Intentionally Left Blank: Chaucerian Cooking Part 1

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Chaucerian Cooking Part 1

Slept in 'til 5:30am. Not that you really call it sleeping in. The cat, the bedroom alarm clock, and the living room alarm clock all have a slightly different time. Guess who starts first? Boy, is he going to be disappointed when I don't throw him out tomorrow.

Today is a good cooking day. The storming that lasted for hours and messed up my yard work plans yesterday apparantly came attached to a cold front. Not dripping humidity out of the air yet and doesn't feel over 80s yet. Which is good, because the AC is busted in the kitchen and it easily becomes the hottest room in the house even with the stove off.

So I started cooking around 7am. It's probably incredible narrsicitis of me, but I can't help documenting these crazy ideas I try to implement.

Menu

Mortreaux

Gode broth

Clarree

Chicken with the Marybones

Braised Spring Greens

Golden Leeks and Onions

Pesen

Fecches

You can see I've dug out most the pots and pans.

First: started unrelated London broil. It's been marinating for a couple of days now.
Second: figure out what to cook first. Gode broth is an ingrediant for Mortreaux, and I need to make pork broth for the Gode broth.
Third: breakfast!

Pork broth: Apparantly the Vietemese use it frequently and I found a brand name on the Net. Stores in my area do not cater to the Veitemese population yet. So making it from scratch.

7:38am - the smoke alarm goes crazy from the heat. No smoke. And it's in the office above the AC in there. *Sigh* And people wonder why I don't cook more often.

Pork broth is going to take four hours to cook. Next step after eating breakfast is to start on the next longest dish. Looks like chicken with marybones and clarree are up next.

Chicken with Marybones: "Marybones" actually means "marrow bones." This chicken is stewed with a beef shank bone split down the middle to expose all the marrow. So I go shopping yesterday. Hammond doesn't have an independent butcher anymore, and I could not get the Winn-Dixie butchers to understand that all I needed was the bone. I ended up with four peices of shank with the bones in them. My observation at the time to another customer: "I'm sure this receipe was a lot easier when you had to kill your own cow."

So I had to trim all the meat off the bones before cooking. Bless Miss Goldie, at least I didn't have to cut up a chicken. The extra beef I grilled on the George Foreman grill. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it--it's stough meat--but at least it should spoil in the fridge while I think about it.

And after I got everything in the pot, I realized I need a bigger pot for it. Shouldn't be an issue for the cooking show since I'll be working with caldrouns, but still.

Clarree is a spiced wine I won't be able to do in the cooking show since we are a no-alcohol event. But the receipe is in the Resource Guide for the teachers. *wink* It didn't take any time but now it has to sit for twenty-four hours. I may end up bottling it early tomorrow.

original wine color

what it looks like after honey and spices

So now it's 9:10, and I'm taking a break while waiting on things to cook. I don't want to cook the veggier until more of the meat dishes are done.

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