I'm Watching Dinner confidential

So Fayfood, my favourite food blog, has branched out into a you tube channel called Dinner Confidential. The episodes are a bit slow in coming out - but feature two women (Fae and Kelly) who are currently helping a very busy family of four figure out how to get dinner on the table in a reasonable amount of time and maybe even eat together once a week.

Their previous story involved helping Kelly's daughter start cooking. I wish I could say the idea of someone who would not buy vegetables or roast something was new; but not everyone loves to cook and this episode (in several parts) they come up with a few different things for the daughter to try and are carefully non-judgmental about her choices. They want her to enjoy cooking, and not do it because it's a chore.

The episodes are short (well under 10 minutes on average) and pretty chatty. Neither Fae nor Kelly are afraid of giving opinions, but they're honest about it.

What I really enjoy is that this is a cooking-advice show that focuses on what's real. They're is no professional kitchen with perfect results every time. There's no immaculate set nor are the hosts immaculate in the way they present themselves. Instead you have two real people who care about what they're trying to do. They don't want the food to be fussy, or bothersome; instead they want it to be healthy, quick, and easy.

It's great lunchtime watching.

A recipe that was sort-of mentioned brought to mind something Fae suggested on her blog a while ago. It's a great and highly-scalable recipe that comes together in about 40 minutes without much tending.

Martedi
Her version is here.

Serves: 6

Ingredients:
12 sausages, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tin cannellini beans, well rinsed
1 tin tomatoes, pureed
2 teaspoons olive oil, divided
1 teaspoon fresh thyme or sage
2 teaspoons oregano
1 clove of garlic, smashed and diced
1 onion, finely diced

Directions:

1. Sear off the sausages in a hot pan. Drain any excess oil.
2. Add the garlic, onion, and sage. Stir to incorporate.
   
3. Add a can of pureed tomatoes and deglaze the pan.
   
4. When this has cooked for a good twenty minutes, add the beans, and other seasonings.
5. Allow to boil down for another 20 minutes. Serve hot over bread, rice, or polenta.
   

Stir-fry chicken with vegetables

This recipe is taken from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, p386 ISBN: 0-4717-8918-6, published March 2006.

I chose this recipe because I was looking for a nice, quick, chicken recipe. Following the advice in the book, I decided that stir-fried chicken and vegetables would fit the bill. The recipe is simple, and since I cook in a mise-en-place fashion, comes together very quickly.

Mise-en-place has its detractors, namely the one in my life who does my dishes, but I find it helps me organize my thoughts and keep on track with a recipe. While most of my experiments don't fail (too badly) I was having guests tonight and wanted something warm and pleasant to ward off the chilly rainy weather without having to steam up the kitchen. I opted to serve the meal with a blue-cheese and argulara salad rather than rice. The stir-fry didn't promise to have much sauce, and we all need more salad in our lives (if not the blue cheese, but more on that later).

I don't have a wok. I do, however, have a very heavy-bottomed skillet that works very well for meals like this. The trick is to get your oil hot before you start. The oil should cause anything that touches it to sizzle. A slight shimmer of heat should rise off the pan before you drop anything into it. Not only does this greatly reduce the time it takes to cook something; but it improves the flavour (or at least, that's my belief-- your mileage may vary).

So I put the oil into the pan and brought it up to temperature. I dropped some garlic and ginger into the pan and cooked it quickly, moving it all over the oil so that their flavours mingle. I removed it once the spices stopped snapping and were browning. I took them out of the pan and back into their bowl. Then I put in the onion and cooked it quickly in the flavoured oil. The onion is cooked when it becomes translucent; I cooked it just a little longer so that there were brown spots on the bottom of my pan. This process sounds wasteful (don't worry - I reincorporate the cooked spices and vegetables at the end), but it's an important step. The garlic and ginger add a depth of flavour to the onion like nothing else can. It also adds brown bits to the bottom of your pan. This is very important.

The onion was removed and I dropped the diced chicken breasts and a bit more oil into the pan. I kept the chicken moving so it wouldn't stick; but even so the browning on the bottom of the pan continued. When the chicken was opaque, I added a handful of diced scallions, and a whole lot of mixed frozen vegetables.

These I stirred quickly and then covered to allow the steam to work its magic. I stirred up the sauce (a combination of soy sauce, chicken stock, pepper, and sesame oil), took off the cover, and added it to the mix. I scraped the bottom of the pan then. Thanks to the few minutes of steam and the sauce, there wasn't much to scrape, but the little bit that did come up was caramalized nicely. Turning everything over to coat it in the sauce and incorporate the brown bits. I added the onion, garlic and ginger (see? told you I'd use them), then recovered the pan for a few minutes, to allow the frozen vegetables to soften.

The recipe actually calls for fresh vegetables; but it's not quite harvest season here -- and frozen vegetables are still a lot cheaper than fresh. The frozen vegetables need a slightly more gentle hand, and can never come out warm and crisp in the same way as fresh; but we'll survive.

The mix came out a lot darker than I'd thought it would. The chicken and lighter vegetables It was fairly dry and tasted really good, especially when topped with some toasted sesame seeds and diced scallions for garnish.

All in all - delicious.