Getting the hang of food blogging

 Most weeks I'm trying to cook some stand out recipes from a cookbook.  I have so many that cooking all recipes in an entire one, particularly when my audience is limited (no spicy food for one; no fish for one, etc) seems unrealistic.

So we mark the end of the first half of samples from Around the World in 450 Recipes.  It's pretty expensive new, but you can get it with the resellers on amazon.  My own copy was an impulse grab at Half Price Books.

The Africa-inspired cod with prawn sauce was AMAZING, and not all that complicated.

The book does leave a bit of vagueness in some of the recipes and it appears geared towards a British audience so you may have to google some ingredients to find their common American equivalent.  Other than that... the fish and prawns implied throwing the garlic and onions in simultaneously, which is a common but pretty fatal culinary misdeed.  So I threw the onions in about half an hour before the rest and what resulted was an incredible dish I'll make again and again.

I also made the Indonesian inspired coconut chicken and rice.  That was just okay.  I may have overcrowded the pan, so I'll take some credit for it.

Last recipe and one for my mom's palate: Indonesian inspired fried bananas.  Many many times YES.  These are so easy and so good that you'll never order out again.  I made my own whipped cream from scratch since we were out of the canned, which was a nice pairing.  I also went with the suggestion from Food Lab of using woks as deep fryers, which immediately  made my nice deep fryer obsolete before its maiden usage.  No splatter and easy to monitor temperature with an instant read thermometer.

On thermometers: I highly recommend getting an easy to use fairly inexpensive instant read one.  Mine goes from -50 to 500 degrees F so can work for pretty much any kitchen use you'd want.  A good thermometer is at the top of the list even above good knives and cookware for "how not to ruin food".

Next week, I'll be cooking from Smitten Kitchen Every Day.  Deb Perelman, and if you don't know her blog, I have no idea how you find mine, has never submitted a recipe I've hated either in her cookbooks or on her blog.  As she cooks out of a tiny apartment kitchen of the sort I was familiar with from my Brooklyn days, her recipes generally don't require a chef's kitchen's worth of appliances, ingredients, and pans.  When I was doing the "one cookbook a week" with my ex husband, her first cookbook yielded the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had, so I'm looking particularly forward to this next week.

Cookbookery and Recipe tests

 So I'm thinking of having a few categories I'm experimenting with.  One I'm excited about is new recipes I tested out from my extensive cookbook collection and blog readings.

Let's try a first post:

This week I'm cooking from "Around the World in 450 Recipes".  Monday night, I chose the "Africa" section for Jollof chicken and rice, a hotly contested dish originating from West Africa.

The recipe is a little light on spice varieties but I went with it mostly as written, only substituting Red Boat fish sauce for dried shrimp because I could not find dried shrimp for love or money.  It gives the dish a nice umami burst.  The chicken was a nice cut up bird from Wegman's, since I was too lazy to do the cut work myself.

Results were quite nice, I thought, though possibly a little less than authentic.  I did pare the green pepper down to a quarter of one due to a less than brave palate in my dining companion and the remaining ingredients did well.  The chicken was juicy though the recipe only calls for it to cook as long as the rice.  I used my trusty meat thermometer and took it off early to avoid it becoming dry (a meat thermometer is a really essential investment and they're cheap).  The rice was excellent, a sort of take on dirty rice using the chicken broth and tomato sauce from the rest of the recipe to cook it in.

Future modifications.  Possibly trying a recipe that incorporates more spices.  The thyme, garlic, onions, and pepper were nice, but it could have used a few more hits.  For my own palate, I'd have kept the whole chili pepper.  Tomatoes are king in this recipe as in any jollof rice, so as the summer progresses, I may try the chopped tomatoes being from my garden heirlooms rather than a can.

Bonus side dish: Smitten Kitchen's poolside slaw from her blog.  Deb Perelman is my favorite food blogger; I have both of her books with the next one on preorder, and I've never had a recipe of hers fall completely.  She's addicted to slaw and as a slaw skeptic, I decided to use her form of "dump dish" to create slaw from leftover vegetables with a tasty miso tahini dressing.

I liked it a lot.  I hate the "soggy mayo" varieties of coleslaw and this had none of that, plus being fresh gave the added vegetables (snow peas, carrots, celery, broccoli, cauliflower) crunch.  To prep it for today's lunch, after serving dinner, I crushed dry ramen noodles and added them, something that I am very glad of today.

Tonight's "Around the World" recipe will be a whitefish and prawn coconut spinach curry.  We'll see how it goes!

 Greetings!

I decided to retire and branch off "A Caribbean MD is Good Enough for Me!" because it was, here I am, and I'm trying to settle into my life in New Jersey while still scratching my travel itch.

This will likely mostly be a food blog.  After being shamed into learning to cook at 30 by a 21 year old roommate, and gradually tinkering more and more with cooking, I'm really loving the practice and art.  I figure if the first half of my life was sufficient to learn medicine and triple board in pathology along with learning to talk, color, walk, ice skate, half speak Spanish, scuba dive, and the like, then surely in the latter half of my life I can master cooking.

There will also be a travelogue, but as I am "semi reformed", I spend most of my time in my newly adopted home state occasionally dashing out of the state (or the country) to get rid of the DTs.  While traveling, I like to pick up new and fun tips on cooking as well as special ingredients to bring a taste of that place home.

Enjoy!