used to have one but am no longer certain of it's location.


9. After the birds have rested for 10 minutes you can either hack them apart yourself or get someone more learned to do it for you!
10. I recommend checking youtube if you (like me!) do not know how to properly carve a bird. I did not do this, but have plans to eventually.
    

Stir-Fry
Ingredients:
(You could really use whatever the hell you want here, this is just what I felt like buying at Redner's today. Also, I didn't have any soy sauce so teriyaki was used. It still tasted super awesome!)

• Veggie oil
  
• A tiny bit of ginger, maybe half a pinky knuckle
  
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 smallish yellow onions
• 2 carrots
• 1 big broccoli stalk!
  
• 2 celery stalks
• 1.5 green bell peppers (or a similar amount of any colors)
• 1 green zucchini
• A couple handfuls of snap peas!
• Teriyaki and/or Soy Sauce
• Sesame Seed Oil

Directions:

1. Cut up everything however you want it. Examples: Slices of carrots, half rings of onions, diced garlic, chopped peppers, etc... Oh, I use most of the stalk as well as all of the heads of the broccoli. I really love eating the stalk and you should too! It is really nice to have this all done before you start cooking so you're not rushing around watching the stove and chopping stuff up. It allows you to just toss it in, no worries. That is, unless you forget about the zucchini like I did...oh well that's what helpers are for!
   
   
2. Heat the oil over medium-high heat.
3. When hot, toss in 3/4 of the garlic and all of the ginger, stir constantly for about 10-15 seconds.
4. Add in the onion, stir well with garlic/ginger and let cook stirring occasionally for about 3 minutes.
5. Add in the carrots and broccoli and stir-them well. It's pretty important from here on out to be stirring a lot. Definitely not constantly, but try not to take your eye off the pan for more than 10 seconds or so. It isn't called stir-fry for nothing!
   
6. After a couple minutes add in the celery and pepper.
7. Again, a few minutes later add in the zucchini and snap peas and stir it in well.
   Sorry this picture sucks so much. I guess the camera just couldn't handle the beauty of my cooking vegetables. If you have really poor vision and don't wear glasses or contact lenses, this is pretty much what your stir-fry should look like at this point.
   
8. Dump in however much sauce you want, stir it up, turn the heat down and then put a lid on for like 5 minutes.
9. Before you serve put a teensy bit of the sesame seed oil in and stir it around to coat the veggies. DO NOT USE TOO MUCH. This stuff is really strong and should really only be used at the end of cooking to add a little more depth of flavor to the food.
10. Serve over/with the rice.

RICE
Ingredients:

• 1 cup of rice
• 2 cups of water
• Pinch of kosher (or whatever really) salt

Directions:

1. Um...cook the rice.
2. Haha, but seriously turn a burner on high and put all 3 ingredients in
   
3. When it starts to boil stir it a bit, turn it down to medium and cover it with a lid.
4. I'm sure some people will object to the next part, dunno, but this is how I do my rice.
5. Every few minutes or less stir the rice to ensure the bottom doesn't get burnt and crusty (this is NOT paella).
6. When there isn't too much water left in the pot I generally take the lid off and allow some of it to evaporate, but you should definitely test the doneness of your rice. If at this point there's still a tiny little bite (hardness) to it then you're a-ok!
   I have a picture of the rice in the pot, but I don't feel that it's necessary to put it up. Let me know if you feel otherwise!
   
7. Server this under/around the stir-fry.

Well, this is my first ever real write up of a meal I've done and I guess it's looking pretty dandy! Overall even though there wasn't really any consistent theme to the meal, it tasted really good and everything seemed to come out about perfect! I'd like to thank Jen and Jesse for helping me out, as they were great! Also Jimmy for reimbursing me!

A good treat after you eat is to go to Dairy Queen and get a Chocolate Covered Cherry Blizzard! It is delicious, especially when it is also covered by the school.


If I had to do anything better next time, I think it would be planning out what pictures I want to take in advance. This time it was mostly willy-nilly and I think this post definitely suffered for it. Not a lot, but it definitely could've had some more relevant pictures.

That being said, here's the two carcasses I butchered because I don't know how to carve birds AT ALL. It was still REAL tasty though!


P.S. guys, you should for sure use those chicken carcasses to make stock! Click here to find out how!

Teaching Someone How to Cook

So a friend of a friend, who I guess will be a friend soon enough, asked me to teach her how to cook. This will be happening on Thursday evening, after my computer science problem solving class. Since it was at the dining hall I agreed readily enough so I could go back to my table and eat, but after having some time to think about it I find the task to be a fairly overwhelming.
The idea in of itself is fairly simple; I just need to show someone how to combine ingredients with heat to produce something edible and tasty. However, in preparation for this I began thinking about how I first learned to cook. After a bit of reflection I realized that there was really no way I could just teach someone to cook in one night, especially since I don't want to use any recipes.


What I think will help is just writing out a brief history of me in the kitchen. At the very least it'll allow me to sort of peer behind and look at how I've gotten to where I am right now

I started cooking when I was really young. I'm sure my parents might be able to give me a decent age range, but I have no clue how old I was when I started helping out in the kitchen. My oldest (I think, it's certainly the most vivid) memory of cooking is of a time when I was making cookies with my mom and I touched the pan they were on right after she got it out of the oven. It hurt like hell and my mom taught me how to deal with burns by running room temperature water over it and then treating it with some cream. Clearly this is not getting off to a running start, but at least it taught me some respect for my tools.

My next memories, which I know for a fact are from elementary school, are me running "experiments" on food. Generally, these would just be me playing with food coloring on/in whatever my mom had made for dinner. A lot of times I would also do this to her food for lunch the next day. I distinctly remember my mom bringing orange colored chicken, blue mashed potatoes and something that was probably green to school for lunch. I doubt I was doing any actual cooking at this point, but I am positive that they were fun at the time.

I soon entered the actual realm of food preparation. I began cooking stir-fry for the family dinners, something very simple and super fun to make. Since I had no idea what I was doing, I just began experimenting with whatever spices my mom had around. Sometimes this would turn out pretty well I'm sure, but this wasn't always the case. Once the vegetables were so heavily spiced that no one could eat it. I clearly remember trying to keep going with it, but, it was just too much spice for one little kid to handle.

It would be about this time that we started cooking fish for almost every Sunday dinner. I'm not really clear why we did it, but it quickly became the "thing" we did for that dinner. In fact, my mom and I even had a little joke whenever we were cooking halibut which was "Let's do it just for the halibut!" Say it out loud a couple times and if you still don't get it, just ask me. Another favorite fish to make (still is to this day!) for us was salmon. In fact, I even made up my own recipe for a sort of honey bbq salmon! I developed the sauce I use by literally just chucking sauces from the fridge into a bowl and then mixing and tasting until I found a taste I like. Smear this on top of salmon fillets, top with drizzles of honey and onion flakes and you are set! I can still make it exactly as I used to, but don't always have all the ingredients and thus must improvise. I'm sure someday I'll so a write-up on here, but that's certainly for another time!

At about this point in my life I was about to or had entered high school. This is a period of my life most noticeable for intense apathy and a sudden love of those $0.16 packages of Top Ramen noodles. I originally would just make it as it was on the package, but one day my friend Leif clued me in to a little secret of success in the instant noodle soup world. Soy sauce! Once I tried making ramen with soy sauce in it there was no turning back. Unfortunately, even though this sort-of-epiphany came relatively early in the game, it wasn't until a couple of years later that I would start to experiment more with ramen. Eventually hot sauce, black pepper, butter, cheese and sometimes even lunch meats would be tossed into the mixture in an attempt to better the salty death that american instant ramen is. I can't think of them now, but this is in no way a thorough list of what I would try adding to ramen.

Haha, looking back on this last paragraph is really making the pretentious foodie in me cringe at my younger self. However, that's really what I was into during high school so I've gotta put it up here. What I find really interesting about it though, is that even though I was just boiling water and dumping in noodles and flavor packets, I still started to experiment with different flavor and texture combinations. Even with one of the lowest types of food available in a super market, I still tried a ton of stuff in an effort to make whatever I was eating more interesting.

Eventually I went off to college and my first two years there are almost indistinguishable in that pretty much zero cooking (Not really counting ramen and easy mac at this point) happened excepting a tiny bit I did in Musser second semester my sophmore year. I forget exactly what we had, but I know I made soup a few times as well as doing an end of the year meal for us band kids.

My junior year was great however! Reeves, Schaeffer and I moved into an apartment down main st that was in a house that had 4 of our really good friends living in it! Luckily for me, there was a kitchen for every apartment in the house! I started doing "Friday Feasts", originally planned to be once a month but instead turned out to be 2-3 a semester. At the end of fall semester I (with much help from Molly) did an Italian feast consisting of fresh bread, bruschetta (not trad), vegan pasta sauce, 2 types of pasta, chicken siena and a fruity ricotta cheese dip. I have since made that meal twice more (without the ricotta stuff) and it is a huge hit every time! Another recipe I'll have to do a write up here for is the chicken siena, that stuff is banging!

Over the course of this and last school year I've learned a ton about cooking. Some is definitely due to hands on experience making food that looks really good to me. However, a lot of how I cook comes from reading Goons With Spoons, too many blogs, TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, cookbooks and food literature, whether it is about food preparation, history, the industry, a mindset or becoming more conscious of what you eat and where it comes from.

I think what this whole thing really boils down to is this. There is no way I can possibly fit all of this, this love and passion that I have for food, no way I could make her understand what a pot of boiling water for pasta or a crackling pan full of hot oil and vegetables means to me in 90 minutes. How can I explain that the simple act of sitting down and slicing and dicing vegetables is something that I not only look forward to and love doing, but that it almost always calms me down, relieves stress and just generally lifts my spirits. Or how about the many hours I've just spent reading recipes and other people's thoughts on food? This I feel is the integral part of who I am as a cook today, but I don't think just anybody can sit down and read recipes off the internet for 3 hours chunks of time.

Is it possible for me to convey all of this over the course of cooking one fairly simple meal? Despite all of the above, I would argue that yes it is. Granted I will not be able to make her understand just how important it is for me to sit down every now and again and just make food, but I am absolutely positive that she will not only come away from this with a solid foundation for food experimentation, but at a little more respect for what goes onto her plate and into her mouth. I already know that I am going to hype local food to her, and stress the importance of trying to get to know who and where your food comes from. It may be hypocritical now as I do not know any of this, but I feel that if I can stress it to a non-foodie then she may influence a portion of her friends to at least think about seeking out this knowledge the next time they go shopping. Anyways, I've already got a CSA picked out in case I get into grad school, so back of critics!

While I do not know just how much of the love and passion I have for what goes on in the kitchen I'll be able to communicate on Thursday, I'm pretty sure that we'll pull out a banging meal that she won't soon forget. Since I forgot to mention it, we are making the following:

• Roasted Chicken
• Sundried Tomatoes & Fresh Rosemary under the skin
• Stuffing: challah, onion, celery, green pepper, craisins, mushrooms, S&P and sage
• Stir-Fry
• Carrots, onion, garlic, green pepper, snap peas, zucchini, soy sauce
• Rice

I would sincerely love any and all comments. If you don't wanna comment, email or just talk to me.