Making Gravy and Giblet Stock

It may sound very easy  but making gravy it not that simple. I remember last Christmas, my friend Katia made the turkey for the Christmas dinner, the bird was dlicious I have to say. When she reached home with the turkey and the Cuban rice (rice with black beans). She told me that this was her very first time that she makes a baked turkey (!)... well realy a turkey in general... she gor the recipe from a web site  in the internet, and we had baked turkey for Christmas dinner... but where was the gravey, I asked her... and she shown me a jar with some liquid... is that the gravy, "fix it" she told me, "we have done a lot today making the turkey for first time" we laughted.

We fixed the gravy... some salt, some soy sauce and flour, and ready.

Making the gravy from the roasting tray in with the turkey, chicken or other bird has just been cooked is the best way to make the gravy. So that the residues in the tray will dissolve into the gravy. If you wish add soem herbs or some chopped garlic or lemon zest.

Use tomato passata, sparingly, rather than tomato puree in gravy (the puree tend to overpower other ingredients)


THE GRAVY

1. Using a large spoon, skim off most of the fat from the pan juices. Put the pan on the hob over a gentle heat. Mix 1 tbspplain flour with 1 tbsp of the chicken fat and whisk it into the remaining pan juices.
2. Add 300 ml (10 fl oz) water or stock and 1 tbsp tomato passata, increase the heat and bring to the boil, whisking constinuously.
3. Strain the gravy into a clear bowl and por into a warmed serving jug.

GLIBLET STOCK FOR GRAVY

1. Bring the giblets to the boil with 1 diced carrot and 1 diced onion in 2 litres (3-1/2 pints) water.
2. Cover with a lid, then reduce the heat so that the stock simmers.
3. Once the bird (chicken, turky,  goose, etc) is out of the oven , drain the fat into a bowl the deglaze the roasting tin by straining then adding the giblet stock.
4. Scrape in any caramelized residues and bring to the boil.

Make the gravy using th gliblet stock.

Organizing my Recipes: Creating an Online Cookbook

I was cleaning my house last weekend for the first birthday party of my baby boy, and I found a lot of lose papers with recipes from different sources, magazines, friends, family, books, photocopies, etc.

I decided to take advantage of having a blog. I think I will organize my mess just transcribing my recipes to this blog, it is amazing how many recipes we can collect along our life. I found some magazines so old that the pages are very delicate and I have to handle them with care.

My mother have tons of magazines at home, it is a invaluable treasure. She have a collection of the magazine IDEAS and my father of Mecanica Popular (Popular Mechanic), I most say that there are nothing like this magazine from long time. People have changed as well as the magazines, the projects in those magazines were very detailed and full of projects that you can do at home, now we buy everything so nobody bother to write projects that you can make from scratch, everything now have to be fast.

I think that a blog is a wonderful and powerful way to record your experience and information. We relay in a platform that suppose to be solid to last many year to come. I mention my parent's magazine collection, because I can see how very important information is being lost in those cabinets at home. But if you put that information in a blog or website,  the information will be accessible to many people and to you anytime that you look for it.

I encourage you to get all your recipes that you have all over your house or kitchen and open a cookbook, online. It can be public or private, that is up to you. Get organize!! You can create a blog (record the articles per day and time like a magazine ) or a website that shown static content. If you are like me that know a little bit about IT matter (almost nothing) or you do not have a clue about this, I will suggest you to use http://www.blogger.com/ or http://www.wordpress.com/, they are free (very important for informal blogs), if you want a website easy to create try http://www.wix.com/, http://www.squido.com/  or googlesite. All of them are very easy to manage. I used blogger for my blog.

Chose a name for your cookbook that you feel comfortable with, and use the same name for the domain name. I made that mistake, my blog name is FOOD, DRINKS + PARTY and my domain name is http://www.mrgiftcateringservices-trinidad.com/. it could have been easier to use http://www.fooddrinksandparty.com/ , and easier to remember for people who visit  my site. I will follow my own advice or my next blog or website.

I hope to see your cookbook around, it is a lot of fun to collect photos, or make videos when you make a recipe and then see them in your own website. You will relief a lo of stress just posting your thought ... or like me getting organize and stop having all those little pieces of paper wit valuable information all about...

Preparation of Chicken and Other Birds

Everybody loves to each chicken -with the exception of  the vegetarians- and chicken is one of the most popular birds in most common kitchens... and other thing that most people have in common is that we hate to prepare it, and I do not mean the cooking, I mean the cleaning, cutting in fact the entire preparation before the chicken is ready to be seasoned.

I remember asking my father to clean and cut the chicken for me, after he finished I was ready for the rest...  After I moved out from home to another city to study engineering, I had to do it myself. And you know it is not that bad.

Here I will give you some tips that will make easy the preparation of the chicken and any other birth.

1. Remove the chicken from the freezer and place it in a bowl with water (do not remove from the plastic bag). Let it to defrost. This may take about one hour.
2. When the chicken is defrost. Remove it from the plastic bag. Remove the giblets (heart, liver and gizzard) and the neck, in some countries you can find the giblets and neck in a pepper bag inside of the chicken. You can use the giblets to make stock (do not use the liver to make stock)

3. Wash the chicken thoroughly (inside and out) in cold water. Remove any frozen parts -this cause uneven cooking - and remove any inedible parts.
4. Dry the chicken with pepper towels, drain the cavity of the chicken as well. A dried chicken is easy to handle and marinates clings better.

5. Remove the large fat deposits that are located on the  tail ens of the cavity. If you are roasting the chicken do not cu the skin, you will need it for trussing. For this use a sharp knife or poultry shears to remove and discard the tail and these large fatty deposit.

Fotos taken from: http://www.recipetips.com/kitchen-tips/t--1090/cleaning-chicken.asp

Types of Chicken you Can Find in the Grocery Store


Last week I went to the grocery and I had an interesting conversation about poultry. I do not usually buy whole chicken, since I got married and my husband loves chicken breast, I stop buying whole chicken and I buy only chicken breast or chicken wings. So that conversation with the two poultry experts refreshed my mind about some basic "chicken knowledge".

Basically you can find three categories of chicken in the grocery stores, there are more, but to get those you may have to go to farms or gourmet groceries. The three categories of chicken according to the cooking technique:

• Broiler-Frying: young, tender, all purpose chicken that range from 1-1/2 to 3-1/2 lb (600 gr to 1.5 Kg). This chicken is about 9 to 12 weeks old and contain the least fat. This young chicken is ideal for whom is following a low fat diet or children. This chicken is the most common to find in the grocery.

• Roasting Chicken: Young chicken, their weight is about 3-1/2 o 5 lb (1.5 - 2.2 Kg). Around 3 to 5 month old. Their meat is tender and contain a lot of fat, that's why it should be roasted or grilled.

• Capons: A rooster that has been castrated at a very young age. Capons are fed a special fattening diet that causes their 4 to 9 pound bodies to have large quantities of tender, juicy breast meat. Great for roasting.

That was the theory of my poultry classes. After that I realised that I have bought all my life the Broiler-Fryer chicken type, I think it is the most commun, and ease to find. But I have tried the others types of chicken by my parents.

My parents have a house with a large back yard and now that they are retired, they have in their back yard about 20 chickens and 2 roosters. In the begining they have more rooster but eventually they understood that you canot have too many males in a back yard, too much fights. We have cooked in my parents house the chicken in the different stage of thier life, and I can tell you for older is the chicken the meat is harder, and some times you have to use a pressure cooker.

I still prefere to buy the commun chicken in the grocery and save myself from all the chicken drama at home.

10 Best Tools to Cook Fish & Shellfish

It is possible to prepare and cook fish without any special equipment, but there are a few items that make the process much easier.

If your kitchen is like mine, you have your draw with all your kitchen tools, a lot of them, at the point that when you are looking for something, you do not even know if you have it. That last statement happened a lot to my husband, he always call me to find thing in the draw when he is going to cook something, he cooks more than me, but I am who buy every single thing for the kitchen, so I know what we have in the kitchen.

Last time we bought some fish, I checked my draw and I found that I did not have the right tools to prepare the fish, we do not eat fish very often at home and when we buy it , we usually buy it clean. This was not the case. It took me a while to clean that fish and prepare it with the improvised tools.

Here the 10 tools that every kitchen should have to prepare fish and shellfish:

1. Chef's Knife: A large knife with 20 - 25 cm (8 - 10 in) blade is essential for cutting fish steak and splitting open crustaceans (crayfish and lobster)



Chef's Knife

2. Filleting Knife:  For filleting and skinning fish, you will needed a sharp knife with a flexible blade, at least 15 cm (6-in) long. The filleting knife can be used for opening some kinds of shellfish. It is essential to keep this knife very sharp.



Filleting Knife

3. Oyster Knife: This short, stubby knife has a wide , two-edge blade to help price open the shells of oysters and other bivalves. Make sure it has a safety guard above the handler to protect your hands.



Kitchen Scissor





Oyster Knife


4. Kitchen Scissors: A sturdy, sharp pair of scissors that have a serrated edge for cutting fins and trimming tails.
5. Fish  Scaler: This item is very important, the fish scaler resembled a small, rough grater.



Fish Scalers



Oval Frying Pan

6. Oval frying Pan: The concept of the oval frying pan is so simple but intensely practical. This large pan enable you to cook whole fish flat instead of bending them to fit a round pan and spoiling the shape.
7. Grilled Pan: A ribbed cast-iron grilled pan is ideal for  searing fish. There are in different shapes, round, oval or rectangular.



Griddle Pan





Barbecue Grilling Rack


8. Barbecue Grilling Rack: A hinged rack in the  shape of a fish makes cooking and turning a single large fish relatively easy.You can find racks that can hold 6 to 12 small fish.

9. Smoker: The cheapest home-smoker is a lidded metal box with a rack to hold the fish. Smoke produced by placing dampened aromatic wood chippings or herbs on coals gives extra flavour.  Stovetop models can be used indoors.



Stovetop Smoker

10. Fish Kettle: This pan is long and deep with rounded edges, it is very useful when you want to cook a whole fish, such as salmon or sea  trout, it can be used for steaming other food. The fish kettle has a handler at either end, and a tightly-fitting lid.  Inside is a perforated rack  or grid  on which to lay the fish. This, too, has handles, and enable the cook to lift out the fish without braking it.

Fish Kettle

Information taken from: The World Encyclopedia of Fish and Shellfish - Kate Whiteman

Steaming Broccoli and Glazed Sauted Carrots

STEAMING BROCCOLI

The cooking method that I present  here is applicable for all kind of vegetables. You can use a steamer, a double boiler or staking Chinese bamboo steamers. The principle is the same using this different tools.

1. Put water into the bottom of a steamer and bring to the boil.  Please the broccoli on the steamer rack, spreading the florets out in a single layer. Cover the steamer.
2. Steam the broccoli until cooked (test by picking the thickest part - here the stalk of a florets - with the tip of s paring knife). Remove from the steamer and serve immediately.

GLAZED SAUTEED CARROTS

In this recipe baby carrots are finished with a delicious butter and sugar glaze. You also can glaze other sauteed  vegetables. ei. baby turnip and cubes of winter squash. You can use the same measurement for other vegetable to get the same results.

Ingredients:

20 small baby carrots or 225 gr (8 oz) peeled, sliced carrot, parboiled for 3 minutes and drained.

45 - 55 gr (1-1/2 to 2oz) butter

1-1/2  to 2 tsp granulated sugar

1.  Put the carrot in a hot saute pan with the butter and sugar (use the smaller amounts of sugar and butter for baby carrots).
2. Turn and toss the carrots until they are tender and coated with the sugar/butter glaze. Sere immediately.

Serve together with steamed broccoli as part of our delicious Saint Valentine's Day Menu