Lobster Fiesta! (Paula Dean style)

Woooo!  It’s fourth of July, FREEDOM!  I’ve been having the weirdest bougie cravings, like lobster…  And being the poor college student I am, I didn’t want to go out and buy it…so I decided to make myself some!  And that way, I can make it for my family back home. :]

Lobster Fiesta!

This recipes is actually ridiculous simple, so to make up for the really short post, I will put a lot of pictures!  Wooooo!

Ingredients:

• Lobster tail (x2)
• 1/3 cup of butter
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• salt & (white) pepper to taste (aka I put a lot…)
• lemon for garnishing
  

  Ingredients!

  The lobster tails I got from a grocery store in town, you can either go to H-E-B or Krogers.  I’m not sure if Publix has frozen lobster tails for sale but it was only $5.99 per tail so I figured it was a good deal.  By the time I got home, I realized I didn’t have paprika, and I used black pepper because I couldn’t find my white pepper, but it still came out delicious.  I tried to replace paprika with Korean pepper paste, and although it added a pinch of spice and a unique flavor, I don’t recommend it because it’s a little strong and takes away from the lobster’s flavor.  And I think white pepper would have brought out the lobster flavor better than the black as well.  Oh well, lessons for my next attempt! 😛

You want to preheat your oven to broil at this point because it does take a little while.  And be warned, the butter will cause your oven to smoke up, so you might want to crack some windows open.

You start with using a sharp knife or a pair of kitchen scissors to cut the shell down the middle.  You want to be able to open it up.  Then use a spoon to separate the lobster from the shell and have it loosened up.  I melted the butter in the microwave and added the pepper and salt and mixed it all together.  I used the same spoon to spoon in the butter into the lobster.  You want to keep the lobster inside the shell so it doesn’t overcook and dry out and it gets to drown in the butter!

Before the over…

Buttery goodness

And then this is me waiting impatiently outside the oven….

Broil, broil, broil…

The cook time varies by weight.  Half pound tail should take around 5-10 mins, while a pounder should be closer to ~20 mins.  It will also vary depending on level of defrost, but the meat should look opaque and the shell would likely be browned at this point.  And you just take it out and bam!

Two lip smackin’ tails!

For presentation, you can take the meat out of the shell and leave it attached only on the tail for a classier look.  This is also where you add the lemon for garnishing and if you didn’t use all the butter, you can use it for dip here as well.  I highly recommend enjoying this delicious meal with some veggies and a nice cup of wine!

❤ Chef jKwong

Po-po-po-tae-toe souppppppppppp

I normally use some of the required ingredient or take lots of pictures, but this time, I made it in a hurry.  I just got back from not one, not two, but THREE intense games of volleyball.  I went from hardly-being-able-to-hit-the-ball-and-losing to hardly-being-able-to-hit-the-ball-but-still-winning!  Looks like hard works pays off! 🙂  Or meeting friends who know how to play, hahaha.  But I digress…I had work the next day and I just wanted to get this out of the way for lunch at work tomorrow.

Bowl of Awesomeness

Ingredients:

• 3.5 cups of potatoes
• 1/3 cup of diced onions
• 3 delicious pieces of bacon
• 1/2 cup of mushrooms
• 2 tbsp of chicken bouillon
• 5 tbsp of button (paula dean style)
• 5 tbsp of all-purpose flour
• 2 cups of milk
• 3.25 cups of water
• salt and pepper to taste

To start, I put the water and chicken bouillon on the stove and set to med temp for low boil.  I proceed to dice the potatoes and put them in the pot to let them soften up.

As I fried the bacon, I diced the onion and mushrooms. When the bacon is done, remove the bacon onto a sheet of paper towel and use the leftover grease to sauté the onion and mushroom.  You may want to add celery for some extra crunch (I wish I did!).  Cook until onions are clear and proceed to pour into pot, along with the ba-con.

Now you wanna create a roux (new word I learned from my roommate as I made it! hehehe).  To do so, melt your 5 tbsp of butter on your stovetop in a nonstick pan, (which by the way is a LOT of butter…).  After melting it, slowly add in the flour, stirring it till you get a nice…mash potato like substance.  Then proceed to add milk in slowly, yet again, creating a milky mash potato like substance.  I wish I took a picture because it looked pretty awesome.  Anywho, pour this into your pot and mix away!  You can add salt and pepper  to taste and just cook until you the potatoes are at the softness level you like!

Ta-da!  Potatoe Soup!  Nomnomnom.

❤ Chef “jKilla”

 

Om-nom-omelet

Well….its been quite a while since I’ve posted, and now that activity has sky-rocketed, I feel obligated to return again.  To be completely honest, I’ve been eating out more than cooking, and so I have plenty of pictures saved up from that, but I don’t think that’s what we’re going for, so I’ll save those for myself.

As you know, our ingredient this time was: onion, mushroom, bell pepper, and cream cheese.  If you know me at all, you know I’m a huge procrastinator, so by the time I decided to create this post, it was Saturday and we have new ingredients Sunday!  And I was also leaving town to go to Dave and Busters for the first time here in Houston, so I decided to make a quick and sloppy omelet for breakfast!

Ingredients:

• eggs
• mushroom
• bell pepper
• onion
• scallion
• butter (if you want)
• garlic powder
• salt and pepper to taste

To start, I diced up the pepper, mushrooms, and onion.  I even tried to make it pretty.

Afterwards, I just tossed in a lot of garlic powder, salt and pepper to add some flavor.  I just like this picture.

Add some oil and bam, start sautéing your fillings.  I decided last minute to add some butter, because honestly, who doesn’t like some butter on all their foods?

Moved that unto a bowl and threw in the mixed eggs and let it form its base.  Then FLIP!  Proceed to pour in your hard work and spread it around the pan.

Biggest regret, I forgot cheese.  Spinach probably would have added a nice touch of healthiness as well.  But there’s always next time!

Breakfast is served!

 

I know everyone knows how to make this but I had to get something down as a post!  I’ll post a better one soon.  Until next time!

-Chef jKwong

Cola Chicken Wings

I’m not sure why, but I always crave cola wings.  They’re easy to make, sweet, and who doesn’t like wings?!  So I figured I had some time this Sunday to make food for the entire week, so I stop spending on going out.  And I settled on this recipe: http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/coca-cola-chicken-wings/

So I started off by marinating about 2 lbs of chicken wings in 1/8 cup of soy sauce.  I got distracted watching NCIS for the next hour or two and just let it sit and soak in the flavor.  Then I put about 3 cups of rice in the rice cooker and started searing the wings.  After 5-8 mins, I added the rest of the ingredients, 1/8 cup of soy sauce, 3/4 cup of coke, 2 teaspoons of apple cider, 2 teaspoons of olive oil, and a few slices of ginger.  After another 10 minutes of simmering, I tasted the sauce and it was way too cidery, so I decided to pour in a bunch more coke and added about 1 tablespoon + teaspoon of sugar.  It was okay, still a little salty, so I just let it simmer for about 30 minutes.  Ta-da, dinner for tonight, and 3 days of lunch! 🙂

Cola Chicken with Rice and Scallion

And that’s it for today!

-Chef JKwong

Mini Spicy Garlic Knots!

So I’m always craving something spicy, and I simply love garlic bread, so I found myself looking at Garlic Knot Recipes for this week’s secret recipe, yeast.  Low and behold, I found this gem (http://whiteonricecouple.com/recipes/garlic-knots/).  It was a sign, this was going to be my first SASE Iron Chef dish.  And it didn’t come out too bad either!

Spicy Mini Garlic Knots!

So I set off in making them Thurs night, so I could bring them into work for Friday…but I realized the dough will take much longer to rise than I had planned, so I made the dough and just let it sit in the fridge.  This was probably the hardest part, and the only part I forgot to take pictures of.  I think I put too much yeast in, and I didn’t realize I was going to be using 5 and a half cups of flour.  So when I threw the ingredients together, it dawned on me that I could never knead this much dough at once.  So I was like, oh no worries, I’ll just split it into two pieces.  Can you believe, two pieces were still too large?  As I was working on a piece, I had to split it up again, thereby breaking the original into four quarters.  I’m still not sure if I kneaded correctly, or if it was enough, since as I was working on the second quarter piece, the half piece I had originally cut was now double its original size.  I didn’t know what to do, so I just cut it into halves again and repeated what I had done for the first half.  After one night in the fridge, it came out looking like this.

12 hours later…

To be honest, I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to look.  The only experiences I had with rising dough were a couple years ago at a friend’s house, where she had a hand mixer, and recently, looking at Virak’s pizza dough and Good Eat’s video.  And man, they didn’t look like this…  This looked like a Styrofoam ball, but was sticky to the touch.  But after setting it down onto the cutting board and getting some dough and oil on it, it looked like freshly bough pizza dough!

I’m terrible with dimensions and mentally sizing anything.  If I don’t have a ruler, you might as well not have given me the measures.  And yet…I have no ruler.  So at this point, I was just rolling the dough to be somewhat of a rectangular shape, or somewhat like bread sticks.  After multiple attempts, I finally achieved something like this.

Dough cuttin’

Quite frankly, I’m still not sure how I got it to look like that.  But it was good enough for me.  You can tell I tried to cut them about the same width, but did a poor job of such.  Oh well, I tried.  At this point, I almost just threw it into the oven, just made bread sticks, and called it a day.  But I was so close to my goal, for the sake of this post, I decided to just chug along.

The actual task of rolling them into knots was rather easy.  It was basically just tying a knot.  Initially, I was worried that the little knob on the ends would be too small and it would unravel in the oven, but at the same time I couldn’t stretch the dough too thin.  But it proved to be no problem in the oven!

Dough Knottin’

As you can tell, I had originally just tied em together and figured they’ll just be like Pillsbury’s Rolls.  But after a few, I decided to cut the dough in half  and  make mini knots!  They’re more bite size and its easier to watch how much you eat, as well as being adorable. So I just sat em on the paper and let them rise a little more.  I was actually pretty skeptical about this step, since I didn’t know if this dough would rise anymore, given how I had originally let it rise 8 more hours than intended, but the yeast is still hard at work, and when I was done knotting, I did notice that they had risen some more.  Time to throw these babies into the oven for 10 minutes!

Meanwhile, I got started on the most important part, the sauce.  The recipe called for a lot of olive oil and butter, so when I first made it, I was a little disgusted…I mean, look at it, that’s a lot of better and oil!  But not knowing anything, I just followed the recipe blindly.  I threw in some garlic hot sauce and sriracha, but I couldn’t get an accurate measure of flavor by just trying a small amount, so I had to wait for the knots to come out of the oven.

Spicy Sauce

And when they came out, oh man…took my breath away!  They’re beautiful!  Much better than I had imagined them…

Fresh Outta Oven

But I still had no idea for the flavor, so I took a little guy and coated it with the sauce with a brush.

A close up of a mini knot

Isn’t it cute?  It turned out okay, the sauce wasn’t bad.  I had to add some hot sauce, but overall, not too much change.  But now that I’ve tasted it, and know what to expect next time, I may use less oil and butter.  But at first, I was just amazed how I didn’t mess up as badly as I thought, but it turns out, after a little while, as they cool down a little, they soften up!  And that just makes these little guys heavenly!  I do have to admit, I gave up on trying to brush them, the garlic refused to stick and the oil just got everywhere, so I decided to just toss em.  Threw them all in a glass bowl and just shook em up.

And as you all have already seen, it came out beautifully!  I still have the other half in the fridge and I plan on making them on Sunday so I can bring them for my co-workers on Monday!  I’m excited, I hope they like them as well!

Thank guys for bearing with me the entire post, I know I am a little long-winded!  🙂

Until next week!

– Chef JKwong