What has been going on in my kitchen

Thanks to my lack of morning sickness, cooking has continued unabated in the A&R household. My mom couldn't keep anything down, let alone cook anything, for about 5 months, followed by a month of exclusive quesadilla consumption. So, needless to say, I consider myself fairly fortunate.

I started the week with one of our favorite occasional treats, beer can chicken. Lucky for me, an empty can of flavored seltzer water filled with herbs, water, and a little splash of cooking wine stands in nicely for the actual beer can, as I would have hated to pour beer down the sink to make the can a little less full.

Part of the reason I roasted the chicken (aside from a strong desire to make stock) was that I wanted to try making spicy cabbage and chicken stir-fry with some of the remaining meat. R's recipe sense was tingling when he saw this recipe, and, indeed, it wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for. It wasn't bad, per se, but it wasn't really that good either. Very mild flavors, not at all helped by the fact that we've developed a high spice tolerance. It was a little better for lunch the next day, but still not something I'm planning on making again.

To make up for always making recipes that only I really like (if even that), I followed up the stir-fry with baked ziti, roughly based on this recipe. Really, though, once you know the basics (meat + sauce + pasta + cheese), it is a pretty flexible dish. It is basically deconstructed lasagna. I wound up using Swiss, cheddar, and Romano cheese (as those were all we had in the house) and adding a little layer of sour cream in the middle of all the pasta. The final dish was delicious, though I will be leaving the sour cream out next time.

Tonight, we try something very new, something R has been looking forward to ever since he sent me this link. Tonight, we make Buffalo chicken wings. It seems simple and delicious, so I think it should be a wild success. I'm very glad for my deep fryer at this moment. Wish me luck!


Edited (9:55pm): Oh, man. The chicken wings were awesome. I wound up cleaning up every last bit of Buffalo sauce from the plate with my finger.

Also, I forgot to tell you about the hash. One of my favorite blog columns, Unexplained Bacon, wrote a how-to article about hash. The, uh, food. Not the drug. Anyway, I decided to give it a shot for breakfast this morning and wound up making a fairly tasty roast chicken hash. The one lesson to take away from it? Don't coarsely dice the potatoes, as it makes cooking take a bit longer than it should (plus it decreases the crispy outside to soft inside ratio in an unfavorable manner).