Month: April 2009

The actual recipe name is Charcoal-Grilled Beef Teriyaki, but I don’t have a grill.

The good: wow, delicious! The flavor was insane, sweet & salty & savory. Ginger & orange zest added a weird little kick, even if they were a PITA to prep. I also have a hunch that once I’ve made it a few times, I’ll be able to streamline it so that it doesn’t take as long to pull together.

The bad: fussy prep; in particular, I hate grating ginger. The sauce was delicious, but didn’t quite come out to the right thickness, and there was too much of it. (I’m not too big on a lot of extra sauce for “drizzling.” Not much for soy sauce on my rice, either.) I’m thinking next time I’ll add a bit more cornstarch, start it a little sooner, and reduce the amount of liquids. (I set aside the extra sauce to use next time.) I also could have cut the meat a bit thicker; it cooked way too quickly. The slightly thicker pieces also had a more complex (?) flavor, less sauce, more beef.

The ugly: I don’t have a grill. I wasn’t sure how to cook it instead, so I went to my go-to pan: the cast iron. I’ll admit that it’s been in need of reseasoning for a while, but what the sauce did to it was INSANE. There’s a lot of sugar and wine, and basically it turns into caramel. (Cleaning the splatters on the stove wasn’t much fun either.) On the cast iron, it created this…I don’t have the words to describe it. Thick black lumpy sugary crust. I even soaked it, which I NEVER do with that pan, and which you’re not supposed to do with cast iron, and still it looks crazy. (There seems to be a lot of ideas about how to clean and/or reseason cast iron; I think I’m going to try this from Michael Ruhlman, if only because it looks easiest.)

Will I make it again? Oh, definitely. Will probably also try with chicken. But we’ll have to see about tweaking the sauce. And one of these days we’ll have a grill, and I’ll actually do that first part of the recipe name. 🙂

Update: not as good for leftovers as I’d anticipated. Too sweet or something.

Another in a long line of superlative adjectives from CI. 🙂 Although, once again, it’s not far off. It makes huge, gorgeous, delicious chocolate chip cookies, reminiscent of something you’d get on a little plate at the coffeeshop.

Slightly more time-consuming that the back-of-the-bag recipe, what with melting/browning butter and resting the batter; on the other hand, I’ve always hated having to cream the butter & sugar with even just softened butter, let alone straight out of the fridge. (O my weak wrists.)

Yes, it does call for 3 tablespoons of batter per cookie; I found that two oversized tbsps was about right. They’re huge cookies, so just one cookie with a little glass of milk hits the spot nicely. As a corollary to that, they keep pretty well, too. After a few days they’re a little crumbly around the edges, but still quite good. (Conversely, they’re AMAZING warm. I have to pace myself so as not to eat the whole damn batch.)

I’ve made these twice now, and they’re quite consistent. A big thumbs up!

Recipe link: Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies (as always, apologies for the paywall. Contact me if you want the details.)