Cooking Thread~ Recipes & Things

Chicken-Vegetable Soup

I've binged Bourdain (rest in peace, you bastard) and Ruhlman's books this past few days. So when I made today's soup I tried to apply some of the technique and the result is much better than expected. I decided to write it down, but who knows - maybe it'll be useful to you, too.

Serve three to five meals.

INGREDIENTS:

Stock:
1 piece of chicken. I use a thigh, both lower and upper.
1 small onion. I use red onion - I honestly don't know if it's onion that just happened to be colored red or an enlarged small shallot.

Starch:
1 potato, small-medium.
1 carrot, small-medium.

Fibers:
4 sheets of big napa cabbage - feel free to swap with other brassica, as needed.
1 large chinese celery. Probably possible to replace with other celery, as needed.
1 small sweet(?) corn.

Seasoning:
3 small shallots.
4 cloves of garlic.
2 bay leaves.
Fish sauce, as needed.
Salt, as needed.
Pepper, as needed.
MSG, as needed.

Make Stock:
1. Wash chicken. Roast 'em until they just beginning to caramelize - thirty minutes on my air fryer, at 200C, but do it however you like it.
2. Put roasted chicken to pan. Cover with water. Doesn't have to be cold, but it shouldn't be hot.
3. Add salt. It can be hard to determine how much is needed at this stage unless you have experience, so err on being cautious.
4. Put pan to the stove. Turn it on. You want to aim temperature where it's hot enough you can't hold the pan, but not hot enough it'll boil. On my gas stove, it's literally the lowest setting short of turning it off.
5. Leave it for 3-4 hours.
6. The water will be reduced; you can add more to previous level as needed. I did it once, but after it got reduced again I decided it's sufficient and take the pan off the stove.
7. Take the chicken, set aside; if you want to store the stock, wait until it's cool before pouring it on convenient container.

Make stock, redux:
1. Put/keep your chicken stock on the pan.
2. Chop onion. Put chopped onion to the stock.
3. Strip chicken meat from bone. Cut meat, roughly. Put both meat and bone to the pan.
4. Put bay leaves to the pan.
5. Put pan to the stove. Same instruction as above - keep it hot, but not boiling (it's best to use drinkable water for this)
6. While stock is being made, it's time to prepare everything else:

Mise-en-Place:
1. Take other ingredients - make sure they're within reach.
2. Wash, clean, and peel everything, as needed. You want to do chopping/crushing later, however.
3. Put washed, cleaned, and peeled veggies and seasoning nearby.

Starches:
1. Cut potato and carrot. You can just add them to the pan immediately, if you want.
2. Set the stove to higher temperature. Aim for simmering.

Fibers:
1. Dehull corns. Set aside.
2. Chop cabbage. Set aside.
3. Cut shallots. Set aside.
4. Crush and cut garlic. Set aside.
5. Cut celery. Set aside.

Finishing:
1. Check on potato and carrot in the pan. If they are fork-soft, then put the rest of vegetables.
2. Taste the broth. Add salt, MSG, fish sauce, as necessary.
3. After it's boiled once, the soup is done. Turn off stove.
4. Take the bay leaves and chicken bones out (unless you want to eat/suck on the bones, I suppose).
5. Taste the broth. Add pepper, or other seasoning as needed.

 

Here's a recipe for some South-East Asia-nised Meat sauce for pasta

Tomato n Chilly meat sauce.

Ingredient Proportion based on the meat component

• 1X Minced Meat, Pork in my case(Salt+oregano+Oyster sauce marinade for 1 hour)
• 0.3 -0.5X minced Onion/Garlic , personally put it in blender it's easier that way
• 0.4X Carrots
• 0.2X of quartered tomato,
• 0.1X of canned Tomato purree
• 0.1-0.2X Chilly sauce as preferred
• Oregano + Thyme + Water + Sugar + Salt + any other herbs + Vinegar for seasoning to taste at the end

Bottled Chilly sauce for reference

Spoiler

Steps

1. Fry the onion/Garlic for a minute
2. Add n Stir the carrots for a couple of minute
3. Add , Stir, and break apart the meat for another 2-3 minutes
4. Add and stir the tomato Puree for a couple of minutes
5. Add n stir quartered tomatoes, you can immediately proceed to
6. Add water until it reached your desired ratio/thiccness of liquid to Solid
7. Add n Stir Chilly sauce , Proceed immediately to next step
8. Simmer for 5-10 minutes until everything is well cooked, stir occasionally as needed.
   1. Add additional seasoning/ingredients as prefered.
   2. Typically I add more sugar.
9. Sauce is now ready to serve with pasta.

Background
Chili Sos is the most accessible form of concetrated flavour, especially in the case in Malaysia where tomato quality is not consistent.

Canned tomato + Sugar+ Cut tomato gives it some of that tomato flavour without overspending on tomatoes.

You can technically replace the meat with any type of protein that breaks down into that pebbles of protein for texture as the oyster sauce adds the umami.

This is a very chinese way of cooking since it relies on adding premade sauces/purees to up complexity without spending on expensive/non-native ingredients.

 

Thought I'd toss my hat in the ring with:

Basic bitch Indian-style omelet

Ingredients (For one egg. Scaling up is easier than scaling down)

- 1 Tablespoon oil, butter, or whatever fat you use for cooking. If you have a nonstick, use the fat anyways, just drop it down to a teaspoon instead. The oil is as much for flavor as lubrication
- 1/8 to 1/6 onion, diced small works best, but sliced is fine too. My own recommendation is to go with a mild onion, or if using a red onion then to brown it first to cook off the raw onion taste.
- 1 green chilli, sliced
- 1/8 to 1/6 tomato, diced into small cubes. Note, you're making an omelet with stuff in it, not stuff with an egg binding.
- A small bunch of coriander leaves, plucked from their stems (you can leave these out if you like)
- Pinch of red chilli powder (that's 1/8th of a teaspoon for those pinchically challenged like myself)
- Up to 1/4 teaspoon of salt (adjust as per preference)
- 1 egg. Of course
- Splash of water


Recipe

- Those ingredients owe you money (except for the oil, he's good on his debts, never misses a payment or is late). Toss 'em in a bowl and beat them until everything's mixed thoroughly together. There should be no streaks of whites left in there. The water helps loosen things up.
- Heat up the oil on medium heat. In the pan, of course—we don't want any reports of arson.
- Once the oil is hot, turn the heat down to low and add in the egg mixture. Don't pour from too high up, that'll force the oil out from underneath and lead to stickage. Try to bring the bowl as close to the pan as possible. Using a spoon, wooden or otherwise, try to distribute the mixture as evenly as you can manage. Trying the French method of "push the edges and tilt the pan" won't work here, since it'll just smoosh all the ingredients in the center and leave you with a sad omelet. Also, try not to spread the omelet too thin—this needs to flip, and if it's too thin then it'll rip.
- Fry the omelet until the top seems set, then flip. Cook the other side as well. Note that the eggs need to be set before you can flip, or else the omelet rips. Also, lightly jiggling the pan helps keep
- Cook both sides brown. Think "milk coffee", not "loam". You want color here, don't be scared to lift the eggs slightly to check for doneness. Black is burnt. Black is bitter. Black is bad.
- Serve hot with a paratha and tea. Eat with your hands, you can wash 'em later.


Notes

- This is basically a flat frittatta. It just tastes more "Indian" because we're using red chilli powder instead of black pepper, and there's green chillis and coriander leaves in there.
- You can adjust the salt as you please, just don't try to undersalt it. The salt helps balance out the bite of the red chilli powder. Without it, the chilli powder just makes the thing taste horribly sharp.
- This tastes absolutely heavenly with pickled green mangoes, but exercise caution when eating Indian style pickles. These are made in mustard oil, not vinegar, and they tend to smell. While not as sour smelling as vinegar, and in my opinion much more pleasant, the smell from these pickles lingers horribly, and even washing your hands with soap and brushing your teeth can't remove the smell. If you want to try them, make sure to handle them at a distance, and make sure you're not gonna be meeting company afterwards—even for people here in the subcontinent, that smell is just impolite.

 

I found this recipe online and it's pretty good

I usually make the 30's version but I make the 40's one every now and then.

People got really creative with peanut butter and potatoes during the depression

 

If you use watermelon radish instead of daikon, substitute vegetable bouillon for chicken, and use a teaspoon or so of miso instead of the butter, you wind up with a result that looks and tastes an awful like a beef steak despite being entirely vegetarian.

Just confirmed. It was delicious.

 

https://www.seriouseats.com/korean-corn-cheese-5196495

You don't really need a cast iron skillet. Broiling it is nice but hardly required. I do strongly recommend adding some processed cheese or sodium citrate.

I prefer making mine with gochugang, which is the pepper version of doenjang, but it's still not all that hot.

Adding some meat is also pretty good and there is a somewhat related recipe using chicken, but you have to brown & cook the meat separately.

If nothing else, some doenjang or gochugang combined with 'real' cheese and a bit of process cheese makes a flavorful cheese sauce.