Sun, Sep. 23rd, 2007, 08:57 pm
Kitchen Victory

I've been improvising more in the kitchen lately, taking recipes I'm familiar with, then rearranging them until they're new. I recently made crisp-braised duck with port wine and dried cherry sauce; I made sauteed pork chops with tomatoes and sherry; last night, I baked (poached?) halibut in the oven, in a pan also cooking rice, peppers, onions, and so on, for a very nice one-dish meal.

Tonight, [info]ironheadjane said that she wanted to have pasta with a sauce containing cherry tomatoes and shrimp, something that we had a month or two ago at Tavolata, in Belltown.

I'd been thinking of making red and yellow cherry tomato confit anyway. So I made the tomatoes. Then I took a pound of fresh shrimp from Wholefoods and sauteed them with garlic, butter, and olive oil. Finally, I combined the two dishes, let them simmer a bit, and served on top of pasta.

It wasn't absolutely, totally, unbelievably spectacular. It was merely the regular variety of spectacular. Which isn't bad for a first try.

I have declared victory.
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Current Mood: triumphant
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 04:05 am (UTC)
[info]batboymaxx: Yum.

...now I'm hungry.

Man. Sometimes I envy you folks that have a knack for cooking. *wanders to the kitchen and looks speculatively at the frozen meal collection*
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:40 pm (UTC)
[info]disappearinjon: Re: Yum.

A knack for cooking requires, above all else, extensive practice. I've been seriously trying to cook for about five years now, and I'm beginning to get some of it down. (Other parts still elude me, however.)

It's mostly about practice. I found this book to be pretty much my lifesaver and default place to try to learn how to do stuff, though this one gave me some theoretical basis for understanding, too.

My method's been:

1. Flip through cookbook.
2. Examine recipe.
3. Does recipe sound good?
4. If no to 3, go to step 1.
5. Do I say, "I could do that!" when looking at recipe?
6. Do I have time to cook this recipe?
7. If yes to 5 and 6, cook it! If no to either question, go to step 1.

So, really, anyone can do it. Like so much else, it's really just practice.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:44 pm (UTC)
[info]batboymaxx: Re: Yum.

"A knack for cooking requires, above all else, extensive practice. "

And patience, I expect, which is something that seems to quickly evaporate from my flesh the moment I lay eyes upon a kitchen. ;)
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:47 pm (UTC)
[info]disappearinjon: Re: Yum.

Patience develops with practice. Start with, say, making tomato sauce from whole canned tomatoes. That's something you can do in the time it takes your water to boil and your pasta to cook. (Assuming you use dried pasta.) It doesn't require anything besides a can of peeled plum tomatoes, salt, black pepper, and olive oil.

I'll usually put a fuckton of garlic in too, and some red pepper, and if I've got a bottle of red wine open I'll pour some of that in before adding the tomatoes to the garlic, but even without any of that it's still better than jar sauce without taking any more time. Seriously. It's like something you'd get in a restaurant. In the time it takes your pasta to cook.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:53 pm (UTC)
[info]batboymaxx: Sold.

Okay, now I have to admit to being intrigued.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:52 pm (UTC)
[info]superbeth: Re: Yum.

I agree, How to Cook Everything is indeed a lifesaver of a book. I adore it.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:53 pm (UTC)
[info]batboymaxx: How To Cook Everything

Hey. Lauren owns that book.

...I've never opened it.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 05:57 pm (UTC)
[info]disappearinjon: Re: How To Cook Everything

Now's your chance! :)
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:32 pm (UTC)
[info]thewronghands

Go you! In the way of people ridiculously impressed with things they can't do themselves, that's really awesome.
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Mon, Sep. 24th, 2007 01:44 pm (UTC)
[info]disappearinjon

Thanks. :)

That said, the tomato recipe basically amounts to, "pull stems off of cherry tomatoes. Put in pan, drizzle with salt, rosemary, olive oil, and red and black pepper, and drop it in the oven until done. Shake it a couple of times before then." Shrimp was "melt butter in pan with olive oil. When the little bit of garlic I dropped in sizzles, add the rest of the garlic. About two minutes later, add shrimp. Cook until shrimp become firm and opaque. Stir occasionally. Dump tomatoes in. Stir, turn down heat to very low, and wait for pasta cooking water to boil."

In other words, pretty much anyone could make this. Even if you had an aversion to peeling shrimp, you could drop frozen pre-peeled shrimp in the pan and it'd just add a minute or three to the cooking time.

Damn, now I'm hungry again.
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