Get Your Popcorn Ready

Friday night marked a first for us on Boy's Cooking Night as we prepared a dinner for... GUESTS. It was only my parents, but still, it's a milestone. Anyhow, we opted to go with our go-to salad, the spinach-strawberry-almond with a maple-mustard dressing, and popcorn chicken with a variety of dipping sauces.

We'd been trying to get the boys to attempt the popcorn chicken for a while, but my oldest kept shooting it down. Finally this week he relented, and our first foray into poultry-cooking was on. Now normally my assistants are pretty overbearing and intrusively energetic, but on Friday it was a struggle to get people involved. It ended up kicking off with just me and the four-month old, but hey, he was ready to go.

Anyhow, I started by throwing together the salad and the dressing. Once again we opted to hold the garlic in our dressing mix. If I'm being honest, I haven't really missed it. So we got that out of the way pretty quick, and then it was time for the chicken, and my assistants slowly started trickling in. 

The dish was actually pretty easy to put together. We only had one wild card, and that was doubling the recipe to account for our extra people. Fortunately there weren't any odd fractions, so that made our lives pretty easy. HOWEVER, I didn't read the instructions and the olive oil that was supposed to go in the pan AFTER we mixed everything... went into our chicken mixture instead... Whoops.

Anyhow, after coating the chicken, we dunked it in our ziplock bag full of breadcrumbs, and the boys went to town shake & bake style. We had one near catastrophe when the first bag ripped, but we caught it early before dumping the entire dinner on the floor. Crisis averted.

Once our chicken was all mixed up, we set about making our dipping sauces. Being that none of us are into real spicy foods, we went with a honey mustard sauce and a curry mayonnaise. We even got Grandpa involved!

Finally, it was time to cook the chicken. It was here that I realized our mistake with the olive oil. Fortunately it didn't hurt us. We got off to a bit of a slow start, but eventually it all came together.

As far as how it tasted, I really thought it was one of our best dishes so far. The chicken turned out great and we had fans of both dipping sauces. Of everything we've cooked so far, I think this is the dish we're most likely to do again.

Grill vs Grille

My loving wife was good enough to point out to me that g-r-i-l-l-e does not spell "grill" as in cooking on a grill.

grille

/ɡril/

noun

1. a grating or screen of metal bars or wires, placed in front of something as protection or to allow ventilation or discreet observation.

grill

/ɡril/

noun

1. a metal framework used for cooking food over an open fire; a gridiron.

So when you're out throwing stuff on the barbecue, you're using a grill and not a grille. Learn something new every day!

Slip Slidering Away

I've never really been comfortable around gas grills, or just gas in general. Maybe it goes back to when my friend's house exploded in 5th grade. Or maybe it was that poor kid in the first Final Destination movie (Mom, don't watch it, you won't like it). Either way, over the years, I've built it up in my mind to where it's something that now intimidates me.

Actual footage of me starting a grill:



In any case, last night, it was me versus the grille as we attempted to make "sliders" or mini-hamburgers. This was our first cooking attempt where the boys actually got to work with raw meat and literally get their hands dirty. It got interesting when they immediately tried to wipe their hands on everything (shirts, countertop, etc), but we worked through it.

We started with 1.5 lbs of ground beef and per the recipe made 8 sliders. Meanwhile, we also cooked up some bacon in the oven, and got started on a waldorf salad. Instead of bleu cheese we went with a goat cheese because we weren't sure our kids would go for the bleu cheese chunks. Turns out they didn't like the goat cheese either. Can't win 'em all.

Our burgers turned out ok and I survived starting the grill (victory!) We definitely should've made the patties flatter as the burgers came out pretty thick. Our recipe also called for two teaspoons of oregano, and that taste was pretty strong, so I'm not sure we'd use that, or as much of that, in the future. The only real disappointment was that our store-bought buns, despite having an expiration date of the 29th of January, had molded. Fortunately my wife caught that BEFORE any of us ate it (but not before I took my pretty picture). So instead we had low-carb burgers! Nothing beats being accidentally healthy!

No Such Thing as Bad Pizza

It has long been a tradition in my family to have pizza on Friday nights. This was the way of things when I was growing up, and a tradition that my wife was good enough to carry on once we got married. Usually my wife's the one making the pizzas (that's right, plural), but now that 2019 has brought about Boys Night in the Kitchen, this time WE got to tackle the pizza making.

Now we cheated a little because our recipe called for store-bought pizza dough, and we instead called upon our ringer to whip up her standard dough for us. Then we set about making our pizzas. Our objective was little personal pizzas, and with my wife's dough recipe we had enough for about a dozen.

Things got interesting early on as my oldest decided that he wanted a heart shaped pizza. Okay, sure, no problem. So he - not clear if intentionally or not - made a heart-shaped dough. Then he decided he wanted a "red pizza". Tomato sauce and red bell peppers. Check and check. THEN he decided that there would be NO CHEESE. And we had a near meltdown about that. But to his credit, he ate his little red pizza, no problem. That said, technically, I'm not sure it still counts as a pizza...

piz·za

/ˈpētsə/

noun

1. a dish of Italian origin consisting of a flat, round base of dough baked with a topping of tomato sauce and cheese

Anyhow, we experimented with shredded mozzarella, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, black olives, leftover Italian sausage, pepperoni, bell peppers and tomato sauce to make a variety of dishes. While I don't think we won any awards for their appearances, all of our pizzas were edible so that counts for something.

Now to go alongside our pizza, we made a strawberry almond salad with a maple mustard dressing. This was not our first attempt to make this salad, and for a dish that doesn't require a lot of effort, it's actually pretty good. We did deviate slightly on our maple mustard dressing since the garlic clove it called for had started to sprout, but honestly there wasn't a huge difference in flavor.

So yeah, ultimately it was a successful evening and it even made for a good lunch the next day. Now I just have to earn my wife's trust enough that she'll let us try and make the dough!

Anybody Want a Peanut?

When you're cooking, it's important to remember that not everything you make is going to be a big hit. Last night was one of those nights for us. The boys and I attempted to make Nutty Noodles with a Garden Salad and Ranch Dressing from Deanna Cook's Cooking Class cookbook. The results were mixed...

It was definitely an educational experience for me though. Right out of the gate I found myself asking my wife lots of questions. For example, while I'm familiar with tablespoons and teaspoons and cups, I had never before measured anything by the sprig.

sprig¹

/spriɡ/

noun

1. 1. 

   a small stem bearing leaves or flowers, taken from a bush or plant.

   
   

   "a sprig of holly"

And that came up twice, both with the dill and the parsley. Then there was the question of how to prepare ginger root. That one required some internet research:



And then we also got some quality time with the garlic press and learned about what constitutes "1 clove" of garlic. Found this nugget online to clarify that:

"Remember that the large bulb of garlic you buy is NOT one 'clove'. The whole garlic is called a 'head' or 'knob'. Each small, individual segment of a garlic head is a clove."

So, as I said, it was a good learning experience. However from a quality of food standpoint, it was slightly less good. We started out by making the ranch dressing for our salad, and while it certainly tasted like ranch dressing, it was really thick and we had trouble pouring it. It kind of had the constitution of a mayonnaise (which makes sense since the bulk of the dressing was mayonnaise and sour cream) rather than a ranch dressing, so that was a little disappointing. The salad itself turned out fine, but that was really just a pile of vegetables and in fairness there wasn't much we could screw up there.

Where our dish really struggled though was our sauce for the noodles. The dish should've tasted like a phad thai, but our sauce was just way too thick. The peanut butter was not subtle at all and that dominated the flavor (and the texture).

I think we also could have done a better job dicing up our ginger. I think my eldest son's first bite had a chunk of ginger in it, and that turned him off of eating it for the rest of the night. We probably could've helped ourselves by adding more veggies to flavor the dish up as well. We added crushed peanuts (which made the already strong peanut taste even stronger), grated carrots, diced bell peppers and a hint of lime. But I think some broccoli or some of the other suggestions would have probably played better. Overall the dish wasn't terrible, but it certainly didn't have me brimming with a sense of accomplishment when we were done. That said, I ate leftovers for lunch today and didn't keel over dead, so it was a serviceable meal if nothing else.

In summary, our sauce needed to be saucier, we should've chopped our ginger a bit finer, and we should've added more veggies to give us some broader flavors. BUT we made our first dinner of 2019 and while we give my wife an absurd amount of dishes to clean, we did have a good time.

New Year's Day Breakfast

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to take a more active role in the kitchen. Normally, I'm allowed to make eggs in the morning, but that's about it. My wife had been reluctant to relinquish control of the cooking duties because of an unfortunate incident that occurred nearly a decade ago when - let's just say - I got a little too ambitious with my experimentation and she fell mildly ill as a result. Fast forward to today where we now have three young boys (5, 3 and 0) and she's understandably become a little more amenable to accepting some help. And lo, Friday Boy's Cooking Night was born.

We got a bit of a jump on the action this year thanks to the New Year's Holiday so our (my, since none of my helpers opted to participate) first foray into the kitchen in 2019 was the New Year's Breakfast. Rather than my go-to scrambled egg dish, we went a little more advanced with the First Order French Toast from the BB-ATE Star Wars Breakfast/Brunch Cookbook.

We opted to go with French Bread, which in hindsight may not have been the best choice. My thinking though was fairly simple minded. French Toast. French Bread. No brainer, right? Right???

Anyhow, a pound of French Bread goes a long way and the loaf itself was longer than our 9" x 13" baking dish. Even after eating the ends our 1" slices needed to be stacked (we had trouble with the "slight overlapping"). Because of our layering, the egg mixture was really prominent on the bottom level, and not so much on the top. Additionally, our cinnamon/sugar mixture wasn't evenly layered on all of the slices. If we do this dish again, I think we'll go with wheat bread as it's a bit denser (in my mind at least). I may also just try and take eight slices of bread since this is designed to make eight servings. They would certainly fit in the baking dish better.

Cooking-wise, we erred on the low side starting with 30 minutes and going up in 3-5 minute increments from there. I think closer to 40 minutes, with our oven at least, gets you in the ballpark, but it's also tough to say with the way our dish was layered.

Overall, I thought it turned out ok although it looked nothing like the picture in the book. My wife thought it should've been sweeter and I'd agree it's certainly not a dish I'd serve the kids without throwing some syrup on there. But hey, not a bad first effort. At least no one got sick!