Sephy’s Platzish

So, on Monday, I mentioned making a special meal on Christmas. This meal was supposed to involve white wine and olive oil. Well, I did try to make the meal - and as I mentioned on Tuesday, kind of messed up the wine selection.

Instead of getting a white wine, I wound up getting Yellow Tail Shiraz - for some reason I thought it was a white wine - it looked clear in the store, but I’m not sure if that was just me wanting to get out of the nutty store as soon as possible on Christmas Eve, or me just proving that I’m Mr. Clueless when it comes to wine again.

Anyway, later on on Monday, I look at the bottle and see that it was, in fact, a red. Well, by this time, all of the shops were closed, and I knew that the bottle shop in town would be open on Tuesday - I checked in to see if, just on some off chance, they’d have a cheaper price on wine, but in fact, the grocery store’s prices were significantly cheaper - for Yellow Tail, the difference was about $4 per 750mL bottle!  Instead of going out and spending more money, I decided to go ahead with trying this dish with the wrong wine, just to see how it came out.

One thing that I didn’t realise with this particular brand of wine was that it was a standard bottle - with a cork in it. As you might guess, we didn’t have a corkscrew here, so I had to make an emergency run over to Walgreen’s (after checking their website to make sure they had them) so that I could pick up one.

I get home, and open the bottle - the scent wasn’t bad, so I decided to try some. Boy, oh boy is that stuff bitter! After one or two sips, I could take it no longer and left it go for cooking. After the experience I had with the chicken cacciatore (where the chicken had changed tints to an unattractive grayish-red color), I decided that I’d put in a buffer for the chicken.

The recipe goes like this - mix about 1 cup wine with 1/2 cup olive oil, a couple of cloves of garlic, along with herbs, juice from a lemon (and a lime if you like), plus salt and pepper. I mixed all that together in a bowl, then put it in a dish lined with aluminum foil - I didn’t want to stain the dish with the red wine. On the bottom of the pan, I had put a layer consisting of a sweet potato that I’d had for quite a while but was still good and a zucchini, diced into large chunks. Over that, I put the chicken and then covered the whole lot with another piece of aluminum foil, and put it in a 350°F oven for an hour.

As the hour came to a close, I went in to check on it, and it looked good - the wine/oil mixture was boiling away in the enclosure, and everything looked to be done.  I take it out of the oven, and the zucchini had soaked up quite a bit of the liquid - it had turned red from the wine. I then put it onto two plates, for separating the meal apart - I wound up being bad and having both breasts I cooked, but left some of the veggies because they were really tasting of the wine. Honestly, it wasn’t that good of a taste - one that I’d not want to repeat, at least without some adjustment.

So, tonight, I went for plan B. That involved taking the leftover veggies and roasting them with a couple more pieces of chicken (so that, this time, I’ll have some chicken for lunch tomorrow) in an open pan, again lined with aluminum foil because it is just that much easier to cook with. I also threw in a regular potato and roasted that using basically the same recipe as above, just minus the wine, and using exclusively lime juice.

That’s what it looked like in the oven - I have to say that the roasting didn’t really help out the veggies that were soaked in wine - it still had a very bitter taste, which I have to say was kind of a disappointment. The good news, however, was that the chicken was very moist and tasty and the white potatoes were very good, but could have used a bit more of a “roasted” taste.

I think for now I’ll stick to what I know - which is dry cooking, ok?

One of my favorite things to make is a simple base for what could be considered a white sauce, but it isn’t a sauce - cream cheese and sour cream. When put together in equal amounts, the resulting flavor combination is pretty darn good.

In fact, you can make some great dips from this combination - add in some taco seasoning, and you have a simple taco dip. If you’re serving it for a party (or just want to spruce up a night in ), layer the dip, then some shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, finely diced fresh tomatoes, and if you want, black olives (either sliced or diced). You can also put on green onions, and try out some other flavors such as some chopped cilantro to make it a more authentic taste (and a whole bunch of aroma). This dip goes perfectly with your favorite tortilla chips (personally, I have fallen in love with salt-free chips - they actually allow the flavor of the salsa or dip you’re using to come through, and not get distracted by the saltiness).

However, there’s another really awesome thing that you can do with this same combination. Mix the sour cream and the cream cheese together in a mixing bowl, then stir in some chopped olives and some shredded cheese (generally cheddar, but I think a good Monterey Jack or even one of those “Mexican” blends you see in the store now). Next, taking some soft flour tortillas - a recommendation on that would be to use the pre-refrigerated types like Aztec and to use the larger sizes, such as burrito size - spread the mixture over the tortilla. Roll it up, then you can either store it whole for later consumption, or you can pre-slice it for serving at a party. Serve with salsa on the side.

A note on yields - a combination of 8oz cream cheese and 8oz sour cream (appx 227g) will yield around 8 full tortillas for rolling up. Of course, I’ll get some flack for saying this but this recipe does work very well using fat free versions of both sour cream and cream cheese. Also, preparation is made easier when the cream cheese is softened - the best way to do that is to either leave it out for a couple of hours to get up to room temperature, or stick it in the microwave (on a microwave safe plate or bowl if it’s a block; you can use the container if it’s “spreadable” cheese) for about 15 seconds on high (that’s at 700 watts, for 1100 watts that’d be 10 seconds).

Try it out at your Christmas parties this year. You will definitely like it!

It’s something I did last year, and considering that it’s now 5 days since the holiday, I better get this posted. Without further ado, the State of the Turkey, 2007 edition. Now, with side dishes

 The Turkey

State 1: Just before cooking, with a lemon on the inside. Seasoning is with poultry seasoning and ground black pepper.

State 2: Right after taking out of the oven, with the temperature gauge still in it. It had to sit for about 20 minutes to rest.

State 3: Believe it or not, this is how it looked right after I did the first cut of the carving instructions. The instruction was to pull the bird out of the pan. All that came out of the pan was the chest.

State 4: What’s left in the pan after taking out the breast; thighs and legs, and wings. The dark meat was really moist

State 5: A note to you and your family, when there are hungry people who mostly eat the white meat, don’t worry about the stuff on the left side of the plate. (As it is, I eat the white meat, but I have a good excuse - the carving guide I was using said that you were supposed to do the thighs first )

State 6: The leftovers. This time, there was less left over (though the fact that the bones went AWOL after the carving didn’t hurt that cause), so we kept it all.

Side Dishes

Two of the traditional side dishes at Thanksgiving are stuffing and pumpkin pie. Last year, I was in charge of the pumpkin pie and kind of misread the instructions, and made a sugar free pie. Needless to say, it didn’t taste the greatest…I redeemed myself this year

Stuffing

A couple of pictures of the stuffing - we don’t put it in the bird, but cook it on the oven and let it heat up through the day. The recipe isn’t written down, but we do it from memory for the most part. My favorite part is grinding the stuff up by hand.

Frying up the ground chicken gizzards, onion and ground beef; interestingly you don’t drain the fat from it. I wonder how much different it would be if you did…

Everything’s been mixed together, after grinding up some fruits and veggies, mixing in some chicken stock and one egg. We also add poultry seasoning, salt and pepper.

Pumpkin Pie

It’s just a simple recipe, off the side of a can of packed pumpkin; here it is in the made-from-a-box pie shell, just after coming out of the oven.

There was also a chocolate pudding pie, which didn’t do a good job of filling the pie crust, so we decided to fill up the rest of the pan with chocolate Cool-Whip which didn’t do that bad of a job of filling in the space. Interestingly, we didn’t open the can of cranberry sauce, which didn’t seem to be missed terribly much (it never really is eaten all too much here anyway…)

I’m going light on the serious content today since it’s a holiday

All I’m going to show you are a couple of pictures I took today, as a hint of what’s coming up in the next couple of days

It didn’t stay this way for too long

Also, something happened last night, and I took a walk to see how things shaped up; I’ll post a couple of more pictures on Sunday, but here’s a taste:

Sorry bout the motion blur y’all, it was cold

Jamie Oliver is known for making simple food; I’ve done up one of his recipes in the past - lemon stuffed chicken in a simple dough. It’s been a while since I’ve made some of his recipes.

However, something I didn’t realize (mostly because I don’t watch much TV, especially breakfast TV), is that he’s a regular guest on NBC’s Today Show. Yesterday, I was perusing their site to find video of a completely different feature to any of the cooking stuff, but one thing popped out at me - Chef Jamie’s chicken recipes.

I go to watch it and they’re just amazing recipes, though the folks don’t quite do everything right, there are some great ways to make chicken. Unfortunately, I can’t embed the videos here, but I can give you a link to it, and a little bonus, an interesting cooking segment from earlier in the show, the team, along with Robin Williams, making lamb shank.

As you might expect, there’s a bit of fun along the way with Robin in the room. However, the recipe does look really good to make, the only issue being to find lamb shank in the store.

Though the first dish I want to try is the Roast chicken breast with lemony Bombay potatoes, I might just try to get that done tonight, but I don’t know…

Try chef Oliver’s lamb shanks (4:3)

Chef Jamie’s chicken recipes (widescreen)