Home cooking

I've been doing some cooking here and there and since I'm so behind, it makes sense to just slap them all into one post.

Josh had a work dinner one night, so I went to Chequer's for their happy hour specials. Among other things, they do a chicken lobster at cost, which basically works out to about $12. I sit at the bar, get some oysters, and a lobster. They crack the most common stuff, but the knuckles and claws are a little hard to eat.

I work through the body and head, suck up all the tomalley, and then go to town on the claws and knuckles. The tail, I bring home.

And so, we have pasta with lobster. Except it didn't seem like enough, so I also defrosted some Sweet Savannah shrimp to go with it. I defrosted them for a long time so they would be easy to peel, and they were.

While they were soaking, I took off the shrimp heads and made a stock. For the pasta, I cooked off some white wine and used the tomatoes I canned last summer. I added in my stock and then later, cream and cheese. Then the seafood. It was pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Good enough that I wanted to make it again.

For mardi gras, Josh wanted something cajun and eventually landed on John Besh's shrimp creole. I used the rest of all the Sweet Savannah Shrimp medium shrimp, which was a little old.

It came out well, but very spicy. We ate it over rice. And then Josh had it for lunch. And then again. And again...

Randomly, we decided to make jerk chicken and invited L+H over for it. It was risky, because I had never made it before. I used two of the Heritage Farms chicken we had in the freezer.

It was a Marcus Samuelsson recipe. It wasn't incredibly complicated, but it is when you are already behind and your friends are at the house as you are whipping it together.

And I also made the yogurt dipping sauce, which is supposed to cool you off, but it has jalapenos in it!

And so everyone got half a jerk chicken, braised greens that H made, some silver queen corn, and the yogurt dip. It was okay. If I kept working at it, I think it could be good, but it's really not there yet.

It was a cold cold week so it seemed like a good idea to make a stew. A lamb stew. And we used up some of the lamb in the freezer, woo. It was a Jacques Pepin recipe, which seemed more fussy than usual, but how can you doubt Jacques?

However, when I finished it, the stew itself was too thin for my taste, so I added a bit of mounted butter to thicken it up. It came out pretty well.

And lastly, the branzino that I made just the other night. Made the same way as normal. The salsa verde was amazing though, and I'm not sure if it's because I hit my stride or what. The only thing is that I was tasting shallots all night long so perhaps less of that next time.

The capers in salt and the anchovies in salt are awesome. The capers finally about ran out, so I went and restocked this weekend.