Holiday Cooking Failure Part 2

Originally posted on my Friendster blog, January 2, 2009 at 11:56 am

As you can read in my previous post, I failed to understand a direction in a recipe which resulted to additional 3 hours of baking the chicken in the oven. I guess that wasn't enough lesson for me to be careful next time because "ooops! I did it again" as Britney Spears says. But this time, it was a different case...and worse. You may call me dumb, stupid, careless, or whatever you please but I'll still blog about it anyway.

It's a Filipino tradition to eat dinner at 12 am of December 31, the very first hour of New Year. I didn't do it last year which was my first New Year in the US but decided to start doing it again beginning this year with my husband and will make it a family tradition when we have a kid/kids already. So at about 9 pm on December 31, I began cooking. Again, I made more than enough for 2 persons to eat because I wanted leftovers for the next couple of days. I made pineapple ham, teriyaki chicken, brownies, and pansit(an Asian noodle that is present in every Filipino household during special occasions because according to Filipino and Chinese superstition, it represents long life. Yea, I'm kinda superstitious.) I wanted to make a sweet potato casserole too but didn't have enough time, it was almost 12 am when I was done cooking the last recipe. Everything came out great except for the ham. I cooked it according to the recipe direction but didn't like the result. The meat wasn't very tender. I like my ham to almost fall apart when I slice it. That night neither I nor my hubby ate the ham though he tried a slice. I hate throwing food so I just let the ham sit in the fridge until I figured out later what to do with it.

Yesterday all other food I cooked for the New Year was almost gone. At night after dinner, I decided to slowcook the ham. I remembered that on Thanksgiving, I cooked my ham in the slowcooker at low temperature for 10 hours and the result was perfect that my husband devoured it. It was a fully-cooked ham and this one I got for New Year is smoked. I figured that maybe a smoked ham needs longer cooking time than a fully-cooked ham. So I set it to 15 hours at low. Calculating the time, it would be done in the morning the next day (which is today.) So, I woke up at 9 this morning and immediately checked the slowcooker on the counter. It still had 1 minute and 3o+ seconds left. But when I checked the ham, this is what greeted me:

That's why it's important to cook more than one recipe

Before I decided to cook it "better".

Lost in Translation on Christmas

Originally posted on my Friendster blog, December 25, 2008 at 11:26 pm

Today is Christmas, yay! I love Christmases. So I prepared some food for me and Brandon earlier today for our Christmas dinner. Since there's only 2 of us, I only made a cake, 2 loaves of bread, and roasted whole chicken. Actually this was even too much for us but I wanted to have some Christmas leftovers the next day. I wanted the chicken to be fresh from the oven by the time we start eating so I made the pineapple upside-down cake first at about 2 o'clock. The cake turned out really yummy, and it also looked pretty. After the cake was done in a little over an hour, I prepared the loaves of pumpkin bread. I haven't tasted them yet but Brandon has and he told me that they're really good. But the problem is, the center of both loaves collapsed haha. They probably weren't done yet when I decided to take them out of the oven but the sides were already very brown, I was worried about burning them. Maybe I'm just not lucky at making anything that has pumpkin because the same thing also happened to the pumpkin pies I made on Thanksgiving and Halloween. Anyways, after the bread, I put the 3-pound chicken in the oven for roasting after marinating it with some spices for 30 minutes. I set the baking time to 1 hour and 15 minutes because that's what the recipe says. After waiting that long, I checked the chicken to see if it was done or if it needed to be cooked a little longer. It was still very raw and didn't look like it had been in the oven for more than an hour. So I set the timer again, this time to 1 hour and 45 minutes. When the timer went off, the result was the same, the chicken was still not cooked. In fact, it was still white. I was wondering what was wrong. This wasn't my first time to bake, and I have cooked meat in the oven many times before. Even before I started cooking the chicken, my guts told me that I misunderstood a direction in the recipe but just ignored it. It was already 8 o'clock and both Brandon and I were already starving so I decided to show the recipe to my husband and read the directions to him.

Me: The first direction says, preheat the oven at 350 deg. F. Then the 3rd direction says bake the chicken to a minimum internal temperature of 180 deg. F. Which temperature should have I baked the chicken at? 350 degrees or 180 degrees?

Brandon: The 350 degrees is the baking temperature and the chicken is done if it's meat temperature is 180 degrees. Don't tell me you've been baking the chicken at 180. It's only a warming temperature.

So yea, I was just warming the chicken the entire time. I haven't in my entire life used a cooking thermometer so I didn't know that 180 degrees was for the meat temperature. Of all the recipes I've used, this is the only one I misunderstood (well, by far haha). The cooking directions in most recipes say "bake at ___ (temperature follows)", so I figured 180 was the baking temperature. I baked the chicken again for another hour, this time at the right temperature :D. This is the longest time I've cooked something in the oven...4 hours total man! We planned to eat dinner at 6 but we ended up doing it at 9:15. Well, at least it's still not too late. Good thing I started preparing for dinner very early. But the chicken came out very juicy and tasty, so I guess it was worth the long wait.

The chicken that took 4 hours to cook, LOL

num-num!

Merry Christmas!