I Love Cooking Shows!

Last night I was sitting in bed watching the first episode of Oliver's Twist (a cooking show) and I thought to myself... I LOVE COOKING SHOWS. When I'm away on vacation or just staying in a hotel for some reason I always stay up late watching the food network. I don't have television at home so I watch food and cooking shows (from several seasons ago) on Netflix. The selection isn't that great so I have watched most of the episodes of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations already. I love the mix of travel and food on his show... although I'm not always fond of his taste for organ meat and strange foods I do enjoy his spirit of adventure. That is why I was so glad to see the Oliver's Twist show... I was about to run out of food TV on instant watch.
When I'm sick of what Netflix has to offer I can check out old episodes of Julia Child's show, The French Chef, at the public library. Before TV went digital and I could at least get a few stations in with my rabbit ears I was fond of watching shows like this on PBS... One of my favorites was Two Fat Ladies . Their motorcycle and sidecar cracked my up... and although I don't eat foods like the ones they cook (in fact when I watched the show I was a vegetarian)... I loved their down to earth style.
My favorite cooking/food show of all time, however, has to be the original Iron Chef. I dream of cooking in kitchen stadium someday. Sometimes I even pause while cooking, bite into a fresh and crispy bell pepper, and smile at my imaginary audience.


Last night I even whipped up dinner Iron Chef style.

I had placed chicken breasts in the fridge to thaw Monday afternoon and when I took it out to marinate it for last night's dinner I realized that I had purchased chicken wings by mistake. I had intended to do a Thai garlic marinade and while that would have worked out fine. I really wanted to make something more suited to the ingredient. I decided to Iron Chef my own Asian style chicken wing glaze... Here is what I did.

I started by adding salt and pepper to the wings. I then gave them to my husband to grill. He cooked them on a medium-hot setting for 6-8 minutes per side. He checked the temperature at this point and decided to let them go just a touch longer.

While he was doing this I pulled a selection of sauces out of my fridge and began to whip up my glaze.

I used an Asian lemongrass BBQ sauce (about 1/2 cup), the juice of two lemons, grated fresh ginger, 3 cloves of garlic and a generous amount of sriracha sauce to give it that kick. I simmered this on low while the chicken was on the grill. The BBQ sauce was very sweet so it cooked down to a nice sticky glaze.

I then poured the glaze over the the chicken wings. I set a few wings aside for the kids and just added teriyaki sauce to theirs. They aren't fond of spicy foods so I thought I'd spare myself the work of making PB and Js while trying to eat dinner.

Then we sat down to dinner. Chicken wings, fried rice, dumplings and cucumber salad.

We had watermelon for dessert. Mmmmmmm!

Cheers,
Jenn