Cooking Adventure: Pineapple (part deux)

Well! Now that you've (presumably) cut up a pineapple and have finished your unwholesome feeding frenzy on its freshly-harvested flesh, what do you do with the bits you can't eat?

Delicious, delicious carnage.

You make pineapple water!

Ingredients:

The peel, core and bottom bit of a pineapple (not the crown)

A lemon or two

Sugar

Water

Firstly, throw all your pineapple bits into a bowl that can hold about a gallon of water. Bigger is better.

Scrap bucket or the beginning of something wondrous?

Chop up a lemon (or two) and throw the slices in the bucket, peel and all. I used a huge one that was probably the equivalent of two lemons, but in the future I would only use one normal-sized lemon.

Giant, mutant lemon.

Today's post is brought to you by the color yellow.

Add three tablespoons of sugar and dump in half a gallon of water. Stick it in the fridge and let it sit overnight.

In the morning, pour into a pitcher or jug or whatever you have. I had an empty water jug.

Yay!

Don't expect an explosion of fruity goodness. The flavor is light and it's mostly tart - the sugar only gets rid of the bitterness this drink would have. It's mostly lemon-flavored and it's refreshing.

Happy cooking!

Cooking Adventure: Pineapple

This isn't cooking, but I didn't want to add the category "Carving up awkwardly-shaped fruit Adventure".

Pineapples! They are the bane and boon of my existence. They're so juicy and sweet and they taste like sunshine, but the fibers tend to go all Hellraiser on my mouth.

Just as hard to open up as a pineapple. And by that I mean anyone can do it.

Canned pineapple does not bring me tears and suffering like fresh pineapple does, but the only "fresh" pineapple I'd had was from a grocery store fruit tray. I decided to carve up my own and see if there was really a difference.

Ingredients/supplies:

A whole pineapple

A big knife

A potato peeler

A note on choosing a ripe pineapple: yank at the center leaves. The pineapple that gives up one of these leaves with the least fuss is the ripest pineapple. I had to work the leaves of this one back and forth twice before they popped out. All the other pineapples had leaves that wouldn't budge no matter what.

Firstly, scrub your pineapple all over with warm water and a scrubby brush. Really scrub it. You can use the rind for pineapple water later.

Hello, beautiful.

Then cut off the green part a bit below the base and the bottom of the pineapple as well. The peel is super tough, so please be careful and make sure to keep your fingers out of the knife's way.

Decapitated!

De-butt-itated!

Set the pineapple upright and cut from the top to the bottom, removing the peel. Don't worry about leaving little brown spots. Just don't leave strips of peel on the fruit.

These cuts are much easier than the initial ones.

Once you've cut all the peel off, you'll see brown spots. Some of them will look like little craters and some of them are small spots surrounded by a dark ring of fruit. Use the scoop end of a potato peeler to remove all these spots, small and large. They're tough and unpleasant to bite into.

Large brown spots.

Small brown spots.

Spots successfully removed!

Now you can carve it up however you choose. I like to set the pineapple down on its side like the picture above and cut it crosswise, making pineapple circles. If you do this, you'll see the pineapple's core. It's super tough and nearly impossible to bite through, so it should be removed.

Pineapples taste like sunshine and look like a mini sun!

How I cut around the core.

A quart of pineapple.

Oh my god, you guys. You guys.

Fresh-cut pineapple - genuinely fresh-cut - is the only way to go. It was ridiculously juicy, super flavorful, and sweet like candy. I eat candy like a panda eats bamboo, so I do not say this lightly. Pineapple would have ousted watermellon as my favorite fruit if it weren't for those darn fibers that cut up my mou-

Oh, wait. Fresh-cut, ripe pineapple doesn't cut up my mouth. Sorry, watermellon. We had some good times, but nothing compares to the tastiness and joy that is fresh pineapple.

Happy fruit carving!

Cooking Adventure: Ham

My mom suggested a HoneyBaked ham for Easter dinner. I do like ham, but that particular brand just doesn't cut it anymore. Not after I had some of my friend Jess' amazing glazed ham. Unwilling to suffer through another HoneyBaked, I asked Jess how she made her ham.

Offerings to dark gods?

She helpfully provided me the following recipe.

Ingredients:

A fully-cooked, spiral-cut ham (I used a "half-ham")

2 cans of cola

Whole cloves

The rub:

Brown sugar

Salt

Cinnamon

The glaze:

1/2 cup maple syrup (you can probably get away with the fake stuff)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tbsp mustard (technically brown or Dijon, but yellow is fine)

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp cinnamon

1/2 can of cola (I left this out and it worked just fine)

First, gaze upon your ham. I did so in fear and hesitation. My fears were unfounded, because this is a ridiculously easy recipe.

Please be delicious.

Don your cooking armor and prepare to do battle.

My cooking armor.

Hidden behind the label are the cooking instructions. The label is designed to peel off. So give it a firm yank and-

AAAAAAAUUUGH!

-tear right through the cooking time and temperature. It's best to leave the label where it is, cut through the shrink wrap, rinse off the shrink wrap and turn it over to peer at the label from the reverse side.

Wash the ham. It's covered in gross.

Put your ham in a roasting pan. Basically any rectangular (or even oval) pan with at least 2-inch sides, preferably a bit higher. You can put the ham on a rack if you want, but I didn't have one. I just stuck the ham in the pan the way it was wrapped - no looking for the fatty side or anything.

Jess elaborates the next step: "Pour a can of Coke over it. Pull spiral cuts apart just enough so that the Coke dribbles down inside. ALL UP IN THAR."

Rub the ham down with some brown sugar, salt and cinnamon. The proportions should be about 80% brown sugar, 10% salt, 10% cinnamon. I eyeballed it.

I also rubbed down the front, so that first slice is going to be amazing.

Jess: "Stud ham with whole cloves. Drop a couple of the f***ers in the Coke.  THAT'LL TEACH IT."

Yeah!

Cover the ham in tinfoil.

Ham! From! Spaaaaaaaaace!

The label will have the cooking time and temperature. It's usually x minutes per pound. Through poor math and rounding wildly at every turn, I figured this ham should be in the oven for about two hours.

Twenty-five minutes before it was due to come out, I opened up the oven, pulled out the rack and uncovered the ham to glaze it. I did it right there with the oven open and received a little sunburn on the back of my glazing hand. Please use caution, or at least have some sunburn ointment to hand. Don't let the glaze drip into the pan. Really baste the ham. Get it in between the spirals. Then throw it back in the oven for the remaining cooking time. You can leave it in a bit longer if you want the glaze crispy. I didn't do this, just in case I made ham flambé.

I was supposed to throw the glaze ingredients into a saucepan and simmer the mixture, but I...forgot. It still turned out perfectly.

Unsimmered glaze, because I'm a rebel.

After two hours and a great deal of praying, I removed the ham from the oven.

Hale-friggen-lujah!

The spirals separated a bit, letting the glaze cook into each slice.

This is a very easy recipe that turns out very impressive and very delicious. I had a 9.38-lb. ham and it cost a little under $20. By comparison, a HoneyBaked 9-lb. ham is a little over $80. Jess' ham beats all other contenders on every front. I definitely recommend this recipe for any special-occasion dinner or family gathering, or just because ham is delicious.

Happy cooking!

Cooking Adventure: French Toast - THE RECKONING

I have a dear friend - McK who is one of the manliest men I know. He plays video games, shoots guns, saves the world and cooks.

If you look past all the wide, smiling faces of TV chef personalities, you see the inherent danger and excitement of cooking. Knives! Fire! Mallets! Slicing! Stabbing!

Did I mention fire?

McK makes manly food - filling, flavorful and tons of it. In the post Cooking Misadventure: French Toast, McK left a comment with his own recipe. Today, I make that recipe.

Ingredients:

Wheat bred (McK specified Roman wheat bread, but I'm not sure what that is)
Eggs
Milk or water (optional)

Time to pray!

Milk/egg ratio should be 1 part milk to 4 parts eggs. Mix the eggs and milk in a flat-bottomed bowl for optimum dunking. My favorite flat-bottomed bowl was in the fridge holding a giant watermelon, so I decided to be lazy (and hungry) and use the next best thing.

I was wary of trying another French toast recipe, so I only used two pieces of bread and two eggs. I'm not sure how much milk I used - maybe 1/4 of a cup. I'm not sure about the measurement of a large egg.

After the previous French toast debacle, I was extremely wary about this attempt. The fact that when I cracked the eggs they both caved in on themselves - leaving me to hold a mass of broken shells and goop - did not give me hope that this would turn out any better. It seemed like an ill omen.

Also, the kitchen walls were bleeding.

Butter a pan with salted butter on a medium-low flame. McK helpfully informs us that using oil will make the French toast taste eggy, which isn't good. He also lets us know that burning the butter will make the French toast taste better. I decided to brown the butter to test this.

French-toast-making station. The picture is blurry because I was beset by a flock of lesser demons.

Lay a piece of bread flat in the eggs, then flip it over, then immediately set in the hot pan. Fill up the pan with the pre-French toast. I had a round pan, so this did not take long.

If I had to cook for guests, I calculate it would take about 4,000,000,000 hours until everyone was served.

Cook until the French toast gets kind of brown on each side.

I also threw in some summer sausage. And holy water.

Remove from pan. McK: "Re-butter the pan for any following frenching of toasts." Serve with whatever you want. I, like McK, prefer butter and syrup.

It was with great trepidation that I approached this French toast. I expected something bland or maybe tough or perhaps dry. It was none of these. I swear when I took a bite that the heavens parted and there was an angel chorus. The darkness was banished. This was proper French toast. Paired with summer sausage, it made for a highly satisfying - nay, highly amazing - lunch.

Breakfast for lunch is awesome, beaten only by breakfast for dinner.

Happy cooking!

Cooking Adventure: Asparagus and Chicken

Asparagus. My arch nemesis. It has a taste like no other, and that's not a good thing. The texture, flavor and smell of asparagus is extremely off-putting.

That said, this is the only dish I will eat asparagus in and I love it.

Oh my stars and garters.

This is a very simple dish with very few ingredients and it tastes very good.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lbs chicken (white meat)

1 bunch asparagus (about 10 stalks, give or take a few)

soy sauce

Present and accounted for.

Chop up all the asparagus into 1-2 inch pieces. Get rid of the white or purple bottoms - they're very tough, won't cook well and are flavorless. If your asparagus is particularly thick, you can chop it in half lengthwise for more even cooking

If you're like me, you can pretend you're Paul Bunyan, felling trees.

Throw them in a pan with a bit of oil and 1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce. I recommend using a nonstick skillet. Stir everything up to get the asparagus well-coated and spread them out evenly in the pan. Cover with a lid and go cut up the chicken.

Can you tell my skillet did not come with a lid?

Cut the chicken up into bite-sized pieces. NOTE: The super-cheap grocery store brand meat is certainly inexpensive, but you'll end up cutting off giant chunks of fat, gristle, tendons and odd-colored bits. High-quality meat will hardly need any trimming at all. By experiment, the cheap meat and the quality meat prices come out to about the same once trimmed. The picture below shows how much I had to cut off four fairly large chicken breasts (good quality).

Suitable for kitty.

Stop every now and then to give the asparagus a stir. The asparagus should be tender, but not mushy. The sliced stalks will cook faster. When the asparagus is done, remove it from the pan and put in a bit more oil and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Add the chicken and stir to coat it.

Raw chicken never looks good.

Cook the chicken until no longer pink on the inside. I like to have a medium-high heat on when I cook it. Once it's fully cooked, throw the asparagus back in and stir it up.

Mmmmmmmmm.

Eat it with rice! If you don't like rice, eat it with...something.

Lunchtime!

Happy cooking!

Cooking Adventure: Tamagoyaki

I tried another French toast recipe and failed. Hard. I am bound and determined to make good French toast. Until that glorious day, I made another egg-based food. Tamagoyaki!

Anyone familiar with Japanese cuisine (or manga and anime) has seen or tasted this. It's a rolled omelet. I'm not sure why it's called an omelet, because it's not filled with anything. It's just egg and sugar and salt. It's also tasty! "Tamago" means "egg" and "yaki" means "fried". I think.

Ingredients:

4 large eggs
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
Optional: 1 tbsp soy sauce and 1 tsp mirin (sweet cooking sake)

I don't use mirin in my tamagoyaki because I'm already using sugar, and I omit the soy sauce because I use it as a dip rather than an ingredient.

 Three ingredients. I can't possibly screw this up. Right?

Beat the eggs with the salt and sugar. Some people like to only beat them until the yoke is broken and things are a little stirred up, claiming fully-mixed eggs become tough when cooking. Some people want the eggs well and truly beaten. I belong to the latter group.

I used an immersion blender. Anything worth doing is worth overkilling.

You'll need a nonstick skillet for this. You need one. First, oil it up with a thin coating. Dipping a paper towel in some vegetable oil and giving the pan a thorough wipe-down will do the trick.

The heat isn't on.

Turn on the burner to medium-high and let the pan heat up for about 30 seconds or so, just enough to get it a bit hot. Then turn it down to medium and pour in some egg mixture. You want just enough to spread out over the bottom of the pan. If it's too much, the top will stay raw and the bottom will burn.

Mmmm, that looks really gross.

Once the egg has just about set, but not quite yet, start rolling it up with a spatula.

More accurately, start flopping it over on itself.

Flop, flop, flop, rip, curse, flop.

Once it's all rolled up, or at least mostly rolled up because of the curvature of the pan, oil the bit without egg, then pour in more egg mixture. Swirl it around to get the pan evenly-coated and lift up the rolled bit to get some egg mixture under it. Then let it cook until nearly set and roll it back the opposite way.

It smells like baking pastries.

Try to roll it as tight as possible.

Be careful not to cook the egg too long before rolling it up. It won't stick to the roll and when you ultimately cut it up, it'll be a loose spiral that comes undone.

Proud and unflinching, the tamagoyaki stares down the cook.

Now you need to let it cool down. The egg will set further while this is happening. If you want, you can wrap it tightly in saran wrap during this cooling-off phase to make its signature rectangular shape even more rectangular. You can also just cut right into it, though the layers might be a bit loose.

First, you'll notice that the ends are tapered. Go ahead and cut them off to even the whole thing out.

 

Shwing!

Then cut it up into sections.

The spiral of egg becomes more apparent after dipping it in soy sauce.

Tamagoyaki

Tasty, sweet and portable

Pack it in a lunch

Tamagoyaki, baby roma tomatoes and sugar snap peas. Guest appearance by Kimlan soy sauce.

Happy cooking!