Cooking is one of the few household skills that I have. Next to that would be carpentry and other handyman thingies. You could check with my mom and Home Ec teachers how I've fared in sewing, knitting, etc. They'll tell you that at least I'm good in one field than none.
We only have 4 (you can make it 5 if I were to include the fondue set that Santi gave us for our wedding, but that's another challenge altogether) cooking equipment at home - induction stove, rice cooker cum crock pot, oven toaster and, grill (which has never left the box due to its massive size, but we're saving it when we get to have our dream house). Most of my cooking challenge is making do with the equipment that we have as I don't want to end up with so many equipment. So I try to experiment what I can do with them.
A and I were watching a show on barbecue one time and we saw this pulled pork feature. Looks kind of tedious as it involves roasting for 6 hours and having to pull off the pork into shreds. Plus, there's that roasting challenge and I don't have an oven big enough for me to follow the instructions on the recipe. So I had to make it work using an oven toaster. With no thermometer and only had 3 heat settings to choose from with a maximum timer time of 15 minutes, I went on with my pulled pork challenge.
Armed with the pulled pork recipe by Tyler Florence, I tried it our using half a kilo of pork tenderloin and adding in the dry rub. I had to make adjustments on the recipe and kept tasting the dry rub before I applied it to the meat. After marinating it overnight, I started the day experimenting on the roasting settings. Since our oven toaster can only time 15 minutes, I had to keep on turning the pan every 15 minutes to even out the roasting of the meat. Apparently, after 30 minutes, our oven toaster has a preventive settings wherein it would shut down the heating coil and restart after a few minutes. So after the 60-minute mark, I decided to give the toaster a rest and basted the meat using the BBQ sauce. The original recipe doesn't call for basting, but an oven toaster tends to dry out food faster due to the vertical difference between the food and the coil. After 30 minutes, I flipped the meat and gave it another 30 minutes to roast.
I took out the meat and let it rest on the counter for 10 minutes while covering it with aluminum foil. I tried to pull the meat apart to see if it's tender enough to flake. Good thing it pulled off easily. Snuz helped as my official taste tester.
We only have 4 (you can make it 5 if I were to include the fondue set that Santi gave us for our wedding, but that's another challenge altogether) cooking equipment at home - induction stove, rice cooker cum crock pot, oven toaster and, grill (which has never left the box due to its massive size, but we're saving it when we get to have our dream house). Most of my cooking challenge is making do with the equipment that we have as I don't want to end up with so many equipment. So I try to experiment what I can do with them.
A and I were watching a show on barbecue one time and we saw this pulled pork feature. Looks kind of tedious as it involves roasting for 6 hours and having to pull off the pork into shreds. Plus, there's that roasting challenge and I don't have an oven big enough for me to follow the instructions on the recipe. So I had to make it work using an oven toaster. With no thermometer and only had 3 heat settings to choose from with a maximum timer time of 15 minutes, I went on with my pulled pork challenge.
Armed with the pulled pork recipe by Tyler Florence, I tried it our using half a kilo of pork tenderloin and adding in the dry rub. I had to make adjustments on the recipe and kept tasting the dry rub before I applied it to the meat. After marinating it overnight, I started the day experimenting on the roasting settings. Since our oven toaster can only time 15 minutes, I had to keep on turning the pan every 15 minutes to even out the roasting of the meat. Apparently, after 30 minutes, our oven toaster has a preventive settings wherein it would shut down the heating coil and restart after a few minutes. So after the 60-minute mark, I decided to give the toaster a rest and basted the meat using the BBQ sauce. The original recipe doesn't call for basting, but an oven toaster tends to dry out food faster due to the vertical difference between the food and the coil. After 30 minutes, I flipped the meat and gave it another 30 minutes to roast.
I took out the meat and let it rest on the counter for 10 minutes while covering it with aluminum foil. I tried to pull the meat apart to see if it's tender enough to flake. Good thing it pulled off easily. Snuz helped as my official taste tester.
Unfortunately, I only have my mobile phone with me to take a shot of the finished product. I'd better get my camera from my sister.
