Mussels with Salsa

There are some foods that seem really awkward to eat and cook, and in my opinion, a lot of them are in the seafood category. Like shrimp, are you going to get it deshelled when you start cooking? You have to leave the tail, there's that horrifying vein fact that everyone knows. For a while, I also thought mussels were awkward and weird to cook. Theyre just...a shell, and you see tiny little ones on rocks at the beach. I'll also let you in on a secret and tell you that for a long time I totally hated cooked fish (I've always loved sushi) and just thought it wasn't for me. LB is still of this opinion and I don't think I'll ever change his mind.

But the thing that got me back into seafood in a big way was mussels. This is definitely another Chilean Grandma recipe (Happy Birthday, Grandma!) that was prepared for me one winter break and I got absolutely hooked. Apparently Chileans typically eat mussels raw which is a little too intense for me, but this recipe is super refreshing and light and doesn't have a strong "seafood" taste that a lot of people are averse to.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup Water
1 lb Mussels
1 1/2 tbsp Salt
1 tbsp Black Pepper
1 Tomato
1 Clove Garlic
2 "stalks" Green Onion
~1/4 cup Cilantro
2 tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
1 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

First, what I like to do is pour the water into a large pot and put it by the sink. Then you have to wash or scrub the mussels as you're putting them in the pot. Important! When you're washing off individual mussels, see if the mussels are clamped shut. If they aren't, put them aside and maybe knock them around a little, next to the pot. Then when you're done scrubbing the mussels (also, pull out the "beards" of the mussels, the stringy things coming out of it) look back at the mussels you put aside. You'll find quite a few of them have clamped shut because they were like, "Hey, who's this jerk knocking me around? I'd better clamp shut so they don't eat me." Unfortunately for them, this has only sealed their fate. The ones that are still open are probably dead, and you don't want to cook mussels that are not completely fresh.

Now take the pot over to the burner, and pour in the salt and pepper and set the stove to low-medium. Note: You know that random trivia you know about how lobsters "scream" when they're boiled alive, but in fact it's air escaping from their shell? The same thing happens with mussels. I don't really think it sounds like "screaming" but there definitely is a noise as the mussels heat up. But while I might find this a little horrifying when cooking an animal with eyes, let's face it, mussels don't exactly have a lot of personality. Don't feel guilty!

While the mussels are cooking, get a bowl and chop up the green onion, tomatoes, garlic, and cilantro. Mix them up with the apple cider vinegar and olive oil.

Every once in a while, look back at the mussels. They'll start to open up! The bad news is that means you've killed them. The good news is they're delicious! When they're all done opening up (or mostly all done, as I'll explain later), take them off the heat quickly so they don't get to be a weird rubbery, unpleasant texture. Expect them to be any color from pink to orange (even a bright salmony orange color!). Then put the salsa you've just made on the mussels! This is way easier if you take off the top shell, which is easy.

But, as you're taking off the top shells, you'll notice not all of the mussels opened all the way. With the ones that are basically impossible to take the top shells off with just your hand, I like to throw those away too because that's also a sign of them having already been dead. You don't want to take chances with not fresh seafood!

With mussels, I often just eat them on their own, as a sort of appetizer (but enough to make it a meal). Tonight, I put it over a bed of pasta and I actually got pretty dang full. It helped that I only had to throw away about three mussels, as opposed to the first time I made mussels where I had to throw away almost half the bag!

Another important note is that when you're buying mussels, if you aren't planning on cooking them that day, wrap them in a damp towel and that'll keep them alive. But that's what I did the first time and they died anyway because I didn't regularly dampen the towel. Just getting the mussels day-of is a much easier way to go, I think. Seriously you guys, this is sooo easy and so delicious and it looks pretty impressive too! Like something you'd see at a legitimate restaurant!

Abuela-style Pork Chops

These pork chops are actually D's grandma's recipe, but she is like too lazy to cook or some crazy thing, so tonight I am taking the reins. I swear I used to dislike pork chops but these ones make me very happy so try it out if it looks good.

The first thing you need to do is peel and dice an onion. You want fairly small pieces of onion, it doesn't have to be too fancy but you need to create a lot of surface area so I cut them into thin strips. The best way to do that, by the way, is to make your cuts horizontally across the onion rather than from top to bottom.

Once you have your onions cut, put them in a pan with some olive oil, making sure they cover the bottom of the pan, and let them soften a bit. You want to be careful with this recipe and use a fairly low heat; the first couple of times I made it I burned it. It cooks for a fairly long time so you don't have to worry about cooking too hot, I usually cook it on low-medium.

While your onions are cooking, prepare a couple of thin cuts of pork by rinsing them off, and salt and peppering both sides fairly liberally. Put these over the bed of onions you've made and add some diced garlic on top for flavor. Make sure to cover the pan with a lid (this is vital) and set a timer for 17 minutes.

Once your timer goes off, flip the pork chops and set the timer for another 17. Your meat should already look pretty cooked; the purpose of the last part of cooking is to make sure it's cooked evenly and to steam the meat so that it gets soft. Once you've flipped the pork, pour about 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of tomato sauce into a sauce pan, and pour in some milk, mixing until it is an orange-ish salmony color. (The rest of your sauce will go bad within a week or two of opening it and you're going to have a lot left, so plan on making pasta soon.) Once your sauce mix looks good, pour it over your pork, again making sure to cover the pan.

Once that timer goes off the second time, you have some delicious pork chops. As an added bonus, the leftover onions and sauce in the pan are tasty over a bed of mashed potatoes.

The last step, of course, is to have D clean up.

Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes are easy to make, easy to clean up, and insanely delicious. They should be a staple of every non-cook's repertoire. Megan: make some mashed potatoes!

First things first: get a pot of water boiling. You need a fairly big pot, but you don't need to fill it up too full, I usually aim for about half-way to allow for the extra room potatoes are going to add, as well as boiling. The important thing is just to get your potatoes covered.

Add a dash of salt to your water as you put it on.

While you're waiting for the water to come to a boil, start preparing your potatoes. For one person, two or three mid-sized potatoes are probably enough, but potatoes are cheap enough and delicious enough that I usually prefer too many to too few. I use Yukon Golds for mashing but baby reds or whites work well too. Usually, you want to use them before they've been sitting out long enough to grow eyes, so that they don't look like that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa puts oatmeal on Bart and Homer's faces and they think they have leprosy. If they do though, you can just cut eyes off and the potatoes are still fine.

(As a side note, do not buy or eat potatoes with a greenish hue. This is caused by exposure to the sun, which makes the potatoes form a chemical called solanine. In addition to being bitter, enough solanine is actually toxic to humans. Eyes contain a high amount of solanine too, so when you cut them off make sure to be thorough, and cut out the green areas around them too.)

Rinse your potatoes in warm water. If you don't like skins, you can peel them; I leave mine on. I also dice my potatoes so they cook faster, but if you leave your skins on and have some extra time, you may want to leave them whole (side note two: this prevents the water from leeching vitamins out of the potatoes, and makes them a bit healthier.)

I also add some crushed garlic to my pot. Take the skin off of a clove of garlic, then place the side of a knife on top of it and press down with the butt of your hand. This causes the oils to seep out and flavor the potatoes. I used to dice garlic and mix it with the potatoes, but this way you get more bang for your buck.

Put your potatoes into the pot by carefully sliding them down down your cutting board into the water, so that none of it splashes down at your hands. Then bring it back to a boil and take the heat down to about medium. You want the water to be boiling but not too hard. After about 20 or 25 minutes, poke one of the potatoes with a fork. If it feels done, take them off and strain the water out. (Side note 3: if they still have the skins on and you want them off, pouring salt over them will cause the skins to shrink and make them much easier to peel off.)

For these potatoes, I used 3 tbsp of butter and 1/2 cup of milk. If you're making less, put in less-- it's not too hard to eyeball it. Make sure to pour the milk in slowly, you probably need less than you think. Then just mash them, salt and pepper to taste, and you're set. (Side note 4: don't mash the potatoes too hard or with an electric mixer: it will break down the starches in the potatoes and make them gluey.)

All set! If anyone can find a longer or more unnecessarilly detailed set of instructions for mashing potatoes, let me know and I will add a couple more paragraphs.

Dinosaur Cupcakes

Happy Valentine's Day! I have been planning what I was going to do for LB for a couple weeks now, which was make a cupcake dinosaur. Without knowing this, LB decided we HAD to make cupcakes a while ago and we were able to try out Betty Crocker's Milk Chocolate cake mix and decided that was a good one for cupcakes because it was lighter than our normal cake mix we get, Triple Chunk Chocolate (ugh, that's really LB's love, not mine).

Anyway, I sent LB off to our neighbor, Cody's, apartment (who has been in on both our Valentine's day gifts the whole time) while I did the baking! Obviously, I started out with just making the cake mix as normal, but I was pretty nervous about the oven temperature. Normal cupcakes call for 350 degrees, but it was kind of ambiguous for various baking pan materials, so I lowered it to 325, which had to be lowered even more because our oven is a little hotter than it should be. This picture is seriously like, 5 minutes after I put it in the oven, I had to fill the things up to pretty full so that they would fill up completely and then I could trim off the bottom so that it'd lay flat. I had a fair amount of scraps so that's what I presented to LB when he first came in to see his special surprise! Of course, he then got to see the little beauty you can see at the very top!

Surprisingly, LB's surprise for me were shrinky-dink stegosaurus earrings that he apparently has been working on for weeks! LB works at a craft store so he has easy access to shrinky-dinks. Meanwhile Cody was snickering at how both of our Valentine's Day gifts were dino-themed! We actually still haven't even had the dino-cakes because we went out to dinner and are soooo full, we'll probably hold off and have them as a midnight snack. No clean up picture for tonight! I cleaned up as much as I could tonight as I was baking, but I still have one huge bowl of cake batter, one bowl of blue icing, and one blue of green icing.

By the way! I'm thinking of suing Deco-Cake! I was all excited for the lime green frosting I was going to color, and I got the green out and the yellow out. When I dropped the green dye in, I thought it looked suspiciously red, but I figured it might be like hair dye, where it develops it color once you mix it in. NOPE! All of the labels were WRONG except yellow, the most harmless color. Awesome. Luckily I improvised and made what should have been lime green into sky blue, and made the belly lime green on my second try.

Meanwhile, this is what the cats, HD and RC decided to do all day. What cuties, huh?

D's Lemon Chicken

I prefaced this recipe with D specifically because I have a lemon chicken recipe, and LB has a lemon chicken recipe (which I think should be called cinnamon chicken because he goes so crazy with the spices, but he says he'll tone it down). What recipes I know are mostly due to my Chilean grandmother teaching them to me, and this is no exception! While I love going back to Maryland and enjoying exceptional food that I'll never get anywhere else, I do like to have a substitute so I don't have to wait 6 months to a year to go, "Yummmm."

So I finally asked her how to make various faves, and found myself having to, "Wait, how much butter? How much salt? How much is too much?" Well since this is pretty much all to eye and you know how much to put in with practice, this makes transcribing this to a "recipe" pretty hard, especially since I've gotten comfortable with eyeballing stuff like that too. BUT! I'll do my best to explain as easily as possible, which shouldn't be to hard because this is seriously super-duper easy to make, and the first recipe I got down pretty well.

Ingredients:
- ~1 lb Chicken (I like to use drumsticks or thighs because they're mega cheap, and that also tends to be what my grandma cooks too)
- Garlic (1/2 clove per chicken piece)
- Lemon juice (if using a real lemon, half-a-lemon's worth of juice; if using bottled juice, about 2 tbsp)
- Salt
- Pepper
- 1-2 tbsp Butter

First, let's start with the prep, hmm? First thing, preheat your oven to 350 degrees. This seems to be the magical number of cooking since most of the stuff I cook, meat-wise, gets cooked at that temperature. While it's pre-heating, arrange the chicken in a baking dish.

Get out your garlic, and (and this is a recent secret I've discovered) crush the cloves with a large knife. Cut a slit into the chicken pieces, and put about half a clove (the average size of a clove, there are some baby cloves and some fatty cloves where you have to make a judgement call) into each chicken piece. Take your lemon juice, either half a lemon or 2 tablespoons, whatever's enough to moisten all of it, and y'know, put it on the chicken. I like to do this before seasoning so seasoning will stick on it, as opposed to lemon juice washing it off afterward. Anyway, then I salt and pepper to what looks good, if I had to put measurements on it, I'd say 1/2 tbsp of salt, 2 tsp of pepper? Is 2 teaspoons the same as 1/2 a tablespoon? If so, I apologize! Then get your 1-2 tbsp of butter, really it just depends on how juicy you want your chicken, and cut it up into like, 4 pieces and get it spread out over the chicken so that it'll look like this!

Now, there's two paths you can follow after this. You can cover up the chicken with some aluminum foil, allowing you to have a way juicer chicken, and you can pour that ish all over pasta or mashed potatoes or rice or what have you. But! You can leave the aluminum foil off! This will leave you with much less juice, but a crispier chicken which is delectable! You could also try out a half-and-half, start out with aluminum foil, and take it off halfway in. Either way, I keep the chicken in there for about 45 minutes. Really this picture to the right is to show Megan that I use her apron quite often!

Anyway, tonight's chicken turned out nice and crispy, and I paired it with "Pappardelle" egg pasta from Trader Joe's. I've recently rediscovered my love of egg noodles/pasta, I think it has a really great texture when mixed with chicken juice and juices of that nature. What I am notorious for pairing lemon chicken with, however, is onion-sautee'd rice, which will eventually pop up in this blog; it's the main way I like to cook rice.

We've gotten pretty serious about this blog, LB has even mocked up some actual designs that we'd like, besides these dumb generic templates, so hopefully he comes through with it! He was supposed to do his version of lemon chicken yesterday, but Mama LB has come into town and it's thrown a wrench in our scheduling. But there is a schedule! Tomorrow will most likely be pork chops, which is my recipe, but LB is well-versed in how to make it because it's his favorite dish that I make! We also forgot that Thursday is Valentine's Day, where we'll be dining out (Black Angus, holla!) so that'll also be a marked off day. Sometime soon you can anticipate Mexican night, though, mark your generalized calendars! Closing, as usual, is LB cleaning up! I don't just always make LB clean up, I've just been the one cooking, and we switch things off like that. You get your first D clean up pic tomorrow!

Basmati Rice

So for our first post, I decided to post an easy, but first-time recipe! I usually have one specific way to cook rice, a way I'll probably post later that my Chilean grandmother taught me, but recently LB and I went to a Persian restaurant and were in looove with their Basmati rice. Theirs was flavored with Saffron but we decided to keep it simple for our first time.



Ingredients:
2 cups Water
1 cup Basmati Rice
1 tbsp Butter
Salt to taste

So if you haven't made rice much, the general go-to with rice measurements is 2 parts water to 1 part rice (there are exceptions but usually it'll say on the rice label). First, you boil the 2 cups of water in a relatively small saucepan (meaning not a HUGE pot). Now, 2 cups of water is not much, so this should happen pretty quickly! When the water comes to a boil, pour in the one cup of rice, put in one tablespoon of butter, and sprinkle in however much salt you want to put in. I'd say about a teaspoon is right if you're unsure.

Then you get the rice going to a boil, and then turn the heat for the rice down loooow, and cover! This is super important, you've gotta have it covered so that the moisture stays trapped in so the rice absorbs all the water. I assume if you didn't have it covered it'd just dry up and dry rice does not make good rice. So anyway, with our particular rice, we had it simmering on low for 12 minutes. After it's done, take it off the heat and let it rest for about three minutes.

When you're done with all that, you can crack some pepper over it and I think that goes well with it! FYI: One cup of rice is a lot more rice than it seems! This amount satisfies LB and me with leftovers. And if you're wondering, we paired it with a rotisserie chicken (the first time in a year that I've been able to convince LB to try it again). All in all, it's super easy, super quick, and a great option for a side for your 45-minute pan fried chicken breast.

Final step, of course, was having LB clean up. Prospective upcoming recipes: tomato sauce porkchops, lemon chicken, mashed potatoes.