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Cooking adventures #1: Stir frys
Jul. 26th, 2007 12:13 pmSo at home I've been making stir frys, mostly because they're relatively quick but also because we still had a fair amount of vegetables left over from the last one and I'm not the biggest fan of salads. This time I decided to try making the sauce from scratch, so I bought soy sauce and crushed garlic from the supermarket and planned to combine it with honey we already had at home.
On cooking a few things became apparent. Chicken from Franklins isn't the most amazing quality and I ended up throwing out a couple of pieces that looked dodgy (yeh yeh I know but I wanted to see for myself how different it was). Next I discovered that using light soy sauce and adding a bit water to a hot pan is a really really bad idea. Within a couple of seconds the front of the stove was covered in a light film of soy sauce and I got splattered a fair bit by boiling sauce. After that came the realisation that it's really hard to get tablespoons of honey out of the jar in a hurry. Also that it wasn't the best idea to put said tablespoon into the garlic first, since now there's a little bit of garlic in the honey and I'm sure that'll taste interesting on my morning toast.. Lastly I suspect that I should have made the whole sauce beforehand, putting it over a low flame and letting it thicken up a bit rather than just dumping all that stuff separately over the meat and vegies and hoping it all came out ok. And there was too much chicken and not enough vegies in the final dish.
Having said that it didn't come out too badly. Parts of the chicken ended up a bit tasteless due to not getting enough sauce on them, which I intend to remedy with the leftovers by trying to make the aforementioned thickened sauce and pouring that over the top. The rice still isn't the most amazing quality (I bought brown rice on my father's advice, which is leading to all sorts of fun since all the recipes and instructions are optimised for white rice) but I'm definitely getting closer to working out the details. But it was still edible and used up pretty much all the vegetables, so I'm happy.
And I'm not entirely happy with the selection of pots, pans and other vessels we have at the moment. We have two pots which come in the sizes of Large and Larger, and I'd like to at some point get a small one for making sauces and small quantities of stuff in general. Our only pan is a shallow, which is good for shallow frying where you don't need to use so much oil or heat but not so good for stir frying since it leads to be being splattered with hot oil/sauce a lot. Zhe recommended getting a deeper pan if not a wok, but they seem a bit on the expensive side. As do pots. Sigh.
Next on cooking adventures: Baking!
On cooking a few things became apparent. Chicken from Franklins isn't the most amazing quality and I ended up throwing out a couple of pieces that looked dodgy (yeh yeh I know but I wanted to see for myself how different it was). Next I discovered that using light soy sauce and adding a bit water to a hot pan is a really really bad idea. Within a couple of seconds the front of the stove was covered in a light film of soy sauce and I got splattered a fair bit by boiling sauce. After that came the realisation that it's really hard to get tablespoons of honey out of the jar in a hurry. Also that it wasn't the best idea to put said tablespoon into the garlic first, since now there's a little bit of garlic in the honey and I'm sure that'll taste interesting on my morning toast.. Lastly I suspect that I should have made the whole sauce beforehand, putting it over a low flame and letting it thicken up a bit rather than just dumping all that stuff separately over the meat and vegies and hoping it all came out ok. And there was too much chicken and not enough vegies in the final dish.
Having said that it didn't come out too badly. Parts of the chicken ended up a bit tasteless due to not getting enough sauce on them, which I intend to remedy with the leftovers by trying to make the aforementioned thickened sauce and pouring that over the top. The rice still isn't the most amazing quality (I bought brown rice on my father's advice, which is leading to all sorts of fun since all the recipes and instructions are optimised for white rice) but I'm definitely getting closer to working out the details. But it was still edible and used up pretty much all the vegetables, so I'm happy.
And I'm not entirely happy with the selection of pots, pans and other vessels we have at the moment. We have two pots which come in the sizes of Large and Larger, and I'd like to at some point get a small one for making sauces and small quantities of stuff in general. Our only pan is a shallow, which is good for shallow frying where you don't need to use so much oil or heat but not so good for stir frying since it leads to be being splattered with hot oil/sauce a lot. Zhe recommended getting a deeper pan if not a wok, but they seem a bit on the expensive side. As do pots. Sigh.
Next on cooking adventures: Baking!
