Skillet chicken in orange sauce looks really, really brown

Today, we're going to take my great-grandmother's skillet down off of the nail over my bed, take a recipe from the cookbook my mom's high school drill team published, and make...
this!

Why will we make this? Because we effin' love orange chicken. It's like sweet-and-sour chicken only it actually tastes like something instead of tasting like cheap sweet-and-sour sauce. I didn't think this would taste anything like Chinese takeout, but given that the most-used ingredient in the sauce is orange juice followed by two whole oranges, it looked like it'd be good anyway.

Although I soon gave up on it being at all good for you.

I must say this got a lot easier to afford since my roommate was so good as to sneak home some oranges and a bottle of orange juice from the cafeteria (which I never go to because it's so expensive you'd have to pinch two plates per visit to get your money's worth).

All that butter- It's like someone made a jacuzzi out of heart attacks.

You know what? My only thoughts as I got all  the chicken browned was "Jee-crawling-hovah, that's a lot of butter!" So instead, I'll tell the story behind the skillet I'm making it in.
It was my great-grandmother's. When she and my great-grandmother moved the family to the United States, my great-grandfather went first to get a job, house, etc. She stayed in Mexico and refused to bring herself and the children to the US until he had provided her with a brand-new set of pots and pans and a stove she didn't have to build a fire in.

At this point, if I didn't have partially-cooked chicken already set aside, I'd have cancelled this.

When she died, a lot of her things somehow ended up in the back shed including this pan. Eventually, bright-orange with rust, it was dumped on my mother who gave it to me since I'd been wanting one. My instinctive reaction upon seeing this was to throw it out, it looked so bad. My second idea was to hit the Free section of Craigslist and let someone else deal with it. Someone actually wrote back to persuade me not to chuck it that easily and that should I actually have the patience to scour and season it, I'd be glad I made the effort. Much to my surprise, they were right. I still remember when I first got it seasoned, looked it over, and thought "Holy crap, this actually is a nice pan!" It's also a really big one, which makes sense given how many people my great-grandmother had to cook for.

I hope it's supposed to look like this.

Unfortunately for my parents, this ended up leading to me reseasoning an awful lot of banged-up skillets (and a griddle) to give away for weddings and housewarmings the one year it seemed all of my friends got married and/or moved. I think I derailed dinner plans a few nights in a row by commandeering the oven for yet another pan.

I tried some right after it was all mixed. It tasted like orange juice.

As for this skillet in particular, it now hangs on a nail over my bed someone left in the wall. Hey, when you live in half a bedroom, these things seem a bit more normal.

It looks kind of like a pan of beef Stroganoff vomited in here.

While there were no problems browning it in batches, I did end up cutting the chicken up once I realized it would all have to fit in the pan at once. I was hoping a pan of chicken in orange sauce would be... well... orange.  This is a really dull shade of brown. It looked even duller by comparison when I put the orange pieces in.

The butter... it's in puddles...

Usually when something looks this bad, you end up telling everyone to shut up because it's good for you. However, that would only work on someone who hadn't peeked at the recipe.

Cooked just long enough to strip the oranges of their color. It's all brown. Everything's brown.

But eventually it was done. And here's the delightful result!

The camera definitely doesn't love this.

But I can set aside how much butter went into this thing to actually assess what we've made. Edit: Besides, I saved it in plastic wrap and it made the best toast ever. It had a nice slight orange kick and some of the chicken taste had also gotten in there. I would make this again just to skim off the butter and have it on toast when I run out, and I don't usually get excited about toast. Seriously, make this, save the butter (rinsing off what flecks of stuff stick to it in a bowl of ice water- that way it doesn't melt as you're getting it clean), and try it on toasted whole wheat bread. You will be amazed.

Besides, enough time in the refrigerator and it was easy to remove.

This isn't chicken in sauce, this is chicken in soup. However, it was indeed really tasty and the most tender chicken I've ever had. However, the orange juice lost all its flavor in the cooking. Therefore, it tasted like chicken, butter, and the oranges that went into this. It'd be better if you cut the orange sections up. However, the sauce was good enough to be worth scooping up on toasted bread. It just wasn't as orange-y as I'd hoped it would be. A night in the refrigerator made it a lot better.
But there was one area where this recipe really didn't disappoint: Look at how many dishes I had after this, including getting out a separate bowl instead of eating out of the pan:

Granted, I used newspapers instead of a cutting board, but still...

When you not only have to hand-wash everything but carry it up the stairs when you're done, a recipe that involves this few of them is definitely worth revisiting.

Where did my mom get these cookies?

We at A Book of Cookrye have not presented something... er... normal since the macaroni. So today, we (that's Marcus and myself) are going to briefly go into the world of relatively normal foods. No flowers in the lemonade, no kidneys in the pie, no wine in the breakfast porridge, no carrots in the cake. We're making... cookies!

This recipe came from one of Mom's cookbooks.

Because for some reason the camera really didn't want to photograph that legibly, here it is:

1 c butter ½ c sugar 2½ c flour 1 tsp almond or lemon extract _________________ Refrigerate for a few hours 300° 20

Now I know where I get writing only the ingredients and cooking time from.

I didn't know where this recipe came from, but I thought if Mom got it from somewhere and wrote it down, it must be good.

Also, I think I may have a guess why she doesn't make these all the time.

It is always vexatious when cookie dough is really crumbly. It is all the more tempting to eat it all at once and just let the oven stay cold.

The cookie dough was really tasty.

Anyvay, Marcus and I decided to make icebox cookies of it. This brought us to the most tedious part of the recipe: refrigerate for several hours. We looked at ugly Renaissance babies. We looked at drag queens attempting to use straws. We looked at Texans pooping on bluebonnets. Eventually, after 45 minutes, we gave up. Marcus was dead tired and for some reason had this thing called "work" to go to in the morning. The cookie dough sat for five days because either he had night shift or I did.

And that's what I call refrigerating for several hours.

Cookie dough sitting unbaked and uneaten for five days is sacrilege. Seriously, how can anyone voluntarily do that? It went all sad and dry.

Really crumbly.

Mom may have written 300° 20 minutes, but we weren't sure what Marcus' oven was set to at any time. Fortunately, he has an oven thermometer so we could look in at any time and tell that it was either nearly 400° or somewhere around 200°.

"Do they look done to you?"
"Eh..."

And so, we tried them.

I would just like to say I like how the bleach job on this shirt came out.

"It's shortbread. It's very dry."

Yes, they indeed were dry, which I think tends to happen when the cookie dough spends a fricken week in the fridge.

Fortunately, there was an easy fix.

A friendly reminder from all of us at A Book of Cookrye

I don't usually do any public political stumping, but this for the sake of the Internet. And honestly, the Internet should not be at risk of being tied up in political and bureaucratic matters.
Having spent spent the earlier part of my life without it, I have witnessed just how much it has changed our lives.  The Internet is still an open resource, available to nearly everyone in the world. It has allowed more cross-cultural exchange than anyone could have imagined even 20 years ago when it first became ubiquitous. We can reach out to people across the planet from us and they can answer in fewer than ten seconds. We have access to all manner of entertainment and information from everywhere in the world, all sent to us as easily as we can seek it out. The last thing we need is to lose this amazing resource as we know it. It would set us back decades and leave us even more broke (in the middle of a recession that has allegedly ended).
Please learn more and take action here, even if all you can do is sign the letter. This affects everyone using the Internet to do anything. Like I said, I don't usually discuss politics publicly because that invites more invective than discourse. But I feel the Internet shouldn't be stuck in politics.
Even if you're one of the approximately 95% of the people in the world who live outside the United States, chances are a lot of sites you visit run their data through here. All right, I'm done being serious.

Pepper "Cake" weighs a lot

Few things in the everyday life of your average college student are quite as annoying as realizing that you have a large stack of assignments due tomorrow. It is very important not to forget to eat when you have to read medieval literature and then write computer code in one night. Therefore, we at A Book of Cookrye are going start our long night of studies off with...

Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

The only thing in this that may have been expensive are the dates, which I still have leftover with my adventure in mincemeat pies with actual meat. Did dates used to be a lot cheaper? I see them in all sorts of older recipes; they're as common as raisins. These days, they are sold individually at the store with a ludicrously high price. Fortunately for everyone pulverizing kidneys into pies or salt-and-peppering their cakes, the Middle-Eastern store has them by the tub at about the price of a sack of flour.

Why does dried fruit look like it should have 6 legs? Even chopped up, it looks like a bowl of bugs.

This is where an ordinary cake becomes a pepper cake. For some reason, inverting the colors turned it from an ordinary shot of a bowl of stuff to a really cool abstract-- er, thing.

And that's how good art becomes great art.

Noting the absence of baking powder, I'd thought that well-beaten eggs meant really well-beaten, so I put them in a small pot (I do not have a set of mixing bowls at multiple sizes) and beat them into suds. This soon proved utterly pointless.

I was actually unnerved at how heavy this was. The bowl had no right to weigh as much as it did.

Given how much this looks like chocolate chip cookie dough, I start to understand my friends who have a pathological hatred of raisins. It seems one out of every 5 people has bit into a cookie expecting to find tasty chocolate chips and found... raisins. This has made them hate raisins all their lives. While I have yet to be scarred from tasty oatmeal-raisin cookies like this, I have a similar experience. It involves Brie cheese.

I think it may have needed a smaller pan.

You see, at some potluck party thing or another, there was a sliced Brie wheel on the table. To my seven-year-old eyes, it looked like a cake dusted with powdered sugar.

DECEIT.

So you know what, people who thought raisins were chocolate chips? I don't pity you. You weren't traumatized, just slightly inconvenienced. Try biting into what you think is a delicious cake and getting a mouthful of stinky cheese. 

It kind of looks like those chocolate chip cookie cakes you can get at the mall that's been bleached up a few shades.

Anyway, on to the results!

Despite having no butter in it at all (which had worried me more than the pepper), this was really tasty. However, it is not a cake. It's soft, dense, and chewy. It's like what you get when you make a batch of cookie dough, decide you don't feel like pulling cookie sheets in and out of the oven all day, and just smoosh the dough into a pan and call it bars.
The dates tasted like raisins and the pepper was just... strange. I'd thought pepper in a cake could be one of those "I'd never have thought of it but it's so tasty!" sort of things, especially since this is one of those cookbooks where every recipe has a name under it so you know who to complain to if it's terrible. But despite being the title ingredient, the pepper was just not good. However, since I stuck to the measured amount rather than being as generous with pepper as I usually am, these were still good.

Leave out the pepper (it was just strange) and swap the dates for chocolate chips, and this will be amazing and addictive.

Hump-Day Quickie: Lavender Lemonade

You know, all those hump-day quickies can make one thirsty. This may be a bit strange, but it's really tasty.

Lavender Lemonade ½ c sugar 1 tbsp dried lavender flowers 2 c water ¼ c lemon juice Mix lavender, sugar, and water. Bring to a boil, stir if sugar's not dissolved, and take off heat. Let steep at least 10 minutes, or just let it sit until the water's cool. Strain it, then stir in lemon juice. Dilute if you think it too strong, but if you're pouring it hot over ice you may want to make it stronger instead.

You may be wondering where the heck you'd get lavender flowers. I got them at the middle-Eastern store that has figured so prominently in the making of older English recipes. They have them with all the other spice shakers.

Since I like adding lavender flowers to tea already, I was curious one night how lavender lemonade would taste. (Bottled lemon juice made this a lot faster.)

Lavender can join dates in the list of things I think look like will sprout 6 legs and crawl away.

Lavender tea is surprisingly brown.

The lemon juice just makes it cloudy.

Like I said, I wondered how lavender lemonade would taste and decided to find out. And... it's pretty tasty. The taste is definitely unexpected, though. Lavender and lemon go surprisingly well together. The combination tastes a little like one, a little like the other, and mostly like something completely different.
If you make it for others, you'd definitely want to tell them what's in it beforehand. You'll skip everyone staring at the glass like it howled at them and asking "What's in this?". I made this for some friends and the consensus was that it's good, but it does take a little getting used to.

Making Italian food with a dagger

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we would like to announce that we have replaced our much-used Italian cookbook!

We even put in a ribbon bookmark.

It seems that once books reach a certain age, putting heavy weights on them because they won't lie flat will make pages fall out. There are a lot of 1¢ copies of this book online, but it occurred to me that I'd get another 50-year-old paperback that would then fall apart from my having to smash it flat to see the recipe. Since it has been a while since I did anything interesting in the craft world, I scanned, reprinted, and bound a new one instead. I used Coptic binding which was easy (see Coptic binding instructions here) and didn't require any specialty supplies aside from a darning needle and a 27¢ ribbon spool.  To inaugurate the new copy and to start another year of living on campus off with a racket, we're going to make...

I think this was invented by lazy fishermen who decided to eat the bait instead.

I must admit I was a bit unsure how to proceed with this one. How was I supposed to clean all those minnows? Do they just mean wash them, or am I supposed to actually gut and fillet each and every one of them? Well, I looked online, and

Just kidding. We're making this.

I only have one recipe that cauliflower recipe I voluntarily eat. Only six years ago, I thought cauliflower was broccoli that had been dipped in bleach. I picked this recipe because I wanted to try something that you don't really see in American Italian restaurants, and I found the list of ingredients intriguingly strange (Currants? Anchovies? Simultaneously?). I was also curious to try a spaghetti recipe that involves neither basil, garlic, nor oregano.
Because I already have leftover currants from this and pine nuts from this, the recipe looked nice and cheap. However, to make it even cheaper, I took the liberty of weighing a cauliflower head (it was 2½ pounds) and buying a couple of frozen bags instead. I then decided to microwave them wrapped in soggy paper towels because I was lazy. By coincidence, microwaving apparently better preserves the vitamins than boiling.
Then, it was time to take out my kitchen dagger and cut up the onion!

This was a Christmas present from a really good friend. I think it was meant to be a letter opener, but I had it sharpened on one edge so it can actually be useful. Plus, since it came with a sheath, I can just drop it in a bag and carry it without worrying about dinging the blade or cutting the bag open.

I'd tolerate 2 months of hearing Jingle Bells 9 times a day a lot better if I knew I'd get weaponry at the end of it.

However, after getting to have at produce with a sword, I had to then face... uh... this.

It almost looks like that woodgrain-looking laminate you see on old appliances.

I don't know why these grossed me out so much. I've blenderized kidneys without feeling as squicky as I did fishing these out of the tin.

Oh, yum.

Fortunately, all I had to do was scissor them which was over in 30 seconds.

It looks so innocent, you'd never suspect canned fish were dissolved in it.

At this point, I must report something strange. Something about the smell of tomatoes and onions with the anchovy just barely there drew people to the kitchen. Seriously, it seemed to have bewitching powers. I was really glad I hadn't cut the recipe in half; a lot of people were asking if they could have a taste and I hadn't even gotten halfway through.

Once again, the pine kernels look like little bugs breeding in there. The currants look like little droppings. Fortunately, once the tomato sauce, cauliflower (which I randomly hacked at with a sword once it was cooked), and noodles all got mixed, it looked lovely.  You just had to not think about the dissolved(!) anchovies.

And.... holy Jesus this is good. It is amazing. You should totally try cauliflower and corkscrews, they are delicious. They are beautiful. I received hugs over this. Even the anchovies added just enough of a pungent kick to make it really nice without making it taste like anchovy.

But I will add that it is best fresh. Casseroles and enchiladas benefit from a night in the fridge to meld, cauliflower corkscrews do not. The next day, everything had blended and... well, it was nice, but a little bland.

Trying out forgotten handwritten recipes: Orange Pie

A few years ago, I discovered this website. Apparently Michigan State has a lot of antique cookbooks and made a project of digitizing them and putting them online. I've read a lot of the books transcribed there and made a few of the things I've found. I've really liked to look through Aunt Babette's Cook Book, which looks like a lot of really practical recipes that mostly look really tasty. I regularly make the recipe for molasses cookies. Today, we are going to Marcus' kitchen to present a recipe someone wrote in the copy the library scanned for the project:

Orange Pie 1 tbsp. butter 1 c sugar 3 egg yolks* Juice of 3 oranges Sugar to taste 1 baked pie crust Cream butter and sugar, beat in egg yolks. Cook in double boiler until somewhat thickened. Pour into pie crust and freeze. *The original recipe says to save the egg whites and put a meringue on top. We skipped this since the pie never set.

Looks easy and tasty, doesn't it?

We present the Mt. St. Helens whaleback recreated with sugar, butter, and frying pan.

I've already gone on about how much I love digging up recipes like this, so I needn't repeat myself. This one just sounded really good, so I guessed at the instructions and figured it was more or less one of those pies where you cook the filling on the stovetop until it's set.

I guess we're making a lemon pie?

Marcus juiced the oranges, and I gotta say I'm really envious of the juicer his mom gave him.

"Do you think I got enough out of it?"

Look at how much it got out of 3 oranges! If you ever see one of those juicers that kind of looks like pliers for sale, you should totally get it.

Granted, we could have gotten out a bottle of orange juice, but we wouldn't have gotten to eat orange fetuses.

So, here's where we first put it all together in out awesome double boiler made of a frying pan on top of a pot!

And wait... and stir... and wait... and finally, mutter that it's been an hour and this is as thick as it's going to get. Midway through the cooking, we decided to put on some music and put on Portsmouth Sinfonia. If you've never heard of them, I'm very sorry for you, but that's all right because you're about to discover one of the best things ever to happen to classical music. I'm just going to let Wikipedia do the talking on this one...

"The Sinfonia had an unusual entrance requirement, in that players had to either be non-musicians, or if a musician, play an instrument that was entirely new to them.
The early repertoire of the Sinfonia was drawn from standard classical repertoire (such as "The Blue Danube" waltz and "Also sprach Zarathustra"), so that most orchestra members had a rough idea of what the piece, or at least famous parts of it, should sound like; even if they could not play their chosen instrument accurately, they would at least have an idea that they should be going higher at one part then lower at another, and so on."

They actually played Royal Albert Hall. That's right, an orchestra of people who couldn't play their own instruments played here. Just for your listening pleasure as you read this, here they are! Please, as you're letting the sublime sounds wash over you, keep in mind they played one of the biggest concert halls in London.

While I was stirring a frying pan of pie filling, someone was really excited to pulverize the graham cracker crust.

He's not mugging for the camera.

And that was a thorough pounding.

After a while, it became obvious that this was going to stay runny right up to when it boiled dry. Not quite willing to let this go to waste, we decided to freeze it. A long time stood between us and pie. But the interminable wait was no bother, for while we were getting groceries, we espied something lovely in the discount bin!

Squeezy garlic!

It being 3AM or so, we couldn't help noticing that not only is the brand on the squeezy garlic the name of the Spice Girls movie, but the logos look oddly similar...

  

However, Marcus was leery about being as generous as I would have been with the squeezy garlic after opening the bottle and smelling it.

It was very moving.

And so, we set out to make pie and ended up making cheesy garlic bread and looking at The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks while we waited instead.

Three AM garlic bread is one of the best things on Earth.

As for the pie which we had the next day, it set to a custard in the freezer. There were no ice crystals or anything. However, it was almost unnaturally yellow.

Lookie how well it sliced!

It tasted like orange juice concentrate. By the time we were done boiling it, it probably was. It was tasty, but it is pretty much orange juice concentrate.

It's not runny, it just slid on the plate a bit.

So thank you, whoever wrote in a copy of Aunt Babette's Cook Book that later ended up in Michigan State's library! Your recipe didn't work, but it was still tasty.