Monday, April 2, 2012

Random Food Updates





It's been a while since my initial post here so time for some updates. It's been a crazy month or so of trying to decide where I want to go next in my life, in the meantime there's always cooking.

Random Pansit Dish:

Made this one night for no other reason than I was craving Pansit. First off I was super lazy and didn't know the right way to make it so I just bought the noodles at the market then threw in whatever I thought would work well, mushrooms, chicken, carrots, onions, tossed in some garlic, red chili, and pad thai sauce. It came out pretty tasty and it was very affordable. The noodles were probably about $3-4 and it lasted all week more or less.


Thai Chicken Tacos:


I was craving a different spin on tacos so looked up recipes on thai tacos. I found a few different ones and decided to try one from food.com. Save for not having fish sauce basically marinated the chicken in soy sauce, cilantro, shallots, red pepper flakes, and shiracha. The marinade was quite good, I let the chicken sit overnight in the sauce but normally I'd think an hour or two would be fine. 

The cabbage to accompany the tacos was comprised of carrot, cabbage, green onion, radish, cilantro, peanuts and some rice vinegar. Personally after finishing the dish it was light and not bad but I thought more flavor was needed. Next time I'll probably try to make the slaw sweeter or perhaps make some sort of hot sauce. I still think the marinade worked well with the chicken.

Chicken Marsala:
I've always wanted to try and make this dish, truthfully haven't even cooked with marsala before this.

 My first dilemma was deciding between sweet marsala and dry marsala. At the advice of some others I opted for sweet, and upon tasting I can definitely say go for the sweet -- it's not even that sweet! For starch I kept it simple and just baked a red potato.

For greens, baby bok choy. This was really simple to make and actually packed with flavor. Just lightly cooked the baby bok choy in olive oil salt and pepper then drizzled maybe about a tablespoon of Kabayaki (unagi) sauce into the pan before removing from the heat. 

The chicken was simple too. Lightly battered with flour, salt, pepper, oregano and then basically pan fried to make the crust and simmered in the marsala and some sherry. The mushrooms were added in the last couple of minutes to cook.


The finished product. Not bad for a late night meal that looks more complicated than it was. Now I have a bottle of Marsala I need to experiment with and make use of haha. 

I'll be adding a post later about a seafood Orzo dish, wanted to give that it's own post because truly I think that's the best dish I've made so far. I was very satisfied, until then these random pics will do!.