Crying over spoilt milk
Or yoghurt, as the case may be.
Cooking mid-day today so I can study and work on a presentation until as late as I need to.
Skipped breakfast completely today because there was nothing fast or easy enough. Not enough milk for pancakes. And no peanut butter besides. I could have made bare eggs, but I've learned over the years that I don't do amazing on pure-protein breakfasts. I need some carbs. I have also learned that sometime, coffee and some cream is as good as food is, as far as maintaining energy until the afternoon is concerned. So that's what I opted for.
What I'm watching on the stove right now is what has become a pretty typical
chicken dinner for me. An onion cut up and cooked a lot in butter; two drumsticks, salted and peppered, browned only slightly in the same pan after pushing the onions aside for a minute; then the drumstick put on top of the onions, doused with broth, and steamed until cooked. As of writing this paragraph I am anticipating taking the chicken out, deglazing, and making a sauce.
A few alternatives I have tried to this sequence of events don't leave me with much sauce material, a huge drawback. What am I missing?
The difference today is sage. Somehow I became aware in past few weeks that "sage and brown butter" is "a thing". I had no idea what sage smelled or tasted like, but it sounded delicious (it does have the word "butter" in it after all). Today in Trader Joe's, I saw some, and I pounced. Back at home, I cut up some of its fuzzy leaves and threw them in the with the cooking onions. It wasn't brown butter yet but I just wanted to bloom it and see what it smelled like. And it smelled just wonderful. It smelled like a "real" dish that had been put together purposefully. I was intrigued, so I've got some more cut up on the cutting board waiting to go in the final sauce, the butter in which will be more browned, I think. So we'll see.
Okay, the cooking is over. There were some wins and losses.
One loss is that is took absolutely forever. From the start to washing the last dish was over two hours. WAY too long for what I have to do in a day. What can I do to make this all faster?
Another loss was sour yoghurt. I usually use some sort of cultured dairy in the final sauce; what I had on hand was yoghurt that was juuuust this side of "is that just really sour or actually a little bad?". It was a little bad, looking back. But as I was considering pouring it into my sauce, I thought eh, no guts no glory, and besides, maybe what smells only slightly bad in the container will do magical things in the pan. It didn't. It just made everything taste like sliiightly sour yoghurt. Kinda gross. Everything was edible but not nearly as delicious as it could have been.
I would love to learn how to make it look pretty and light. All yoghurt aside, this looks pretty heavy and colorless.
The sage was good but sadly overshadowed by the yoghurt microdebacle.
Live and learn.