Chicken Wings: Tasty Scraps

One of the good things about buying whole chickens is all the things you can do. I'm able to parse out the breasts, leg quarters, carcass for the cat food and stock for rice, and all the while squirreling away the wings into the freezer for a rainy day.

Or until the bag gets too full.

When that happens--overflowing stock--you know there's enough to yield an entire dinner for two and lunch for one the following day.

That, and wings are good. They're the tastiest scraps you'll be finding on a chicken. If you want to deep fry them so be it. If you want to pan fry them and butter baste them to make 'em sexy, so be it again (highly recommended).

For me, with the (overwhelming) amount of wings I had stored, I went ahead and roasted them in the oven. I tossed them in a large bowl with olive oil, salt and pepper, and a little cayenne and placed them out on sheet trays:

There were a lot, seriously:

Wings are just too good, and I mean that with all sincerity. Not that it matters, but the forearms are my favorite.

How to Cut "Nice" Cucumber for Salads

This method for cucumber cutting can be used for both American style green salads as well as Mediterranean style chunky salads (the tomato, olive, cucumber and feta kind). Some folks will tell you that it's always best and "nice" to peel the cucumber. That's right and wrong. It's best to be able to see both green skin and white flesh on each piece of cucumber.

Like so:

Start with a piece of cucumber:

From there, using a knife slice off pieces of skin at places you call top, bottom, and sides, like this:

Now quarter the cucumber thus:

Next, tip each quarter on its side and slice out the seeds. Those are definitely not "nice":

Next, slice each quarter piece in half down the white section...

...and then dice into appropriate sizes. This yields uniformly sized pieces of cucumber with a bit of green and a bit of white on each piece, with nary a seed in sight (is the idea anyway):

The remaining seed centers are great to scarf down with a pinch of salt and pepper. Yummy and refreshing.

Simple Beef Tips and Rice

Beef Tips is a dish I first heard of while working for a caterer in Texas. Apparently many people are familiar with it, but I probably wouldn't eat too much of what we made. I wasn't sure what it supposed to be at the time, and nobody said it was just braised beef cubes served over rice. Now that's pretty good stuff. Braised beef over rice is simple and grubbin and a good way to stretch your money, but we at the caterer made was a poor example. 

Braising beef is very easy; it really only taxes your time. I'm talking about over the stove in the following case. Other methods for braising meat is in the oven or in a counter-top crock-pot. If you use fat or oil instead of a water-based liquid then it's called confit.

And, just to set people at ease, when I started working in the fancy kitchens in Manhattan and came across the word confit for the first time written on paper, I totally did pronounce it "KAHN-fit". The word is French, and pronounced "kohn-FEE".

In any case, the meat here is cheap beef. Cube it and season it. Start with some mire poix in the pot:

For this particular job dredge the cubed beef in a mixture of flour, salt, pepper and cayenne:

The flour dredge isn't necessary really, but for this simple recipe it helps with thickening the sauce. Not necessary.

The liquid for this braise/stewing is a simple one: 4 cups water and a half cup soy sauce. Beef tips in general can have different kinds of braising liquids, but it doesn't need to get too fancy; no ketchup or mustard or beer or pickle juice or savory spices needed.

Once the mire poix is done, the bottom of the pan will look nice and covered with yummy glace:

That's flavor right there. Remove the vegetables and set them aside. Add some more oil and start browning your beef chunks.

Pay close attention, as the flour will have a tendency to burn and pretty much screw everything up. Get the heat turned down and constantly prod the beef. This is contrary to how you brown meat for stewing in normal cases when no flour is being used.

Once all the cubes are browned, return all batches (most likely) and vegetables back into the pot along with the water and soy sauce:

Simmer until the beef is fork tender, anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes (checking periodically):

Serve over rice with some greens. I prefer blanched broccoli:

Pounded Top Sirloin Steaks

Happy New Year and welcome back to my home-cooking blog, a blog I have inadvertently ignored over the past six weeks. The holidays came and went, I cook almost everyday, and I even take lots of pictures...well, some pictures. Anyway, I have a bunch of pictures that I today find myself having a hard time placing.

But today I thought I'd ease myself back into the foodie swing with something easy, something quick.

Top sirloin is a cheap cut of beef, as far as the local Vons is concerned. Well, it's not blade steak, or a round roast, but it's certainly more affordable than eye-round or strip loin or T-bone or even the California specialty tri-tip.

Usually sirloin steaks come in thick pieces like the following:

From there, there's a number of things you could do: go for a large dice to make a stew; cut it down to strips for stir-fry; maybe even roast it whole. Today, none of those are what I'm going for. This is more of a how-to for one of my favorite diner breakfasts: Chicken Fried Steak.

From this spot, using the knife, cut the thick piece in half longways, giving you two of the same trapazoidal shape, but each half as thick:

Now things get simpler than you may think. Here you can use plastic bags, like I have in the following pictures, or you can use plastic wrap layered a few times. The basic idea is that you want the meat covered because you're going to be pounding it down, an action that takes patience, time, and elbow grease. Start with:

And eventually you'll be left with this great big sheet of beef:

The idea is to pound it down to between a half-inch and a quarter-inch thick. After getting the meat like this, bread it with the tri-wash of flour, egg, and seasoned bread crumbs and you're ready for deep-fry or pan-fry or even oven bake.

Quick note: When the pounded meat is as thin as a quarter-inch, what you have is the German dish schnitzel. They deep fry their schnitzel, which is what makes it so great. The half-inch pound is what you tend to see in diners for chicken fried steak.