52 Changes - Banish the Snooze!

As many of you may know, my wife is currently just short of halfway through a Master’s program, and just completed a semester in which she was working full-time while simultaneously taking two online courses.  Needless to say, she was really busy and didn’t have time to do much else.  Apparently that seemed like a really good excuse for me also to not do much around the house, and the place kinda went to crap.  Junk started piling up, dishes went unwashed, we cooked at home less frequently.  It was relaxing, not doing any of the household responsibilities, but it was also really lazy.

Toward the end of the semester, I took a mental step back and looked around.  While having lots of free time and nothing to do helped me make a lot of progress on my movie list (8 this month, seriously), I wasn’t moving forward with any of my other interests.  For all I talk about loving to cook, we really hadn’t made much of interest the past month or two.  As much as I consider myself a planner, I hadn’t consistently made a meal plan since the end of the winter.  I hardly played with the cats, had fallen out of reading, and had just written cursory blog posts, mostly about movies.

Now, before you think I’ve been really down lately, we did make time to do a lot of fun stuff.  We camped, went to baseball games, traveled locally, went to the Farmer’s Market, planted an awesome garden; all the things we enjoy.  It was just my big goals that had slipped.  I started the year vowing to get better at cooking, and actually learning some skills, but spent more time on the couch than in the kitchen.  So, it’s time to make some changes.  You’ve seen how I bought a new pan and made some nice, real food earlier this week.  But since I love lists, I’m also making lists of changes I want to make to get back into the groove of actually doing the things I say I like.

And just to get nuts, I’m going to try to make a change a week, and keep up each prior one as I go along.  Honestly, I just really love resolutions and fresh starts, so the true challenge will be maintaining the process.  But it’s worth a shot, and if nothing happens, well, I’m no worse off than when I started.  The first one’s simple, and started this Monday: no more snooze!

For background, here’s how a typical morning in the Zink household went prior to Monday.  First alarm went off at 6:00 AM, Greg hits snooze before Stacia can even wake up, and goes back to sleep.  Snooze lasts five minutes, then the alarm goes off again, Greg hits it and goes back to sleep.  Meanwhile the cats have heard the alarm and know we should be getting up, so they start doing this.  We brush them off and go back to sleep.  In total, our alarm allows five snoozes at five minutes apiece, so we spend almost half an hour getting sleep in five-minute increments.  Finally I look at the alarm and realize it’s the last snooze, so we stumble out of bed and get ready.

That snooze button is tempting when the damn alarm is waking you up, but if you think about it once you’re out of bed, it’s not doing you any good.  It’s not exactly restful sleep if you’re being jolted out of it every five minutes.  If you trusted yourself to just wake up when the alarm goes off in the first place, you can set it those 25 minutes later, still be up and about at the same time, and get a more complete night’s sleep.  Or you could keep the early alarm and actually get more use out of your morning.  When you think about it logically, it’s really logical.  Logic rarely factors in when you are groggy and waking up, but people can be trained.

So week one of my 52 changes is to say banish the snooze button.  As soon as my cell phone alarm starts singing, “doo-doo-doo, good mor-ning!” (no kidding, this is my alarm ringtone), I am getting up.  I started this Monday, mostly without informing Stacia, and five days in, things are going really well.  It’s an adjustment for sure, but I’d wager that we can get used to it to the point where we can’t remember the days of asking for “uno mas” snoozes ad infinitum.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve come up with 51 other things I want to change yet, so I may need suggestions, or need to start getting really creative once I get further in.  And some of them are sure to be more fun, especially the cooking-related ones.  But if the overall goal is to get me away from being lazy, the snooze is kind of the poster child for the cause.  Kick that out, and then we can really get going. 

Kitchen Zink - A New Addition

We welcomed a new addition to our little family yesterday!  She’s 10” long, and weighs 2 lb. 10 oz.  Oh, and she’s a lovely shiny silver color.  And that 10” is more of a diameter than a length.  And there’s a long handle sticking out of one end.  And “she” isn’t so much a she as an it.  Wanna see a picture?  Here ya go!

Beautiful, isn’t it?  That’s a 10” stainless steel All-Clad fry pan, just purchased from Williams-Sonoma for the low, low price of… well, okay it wasn’t low at all, but hey it’s a pretty pan, isn’t it?  We went with the pan out of the d5 line, which is supposedly super schmancy, with 5 alternating layers of metal making up the thickness of the pan.  It goes stainless steel, aluminum, stainless steel, aluminum, stainless steel, which apparently gives you really quick and even heat distribution.  If you believe the website, they have real artisan-style panmakers who forge their cookware, and it’s all made in the USA.

Now, you may be thinking, “but Greg, you already have pans.  I know, I’ve seen them in that one other post that had pictures.”  This is true.  We have many pans, and they are actually really nice too (Calphalon Contemporary, in case you really want to emulate me).  But the one difference is on the inside.  All our Calphalon pans have nonstick coatings on the interior, which is great for a lot of foods.  But as I was reading Fine Cooking the other day, I stumbled upon an article on pan-searing.  Searing is a really fun cooking style, and it’s a pretty basic one that you better master if you want to call yourself a cook.  The article said you can’t get the same quality sear in a non-stick pan as you can in a regular stainless steel one.  That set the wheels turning.

The accompanying recipe to that article, Sear-roasted salmon with lemon-butter sauce, sounded awesome, and we hadn’t yet had any fish this week, and we had salmon in the freezer, and besides I really really wanted that pan, so I decided to go for it.  I hemmed and hawed a bit between the d5 and the LTD2, which has an anodized aluminum exterior but is otherwise the same.  I was pretty sure the heat transfer would be different somehow, but I was pretty sure d5 was the top of the line and only a few bucks more, so I chose that one.  Added bonus, it’s much prettier!

After sufficient time marveling over the beauty of the pan, it was time to give it a try!  The salmon recipe was pretty simple, another variation on the sear, roast, make pan-sauce theme that is so handy.  Step one was to heat the pan up, add a little olive oil, plunk in the salmon pieces and leave them alone for two minutes.  That was a bit tricky, since I tend to always feel the need to be stirring, poking or flipping as I cook, but I managed to hold myself in check and not disturb the darn fish.  After two minutes, they had seared enough that they didn’t stick when I flipped them over.  Then another one minute on that side, and into the oven they went.

Our pieces of salmon were small, so they didn’t need much time in the oven.  Following the recipe, we kept to the low side and did 4 minutes at 425.  Then the fish got to rest while we made the sauce, in the same pan, on the stovetop.  Note that the pan, including the handle, is really hot when it comes out of a 425 degree oven!  I have been burned by this (literally!) on more than one occasion, so now I use on oven mitt to grab the pan, naturally, but also drape a hot pad over the handle as a reminder immediately once it comes out of the oven.  Trust me, you don’t want to reflexively grab onto that handle when it’s that hot.

For the sauce, we used some green onion as a substitute for shallots, cooked with a bit of fresh rosemary in ¾ cup of dry white wine.  Here’s where you get to scrape up any of the browned bits from the cooking of the fish, and work them into the sauce.  Just like the pros!  Once the wine had almost all reduced, we whisked in about 5 Tbsp of butter until the sauce was nice and thick, added a splash of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and the dish was done.  Served with a little brown rice and some local spinach, wilted in olive oil.  Sounds like a meal!

A really tasty meal, too.  Criticisms first, I think the outsides weren’t seared enough.  I was a bit too chicken to really crank the heat on my brand-new pan, especially since All-Clad warns you not to.  But that’s just so the pan doesn’t discolor; it doesn’t actually harm it, and I should have known that we needed some righteous heat to get a nice sear.  Secondly, these were rather small pieces, and I think even that 4 minutes was a bit too long in the oven.  They weren’t dry, but they could have been pulled a few minutes earlier and they would have been a bit tastier.

On the plus side, the salmon was tasty, and the sauce was fabulous.  I had a meuniere sauce over Halibut at one of the restaurants we visited in DC, and it was one of the best fish dishes I’ve ever had.  This one wasn’t marketed as a meuniere per se, but it was comprised of lemon and butter, so it was close anyway.  We’ve tried making these sauces before, but this one was hands-down the best attempt yet.  Not sure if it was those browned bits in the sauce, or that we’re just getting better, but it was crisp and fresh from the lemon yet retained velvety smoothness from the butter.  It was so good, we just had to pour it over our rice too, so we could get a little more of that flavor.  :)

Not to be too boastful, but I honestly think once we perfect the cook time for the size of fillets, this is on par with a dish you’d get at a fancy sit-down restaurant.  Not too shabby for the first outing with the new member of the “family.”  I guess we should keep her.

In the Garden - Week 1

Note: We’ve had a garden for quite a while now, so there’s a lot to tell.  I plan to update the status of our plants weekly, each time giving a little of the backstory.  I'll also try to come up with a witty title for this series, which I haven't been able to do yet.  :-)

It hits you as you step outside, from the pleasant, controlled air conditioning into the world outside.  Sucking in hot sticky air, baked by radiant heat from the orb in the sky and the impervious blacktop below, it feels like summer is here to stay.  It’s 92 degrees outside, as if you need to quantify this, and supposedly feels like at least 96.  I head out to my car, not even considering the irony of where I’m headed in the midst of this early-season heat wave.

I’m sure it got hot in May when I was growing up, but I don’t remember that specifically.  Looking back, I recall summer vacation time, mid-July perhaps, where the grass was dry and crackly underfoot from lack of rain, and the sun was already oppressive by 10 in the morning, so you couldn’t even get outside early to avoid it.  We’d usually stay inside the air-conditioned house as long as we could until at last we couldn’t weasel out of it any longer and have to head outside to help in the garden.

We pretty much always had a garden growing up, and I never knew any different or presumed that we might not grow our own produce.  We lived in a typical suburban house in a standard subdivision lot, something like ¼ of an acre all told.  And out of that postage-stamp lot, with horrible clay soil, my Dad was somehow able to coax so much food..  Probably a quarter of the backyard was vegetable garden, with much of the rest of the space devoted to fruit trees and berry bushes.  Each year we’d have a bounty of tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, carrots, beans, chard, cucumbers, fruits and berries that kept us eating fresh food all summer long.

Honestly, though, I never much liked the garden back then.  I suppose I did enjoy the food we got from it, but doubt I even fully appreciated how good that was compared to what was available at the grocery store.  But I definitely hated the work involved.  I’ve always been pretty lazy, and having to toil in the middle of summer for something I wasn’t too interested in felt more like it was a punishment than what it really was, a way to help out the family.  I’d pull the weeds, or move the mulch, or help transplant, if my parents told me to, but I virtually always moped about it.

I guess a lot has changed in the past ten years or so that I’ve been out of the house.  Today is a damn awful weather day, muggy and unbearable.  And after lunch I was gladly leaving my climate-controlled office to make a quick run to tend our garden in the heat of the day.  To be fair, I still don’t like it when it feels like 100 degrees outside.  But going out there meant a respite from the monotony of being at my desk, and it was an opportunity to check in on the plants that I have helped grow, something I’m now very interested in and in fact, quite proud of.

The plants all looked fine today, though there was certainly a dry crust of soil at their bases.  I did a little digging down below the surface, and we seem to be retaining moisture fairly well.  But with temperatures like they are, it was a very good idea to do a little watering.  By time I got 5 watering cans poured out over our various crops, I had “wasted” half an hour and was sweating like crazy.  Time to head back to civilization, to cower once more in air-conditioned comfort and the routine of the office.  But I was glad to have spent a little time laboring in the heat of the day, for the sake of the garden.

Update 5/23 – All boxes but 4 are planted and growing.  Last night we picked the only two spinach leaves that were mature, plus one radish as a test to see how big they are.  The radishes are still small, and taste so strongly peppery.  I’m not sure if that mellows as they continue to grow, but they are very potent right now.  The spinach leaves we just munched as we walked out of the garden last night.  I like spinach a lot, but I have to say, I’ve never had spinach that was so sweet and fresh tasting as those leaves just-pinched off the plant.  If they continue to grow like they have, I’ll be very happy.

The Boy(s) of Summer - Part II

In retrospect, perhaps May 2^nd was a little early in the season for Jimmy Buffet day.  I-Cubs game number two of the 2010 season was a Sunday afternoon game, with free tickets courtesy of participation in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes.  Someone somewhere decided that JDRF day should also be Jimmy Buffet day, with half-price admission for Hawaiian shirts, and a “Cheeseburger in Paradise” meal deal.  Now, I would have been up for that buy-one get-one-free Hawaiian shirt deal anyway, but free is better still.  We headed out to the ballpark on a beautiful sunny afternoon, high of 72, ready to cheer on the I-Cubs.

I’ll admit a bit of a soft spot for the Cubs franchise having grown up in the Chicago suburbs, but I still dislike it when minor league baseball teams take their parent club’s name.  As much as I love going to I-Cubs games, it makes me a bit sad that Des Moines couldn’t have been a bit cleverer.  The minors are where you find teams like the Quad Cities River Bandits, the Albuquerque Isotopes, the Montgomery Biscuits (a personal favorite), and the Toledo Mud Hens, just to name a few.  That’s what I think a minor league name should be like, and have ever since about third grade.

That was when I, like many other schoolchildren of my era, read Maniac Magee.  I don’t remember thinking a ton of it when we read it, but a tattered copy somehow made its way onto our bookcase at home, and I ended up reading it a handful of times.  It’s a good story about a kid finding out who he is and where he belongs, but the most vivid part to me was always when Maniac lived with old Earl Grayson.  Earl, the zoo groundskeeper, is a lonely old man who pitched for the Toledo Mud Hens but never made it to the majors.  As he and Maniac become friends, we hear more about his time playing baseball, but more so about his life and how it’s turned out.  For some reason the descriptions of the minor league games stuck in my mind and that part of the book always seemed beautiful.

Another place you see some name ingenuity is when expansion teams pop up, as two did in 1993.  I followed baseball ever so slightly at the time, so I wasn’t really familiar with the new teams.  That’s why, when we were shopping at the local Wal-Mart and my Dad showed up with a pair of caps, asking me which one I wanted, I didn’t exactly recognize them.  I distinctly remember replying, “The Colorado Rockies or an F for Fishing?  I’ll go with the Rockies.”  When my Dad explained the other cap was also an MLB team, I quickly had my mind made up.  With a name like the Florida Marlins, a picture of a fish on the front, and an awesome teal color, that was the cap for me.  I started wearing it all the time, and was pretty sad when I had to give it up because it was too small.

So my path has crossed with baseball more than a time or two over the years, from that first pack of baseball cards to the sundae helmets, a real Sox game, a book and a cap.  But all that happened when I was pretty young, and as I approached high school age, I had so many other pursuits that I pretty much stopped paying attention.  It’s not like baseball was a driving force in my life; it was an occasional diversion.  And with so many others, it got left by the wayside.

So, the final step in this saga occurred while I was in college.  I’d never really been away from home for an extended period of time before, so I wanted to try to plan something special for when I did get back.  I did a lot of brainstorming, spent many hours browsing the web for something to do with the siblings I hadn’t seen for months.  Somehow I lighted upon the Schaumburg Flyers baseball team, and on a whim, bought some tickets online.  I managed to keep it a surprise until we arrived at the ballpark, and I seem to recall a few skeptical looks once they saw what I had in mind.  Truth be told, I was a bit nervous that my big plans would backfire, unfamiliar as I was with the subject.

My fears turned out to be baseless, though, as we had a great time.  I quickly saw that a minor league ballgame is a great way to just relax and spend time together, with entertainment right in front of you all along.  We chilled and chatted, got hot dogs, watched the Flyers win, and got to see some fireworks at the end.  Oh, and I totally caught a bag of peanuts thrown into the stands.  Over the years it became a mini tradition that when I came home we’d go to a ballgame, and each one was a lot of fun.  The baseball was good, but so too was the camaraderie, and the laughs of the bat-dancer, the wolfman, and the much despised Birdzerk (inside jokes - probably better not to ask :).

And now that I live full-time in Des Moines, I’ve got a minor league baseball team right here in my own backyard.  We’ve usually gone to a handful of games per year, but this year we’ve really ramped up, buying “Mug Club” memberships and already having been to two games.  Oh, yeah, speaking of that…

Game two started off gorgeous out, but about five innings in, some very ominous looking clouds appeared out of nowhere to the West.  It started sprinkling; the game went on so we stuck it out.  It started to really rain; the players kept playing so we migrated further up the stands (under the roof slightly) and kept watching.  All around us people were leaving, but we decided to stay.  Until it finally started raining hard enough to pull the tarps over the field.  At this point the game was in the eighth, we hadn’t yet had “Cheeseburgers in Paradise,” and we were cold, wet and hungry.  The executive decision was made to bail and just get some Sonic burgers on the way home.

The I-Cubs eventually finished and lost that game, but we were long since home by that point.  Staying through the rain was fun in its own way, until things got out of control.  Besides, there are plenty of other games I plan to go to this year, so missing one inning doesn’t bother me much.  Other games, like next Thursday, May 20th.  It's a Mug Club night, I-Cubs against the Colorado Springs Sky Sox.  You know I’ll be there.

April Filmfest

Funny place, that Urbandale Library.  In many ways the best of the metro libraries, this month it did something so utterly bizarre that I was unable to complete the monthly filmfest on time.  You see, one of my movies this month was “The Jazz Singer,” which I planned to get at the Urbandale Library.  I checked the catalog, saw it was in stock, ran out there, picked it up and brought the disc home.  Imagine my surprise when I found that the disc I had was only “special features,” disc 3 of a 3 disc set.  Apparently Urbandale checks out discs 1 and 2 as a single item, but disc 3 is totally separate.  So I returned disc 3, but inexplicably, someone besides me has checked out “The Jazz Singer” and won’t return it before the end of the month.  Sigh.  So it’s a five movie month, I have the movie on hold, and I’ll catch up whenever it comes back in.  In the meantime, here’s what I saw in March.

5) Easy Rider (1969) – Have you ever longed to see what would happen if Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper did a lot of drugs and aimlessly rode motorcycles around the Southwest?  No?  Me neither, but that’s what I got with this movie.  The entire plot can be summarized thusly: Two guys make a lot of money off a drug deal, buy motorcycles and decide to go to Mardi Gras.  There are but two interesting parts to this movie: Jack Nicholson’s character, and the filmography during the acid trip.  But neither of those come in until at least halfway, and the ending is so lame and arbitrary that you can’t help but feel disappointed.  Very, very pointless movie.

4) Swing Time (1936) – This seems to be a pretty standard Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie.  I don’t really know, since it’s the only one I’ve seen so far, but it’s relatively light-hearted, has some laughs and some romance, and a lot of singing and dancing, so it pretty well fit my expectations.  The plot is a pretty well-rehashed romantic comedy formula with the couple who hate each other when they meet, go through stuff together, and by the end, well, they might just be in love.  Which is fine.  This is fun, fluffy and has some catchy songs.  My only complaint is the ending with Astaire’s rival dude, which came off very rushed and out of character, like they just needed to tie up that storyline.  Other than that, it was nice, but not a favorite.

3) Patton (1970) – I fully expected to hate this, being just the type of bleeding-heart pacifist liberal that General Patton would probably hate.  But as the three hours of this movie wore on, I realized it was pretty interesting and that Patton was really quite a character.  Lots of his philosophies were things that I don’t necessarily agree with, but you can’t deny that the man was very enigmatic.  From his beliefs in reincarnation to his zeal for competition with the enemy generals, and of course the famous speech in front of the flag, there’s a lot more to General Patton than you get out of history books.  And the movie, I think, does a really good job of focusing on Patton the man, and not just the battle sequences.  Still, war movies aren’t really my thing, so it wasn’t top of the list, but I was pleasantly surprised.

2) The Sixth Sense (1999) – I originally saw this movie shortly after it came out and thought at the time it was really good.  Since then I have seen the exponential decay of the quality of M Night Shyamalan’s movies over the years.  So when I came back to this, I figured, okay, I already know the twist, and don’t all of Shyamalan’s movies suck anyway?  Once again I found myself pleasantly surprised as “Sixth Sense” was really his pinnacle.  Granted, there is the whole sci-fi/supernatural aspect to it that makes geeks like me love movies like this, but there’s also a lot more.  The material is naturally heavy stuff and Shyamalan delves right into it, pondering questions of life and death, and exploring the depth of emotion that permeates it.  I thought this would be a popcorn movie, especially on second viewing, but it was a lot deeper than I remembered.

1) Sophie’s Choice (1982) – Wow.  This was a very powerful film.  I don’t know how I’d never seen it or even heard of it before this project, but I’m glad I did.  On the surface, it’s about a young writer and the friends he makes in the building he rooms in.  But as he develops relationships with these people and there pasts begin to unravel, we learn more about them, and see the fragility of human existence as we experience joy and sorrow with them.  Meryl Streep is incredible as Sophie, the Holocaust survivor with deep inner torment, as is Kevin Kline as the man who loves her. This movie is tragically, hauntingly beautiful.  It will leave you emotionally drained, but it is absolutely worth it.  This is now my favorite of the movies I’ve seen so far on this project.

Next month I’ll finally see The Jazz Singer, plus the following:

12 Angry Men (1957)

Frankenstein (1931)

Platoon (1986)

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

A Night at the Opera (1935)

Duck Soup (1933)

Throwdown 1 Results

Here are the notes from last night’s Throwdown Chicken Marsala.  It went pretty well, I had fun, and I certainly learned a lot.  The end result was ok but not great, so I don’t necessarily recommend following this recipe yet.  We’ll tweak things in the coming months and revise, so be patient.

So we started off getting our mise en place, which is French for get all your shit together before you start cooking.  Or something like that.  Here’s what it looked like.  All good stuff: real chicken, fresh mushrooms and parsley, a little cream and butter, and imported Marsala wine, which I’m just sure is better than the cheap cooking wine version.  After all, it costs more.

Here we are prepping the ingredients.  Thinly slice 8 oz. fresh mushrooms and 2 green onions, and mince up a handful (maybe 2 Tbsp) fresh parsley.

Then the chicken needed to be flattened to about ¼ inch thick.  We tried two ways: slicing longitudinally into two sections, or placing between plastic wrap and hammering with a meat mallet.  Both seemed serviceable, but neither did a great job.  Slicing was difficult and I kinda shredded one of the pieces.  Pounding is noisy and it never seems that the thick part gets fully flattened out.  This is something we need to look into for the future versions.

Next, the chicken was dredged in ½ cup of flour with about a ½ tsp of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and ½ tsp of dry thyme.  This was way more flour than we needed for two chicken breasts, and I’m not sure we could taste the spices.  Probably a proportion thing.

The chicken got cooked in a big sauté pan (ours is 12” but it could probably have been done in a 10”).  A combo of 1Tbsp butter and 1 Tbsp olive oil were melted together and the floured chickens were cooked for about 2 to 3 minutes per side.  Then we pulled the chicken out, put them on a plate and put foil over to retain the heat.

The pan was looking a little dry, so we added maybe another Tbsp of olive oil and sautéed the mushrooms until they let off most of their liquid, and looked awesomely soft and buttery, probably about 5 minutes.  Added the onions, sautéed for a minute more, and deglazed the pan with ½ cup of the Marsala, making sure to scrape up any of the browned bits into the liquid.  Oh, sometime about now we started the pasta cooking.

Once the pan was deglazed, we added ¼ cup chicken broth and ¼ cup heavy cream in an attempt to thicken the sauce.  It looked something like this.

Unfortunately, cream alone didn’t really do much to thicken, even as we simmered for quite some time.  After about 5 to 7 minutes, we gave in and added ½ tsp of corn starch, dissolved in just a little chicken broth.  Once we poured that in, presto!  The sauce thickened instantly.  So the thickening process is another thing for us to look into.

We plated with perhaps a bit much pasta, placed the chicken on top, and poured the sauce over.  It looked like this, and smelled awesome!  I love the aroma of Marsala wine, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The taste wasn’t quite as stimulating, though.  The sauce didn’t quite have enough of the distinct Marsala flavor, and tasted like a generic cream sauce.  The chicken pieces that were thin enough ended up being pretty tasty, but might have needed a little more crispness to the outside.  All in all, it was a good dinner, and I’m sure it would have knocked my socks off a few years ago.  But it still needs work, which is fine, and actually kinda cool.  Now I get to work on revising my recipe, fine-tuning it until we finally reach the perfect Chicken Marsala.  It might take a while, but we’ll get there!

And with April almost over, it's time to look forward to next month's Throwdown.  What will it be?  I don't know yet, but I'm sure we'll come up with something.  Maybe you have an idea?

Throwdown! Chicken Marsala

Exciting news, blog fans.  This week marks the first installment of the much-anticipated yet little-actually-done-to-get-there Throwdown series right here on Zinkthink.  For those of you who don't recall this latest attempt to blatantly rip off genuine entertainment outlets, here's the concept.  Throwdown is a show on Food Network, where Bobby Flay, world-renowned chef and grillmeister, finds the best in the world (something)-maker, trains up on how to make the (something) and then challenges them in a surprise cook-off.  It can be some fun television, though honestly I haven't watched in a long time.

Now, there are a few small differences between Bobby Flay and me.  For example, I do not own a megalithic empire of successful restaurants.  Also, and perhaps more pertinently, I do not have the time, resources or skill to cook up different versions of the dish in the test kitchen before the challenge.  And for that matter I don't have someone to challenge.  In the end, my Throwdown ends up looking not at all like the TV show and basically consists of me researching a certain dish, comparing and/or combining multiple recipes to find the one that sounds the best, then making it.  The more I write this, the less it sounds like the show, but I've started off calling this segment Throwdown, and I'm going to stick to it!

There was much hemming and hawing about which dish to begin with.  The original plan called for doing some "classic" dishes, then I decided I wanted to do fish tacos, then things just kind of fizzled out.  But we had an opening for chicken in this week's meal plan, we've had moderate success with Chicken Marsala, and it is a pretty classic Italian dish.  And it's really tasty.  So, I have between now and Saturday evening to come up with how I want to make my Chicken Marsala, and the contest begins: Greg's food versus deciding it's so bad we need to go out for dinner.  Kidding.  Sort of.

I'm now in the midst of the research phase, but here's what I know so far.  Chicken Marsala is a pretty simple meal, consisting of a few steps.  1) Saute chicken in a pan.  2) Cook accompanying vegetables.  3) Create sauce.  4) Combine all previous steps and serve, usually over pasta.  But there are still so many variables!  Flour-coat the chicken or not?  (The recipes split here, but I've gotta say yes).  What vegetables to use?  Mushrooms are classic, but you can apparently add others for more veg content.  And perhaps most importantly, how to make the sauce?  If it falls flat, the whole dish is a disappointment.  I have a preference for a thicker sauce, but even still there are many ways to get there.  So there's lots of exciting research and planning still to come.

As of now, I have consulted the following sources: Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, America's Test Kitchen, Fine Cooking website, Epicurious.com, and Food Network's site.  I'll try to come up with some other ones too, in case I need them.  I'm leery of the sheer volume on the community sites like Allrecipes and Recipezaar, but I might give them a look if I have time.  And any reader suggestions are totally welcome.

Oh, and one last note.  If I can finagle Stacia into playing photographer, I might try to make the result blog post kind of a photo essay, with some pictures of the process as well as the final dish.  Keep in mind our camera is not spectacular, especially when it comes to food, but we'll see about giving it a try this time.

All kidding aside, this is a really cool and exciting challenge for me.  I like to cook, but most of the time I feel like I don't have enough depth of knowledge or experience to make things up on my own.  By doing the real research it takes to figure out what the common ingredients or steps are in successful versions of the dish, I feel like the final compared/combined recipe will more or less be mine, which makes it more or less the first real dish I've created.  It'll be so exciting to say, "let's have Chicken Marsala tonight.  Here's my recipe."  We'll see if we get to that point with the first try, but it's the goal.  Saturday night we should know for sure.  Right now, though, I've got more research to do.