Thursday, October 29, 2009

Roasting our own Chicken


Made on October 15th

We decided to be ambitious, starting at 7pm. We had gone to the store the day before and were ready to try our hand at roasting our own chicken. We knew it would take a while but I don't think we had fully done the math.

Our first challenge was stuffing the chicken. We removed the neck and whatever else was in there ... eww and stuffed it with lemon pieces, Rosemary and garlic. I am still not sure it we did it right but nothing came out the back. We secured it with rubber band since we did not have any string :) We also had to rub an herb mix under the skin and onto the chicken, a task that was hard to do without ripping the skin off the chicken. Brian took care of these tasks

We placed the chicken in a roasting pan with cut up shallots and pears. Roasted in for 30 minutes and then based it. We did this combination three times! It was now 2 hours into our dinner experiment.

Once the chicken was fully cooked we made a sauce from the drippings from the chicken with 10 other ingredients and reduced it. We didn't have the patience to reduce it all the way from 2 cups to a 1/4 of a cups. We enjoyed our beautifully roasted and delicious chicken at 9:45 and the sauce tasted great.



Queso Expereiment #2

Made on September 19th

In our first attempt was to make queso, we have tried to use an actual receipt and real cheese, but were unhappy with the texture and effort. The cheese turns into this lumpy and grainy mess and it is way to hard to clean.

We made our own version on queso for the Texas v Texas Tech game back in September. We usually invite our friends over for such an occasion as watching UT football.

We started making the queso at4pm when the party would start at 7pm. This queso was the star of our spread. We bought Velveeta this time, a processed cheese substitute, and two pounds of it to be exact. I cut the cheeses :) into cubes and it alarmingly stayed in the same shape as before I sliced it and dumped in into the crock pot. The "cheese" itself looked pretty waxy but it did melt perfectly.

To add some heat to our queso we browned ground meat and added McCormick taco seasoning. We dumped that into the melted cheese and then added a whole jar a medium Pace Picante. I truly enjoyed every bite of unnaturally perfectly smooth cheese, spicy meat and chunk salsa.