The Cooking Critic

I made Chicken ’n Dumplings recently because I like to do them once a year, and we’re getting into spring now, and dumpling season will soon be over. (Dumpling season is a made-up season in my head, but dumplings in the heat just don’t seem right.) Anyhow, it was all very pleasant. I was listening to some new music as I cooked because I raided my friend’s computer and added all sorts of stuff willy nilly to my iPod. I got Norah Jones (good cooking music!), Chet Atkins (turns out I like Chet Atkins!) and Michael Jackson (good to run to!)

Anyhow, I was feeling all satisfied watching my dumplings puff up and then turned away for five minutes, and when I returned, my dumplings were gone. Dissipated! I’m not too sure what happened…. I assume the rollicking boil of the stew was more than the dumplings could take?

This incident turned my pleasant day into a bit of downer. Because who wants chicken ’n dumplings without the dumplings? It’s just not the same. And now I have all this dumpling-less stew left over that already bores me when I’ve only eaten one bowl-ful. I also am left with a bunch of dishes in the sink, which don’t seem worth my while when I didn’t even get any dumplings out of the deal. Sigh.

This meal is a little foggy to me because I made and took the picture over a month ago. But I do recall it made me inordinately happy. If I remember the rest correctly (and I often don’t), this meal took place after a particularly long drive from work, and I walked into my place thinking, Oh my God I hate traffic, I need a beer, and what in the world am I going to make for dinner? I made Toasted Ciabatta Pizzas with olives and basil, the after-work salve, as it turns out.

This little makeshift pizza made me feel like I was at some upscale sports bar during happy hour having a beer and a snack, but instead I was at home alone, and that’s cool too, because I made this dinner myself (always very satisfying), and it was easy and tasted good. Ain’t a thing wrong with that.

Have you ever heard of using bread to grate your garlic? This one was new to me, but I loved it. Toast the bread, then rub the garlic against it for a surprisingly effective mincing. And I’m sorry that useful information is so boring to read sometimes.

This is an abrupt ending, but it will have to do since I have apartments to look for (kicked out of mine due to “owner occupancy.” Boo!)

Lately the phrase “coconut cream” has a strange, hypnotic effect on me—I basically feel compelled to test any recipes that contains the ingredient. This was the case with Lime-and-Coconut-Soaked Chicken with Cilantro, and it certainly helped that the dish listed only six ingredients total.

My recent coconut cream obsession has come from a fling I’ve been having with the piña colada lately. Frothy and potent, it’s my hot afternoon drink of choice and has made coconut cream a staple in my pantry. I also have another coconut cream infatuation: the Thai soup tom kha. Made of coconut cream and lemongrass broth, it’s rich and borders on buttery, and I find it pretty much impossible to go into a Thai restaurant and not order it.

My grilled chicken recipe did not list lemongrass as an ingredient, but it was recommended as an addition in italics. I figured a tom kha-like marinade couldn’t be a bad thing, so the marinade was thrown together one warm evening that was, despite the recipe’s original draw, sadly void of lemongrass. While coconut cream has reached staple status in my kitchen, lemongrass has not. So the marinade was made with only the official ingredients listed in the recipe proper (coconut milk, chicken, lime, cilantro, salt and pepper.)

Assessment: Since I had successfully paired a lime chicken with polenta previously, grilled polenta became the companion to this chicken as well. My friend described polenta as “filler, like yucca,” the latter being a Caribbean potato, more or less. And then he went on to say I best not rave about this meal on thecookingcritic.com. I lashed out by calling him an uncultured polenta amateur. He reminded me of his art degree and all the culture it implied. I harrumphed.

While the grill gave the polenta a nice flavor, I have to say I much prefer my polenta fried—perhaps this isn’t such a big surprise. The chicken, on the other hand, had a pleasant, mild flavor to it, but I had hoped for something with a little more oomph. Marinating it over night might have helped, and I think it would have benefited from being skewered next to some pineapple. But all in all, I prefer the similar-but-better-tasting Lime-Cilantro Chicken I made before and will probably turn to it next time I grill up some chicken.

I had already started a story in my head about how I called multiple grocery stores in the Los Angeles area asking about red velvet cake mixes, no one knew what I was talking about, and isn’t that strange? But as it turns out, red velvet cake, a mild chocolate cake dyed red and typically served with cream cheese frosting, is a Southern phenomenon, which baffles me since it’s not as if red food coloring and chocolate cake are indigenous to the South. And while I couldn’t find any reason why Southerners are partial to the cake, I did figure out how it came to be: the term “red velvet cake” comes from the fact that the cocoa used in the 30s-40s (or thereabouts as far as I can tell) made the cake reddish-brown. Modern cocoa has more alkaline in it and no longer produces this color, so red dye is added to achieve the hue instead. (Thank you Wikepedia.)

But I doubt my brother cared about the historical and cultural relevance of the red velvet cake when he requested it every year for his birthday growing up. Today he turns 28. I was going to use red velvet cake mix to make some cakey cookies (I’ve done this before with lemon cake mix), and ship them to him. But since California doesn’t carry red velvet cake mix, he got Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies instead, mainly because I’ve been wanting to try them.

Still, I did have Michael in mind. I called Mom and Dad and quizzed them on Michael’s favorite flavors. Their response, “Hmm, I don’t know. Maybe peanut butter?” When I think about it, I realize Michael doesn’t voice his opinion on foods so often. I believe he likes a balsamic vinegar linguine with bacon and goat cheese that I make, but besides that and red velvet cake, nothing else comes to mind. His main concern when we made food in our family was the ease in making it and the ease in cleaning it up. In fact, when we were pre-teens and assigned to make a meal once a week, I’d go about making homemade breadsticks and strawberry chicken. When Michael cooked, he made something along the lines of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. His specialty was baked chicken fingers well-seasoned and doused in butter. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them.

But back to the glories of toffee. The reason cookies with toffee candy appeal to me (and hopefully my brother) is because my family went on a toffee bar craze when we first discovered Skors. I’ve always preferred the Skor to the Heath bar, which is why I used it in this recipe despite the fact the recipe is called “Heath Bar Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Perhaps I like Skor simply because I met it first, and it introduced me to the world of toffee. But I’ve always thought it tasted better too, and I felt vindicated when an examination of the ingredients of the two candy bars revealed Heath had more unpronounceable ingredients than Skor. It also revealed both candy bars are made by Hershey, which I thought was very strange.

I suspected Michael must have the same fondness for the Skor bar that I do since we grew up in the same Skor-obsessed household, so I decided these cookies would be up his alley. And here’s a picture of my brother pretending he can operate machinery. He’s got a bit of a Burt Reynolds thing going on these days.

Happy birthday, Bear!

Assessment (of the cookies, not my brother): When I first tasted a warm Skor Bar Chocolate Chip Cookie, I determined they’re better in theory than in actuality. The toffee distracted rather than added to what is primarily a chocolate chip cookie with oatmeal and walnuts mixed in. But I adjusted my opinion when I tried the cookies cold. The toffee added something more when the Skor bits solidified into a buttery crunch rather than when they were sticky and oozy. So my final verdict is: if you’re bringing cookies somewhere with you, than try out these chewy Skor cookies (an adjustment involving 3/4 cup butter and ¼ cup shortening might have helped the texture of this cookie). But if you’re mixing up a batch to eat out of the oven, stick to the tried and true regular old chocolate chip cookie—they’re hard to beat.

I’ve determined it’s time to stop hiding behind my cookbooks and create my own recipes. Not solely, of course. Occasionally. And despite the fact I rarely create a new dish entirely from scratch, I was anticipating a high success rate with this new endeavor. I would create one spectacular dish after the other, win big cash prizes and be featured on TV.

While Bizarro Me collects huge checks for some vague job with food, and so, shops for beautifully packaged goods at gourmet markets, the actual me has to deal with the flourescent lights and non-sensical organization of Ralph’s and the reality of would-be culinary masterpieces gone awry. I created this brand-new version of macaroni and cheese all by myself. It involved roasted peppers and roasted garlic. It is, in fact, mediocre.

I actually took the time to make a roux out of milk and flour for this then added sharp cheddar, Monterey jack and many seasonings. But this cheesy mixture looked a lot like Velveeta to me. It even tasted a bit like Velveeta. And I found myself thinking as I ate my meal, no wonder people just make the stuff from the box.

Despite this setback, I have some new ingredients in mind and high hopes for my next foray into mac-and-cheese making. And my overactive imagination is already primed for more guest appearances on talk shows.

If you want a mac and cheese recipe, go here—it’s what I do to box macaroni and cheese to give it more heft and flavor. It takes less time and tastes better than what I tried last night. And since I didn’t bother taking a picture of my culinary failure, I’ll leave you with this image of some sort of sausage I ate in Germany.

Tim McKeon likes potlucks. He likes potlucks so much that he decided to throw one for his 29th birthday.

I like potlucks too, and I especially like it when somebody else hosts one. That way I can completely trash my kitchen attempting to make something new and complicated and won’t have to worry about trying to clean the place up before company arrives.

Of course, wonderful, easily transported dishes aren’t the easiest things to come by, but I’ve been eyeing the Greek Chicken Strudel recipe in my Williams-Sonoma Complete Entertaining Cookbook for a while—especially appealing is it can be either an appetizer or a light dinner. I told Tim I was thinking about making a fruit salsa, mushroom blintzes or the above strudel. He said, “Ooohhh strudel,” or something to that effect (people like food wrapped in flaky crusts), and the decision was made. And here’s the birthday boy.

My afternoon in the kitchen started out happily enough. It was a nice day, so I opened the windows, turned on the music and sang loudly along (much to my napping neighbor’s dismay, who yelled out, “I’m trying to sleep here!”) while I poached chicken in chicken broth. But I accidentally overpoached the chicken, determined I would use it anyways, then fifteen seconds later decided I absolutely could not use it and went about poaching more chicken.

Then I got to the chopping. There’s lots of chopping involved in this dish: spinach, dill, parsley, green onions. I mixed those ingredients together with the now shredded chicken, seasonings and cheeses (feta and Monterey Jack). Then I tried the mixture. It tasted . . . weird. There was no other way to describe it. I looked at the recipe to see if I left out any ingredients. I had left out the cayenne! So I added the cayenne, certain that this would turn everything around. I tasted the mixture again. Now it tasted like cayenne. I was convinced my dish would bomb, and the only solution was to bring a second dish I knew would succeed in order to redeem myself. You can’t call yourself The Cooking Critic and bring crappy dishes to potlucks. Everybody knows it.

To break up the text, I will now show you a picture of one of the dishes at the potluck.

Jell-o shots.

Back to our show . . .

Halfway hopeful that the Greek Chicken Strudel would convert itself into something amazing when it cooked, I begin to work with the filo pastry. Man, filo is a pain, though quite beautiful in its way. I like how the thin sheets drape over each other when you take them out of the box. I began buttering filo sheets and layering them, trying my best not to tear them (though I did, often) and determined I would taste the strudel once cooked, and then make fool-proof Butterscotch Brownies if my strudel was a dismal failure and guaranteed to invite the ridicule of my friends.

Eventually, the strudel was cooked, I tasted it and was thoroughly pleased with my strudel and myself–it tasted more of fresh herbs than cheese, and the cayenne had morphed into just a hint of spiciness. I’d like to thank eggs for strudel’s transformation, which mellowed the filling when cooked and brought all the ingredients together in the spirit that is strudel. Still, despite the pleasant flavor, I was surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, to realize that what I made was essentially spanakopita, a Greek pastry stuffed with a spinach blend. I adore spanakopita, but I’ve never tasted a bad version of it. There’s really no need to make it at all. You buy spanakopita. You don’t labor over lining up filo pastry to create your own.

So the party came, and I brought the spanakopita and no brownies. To give you a sense of the party, here are some of the characters that peopled it.

Makes you wish you were there, doesn’t it?

As for my food, I actually considered using a mediocre picture of myself with my strudel, where my strudel looked better than I did and certainly better than it does below—that’s how dedicated I am to my food—but decided that the world should know the crust flaked all over the place and marred the presentation. See for yourself.

I should say here that I didn’t let the strudel rest for 10 minutes like I was told to (the crowd was hungry!), and this might have made the crust break apart more than usual. Also that’s a Post-it note folded over on a toothpick to alert people to a no-nuts version (for people with allergies and people who hate nuts—I think there are more of the latter than the former), a vegetarian version and the full-on version with chicken and nuts.

Assessment: The only way I would make this dish again is: a) If someone requested it, and I really, really liked that person, or b) If there was Mediterranean-themed potluck dinner at someone else’s house, and I couldn’t figure out what else to bring. While Greek Chicken Strudel was certainly tasty, and some people were proclaiming its tastiness throughout the evening, it just doesn’t make the cut on the “worth the effort” scale, especially when you can purchase nearly-as-good spanakopita without any effort at all.

Photos courtesy of Tim and Danielle McKeon.

The End.

Team We Aim To Cheese was primed for the 2nd 3rd Annual Grilled Cheese competition. We had gone through a very successful practice session without a hitch. We had participated in vigorous exercise to keep ourselves alert and ready. We had named Rob’s fresh mozzarella/French toast entry (normally called mozzarella in carrozza) “The Breaded Pirate Roberts” in an obscure nod to The Princess Bride and my cheesecake-like quesadilla “Requiem for a Cream . . . Cheese.” We had completed complicated math equations involving cross-multiplication to make sure my recipe fulfilled the minimum 60% cheese requirement. It was 72. Victory seemed near. And then we entered the 2nd 3rd Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational through this industrial-but-artsy door:

What Team We Aim to Cheese found at the Grilled Cheese Invitational was an outdoor grilling area (much to Adam’s short-sleeved shirted dismay) with roughly twenty stations, a grilled cheese roster with three heats and sixty or so competitors and even cheerleaders to cheer on a friend’s sandwich (or cheeseleaders, as they prefer to be called):

Also, there was one leprechaun:

The first heat of the competition involved only standard grilled cheese—no fancy bread, no crazy cheeses, no additional ingredients. People grilled four sandwiches, cut them into quarters, put a wedge of sandwich on a paper plate with a voting document already stapled to it, lifted a flag, and a runner would whisk the plates to the taste-testing station to be judged by the crowd.

Team We Aim to Cheese wasn’t so interested in this heat because we had no one competing in it. But we, like the rest of the crowd, got to judge the sandwiches on taste, presentation, originality (less important for this heat) and spazziness (for ridiculously awful sandwiches.) Sandwich eating was no easy feat since it required standing in a line that ran the length of a very long building all to get a quarter of a sandwich that may or may not taste very good. When you got to the front of the line, you were directed toward a sandwich quarter and voted on the spot, and then went back to the end of line to wait about twenty minutes for another quarter of sandwich. Here’s the taste-testing station:

Next came the second heat for savory alternative sandwiches with Rob and Maggie representing We Aim to Cheese. Competition included a Lucky Charms sandwich, which was coated in blue crystals on the outside and tasted surprisingly good, though it seemed to have little to do with Lucky Charms. There was also a brie, grilled chicken and marmalade sandwich, which was, uh, fine. There were numerous sandwiches, though I can’t seem to recall many of them right now. But here’s Rob and Maggie cooking up a storm in the grilling arena:

Will Team We Aim to Cheese be victorious? Will the best grilled cheese win? Will the leprechaun find his pot of gold? Stay tuned for the next installment of “Who Will Be the Grilled Cheese Champion?” coming soon (most likely tomorrow but no promises.)

Photos by Leslie Limerick, Jim Sutherland and Brandon Oropallo.

I feel like this post is like one of those freestanding episodes of The Wonder Years thrown in the week after something exciting with Kevin and Winnie happened. You didn’t care about that episode–you just wanted to see if Kevin and Winnie were going to get back together after kissing in the previous episode. And then you were forced to watch an episode all about the father without even a mention of Winnie. Anyhow, you will have to wait a little longer (and I know the world is waiting with bated breath) for my official Grilled Cheese Invitational post and how Team We Aim to Cheese fared. Crafting highly entertaining posts on important events take time, you know. What also takes time: getting the necessary digital images from my friends in charge of photography.

Poor Stuffed Tomatoes with Spinach and Ricotta. No one cares. But I will post a picture of them to pique your interest, and then I will discuss them without a decent transition.

I used to request the ricotta cheese be left out of the calzones I ordered since I felt it overwhelmed the other cheeses. Ricotta was strange and oozy. The others were stringy and familiar. And stringy, melted cheese is one of the most tempting things ever.

But I never gave up on ricotta completely—for some reason I felt compelled to give him additional chances because while he never made a huge impression, we got along and I liked his company well enough. I just didn’t know if anything long-term was in the cards for us, but sometimes I would wonder. . . . I’ve been flirting half-heartedly with ricotta cheese ever since. I’ll avoid him, then determine I like him, grab his upper arm when I see him, and then avoid him again. I’m pretty sure this is why he’s into me.

The turning point for ricotta and I was a dish at AOC where the ricotta was so mild and smooth and wonderful that I didn’t even recognize it. It’s lame that I can’t remember the actual dish or who I ate it with (my mom, maybe?), but the fact I remember the ricotta and nothing else says a lot about ricotta.

Stuffed Tomatoes with Spinach and Ricotta is intended to be an appetizer, but since I happened to have all its ingredients lurking in my kitchen one evening, it became my dinner.

Adjustments: I used Roma tomatoes, which are more dinner-like, rather than cherry tomatoes, which are more adorable and appetizer-like. I also let it bake in the oven longer since I was using the bigger tomatoes, though I can’t say how long because I wasn’t paying attention.

Assessment: Very pretty and mellow-tasting with a nice crunch from the pine nuts. I should have included more salt. I wasn’t as wowed as I would like to have been by this, but the taste did grow on me as I continued to eat it—ricotta is like that. I think I’ll sit on this recipe, and if I return to it again, then I’ll take the time to type and post it.

The Cooking Critic’s permalink structure has been updated! If you are new to this blog, please skip this boring post and read something more interesting, like “Lime Cilantro Chicken and Grilled Polenta, Where It’s At, Yo,” which, for some reason, has people coming from far and wide to my blog. The demand for lime cilantro chicken recipes is great these days, and I have the Google statistics, though not a logical explanation, to prove it.

If you are not new to this blog, the new permalink structure probably won’t affect you either. But if you happened to bookmark pages, then most likely those bookmarks are no longer good. So, for example, if you bookmarked the “Avocados” page under the handy-dandy “By Ingredient” category section (you’ve noticed the “By Ingredient” section, right?), your URL looked like this: www.thecookingcritic.com/?cat=41. Now the URL is more descriptive and looks like this: www.thecookingcritic.com/category/by-ingredient/avocado/. If these changes produce some unforeseen fallout that you detect before I do, please contact me at christine@thecookingcritic.com. Expect other amazingly awesome changes, like recipe index improvements, in the near or far future!

And for those of you wondering, yes, the results of the 2nd 3rd Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational are in. No, I’m not going to tell you them. Instead, you will have to wait a couple days and be teased by this picture:

Everyone knows you have to practice in order to demolish your opponents. The newly named Team “We Aim To Cheese” did just that (practice, no demolishing yet) one rainy Monday evening. Of the three grilled cheese categories at the Grilled Cheese Invitational (or GCI for short) hosted in Downtown Los Angeles on April 1, we are entering two. Categories are: standard grilled cheese, alternative grilled cheese and dessert grilled cheese. We fully intend to win the last two categories by virtue of our delicious sandwiches, but certainly the hilarious names we voted on will also assist us. The GCI, to my understanding, is one big party with stovetop stations for grilled cheese making, and you have to produce at least four cheesy sandwiches divided into fourths. When you finish grilling a grilled cheese, a little flag goes up, a runner comes to the table and the sandwich is distributed to the crowd to be eaten and judged. There’s also a cash bar, but I’m foggy on the rest of the details. Rest-assured, those of you dying to know more about the GCI, I’ll report back with clearer details once my team and I return victorious from said gathering.

Obviously, I can’t give too many details about our sandwiches or their names at this juncture since I’m sure competitors are trolling my blog in an attempt to learn our secrets and foil us. Instead I will provide you with a picture story of our evening with captions.

Here are the cooks (note Rob’s spiffy apron and look of suspicion:

and Christine’s amazing ability to change her eye color to match her top):

Here are some of the eaters and fellow teammates reacting to the grilled cheeses with shock:

and amazement:

Here Maggie lounges with a strawberry, contemplates team names and secretly hopes that someone will hang grapes over her head while she eats them at her leisure:

Here I will give the full name of the people in attendance, so if they are Googled, the Googler will be led to my blog: Rob Saccenti, Leslie Limerick, Jim Sutherland, Steve Hanna, Michael Zimmer, and Luke Godwin (who thinks he should get royalties for use of his name in this blog. When I told him no one else suggested such things, he said his name was worth far more than anyone else’s. He said it. It’s true.) Actually, that’s only about half the people in attendance. The others have already been mentioned by full name on this blog (or their last names are not known to me), so they can’t help me with Googlers. But so they won’t get mad at me, I’ll give their first names: Shahan, Maggie, Shayna, Stacey, Adam, and Brandon.

And here’s why other Grilled Cheese Invitational contestants should be fearful at the thought of competing against us:

Look at those beautiful, well-named, tasty sandwiches.

And another reason competitors should fear us? We have team aprons. That’s right. Team. Aprons. First the 3rd 2nd Annual Grilled Cheese Competition, next the world!