White Wine Sauce

Congratulations, reader! You're reading my first post with a total flop!

Well, it was still edible. But it wasn't very good. I didn't even bother taking a picture of it.

I made this sauce to put on chicken that I lightly breaded in Parmesan, garlic powder, and paprika, and sauteed in a pan with some olive oil.

White Wine Sauce

Ingredients
1 Tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp flour
1.5 cups white wine (I used pinot grigio)
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese

Equipment
saucepan, stove

Instructions
Melt butter on low in saucepan. Add flour and salt; stir constantly for about 2 minutes. Add wine; stir and cook for about 4-5 minutes. Remove from heat and add Parmesan, stirring until it's all melted.

Yields
about 1.5 cups of sauce

Total time
about 10 minutes

Cleanup rating 2/5
I actually haven't cleaned it yet but it won't be hard. Just don't let it sit. That would get pretty gross.

Difficulty rating 3/10
It isn't particularly hard, but you need to babysit it because of all the stirring. You can't do much else for those 10 minutes.

Flavor rating 3/10
The real problem, I think, is that the cheese didn't really melt. I know, I know; I should have used fresh Parmesan. Or at least shaved, not that crumbly stuff. But it didn't really melt, so it didn't really incorporate, so the sauce didn't really get thick. Birk suggested more flour or some cornstarch or something, which would probably help. (The problem is, my timing was otherwise perfect, so I didn't have the patience to wait to fix the sauce and let everything else get cold.)

So, it isn't impossible... my suggestions for fixing it would be:
- Use better Parmesan, or perhaps even a different cheese that melts more easily.
- Give yourself a few minutes to fix it with cornstarch if you need to (you can leave it on very low heat if you need to keep it warm while everything else finishes up).
- Maybe less wine in the ratio of wine to cheese, too. It was very... winy.

Samosa Filling

The plan was to make samosas with the butter chicken. But they didn't have samosa wrappers (or even a satisfactory stand-in, like egg roll wrappers) at the store, so I decided to just make the filling, which is kind of like Indian mashed potatoes. It's actually pretty close to aloo tikki.

Samosa Filling

Ingredients
two large potatoes
3 oz peas
turmeric
garam masala
coriander
ginger
1 Tbsp vegetable oil

Equipment
pot with lid, skillet, stove

Instructions
Peel, quarter, and boil the potatoes. (This takes so much longer than I thought it would; plan ahead! Mine took about half an hour because I didn't cut them into small enough pieces.) Drain the potatoes and mash them (I used a fork). Heat oil in a skillet. Add cumin and ginger; heat through. Add potatoes, peas, mix thoroughly. Add spices (about 1 tsp each). Mix thoroughly; heat through.

Yields
About 4 servings

Total time
FOREVER. Don't try to boil big pieces of potato when you're starving. It took about an hour total.

Cleanup rating 2/5
Very easy to clean the pan after; nothing sticks to it.

Difficulty rating 5/10
Half of the difficulty for me lay in waiting for potatoes to boil. The rest is pretty simple.

Flavor rating 5/10
It was a little bland. It definitely needed salt (potatoes suck up all the salt, but you can't taste it... Always confuses me.) I think it would have been better inside samosas.

Butter Chicken

Last night, I made two Indian dishes for dinner. It was a bit of an undertaking for a mid-week dinner, but hey, there are sufficient leftovers for a complete second meal!

The main dish was butter chicken (which has so much more tomato in it than anything else, I think it should be called tomato chicken). I found a recipe online and made my own adjustments to it, so I know this is like... Alex-ized butter chicken. Go with it.

Butter Chicken (which I think should be called tomato chicken)

Ingredients
3 chicken breast filets
garam masala
coriander
ground ginger
cinnamon
2 tsp minced garlic
8 oz peas (I got a steam-in bag and nuked them)
3 Tbsp butter
15 oz can of diced tomatoes in juice
14.25 oz can of tomato sauce
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 an onion, diced

Equipment
skillet, stove

Instructions
Cook your chicken. Technically this should be made with baked or rotisserie or tandoori chicken, but I made mine like this but with garam masala and some salt. Take out your chicken and let it cool and absorb its juices for a while. (This is time I spent paying attention to the samosa filling.) Dice your onion. Melt butter in the pan and add onion, cooking until they're golden. Add the garlic, tomato paste, and about 1/2 tsp each of garam masala, coriander, ginger, and cinnamon. Stir constantly for a few minutes, until well blended. Add the diced tomatoes and tomato sauce, mix thoroughly, let it heat through. Add the chicken and let it heat through. Add the peas and cream, mix thoroughly, let it heat through but don't boil.

Yields
SO MUCH. Probably about six servings.

Total time
30 minutes if you're making it by itself*

Cleanup rating 3/5
It can be a messy dish, but it's mostly tomato sauce so it comes off fairly easily when you clean it right after dinner.

Difficulty rating 4/10
There are a lot of ingredients to keep track of, but if you play the cooking show game (set out all your ingredients ahead of time) it's a lot easier.

Flavor rating 7/10
I had never had butter chicken before, so I don't know how accurate I was, but I thought it was good. I think we could do without the diced tomatoes (I like tomato sauces but not pieces of tomato) so I'll probably experiment with this one in the future.

*I made this with samosa filling so it actually took about an hour to make dinner.

Pulled Pork for Dummies

I got this one from Cassy, who was right in describing it as super easy and super yummy. If you have three ingredients, a crockpot, and all day to wait, you have pulled pork, my friends.

Pulled Pork

Ingredients
Pork roast
Bbq sauce of your choice
Applesauce

Equipment
Crockpot

Instructions
Put the roast in the crockpot. Pour most of a bottle of bbq sauce on/around it. Cover the top of the roast with applesauce. Cook on low for 8-9 hours. Shred with a fork.

Yields
Depends on how you eat your pulled pork. I could probably make ten sandwiches out of this thing, maybe more.

Total time
8-9 hours (unattended)

Cleanup rating 4/5
I hate cleaning the crockpot. (Usually Birk winds up doing it for me.) I used to have some of those plastic liners... I should find those again, then this would be like a 1/5.

Difficulty rating 1/10
Put three things in the pot and turn it on (and make sure it's plugged in). Literally anyone can do this.

Flavor rating 7/10
Birk suggested a more... permeating... sauce. Something with more vinegar (I used a honey bbq... not the best suited to this task, because it stays on the outside of the roast for the most part). But I enjoyed it very much anyway.

Winey Chicken and Roasted Carrots

It's a two-fer! (There's also garlic mashed potatoes and peas but there isn't much to say about them... follow box directions for the potatoes, and microwave the peas with some butter. Ta-da...)

Winey Chicken

Ingredients
Chicken (I used tenderloins, about 10 of them... 1 package)
Red wine, about a cup
Minced garlic
Olive oil, 1 Tbsp
Paprika
Brown sugar (about 1/2 cup)
Salt

Equipment
Skillet (with a lid), stove

Instructions
Put the oil in your skillet and put it on medium heat. Add garlic and let it cook until it's tender and starting to turn golden. Add the chicken in one layer and cook it ten minutes on each side (until it's almost entirely cooked; no pink on the outside). Sprinkle the brown sugar and paprika on the chicken, and pour in the wine. Cover and simmer for 15-20 minutes. (If you want even color, turn the chicken about halfway through. You can see in the photo that I didn't do this.)

Yields
About 3 servings, for us. Scalable to a degree.

Total time
About 45 minutes.

Cleanup rating 3/5
You get a gunky pan but if you wash it quickly, it's not a problem. (I didn't wash it quickly.)

Difficulty rating 5/10
You really have to pay attention to this one at all the stages, and it takes a long while. It's helpful to have a few other things going (like I did) but then you have to orchestrate everything.

Flavor rating 5/10
Good... not great. I feel like I can fix it somehow. Maybe more sugar and paprika? Maybe I needed to flip the chicken? I'm not sure. But it was good.

Roasted Carrots

Ingredients
Baby carrots
Vegetable oil
Seasonings, including kosher salt (I used shallot-pepper seasoning)

Equipment
pan, oven, foil

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 400F and line the pan with foil. Toss your carrots in the oil, coating them evenly. Lay them in a single layer on your foil-lined pan and sprinkle with kosher salt and the seasoning of your choice. Bake for 40 minutes.

Yields
How many carrots did you use? Scalable.

Total time
45 minutes

Cleanup rating 1/5
Wait for foil to cool; throw away foil. Easy-peasy!

Difficulty rating 2/10
Other than testing to make sure the carrots are done, there isn't much to this. You can do it.

Flavor rating 7/10
I love roasted veggies, especially potatoes and carrots. YUM. Just... just yum.

Sweet-and-Spiced Chicken

Birk suggested chicken. I couldn't decide how to flavor it. I turned to Pinterest. This is what I adapted from what I found.

With oven potatoes - with onion thrown in this time! - and peas... and red wine.

Sweet-and-Spiced Chicken

Ingredients
Chicken breasts (I actually bought the tenderloins because I wanted them to bake faster)
Light brown sugar (about 2 Tbsp)
Cumin (1 tsp)
Paprika (1 tsp)
Garlic powder (1 tsp)
Onion powder/flakes (ours is dried minced onion) (1 tsp)
Oregano, dried (1 tsp)

Equipment
Oven, bowl for dredging, baking sheet with a rim

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425F. Line your rimmed baking sheet with foil (trust me on this one) and spray it with Pam or your favorite equivalent. Wash and pat dry your chicken. In a bowl, mix together the sugar and your spices. Break up the brown sugar so that it's more powdery than it is clumpy. Dredge your chicken pieces in the mixture and lay them on the baking sheet. Bake for about 20 minutes if you're using chicken breasts; 12 if they're tenderloins. (Obviously check them for doneness.) The brown sugar will burn, but mine didn't burn ON the chicken... it sort of ran off and made a puddle shape outlined with burnt sugar, but there wasn't an iota of burnt sugar on the chicken. So maybe turn on a fan or something before you take it out of the oven, if you have a super-sensitive smoke alarm like ours.

Yields
Well, how much chicken did you use? Scalable.

Total time
This took about 30 minutes, what with preheating and baking. (Prep takes less time than the preheating.)

Cleanup rating 1/5
If you don't use the foil and the spray, you'll have a 6/5 on cleanup. But with the foil, all the cleanup you need is to throw away the foil and dump out the remainder of your sugar/spice mixture (you put raw chicken in it, don't you dare use it for anything else).

Difficulty rating  3/10
Dredging the chicken and getting it evenly coated when you aren't using a sticking agent like a beaten egg can be tricky (make sure the spices don't settle in the bowl and hide under the sugar) and you have to get the timing right on removing it from the oven (chicken needs to be done, but sugar shouldn't be too burnt) but it's pretty straightforward. If you get chicken cut the way you like it, you don't even need a knife.

Flavor rating 7/10
Yum! It was different, and I think I could probably tweak the spices a little bit, but overall, quite good.

Mushrooms, Part Two

Remember how I got my mushrooms drunk last night? Well, tonight I made them breakfast.

Mushroomelette

Ingredients
Eggs (I used 3)
Mushrooms (I used 3 button mushrooms)
Butter (about 1 Tbsp)
Cheese, shredded (I used Jack)
Seasonings (I used shallot-pepper)*

Equipment
Stove, pan, cheese grater

Instructions
Dice your mushrooms. (Just like last night, they don't have to be perfect, just evenly-sized.) Put your butter in a pan over medium heat. Once it's melted, add the mushrooms and stir them around to get them all buttery. Leave them alone for the most part (stir around occasionally) and go grate your cheese if you haven't already, and beat your eggs in a bowl. Once the mushrooms are tender, add the eggs and stir around until they look approximately like this:

Add the cheese and keep stirring around until the cheese is melted and the eggs are done.

*You can season at several different points: while the mushrooms are sauteeing, while the eggs aren't yet done, after you add the cheese, all three... whatever.

Yields
This was enough for two, because I used three eggs. This one, like last night's, is easily scalable.

Total time
Darn my lack of accountability on this front. I would guess about 15 minutes again, because I baked biscuits at the same time and they took a little over 15 minutes.

Cleanup rating 2/5
Eggs are pretty easy to clean up because they don't really stick to the pan. There are still a handful of dishes that need to be cleaned up, though (cutting board, knife, pan, bowl from the eggs, spoon).

Difficulty rating 3/10
You do have to pay attention when making this, but it's not terribly hard.

Flavor rating 5/10
Pretty good. Not great. I could have used more seasoning probably, but generally pretty good.