melange

Sometimes you get so hungry everything sounds good.
So you take your favorite things and throw them in a pan.
Actually, this is quite nearly a perfect meal with no extra anything to go goofing it all up. And yet, could stand a little enhancement, like miso or cheese or sauce, without suffering the you-overdid-it-again syndrome.

Zo. I call it mélange for it is a mixture of all good things in the right combination.



What to do: Treat it like an American stir-fry. Have everything ready and toss them into the pan in the order you believe they'll cook. You have a margin of error and can pick out the mistakes you can't live with later.

A potato is unusual. I boiled it partially first, while the other items were being prepared. Broccoli first, then pork (dusted with flour), then the already cooked potato chunks then the rest, all of that in rapid succession. A gravy was prepared from the fond that remained in the pan, but this isn't necessary.

How do you do that? + a pat of butter, + tablespoon flour, +seasonings +liquid, in this case, white wine and duck broth, but it could have been milk or water or pretty much anything including beer.

peach pie

Look! I made an Islamic pie.

Rustic, with cherries.





The crust is butter cut into tiny cubes and smashed into flour with fingers. Ice water sprayed while stirring until it begins to clump. Should remain largely crumbly, that is, not a completely coherent blob of dough. +Salt +Sugar.



Filling, frozen peaches +frozen cherries
+raisins soaked in rum
+cinnamon +speck of clove +speck of nutmeg.
+sugar

eggs over easy, hash browns

+Denver bread (isn't sour)

sourdough bread

Denver culture.

Removed from refrigerator, over a few hours the reserved culture inflates the bag.↑

Fed 1 cup water + 1 cup flour↓


Fed 1+1/2 cup water + 1+1/2 cup flour
and about four hours went by ↓




This was weird. The sponge for this batch was chilled before its final proofing immediately after mixing to arrest its rising activity while it ages. The sponge, instead continued to rise throughout the chilling procedure so it was pretty much entirely spent by the time it was removed for actual proofing. The yeast culture seems particularly suited to cold temperature, so the next attempt to arrest the culture's proofing will have to be done at temperature even lower than a refrigerator.

omelette

Plain cheese omelette
on top of my favorite things
with some gravy first.

thin spaghetti dinner

This is indescribably simple to make.


Therefore, I shall describe it; thin spaghetti cooks fast. You don't need a ton of water because it bends almost immediately and it doesn't actually have to be at a roiling boil.

Heat up a few tablespoons of tomato pesto you made a long time ago out of tomatoes you roasted yourself along with a few tablespoons of store-bought tomato pesto, an Italian salsa, diced tomato in actuality that could be made easily enough by yourself, but this time out of a giant jar from Sam's Club.

Combine.

Add flecks of the King of All the Hard Cheeses, anything that's stamped and is not made by Kraft and does not come in a shiny green cylindrical tube

Take a single clove of garlic and release the enzymes that activate its defensive sulfide compounds by cutting it in half. Rub the cut garlic across the rough surface of toasted homemade Denver Sourdough bread™, like sandpaper, then drizzle with olive oil.

Click for slurpable splendiforisness.

chicken tempura

Psyche. Not really tempura but it might as well be. Dusted with flour then dipped in flavored batter. This can be done using one bowl. If some rice flour is used along with  ice water then it's tempura. If wheat flour and plain cold milk is used then it's regular old fried chicken, which is every bit as good as tempura any day, plus it gets you out of having to make an Asian dipping sauce, an advantage erased if you bother with a Western dipping sauce or gravy.

The trick is to make a loose batter then rub it off instead of just letting it drip off. This is faster than waiting for the last drop to fall off and it prevents bits from breaking off and burning in the oil. Rub off nearly all the batter. What you see above is the remnant of the batter dipping.  The thing that makes that ↑ so light is a speck of baking powder added to the flour.  Don't overdo it with the baking powder -- it'll turn to foam, and deep-fried batter foam is disgusting -- holds too much oil.  

Keep the oil at 350ºF

Gravy made using extra batter as a pre-made and pre-seasoned slurry. Heat butter in sauce pan, add chicken stock, here duck stock is used, remove from heat and with whisk flipping around, add batter by the tablespoon. Possibly as little as one single tablespoon. If lumps form just whisk them out, strain them, or eat them -- they're like tiny flavored dumplings.