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Dinner 2020


JoNorvelleWalker

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We had an all dressed up and nowhere to go brunch.  I've been threatening to make the Shrimp and Tasso Henican appetizer from Commanders Palace for years so this weekend I got busy.  I followed the recipe published in Savuer and substituted homemade guanciale for the tasso.  It is a really tasty dish and worth the effort.  It would have been perfect with a few of CP's twenty-five cent  martinis!  

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I also made the Caviar Parfait from Michael Mina after watching Hubert Keller's Secret of Chefs Las Vegas.  Another delish dish but I'm afraid the caviar would blow the budget for a party.

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13 hours ago, heidih said:

Lettuce etc to wrap and rice alongside or just for the gusto as is?

We did have rice with it and more kimchi.  Sometimes we use laver for a wrap but seldom think to use lettuce.  

 

 

Edited by Norm Matthews (log)
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5 minutes ago, Norm Matthews said:

We did have rice with it and more kimchil.  Sometimes we use laver for a wrap but seldom think to use lettuce.  

 

We do not do the laver but do enjoy red leaf lettuce and shiso as wrapper. Must try the seaweed sometime. I trend more fresh towards Vietnamese food so the greens plate appeals to me. I realize your flavors were Korean. Did live in Koreatown for a while :)

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Chicken and rice soup. With methocel-clarified consommé and 64C yolk. Blanched carrots, celery, and napa cabbage stems. SV chicken breast. Shiitake and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms roasted in chicken fat. 16-grain donabe rice. 


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Sur la plate w/ Ruhlman soup soon.

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Edited by btbyrd (log)
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33 minutes ago, heidih said:

We do not do the laver but do enjoy red leaf lettuce and shiso as wrapper. Must try the seaweed sometime. I trend more fresh towards Vietnamese food so the greens plate appeals to me. I realize your flavors were Korean. Did live in Koreatown for a while :)

 

Charlies grandparents lived in Koreatown for a while.  He stayed with them one summer when I was finishing up my masters degree.  The main reason we don't have lettuce very often is because I don't usually have the right kind in the refrigerator and seldom think far enough ahead to get some first. I like it, Charlie is eh about it.  Never had shiso. Not sure I have ever seen it at the store.  I'll have to pay more attention when I go to the Asian market.

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13 minutes ago, Norm Matthews said:

 Never had shiso. Not sure I have ever seen it at the store.  I'll have to pay more attention when I go to the Asian market.

Its is an interesting flavor, makes a perfect bite size wrapper. Our Korean markets have the bundles but the stuff for wrapping is sold on trays and larger. Like this old crummy image from my food blog. That classy paper plate is 8" dinner size.

DSCN0906.JPG

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42 minutes ago, Ann_T said:
Tonight's dinner.
Easy dinner. We were eating an hour after I walked in the house from work.
218337834_PorkTenderloinwithmustardsauceDecember20th20201.thumb.jpg.ab4a3fbfd955fcd1a47a8efb5abe253a.jpg
Roast pork tenderloin with a mustard gravy.

 

An hour after I walk in the house from work I haven't even started on my mai tai.

 

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Cooking is cool.  And kitchen gear is even cooler.  -- Chad Ward

Whatever you crave, there's a dumpling for you. -- Hsiao-Ching Chou

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3 hours ago, btbyrd said:

Chicken and rice soup. With methocel-clarified consommé and 64C yolk. Blanched carrots, celery, and napa cabbage stems. SV chicken breast. Shiitake and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms roasted in chicken fat. 16-grain donabe rice. 


4B3A4471-F7EC-4F99-970F-E1E946A08B25.thumb.jpeg.2c3dc94fe4be684fbec77e36635cbaac.jpeg

 

Sur la plate w/ Ruhlman soup soon.

230A91B1-11DD-4E34-A99A-B0FB8744A919.thumb.jpeg.93dafc46477b3fc62fb14f24839ca9a2.jpeg

it looks good. I would pay for this dish definitely. It looks like it has a lot of elements - like fine dining. Did it take a very long to prepare? I wasn't sure if it's practical for a home cook and maybe better for a restauranteur. 

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2 hours ago, heidih said:

Its is an interesting flavor, makes a perfect bite size wrapper. Our Korean markets have the bundles but the stuff for wrapping is sold on trays and larger. Like this old crummy image from my food blog. That classy paper plate is 8" dinner size.

DSCN0906.JPG

it still looks good - I mean - I would eat it. That leaf looks quite large in relation to all the other ingredients. 

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8 minutes ago, eugenep said:

it looks good. I would pay for this dish definitely. It looks like it has a lot of elements - like fine dining. Did it take a very long to prepare? I wasn't sure if it's practical for a home cook and maybe better for a restauranteur. 

 

Thank you. It does take a while to prepare, but the process is very straightforward. It's not impractical for a home cook, but it's also a somewhat ambitious "composed" soup. The impetus behind it was the fact that whole chickens were on sale this week, and it had been forever since I'd made a proper soup. Now that the weather is colder and we're in a pandemic, I figured some comfort food was called for. So I told my wife that chicken soup was to be on the menu and asked her what she wanted. Ramen was out. Pho ga was out. Noodles in general were out. She wanted a chicken and rice soup, which is usually somewhat homey and modest, but I wanted to do a take on a showstopper chicken and rice soup. And that's what I did.

So I bought two chickens and broke them down. I deboned the legs and thighs and used the bones, along with the carcasses and wings, to make a roasted stock in a pressure cooker. While the bones were roasting in the oven, I brought the water to a boil and added half a head of napa cabbage and two sheets of kombu, and then turned off the heat to let it all steep. Once the bones were roasted, I strained out the veg, added the bones and meat, deglazed the roasting pan with water, and added a boatload of alliums. I used onions, shallots, garlic, and ginger as aromatics for a sort of vaguely Asian broth. Pressure cooked for 1.5 hours. Then I strained the stock, chilled it overnight in the fridge, and defatted it (reserving the fat). It was around this time that I thought about clarifying the broth to make it more upscale. So I used a technique from ChefSteps and blended the stock with a chicken breast and a couple grams of methocel, which I then brought to a simmer until a raft formed and I could strain out the clarified broth. I also added a spoonful or two of Minor's chicken base before clarifying -- a way to add salt to the broth along with some chicken flavor and MSG. I strained the clarified stock through a cloth and reserved that until it was time to make the soup. 

The broth is the complicated part. Everything else is pretty easy, especially if you skip the pretentious steps like using a tiny melon baller on the carrots. The carrots got balled, and the celery and napa cabbage got cut into large-ish, but spoonable pieces. I did a quick blanch on these in salted water and chilled them down in an ice bath. It sounds fussy, but really didn't take much work. I salted the chicken breast and threw it in a bag with a bit of oil and white soy sauce, and then cooked it SV at 64C for an hour. After an hour, I added a few eggs to the water bath. While the chicken and eggs were cooking, I made some rice and threw the mushrooms in the oven after tossing them with some chicken fat.

At the end, it was just a matter of assembly. I mounded the rice in a ramikin and unmolded it into the bowl. Staggered the celery, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms and cubed chicken meat around the bowl. I brought the broth up to a boil and seasoned it with white soy sauce and a bit of salt. Poured in enough of the almost-boiling broth to come close to the top of the molded rice, scattered over some green onions, and added the egg yolk. Added a drizzle of sesame oil around the broth and it was done.

So yes, I suppose it was a lot of work. But I went pretty crazy on broth-based soups a few years ago, including a deep dive on ramen and pho. I would never have made this dish without having done that before, but after cooking enough stock over the years, cooking something like this didn't seem especially extravagant. If you make the broth consciously and in large quantity, by buying a bunch of chicken backs or wings just to make the liquid, it can be really easy to do. If you're just trying to make the most of a couple of birds, it's somewhat more work than the payoff (which is why buying extra wings to make stock is a great idea, but one I didn't follow this time). But the idea of making a non-cloudy chicken and rice soup got in my head, and I decided to run with it. I love a rustic soup and stew, but there's something really special about a bowl that's filled with artfully plated (or "bowled"?) and intensely flavored ingredients that have been cooked separately and then get brought together by a well-seasoned, aromatic broth. If you're a hobbyist cook, there are worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon.

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3 minutes ago, weinoo said:

Hey, I'm on your side here...

 

I have absolutely no objection to "broke down" and never mentioned it. I railed against unnecessary pronouns. There is a difference between breaking down a chicken and breaking a chicken!

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...your dancing child with his Chinese suit.

 

The Kitchen Scale Manifesto

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11 hours ago, eugenep said:

it still looks good - I mean - I would eat it. That leaf looks quite large in relation to all the other ingredients. 

 

I fold the ends in and roll up. Also I think this is generally referred to as perilla. Shiso is smaller.

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