Sometimes I love spending hours and hours in the kitchen, but often, especially on weeknights after coming home from work, I want to be done with dinner fast. After being in a restaurant kitchen and watching chefs cook, it gave me a new perspective on my own kitchen. It isn't really a secret. But growing up, cooking was just that, and not much thought was given to why things are done a certain way, but rather it was simply doing things the way previous generations of women (my mom, my grandmothers and other female relatives) had done. With new gadgets, better technologies, simply more space in my kitchen (compared to my grandmother's that measures 2 by 2 meters/about 6 by 6 ft!) and just having the financial means to acquire more and better tools, the new name of the game is efficiency.
This is what I saw in a professional kitchen: organization and prep work go a long way. And there actually is little magic done when it comes to cooking, but because all is planned and well orchestrated, the end result may seem magical. Of course, when it comes to home cooking, nobody is going to start doing prep work for you at early morning for the dinner service (such as cleaning all the ingredients, cutting produce, cleaning fish, prepping meat, etc), nor is it really necessary because of the scale - restaurant serves many meals each night, we only serve one.
However I still find that principals governing restaurant kitchen are applicable at home. It goes without saying that organized pantry is a must as well as organizing various cooking utensils and placing them strategically around the kitchen. And just as important is planning ahead, if you want to enjoy cooking and having a great meal and then still have time left over in the evening for the rest of your life. For example, it is so helpful to prepare your sauces ahead and just store them properly (refrigerate necessary portions for use within next few days, freeze the rest - it helps to freeze in suitable portions so as not to defrost the entire batch, but only the right amount). And there is absolutely nothing wrong with cooking for couple of days ahead and eating leftovers. I have been raised where wasting food is absolutely unacceptable, and only time food gets thrown out is when it is spoiled, which would be a rare occasion because it is equally unacceptable to let food spoil in the first place. Therefore I have little to no respect for people who throw food out simply because it is leftovers and they refuse to eat it the next day.
I do understand wanting to eat variety however, and it may get boring to eat the same dish two days in a row. But it is certainly no excuse for wasting perfectly good food. This is where some more planning comes in. It is easy to cook some basic yet delicious dish that can be transformed the next day. Tonight's dinner is one such example.
Chicken livers
Prep work - cut onions, mince garlic, cut livers:
Heat some oil on a pan (I used olive oil) on medium-high, when hot, add garlic, stir and fry until it just starts to brown, then add onions:
Fry for about 5 mins, until onions start becoming slightly translucent, then add livers. While stirring frequently, fry for about 10-15 mins (I like the pieces of livers to start breaking up a bit):
Season with salt and pepper to taste. I have recently cooked my first ever mole Poblano (delicious!) and am now quite taken by the mixture of flavors that hot chillies and chocolate produce, so to spice up this otherwise very plain dish so far, I added some cayenne pepper powder and some bitter sweet chocolate (you can add a whole piece, but I would recommend breaking it up in smaller pieces or grating it into a bowl and adding it to taste bit by bit), also, not pictured, I added a bit later some chipotle chilli powder, which provided nice smokiness to the dish.
After dish is seasoned to taste, take off heat. Not only is this our dinner tonight, this liver mixture will be the stuffing for my take on chiles rellenos tomorrow night. Like I said, plan ahead!
While onions were cooking, I diced bell pepper, and while liver was cooking I sauted it in some olive oil, add a bit of salt:
Sona masoori rice was prepared in rice cooker (types of rice, rice preparation and reviews of the rice cookers we went through deserve a separate blog post, to come later). Plated dish consisted of bed of rice, chicken livers on top, then bell peppers and finally previously prepared mole Poblano on top:
(I promise to work on my photography of food, as I'm pretty excellent in photography in general but food photography is new to me).
Despite not the most appealing look on the picture above, and not trying too hard to plate perfectly so a casual meal, the dish was actually very tasty, flavors worked well, and mole Poblano was the perfect touch to an otherwise too plain of a dish.
My Modernist Cuisine reading today
Shyam was kind enough to give me a wonderful present: Modernist Cuisine book. I've been reading it and am now in volume 2, chapter on Traditional Cooking. Overall a fantastic book, and I keep learning a lot of new information about cooking. Section I've read today is about canning. Surprising thing I learned today, among many others, is the following:
"If you open a jar of canned food and see mold on the surface, the food is bad; toss it out. This is particularly true for jams and jellies. Had sterilization occured, the mold would not be there. The claim that you can scrape the mold off and the food will be safe is a myth. Molds often produce microscopic, root-like filaments that penetrate into the food below the surface. These filaments can produce metabolites known as mycotoxins that may cause genetic mutations and cancer."
I guess that chance of getting that kind of food poisoning is small, and I have eaten home-cooked jams that did have mold on top, but grandma would just scrape it off, and we all enjoyed it. Who knew we were playing with fire...
New toy of the day
And lastly I will leave you off with a new "toy" that our kind UPS man brought to our door today:
This is a terrine dish with press from Le Creuset. I still have plenty of that 2lbs chunk of foie gras left that was needed for one of the dishes for our Valentine's Day dinner (Thank you, TAG, for the wonderful class and for help acquiring the aforementioned foie gras!), so plan is to make some Terrine de Foie Gras this weekend. I will surely share that adventure with you, as I've never prepared foie gras pate in my life.
Good night for now!
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