...this blog will have 2 weekends' worth of cooking.
Last weekend my brother brought his fiance home to meet the family. As I was debating what to try cooking it was brought to my attention that I would not be cooking for myself as usual, but rather for the family. Because of this I decided to do something I knew would work out and leave the experimentation for the appetizer. We had Orange Chicken and Lettuce Wraps like those found at PF Chang's.
Since I only mentioned the orange chicken and never really discussed it, the recipe can be found here. It is a lot of work, but very much worth it. I did not have the red pepper flakes and my mother (who was helping me because these are both rather involved recipes) suggested adding cayenne pepper to spice it up. I gave the go ahead and she put some into the sauce. It really made everything else pop, but there was no spice. I told her to put more in, and there was still not the spicy element I was going for. Unfortunately it did bring the flavors out even more and in the end the orange chicken was too strong. A minor mistake. It still tasted great, the orange was just a touch too strong. Moral of the story: adding a bit of cayenne can really bring out the flavors, but be careful not to add too much.
The lettuce wraps were a narrowly averted disaster. Knowing that making these two complicated recipes at the same time would be a stretch for me, I mixed the cooking sauce before starting the real cooking. I put it in the fridge and forgot about it. I got everything cooked up and thought "this is not working, the flavor is not there." Frantically, I had my mother stir as I scrambled and threw a little of this and a little of that into the pan. Just as we were about to serve the meal, my mom opened the fridge, pulled out the sauce and asked what it was. I just about died from the embarrassment. We put some in and let it simmer a little and served dinner. Afterword while thinking about what I had added to the pan, I realized that we had ultimately re-created the cooking sauce plus some chili paste. The appetizer was amazing, very much like PF Chang's. The chili paste gave it a little bit of flare- almost enough to make you breathe fire if you got a chunk of chili. It would have been better with some cashews added. Also, shiitake mushrooms are hard to come by in Delta, so I used portobello mushrooms instead.
So far this weekend I have made Orchiette Pasta with Wild Mushroom Cream Sauce. There are biscoff cookies in the near future (the ones served by Delta Airlines), but I'm still in debate on that. The pasta worked out okay. Rather than a pound of wild mushrooms, I used the rest of the portobella mushrooms from last week. Everything but the cream was eyeballed and I intentionally added extra cheese. Ultimately I think it was good, but missing something. After some discussion with my parents I decided a little bit of sweet Italian sausage would be perfect. For those (like me before making this) who do not know what orchiette pasta is, it is the little shells.
If I make the biscoff, or more properly speculoos, I will write about it later. The recipe I am looking at is here. These are probably my favorite cookies, so finding a recipe has made my day! I no longer have to wait until I have an excuse to fly in order to enjoy them! Assuming of course I can bake, we'll see about that...
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