Which is the dish cooked by you that you are most proud of in 2015?
(Either created by your or following a recipe)
Mine is a quite simple dish: grilled squid with a lemongrass, spring onion, dill, lemon, curry, nuoc-mam sauce sided with a dish grilled egg plant with sage, sprinkled with fleur de sel.
The cooking on barbecue was done to perfection. I remembered it was a meal serving our neighbours. There was a kid, he hated egg plant, but ate everything before his mother arrived to say to me that his son disliked aubergine and should be served without it!
I made a Greek lemon chicken (whole legs) & lemon potatoes in the oven while we were in Berlin over the summer. My man still raves about it. Personally, I think I made a better version of it back home on the grill (BISO breast).
I also make a mean smoked/roasted pork butt, loosely based on an internet recipe.
Then there’s the magic and wonder of the NYT’s Trini-Chinese chicken, for which I really can’t take any credit. It’s dead simple & delicious, but that’s just b/c the recipe is awesome.
I went to Santa Fe over Thanksgiving and took a New Mexican traditional cooking class at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. I came back and made Green Chile Enchiladas for a group I’d never had over before. It was unbelievably fantastic - probably the best thing I made all year!
It would have to be our NYE meal, particularly the potato side which I have given the name “My mother’s crappy pan potatoes”
We made a last minute decision to drive upstate NYE and spend the night at my moms and thus did not have time to pack our entire kitchen like we usually do with a planned visit
To find a knife that cuts, salt and or pepper, a pan that doesn’t catch fire the moment it comes into contact with heat … in her kitchen is a challenge.
We kept the meal very simple on NYE, steak and potatoes and a green salad. What started out as a simple roasted red potato side turned into a ridiculous luscious crunchy potato dish due to having to scrape the bottom of the pan every 5 minutes to keep them from sticking and burning and spontaneously combusting…because as I mentioned her pans suck…
That sauce was a killer, the combination of ingredients is really unexpected. Actually the funny part: the squid was supposed to be served with grilled red onion. There was a mistake in the order of cooking food with the barbecue, normally the eggplant should have to go with the chicken in the main. Accidentally, it matched perfectly with the squid as entry. Also, the fact that we didn’t buy enough squid that day for the 8 persons… scarcity made the food tasted even better, we were all very hungry too. I redo the same recipe at home (not with barbecue), it was still very good, but the squid didn’t have that smokey taste that make it the eureka moment.
I think at times, it needs several factors to make it happen: right cooking + right atmosphere + right people.
The same dish when cooked for a quiet dinner for 2 was completely different when it was cooked for a cheerful larger crowd.
I like your NY top chef challenge and the result! Just curious how your mother manage to live everyday with her knife that doesn’t cut and her pan that burnt food? She cooks?
naf
“I like your NY top chef challenge and the result! Just curious how your mother manage to live everyday with her knife that doesn’t cut and her pan that burnt food? She cooks?”
I’m still trying to figure out how she raised 4 children not knowing how to cook… with or without pans, knives…
She lives on salad, fruit and makes one really awful chicken dish that consists of boneless chicken breast and an onion that she puts in the oven with water…
We almost always leave her with a fully stocked fridge and often when we return weeks or a month later many of the items are still in there untouched … I always explain to her how to reheat the dishes but even microwaving is beyond her skill level.
This visit I made and left her with a lot of tuna and egg salad, she was beyond pleased!
PS she is 83 but looks like and has the energy of a 60 year old, works full time and still has the energy to make all of her children crazy, she began reading prevention magazine at its inception…what ever she is doing it’s working it just doesn’t taste good
Cheese Enchiladas (Emeril) and Mexican rice (CI). I made the meal the first time for dinner because I didn’t want to defrost any meat for dinner. I use Emeril’s easy enchilada sauce recipe and make the tortillas. It isn’t anything fancy but to hear my hubby talk about it is too sweet. He calls it “life changing”. Maybe it’s that our mexican food here isn’t that great (we actually do have some good places) but I like to think the secret is the home made tortillas.
