I decided to go balls to the wall with dinner tonight. I'm talking about 3 pans and 1 pot taking up my four burners, plus some oven usage. I knew that keeping that many things going and synchronized would take some focus, so my first step would definitely be a glass of whiskey.
I opted for the Old Dominick's Huling Station Single Barrel bourbon, and it was absolutely lovely. Despite the high proof, it's a smooth drink, strong caramel notes, just...well, fucking lovely. Now, as you can imagine, with all of the things going on, there weren't a ton of pictures, but I'll give you a quick run-through of what I planned to make, then what ended up happening.
So my plan was to bread a chicken breast, sear it in butter and olive oil, then top it with grated parmesan and bake it in the oven; grate some purple sweet potato, mix in a little egg white and minced garlic, then fry that up in butter and top it with pickled zucchini and "egg pearls," which are drops of egg white cooked in hot oil; and Jasmine rice mixed with sliced tomato and sautéed red and orange bell pepper, red onion, garlic, and mushroom, then topped on the plate with a lightly fried egg yolk.
The chicken went off fairly well. I did pretty similarly to what I did last week: dredged in flour with cayenne, washed with balsamic mayo, covered in bread crumbs with salt and black pepper, and fried in butter and olive oil for a few minutes. When the breading had a nice golden brown to it, I pulled it out, sprinkled some grated parmesan on top, and slid it into an oven preheated to 400 degrees.
I wasn't 100% sold on the final product as the cheese was a little dry. I think next time I may wait until the baking is almost done, then add the cheese and broil it on high for a minute to get it good and melty. It still tasted fine; just wasn't exactly what I was hoping for.
I'm not going to bore you with explaining how I make rice, sauté veggies, and mix those together because I've done that so many times. Those purple sweet potato hashbrowns, though? That shit came out really fucking well, despite me forgetting to add the garlic into the mix. I'm sure having minced garlic mixed in would have been fucking amazing, though, and I've got a little potato left, so I may do that tomorrow night for shits and giggles.
Unfortunately, my egg yolk broke before I could get it into the pan, so I decided to just try to do pearls of egg yolk and egg white. I don't know what I did wrong, as I only watched one video about the pearls 2 weeks ago, but instead of nice little spheres, I got mini egg circles, so I just had to roll with it. I used some glass medical droppers that I picked up at Kroger to pull the egg out of a bowl and drop it into the pan (I got them specifically for the kitchen, so no medication was inadvertently mixed in) and tweezers (also for the kitchen only) to pull the cooked circles out.
For the plating, I first put one of my hashbrown discs down and stacked a few pieces of egg on top. Two of them were kind of like mini fried eggs, and I flipped the order of the third because I didn't want it to look too boring; instead, it looked kind of stupid as fuck.
After that, it was simply a matter of stacking some veggie rice with my PVC and lying down a few pieces of sliced chicken, which I drizzled with some parsley oil. You'll notice the lack of pickled zucchini. I stuck it in the fridge to keep it out of the way and forgot about it, so I'll have to use it later, too. I was a bit pissed about that, but c'est la vie.
Overall, I was disappointed with the plating. I think the zucchini and egg yolk would have helped tremendously, but hey, I fucked that up. Beyond that, though, the flavor was pretty good. I cooked way too fucking much rice, hence why that tower is going off the top of the pic, but I've got a few ideas for making that look better, too. First off is using the 2" PVC to stack a smaller cylinder, which I could actually do on top of the hashbrowns. I've got a few more egg ideas I want to try soon, too, but we'll get to that eventually.
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