Like I said, people should feel free to change sides or tweak recipes as they feel appropriate so long as it fits within the theme.

That said I still want to provide a full meal for those who have never cooked anything similar or might be newer to cooking in general. I'm far from a decent cook by 2p2 standards and if this started 3 years ago when I was even worse I would probably be intimidated by a dish that called for salmon and didn't tell me what to do with it.

There will hopefully be a huge variety of people participating and some will be able to make a great meal from stuff they have sitting around the kitchen and others will want more guidance. If you're in the former category then your take on things will probably be better than the original idea and sharing that will be a good way to educate the rest of us.

I have never made risotto and don't think that dish is just going to be "make risotto" as I understand it bc for people like me that would be an uphill battle to make into a meal without further instruction on what else to eat in or with it and how to make it correctly.

Is the theme bacon wrapped meat? Spicy maple? Out of season fish? Protein + veggies?

It was thrown out there as a very specific dish of salmon in dead of winter in the northern latitudes.

I guess I'll just interpret that how I will.

Bacon wrapped meat I guess. I also cooked chicken at the same time so I can just change it to that since chicken might be easier for people. I just found a recipe I liked and decided to make it and winged the sides. I have no idea what fish are in season given the salmon always looks and tastes the same year round in Georgia. Never knew it wasn't supposed to be a winter dish.

The farmed salmon is available year round. Alaska and PNW salmon, where the great bulk of wild caught supply comes from in North America, is typically beginning in May and runs through November with the height around September. Salmon is delicious and nutritious and awesome and yeah I get that my fish privilege is coming out itt.

When considering your actual dish though, spicy maple and bacon pairing is intriguing and I think I'll run with that.

I think if you just stay roughly on topic it's fine, one main ingredient is out of season? just replace it with a similar in season product(like replacing salmon with codfish or sth along those lines)

I think ill be doing something along the lines of "pancetta wrapped salmon on caramelized maple apples with potato-brie-walnut rösti(fried grated potatoes)

I was thinking of a rosti actually but that has all the calories and were already cooking with fatty meat and maple. I'm more leaning bacon wrapped roasted pork loin with spicy pumpkin soup. A crown roast would be kind of perfect but. Way too much food.

I agree with the points about wanting things to be flexible enough for us to get creative. I also agree with CDL that very specific examples are helpful, especially for inexperienced chefs who may not want to be "creative", and would prefer to just be told what to do.

Target format should be something along the lines of:

This week's menu item is: (Something somewhat specific, but still flexible)
To demonstrate it, here is (Specific example, complete with instructions and photos*)
Some ways you might customize your own version include (ideas)

Which is precisely how the stir-fry was done (This week is stir-fry. Here's an example: a chicken stir-fry with noodles. Other things you could do include different meats, different veggies, etcetera.) It seems to be a format worth repeating.

*The demonstration can either be home cooked with photos, or can be a recipe found online (as long as it's got good instructions and photos included). The former is certainly preferable, but if someone wins the right to choose a week's entry and just doesn't have time to cook and document it, or if they aren't comfortable with it, the latter should also be allowed as a backup option imo.

This is a solid summary of how I feel.

Which still leaves you options for what you want next week's general category to be, CDL. If you want to focus on technique, "bacon wrapped salmon" could be your specific dish in the category of "bacon wrapped meat", and other people would have plenty of other directions to take it. Alternatively, if you care more about the protein, your dish could be an example of "fish", which would leave an entirely different set of options for everyone else.

subbing great thread idea

Did this after coming home from the gym late last night. Wish I spent a little more time on the prep, but oh well.

Started with udon noodles:



First added with garlic, ginger, and some dried chiles to the oil. Set aside. Browned pork tenderloin (or attempted to) after mixing in cornstarch (should've cut smaller and probably marinated) then aside. Had some broccoli and ripped up some chinese cabbage leaves, put that in, mixed in noodles and pork. Lime juice and zest at the end.



I didn't take any pictures while cooking because I was fumbling around too much. Decided to add some granny smith and golden delicious apple for some additional sweet and sourness and texture.



It seemed like it would be too bland, so I ended up making a sauce at the end as well from hoisin, soy, and brown sugar.





Next time I'm going to marinate the pork and attempt to brown it better. Probably add more vegetables (quantity, not variety necessarily).

Responding to post/support exactly this.

So is next week "bacon-wrapped meat" or "salmon" ?

Mrs W and I will whip up a stir-fry to get in the mix. Excited for risotto week, and I enjoy both bacon-wrapped meat and salmon, so...

Decided to make Kenji's Real Deal Kung Pao Chicken.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2...en-recipe.html







Had to do it in my All-Clad as I don't have a wok, so things were a little crowded at the end. Still, pretty damn good, will make again next week.

God damn that looks good, yeti

Yeti with the lead going into the weekend.

That is absolutely gorgeous!

a very popular stir fry dish around here called "geschnetzeltes" consisting of meat of choice with mushrooms, cream and white wine. the orginal version "züricher geschnetzeltes" is with veal and its kidneys and usually with rösti on the side while in germany/austria it's oftentimes with chicken or pork and spätzle or rice as side.

my low-kcal version with chicken and potato-broccoli purée

I am by no means an expert on making a stir fry, but so far this is the only one that really looks amazing. There are definitely good ones here (Faluzure, Bode-ist, Shark Doctor, TrustySam to name a few), but this one captures what I really want in a stir fry - Sauce. It looks like an explosion of flavour. Several others look really well cooked, but the different parts, be it chicken, peppers, onions, etc, all look like they are individual parts on a plate, whereas with Yeti's dish, the pieces are connected to each other by the sauce. One guess as to why? We in North America tend to think of stir frys as being healthy. Clean, well prepared and well cooked stir frys are what we think of. But Yeti. Everything looks integrated, and delicious.

I would love to eat that.

thx for the kind words! to quote the great matthew mcconaughey, unexpected...but graciously accepted.

i'm not much of a chef, my gf found the recipe, bought all the stuff in chinatown and did most of the mise. i then banished her from the kitchen, taped up the smoke alarms, cranked up the heat and pretended i knew what i was doing.

getting a bit more into cooking has made me realise what an absolute travesty it is to use a non-stick pan all the time. not sure if this is an english thing, and i know people in this thread won't be doing it, but so many people just use these for everything with low heat, and it's insane. just the other day my buddy (who thinks his gf is a great cook) was telling me 'we don't really use oil much, we just dry fry everything in a non-stick'. huge facepalm i know, but i've also been guilty in the past of doing steaks in the cast iron and most everything else in a non-stick for cleaning convenience. lately i've bitten the bullet and starting using stainless steel more. the colour i was able to get on this chicken was really excellent.

lastly, I'm sure everyone thinks this, but it really looked wayyy better in person.

can we have a confirmation of what this week's dish will be and when we can start posting pics? I'm cooking salmon today for my weekly lunch with my mom*, it's gonna be something like oven baked with a creamy dill sauce and some sort of potatoes (still undecided about how to cook those), so I'm curious to know if it's gonna fit under the umbrella of this week's dish.

* funny story here, my mom insisted I come over to her place once/week for a "home cooked meal", i mostly did it because she's lonely and barely has any friends and is always happy to see me although she's the most annoying person in the world. But recently because of how ****ing terrible her cooking is (how in the **** do you overcook fish n chips??? Also I get you're on a low-sodium diet, but not putting any salt in anything ever is ****ing ridiculous) I just straight up told her we're changing up and that she's going to be coming to my place and i'm gonna be cooking

Ok, here we go.

Someone earlier mentioned sauce, and a good sauce is really essential for noodles imo. I've made so many stir-fries that end up tasting like a bunch of decent ingredients that don't meld into a coherent dish at all. A couple ways to combat that:

1) Have a good sauce.
2) Marinate the meat. Meat that's not marinated doesn't have time to pick up the flavors. Otherwise you cook the **** out of it, which is just as bad.

That said, borrowing liberally from David Chang's Momofuku, we made a Korean-inspired pork and shrimp stir-fry with "Dragon Sauce."

For a rough recipe, see: http://www.oregonlive.com/mix/index....gon_sauce.html

Proportions: We made 3x the dragon sauce for 8 oz dry udon, 2.7lb pork, 1lb shrimp, 2 large fistfuls of bok choy, and about 1.5 pints of mushrooms.

Basic idea:
Brown meat (we did shrimp and bulgogi-marinated pork)
Cook whatever veggies you want
Cook noodles in water – our udon took < 4 minutes
Fry noodles
Combine all ingredients in the wok/pan with dragon sauce

You have a lot of flexibility here in all the steps. You can use any meat(s) you want, tofu, or just roll with veggies. You can use any marinade you want. You can CYO veggies. We used bok choy, green onion, and mushrooms as in the recipe here and added bean sprouts. You can choose your noodles. We used udon, but you can go soba, lo mein, or whatever. And you can use any sauce you want, from a simple soy sauce with garlic and ginger to a hoisin, XO, or "dragon" sauce.

Meat: Shrimp for some color, but the main event here is bulgogi-marinated pork, which is so god damn easy and requires very few ingredients (and the recipe is the same for beef, so ...). With beef, usually you use a ribeye, but this is a stir fry so we went cheap and quick. We bought a 2.7lb pork shoulder. The plan is to cut the shoulder long-ways so that the cross-section is bite-size -- for us, we cut the shoulder into 3 long pieces -- and then thinly slice each of those. To make this easier to slice, it helps to freeze the shoulder for about an hour. It won't be frozen, but it will be more solid and easier to slice thin.



We then marinate the pork for as long as possible but at least an hour. We did for 6 hrs, but we got the pork this morning. Ideally, we'd let it marinate for 12-24 hrs.
Marinade:
1/4c rice vinegar
1/4c soy sauce
1-2T sherry
1-2 tsp sesame oil
1/2" - 1" of a ginger root grated
1 clove garlic grated (we use a microplane to grate the garlic and ginger, sliced or minced is fine as well)
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/2 tsp sugar

But adjust as you like, measuring is for bakers.

We prepped the veggies, peeled the shrimp, and drank a beer. Mise en place:



We sliced the green onion thin and trimmed the bottoms off the bok choy and halved them lengthwise. You can use whatever mushrooms you want, but when I go to the Asian market, I try to get the mushrooms they don't have at the neighborhood Vons. So here we're using brown beech mushrooms and maitake.



The only other thing before we start stir-frying is to get the sauce made. The recipe I linked earlier gives the same ingredients but massively different proportions than the Momofuku cookbook. Chang's version is sweeter, while the linked version has more bite (from vinegar). We made the sauce in stages to taste both and ultimately went with a hybrid, but I'd recommend the version linked. Momofuku's proportions were a little sweet for my taste.

There's a weird ingredient in the sauce, and I know that's a no-no for this thread. Ssamjang, which basically means "sauce for wraps" is an almost ubiquitous Korean condiment that is a mixture of gochujang (chili paste), doenjang (bean paste), and some other ingredients you won't miss. If you don't have a Korean grocery nearby where you can find this (or at least gochujang), substitute some kind of chili paste or sambal. You can find it at most grocery stores. If you can find it, mix in bean paste or miso, but if not, no worries. By the way, if your chili paste is really frickin spicy, just cut it back. This isn't supposed to be enfuego.

Ok, now we just cook things one at a time and combine at the end:

Brown the pork


Cook bok choy



Cooking mushrooms and bean sprouts


Fryin' up the noodles and cooking the shrimp


All the ingredients combined


Adding sauce and tossing everything together


Boom.

That looks fantastic! I love funky mushrooms. I use that marinade for my sauce as well, normally with a bit of corn starch to thicken it up and, if I'm feeling indulgent, a good lump of peanut butter. Makes a great creamy satay style sauce.

Yeti, wyman: great looking, well planned composed dishes.

Wow, the last couple of recipes look spectacular - they really inspire me to try making more stir frys to try and improve, because they look so delicious I want try dishes that look like those, yum yum!!


May try making wyman's noodle recipe next time, keeping the tips in mind - one thing that's nice about the cooking club is that sometimes I can be lazy about trying out new dishes. But after making the stir fry, it seems like maybe with each time I make another it should hopefully be easier than the last time? And hopefully tastier too?

Thanks. Let me know if posts are tl;dr. I get long-winded but try to provide context and commentary. Making a large batch of mozza meatballs today for super bowl, will try to post 'after' pics in the cooking a good everything else thread, where these meatballs have featured before.