Month: April 2016

Always brush your chicken before bed.

Posted on by Craig Stewart

Selecting what recipe to make each week is a sacred ritual for me. There are certain traditions that must be upheld. The place? The front seat of my car outside the grocery store. The time? The last night of the week I don’t have plans. The process? It begins with a moment of reflection. I look at myself in the rearview mirror and say, “Next week I’ll prepare better. Next week I’ll do all of my shopping ahead of time. Next week I’ll have the guts to wear a cowboy hat to work.” It never happens.

Then I travel inward and seek answers to the great unknown questions. “Am I out of butter? Whatever I’ll just but more anyway because I’m a consumer whore. Are vegetable and canola oil different? I think I have one of those at home right now, it’ll probably work. Where the hell do you even buy fresh basil? I’m more likely to find Bigfoot than fresh basil. What the shit is tarragon?”

Then comes the final step—intensive research. I scour The Food Lab looking for a recipe that I can complete in one night, without pulling my hair out, impressive enough that it doesn’t look like I’m phoning it in.

This week’s lucky front-seat recipe was Barbecue-Glazed Roast Chicken (Page 600). It fit all the important checkboxes of a Craig Cooks Crap special—low upfront cost, already owning most of the ingredients and possible to pull off in under an hour. I’m a growing boy, I can’t be expected to wait around for my food forever. This isn’t a Bob Evans.

First thing’s first—ingredient photo. I’ve got a brand new cutting board, and it is time to show it off. So I whipped out the chicken and it…whipped out its own chicken.

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WHAT IS THAT?

My chicken has a penis. Which is odd because chickens are girls. But it definitely has a penis where the neck hole should be. This pink monstrosity can’t be a neck unless my chicken’s father was a giraffe. I’m from the Midwest. I refuse to believe that anything this horrifying isn’t some kind of a sexual organ. But to her credit, the gal’s got some length. Girth leaves a bit to be desired, but really whose doesn’t? I decided that this chicken’s endowment wasn’t something to hide away, but instead it should be honored as the centerpiece of this week’s ingredient photo.

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It’s time to make this poor bird a eunuch. I approach the procedure with all due care and respect, and of course make a Snapchat video out of removing the poor bird’s bits.

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I’m definitely never ordering chicken sausage again.

Now it’s time for even more surgery, because I spatchcocked this little bastard. What is spatchcocking? It’s not a sex move. It’s splitting open the bird and flattening it to cook evenly. Why is it called spatchcocking? This is because the chicken should be flat. Like a spatula…duh. Anyway in order to effectively divide this bird in half, just like our country over the next six months, I needed to remove its spine Sub-Zero style.

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When that didn’t work I used scissors. Less excitement, but also less blood. Kind of like when they remade RoboCop.

After that I blended all of my spices for the rub in a coffee grinder (I don’t currently own a kitchen table, why the hell would I own a spice grinder?) and rubbed the chicken down like Tyson (the boxer not the chicken), before the opening bell. Then the well-massaged chicken was off for his date with the hell-fires of my electric oven.

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Thirty minutes in, I needed to brush the beautiful little bird with barbecue sauce. I chose Sugarfire Smoke House Honey Sriracha BBQ Sauce, from a St. Louis barbecue joint that’s putting Kansas City elitists, Memphis traditionalists, and Texas good ol’ boys to shame. Now, I’ve made some bold statements before, but I’m pretty sure this is the only one that will actively put my life in danger. Barbecue is more divisive than politics, religion and olives combined. If they find me dead in my apartment drowned in a vat of Gate’s Barbecue sauce, we’ll all know why.

The alarm went off and I grabbed the bottle, intending to lightly brush the bird with sweet and spicy goodness. Then I realized I don’t own a kitchen brush. I considered my options and identified an undeniably brilliant solution.

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If they made barbecue sauce flavored toothpaste, I’d brush my teeth nine times a day. I got to work on the bird with my Oral-B. I think it worked better than a traditional kitchen brush. I could get in to small crevices. I could even get to the hard-to-reach corners of the chicken. Plus, when I was done my Barbecue-Glazed Roast Chicken had 99% less plaque than the leading competitor’s Barbecue-Glazed Roast Chicken.

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I put it back in the oven, and went through this process a few times before delivering my beautiful baby from it’s 450o womb. I’m not a father, but I assume the feeling of overwhelming pride and joy seeing your first child is pretty similar. Probably just as sticky, too.

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I understand the naysayers who will say this isn’t a barbecued chicken, and they have a point; it was cooked in an oven. But for a weeknight barbecue fix, you really could not do any better. It’s surprisingly simple and yields a tender, moist and flavorful chicken with crispy skin and sticky sauce.

And 4/5 dentists recommend it.

Recipe: 314/314
Did I do the Dishes? No.

New Kitchen. Same Bitchin’.

Posted on by Craig Stewart

You might be wondering what happened to me. Did he cut off his fingers rendering him unable to type? Did he get overwhelmed by success and go on a soul-seeking journey to find the meaning of the universe? Did he simply give up, like he has on everything else in his life?

Still have all my digits (look ‘em up ladies), I already know the “why” of the universe (salami…duh) and despite all evidence to the contrary I have not given up on learning to cook or writing about it. Craig Cooks Crap went on hiatus because I moved into a new apartment, with an exciting new kitchen to destroy each and every week.

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You might not think the new kitchen is very relevant to cooking Pan-Seared Pork Chops with Maple-Bourbon Glaze and Hot Buttered Snap Peas with Leeks and Basil, but I have a confession to make. I own almost none of the kitchen equipment, including the stove, I’ve been showing off with. With the exception of my cast-iron pan, which I’ve grown to love more than Donald Trump loves himself, almost everything belonged to my former roommate. He has a Food Science degree, manages a restaurant and owns pretty much every kitchen tool known to man except a damn garlic press. So we’re all going to be taking a step back here. For the first time since this experiment started I’m operating without proper equipment. Considering how poorly I did with proper equipment, this does not bode well.

One minute in to cooking the first dish in my new apartment things started to go downhill. I like to take nice pictures of the ingredients on my cutting board before getting started. It’s my pre-game ritual. Wade Boggs used to eat fried chicken before every baseball game. That’s 162 fried chicken meals a year not counting the playoffs. He also once drank 64 Miller Lites on a cross-country flight. That man deserves his place in the Hall of Fame.

My taking-pictures warm-up routine is significantly less badass, but probably healthier. The problem is my kitchen’s not the only thing less than half the size it used to be.

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Yeah. So no nice pictures for the moment.

The first step is to salt and refrigerate the chops for at least 45 minutes as part of a process called brining. Brining is supposed to keep the pork chop juicy, but with what I put these poor little pigs through they turned out drier than Cloris Leachman’s lady bits.

I decided to use the brining time to prep everything else, starting with the leek. I’ve never seen a leek before, much less bought one. They’re huge. When I was carrying it around the grocery store I was worried someone from the EPA was going to fine me for deforestation. Apparently, only the white part of the leek is edible, leaving roughly 95% of it absolutely worthless, similar to cable news. I wonder if leeks taste good, because as you’ll soon see why, I’ve never eaten one.

Making the maple-bourbon glaze involved three of my favorite things; women, whiskey and mustard. Usually you can only get that kind of action at Oktoberfest, but anything can happen in Craig’s new kitchen. I’d like you all to meet a very special woman.

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We’re dating. She’ll probably be embarrassed that I’m writing about it, but I think I’m in love. She’s super sweet, a little on the quiet side and sometimes smothering but come on, she parties with Jack Daniels and Bulleit Whiskey. What’s not to love?

The prep work was done and it was time to start cooking with my new lady love, on my brand-new super-old electric-top stove. I’ve heard electric heat is harder to manage, and you need to pay close attention or things burn quickly but I was feeling confident. Like Jordan Spieth on the 12th hole at The Masters, that confidence was about to be shaken to its very core.

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Small problems started to pile up. I don’t own tongs so I used a spoon to flip my pork chops. Not ideal, but not a big deal. The chops weren’t browning, so I pumped up the juice a little bit. Again, no big deal. The water wasn’t boiling quite fast enough for the peas and chops to be done at the same time, and the butter wasn’t melting to cook the leeks in, but there’s an easy solve. Just turn up the heat.

BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP.

BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP.

BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP. BEEEEEEP.

DO NOT TURN UP THE HEAT. I REPEAT–DO NOT TURN UP THE DAMN HEAT. IF YOU DO TURN UP THE DAMN HEAT THE FOLLOWING THINGS WILL HAPPEN:

  • You will set off every smoke detector in your apartment, which is a great way to say hello to your new neighbors you haven’t met yet
  • You will attempt to remove the batteries from the smoke detector, which is 10 feet off the ground without a chair or ladder because you do not own a chair or a ladder
  • You will run back and forth between the kitchen, living room and bedroom fanning the alarms with a sweatshirt, moving from detector to detector like a game of whack-a-mole from hell
  • You will forget that the leeks and chops are still on the stove, continuing to create smoke and turning exciting new colors
  • You will turn off everything on the stove, including the peas which were making steam, not smoke, and not doing anything wrong
  • You will fall over and injure your pride as you attempt to plug in a fan and open every window in the apartment
  • You will have the heightened senses of a dachshund on Independence Day.
  • You will cry a little.
  • You will attempt to eat a semi-frozen pea and burnt-rubber pork chop
  • You will go to the bar down the street and order chicken wings

So there it is—my first true failure. There will be no final photo. There will be no uplifting story of unexpected success. Life is not a Disney movie, everything doesn’t always end up the way you want it to. That’s why I thought Toy Story 3 should have ended with them all going down together in the incinerator.

The only thing I’ve ever failed at is pretty much everything, so it’s not an entirely unfamiliar sensation. I like to look at failures as lessons and I have learned a few very important things from this traumatic experience.

  1. Don’t trust Mrs. Butterworth’s. She’ll run when it gets too hot.
  2. Own a chair. They are useful for more than just sitting on.
  3. Don’t take time off from your blog. Karma’s a bitch.

Recipe: Chicken wings were pretty good.
Did I do the Dishes? Yes. I might be developing a sense of pride in my own place.