No photos today. It’s strange how on some days we’re just trigger-happy, and on others the camera doesn’t even come out of its case. So you’ll just have to take my word for how good today’s chicken in milk was. Originally a Jamie recipe, modified (i.e. made easy for lazy people) by us.

Brown your chicken in a deep pan. Drain off the excess fat. Cut a lemon in two give it a wee squeeze before throwing in the whole thing anyway. Pour in about a (British) pint of milk (that’s just over 586ml in metric, but I usually just pour until I remember to stop, so I’ve never any idea just how much I’ve used). Throw in several cloves of garlic (we always start with three, but end up adding five or more. Needless to say, our breath honks after.) Stick in the oven at 190C for around 45 min. (There are rules of thumbs for gauging how long to cook a chicken by weight. If I’m being particular, I check them out and follow them. Otherwise, I guess. This was no spring chicken, but no gargantuan either, so 45 minutes seemed sufficient.) In the meantime, faff around and forget to prepare anything to go with the chicken. Remember at around the 45 minute mark, and grab some angel hair pasta from the store cupboard. Take the chicken out while the pasta is cooking. Let it rest. It’s a bit exhausted from being in the heat, you know. Don’t bin the curdled milk in the pan: reduce it! (um, technical term for boiling some of it away until it’s a bit thicker) Shred some of the tender breast into the pasta or noodles, pour over the reduced curdled milky jus, tuck the napkin in and attack with a fork. If being posh, don’t bother with all that and serve carved pieces of chicken with some mashed tatties and roasted veggies (yeah right, like we ever plan in advance and have everything in). Bitch about how significant other never takes photos of your cooking even though you’ve been slaving away over a hot TV watching Stargate. Blog about how crap you are at documenting your cooking.

Technorati tag: roast chicken.

My parents used to take us out for teppanyaki for birthdays and special occasions, like the end of exams. So I felt the need to go out for teppanyaki today (well, yesterday by now…). I didn’t particularly want to be wandering around Downtown LA in the wee hours, so we couldn’t try the grill at the New Otani in Little Tokyo.

Instead, we headed for our local branch of Benihana in Santa Monica. Completely different atmosphere to the teppanyaki restaurants of my childhood. It’s an open-concept space (or is that open-space concept; couldn’t care less), which along with the high volume of customers and high turnover rate, takes some of the cosiness away from the experience. Sure, I could have looked for a more intimate dining experience. But I really wanted teppanyaki for my final hurrah and farewell to my youth. Plus, it was P’s first foray into the world of teppanyaki dining, so somewhere he could feel comfortable was also important.

Because of the way they seated different groups at the same table, we didn’t feel it would be right to take photos of the evening. Which was a real shame. Every teppanyaki chef has his/her own style and little gimmick. Our chef tonight had two little tricks I’d never seen before. First, he turned our fried rice into a beating heart, earning him delighted claps from the two of us (boy were we seated at a table of jaded or too-cool-to-smile Angelinos). Then he amused the kid in me by turning mere rings of onions into a smoking volcano. It’s these little things that make teppanyaki so fun for me. Of course, the squid was perfectly tender, the prawns just so, the scallops tasty and the filet mignon just the right side of bloody. It may be a chain, but our chef for the evening was as good as any posh teppanyaki restaurant’s.

And may I never grow so old that I cannot appreciate a bit of fun…

After a slow start and a lot of tinkering (with minimal thinking), I think it’s about time to get this blog off the ground.

Since arriving in LA, I can’t honestly say my food intake has been particularly healthy nor inspired. Perhaps keeping an online food diary will guilt me into making more of an effort.

It’s Turkey Day in America. I’m no fan of turkey. It’s a pointless meat unless you go the whole hog and prepare stuffing, roast veggies, roast potatoes, brussel sprouts with bacon and chestnut, chipolatas and all the other turkey trimmings you’d normally have for a British Christmas lunch. Over here, they do creative things with sweet potatoes and make weird concoctions with marshmallows.

We were lazy. And I like my BBQ grill (see last post). So we had a repeat of last Sunday’s BBQ. This time, we were even lazier and bought marinated beef kebabs and marinated chicken kebabs. To make up for that laziness, I made some tzatziki. OK, I cheated even on that. Normally, the yoghurt has to be strained for several hours to thicken it. I strained whole fat yoghurt for 1 hour, grated a peeled cucumber and squeezed all the liquid out of it (again, you’re supposed to let it strain for hours). Mixed the two together, and finely grated two cloves of garlic into the pseudo-tzatziki (sans dill cos I don’t like dill… hey, that means it wasn’t tzatziki at all, but merely cucumber and garlic in yoghurt). To pretend we care about being healthy, we stuck some peppers and sweet corn on the grill. And we finished off with some chestnuts leftover from the Halloween BBQ.