Cooking!

Hi there!

I suppose no one who has my level of cooking experience (namely moderate) has a right to break into the Blogging About Cooking racket.  I should check with my Board of Directors before I continue ... OK, game on!  Haha!

This post was inspired by an article in the New York Times, about how to make a scrambled egg just the way you want it.  Warning: the author assumes some moderate degree of knowledge of physics and chemistry, but you can get away with just reading between the lines.  HOWEVER, I’m going to write generally about cooking and me, and only put in maybe a couple of sentences about scrambled eggs; you can get the low-down by going to the link.  By the way, a lot of what I say comes by way of the NYT*; I don’t pretend to scour the Web for information that I then distill into these blog posts.  I’m seventy years old, and this is the age where you want other people to do their own work, and my work, too.

By the way, for any recipe, read the whole thing through before you start, making a note of equipment you need to have ready.  In the recipe for chicken stir-fry below, you’ll need to cook some rice to go with it.  I could have put that warning at the top of the recipe, but I forgot.

Cooking
Anyone can learn to cook, and can start off cooking well right away.  The magic ingredient is—patience.  That’s it.  If you’ve tried to cook an egg by turning on the burner to high ... you know where I’m coming from!  Especially if you like food, it makes perfect sense to learn to fix it the way you like it.  And, if you’re getting to the point where being careful about what you eat seems like a good idea, it makes even more sense.  If you have kids, and you want to be careful about what they eat, and you do not want your spouse to do all the work, and if you want this spouse to stick with you for a long time, being a decent cook is unavoidable.

Anybody can be a ‘recipe cook’.  These people look up recipes for a dish they want to make, make the recipe any old how, serve it and eat it, and promptly forget how it went.  This mode can only get you so far.  But some cooks will pay attention.  If they make, say, several Stir-Fries (on different days, of course) out of several recipes, they observe how the ingredients respond to the several different recipes as they’re going along, and create a sort of database in their heads about how the ingredients behave!  These cooks are on their way to becoming gourmets.  Soon they can make their own recipes.  Another way to do it is to, for example, get 20 samples of the same cut of beef, and do 20 different things to it, and carefully record the results.  In principle this is a good way to get started being an expert on that specific cut of beef, but of course the Planet can’t afford for you to play with food.  Instead, just cook from recipes, (making sure to select recipes that have been endorsed by people you have some confidence in,) and keep trying to understand why the recipe has the steps that it has, and the order in which it wants you to do them.  (A good recipe-writer will often explain the logic behind their approach.  Often it is a modification of another recipe, to get a very specific desired improvement.)

Stir-Frying.  This technique can yield a nutritious meal in a very short time.  Unfortunately, it demands very quick reflexes.  Every professional chef needs to master it, but obviously not everyone has lightning reflexes.  So good recipes have the process divided into stages, which allows the cook to catch his or her breath between stages.  For instance, for a Chicken and veggie stir-fry,
(1) cut the chicken up into small pieces.
(2) Put the pieces in a bowl, with a sort of sauce.  You can use a ready-made bottled stir-fry sauce, or just put in some salt, some pepper, some oil, a little soy sauce or teriyaki or even ketchup or tomato juice, perhaps a tiny bit of vinegar or lemon juice, a little Sherry, perhaps, and set it aside.  (Breathe.)
(3) Cut up the veggies: carrots, celery, green onions, Bok Choy, cabbage, sweet peppers; put them in a bowl with sauce, e.g. soy sauce, or bottled sauce; pick your poison.  Sriracha!  It’s your funeral!  (Breathe.)
(4) Slice an onion.  Mince some garlic.  (Stop breathing.)
(5) Heat your Wok, or any old fry-pan (the deeper the better, to avoid spilling) to medium-high heat —or just medium, your first few times — and fry the onions and garlic quickly.  (No need to deeply brown them.)  Carefully drain them**, and put them in a large bowl.
(6) Wait just a few seconds for the oil to warm up again.  (Quick breath.)  Briskly fry the chicken.  Cook it completely; it won’t really get cooked again.  Carefully drain it**, and throw it in with the onions.  (Avoid moving too much oil into the onion / chicken bowl.)
(7) Wait just a few seconds for the oil to warm up again.  Fry the veggies next.  (Be prepared for the sauce to spatter when it hits the oil; can’t be helped.  Stir-fry implies a certain amount of mess on your cooking range.)  Fish them all out, and put them into a large serving bowl you have kept ready for the purpose.  Ideally, briefly fry each type of vegetable by itself.  Once you’re comfortable with this procedure, you could use a different sauce for each vegetable, if you like.  Of course, they end up in the same container, but different from the chicken container.
(8) Wait a little for the oil and the Frying Pan to heat back up, and put all the ingredients back into the pan; stir to mix them.  Fry briefly.  Turn the burner OFF.  Move the frying pan off the burner.  Transfer the food with a large spoon into your serving dish; I have had very little luck trying to pour things from a frying pan into a serving bowl.

Have some rice ready, to serve with the stir-fry.  Nothing else really works...

If you were paying attention, you would have noticed a lot of things you could do slightly differently; or which I could have described better.  I can't do any better with all this COVID flying around.

The reason for cooking each component separately and storing, is because each ingredient could, in principle, take a different amount of time.  The chicken takes a fair amount of time to cook thoroughly.  The veggies don’t; they do not need too much cooking; after doing this a few times, you’ll get a feel for just how little you can cook the veggies.

I'm exhausted!  More next time.

Arch

*NYT -- New York Times

**Lift them out, leaving the oil behind.