Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Kitchen Zink - Student Work

Sunday night was a proud one in the Zink household.  In just under two hours, from ingredients laid out to plates licked clean, we created a dish that is apparently worthy of scorn by any real chef.  But since I'm not a real chef, I would be happy to be scoffed at if I got to eat that dinner again!  Actually, I'm being a tad bit facetious about the derision for this dish - in fact it's based on one comment from one Chopped contestant on one episode.  In said show, one of the contestants makes a roulade (rolled up meat around a filling, basically), and in the talking-head interview, his or her opponent makes a snarky remark about roulades being "so culinary school."  You hear that?  I can make things culinary school students make!  Woot!

It all began, as these stories so often do, with the downtown Des Moines farmers market.  It's October, but there is still an incredible array of fresh food available.  And amongst the many squashes and potatoes, there were a few other veggies lurking, including what we found at the Grinnell Heritage Farm booth... collard greens!  Prior to this weekend I have had collards on exactly one occasion, in a steamed mass at a Golden Corral.  They were okay but not scintillating, so I had no real reason to be interested, but the greens at the Grinnell stand looked so pretty, we couldn't pass them up.  One bunch of greens, $3 down, and no real plan yet.

Once our heavily laden bags were unpacked at home, I spent a few minutes searching for recipes when one caught my eye - wild rice and collard stuffed chicken, from the Food Network website.  Sounds good, but it involves deboning an entire chicken.  So unless you live near one of these, it's a whole lot of work!


But we did have some leftover chicken breasts in the fridge with no plan and a semi-urgent need to be used before they started to turn, well, unpleasant.  Bingo!  Our super-local ingredient collection included greens from Grinnell, wild rice from Minnesota, and chicken breasts from Nebraska.  Which is great, but we had no recipe.  Time to improvise!

Drawing inspiration from a Chopped episode and a Fine Cooking magazine, we sliced the collards into a chiffonade (which is super fun to do - just try it sometime), and sauteed them in, you guessed it, bacon fat.  Just a minute and pulled from the heat.  The wild rice, meanwhile, was simmering away on low heat for 45 minutes, and Stacia did an expert job slicing the chicken into butterflies and pounding them flat.  Note: I'm not scared of raw meat or anything, but Stacia really likes that part of the prep and does a kick-ass job of it, so I'm not about to try to budge my way in.  Assembly was a bit of a task, piling up the greens and rice on the chicken and rolling them up.  One of the two tore a bit en route, but enough toothpicks held it together.

I wanted to sear the roulades, and had a slightly lousy idea to bread them first.  We rolled them in a beaten egg, then some bread crumbs and put them into my precious (All-Clad pan) over fairly high heat with some oil.  The plan was to sear the outsides in the pan, then finish them in the oven - a great way to go, but probably better without bread crumbs.  The crumbs got crunchy and all, but I think a nice sear on the meat itself would have been just a little tastier.  In the future, that's definitely the way I'd go.

So the roulades got popped into the oven at 400 for about 15-20 minutes, while I made perhaps my most successful pan sauce to date!  With my newfound knowledge from my cooking class, I opted to make a veloute: a chicken stock sauce thickened with roux.  It was so exciting!  Butter/chicken drippings and flour to a roux, cooked to about a blond color, and then whisk in chicken stock and some salt and pepper.  Nearly instant gravy!  Unfortunately my homemade stock hadn't quite defrosted yet, so we had to use boxed stuff, but it came out awesome.  Really great chicken flavor, and the right consistency with the roux.  I felt like a real cook (or at least a culinary student ;).

We had to go a little fancypants with the roulades, so we sliced them and laid the pretty spiral discs on the plate, then drizzled the gravy across the top.  Again, here a bunch of the bread crumbs fell off and looked a little less pretty, so I would opt without for next time, but still, a rather beautiful plate.  Roulades always look nice, with the fun little windows of filling between the spiraled meat, and the collard/wild rice mixture was particularly appealing.  Taste didn't disappoint either!  It all came together in a nice earthy, homey kind of flavor, from the hearty chicken to the slightly chewy, nutty rice, and the mild smooth greens, all bound together with my creamy veloute, or gravy if you don't want to be so hoity-toity.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, it wasn't exactly easy to make.  This meal took about two hours from start to finish, but if you like to cook, that's not really a downside - more time to have fun in the kitchen.  And the cool thing is that now that we've kind of figured out how to do roulades, we can fill them with anything!  Chicken kiev, chicken cordon bleu, or chicken whatever we've got in the fridge are all possibilities now.  Some might call that student work, but if they ever said that about mine, I think I'd take it as a compliment.  After all, in the kitchen, I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner.  

Monday, October 4, 2010

September Filmfest

Just in time for blogspot to become un-blocked at work, here we are at the beginning of another month, meaning it's time for the usual look back on the old movies from last month.  Apparently September was busy (although it doesn't feel any more so than the rest of the year), since I only watched five movies from my lists.  Five was my original goal, then it became more of a minimum, and now apparently that's all I had time for.  But that's fine, too, since I'm being more open about picking ones I want to watch rather than just the next one up the list.  So it was a pretty good batch.  But enough yakking, here's this month's list, from least to most favorite.

5) Raising Arizona (1987) - Extra!  This movie was only on the list of 100 comedies, not the full AFI list.  But I had heard of it, so I recorded it to the DVR at some point and decided to try to watch it.  Emphasis on try.  Out of the 54 films I've seen since starting the movie section of the blog, this was the first I've had to give up early on.  It's allegedly a quirky comedy from the Coen brothers about Nicolas Cage stealing a baby (sounds surprisingly natural when you write it that way...), but after nearly an hour, I don't think I'd even chuckled once.  All the jokes were the stupid, screaming-style physical comedy that I usually expect from lousy kids' movies, and the characters were so vapid they were just irritating.  Sorry, but I'm not going to laugh at Cage putting six babies on the floor and then running around hopelessly trying to catch them all.  I think this was the worst movie I've seen on this project, and I am so glad I quit partway through.

4) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) - This movie was very much not what I expected, and it was nasty and uncomfortable, but also interesting in its own way.  The premise is that a verbally abusive husband and wife invite a younger couple over to a late night party and basically unravel while the other couple watches/kind of falls apart themselves.  They all are really very cruel to one another, so it's not really fun to see, but it's an intriguing view of the more base levels of human nature and raw, ugly emotion.  Kind of like American Beauty, where the family's destruction isn't entertaining per se, but it does keep you drawn in.  I wouldn't recommend pulling this one out if you have guests over (ha!), but it could be worth a try.  If the first half hour or so feels too uncomfortably nasty, though, call it quits, because it just gets meaner.

3) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - Well, I think everyone has seen this, so there's likely not much that I can say that would be informative or interesting.  It's creepy, but in a good way, or at least as good as a movie about a serial killer who eats his victims can be.  ;)  There are lots of parts that I like about this film, but the best moments are, not surprisingly, the interactions between Clarice and Hannibal Lecter.  The tension is palpable, to coin a phrase, as Clarice desperately seeks information from a psychopath who's just toying with her all along.  Bizarre as it may sound about such a twisted movie, it really is an enjoyable film to watch.  Downsides are few: the ending seems a bit happenstance to me, but not overly so.  And this may be just me, but I always preferred Julianne Moore in the sequel to Jodie Foster as Clarice.  That's probably blasphemy to hardcore fans, but I thought she was more identifiable with.  Both good though.

2) All the President's Men (1976) - As the movie jacket calls it, "the film that launched a thousand journalism careers."  This is the (perhaps dramatized) true story of the reporters who broke the story of the Watergate scandal, and one I've liked from the first time I watched it, probably ten years ago.  Now, I had not yet been born when this scandal occurred, so I can't comment on the factuality of it, but it's got to be the best newspaper movie ever.  We follow along with Woodward and Bernstein, rapt, as they slowly peel away layers of clues to find out just how far up the cover-up goes.  Played perfectly by Robert Redford, as the youthful idealist and Dustin Hoffman, as more worldly but reinvigorated by the story, the pair is the perfect inspiration for seeking truth and doing what's right.  The movie's long, but I don't think much of it could have been cut without losing the drama of the struggle to both uncover the truth and actually get it published.  My only complaint with this movie is the ending.  I can understand ending it where it does, since that's essentially where Woodward and Bernstein's story closes, but you're left wanting to know more.  It's great, though, and heartily recommended.

1) The Sound of Music (1965) - I think Stacia would kill me if this didn't rank pretty high up the list.  ;)  Although I don't hold it in quite the same esteem as she does (it's probably not in my all-time top ten) I did enjoy seeing it again.  Part of my hesitance I suppose is that I didn't really grow up with this one; the singing Julie Andrews in our house was Mary Poppins, not Sister Maria.  All that said, this is a cute and charming movie, it has a pretty good lessons about standing up for what you believe in yet encouraging fun and happiness, and it has good songs and laughs along the way.  Even if you've never seen the movie, you probably recognize the songs - "My Favorite Things" and "Do-Re-Mi" are my favorites in this film.  It's not quite as serious as most of my top movies, but it's a lot of fun, and you can't help but smile at Maria's boundless enthusiasm.  A good movie, to be sure, and worth watching if you happen upon it.  Oh, and I totally want the puppets from "The Lonely Goatherd!"  :)

The AFI lists are slowly getting whittled down.  Technically, I still have to watch one of the #79s, but I've been picking and choosing higher up the lists, so there are 71 movies to go, or just over 55% of the original list.  Fortunately, whenever I do finish the list, there are literally hundreds of other AFI-recommended movies, and thousands of other old films for me to enjoy.  I'm starting to think this project might never officially end, just adding new movies as I go.  Can't wait to see some more!