Food Day!

It must have been thirteen or fourteen times that I walked into the kitchen today. It is a short path in my 760 sq ft apartment, but normally I spend my time sitting at my table in my bedroom - drawing, painting, sculpting, painting some more. Sometimes I just get this urge to sit and paint all day, and others I just want to cook. All. Day.

Today was one of those days.

Like most days, one thing just led to another... at first I was cooking a whole chicken to make Ravioli Caprese. I didn't want to use a rotisserie chicken, instead I boiled the chicken in a large stock pot with onions and garlic, herbs and spices... It makes a nice moist chicken for shredding and a salt-free chicken stock. I don't have celery or carrots, but the stock came out great anyway. After the chicken cooled, I shredded it into a couple of ziplock bags.

While that was cooking (45 minutes covered, 1 hour uncovered) I cooked onions and peppers in oil, then blended them.. then cooked the mixture with chocolate, spices, and some of the chicken stock to make a cheater mole. I had an empty glass jar (because I don't throw these things away) and now the mole is sitting in our fridge happily. The boy loves chicken, peppers, and chocolate, so I can see mole chicken in our future.

I did not successfully make the ravioli, no matter how easy Giada made it look, so the ravioli filling went into two dishes; a fettucine alfredo full of basil and shredded chicken, and a spaghetti 'caprese' full of all the original fresh basil, lemons, butter, and garlic with shredded chicken. Both were delicious. The dough that was originally made for the ravioli is in the fridge, I'll make No Knead Bread with it tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will make Char Siu Bao. I made the bao (bun) dough tonight as well... and since I already had the flour, sugar, and milk out I made a 1234 cake.
Still not tired from all the cooking, I made a butter/sugar/lime/rum glaze for the top of the cake.. its a really thick cake, like a Tres Leche cake, so the glaze was soaked into it.

I couldn't decide if I wanted mango with it or not, so I chopped some mango anyway, and grated some ginger ontop.
I knew yesterday that I wanted to make the char siu bao, so I already had stew pork marinating in a soy sauce and garlic. The oven was on for the cake, so I went ahead and roasted it in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour...
Then I chopped it up and mixed the sauce together and put it back in the fridge. Tomorrow I will cook it, and assemble the buns.

I am out of things to cook, and it is pretty late at night. I'm done cooking, but I'm still looking at recipes.
Maybe I should have gone to culinary school instead of art school ^_^