It was the weekend of cooking. I had bought Alton Brown’s Gear For Your Kitchen on Thursday and decided what I wanted to try and cook.
On Saturday morning Serenity graduated from puppy obedience training with a perfect score for Sit, Down, Stay and Leave It. As a reward we locked her in her crate for 4 or 5 hours while we went cookware shopping. Sorry girl, but if you’d stay in your run instead of climbing out we’d leave you outside.
We went looking for a spice store first. We took the RX because so we’d have the Navigation system. It lead us to Flores Spices, which was a bit of a cross cultural experience. I’m not sure about the quality of the spices, but we did get to learn the names of spices in Spanish. Got some ground ginger, and chile powder, both mild and spicy. I’m sure the spicy will be painfully hot. I can’t wait.
Then we set the nav to take us to a Acemart restaurant supply. Or we tried. It wouldn’t let us pick the address. Finally we called them and found out they were closed. So we decided to just go to the Galleria area of Houston and look for cool food stuff.
We ended up stopping at a Rice Epicurean Market. This was a really nice gourmet grocery store. We didn’t really buy anything there because we weren’t ready to go home.
We then called a place I remembered from my searching, Kitchen Depot, and asked for an address. I wasn’t even sure what they were, but the name sounded good. They were in fact a restaurant supply place. The Nav system got us there in a way I might not have been able to find on my own.
Got a bunch of hardware there pretty cheaply. Most expensive thing we bought was a digital probe thermometer for $35. That’s $4 cheaper than at Bed Bath & Beyond. Got a chefs knife, a paring knife, and 10″ Non-stick skillet, a bunch of little condiment bowls, a 18 X 23 baking pan and some other stuff for under $100.
It was late in the day now, and while I’d planned to cook, the boys had been good and we ended up at Chuy’s for dinner.
Sunday I was gung-ho and as soon as church was over I was on the way home. I chopped up some fruit to give everyone something to eat immediately and went to work on broiled chicken, a salad and sautéed green beans.
The salad was easy and good. Romaine lettuce, a little iceberg, cucumbers, appricots.
The green beans were a disaster. Not-only did I end up spraying hot oil all over the kitchen, they didn’t even get cooked well.
The chicken was a success. A little dry because I wasn’t sure how long to cook them for. 6 minutes to a side ended up being too long. But the flavor was great. Prepare the meat. This is a key. A little bit of oil, just enough to coat the chicken. I used Canola because that was all we had. Now we have olive and I think that would have been better. Then sprinkle Kosher salt and ground pepper on it. Tasted great when cooked.
I had bought a bottle of Buffalo Wild Wings Hot wing sauce. I love wings, but they ain’t on the diet. So I wanted to see if they would work on a chicken breast. I took a zip-lock bag and put some sauce and one of the finished breasts in it and rubbed the sauce all over the breast with the bag sealed.
It worked, but all you could taste was the sauce. But I did end up with a great idea. The sauce is hot. The salad was cool. Eating them together was great. So a Buffalo Breast Salad with Ranch or Blue Cheese dressing is a great idea.
Ate leftovers Sunday night. We spent the afternoon trying to reorganize the kitchen and didn’t feel like cooking.
I want to make the Chicken with Shallots and Garlic from I’m Just Here For The Food, but it takes 1.5 hours after the saute is finished. Can’t really do that after work. I’ve now got all the ingredients and some of them may go bad before I get that kind of time.
Tonight I think I’m going to saute some mushrooms. Hopefully without exploding oil this time.