Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
So you just got off work, you’re tired, and you don’t feel like cooking up a hot fresh meal. What do you do? You head to the freezer for a frozen TV dinner of course! Well now you don’t have to settle with dry Fish Sticks or a plain Beef Straganoff. Ladies and Gentleman, please give a warm welcome to the frozen Chinese Beef Noodle Soup in a box! At $3.99, I’d say it beats your traditional Hungry Man or Stouffer’s TV dinner.
Of course the portions were bigger. We probably ended having 4-5 bowls of that size shown in the picture. The soup and noodles was actually quite tasty and unlike normal TV dinners, they were actually pretty generous with the meat. The same company also makes similar noodle dishes such as Pork with Cabbage Soup and Dan Dan Noodles.
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Thursday, August 17th, 2006
I consider myself fairly resourceful when it comes to leftovers. Probably got it from my college days. This was just something I threw together from what I found in the refrigerator and pantry. I call it my okra, beef tendon, and bamboo shoot spaghetti specialty.
Tags: left over, spaghetti, beef tendon, okra, bamboo shoot, noodles
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Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Here’s a quick and healthy vegetable noodle soup that I made using some soup stock I found in the refrigerator. The soup was made using stock bones, carrots, corn, wood ear mushrooms, daikon radish, and ginger. Okay, so it’s not entirely vegan, but you just can’t make a good soup without meat or bones, and especially if you plan on making a noodle soup. The fats and oils from the bones and meat help keep the noodle soup hotter, longer, and let’s just face it, cold noodle soup just doesn’t cut it.
Anyway, I put some of the stock on boil, add salt, pepper, and some soy sauce for color and flavor. I tend to make the soup it a little saltier than usual because I want the noodles to absorb it. As the soup’s boiling, I also boil the noodles (in a separate pot). Thin Chinese flour noodles work best because they cook fast. I put the noodles to a boil in plain water, no salt. The trick here is to cook the noodles just enough so when you bite into it, the inside is still a bit raw and chewy.
To assemble the whole thing, put the noodles in a bowl, pour in your soup (which should be piping hot) and let it sit for about a minute. That’s the 2nd trick. The noodles will finish cooking within that minute and will have absorbed the flavors of the soup. I topped it off with some of the vegetables from the stock and…
Voila!
Tags: noodle, soup, vegetable, healthy, homemade
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Sunday, July 16th, 2006
I was watching an episode of Good Eats about steak and thought, “hmm, I’d like to try that.” (Come to think of it, that’s usually how I get my inspiration to cook.) So we decided to do a steak night. Easier said than done. None of us are experienced when it comes to buying steak, and it took a little fumbling around before we ended up getting 3 different cuts: T-bone, top sirloin, and strip steak to try them out. For the side dish we choose to make baked potatoes (also inspired by an episode of Good Eats). Everything else we bought pre-made because we didn’t want to get in over our heads with too much cooking for one night, especially since it’s pretty much our first time cooking steak and baked potatoes.
Once we had all our ingredients, I prepared the meats by cutting off the excess fat, sprinkled salt and pepper and rubbed oil on both sides. The potatoes we washed and poked holes in it with a fork for ventilation. They were also treated to a salt and oil rub, no pepper. Then they were sent to the oven to bake supposedly at 350 degrees, but since we had only one oven and we needed it to be at 500 degrees for the steak later on, we had it set at 500 and threw the potatoes in.
I started searing the steaks on high for a couple of minutes to get a brown crust on both sides, then they went into the oven to finish up.
Before I go on, I just wanted to mention one thing…you gotta have the right equipment if you want to do the job right. We, unfortunately didn’t have all the necessary equipment, in particular the oven mitts. Well, you can probably guess what happened. 
One of us, while trying to adjust the racks inside our 500 degree oven using some towels, slipped his fingers from the towel and grabbed onto the metal rack with his thumb instead. We laughed about it for a few seconds (ok we didn’t, at least not aloud, because he was in obvious pain), then patched him up and he soldiered on.
I started making a roux, basically a mixture of butter and flour cooked for a few minutes over low heat, mixed it with the pan drippings from searing the steaks and added chicken stock to thin it out. We wanted to get the steaks to between medium and medium well, so we took it out 2 or 3 times to check them with an instant thermometer. The second time that we took it out the thermometer read 150 degrees, about medium. So we stuck it back in the oven for a few more minutes which in hindsight we shouldn’t have done. Had we not threw it back in the oven that final time, our steaks would’ve finished “cooking” by itself. Lesson learned? Take the steaks out when the inside is a few degrees below what you’re aiming for. It’ll eventually reach your desired temperature as the heat outside the meat redistributes itself and finishes cooking the inside.
Our steaks were done, and the potatoes were also finished. I sliced up our thickest steak, the strip steak, which turned out to be the one closest to what we were aiming for. The melted fat from the meat helped it maintain its juiciness. The other pieces were leaner and were unfortunately cooked to well done. Luckily we had the gravy that I made for dipping. As for the baked potatoes we topped it with shredded cheddar, butter, and baco bits. Overall I think the gravy, the potatoes, and for the most part our strip steak were successes.
Tags: steak, potato, cooking, dinner
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Sunday, June 25th, 2006
I was wandering down an aisle at the grocery store a couple of weeks ago and saw some instant jello packs displayed. I have never made jello my entire life, and at the spur of the moment I grabbed a box and thought, “how hard can this be?” Following the instructions word by word, I mixed 1 serving into 1 1/2 cups of boiling water, stirred until the powder was dissolved, then added 1 1/2 cups of room temperature water and put the whole thing in the fridge to set for 4 hours. Well, it didn’t really set in 4 hours, so I let it set overnight. Needless to say, my first attempt at making jello ended up as a slightly thick version of colored water.
A couple of days ago I wandered down the same aisle, and I passed the same jello display and felt as if they were mocking me for being such a rookie at my first attempt. So with a fierce determination, I yanked another box off the shelf, threw it in my cart, and headed home to give it another shot. This time I thought, “screw the instructions” and boiled 1 1/2 cups of boiling water per serving, then put the mixture in the fridge to set. What did I get this time around?
Success!
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