Dinner Time!

May 4, 2008 - 4:37 pm PDT

I should have missed making dinner at night more than I did when we didn’t have a car. Corey and me for a few months now have been back on track with our delicious dinners since we got the car and have been making regular grocery trips. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy cooking and eating good food. The last three nights I’ve made some really great meals if I do say so myself.

Lentil Dahl While Corey and me were in our hotel the night before we got home from Louisiana we were watching this food show about cooking in India. One of the meals that the host tried was lentil dahl, and it looked so good. We decided to try it out when we got home since we had some lentils ready to be used in the cupboard. It’s a fairly simple meal and if you google the name you’ll find several recipes to get the basic gist. It’s just cooked lentils with a particular blend of spices. We bought some pitas to eat with it and used those instead of utensils to eat it. Yummy. I will have to admitt one thing though, Corey made this meal.

Chili This is one of my favorite things to make, but I’m really not sure why. My recipe is fairly simple to make, but it’s different every time. I guess you could call it more a formula than a recipe. However, I made this two nights ago and even though it was lacking meat (it’s just not a good chili without meat) it was the best chili I’ve ever made. Corey agrees with me and I think it’s because we decided to cook a ham hock in the pan first. If you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s used in a lot of southern cooking and you should be able to find it in a good sized grocery store. Basically you cook it (probably with some oil) in the bottom of your pan to get the flavor. You don’t eat it, but the flavor it adds is just wonderful. Add some well made sour cream and deeelicious cheddar (thank you Cabot!) and you’ve got a beautiful chili.

Oh, and one thing I highly recommend is that you watch the Good Eats episode where Alton Brown shows how to make your own chili powder. It makes a big difference and is quite easy if you’ve got a spice grinder (cheap coffee grinder used only for spices).

Southern Style Cookin’ Last night I did pretty good with dinner as well, and Corey deemed it good southern cooking. It wasn’t anything traditionally southern, just a simple well seasoned meal with good stuff. I roasted some whole chicken breasts (basically a roast with the legs and wings removed) with an herb butter, stuck a few potatos in the bottom of the dish to roast with it and soak up the flavor. We also had some slow pan cooked broccoli and green beans with butter and lots of seasonings. I don’t care what fancy cooks say about steaming or sauteeing broccoli, because I like my broccoli cooked almost to mush. Add some corn bread and you’ve got a damn good meal.

While both me and Corey like cooking the same, we’ve learned over time that we have very different cooking styles. A while ago we decided that whoever didn’t cook had to do the dishes. Since I don’t enjoy doing dishes, I often opted to cook and that has become our habit now. This is probably for the best because my cooking style lends itself to cooking on the fly. Most meals take me about an hour, and most stuff that I cook involve throwing stuff together in one pot and seasoning to my liking. Corey’s cooking style involves a lot more research, recipe lookups, and planning which is probably not best for night to night cooking.

My chili formula: simple-chili.txt

Categorized: Food & Tea, General