Territan (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} territan) wrote,@ 2007-10-14 13:50:00 |
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| Current location: | home |
| Current mood: |  hungry |
| Entry tags: | food |
Multiple Cuisine Disorder
Attitudes on food vary. Some primp and fuss over the stove to the point that you wonder what they're going to do with whatever they're preparing: will they eat it, or marry it? Others look at it as mere sustenance, and will gladly slouch into the kitchen, grab a can, open it, and eat whatever is inside, even if it's cake frosting. Oh heck, especially if it's cake frosting.
I...............vacillate.
The Quick & Easy
I have no shortage of ready-to-eat foods in my kitchen. Over the stove, I have a number of packets, containing precooked chicken breasts, seasoned tuna, noodles and sauce, and rice. Over the microwave I have several cans of soup and a particularly guilty pleasure, chicken spread. In the freezer, I have many boxes of grilled fish fillets (can you really say they're grilled if they're cooked in the microwave? Common sense says "no") and a couple of boxes of frozen jerk shrimp.
Of those, it should be noted that the jerk shrimp requires the most preparation, being cooked up in a skillet where the crusted-on frozen-on glaze becomes, they claim, a "sauce." And it should be observed, that stuff is pretty good when served with rice. But you have to make the rice yourself.
The Slow & Complicated
Right now, I have a pan soaking in the sink. It's the drip pan which sat under a wire rack which contained several chicken breasts, and sat in a larger cast iron pan. And sandwiched between the cast iron pan and the drip pan was about a tablespoon of applewood chips, now fully blackened by the heat.
There's a sheet of plastic wrap.....well, let's just say I built a safety catch for the smoke detector. The temperature probe is sitting next to the stove, cleaned but not yet put away, because the last time I tried to use the smoker on chicken breasts, I let it go for an hour or so and got chicken jerky as a result. I now know it takes about 25 minutes to achieve doneness. I know because I have my countdown timer sitting next to my temperature probe.
The cooked chicken, caked with herbs du provence, are chilling in the fridge along with a pound of ground beef (for a dirty rice mix), a pound of ground turkey breast (for a meatloaf) (yes, that meatloaf), celery, cilantro, a quart of milk, and a carton of egg whites. On the counter I have a bud of garlic and an onion, sitting next to a new bottle of sugar free vanilla syrup.
And the Ugly
I like coffee. That's why there's the vanilla syrup on the counter: to add to the coffee. And even if I don't make a pot of hot coffee, I have a supply of iced coffee (just add ice!) in the fridge, which gets supplemented every time I make a pot of coffee and don't drink it all when it's hot. A combination of logic and wishful thinking says it should be okay to drink.
