Cooking Experiments: Kung Pao Chicken/Tangerine Beef, and ChefMongoose-style Omelettes

[tuftears]

You might recall from my other entry that I recently decided Chinese food was best cooked two entrees at a time. I decided the other weekend to continue that and selected 'Kung Pao Chicken' and 'Tangerine Beef' as my next Chinese meal.

So how'd I do?



Not so well, and not so bad. Oddly enough, this dinner actually tastes better when frozen and reheated. I don't understand it myself. But anyway, let me go over the individual parts.

The 'Kung Pao chicken' is really just stirfried chicken; it didn't get that unique caramelized spicy flavor that I wanted. I need to figure that out, it occurs a lot in Chinese food I enjoy, but it's hard to replicate. It tastes better when reheated though.

The 'tangerine beef' is made with 'Seville orange marmalade'. I won't be buying this marmalade again, unfortunately; I've realized that it's actually too bitter for my tastes. I was expecting a flavor more like strong orange marmalade. Still, like the chicken, it tastes better when reheated, so it's quite edible as such. Something about the microwave process helps complete the caramelization of the sauce.

And finally, the rice has a secret of its own: I used some leftover rice, crisped that in the oven at 400 degrees for about an hour, then crumbled it into freshly made brown rice. This time it worked out as I expected, giving the rice little crispy bits to contrast with the usual starchy texture. Was pretty good, but I think it's something you should only do if you just happen to have a little leftover rice, and you have to prepare more rice to have enough to go with your meals.

So let's go to the other meal I made: a ChefMongoose-style omelette.

Up to now, I'd always assumed omelettes were supposed to be thin egg wrappers around filling. Then ChefMongoose posted this Tweet. "What's this?" I asked. He explained that it was just a different style of omelette: he put the filling in first, then added the egg, then melted cheese on top and folded it once.

Well, I figured I'd give it a try and see if it was any sort of improvement. Here's mine:



This one has spinach and ham, my usual omelette filling; also a chicken-apple sausage and two English muffin halves topped with that Seville orange marmalade. (this is how I figured out it was the marmalade, not some deficiency of my cooking, that was making it bitter)

Verdict? Seems to work well enough. It's definitely a bit easier than trying to fold the egg over neatly as I do in this entry. No real difference flavor-wise though.

Comments

[centauress.livejournal.com]

I think we refer to that as the 'stew problem': Stew usually tastes better the day after, because the sauce has had time to soak into the meat and vegetables better. Traditionally the starting dish is cooked either a long time or the meat has been sitting marinating, right? I think there may be some bitter or sour flavors which degrade over time, too.

But I always find my stir fried stuff tastes better the next day and I've yet to solve that. Sammi usually does those dishes for us.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

They went straight into the freezer after cooking, so... I'm thinking more the microwave does something. ;) But it could be that the bitter flavors degrade as part of the process.

[rowyn]

I'll have to tell Lut about that omelet variant; he's been trying to make omelets lately and not always been happy with the results.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

It seems like cheating to me, but if ChefMongoose says they're legit, I won't argue. :)