Pork Chops

Is it possible to cook a quick and dirty meal that tastes great and yet is super cheap? The answer is yes, though eating it everyday will probably take a few years off your life.  Pork chops - described by Gordon Ramsay as easy to cook and will send your confidence sky high - can be cooked in minutes and is oh-so-tender and juicy :)

My maiden attempt is Sweet and Sour Pork Chops, based on Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Cookery Course which, i must say again, is really great for newbies.  Unfortunately, certain ingredients like basil and thyme are harder to find in your NTUC supermarket so i actually skipped the basil and bought a bottle of thyme instead of a getting a fresh sprig.  I guess it could have tasted more awesome-er but overall i was still pretty satisfied with the end product.

What You Will Need
2 pork chops
2 capsicum (referred to by GR as red peppers)
Cooking Oil
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp wine vinegar
Salt & ground black pepper
Thyme

Roast Chicken 101

After trawling youtube, it seems that there are many variations to roasting your chicken.  Numerous way to get the skin crsip, to infuse different flavours and to add various sides.  However, what they all have in common in that the bird is cooked at around 180 degree centigrade for about 1 hour.  And this means at that is the very basic needed in cooking a bird.  For my first attempt, i have gone with the bare bones version and done the very minimum.

Anthony Bourdain - Medium Raw

Served half-cooked like a soft boiled egg

Bourdain dishes out a follow-up to his best-selling Kitchen Confidential.  As the title suggests, it is half-cooked and I cant really tell the intent of the book because each chapter seems quite unrelated to the next.  In more than one chapter, he rants against the people and corporations he dislikes and if it was anyone else, i would have tuned out quite quickly.  However, since it is Bourdain, it comes across as quite entertaining to learn what is on his mind, and he also does not draw the line at putting his own self down.

What does come across, is his love for food and the industry.  When he attacks his enemies, it is because they go against his vision of what the industry and "good" food should be like, and in one chapter where he describes his favourite foods from across the globe, my stomach ended up growling. 

Baby Steps - Chopping

My knife is bigger than yours

Before the cooking starts, there is always the prep work and this almost invariably involves the use of a knife.  Knife skills are essential not just for efficiency, but also more importantly, for safety.  Once the safety aspect is established, we can then work on increasing the speed.  After all, slicing off part of one's finger will only cause more delays and being lazy, I just want to get over and done with the chopping so i can get back to lazing in front of the tv instead of going to the hospital.

Being lazy (i cant emphasize this enough) and not very proficient, I am not going to trying to teach anyone how to use a knife.  Rather, i have done my youtube research and my favourite thus far is this one below by Jamie Oliver.  Brief summary is appended below.