*1247 - roasted chicken

Being someone who loves cooking so much, it was pretty odd that I had never roasted a whole chicken by myself (I recall stuffing one for maybe Christmas when I was at home years ago).  Chanced upon whole chickens in Whole Foods one day and decided to give it a shot.  Me being me, I researched the art of baking chicken thoroughly before beginning.

Let it sit out of the fridge sitting up and pat with a paper towel so the skin dries out as much as possible.  We stuffed with lemon, garlic, and rosemary.  Lots of salt and pepper and olive oil/butter.  Get it under the skin and on the skin and in the cavity.  No need to truss.  Cook it breast down at 425F for about 2/3 of the time so that the fat from the dark meat on top drips into the white meat and moistens it.  At the end, sit it breast down for at least 15 minutes covered with foil again to let the moisture redistribute.  Best gravy ever made from the drippings, together with a bit of chicken stock.

 

Poka and EV watching the chicken cook together!

So beautiful!  It was delicious and the entire house smelled delicious too.  I also have a weakness for cooked lemon.

*1246 - friends

To those of you who
Have your friends a subway ride away, or
A taxi ride away, or a trot down the street, or
Work with a group of colleagues who at some point became your friends without you even realising it, or
Can pick up the phone and chat to friends in the same timezone, or
Can pick up the phone and whatsapp someone "casuarina prata tonight ok?", or
Bump into friends ever so often randomly on the streets of a little country, or
Have regular girls' night outs or weekend brunch buddies, or ...

Don't take all that for granted.

*1245 - subway

But of course the one week I am in NYC, the subway happens to shut down (or at least the line headed downtown).  Now I know what the streets of NYC look like minus trains: chaos.  Going to be remarkably late for work but at least I miraculously managed to squish myself onto bus.  Pretty harrowing.  At some point I seriously considered walking 60 blocks in heels, so I'm glad it didn't come to that.

I wonder how I used to survive without smartphones and google maps on the go to tell me what to do in an unfamiliar place!

*1244 - sous vide diary: eggs and steak

Back in culinary class in Cornell some 3, 4 years ago (oh my), we learnt about the chi chi method of cooking in gourmet restaurants: sous vide.  Literally meaning "vacuum" in French, it involves vacuum sealing your food (especially proteins), immersing in a circulating temperature-controlled water bath, at a fairly low temperature, for a fairly long time.  This results in very precise temperatures and very even cooking and no chance of overcooking.  When you grill a steak for example, you put it on a really hot grill and it cooks quickly from outside to in and you guess at when to pull it off the grill and hope for the best = very unforgiving.  For sous vide cooking, all you need to do is to find the temperature for that protein to cook the the precise doneness you want it to be at, no guessing involved.  It also results in perfect textures and is packed with moisture, and because you're vacuum sealing your food tightly with its seasonings sans air to get in the way, you don't have to marinate as long for an equal intensity of flavour.

The one thing that doesn't happen when things are sous vide cooked is that Maillard browning doesn't occur as there's no hot, dry, heat (this is culinary class theory that has stayed with me, woohoo), so at the end, you have to do the quickest, hottest sear possible to get that nice tasty crust without cooking it more as far as possible.

Anyhoo, my progressive (in the kitchen) brother decided to buy a professional sous vide machine for himself to replace his amateur home-cook version of the equipment, which now has fallen into my very willing and thankful lap!  It is essentially a temperature control probe that measures and regulates the temperature of a non-digital piece of cooking equipment, in this case, a large rice cooker.

Yes, my siblings and I are kitchen/food dorks.

My first experiment was the simplest way to embark on a sous vide journey--soft-boiled eggs.  I'm typically an egg snob so having perfectly cooked eggs is like heaven to me.  Every tenth of a degree results in a differently cooked egg, so I'm still trying to find my favorite temperature; at this point it's probably somewhere around 62.8 degrees C for one hour.  (Pictured above was my first attempt at 62.2 degrees C eggs--a teensy bit too runny for my liking; adjusting to 62.8 worked much better.)  Sous vide eggs are unbelievable in texture, it's like drinking egg in cream form.

Second experiment: steak.  56 degrees C for about 2 hours, length of time depends on fattiness of steak.  The steak was perfectly, evenly, juicily pink almost all the way through except for the very thin browned rim outside.  Unbelievable!

I'm a convert and cooking steak any other way would be unthinkable at this point.  I've never been very good at cooking steak the conventional way anyway so this works perfectly for me.