Cooking with Kyle: Episode 3

This time we have a double meal special. I will be showing one meal I made for breakfast and one for dinner. Let's start in chronological order.

Breakfast

As usual we begin with a shot of our ingredients.

A proper breakfast is composed at least partly of eggs, and somewhere between partly and completely bacon.

Starting from the left we have the remains of my baguette seen in Episode 1. These posts are more spread out than the actual time between cooking, so that hunk of bread is not completely stale I promise. The bacon is cut in half because... that's the way I found it. It ended up being a good size for my purposes.

I really just like cutting holes in bread.

I scrambled the egg up with a fork. Some may tell you to add milk, I will tell you it doesn't matter. I then sliced up my bread and hollowed out the slices with a knife. Honestly those two should have been done in the reverse order. I had some notion that hollowing the bread first would make the rings squish up when I cut them, but I could have easily unsquished them.

This photo shows that I am, in fact, not a chef.

I placed my bread slices in a good-sized buttered pan. I then put a half slice of bacon inside each bread hole (I had cooked the bacon in another pan) and followed up with scooping egg into each hole. This was the most difficult part of the procedure, because a.) egg is a stubborn... liquid?... and doesn't like to come up in a spoon and b.) most of the egg spilled through the bottom of the bread. I had to scramble another two eggs to fill all the holes. As you may be able to guess, this was far more than one person can eat.

I scraped the extra egg into the trash, 'cause I'm a privileged little shit.

And here is the final product, alongside chocolate milk: the ale of little boys. I put some salt on top and it was quite good. Cooking eggs in a regular piece of bread is better though. There is less spillage, one slice = one egg, and you can leave the yoke intact so you can crack it when eating and get the goopy good stuff all over your plate. (And let someone else do the dishes.) The advantage to this method is the pieces can be picked up by hand and are two-bites size.

Dinner

INGREDIENTS.

White stuff, white stuff, egg (Also white).

From left to right: flour, milk, one egg. The milk and flour are unmeasured, they aren't going into a pot or anything, so it isn't important to take measurements. Although I did have quite a bit excess flour in the end. Same with milk, but you need enough milk to balance the egg. I don't have a photo of the egg mixed with the milk, but that is what you do. It is better to whisk the egg in the bowl and then add the milk.

Did you think my only two ingredients were milk, egg and flour?

Here are the main ingredients. As you can see I used plain Panko bread crumbs, the style and brand are up to the individual but I like Panko. Mixed in are 3 pinches each of salt, pepper, and thyme (pronounced "time"). Different people like different spices, and I mean to experiment myself in the future, but S&P with some thyme is the way I learned it. To the right we have chicken thighs. I meant to grab boneless breast, but my freezer is a conglomerate of different chicken parts that all look the same to me.

It always puts me off how clearly you can see the meat past the crumbs.

The photo above was taken after skipping a few steps. While I was setting up all my prep work, I set the pan to high heat with about 1/3 cup of olive oil (I didn't measure) and two tablespoons of butter. Canola oil and vegetable work just as well as olive, canola being the healthiest. The chicken itself you cover in the ingredients set up earlier, in the order I presented them: flour, egg/milk mixture, and then bread crumbs. Then I dropped my chicken in the pan (lightly, mind you) and lowered the temperature. You want the temperature low to give the chicken time to cook through without overcooking the outside. I didn't time the cooking at all, it's safe to leave on for quite awhile (especially with bones). 

Bread crumbs make everything looks so good.

After, waiting, flipping, and waiting again, my chicken was done. There are only two shone because the others went to my parents. I checked their done-ness by cutting them open, looking for running blood. I didn't make any sides, but the chicken was quite good. You might not think something this tasty was so simple to make, the only difficulty being the knowledge of ingredients.

With that we are finished. What would I do differently next time? For the breakfast: more ingredients. Add anything you think is good in an omelette. I'd like to try salsa next time, it is strangely quite good with egg. The chicken was fine, I would just toy with spices. Hope you enjoyed this episode, I'll try to make one more episode before I leave for school.