Good Food For All

Week 3  

Cookbook annotations- 

Salt Fat Acid Heat 

This week I annotated recipes from the cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat to pick out recipes that I might want to use in my project. I did my annotations on sticky notes and a lot of it is only legible to me but I will share the highlights: 

-Buttermilk Roast Chicken, the ingredients seem pretty simple, a whole chicken isn’t cheap but I can use it for several days and make bone broth with it after. I will need to start it the day before but I can probably brine it and do the actual roasting of it during class or before dinner.  

-Chicken with vinegar, I’ve been told that once I master cooking with vinegar that I will really truly know how to cook, so I want to try this recipe for sure. However, it’s definitely not a cheap recipe so I would need to have some extra money set aside for it, or be skillful at sourcing my ingredients. It needs heavy cream, dry white wine, and tarragon leaves so it’s defiantly not an “affordable” meal.  

-Chicken and garlic soup, this seems like a relatively cheap and easy recipe, I think I would want to dress it up a little more but it looks like a nice comfort meal. There’s a variation she lists that involves star anise and fish sauce that I think I would want to try.  

Food Access Sheet-  

I spent some time today looking over some different templates for my food access spreadsheet. I am really not very good at designing spreadsheets so I was hoping a template would be helpful, but I am not finding any that seem to fit quite right. I tried to make my own but it was embarrassingly bad. Next I am going to mess around with editing some of the pre-made templates, or seeing if there is one I can import from somewhere else.  

Gara Masala Curry-  

I made Gara Masala Curry! I was back with my parents for a day and my dad taught me how to make it, it is a similar theory to another curry I can make but a few big differences with how he fries the seasonings. It took us about 30 minutes and at a rough guess probably cost around  
$15 to make the pot that fed four people with two servings left over, making it around $2.50 each. It’s easy to freeze and defrost for another time, and can be served with a variety of things like naan, rice, or over roasted greens. We had ours with rice (included in the listed cost) and I really enjoyed it. I did feel that it was a little grainy so I wonder if there is a better way to mix our spices in. Maybe by heating the broth up more?  

Week 6  

Chili Oil- This week I had to spend some time in Issaquah where I went to high school, and while I am not a fan of the place, it gives me the chance to learn from my mom, who makes a lot of interesting things in her kitchen. Today we did chili oil, which was not the process I expected it to be at all, but it was so fun to learn and I am definitely going to try it in my own kitchen. I like the way the herbs smoke and that’s how you know they’re ready, and it really doesn’t take long to make the oil at all. I am going to take some home that we made today but I will definitely be making it at home next time I run out.  

Chicken Pot Pie-  

Using the leftovers from last weeks chicken I made a chicken pot pie recipe I learnt in my Freshman year. I went over to a friends apartment in the glens and we worked on it together, sharing ingredients and seasonings based on what we each had. We used carrots and celeray and the a mix of chicken broth and home made vegetable broth, and it took me a few hours to assemble. It is a little bit more expensive than my normal meals at around $6 per portion but it was highly reviewed by my roommates and it gets points for being shaped like a heart.  

Week 5 

Pickled Red Onions- Today I learnt how to make pickled red onions, one of my favorite condiments/toppings. I had no idea how easy the process was and it only took me an hour. I sliced up my onions and put them in a jar with sugar, warm water, apple cider vinegar, and distilled white vinegar. I didn’t have any peppercorns but I know you can add those too. I left my jar on top of the fridge for an hour and they had turned a bright pink! I can’t believe I have been getting these from the store, I’m never buying them again now that I know how to make them.  

(Picture taken the next week so onions are not as vibrant, more of a dark purple)  

Bechamel- Bechamel is a fancy word for white sauce, and it’s the base for so many foods that myself and other cook, it’s made of butter and milk and flour and is easy to do right by disastrous to do wrong, burning milk will stain your pan and make your apartment smell awful. I know the basics of making Bechamel but the recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking gives small details and a time tested recipe that I have really wanted to try. I actually ended up making three batches, the first was too thick and the second got kind of curdled (I’m still trying to figure that out) but the third one was a pretty good consistency an ended up being the one I went with. I wasn’t fully pleased with it but the pasta I made in the end turned out really good, I made a cheese and herb sauce with panko crusted chicken and I had friends over to help me eat it.  

Buttermilk Chicken- Today was the big day! I prepared my chicken last night, removing the giblets (I had never done this before, ended up calling my parents) and breaking of the wing tips for stock. I also mad the brine and got up early to flip the chicken over so both sides get a chance to sit in the buttermilk. I took the chicken out of the brine and left it on the counter for an hour so it would cook more evenly, and put it in the oven at the start of class. It came out beautifully and I am so proud of myself. It was a hit with my roommates and I am going to be able to use the leftover chicken and the bones for more stuff over the next few days.  

Week 4 

I realized that despite my best tries, making recipes only from the selected recipe books was not going to be efficient or particularly helpful to me. The recipes in the books are tested and have a feel of reliability to them, but they’re not always catered towards a person like myself, therefore I have decided I will be taking some liberties and using recipes from recipe blogs if I get them as a recommendation, as well as family recipes.  I could also definitely throw in the recipes we make in our cooking labs but I don’t want to take too much from another module.  

Hungry potato soup– Any “hungry” recipe refers to me being a little short on money but wanting to eat something that I like that costs a little more. I really loved loaded baked potato soup and my guilty pleasure is buying it from Safeway in the containers by the deli, but I know how to make it and I do pretty often. This is the broke verson, it omits a lot of the fresh vegetables that I like in it (celery, onions, green onions etc.) but my roommate was kind enough to buy some bacon for the house so I got to keep that in. It’s mainly potatoes, milk, chicken stock, bacon, and seasoning, topped with some finishing oil (I was given some finishing oil as a gift but you can finish it with olive oil if you’d like). It also doesn’t have the fresh toppings (sour cream, spring onions etc.) but I had fake bacon pieces and cheese. It’s a filling, homey soup that with another $10 can be made amazing, but as it is it cost me around $12 and made 8 servings, putting me at around $1.50 per portion.