Some recent cooking

First off: intellectually, I know the world is really no more a dangerous place than it was this time last week. But it certainly feels that way. (The current thing: the explosion at the fertilizer plant near Waco. At this point it looks like it is a horrible industrial accident - I know, they have the ATF there, but that's just a precaution - but still, no matter what happened, it's still awful. The worst thing for me was hearing the audio from the video that one man recorded, where his child says, "Please let's get out of here." That killed me, because that would have been me at 8 or so if something similar happened)

So anyway. In times like this, I turn to the things I do control - making stuff, cooking, gardening.

I've been doing some cooking recently. Well, cooking more complex than steaming cauliflower or heating up frozen green beans.

I made a big batch of tomato sauce (Super-simple: heat up a tablespoon or so of good olive oil in a pan, chop a clove of garlic into it, dump in a 28-ounce can of plum tomatoes, add one of those little cans of tomato paste, cook until it's the right consistency, add whatever herbs you like to season). I had pasta with it one night, made a pizza another night (I am so glad I have the Cook's Country "deep dish crust" recipe - it's really good, fairly fast, and I can make it low enough in sodium that I can eat it. So I can have pizza even though I dare not order from any of the carry out places).

I had a few tablespoons of the sauce left over, so the other night I made something kind of like chili - I browned some ground bison meat, added the tomato sauce (and a can of paste, when I saw that the sauce wasn't enough. Tomato paste is pretty strong but I like it in things). I dumped in a bunch of chili powder and some adobo seasoning and some cumin (If I had been thinking more in advance what I was going to do, instead of just dumping stuff together, I would have browned some onions and garlic first). I opened up a can of lower-sodium pinto beans and added them. (The lower-sodium beans are frankly disappointing as "just beans" - they taste like they're missing something, which is probably the salt - but mixed in things they're not too bad). It turned out pretty well. I think tonight I might make Indian Fry Bread (which is kind of a cross between a biscuit and a tortilla - it's not as rich or doesn't have as much liquid as biscuits, but it has baking powder in it to make it rise, and I don't put that in when I make tortillas). Then I can have one variant of an Indian Taco. (There are different forms. Some are more typically "taco" with the shredded lettuce and everything, some are just beans and hot salsa....sometimes they are called Navajo Tacos but around here they are more commonly called Indian Tacos and are a very popular fundraising lunch sort of thing - I suppose most people like them and provided you have a good big deep-fryer to make the frybread in, a group of people can probably make lots of them fairly fast)

And today we are having a departmental lunch. I volunteered to do the main dish - partly because I knew I could make it low enough in sodium I would not have to worry, but mainly because I had a large-volume recipe I wanted to try. It's the slow-cooker pulled barbecued chicken from the most recent issue of Cook's Country. It's not a HARD recipe but it is kind of long because there are lots of things to combine - you combine the chili powder and oil and onion and cayenne and heat them in the microwave (because the recipe author said they wanted to avoid having to saute stuff as a first step) and then add that in with the other sauce ingredients. And then you put the chicken in. I put the thighs in first and waited an hour to put the breasts in - they asked for bone-in, skin-on breasts so they would not cook so fast (white meat cooks faster than dark does), but of course I could only find boneless, skinless.

The biggest step, and especially big for me because I increased the amount of chicken (the recipe says it serves 10, but we often have 12, and a couple of them are big eaters), was shredding the breast meat with two forks and then chopping up the thighs.

It did make a lot. There should be plenty for everyone. I hope it's good, but I've never made anything from America's Test Kitchen (the people who publish Cook's Country and at least one other magazine) that wasn't good.