Blizzard Wednesday

There was a blizzard in NYC yesterday and as I was marching home, though the snow in with my pink galoshes, I was thinking about what I am going to do for dinner. I didn’t want to stop at Food Emporium because they would probably be out of everything and it was so gross out I just wanted to get warm and dry. Luckily, I always have some bone in chicken breasts in my freezer. When these babies go on sale I like to stock up and they are just perfect for a quick meal. I had some baby carrots in my fridge from last weekend and rice again to finish off the meal.

Roast Chicken

Ingredients:

2 bone-in Chicken Breasts
1 TBL of Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper

Directions:

Pat the chicken dry with a paper towel. This is very important to get the skin crisp. Even if you don’t eat the skin, it keeps the meat nice and moist. Preheat oven to 400°.

Sprinkle chicken with olive oil and liberally season with salt and pepper. Rub chicken with your hands ot make sure chicken is coated.

Pop in the oven for about 30 minutes, or until internal temp reaches 155°. Place with aluminum foil and rest for 10 minutes.

Roasted Carrots

I did the same thing to the carrots I did with the chicken. Coat in olive oil and season with salt and pepper. If you have other spices such as rosemary or thyme you can add those as well. Rub with your hands to make sure everything is coated and bake for about 20 min in a 400° oven or until brown.

White Balsamic Rice

Ingredients:
1 shallot. chopped
½ cup of rice
½ cup of white balsamic vinegar
1 TBL of olive oil
¼ cups of chicken stock
Salt and pepper

Directions:

Heat medium sauce pan to med-high heat and add the butter and shallot. Sweat the shallot until translucent. Add the rice and stir to coat. Add the white balsamic vinegar and cook until all liquid is gone.

Next, add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cover. Cook for about 15 minutes stirring once or twice. Remove from heat and let stand another 5 minutes still covered. Fluff up with a fork when ready to serve.

Weeknight Risotto

One day BP II and I were wandering around Whole Paycheck and there was a sale on Arborio rice which is perfect for risotto. I had leftover shrimp from the shrimp and orzo dish I made a bit ago and decided that a shrimp risotto would be a nice weeknight meal. I have actually never made a risotto and was excited to try it out. I used the basic recipe from my Mark Bittman book and risotto does not require a lot, actually most ingredients are in your cupboard. But boy is it a lot of work. I stood over my hot stove for 30 minutes constantly stirring this rice plus the heat from my 400° oven. It was HOT!. Towards the end, my arm was quite fatigued. But the end result was very yummy and well worth the heat and fatigue. I will definitely make this again and what is nice, is that you can just throw anything in at the end. Leftover veggies or maybe some herbs and cheese, lots of things you can do with this basic recipe. You can even use it as an upper arm workout.

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups of Arborio rice
4-6 cups of chicken broth
3 TBL of butter
1 med onion, chopped
½ cup of white wine
½ pound of raw shrimp
1 TBL olive oil
Salt and pepper

Directions:

Place shrimp on a baking sheet and drizzle will olive oil and season generously with salt and pepper. Preheat oven to 400° and set aside.

Heat a Dutch oven to medium heat and add 2 TBL of butter. When melted add onion and sweat until soft, about 4 minutes. Next add rice and stir until rice becomes glossy and is well coated with the butter/ onion mixture. Add ½ cup of white wine and stir until evaporated.

Next, add 1 ladle full of chicken broth and stir constantly or rice will stick to the bottom. Once first ladle is evaporated add another. Continue to do this for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes stat to taste the rice, keep adding ladles of chicken broth until the rice is soft on the outside but still maintains a bit on the inside.

After the rice has been cooking for about 10 minutes, pop the shrimp in the 400° oven for 10 minutes. The shrimp should be pink and have a slight browning to them when done.

When rice reached desired consistency, still in last tablespoon of butter and season with salt and pepper. Finally, add the shrimp to the rice and stir to incorporate. Serve immediately.

Superbowl Sunday Bagels

Awhile ago my mom suggested that I learn to make bagels. I am a carbohydrate addict and absolutely love bagels. Apparently, my mom used to make them all the time but that mysteriously stopped once I was born. Anywhoo, I woke up unexpectedly early on Sunday morning and decided to try and make these bagels. They looked deceivingly simple. Flour, yeast, sugar, vegetable oil, salt and warm water. Creating the dough was a lot like making a pie dough. The ingredients came together nicely and these bagels tasted really good if I do say so myself. Although, they did not turn out perfectly round. I think that is a technique I need to work on. The recipe called for wrapping the dough around your wrist and all this crazy stuff. I just made little balls and stuck my thumb though the center. These only take an hour and are totally worth it.

Homemade bagel recipe

Ingredients:
4 cups bread flour
1 Tbls sugar
1 1/2 tsps salt
1 Tbls vegetable oil
2 tsps instant yeast
1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water.

Directions:

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. You don't have to worry about soaking the yeast when you use instant yeast (most yeast sold these days is instant yeast). The dough should feel stiff, but add the extra water if it's really stiff, or you can't get all the dry flour incorporated.

Plop the dough down onto the counter, and knead for about ten minutes, or until the dough is uniform and smooth.



Cut the dough into 8 equal sized balls, and let rest for 10-20 minutes.

Pre heat your oven to 425.

Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together. Once the dough is fused, you should have a perfectly circular bagel-to-be! This is the only part of the process that can take a little practice before your bagels will look really professional. Don't get discouraged if they don't look perfect, it just takes practice!



Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.

After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it's time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.

Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they're done!

Let them cool for at least 20 minutes, get the cream cheese ready, and feast on what's got to be one of the best weekend brunch treats possible!

To Tip or Not to Tip?

I never really thought about tipping someone when I ordered takeout. I figure that I am paying for the food and not really receiving any service. It is like ordering McDonalds, you wait in line, give your order to the person behind the counter, pay, and wait until food is ready. That is it. You would never tip a McDonalds employee for “preparing” your food. I am not saying that I am right. I tend to be super awkward are generally do not know when it is appropriate to tip. For instance, I did not know I should tip my super during the Holidays. (Luckily, I was told by my coworkers and this holiday season my super was tipped.) I also think people are a little tip happy in America. We have to tip everyone. From cab drivers to the people you do your nails. Again, I might be a selfish brat who doesn’t think of other people but honestly, I am just trying to make ends meet myself. All and all it is an interesting article that generally agrees that if the person did not perform a service, like cleaning your table or serving your food, they should not receive a tip. Interestingly though, I took the survey and it seems people are almost dead even between tip all the time and no takeout tippers.


What Can I Get You Folks? - Tipping on Takeout

by Hanna Raskin, Posted Feb 3rd 2010 @ 4:00PM

Photo: passiveaggressivenotes, Flickr

"Tipping may be contentious, but it's generally not too complicated. Most diners today are in the habit of adding at least 15 percent to their bills for the luxury of not having to pour their own drinks, fetch their food from the kitchen or clear their table at the end of their meal.

But even practiced tippers continue to struggle with what may very well be the most complex tipping quandary for restaurant-goers: Should one tip on takeout?

Here's why the problem's so advanced: It forces the customer to evaluate what's happening behind the scenes, a tricky proposition even for seasoned industry insiders. Since no server is going to bore you with the details of how your order was taken, placed, boxed and bagged, it's up to you to figure out whether anything tip-worthy transpired.

Tip-haters will be delighted to know I don't think there's generally anything wrong with skipping the tip on a to-go order. My fellow servers and I expect to be tipped on things like knowing the menu, anticipating diners' needs and keeping the dining room spotless – all of which are irrelevant in a take-out situation. While I'm quite sure there isn't a server anywhere who'd turn down a tip, few servers plan to get rich handing bags to customers.

If customers sense that their to-go orders might have chipped away at a server's time (which really does equal money in the restaurant biz), leaving a tip is the right thing to do. An astounding number of take-out customers will call a restaurant during dinner rush and ask whoever answers the phone to read the entire entrée section aloud -- and then check whether there's peanut oil in the salmon.

Most restaurants allow their servers to ring up to-go orders in such a way that they aren't penalized for the sale by having to report it to the IRS or calculate it into their end-of-shift tip-out. If your order's waiting for you at the bar, it's a fairly safe bet that nobody will suffer if you leave the tip line blank.

But if you arrive at a restaurant to find a server hustling off the floor to package your spaghetti, that's probably worth a dollar or two. Similarly, if a server offers to carry your food to your car, there's nothing wrong with expressing your gratitude in cash. Take-out orders don't require tips – but that shouldn't stand in the way of acknowledging good service. "

Do you tip on takeout?

Of course. It's the least I can do for people who don't make much in wages. 1900 (41.6%)

Never. If I haven't been served a drink or had my plate cleared, what's the point? 2112 (46.2%)

I never thought about it, but maybe now I will. 560 (12.2%)

The Jewish French Toast

After the steak incident, I thought I needed to earn some girlfriend points back. It was a restless night and early morning for us. BP II was hungry because he technically had not eaten since breakfast the day before but was still hesitant to eat anything I made. (He stills says that I poisoned him.) BP II thought he could muscle down some French toast and with my guilt; I was more than happy to oblige. I grew up in Pennsylvania and went to Catholic school all my life. I even went to a Catholic College for heaven’s sake. That being said, I never really knew any Jewish people. So when I moved to New York, I really didn’t know how wonderful Jewish breads were. It actually wasn’t until my roommate started to date her boyfriend, who happened to be Jewish, that I was introduced to Challah bread.

Challah bread is used in the Jewish tradition on the Sabbath to represent the manna that fell from the heavens when the Israelites were wandering around the dessert with Moses after their exile from Egypt. Because manna did not fall on the Sabbath, this was God’s day of rest, a double portion would fall the day before. The Challah is a double braided loaf of bread that symbolizes the double portion of manna that God provided for the Israelites. (An interesting note: According to the bible when the Israelites would store extra manna on any other day, it would spoil. God would be displeased and through Moses would scorn the Israelites for not believing that God would provide for them.)

Challah bread is fantastic for French toast. I am not sure why but this bread stands up to the egg mixture and still maintains its soft center. It is actually best to keep the bread out the night before and let it go stale. It helps the absorption of the egg mixture.

Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 tsp of vanilla extract
¼ cup of milk
1/8 tsp of cinnamon

Directions:
Combine the above ingredients in a shallow dish. Cut the Challah loaf into thick slices. Coat the slice in the egg mixture on the first side and then the 2nd side. Place on a skillet heated to med heat with a tablespoon of melted butter. Brown on both sides. Repeat for all slices.

You can keep slices warm in a oven heated to 300° for up to 30 minutes.

This might be difficult to recover from

I have really been neglectful of my blog readers (are there any?) lately. The truth is, there was an incident and I was unsure if I was going to share it with the world. But the point of this blog is to learn and tell my story so here it goes. The night started out normally. I went to Food Emporium with BP II and we were picking out things to eat this weekend. Steaks were on sale so we picked up 2 along with some eggplant as a side. I happened to have some salad at home as well to complete the meal. We went home and everything was normal. I started cooking around 7:30. I started by sautéing the eggplant until soft then adding some cream and walnuts. Now it was time for the steak. It was a thin steak this time around; maybe a top round sirloin without the bone. I patted the meat dry with a paper towel and seasoned with salt and pepper. I heated my pan and added a tablespoon of butter with some olive oil and then added the steaks. I waited about 4 minutes and flipped. There was a nice brown crust and I figured that because the meat was so thin and I like my meat rare, another 4 minutes should be perfect. I still had to make the salad and meat continues to cook while resting. I have the meat on a cutting board and make a very simple pan sauce with some red wine, Worchester sauce and a little bit of butter.

BP II and I sit down to eat and everything looks good. The steaks were a little rarer then I intended but they were tender and quite good. The eggplant was ehh. I probably won’t make that again. We happened to stay in that night and I went to bed early. In the middle of the night I wake to projectile vomiting. The poor kid. I gave my boyfriend food poisoning. He was up half the night vomiting his brains out. I felt terrible. And the weird thing is, I was fine. I am normally the person with the sensitive stomach. I have no idea what happened.

I guess the moral of the story is you have to cook your meat well or risk food poisoning. No if, ands, or buts about it. Needless to say, I think it might be awhile before we have steak again.

**Note: I would like to say that my steak was not any rarer then the picture

Happy Birthday Ina!

Everyone's favorite Hampton Queen turns 62 today. Ina you are the bees knees. Happy Birthday.