I made the world's best omelet this morning with two extra large eggs that were beaten and fried in safflower oil and seasoned with sea salt, ground black pepper and chives and filled with pork sausage. The omelet was cooked to just-perfect-slightly-runny.

The whole omelet process is uniquely satisfying, from the egg frying on the pan all the way to the part where you eat it. I could have this every morning if I weren't trying to cut back.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2206 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.

Oh gosh darn, I should have totally taken photographs of my absolutely decadent braised chicken drumsticks I made last night served with a white wine reduction sauce and brown rice, but I had a friend over and it would have been weird to photograph it. The chicken was amazing and cooked to perfection, absolutely tender, a wonderful introduction to braised dishes but to me the real star was the sauce which was just so flavorful. My friend of course loved my cooking, too. He says I spoil him and maybe I do just a little, tiny bit.

Braising is when you take meat and sear it first, getting that nice caramelization action going on on the outside and then you submerge it in stock and simmer the stock until the meat is all cooked through and tender. It works on really tough meats but it's cool with stuff like drumsticks, too.

Before I seared my drumsticks, I marinated them for half a day in the refrigerator in sea salt, ground black pepper, sage, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce and some garlic powder. I seared the meat in a stainless steel pan and then I moved it to a plate and added chicken stock, white wine, scraping it with a scraper while it deglazed the surface and then added the drumsticks back in and filled the pan up to half or two thirds the height of the drumsticks with some more wine and stock in an about-one-to-three ratio and then I threw in some chives and some ginger powder to the pan and then brought the liquid up to a boil and then simmered it for 45 minutes making sure to turn the chicken every ten or so minutes.

Then I took the chicken out onto a different plate covered with tinfoil while I reduced the liquid on the pan to a thicker more gravy-like viscosity. I added some sea salt, too, while it reduced. The sauce was a very good flavor, the reduction concentrating the chicken and soy flavors. It went great with rice, but the sea salt might have been unnecessary. In the end I had some sauce leftover. I did end up chugging some because my friend dared me to, but that's another story.

Anyway, lunch today was fried brown rice I made along with diced breakfast sausage, green onions, some leftover French fries all diced up of course keeping in mind that potatoes in Chinese cuisine are treated like any other vegetable and an egg scrambled on the pan with everything else. I know, this screams "breakfast for lunch". Everything was stir fried on a skillet in a mixture of butter and safflower oil and then I threw in the sauce from yesterday for flavor. The sauce thickened from standing in the refrigerator so I put it in the microwave at 80% power for 20 seconds before adding it and the dish ended up being, aside from super-eclectic-fusion food, pretty scrumptious, much more flavorful than the traditional soy-sauce-white-rice-pea-corn-spam fried rice dish my mother would make with a wok.

This whole post should like compensate for half a picture or something [via "a picture is worth a thousand words" rule].


Overall ratings:
Last night's dinner:

Probably my best chicken preparation yet.

Lunch:

Delicious application of leftover foods.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2211 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.

Forget the cheese, just go for the cheap plastic yo-yos!

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I had a two-sunny-side-up-eggs-two-sausages-and-hash-browns fry-up-esque breakfast and it occurred to me that I'm losing my taste for those greasy Southern-style breakfasts no matter how well I season the eggs with smoked paprika and black pepper or the hash browns with a hint of cayenne pepper even if I am using safflower oil to fry everything.

Next to my simple poached egg and toast topped with some chopped chives or Frosted Wheats cereal with milk and raspberries and blueberries, a breakfast like today's seems to cross over from indulgence to gluttony. It's tasty but the portions are way bigger than what I'm used to these days and consuming it gives you those nasty post-edacity blues, the feeling of "did I just eat that".

Maybe "downsizing" is now in order. Instead of frying two eggs, I'll fry one and I'll serve it with one sausage and half a small-sized Yukon gold potato. Instead of Eggs Benedict, how about a single crostini topped with chorizo, a poached quail egg drizzled with Sauce Béarnaise and chopped chives? Haute cuisine and low calorie.

Someday when I have like real money or something, I'll downsize my breakfast during the week all the way to quail eggs and reserve a nice "medium"-sized chicken egg for my special occasions and it'll be like totally normal. I guess to eat small, you have to dream big.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2215 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.

It's that super-rare once-in-a-month-or-two day where I fulfill my American Chinese cravings. American Chinese food is widely considered "inauthentic" by those who are like ethnic Chinese and stuff, but this greasy umami-heavy culinary cousin has its own sort of authenticity. It's effectively a subset of American cuisine with its roots in 19th century San Francisco, you know, with those gold rush dudes.

So for dinner I had a "special meal dish" from a local American Chinese restaurant called Hoy Hing. The dish was orange chicken with a typically generous serving of white rice plus a crab rangoon appetizer. I think this is the first time I've ever had crab rangoon and it's really odd because it's filled with cream cheese which is like nonexistent in native Chinese cuisine. There is something I can only describe as "French" about this appetizer. I liked it.

The orange chicken was good enough and the meal came with a fortune cookie that told me "Whatever you want to do, do it. There are only so many tomorrows." and the back told me how to say "chicken" in Mandarin. There's enough chicken to last a few days and, you know, leftover Chinese food is a lot like balsamic vinegar, provolone cheese, Worcestershire sauce and kombucha—aging strangely makes it better.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2218 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.

Originally posted by Gabu

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Sofi writes the best food porn.

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:J

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Breakfast today was sunny side up egg with sausage and some leftover white rice from yesterday's orange chicken on the side. The rice had some orange chicken sauce and it wasn't too bad at all. The egg had, you know, the usual: sea salt, ground black pepper and smoked paprika and fried deliciously in butter.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2221 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.

Dinner was leftover Chinese and a little pseudograin called quinoa acting as my rice. I already made my huge post about quinoa and why I'm thinking about switching brown rice for it so I'll skip that.

I made quinoa in my rice cooker with chicken broth. Quinoa's a tiny little pseudograin but when cooked it swells up and looks more like cut up pieces of short-grain rice. Then it becomes surprisingly soft with a texture that's a lot like rice but softer. Quinoa takes only like twenty minutes to cook in the rice cooker, which is super-convenient.

The real test is how it holds up against the Sino-American classic orange chicken. The quinoa totally passes for rice. I'm pretty sure I'm renouncing the hopelessly mainstream sensation brown rice now for the super (faux) grain of the future.

Tomorrow: leftover white rice (the last rice I'll ever eat) and a poached egg for breakfast with some fruit as a snack; sushi for lunch (okay, fine, it has rice in it); probably a hot dog or something for dinner when going out with a friend.

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About the author: A prolific contributor to Jul with some 2223 posts published, Sofi better fancies herself as a cinema geek, a composer, an occasional gamer, a budding fashionita, an absolute cooking newbie and a general life enthusiast-satirist. She is responsible for a number of notable discussions about meteorology and current events and may be contacted at any time through private messaging.