Convergent evolution. Funny stuff.
I like to cook eggs. Eggs are among the first things I really learned to cook well, and I definitely did it the hard way. (Remind me to tell you the story of the first time I cooked eggs, sometime.) I spent years learning how to make a good omelet - cooking, figuring out what went wrong, refining, practicing the flip, adjusting the batter, adjusting the pan. And when I was done - when I felt like I could make a great omelet every single time, regardless of circumstances, available ingredients (within reason) or anything else, someone pointed something out to me that caught me by surprise.
What I had developed wasn't an omelet at all; it was almost exactly, in fact, like an Italian frittata. Which is, admittedly, just an Italian omelet - but comes out a lot more like a crustless quiche than like a French omelet. Seems like somewhere along the line, someone else had done the same thing that I had, and had refined and perfected until they got something that was not really what they were reaching for at all. Not to be bold, but I think it's a heck of a lot better, to be honest. Actually, that shouldn't be surprising. After all, what I was doing was refining the recipe so that it fit my taste better and better; of course I think the end result tastes awesome.
When I was in Israel, I was sitting around my tiny, tiny kitchen one day thinking about what I might want to eat for dinner. I had half a plate of hummus left, as well as some chicken breasts. Feeling adventurous, I coated the chicken in the leftover hummus (well-mixed with the paprika and olive oil by now - you DID read my last post, right?) and fried it up. It tasted great, and I wound up making it fairly often.
Cut forward a year or two. I'm in law school, and a local diner - Sam's Cafe, a wonderful little greasy spoon on Walnut Street in Champaign, IL - decides to start doing a Lebanese menu on Friday evenings. The owners are both Lebanese, and they've been feeling a bit homesick. As for me, I've been feeling a bit home-away-from-homesick, and since all the good food in Israel is either Lebanese or cooked by one of my aunts, a Lebanese diner sounded right on the money.
It was a small menu - they only had four or five dishes, which is understandable, considering that they were just starting to do the Lebanese thing; I wouldn't want to stock up to do middle eastern cooking in the middle west. In fact, that first evening, there were only about three group that showed up in the entire two hours my friends and I were there. (Gratifyingly, word of mouth spread - less than a month later, the place was packed on Friday evening. Six months after that, it was a normal evening crowd. So that worked out okay.) I ordered a chicken dish I vaguely remembered having before, called Shish Taouk. (To be perfectly honest, what I was really looking forward to was being able to take the hummus, fries, and whatever else I ordered as a main dish, wrap them all up together in a pita, and eat it that way.)
(Shawarma is pretty much the best food in the world. It's kind of like a Greek gyro, in the same way that a Kobe steak is kind of like a Big Mac. You can generally get them one of two ways - stuffed into the pocket of a pita, or in a laffa - a larger piece of flatbread without an empty space in the middle. I desperately miss it.
Seriously - this was something I would eat six or seven times a week in Israel. For four bucks, I could get a full meal - including a ton of vegetables - wrapped in an amazingly delicious piece of bread, and walk down the street eating it.
Man, my next blog should be "the year of eating nothing but shawarma.
I have no idea why it's been so difficult for me to actually talk about cumin this week. I mean, I really like it! It's a delicious spice! I think I made a strategic mistake in cooking hummus first - that mistake being that I forgot how totally nuts I am for middle eastern food.
DAMN I miss shawarma!)
...called Shish Taouk. I knew that I'd had it before, and that I had really liked it, but couldn't remember when. When it finally arrived, I bit into it... And tasted my hummus-fried chicken. Apparently, twice in my life now I've made up on my own, dishes that already have a long history.
The joke was on me, of course, because although they taste similar, Shish Taouk is actually nothing like the chicken dish that I make. They taste similar, and use many of the same flavors, but shish taouk is missing both hummus and tahini, two things that many people might consider fairly important to the whole hummus ambiance.
I have no idea what this story was supposed to be about.
So, anyway - I had some hummus. I had some chicken. I also had some mushrooms. I made some hummus-fried chicken, as well as some hummus-fried portobello.
HUMMUS-FRIED STUFF
Ingredients:
One pound of chicken breasts
Two good-sized portobello caps
One cup of hummus (Recipe in previous post)
One half teaspoon cumin
A pinch of salt and pepper
Lemon juice
Oil - olive or sesame
This is a really simple deal here. First, turn the hummus into a marinade. That involves making it slightly more acidic, and amping up the primary flavors a bit. So, mix in the extra cumin, salt, and pepper, and hit it with the lemon juice. How much? Damned if I know. I've been trying to be better about measuring things, but I totally forgot. Also, I was using squirt-bottle lemon juice rather than fresh lemon juice, so I just kept adding it until it was the consistency I wanted. To put it differently - keep adding lemon juice until the hummus loosens up a bit - you want to be able to smoothly spread it on the chicken, but it shouldn't be runny.
I cooked the chicken breasts whole, but you could also slice or cube the chicken. The mushrooms should be sliced think. Coat everything liberally in the hummus mixture, and let it sit for a half hour or more. (really, for as long as you have the forethought to have given yourself.) (Work through that sentence again, slowly - it'll make sense.) Warm up the oil and toss in the food. (You'll probably have to do it in two batches, if you made all the stuff I listed above.
You want the oil to be medium-high. You're playing a dangerous game here; you need to get it hot enough to turn the hummus into a crust, but if you let it get too hot, the hummus will burn, bind to itself and the pan, and pull right off when you go to remove your food. (Using tongs is a good idea.) If you're cooking chicken breasts, it may be a good idea at this point to go back in time and cube the chicken - it will definitely be easier to control the heat and not overcook things with cubes rather than whole breasts.
Your mileage may vary, depending on the thickness of your cut of chicken, but I find about five minutes, flip, then another five does the job. (You could also start in a frying pan, then switch to the oven - but you'll probably wind up with soggier chicken than you'd prefer.) The mushrooms get basically the exact same treatment, except less time per side - two minutes should do fine.
Serve over rice. In my case, I served it over the following:
JEERA RICE
This is an Indian rice recipe, using cumin seeds. You can find many different variations on it, all over the internet. It's an interesting variant on fried rice; instead of taking already cooked rice and frying it, you take rice that's about 3/4 cooked and fry it for a few minutes to add some flavor before finishing cooking it.
In one pot, start a cup of basmati rice goin'. When it's almost done - soft, but still hard in the middle - drain out the water. Get some oil (or ghee - and sorry if you don't know ghee, I don't know enough about it to explain) cookin', and toss in a small chopped onion. When it gets lonely, throw in two teaspoons of cumin seeds to keep it company. After about two minutes, your nose should be telling you that cumin is delicious - when this happens, dump the rice in and give the whole mixture a minute to get acquainted. Once you feel like the rice has gotten some oil, cumin, and onion all up in its business, rain on the party - a half cup of water, cover, and simmer till the rice is complete. Serve it with the hummus-fried chicken.
Yousef, at this point in the dinner, made a really smart point - you could do some really nice harmonies, with (let's say) coriander rice going under the heavily cumin'd chicken. As it is, the main flavors in the rice and the chicken went smoothly together, which is definitely one way to do things. There are others.
Tomorrow - I've been looking so long at these pictures of cumin that I almost believe that they're real. Also, a quick recipe, the weekly mushroom report, and black cumin.
(He was my favorite cooking-related superhero in the turbulent 70s.)
Showing posts with label Rice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rice. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 3
A different person would have skipped the "early experimentation" bits, where I tried to cook this and got it wrong. I'm certainly dedicated to showing you the warts and all, because this is supposed to be a learning process, and it is very cynical of you to be thinking "by doing it this way, he managed to stretch one blog post out into three."
So the next day, I was feeling a lot better - Benjamin and I hadn't been fighting over what we wanted to do all day. We mutually decided that what we wanted to do was sit in his playpen, play with his toys, read to him, and cuddle him. I have to give it to him - the kid is already a convincing arguer. He made it clear that the day before, I had tried to do it my way, and it had been soul-crushing... so why not try doing things his way? Wouldn't that work better?
What I had wanted to say was "Assuming that my goal in life is either 'housewife' or 'baby life support system', yes, that works better." What I actually said was, " Chapter One. The Bride. The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." All in all, I've had worse days.
When dinner time rolled around, I thought "I still have a bunch of fish left over. I still have a bunch of rice left over. I think I can fix the problems that I had yesterday, and I have a wonderful and supportive wife who is okay if we have the same dinner two nights in a row for the sake of a good blog post." (Which is true. I almost never get hit these days when dinner isn't good enough.)
Again, I wish that I could overstrike in the title bar, because while I had plenty of red snapper and tuna, I was a little short in the salmon department. (The tuna had been decidedly inferior as sushi tuna, but it looked like great cookin' tuna.) The red snapper was a filet, the tuna was a small steak with some sushi-sized pieces left over.
So, I went about fixing the mistakes of the night before. I prepped the fish first, then took a fifteen minute break. This time, rather than using fresh garlic, I used powered garlic with some garlic salt to boot, and threw in a tiny bit of the Kala Namak salt along with the turmeric. I gave the fish a good rub on both sides and threw it back in the fridge while I started on the rice.
The rice was fine last night, so I didn't really feel the need to make any changes. I cooked it for slightly less time than I did last night, because... well, because I had an idea. Rice gets fried, rice goes into a prep bowl, and rather than getting another cooking vessel dirty I just kept the wok on the heat. Besides... I had an idea.
Measure out a half cup of coconut milk; add some pepper and the chiles. By now the fish has had a half hour to get used to its new life partners, turmeric and garlic. Wok is hot again. It gets some oil; the fish gets two minutes per side. I decide to get fancy and try to keep the little bits of tuna higher up on the wok so they don't scorch. My success was decidedly mixed. Between sides, I dropped the heat a bit - it would still be hot enough to sear the second side, but would bleed off a little bit of heat before the coconut milk.
Now, last time, the coconut milk had boiled immediately, and I had poured water in to prevent it from burning, which washed out the taste. This time, I was ready for it. My idea was this; coconut milk goes in. Coconut milk starts boiling. Now, I took a handful of the rice and tossed it in the pot. Between the lower heat, the rice, and me realizing that this is what happens to coconut milk, everything works out perfectly. The fish gets about five more minutes cooking in the milk, then I toss in the rest of the rice. (I'm going to mix it up with the sauce the second I get it to the table anyway, so why not just do it in the pot?)
It took two tries, but this came out exactly the way that I wanted it to, and it tasted great. It was an incredibly tasty dish, was fairly easy to make, and used up a bunch of leftovers.
For the record, here is the final recipe that I made.
Ingredients:
1 cup day old rice
.75 tsp turmeric, or enough to give the rice a yellowish cast
1 small onion, chopped mediumly
Peanut oil
Slightly more than a pound of tuna and red snapper
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Some more peanut oil (it was already out)
1/2 cup coconut milk
A few grinds fresh pepper
One hot asian chili
Combine the turmeric, garlic powder, garlic salt, and kosher salt in a bowl, and rub in on the fish. Set the fish aside for a half hour at least.
Heat the wok, put in two tablespoons of oil or so and spread it around. It will of course pool back up; don't let this discourage you. When the oil is at "fry" toss in the onion. Cook it for about two minutes, or less if it's getting burned. Duh. Toss in the rice; fry for about five minutes, moving constantly. Remove the rice to a prep bowl, wipe out the wok, and put it back on the fire.
Reheat the wok. While it is warming, measure out the coconut milk and add the pepper and chili. Put some more oil in the wok, and fry the fish for two minutes per side. In between sides, turn the heat down to medium. When the second side is done, add the coconut milk. Lift the fish so that the milk can get under and around it. When the coconut milk starts to boil, toss in a bit of the rice to absorb some of the heat. Cook the fish for about four minutes, or until it starts to flake. Toss in the rest of the rice, mix well, and let cook for one more minute. Remove to a plate, eat, then write a blog post about it.
Tomorrow: Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
So the next day, I was feeling a lot better - Benjamin and I hadn't been fighting over what we wanted to do all day. We mutually decided that what we wanted to do was sit in his playpen, play with his toys, read to him, and cuddle him. I have to give it to him - the kid is already a convincing arguer. He made it clear that the day before, I had tried to do it my way, and it had been soul-crushing... so why not try doing things his way? Wouldn't that work better?
What I had wanted to say was "Assuming that my goal in life is either 'housewife' or 'baby life support system', yes, that works better." What I actually said was, " Chapter One. The Bride. The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." All in all, I've had worse days.
When dinner time rolled around, I thought "I still have a bunch of fish left over. I still have a bunch of rice left over. I think I can fix the problems that I had yesterday, and I have a wonderful and supportive wife who is okay if we have the same dinner two nights in a row for the sake of a good blog post." (Which is true. I almost never get hit these days when dinner isn't good enough.)
Again, I wish that I could overstrike in the title bar, because while I had plenty of red snapper and tuna, I was a little short in the salmon department. (The tuna had been decidedly inferior as sushi tuna, but it looked like great cookin' tuna.) The red snapper was a filet, the tuna was a small steak with some sushi-sized pieces left over.
So, I went about fixing the mistakes of the night before. I prepped the fish first, then took a fifteen minute break. This time, rather than using fresh garlic, I used powered garlic with some garlic salt to boot, and threw in a tiny bit of the Kala Namak salt along with the turmeric. I gave the fish a good rub on both sides and threw it back in the fridge while I started on the rice.
The rice was fine last night, so I didn't really feel the need to make any changes. I cooked it for slightly less time than I did last night, because... well, because I had an idea. Rice gets fried, rice goes into a prep bowl, and rather than getting another cooking vessel dirty I just kept the wok on the heat. Besides... I had an idea.
Measure out a half cup of coconut milk; add some pepper and the chiles. By now the fish has had a half hour to get used to its new life partners, turmeric and garlic. Wok is hot again. It gets some oil; the fish gets two minutes per side. I decide to get fancy and try to keep the little bits of tuna higher up on the wok so they don't scorch. My success was decidedly mixed. Between sides, I dropped the heat a bit - it would still be hot enough to sear the second side, but would bleed off a little bit of heat before the coconut milk.
Now, last time, the coconut milk had boiled immediately, and I had poured water in to prevent it from burning, which washed out the taste. This time, I was ready for it. My idea was this; coconut milk goes in. Coconut milk starts boiling. Now, I took a handful of the rice and tossed it in the pot. Between the lower heat, the rice, and me realizing that this is what happens to coconut milk, everything works out perfectly. The fish gets about five more minutes cooking in the milk, then I toss in the rest of the rice. (I'm going to mix it up with the sauce the second I get it to the table anyway, so why not just do it in the pot?)
I need to learn to be a better food photographer if I'm going to be doing this for a year...
This looked delicious on the plate, but that picture kinda looks like a fairly unappealing, undifferentiated lump to me. Oh well. Do either of these pictures look any better?
These are the same picture... for the one on the bottom, I let the computer's auto image correct feature mess with the brightness and everything. Notice the hot pepper right in the middle of the fish... that got removed right after I took the picture. Anyway, feedback on the pictures is appreciated.
For the record, here is the final recipe that I made.
Ingredients:
1 cup day old rice
.75 tsp turmeric, or enough to give the rice a yellowish cast
1 small onion, chopped mediumly
Peanut oil
Slightly more than a pound of tuna and red snapper
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Some more peanut oil (it was already out)
1/2 cup coconut milk
A few grinds fresh pepper
One hot asian chili
Combine the turmeric, garlic powder, garlic salt, and kosher salt in a bowl, and rub in on the fish. Set the fish aside for a half hour at least.
Heat the wok, put in two tablespoons of oil or so and spread it around. It will of course pool back up; don't let this discourage you. When the oil is at "fry" toss in the onion. Cook it for about two minutes, or less if it's getting burned. Duh. Toss in the rice; fry for about five minutes, moving constantly. Remove the rice to a prep bowl, wipe out the wok, and put it back on the fire.
Reheat the wok. While it is warming, measure out the coconut milk and add the pepper and chili. Put some more oil in the wok, and fry the fish for two minutes per side. In between sides, turn the heat down to medium. When the second side is done, add the coconut milk. Lift the fish so that the milk can get under and around it. When the coconut milk starts to boil, toss in a bit of the rice to absorb some of the heat. Cook the fish for about four minutes, or until it starts to flake. Toss in the rest of the rice, mix well, and let cook for one more minute. Remove to a plate, eat, then write a blog post about it.
Tomorrow: Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 2
Last time, on The Year of Living Spicily:
After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.
Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"
I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.
You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.
Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.
Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.
I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.
OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.
What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.
wheeee. fried rice.
I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.
I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.
Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"
What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.
The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.
So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:
Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.
I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.
Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.
One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.
So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.
Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?
HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!
Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.
After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.
Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"
I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.
You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.
Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.
Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.
I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.
OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.
What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.
wheeee. fried rice.
I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.
I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.
Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"
What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.
The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.
So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:
Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.
I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.
Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.
One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.
So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.
Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?
HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!
Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.
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