Josieworld

Decided to try something different. I came to the realization yesterday that I make chicken + bok choy WAY too much, with beef and green beans a very close second. So, I decided to try steamed fish, chinese style.

I have absolutely zero experience cooking fish, so I relied a lot on my a phone call I had with my mom while I was shopping for fish. It came as a surprise for me, then, when I asked the person at the seafood counter at Shaws if he ever steamed fish before – he had not.

So I basically bought a slab (is that the correct unit word?) of cod from Shaws. When I got home, I sliced it in half, ‘thin-wise’ (ie, I halved the thickness of the fish, since even though it was a filet cut, it was still rather thick. I then proceeded to prepare the fish for steaming; added a little oil to the dish, some parsley herbs on the bottom layer, and laid the fish on the dish (haha, that rhymes!). On top, I added very thin ginger strips. I was told by my mom not to add the soy sauce or cilantro yet.

The next problem I faced was that we didn’t have any steaming equipment in our apartment. Check out the mad ghetto set up I came up with.

The set up I used to steam fish for lack of better equipment.

Once that was all done, I waited until the water was boiling inside the sauce pan before I put the dish inside. I was told that the fish would take no more than 10 minutes to cook, and even at 5 minutes I should start checking. I took mine out at 7 minutes.

While the fish was cooking,  in a separate frying pan, I heated up a little bit of oil and soy sauce for use later on. After the fish was done, I laid some cilantro leaves on top, and poured the heated oil and soy saunce mixture on top; this effectively gives the fish a nice smooth texture, and also semi-cooks the cilantro, releasing just enough flavor. One thing you don’t want to do with cilantro is overcook it – it makes it mad bitter.

Overall, it didn’t come out bad at all. I’m pretty impressed myself :O

More shots:

The fish, before it was cooked

Fish after it was cooked

Prepared rice and the fish plate, with the soy sauce + cilantro

My roommate and I had a pretty nice lazy Saturday morning. We woke up around 10, and decided to make fried rice. Except we didn’t have eggs. It was an interesting experience nonetheless.

First we pre-cooked some rice in the rice cooker (hm…pretty obvious). For the main ingredients, we used ground beef, sliced coldcut ham, and cut up green beans (see picture below). Once the rice we done in the rice cooker, we proceeded to fry it on the frying pan, and threw all the ingredients in. One thing that we should’ve made sure was that we should have cooked the ground beef before throwing it in – once it was mixed in with the rice, it became hard to make sure that the beef was actually all the way cooked through. Extra seasoning included some salt, soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and sesame oil. Overall, didn’t come out too bad at all.

Ingredients for the improvised fried rice.

Hm. This was basically the chicken + bok choy dish, except I substituted broccoli for bok choy. Taste and preparation is about the same. Nothing new to add. On the side (can’t really see) is the typical beef + green beans I make. One note is to make sure I’m more careful about which beans I’m buying – the quality was surprisingly bad; there were bruise marks everywhere, and I had bought them only a few hours ago. Best be careful when I go shopping at Shaws next time.

My roommate and I had two friends over today, so this was our first time both cooking together and also cooking for other people. We decided to make some tomato+egg+beef, a pretty common dish among [Canto-]Chinese people, as well as another go at bulgogi.

For the tomato, egg, and beef, we used about a pound of ground beef, 4 eggs, and 2 tomatoes. The tomatoes we cut into semicircle slices (although it didn’t really matter since they’d get all crushed when we cooked them anyway). We started with just scrambling the egg, then when it was about half done, we threw in the meat the and the tomatoes. Overall a pretty easy dish to make. We may have used a bit too much meat – I personally am used to having more tomatoes in the dish.

For the bulgogi, we only had about an hour to marinate it. We decided to use jackfruit juice this time, instead of the peach juice that I used last time. Cumin and garlic were used a bit. In retrospect, I don’t think we used enough soy sauce. We only had an hour to marinate, so we stuck it in the freezer to marinate instead. We used about a pound of beef that was pre-sliced into circles – we cut them again into semicircles. One problem we faced was that the slices kept sticking together – perhaps try not stacking them when we cut them, or adding oil into the marinade? In any case, we learned from our Korean roommates later that bulgogi tends to need to be marinated over a course of a few days…that’s something to keep in mind for next time.

In any case, dinner was a success. I think everyone (4 guys) were pretty full, and we didn’t have any leftovers.

Decided to try the Chicken and Bok Choy dish over again. This time, came out purrrfect. What I did differently was mostly cook the bok choy halfway through in a pot of boiling water, and cook the chicken almost all the way through. Then I mixed them together in the end, and voila!

I also forgot to mention in my last post, the marination for chicken: garlic, salt, pepper, a little sugar, and ginger. I’m thinking next time maybe I should cook the ginger with the bok choy as well, I think that’s how my mom usually does it.

Tried making two dishes today – marinated beef and chicken/bok choy. Was originally supposed to be a meal for me and my cousin, but he couldn’t make it…so I had enough for leftovers.

The beef I think maybe had a bit too much oil in it when I cooked it. It kinda made me think of peanut butter almost when I ate it – that would be an interesting marination to try out one day. The beef was a bit hard to cut – I bought the “top blade flank steak” from Super 88. Perhaps I should try a different cut.

The chicken and bok choy didn’t come out that great – the bok choy was kinda overdone and not so great. I cooked it with the chicken – maybe I should have boiled it before adding it to the chicken. The meat though came out great – I never knew I could cook chicken that well. Wasn’t too overcooked or dry, really nice texture.

Next time, since we only have the coarse salt at home, I should use less – both dishes came out a bit salty.

This time tried to make beef and string beans. First time it was really all on my own. I think I was a bit rushed though. I tried using the method Elliot showed me to defrost the meat, by microwaving it for 30 seconds on both sides – I ended up accidentally cooking it. Then for the marination, I used a bit too much soy sauce, so the meat came out too salty. The sauce was some chinese oyster sauce, sugar, salt, pepper (couldn’t really taste any though), and sugar.

The cooking part itself wasn’t too hard. To make sure the beans weren’t too overdone, I actually cooked 60%ish before adding them to the mix of beef and sauce. Overall, not too shabby for my first time all alone.

Voila.

Attempt number 2 at cooking – Elliot taught me how to make Bulgogi. Apparently it’s pronounced ‘purlh-gol-gi’ I think, if I were to phonetically write it out. 

In any case, first we made the sauce to marinate the beef in. The beef should be thinly sliced (according to Shaws, it’s ‘Shaved Beef’). The sauce we made consisted of…sesame oil, soy sauce, sesame seeds, sugar, canned peach juice, salt, pepper, garlic powder, garlic, paprika, cumen, ginger powder. Everything was made according to taste (note to self: cooking is a VERY creative process). Basically, we wanted to end up with a sesame oil -ish  taste, not too salty. We then placed the sauce into a plastic bag, put the strips of beef in, and added some mushrooms and onions in, and let it sit in the freezer for half an hour. Took it out, cooked it, add some rice and lettuce, and voila.

Tried my hand at cooking today. Actually, I didn’t really get to cook much. One of my roommates for the summer taught me and another roommate how to cook today. Seeing as we’ll have to do it for most of the summer, I thought it’d be a good idea to document our adventures (and to work on my photography skills as well!). So yeah.

Basically, it’s steak, dry marinated in a mixture of salt, pepper, sugar, paprika, sesame seeds, and some other spices. We let it sit in the fridge for a little bit, then seared it. Good stuff.

Simple, but yummy. All that was missing was probably a few leaves of lettuce.