Culinary Adventures II: The Main Course

On Wednesdays I have a lecture until 10am. After that I am free. This is one of the reasons I decided to differ from cooking my usual variations on onions-and-garlic-fried-in-pan-plus-potatoes-or-rice-(side-of-apple-and-carrot-sticks). I had time to try to cook something. I spent maybe 20 minutes looking through the Extending the Table cookbook that I had brought from home. I had a few criteria: I wanted something I could serve with rice, I wanted something that didn't have too many fancy ingredients that I wouldn't be able to find in the little grocery store near the dorms, and I wanted to use up the ground beef that I had in my fridge. (Incidentally, an ingredient doesn't have to be very fancy to not be offered in the "Penny Market." For example, almost all spices aren't to be found there.) After thoroughly searching through the cookbook I landed on the elegantly titled: "Skewered Ground Meat," a recipe from Iraq.

This recipe called for:
Ground Beef or Lamb: check.
Onion, finely minced: check.
One Egg: onto grocery list.
Bread crumbs: can do.
Parsley Leaves, finely minced: I didn't think "Penny" had this, so I left it out.
Salt and Pepper to taste: check.
Cinnamon (optional): left out.

This recipe also was to be served with "Brown Rice." This was rice that was supposed to be browned in butter and onions, and then boiled. I added butter to my grocery list, and went to "Penny."

At about 5:30 I began preparing the food. One of my problems, is that I am very poor with timing in the kitchen. First, I started with the brown rice. I melted some butter in a pot, and put the rice and some minced onion in. I had never browned rice before, but nothing really seemed to be happening, so I got started with the meat. I got the ground beef out of the fridge, and when I opened the container an unpleasant smell that I wasn't came out. I just figured it was a raw meat smell, and after I cooked it, it would be OK. So I put the meat in to a bowl (a soup bowl, not a mixing bowl). I then added the onion and egg. It took up almost all the room in the bowl, and was fairly difficult to mix. Then I began to smell a more pleasant odor from the rice. I checked it again, and the rice was actually browning, in fact it was blackening. I quickly tried to rinse the egg/meat mixture off my hands, so I could deal with the now burning rice. I added the water to the rice, and let it boil. It wasn't all black, so I figured I had salvaged it. I went back to mixing the meat. The meat was still very runny with egg. I had forgotten to add the bread crumbs. I again rinsed off my eggy meat hands, got a piece of bread, and crumbled it into the meat. As I mixed the bread crumbs into the meat the consistency got firmer. I made the mixture into about four patties, and put them on a pan, and onto the highest rung on our toaster oven. I turned the oven to one of its two settings: "on." About a minute later, I realized I hadn't salted the patties. I decided my best option was to attempt to throw salt into the oven in hopes that some would land on the patties. I am not really sure how successful this was, but I believe a high estimate is that 10% of the salt actually landed on the patties. It didn't really matter, I was still excited to see how they would turn out.

After about 15 minutes of cooking the patties, they looked done. There's not a light or anything in the oven so it is a little hard to tell. When I took them out, they were very black on the top. That was still OK by me, a little carbon never hurt anybody. The rice at this point had dehydrated a bit, because, through my neglect, I allowed all the water to boil away. Again, the rice wasn't beyond my (fairly low) standards of edibility, so I scraped it out onto a plate, and adorned it with the four blackened patties. Here was the end result:


Despite the beautiful display, the taste left much to desired. The reason I eventually decided to throw it all away was the flavor/taste of the meat. It turned out that the smell from the meat didn't cook out as I had hoped. It was still a fairly prominent flavor in an otherwise flavor lacking meal. I figured that stinky meat might lead to an upset stomach, so I only ate about half a patty before I dumped it all into the trash. Oh well. Error is half of my method of trial and error cooking.

Luckily, that wasn't the only thing of interest that happened this week. On Friday, I went to a 90s party. I hope that doesn't make any of my medium-aged readers feel too old. Unfortunately, I hadn't packed any of the clothes I wore in the 90s, so I borrowed a cap, and wore it backwards. It was fun, but I have to say that I wasn't highly aware of fashion in the 90s. Mostly I wore what my mother bought for me. In my first years in elementary school, I didn't like the way jeans felt in the crotch, so I wore sweats that my mom bought at Alco. Unfortunately, they tended to get holes in the crotch fairly quickly and fairly suddenly which was cause for at least one embarrassing P.E. session. Later on, I can remember wanting the snap up "swishy pants," and wanting some "Lee Pipes" jeans, when I got over the jeans-crotch problem. But that was about the extent of what I could remember about my nineties fashion choices.

Yesterday my friends Pedro, Manuel, and I went to Dusseldorf and had a very German evening. We visited three different breweries to try their "Alt Bier," which is the style of beer brewed only in Dusseldorf. We ate at a German food at a kind of German-style greasy spoon. It was a good evening.

Til next week.
--Austin