Self-Taught Homework #2: A poor chef blames their tools
Everyone gets a little burned in this one.
You feel obligated to defend yourself for a second to keep the audience on your side for future posts:
Okay, I actually don’t think I’m that bad of a cook. I’m pretty detail-oriented in my life, and I pay bills on time, and I want to be thorough, and my food has been coming out well-seasoned and balanced. So what if I don’t know how to do a lot of things? So what if I bite off more than I can chew—and no, not in the “pun intended” way? So what if I boiled my hand, seared Luke with hot oil, and blew a fuse in our apartment? I’m not as insane as I appear, I swear!!!!
You exhale.
To prep for a week of learning how to properly use a knife, there are three recipes on the docket in your apartment, none of which overlapped the ones assigned in the Dinner Party thread.
Tuesday: Gabriela Cámara’s pollo con salsa verde y arroz from My Mexico City Kitchen
Wednesday: Joy of Cooking’s pasta e fagioli
Thursday: “kitchen sink” fried veggie fried rice
You go to the grocery store early Tuesday with a basket full of produce and a peeler. The total came out to $46. This feels exceptionally cheap, and you feel chuffed that you’re being so cost-effective. Three meals, two people, so six meals and a peeler for the cost of your new tripod + smartphone extension?
A complete meal prep wizard you are.
You imagine yourself Fruit-Ninja’ing your newly acquired onions mid-air. Benihana approaches you for a job for your masterful air-chopping skills. You reject Benihana because you have gone viral on TikTok for peddling knives for six figures a month.
In the real world, things went sideways from there.
Tuesday: chicken with rice & homemade salsa verde
Earlier this week, you recommend your Kindle to a friend debating buying one before a trip to New Zealand. You advise her to buy it with no regrets: it can display screenplays and graphic novels easily, the Libby app makes it easy to get virtual library books (which might have a shorter line in the user-heavy population of New York & Brooklyn Public Libraries), and you can bring it anywhere.
You didn’t mention that you can also look at cookbooks on your Kindle. You have gotten into a habit of reading cookbooks virtually but as books. You haven’t used them as a reference book to flip back and forth between pages while cooking yet. One night in bed, flipping through your meal-prep-wizard cookbook-heavy Kindle, you opted for a recipe where two of the ingredients linked to other recipe pages within the same cookbook…and you thought that was a sound idea.
What you would tell your friend, if she planned on using e-cookbooks on her honeymoon in New Zealand, is this: as you’re flipping between three virtual recipes, sniffing for smoke with your eyes stuck on a virtual screen, you’ll pine for a hefty-spined, few-hundred-page, oil-stained cookbook.
This pollo con arroz y salsa verde recipe from Gabriela Cámara’s My Mexico City Kitchen is simple enough, yet it feels like a challenge.
Chicken, rice, salsa. Familiar! Safe! Totally doable!, you tell yourself.
This is also (gringa alert!) your first time touching tomatillos. They come in a little leaf basket, like Cabbage Patch Kids. The inside of that husk has a mild, sticky sap.
“Choose the smallest tomatillos you can find, tightly encased in their papery skins, since they will be the freshest and least bitter,” Cámara writes.
The tomatillos at your supermarket in that affordable bundle were small, but they were not filling out their husks. The baggy external leaves fit like parachute pants on your baby, green tomatoes. When you peel off the outer husks, you find wormholes and brown rot in two of ten tomatillos. So that’s good.
Pro tip: avoid produce that’s rotten.
(You defy this sage-won advice later when the bottom of a white onion had brown embedded in the layers near the root end.)
For the salsa verde: Chop the vegetables. Throw the tomatillos, garlic, serrano peppers, and half an onion into a pot of boiling water.
For the rice: put oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Once heated, add olive oil and garlic. After the garlic fries, add the rice. Stir continuously until every single grain of rice is opaque.
Because you are “ambitious,” you start both pots simultaneously. You will fry the rice alongside a simmering salsa. Benihana, please wipe the drool off your chin.
For the salsa: Bring down to a simmer. Simmer until the serranos turn “khaki-colored” and the tomatillos pale. Then move the produce and water from the pot into a blender, and purée.
Pro tip #2: If you express fear when holding onto the Hamilton Beach protein shake blender, it will sense that.
Your boyfriend’s protein shake blender may blend, though your boyfriend says it doesn’t grind ice. You take advantage of his trip to the gym to use this blender. You don’t really go to the gym or use shakes, so you and the Hamilton Beach haven’t gotten to know each other outside of dishwasher runs.
“Hi,” you whisper. You lightly stroke the blender. You hope it’s okay you’re using it while you’re boyfriend is out. Soft music starts to play—in your head?
But the fear is there, despite your attempts at projecting “suave viral-Fruit-Ninja-to-be.”
The blender will turn you down. It will push a quart of hot, hot water with more pressure than you expected, unleashing itself onto your hands and your kitchen counter.
You call your boyfriend while he’s out.
“Hey, so your blender, it’s just like a regular blender right? Where you have to hold the cap?” you ask.
“…Yeah,” he responds. Gym machines clank in the background.
“Okay, bye!” you say, and you hang up.
Think you’re ready to get back on the horse and finish the job? Think again.
If you still have that fearful light touch, it will explode just like it did before.
And it did.
The third time, cowering with fear now tinged with anger, I held onto that top until it was pulsed into a frothing green water. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Later, after the rice is cooked (and tastes good!), and the salsa verde is mixed back in the pan and reduced and mixed with your diced onion, and your boyfriend is back from the gym trying to clean and refill protein shake blender that you doused with spicy serranos at the sink right next to the stove, and he’s on the phone with his mom while you’re throwing a fat bottom half of a chicken into the skillet with a good layer of sizzling oil hot enough to turn a garlic clove brown on exposure—you may throw the chicken on right at the point where it gives a significant splash back, whacking your boyfriend a second degree oil burn, causing him to scream “FUCK, CHLOE—Mom, I gotta call you back.”
This, you tell yourself, is part of the cooking process.
The recipe here did call for a whole chicken, split into six parts, so you bought “hatched” breasts in a package and “hatched” thighs. In the plastic wrap, it looked like 1.5 top halves (the mega breasts) and 1.5 bottom halves with drumsticks and thighs still attached.
What does “hatched” even mean in the poultry butchering world? You haven’t even thought to check it out until right now.
Even Google operates under the chicken-or-egg cycles in its searches.
Incredibly depressing.
God bless his soul, your boyfriend does the “It’s okay, don’t be embarrassed, it’s not your fault…I’m gonna take a shower now” routine that comes with being maimed by the chef. Fair enough. (Who among us is not familiar with this routine?)
After the maiming, it does not feel like the time to turn your kitchen into Content City, so you forget to record the final product. The chicken sits in the salsa verde and fat and cooks through in a cast-iron with a baking sheet on top. The recipe did call for a Dutch oven, but you have a cast iron skillet, and the show must go on.
You clean while the chicken cooks, hoping this never gets onto Gabriela Cámara’s online path. She would doubt why she ever made a cookbook.
While you are trying to play it cool, you clean the electric tea kettle of serrano seeds with a wet wipe and electrocute yourself.
Your boyfriend comes out of the shower to a dark kitchen. You blew out all the fuses connected to the lamps, but you’re standing by the skillet, shifting the sheet-covered chicken hulk back and forth in a scripted way.
“Oh, ya, the lights? I noticed that too, how weird,” you say. “So weird, you should call the landlord. I tried the fuse box already, btw.”
You both sit down for dinner in the dark. The chicken is well-seared so it’s beautifully crisp on the outside, but the inside looks, how do you say… bloody.
The salsa verde and rice are great, but there’s a hint of undercooked chicken flavor. (Whose palette among us is not familiar with this taste?) You eat it together. Your boyfriend says it’s great.
And you remember that there’s tomorrow, and other meals, and today you learned how to sauté your boyfriend and how a reset button works on the plugs in your kitchen—so that counts for something.
Notes from this week
Hi, me again, back to first person.
I’m mostly sharing this recipe because it was a hit. Throw a little lemon or acid in there as a final touch, but this is the exact type of one-pan wonder that makes me feel like I can do anything. Am I retreating back into my skillet only B.S.? Probably! But I had friends over, and they accepted leftovers. Are they incredibly kind? Yes! But they also took seconds. This is gonna be a great winter go-to. Please enjoy.
Thursday: the veggie fried rice medley
This came from a moment of “Thanksgiving is coming and all the produce has got to go.” Celery in fried rice is a specific flavor. But celery, kale, and tomatoes in a fried rice from the salsa verde chicken? All unusual. But this is my favorite way to move vegetables at the end of the week. Sauté queen is back baby!
I will say the chopping and knife grip is coming easier. Let’s go! Your girl is learning how to practice anything through repetition!
Saturday holiday bonus: apple crumble pie
Yesterday, Luke and I also made pie crusts for an apple crumble pie we volunteered to a Thanksgiving this year. This apple pie crumble recipe from a quick Google search is a great one that I’ve had great success with before, and I used Carla Lalli Music’s pie dough recipe (also tried and tested before with this pie).
The pie dough session quickly became me teaching Luke to me choosing Luke’s pie dough crust over my own.
That peeler that felt like such a steal on Tuesday? No longer viable as of today. Luke could not get it to work and peeled with a small paring knife (thank goodness, because I would’ve just gone out and bought a new bad peeler). Then we chopped up eight sour, sour apples. TBD on if the pie is any good.
Thanks for reading this week’s Self-Taught! With Thanksgiving, the Thursday lesson on poultry (and getting rid of that undercooked flavor) will be moved to Tuesday for paid subscribers.
tomatillo wearing parachute pants really KILLED me, feel the need to draw this gen z icon veg. i also made the salsa verde from that cookbook and mine was a flop too, for not explosive reasons. it just was bitter, apparently if you overlook tomatillo it turns bitter!!’ the more u know
I just made pasta e fagioli last night and thought of you as I was cutting up the onion.