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Spatchcock smoked chicken. Injected with a mixture of melted butter and Better Than Bouillon roasted chicken base. Rubbed with Casa M's Pecking Order.

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Making steak, baked potatoes, and buttered corn tonight. I wanted to try to make baked potatoes without foil in an attempt to make the skin crispy. Got about 20 minutes until they're "done" but that'll be for my fork to decide. As for the steak, I have two bone in strip steaks I got for dirt cheap seasoned with garlic powder, onion powder, salt and pepper getting up to temp before I drop them into a hot skillet. As for the corn: it's corn with butter. Simple as.
 
Fancy seafood mood. Fish soup (bream, tomato, fish stock, veggies, clams and clam juice, dry wine, some old bay and cayenne, bay leaf, other odds and ends). Buttered bread with asiago melted on it, topped with farmer's cheese and salmon caviar, finished with cracked pepper.
 
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I made some scotch eggs (with pork rind breading) and colcannon.

I haven't tried the eggs yet, but the colcannon is bomb. But then, I could eat an entire cooked cabbage in one sitting with how much I love it. It'd be even better with fresh bacon crumbled on top.

With autumn here now I'm thinking of looking for some Irish/Scottish/etc. cookbooks for some hearty, cozy recipes.
 
I dont know why it took so long to realize that the air fryer is the perfect device for baked potatoes, made some nice cheesy twice baked earlier.
It's really good for potatoes in general, especially the seriously crispy jacket potato style that Brits like, without waiting a whole hour at max temp.
 
So I tried a different method of chili making today. I put all my chili fixins in a dutch oven and stuck it on my smoker. I then put my ground beef on a grill on top of the dutch oven and let all the juices drip down into it. This is a very tasty method of chili making but definitely use less water than normal to make up for the drippings.
Forgot to take pics. Tor probably ain't gonna load em anyways.
 
Actually made Mafe just the other week, the dish of Chantal and Bibi fame, though I perfected the recipe prior to the pandemic now that I think back...I actually tried it in the first place because of the MATI episode about Chantal.

I started with this:

And then I started fucking with it until it was more to my liking, and the result is something that seems nearly impossible to fuck up as long as you hit the broad strokes of the recipe.


First thing was take out the sweet potato, personal thing, but it can be added back in no problems. I added more potatoes (I've tried all, gold work best, but all work fine), carrots, and white or green cabbage to compensate, depending on what I've got, though I try to find a small cabbage so I can just use the whole thing since a big cabbage you might only be able to use half of without having too much cabbage. I also double the onion regardless any other factors.

Next thing is ditch the bone-in chicken, just get boneless chicken thighs (or bone in and de-bone them, not as hard as it sounds). I use the costco packs, typically 2 of the boneless or 3 of the bone-in (this usually yields 8 to 10 thighs). This makes eating it so much less tricky for Amerimutts like myself and the recipe does not lack for flavor without the bones. YMMV, it's just a little optimization that saves time and effort.

Next was double the fucking garlic and punch up the spicing for the overnight chicken spice rub. I use roughly 12 cloves smashed with the side of a big knife, kosher salt, black pepper, and "Ethiopian Berber spice mix" (these seasonings in roughly equal parts to each other) to "marinate" the chicken for at least 24 hours. Note the lack of ginger, I'll talk about that at the end. I wish I could give better quantity directions for the spices (my guess is minimum 2 tablespoons of each but if this isn't enough for the chicken just up the amount), but I kinda just dump 'em into a bowl, mix, and then do layer of spices/garlic, layer of chicken, layer of spices/garlic etc. in a gallon ziploc freezer bag which I then suck as much air out of as I can after mooshing the chicken around inside the bag to distribute the spices more evenly.

After that was take a tip from Bibi's recipe and brown the chicken a bit in the dutch oven first and then set that aside before the recipe's step 2, roughly a minute each side of a thigh typically 2 or 3 at a time: if done correctly, you don't need much starter oil I use peanut oil + high-ish heat) since the chicken thigh fat will render into the dutch oven, and then you dump the onions and garlic into that oil after you're done browning all the chicken each side (no need to fully cook it though, that happens later). I've had the fat not render properly once before, but the solution was just to add a bit more oil and there was no longer a problem when it came time to do the onions.

Don't throw out the bits of garlic and smaller pieces of chicken that might fall off, just pull them before they burn and leave them with the chicken on whatever you let the chicken sit on after you pull it from the pot, then dump them in with the chicken in step 3 of the recipe.

As alluded to, step 2 of the recipe is simplified. Smash the garlic with the side of a knife until it's pretty flat, you won't ever find the garlic by the time it's done cooking so no need to agonize over finely dicing garlic. Also double the garlic in this step as well (12 cloves, up from 6). Onions are diced, but dicing an onion roughly using what I'll call the "Gordon Ramsay method" for SEO purposes (though I doubt he invented it) should be used for the onion. Outside of that, only use the times as a vague suggestion, I've found them wholly inadequate, instead just base it on whether it's doing what the recipe says it's supposed to be doing...and keep cooking it until it does that rather than staring at a timer. Oh, and if you "burn" the tomato paste, don't freak out, just dump in the water and scrape up the resulting sludge back into the mix, I have yet to actually burn the tomato paste badly enough to ruin the recipe which never ceases to surprised me. This is the part where you'll want a good heat resistant rigid spatula for that scraping, you'll be doing a good deal of that as you stir coming up. Just as an FYI, this step will make your house stink to high heaven between the fish sauce and the tomato paste, but have faith, it's worth it, and the stank will dissipate.

At this point you need to have already located your splatter screen, you'll be using it for the rest of the recipe unless you want tasty orange gravy deposited on everything within a 2 foot radius of the dutch oven. Might also want an apron.

The recipe's step 3 I follow almost to the letter except I add the previously browned chicken and peanut butter (unsweetened Kirkland peanut butter is PERFECT, but as long as it's unsweetened non-hydrogentated PB it works) directly into the dutch oven at the same time, stir until the peanut butter is mostly broken up, and let it boil before starting the timer. As far as I can tell there's no need to fuck around with removing cooking liquid and stirring the PB in elsewhere and then re-adding the peanut mixture, ffffffffuck that, over complicated and unnecessary.

From here on you'll want to keep scraping around where the heat is hitting the dutch oven to keep the flavor sludge from building up too much: you'll be able to feel it with your spatula. After the times in step 3 are up I let it simmer longer until it's as thick as I like it checking every 5 to 10 minutes to stir and scrape. You might need to create a crack on one side between the pot and the splatter screen if not enough steam is escaping. Also make sure you're ensuring veggies and chicken are submerged as possible during this time, sometimes they will migrate to the top and not get fully soaked which can result in uneven cooking. Done correctly, the chicken will be basically falling apart if attacked with a fork, and the veggies will be cooked through such that they don't resist the knife test.

That's basically it, though that tends to take me between 2 and 4 hours depending on how drunk I get or how efficient I'm being about prepping the sets of ingredients for step 3 while I'm cooking the previous set of ingredients. It's a lot simpler than it might seem looking at all those words.

I've found that you don't need to add jack diddly in the way of seasonings because the chicken and the rub still stuck to it will be more than adequate and you're using the same dutch oven to cook the entire recipe, still, ymmv.

Oh, and you can make it without the ginger and have it still be delicious, but the ginger does add a nice zing and flavor to it. Dried ginger can also work but you'll need to mess around with amounts to figure out how much tickles your fancy. I add the ginger to the recipe when you add the chicken but this is an area of optimization I've not played around with a lot.
 
I made a pot roast that turned into a disaster as the gasket on the pressure cooker blew out in the middle. I was dubious enough about this possibility I'd already heated the stove for the Dutch oven to transfer it over if this happened. It was still edible, but disappointing. At least it wasn't rendered completely inedible.

I'm contemplating whether to replace the gasket on this no-name chinkware or just break down and get a Ninja Foodi or some other shit. Any opinions on cheap multicookers?
 
Made a meatloaf with the main elements about two and a half pounds of 75 25 ground beef and a box of aldi generic stove top cornbread flavor stuffing
Went a little too heavy into the seasonings on top of that, but still some good stuff as an experiment.
Ended up a much more coherent loaf and less a random pile of baked loose meat than a lot of my meatloafs have turned out
 
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Made a meatloaf with the main elements about two and a half pounds of 75 25 ground beef and a box of aldi generic stove top cornbread flavor stuffing
Went a little too heavy into the seasonings on top of that, but still some good stuff as an experiment.
Ended up a much more coherent loaf and less a random pile of baked loose meat than a lot of my meatloafs have turned out

How was there not a horribly greasy mess with that fat ratio? Especially when done in the oven. I personally do not dare meatloaf in the oven unless at least 93 percent lean. Not shitting on your meatloaf just honestly confused.
 
the box of dry stuffing ate it

Thats one artery clogging meatloaf bud.
Okay here is what you do (I know this a repost).
You use one pound of the leanest hamburger meat you can find.
You use half a cup of ketchup.
You use one egg.
You use 1/3 a cup of milk.
Mix all that up.
You then crush up as much Ritz crackers as you need until the mixture feels like dough. There is no exact measurement for this.
Put that shit in a greased bread loaf pan.
I like to cover mine with ketchup and worchestershire sauce. Some people use ketchup and brown sugar you do you.
Bake at 375 for one hour.
There is absolutely no way to fail this recipe.
 
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