Category: savory

THIS FOODIE FIGHT IS ON! i’m a proud participant in the first ever foodie fight, a competition between 6 bloggers who all have to use the same 2 ingredients to put their best dish forward. it was created by nick of macheesmo and dan of the food in my beard (2 really awesome blogs). go check them out, then come right back here, because, oh, do i have something to show you.

as soon as i found out the 2 main ingredients for the competition were potatoes and lemon, my mind instantly went to potato wrapped fish. lemon works with both fish and potatoes, and potato wrapped fish = instant fish and chips. add a little spring veggie goodness, and it’s good!

i figured that the fish would be the most challenging part, but it was even harder than i thought. the key is to get the potatoes really paper thin so they’ll wrap around the fish and also fry up and stay crispy. using plastic wrap to pull the potato packet together was a huge help.

i love that the wrapped potato gives the illusion of giant scales on the fish. after wrapping all the fish pieces, i put them in the fridge to firm up and moved onto the veggies.

what’s better than asparagus and zucchini? how about grilled asparagus and zucchini? even cooking it up for just a minute or two really changes the taste. the veggies got tossed with a bit of lemon juice and lemon zest as well as salt and pepper. the slices were very thin, but even after they were cooked, they still had a healthy bite to them.

ok, back to the fish. unwrapping the fish packet from the plastic was pretty tough, but i could breathe a sigh of relief once it was in the hot pan. like anything you want to crisp up correctly, you have to actually walk away from the pan and give it a few minutes. the potato will naturally release from the pan once it’s got a good crust on it.

amazingly, the fish stays incredibly moist while the potato gets perfectly crisp. since the fish and potato were both seasoned before cooking, the only thing you have to worry about is getting it in and out of the pan carefully.

the last part of the dish that tied it all together was the aioli. i thought it would be a good sauce for the fish, and it really added a garlicky and lemony tang. finally getting to taste the finished meal just felt good. the best thing about this competition was that it pushed me to try new cooking techniques. now i just need to learn how to not have it take me 3 hours to prepare a nice meal. it’s an honor to be in this contest with the 5 other talented bloggers, and i can’t wait to see what they’ve concocted.

so one last thing – HEAD ON OVER TO THE FOODIE FIGHTS SITE TO SEE ALL OF THE ENTRIES AND VOTE!

or you can vote below:

after i graduated from college, i wasn’t exactly batting down a barrage of job offers. that’s not to say that i wasn’t prepared to find a job, but as a creative writing major, i was a little uncertain about my future. graduation meant moving back to my parent’s house in pennsylvania while i job-hunted for positions in dc. getting an interview meant having to take a few hour drive south – or, as i did, crashing with my girl in baltimore, an almost halfway point. i had several interviews spaced a few days apart (for the job that i still have now!), so crashing for a night became crashing for a week…and a half.

so what did i do on those days in between interviews? well, besides online job-hunting, not a whole lot. so when the girl got home after a full day of summer classes to find me still watching tv in my pajamas, i figured i need to find a way to busy myself (and repay my incredibly gracious and beautiful host in the process). so began my quest for new meals!

i dedicated my days to cooking things i had never attempted to surprise the girl each night with a new dinner. that week marked a few first-time meals for me, but what really sticks out in my mind is this pumpkin corn chowder. using fresh corn helps, and make sure you use plain canned pumpkin, NOT pumpkin pie mix, then adjust the flavors with your own spices. if you like hearty soups, this is the way to go. as with any soup, the fun is in playing around with the ingredients, so feel free to deviate from the recipe to make it your own.

there’s no shortage of fried chicken joints where i live, but my favorite kind will always be homemade. since the first time we had “corn flakes chicken,” i’ve been searching for new and interesting ways to fry delicious things. after trials with several different cereals (cap’n crunch, no crunchberries, thank you, and frosted mini chex – too sweet), i’ve settled on honey bunches of oats. it’s got the perfect amount of crunch, a good sweetness, and it tastes great cold when you’re looking for something to gobble down at 2 am.

the assembly line: breading and frying chicken can be an extremely messy task, and my one piece of advice is to constantly clean your workstation and keep your hands clean and dry. the worst thing you can do is get globs of egg and flour in the cereal breading. trust me, taking your time here can make a world of difference once you’re ready to start frying.

the key to flouring your chicken is to keep the coating very light. pat off any excess flour so there’s a thin even coating. if the flour layer is too thick, dipping it into the egg will get you clumps of egg-flour glue that will drip right of the chicken, putting you back where you started. keeping both the flour and egg layers thin ensures you get a strong glue to help the coating stick close to the chicken and stay on during the frying process.

can you find the chicken in this picture? here’s the giant tub of cereal i used to bread the chicken. since the flakes are a little large,  i dumped a bunch in a tupperware container and crushed it with my bare hands. i suppose you could also quickly pulse it in the food processor or pour some into a ziploc bag and crush it with a rolling pin but i like getting my hands in there. see all those tiny crumbs of cereal goodness? make sure you use them – the goal is to get each piece of chicken completely covered, and those tiny crumbs can fill in the gaps between the giant bunches and oats.

here’s a quick reminder that i’m also making macaroni n’ cheese. did you forget? this will also have breading on it. i can’t wait.

and now back to the chicken, post-fry. there are few sights as beautiful. i almost don’t want to ruin it by, you know, eating it. alas, i must. for blog purposes, you see. to backtrack a bit, i fried up the chicken in vegetable oil, although you can use your fat of choice – if you’re a purist, maybe a tub of crisco is the way to go. for some reason though, crisco just weirds me out.

i mean, just look at this chicken. if you start seeing honey bunches of oats chicken on the menus of fancy restaurants soon, don’t freak out. embrace it.