Thursday, March 16, 2017

Adventures in Kooking: Creamed Chicken Guts with Squadoodles -- in a Wok, Yet.




Word must have got out somehow -- Torkildson is cooking again; this time he’s doing something unholy with chicken gizzards and julienned zucchini! No one I called answered their phones; my neighbors are all LDS and very polite, so they don’t like telling me to go to hell when I offer to share some of my culinary bounty. Well, this won’t be the first time I’ve made a gallon baggie offering to the Freezer God! Chicken gizzards are darn cheap, and, if memory serves me, they can be cooked to tenderness in just a few minutes. But to be on the safe side I think I’ll pound the daylights out of them with my tenderizing hammer first. I’m putting them in the wok, with shallots, garlic, and the zucchini noodles. Then, at the last minute, I’ll add some thick cream. And Voila! --a meal to give a king a fit.

 How to peel a shallot 

 For those of you who hesitate to operate on the delicate shallot, I congratulate you. You show some common sense. The rest of you fools can deal with it however you want -- I have yet to find a way to peel one of the damn things without losing half of it. I just didn’t want to carry a big bulky onion home from the market and only use half of it and then stink up my fridge with the other half until I figured out something to do with it. Cooking for one sucks, Food Channel. I hope you fricking know that.

 Course correction

 I decided to drop the pickled garlic and go with a pack of Lipton’s Instant Onion/Mushroom Mix instead. What? You got a problem with that? Back off, apple-knocker. I think the chicken guts are going to need to simmer a bit before I add the cream at the end, so I thought they’d taste better simmering in a soup base. Besides, I’ve had that packet laying around for eight months now -- what do you do with those Lipton packets besides make chip dip or brown finger paint?

 It screams no cream! 

Watching it froth in the wok I intuited that this was not destined to be a creamed dish, so I’ll keep my Western Family half pint of heavy whipping cream for a rich gravy or curry another day. Also, those squadoodles really fried down to next to nothing -- they must be all water. So I toasted a bagel to go along with the meal. At the last minute I decided against the soup mix, too. I had just called my son Adam, who eats zoodles till they swim out his nose, and he told me not to let them simmer very long or they’d lose all their crispness. And there’s nothing worse for a man to discover than a limp vegetable noodle. Nothing. Not a darn thing. Nothing else that can ever go limp is half as bad as a limp vegetable noodle. No Siree. Nothing. Nada. Oh, wait . . . .

 The proof of the pudding is in the eating


 Now I’m ready to sit down and eat the stuff. Living alone, I always have a book on the table to read while I eat. Sometimes, when the book has been real interesting, I’ve crossed the line into indigestion because I forgot to stop eating when I felt full. But this appears to be a small enough portion that I won’t suffer from literary-induced dyspepsia. I’m reading Gene Fowler’s biography of Jimmy Durante, called Schnozzola. The results are occasional dyspepsia when I get too involved in my book.


The Results

Oh crap




The debriefing


It appears you cannot stir fry giblets or gizzards; it vulcanizes them into tire patches. The squadoodles turned out okay, but were still a little too limp for this manly man’s liking. And I forgot to butter my toasted bagel until it had cooled down -- bleck. Luckily I only cooked half of the giblets and a third of the squadoodles, so I may be able to salvage something out of it after perusing some real recipes online. In the meantime, it all goes into the freezer to become part of my cryogenic culinary baggage.

I guess the neighbors were right.







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