Catching up on past and present cooking
Mar. 31st, 2012 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsIt's been a bit of a while, but no, I have still been cooking various things! Here, have some random pics and commentary.
This one's french toast made with the sausage bread I mentioned previously. Sadly, the remainder of the loaf developed mold shortly thereafter. Lesson learned: keep home-baked bread in the refrigerator!
This one's an effort at orange chicken. Sadly, I think I used too much cornstarch or something and the sauce never came out quite right. I want to nail that perfect restaurant-style orange sauce... Maybe it'd be easier to just buy that orange sauce by the jar.
Orange-teriyaki chicken! This came out a lot better, actually. I was surfing the web for some good tender chicken breast recipes and noticed one that called for poaching the chicken in the sauce, a cooking technique I had not previously tried. I was all set to do just that... Then a friend pointed out how much sodium that'd be. Yikes. They were right about that!
So I made the marinade with 2 tablespoons of teriyaki and about a cup of orange juice, then since there wouldn't have been enough liquid to poach the chicken, when I went to the poaching stage, I added another cup of chicken stock, poached for 20 minutes, took the chicken out, and boiled the carrots in the liquid, then added some corn starch at the end to turn it into a sauce. Worked pretty well, IMO! Actually it was a little too spicy-- too much crushed red pepper.
Today's effort! Actually last night and today. About 1.5 hours of simmering chopped carrots, celery, ground turkey, diced tomatoes, and Classico tomato-herb marinara sauce, then I cooked the noodles this morning and layered the pan with meat sauce, noodles, ricotta cheese, et cetera. Some pieces have already been cut off of the lasagna here.
The lasagna came out pretty well, but that's a lot of work, IMO for something that looks like it should be simple. O_o
I may try another stab at baked baus sometimes in the near future. I just need to figure out the filling...
This one's french toast made with the sausage bread I mentioned previously. Sadly, the remainder of the loaf developed mold shortly thereafter. Lesson learned: keep home-baked bread in the refrigerator!
This one's an effort at orange chicken. Sadly, I think I used too much cornstarch or something and the sauce never came out quite right. I want to nail that perfect restaurant-style orange sauce... Maybe it'd be easier to just buy that orange sauce by the jar.
Orange-teriyaki chicken! This came out a lot better, actually. I was surfing the web for some good tender chicken breast recipes and noticed one that called for poaching the chicken in the sauce, a cooking technique I had not previously tried. I was all set to do just that... Then a friend pointed out how much sodium that'd be. Yikes. They were right about that!
So I made the marinade with 2 tablespoons of teriyaki and about a cup of orange juice, then since there wouldn't have been enough liquid to poach the chicken, when I went to the poaching stage, I added another cup of chicken stock, poached for 20 minutes, took the chicken out, and boiled the carrots in the liquid, then added some corn starch at the end to turn it into a sauce. Worked pretty well, IMO! Actually it was a little too spicy-- too much crushed red pepper.
Today's effort! Actually last night and today. About 1.5 hours of simmering chopped carrots, celery, ground turkey, diced tomatoes, and Classico tomato-herb marinara sauce, then I cooked the noodles this morning and layered the pan with meat sauce, noodles, ricotta cheese, et cetera. Some pieces have already been cut off of the lasagna here.
The lasagna came out pretty well, but that's a lot of work, IMO for something that looks like it should be simple. O_o
I may try another stab at baked baus sometimes in the near future. I just need to figure out the filling...
