The Real Cooking BeginsAfter a couple of weeks of false starts and refinement, we are finally in the new cooking routine for this project. As a recap, I am choosing dishes each week based on a random drawing from my stack of Hello Fresh recipes from the past few months. While I reserve the right to deviate from this stack specifically if it makes more sense financially or logistically, the goal is to make at least two meals a week that are either unfamiliar or force me to work on a skill that I have not yet mastered in the kitchen. After eating each dish, I and anybody else who has eaten it will rank it on a scale of 1 to 5 both on its taste and its presentation. Main Dish 1: Crispy Kickin' Cayenne Chicken CutletsOverviewThis recipe turned out significantly better than expected. Everything cooked remarkably well in the oven, and the sauce on top of the chicken was phenomenal. Even when I forgot to add the sauce for the following day's leftovers, though, the panko breading mixture served up enough flavor that it didn't even matter. The biggest flaw with the dish overall was one key mistake: we didn't actually make chicken cutlets. When completing this recipe with Hello Fresh, everything came pre-portioned and pre-cut. We knew that chicken breasts would be used for the cutlets, but I thought that there would be no need to cut the chicken down further in size. Turns out, that's exactly what a chicken cutlet is: a chicken breast cut in half lengthwise. The lack of actual "cutlet" making goes a long way to explaining why the chicken still felt a bit watery at times and as if it was too thick for the flavor to fully penetrate it the way it should have. The fact that the food was still as good as it was despite all this is a testament to its overall quality for sure. I would 100% make this recipe again, and I may even do so during this project to see if I can get its ranking even higher. Final ResultTASTE: 4/5 PRESENTATION: 4/5 Main Dish 2: Zucchini & Sun-Dried Tomato RisottoOverviewNote: As a complication to my originally-noted plan, from this recipe until an indeterminate date, my wife will not be able to rate any of these dishes because she is dealing with some stomach issues. So, this dish has an interesting history. This is one of the first recipes we ever made with Hello Fresh, and it was phenomenal. Hands down one of the best things I have ever cooked in my life. I was thrilled when this was one of the two recipes chosen for this week because I had been hoping to tackle this one again. But here's the problem with expectations like those: they were nearly impossible to meet. This dish was a monster to prepare. Without the ingredients portioned out, the prep alone took a half hour. And one thing to note about risotto is that there's no way to shortcut the process. There's no inactive time. One key part of its preparation is adding eight cups of warm water to the rice mixture one half cup at a time until the mixture sets. The process continues until you've gone through all your water. With all the set-up time involved in this process, it's no wonder that I found myself frustrated by the end. But it would've been worth it if the risotto had been as good as I remembered it. It wasn't. To be fair, I do know I made a few mistakes at the end, including adding the cream sauce later in the process than I was supposed to. Had that gone in earlier and had I been a little more generous with the salt and pepper, I might have been able to save it. What came out wasn't bad by any means, and I can have leftovers for the next couple of days because I made so much, but it still left me feeling a bit underwhelmed by the end of the week. Final ResultsTASTE: 3/5 PRESENTATION: 4/5 Other Meals for the WeekBesides the main dishes I made specifically with the project in mind, I also did some experimenting this week. I had a lot of leftover buffalo chicken from making buffalo chicken sweet potatoes last weekend, so I decided to make a variety of sandwiches this past week all using the leftover chicken to see what I could come up with. From a pure flavor standpoint, the final sandwich was undeniably the best, but using shredded buffalo chicken did make portioning out the ingredients inside (particularly the cheese) a bit messier than I had wanted. Of the four, I would definitely make that one again, though I think the second egg sandwich could have been enhanced with the addition of some buffalo sauce, hot sauce, or even some cooling agent (sour cream, mayo, or ranch) to bring out more of the flavor. OverallWhile the week began with a notable high and ended on a bit of an underwhelming note, I am overall pleased with my initial progress. I made more meals this week than I ate out anywhere else, thereby saving me some money (the one night we did eat out was my parents' treat), and I got to do a decent amount of experimentation with leftovers, ensuring that my initial prep for food had a use beyond one or two meals.
Next week will see us going back to some things that should be a bit simpler: Grilled Onion Hamburgers and Santa Fe Pork Tacos. Check back in then to see how I did.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMr. Barker is a high school English teacher, and this website is his contribution to his classes' Genius Hour projects. ArchivesCategories |