Cook Monkeys

RB and I decided to make beef stroganoff tonight. We had most of the ingridients, and by that I mean we had ground beef and egg noodles. “Sure, we can just improvise.” That’s pretty much our philosophy to most of the dishes we cook.

Step 1 involved looking online for beef stroganoff recipes. The recipes we found contained things like cream of mushroom or “grass-fed beef cubes” - neither of which we had. So we just decided to forego everything and make our own version of ‘beef stroganoff’. We had celery, carrots, and a little garlic to add to the beef and noodles.

After cooking the beef, we started adding random spices like: cumin, oregano, parsley, more cumin, chili powder, salt, black pepper, a little A1 steak sauce, a little Worchestershire sauce, more cumin, and the cycle continues.

RB decided to make the sauce which consisted of water, flour, A1 steak sauce, Worchestershire sauce, and oregano. We then combined the two and let it sit for a while. After a taste, we continued adding more and more spices to make the flavor stronger before we added the noodles. So once again, we added: pepper, salt, garlic powder, oregano, cumin, chili powder, and probably more that I don’t remember.

The flavor wasn’t exactly getting any stronger so I added the noodles. After a thorough mixture, the sauce kind of disappeared and we had noodles with beef and vegetables in the end. It still tasted good although it was bit lackluster in flavor. So it didn’t quite turn out to be beef stroganoff but it’s a start.

It seems like anything we ever try making just dwindles down to adding whatever assortment of spices we have on hand. I really like cumin.

I remember from my youth of a time when my parents tried to use a Salad Shooter to dice green peppers for use in topping tacos. I also remember that they inadvertently made a green pepper paste in the process. That was both the first and last time that tool was used on that vegetable.

I recently purchased a nice food processor at Target since it was getting tiring chopping and dicing some of the vegetables everytime.

Why did I think that my food processor would react any differently with the green peppers? Because I’m a moron sometimes?

Let’s just say that you could still tell that it had come from peppers, but where did the bubbles come from exactly?

Last Thursday, cook monkey Nick purchased a coffee maker which now fuels my newly acquired daily caffeine addiction. This is his story originally posted on his Livejournal.

So today I bought a coffee maker, which was much more difficult than it should have been. There are not a large number of stores near my apartment, so I chose to go the closest (read: my roommate would only drive me to the closest place). At Target, I found an aisle of coffee makers from many companies. They ranged from four-cup machines with a simple on-off switch ($15) to massive sixteen-cup monsters with complex, programmable controls and a built-in grinder($90). After considering my options for a few minutes, I noticed one that had a button marked “I/O”. The moment I saw it, I knew I had to have a coffee maker with an IO button on the front. Yes, I am a geek.

My dreams of IO-geek coffee were dashed, however, when I found that Target did not actually have any makers of this model in stock. The IO coffee maker is made my Philips, in case anyone cares. I don’t really need to have an IO coffee maker, so I grabbed a box for my second choice-It had the same features, minus the IO button. RB, my roommate, suggested that we check BestBuy (which is right next door to Target) for coffee makers–maybe they would have the one I wanted.

We walked to BestBuy-on the way in, the security guard said “Hi.” I guess that being a security is a pretty lonely job because they always say “hi” to me. I wonder if they ever consider finding a more social job, like being a bus driver.

Anyway, back on topic, we found the coffee maker aisle in BestBuy, which is pretty much like the coffee maker aisle in Target except that the coffee makers are about 37.4% more expensive. BestBuy did not have the coffee maker I wanted (even on display). They didn’t have any other models with an IO button. BestBuy did have my second choice from Target, though. I almost bought one before I realized that it was several dollars more than at Target, and that it was not the color I wanted (more expensive, not the color I wanted, AND it didn’t have an IO button). We walked back to Target. I bought my second-choice coffee maker (without an IO button) from Target and brought it home.

Overall, I am very happy with my coffee maker. It has a clock and an auto-start feature so that I can have fresh coffee waiting when I wake up. My coffee maker can brew up to twelve cups of coffee at once and it will turn the decanter heater off after a set time interval. I am currently drinking a cup of coffee that I just brewed (Wegman’s brand Traditional Ground with milk and sugar), and I must say that it is excellent. I think that I will glue an IO button to the side.

And this is his follow-up about the coffee maker.

Yea….it didn’t occur to me before the the “I/O” button on the one coffee maker I wanted was a power button not something that activated special features….yea.

Yesterday, in an attempt to purge our refrigerator of leftovers from the dinner party, I decided to make soup.

Our ingredients consisted of:

• spicy chicken wings
• a curry beef and potato mixture
• celery
• onions
• carrots
• rice

I chopped the vegetables while R.B. tore the meat off the wings. We threw the beef and potato mixture along with the vegetables into a pot and put it medium heat. After boiling the chicken bones, we added the broth into the mixture along with the chicken. Determined to make it taste good, we decided to use a variety of spices to add flavor to the soup.

What we threw into the soup:

• a leftover spice packet from a package of Ramen noodles
• salt
• black pepper
• celery salt
• garlic powder
• dehydrated tomato stew mix
• seaweed
• and lots of chicken bouillon to make it taste like chicken again

After a few hours, it was pretty good and R.B. suggested adding rice. We made 3 cups of uncooked rice and then added it to the soup. A little later, and the soup was done. By this time it was starting to turn solid again. All throughout the day we were tasting it to see if it was ready, and we burned our tongues. I also ended up burning my finger too because I turned the heat on the wrong burner. When we ate it, it was still relatively soupy. By the end of the night, it had essentially turned itself into stuffing thanks to the absorption of the water by the rice.

Friday, we hosted a dinner party at the apartment. We tried to keep the total guest count below 20, as cooking for more than that many people is a much greater logistical nightmare than for less than 20.

At around 10pm on Thursday night, Matt started preparing vegetables and the curry-beef-potato dumplings. That continued until around 2:30am Friday morning. After all of us were finished with classes at 1pm on Friday, we came back to the apartment and started cutting chicken, coating the wings, making biscuits, boiling carrots, making pseudo-lo-mein, making lots of fried rice, etc…

People started arriving slowly. Bit by bit the party was assembled by people from art house, hogs, and physics, and there was way way way too much food for 19 people to eat:

• curry-beef-potato fried dumplings
• pseudo-lo-mein with bell peppers
• fried rice
• spicy chicken wings
• orange sugared sliced carrots
• garlic, thyme, and cheddar biscuits
• veggies in a black pepper sauce
• seasoned chicken pieces
• Dan’s hot sesame teriyaki chicken

I think I have a new respect for anyone who ever prepares a large meal for many people, such as a Thanksgiving event. There’s just so much time involved in the preparation, intermediate cleaning, cooking, serving, cleanup, and hostishness.

There are pictures of the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/eggplant/sets/168734/.