Pass The Sushi!

I am so tired of rain. :p blah. Nor­mally, I would never say that, as I enjoy a rainy day or a great big thun­der­storm, but right now, I could be play­ing in the dirt. I want to plant things and make a gar­den. My BF bought sun­flow­ers for the back­yard and all kinds of other plants and they are just sit­ting in their lit­tle plant like con­tain­ers bored. Oh well, it’s not like I know how to gar­den any way.

Here’s a pic­ture of one I saw and liked:

I dig its messi­ness. That noth­ing looks orga­nized and yet, its all so well groomed to fit together. And the rock. A rock would take up a large amount of space where I couldn’t be plant­ing some­thing just to kill it.
This is what I think will work (haha, once again, I know noth­ing about gar­den­ing).

A lilac for most of the space along the back cor­ner. Rozanne gera­ni­ums, Com­mo­tion Tizzy, Domino Core­op­sis, Becky Shasta daisy (not that I remem­ber what a sin­gle one of these looks like, but they were all dif­fer­ent heights and col­ors which I want). For ground cov­er­age, I would like thyme. All I know is this spot gets full sun. No shade. Ever. Let’s see how far I get.

Last night for din­ner we used some of the pot stick­ers my BF’s mom gave us and I made honey-ginger chicken bites, rice and steamed broc­coli.

Honey-Ginger Chicken Bites from myrecipes.com

• 2/3  cup  honey
• 2  table­spoons  minced peeled fresh ginger
• 2  table­spoons  fresh lemon juice
• 2  table­spoons  cider vinegar
• 2  table­spoons  low-sodium soy sauce
• 2  tea­spoons  dark sesame oil
• 1  tea­spoon  grated orange rind
• 1  tea­spoon  Worces­ter­shire sauce
• 4  gar­lic cloves, minced
• 1 1/4  pounds  skin­less, bone­less chicken thighs, cut into bite-sized pieces (about 16 thighs)
• Cook­ing spray
• 2  tea­spoons  cornstarch
• 2  tea­spoons  water
• 2  scal­lions chopped up for topping

Prepa­ra­tion

Com­bine first 9 ingre­di­ents in a large zip-top plas­tic bag; seal and shake well. Add chicken; seal and toss to coat. Refrig­er­ate at least 2 hours or overnight, turn­ing occasionally.

Pre­heat oven to 425°.

Remove chicken from bag, reserv­ing mari­nade. Arrange chicken in a sin­gle layer on the rack of a broiler pan coated with cook­ing spray. Sprin­kle chicken with salt and pep­per. Bake at 425° for 20 min­utes, stir­ring once.

While chicken is cook­ing, strain mari­nade through a sieve into a bowl; dis­card solids. Place mari­nade in a saucepan; bring to a boil. Cook 3 min­utes; skim solids from sur­face. Com­bine corn­starch and water in a small bowl; stir with a whisk. Add corn­starch mix­ture to pan, stir­ring with a whisk; cook 1 minute. Remove from heat; pour glaze into a large bowl.

Pre­heat broiler.

Add chicken to glaze; toss well to coat. Place chicken mix­ture on a jelly roll pan; broil 5 min­utes or until browned, stir­ring twice. Top with scallions.

The honey-ginger chicken was just ok. I would prob­a­bly rec­om­mend mar­i­nat­ing overnight and dou­bling the sauce to pour over the chicken at the end. On a side note, one should know this smoked up the kitchen pretty badly too as the extra glaze on the chicken burnt to the pan. Make sure that there’s not much extra sauce just hang­ing out on the pan or your in for a world of hurt. It was, how­ever, quick, easy and some­thing I can see tweak­ing to make again and again.

Ever notice that if you are just lis­ten­ing to the food net­work it could eas­ily be mis­taken for a soft core porn? I put the food net­work on at work. It’s not what my aver­age cus­tomer expects to see when they walk in, but I don’t have to pay atten­tion to it and get more work done. If a sit­com is on, even one I hate, I feel like I may miss some­thing, so I pay way to much atten­tion to the tube. With food net­work, if they are cook­ing some­thing I’m inter­ested in, I can google it later.

But when your work­ing, and not watch­ing, some things eas­ily get taken out of con­text when they do get your atten­tion. Paula’s con­stant moan­ing can be a lit­tle awk­ward if you really don’t know why she’s in paja­mas with Amy Sedaris. Rachael Ray said “smells like toasted nuts” the other day and I totally lol’d. The Neelys might as well be mak­ing out. And God knows, if the cam­era isn’t aimed to flat­ter Giadas already blessed fig­ure, her com­ments really make it. “It’s pen­e­trat­ing my nose” = eas­ily my hands down favorite.

Don’t get my wrong, I LOVE the Food Net­work, and all the hosts I men­tioned above. But take things out of con­text for a few min­utes and it can be a truly inap­pro­pri­ate gig­gle­fest.

Cajun Turkey Burgers

• 1 1/4 pounds ground turkey
• 2 tea­spoons Cajun seasoning
• 1/2 tea­spoon hot sauce
• 1/2 tea­spoon ground black pepper
• 4 buns
• 4 pieces of cooked bacon
• 4 pieces of cheese
• condi­ments and other top­pings ( like onions, you hater ) of your choosing.

Mash the turkey, hot sauce, sea­son­ing and pep­per together and grill for 5 to 7 min­utes on each side. Go ahead, be fancy and toast the buns while your at it.

Really, why don’t more peo­ple cook at home? This took less then 10 min­utes to make — includ­ing cook time (on the panini / grill press my boss got me for Xmas — maybe a few min­utes longer on the out­door grill) and they were deli­cious! The BF asked what it was, to which I replied “burg­ers” and he con­tin­ued by steal­ing mine while run­ning out the door. At least he said it was “good” and the” done­ness was nice” for an indoor grill before he left. Not once did he put his nose in the air because it was turkey. Win!

I pretty much live at my boyfriends house — though every­thing I own (minus my two fluff­balls) is at my par­ents house or in my uncles base­ment at this point. I have pre­vi­ously writ­ten how its dri­ving me nuts not hav­ing a space of my own.…

Well, I guess this week­end that all caught up with me.

What started as me try­ing to be cute/annoying in the front area (we can’t call it a gar­den sim­ply because its not) turned into a 3 hour demo­li­tion of what was there With no knowl­edge of what I was doing or a plan as to what would be done with the space, I attacked. I pulled out weeds that had entan­gled enough brick to build a grill ( I know for a fact these par­tic­u­lar bricks were indeed once a grill) vines, roots, ants, cement stones and cement blocks, plants that I’m not pos­i­tive were weeds and a hose that had fallen to its death years ago.

Whew.

Now what do I do with it? PS, I know NOTHING about plants. But hey, we now we have a start­ing point?

The BF did build me a pic­nic table this week­end. Well, 99% build, it still needs its sup­port beam. I’m super happy with it though. Birds have already pooped on it, so I’ll take that to mean its good.

PS. Any / All sug­ges­tions wel­come for the “gar­den” area.

There are a few things in the culi­nary world that intim­i­date me for no log­i­cal rea­son. Bread would have to be in the top 5 if I were to actu­ally sit down and write that list. I don’t know why. I have done a bil­lion cake like breads, but to me, they don’t count. I’m talk­ing yeast and dough and kneading.

How­ever, I was deter­mined to over­come this silly fear by tak­ing on my first bread dough with a no knead ver­sion (pretty much can’t screw that up right). So after googling and tastespot­ting - then not read­ing the recipe through, this is what I came up with.

No Knead Arti­san Bread adapted from Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day

makes four 1 pound loaves.

3 cups luke­warm water
1–1/2 table­spoons gran­u­lated fast act­ing yeast (2 pack­ets)
1–1/2 table­spoons kosher or other coarse salt
6–1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached all pur­pose white flour

1.  Add yeast and salt to the water in a 5 quart bowl or a plas­tic con­tainer with a lid.

2.  Mix in the flour - knead­ing is unnec­es­sary.  Add all of the flour at once, mea­sur­ing the flour by scoop­ing it and lev­el­ing it off with a knife.  Mix with a wooden spoon — do not knead.  You’re fin­ished when every­thing is uni­formly moist, with­out dry patches.  (it said wooden spoon, but I just used my hands as my BF doesn’t have wooden spoon — that was prob­a­bly a bad choice as it was crazy messy >.< but who cares)

3.  Allow to rise. Cover with a lid (not air­tight — I used a large bowl and cling wrap — but not sealed).  Refrig­er­ate  overnight (they say you can use it after 2 hours of ris­ing, but the dough is bet­ter to work with over night — and will taste bet­ter as time passes).

4. Shape your loaf.  On a upside down bak­ing sheet, sprin­kle a lit­tle flower. Sprin­kle the sur­face of your dough in the con­tainer with flour.  Pull up and cut off about a 1-pound piece of dough.  With flour dusted hands, stretch the sur­face of the dough around to the bot­tom on all four sides, rotat­ing the ball as you go.

5. Let the loaf rise / Pre­heat your oven. Let the dough rise about 40 min­utes (it doesn’t look like much has changed). Pre­heat your oven and bak­ing stone to 450 for the last 20 min­utes. Place a rimmed bak­ing pan on the rack under your stone.

6. Dust the loaf with a lit­tle flour and slash the top with a knife. (haha, I for­got this step — it wasn’t the end of the world).

7. Bak­ing. Quickly trans­fer your dough ball to the stone in the over and poor water into the rimmed pan under it. The water in the pan cre­ates a steam that gives the bread the crusty outer layer.

8. Cool all the way through

9. Enjoy!

10. Store the extra dough. You can store the extra dough in the same not air tight bowl it is in for up to 14 days. Once again, they say it gets bet­ter the with time.

My other culi­nary accom­plish­ment this week was a nice baked chicken — using the best of both an Anna Bar­rel and Ina Garten’s sim­ple baked chicken recipes.

And on that note, I have just pot­ted some rose­mary, laven­der, and pars­ley (and by I, I mean, my BFF’s hubby did all the work — thank you so much Arthur!). Hope­fully they live long enough to be used as herbs for some­thing in the future. I would love to see them grow and actu­ally get all down and dirty in the yard plant­ing all kinds of beau­ti­ful things just to spruce up the place.

We’ve all danced around our kitchens fan­ta­siz­ing about being the next food net­work diva (I mean some of them are so bor­ing a log could be more enter­tain­ing). Per­son­ally, I’m con­vinced they are miss­ing a mar­ket. Sunny is close, as she cooks for her­self and friends often enter­tain­ing. Brian Boi­tano would be close too if he were a lit­tle younger, as he caters to crowds.

The scene food net­work is miss­ing is the girls who are still in col­lege, not mar­ried, don’t have kids, are on the high­way to the career of their dreams that want to be the hostest with the most­ess. The girls that have pink crap plas­tered on their walls, pho­tos of their high school prom and soror­ity sis­ters tucked away every­where, match their over­priced bras with their over priced panties, spend 45 min­utes doing their makeup just to slap sweats that say juicy acrossed their bums to trek to class as if they woke up that way.

Well, I’m not one of them, but in my mag­i­cal dream world I could be the host­ess of the food net­work show that did. The young crowd that wants to be sophis­ti­cated and still end the night too drunk to remem­ber what really happened.

Yeah, I could teach them what their toaster oven is really capa­ble of.

Chicken Man­i­cotti — adapted from myrecipes.com

1 (8-ounce) pack­age can­nel­loni or man­i­cotti shells
4 cups finely chopped cooked chicken
2 (8-ounce) con­tain­ers chive-and-onion cream cheese
1 (10-ounce) pack­age frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained
1 cup (8 ounces) shred­ded moz­zarella cheese
1/2 cup Italian-seasoned bread­crumbs
3/4 tea­spoon gar­lic salt
1 tea­spoon sea­soned pep­per
1 jar red sauce
Gar­nish: chopped fresh basil or parsley

Prepa­ra­tion

Cook pasta accord­ing to pack­age direc­tions; drain.

Stir together chicken and next 6 ingredients.

Cut pasta shells length­wise through the other side. Spoon about 1/2 cup chicken mix­ture into each shell, gen­tly press­ing cut sides together. Place, cut sides down, in 2 lightly greased 11– x 7-inch bak­ing dishes. Pour Roasted Red Bell Pep­per Sauce evenly over shells.

Bake, cov­ered, at 350° for 25 to 30 min­utes or until thor­oughly heated. Gar­nish, if desired.

And then it hits me as I am mak­ing my chicken man­i­cotti, Food Net­work would never have me, because I’m pretty much a 14 year old boy on the inside — because,  as I’m slic­ing and fill­ing these tubu­lar hand sized pas­tas, I real­ized how I would describe how much to put inside each and laughed out loud know­ing I will never been the next food net­work star.