Christmas time is here

Ginger molasses cookies with orange zest. Very tasty. I was too lazy to take an "after" picture, but the "before" picture looks like space boulders or something. Credit goes to my sister for helping to tackle this cookie job.

Yelp!

I'll admit, it's hard to keep up with a blog. Though it's not an excuse, I've been moonlighting as a food writer on Yelp. Check out my reviews, which have been featured a couple of times on the Philly website.

Would you like some cream cheese with those veggies?

Veggie cream cheese is something I gladly pay the extra 50 cents for at a bagel place, but I never tried to make it at home.

Seemed easy enough...fine dice carrot, celery, and green onion, mix it with cream cheese, add some salt (if you can't tell I'm a salt addict).


Turns out you should only try this with a surplus of cream cheese. A 1:1 veggies to cream cheese ratio is a little too high. Next time I'll try it when I have more than a few tablespoons of cream cheese to work with.

Tomato salad

Got some unreasonably expensive mini heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's last weekend. To my surprise, they didn't taste nearly as good as normal cherry tomatoes, but the texture was beautiful. I decided to let them rest in a paper bag in my fridge for the next few days and give the benefit of the doubt with a tomato salad after they ripened a bit.



Not sure if I've done tomato salad on Table Vibrations before, but the dressing is a mix of sherry vinegar or sweet balsamic, olive oil, mustard, and black pepper. Tossed with halved cherry tomatoes, minced parsley (or basil), and some celery slivers for texture. Add coarse salt at the end, as it's best when the salt coats the dressed ingredients.

Oyakodon

Donburi is a Japanese rice bowl dish, similar to what you might find at Yoshinoya, and Oyakodon literally means "parent and child" donburi since it contains chicken and egg. I have had trouble with getting this dish right in the past, but I think I found a good basic recipe that allows for some vibration. It's from a youtube channel called Cooking with DOG!. (note: this is not a video about eating dogs)

Basically you make the sauce in the pan and simmer everything cumulatively in the same pan. The hardest part is boning the chicken thighs...which really isn't all that hard if you've done it before.



I added chopped scallions as well as roughly chopped parsley.

Pork chops revisited

This time with roasted garlic polenta! Now it's a complete meal.

Butterfly chicken

The only recipes I like to follow precisely are by Alton Brown. He's someone who actually tweaks his recipes scientifically. This is Alton's butterflied chicken.



Kosher chickens are pre-brined so they are flavorful and juicy. Plus, if you live in a Jew-less place like I do, kosher meat goes on sale often because they can't sell this stuff! $0.99/lb for kosher meat is a steal.



I guess the only different thing about roasting a chicken in this fashion is the butterflying. You basically yank out the keel bone by dividing the breast meat and dislocating the clavicles. Alton calls for broiling, but I wanted my veggies to soften up properly and I didn't want to babysit it. This took about an hour at 400 degrees.



Those dark spots under the skin are peppercorns. Alton wanted me to make a garlic lemon pepper paste, but I didn't have a mortar and pestle, so it's super rough. Next time I would just use ground pepper.