What's Cooking (Take Three!)

Nice menu, Jenise.

Tonight is our DIY salad, raw bar (clams, shrimp), then Shrimp & Scallop Pot Pie, followed by Gingerbread and my usual spread of ice creams and whipped cream.

Tomorrow is our Thanksgiving Redux, this time with capon. I haven't made one in ages so let's see how I like it now.

[Jenise]

How many are you feeding, Jeff? A raw bar sounds like more than two! Love your menu.

I love Capon. I recall the first I had. 100 years ago, or so long ago it feels like that, my mom died and my father started wooing a woman he'd been engaged to in his 20's whose husband had also just died. They dined out BIG almost every night in the Newport Beach area, and a favorite spot was a dark, clubby restaurant in Fashion Island called Bobby Burns. I was often along for the ride and it was the first place I had sand dabs, Veal Oscar and capon. There, it was thick slices of white meat molded over a mound of wild rice and covered in a delicately intense champagne sauce. I was smitten. Better than chicken or turkey as I'd ever had either. Good luck with yours!

Just the two of us. However, when we feast we can do the work of many.

Great back-story on capon. Though, initially, I saw 'white meat' and 'rice' and I thought this was not going to end well for you... but then the word 'wild' registered. ::whew::

Our experience with capon is a single bird, many years ago, which we both recall as nothing special. But, as we have more experience now, and we have in recent years rehabilitated our opinion of goose so we decided to give capon another go.

We liked it. A lot. The general susurrus on the web is that capon tastes like chicken but the meat is firmer; that is, indeed, just what we found. It almost has the chew of turkey, meaty and dense. I did a lemon + thyme prep, placing compound butter under the skin and rubbing it all over, lemon wedges in the cavity and in the roasting pan. The bird weighed just under 10# so roasted about 2.25 hours (quick-read 170-ish). We would absolutely cook this again.

And the carcass is becoming stock as I write this.

Today I'm creating a Vegetable Wellington.

Virginia Lee has a recipe for cabbage Wellington in The Chinese Cookbook (Craig Claiborne, co-author). It's a whole cabbage baked in pastry. When she first came to America, she was served Beef Wellington and that inspired her to create a Chinese dish of something wrapped in pastry and baked. It came out so good that she named it after her friend the Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Paul, that sounds pretty awesome. Have you made it?


Dinner last night: black truffle omelets with grits and a bottle of Burgundy.

Tonight: chicken cacciatore.

Tonight, it's leftover chili con carne made with tri-tip beef and NM chiles and the last of my homemade multigrain bread.

Hi Jenise. No, I've never made Cabbage Wellington. I also misremembered a bit. It is Virginia Lee, not Joyce Chen, who invented the dish. I corrected this in my previous reply in this thread.

-Paul W.

Dinner tonight is Sichuan: gong bao ji ding (aka Kung Pao chicken), accompanied by stir-fried baby bok choy.

-Paul W.

Kung-pao chicken is one of my faves. It's the dish I order to try out a new Chinese restaurant.

[Jenise]

Kung-pao chicken is one of my faves. It's the dish I order to try out a new Chinese restaurant.

It's out benchmark dish, too. Unfortunately we have to travel quite a ways for decent Chinese--the four or five so-called Chinese restaurants in this town have no authenticity, the food's loaded with sugar and ketchup to please uneducated American palates.

Luckily, we have dozens of Chinese restaurants--and the same with other Asian restaurants. I find that some of them have a secret menu for their own ethnic diners. You may want to ask, if you don't know that already. Albuquerque has a great number of Asian restaurants and markets because we were a resettlement city during the Vietnam War.

[Jenise]

I did once ask our waiter, who was the son of the owner, if he could talk the kitchen into making our food the way they'd make it for Chinese. He did and that worked out. Further attempts in other restaurants since have failed. But I get what you mean.

A big grocer near me offers Chinese food. The offerings generally consist of one or two badly cooked stir fries and 10 or 12 different battered & fried meats with sweet sauces. This is what the locals think is actual Chinese food. It's a battle, and I've given up. I just go to Canada.

[Jenise]

Not cooking dinner tonight, but lunch will be a seafood salad--basically, white asparagus in a light truffle vinaigrette with seared scallops.

Ribeye, bone in, and a tossed salad with bleu cheese dressing. And maybe a little spanokopita that i bought today.

[Jenise]

Not sure what I'll do tonight. But on Thursday I made breast of pheasant from South Dakota birds shots by my neighbor. I had to look this up on the internet, as I've never had skinless breasts to deal with before (only did whole birds). I had roughly planned to sous vide them in butter but ran out of time, so I did a quick one-hour brine, lathered them with oil and grilled them to finish. A mustard sauce and wild rice went with them. Very good, but I slightly overcooked them in spite of my being on top of them the whole way--it literally came down to the difference between 8 minutes and 9. The leftovers large-diced and tossed with tomato, green onion and a vinaigette then stuffed into an avocado half was a better lunch the next day than the dinner had been. Next time, sous vide.

Yesterday for dinner we had Version #2 of the pot of black eyed pea soup I'd made on NY day. That is, I didn't start anew, I just revised the leftovers to make it brothier, brighter and more complex with fresh diced tomato, chives and enough black pepper to give it some heat. Version #3 is coming up for today's lunch: now with cabbage cooked in and served on rice, a la red beans and rice.

No other plans.

Good to know about the pheasant... precise timing is important!

I made some lamb Sloppy Joe for myself the other night, and, other than that, we're working our way through the last of the leftover capon.

[Jenise]

How'd the bird turn out? In the world of poultry, for my tastes there's nothing better. Fun to debone, stuff and roast in a small mound shape, too.

How'd the bird turn out? In the world of poultry, for my tastes there's nothing better. Fun to debone, stuff and roast in a small mound shape, too.

We liked it. A lot. The general susurrus on the web is that capon tastes like chicken but the meat is firmer; that is, indeed, just what we found. It almost has the chew of turkey, meaty and dense. I did a lemon + thyme prep, placing compound butter under the skin and rubbing it all over, lemon wedges in the cavity and in the roasting pan. The bird weighed just under 10# so roasted about 2.25 hours (quick-read 170-ish). We would absolutely cook this again.

And we've gotten at least 8 dinner plates out of it.

It’s what’s in house tonight.
The smoke from the fires finally descended on my town overnight aided and abetted by cloud cover.
Cannot imagine what my friends and all the other affected folk are going through.
So, as I make it a rule to walk to the shop I chose not to go out.
So dinner turned out to be turkey macaroni cheese.
Had turkey slices from the deli leftover from a cold collation, a smal can of corn kernels, dried green peas, bits of cheese, a handful of macaroni, so off we go white sauce etc.
Quite tasty

[Jenise]

Barb, so worried about you. Are the fires headed your direction, or just the smoke? I know dense smoke can travel hundreds of miles so it doesn't have to mean the fires are close.

I hope you stay safe from the bush fires.

Smoke from the 2019 Alberta wildfires covered the sky in New Hampshire and ruined a public telescope observing session that we had planned. Although weather-wise the skies were clear, the smoke left the sky completely overcast.

-Paul W.

To stay warm I'm cooking Cajun chicken and tasso jambalaya tonight.

-Paul W.

Some leftover baked ham. For the entree, I made a bechamel sauce with real curry powder. Into that I stirred in the ham, some peas, and a few pieces of diced yellow bell pepper. That was poured over slices of toasted multigrain bread that I baked a few days ago. Everything washed down with a bottle of Tribunal red wine. Yum.

Chicken in champagne cream sauce with lots of mushrooms.