Why do you assume the chicken is raw? 
This is a good point. I don’t know why I assumed that.
My mom was a terrible cook. Spaghetti was noodles boiled to the consistency of salty mush, pour a can of tomato sauce over it, add some garlic salt, top with Velveeta slices, and bake until the Velveeta turns brownish. A common meal at out house was a pound of low-quality ground beef cooked until gray, add a can of onion soup (remember not to drain off any of that fat, ladies!) and serve over sliced white bread. True shit-on-a-shingle. Those are just some of the highlights. Don’t ask me about mom’s “stew” or the dreaded navy-bean soup.
A few years ago I called to say Happy Thanksgiving (happy being 1200 miles away and unable to visit). While talking to my dad he interrupted me with a panicked “Gotta go - your mother set the turkey on fire”. I never did get the full story of that one.
Needless to say, food advertised as being like mom used to make won’t make me come running.
I have mentioned this on the boards before, but still worth repeating.
Nice Jewish Princess invites me and SO to dinner at her house. She never cooks, has never cooked, but wanted to prove she could to impress us.
Sitting in the living room, smelled odd odor in kitchen.
Apparently, someone told her that to make spaghetti, you just throw the spaghetti into a pot and cook for about 5 minutes. That person neglected to say you also put WATER into the pot first .
She just thought the spaghetti would sort of melt from the heat.
We finally showed her how to cook the spaghetti (in boiling water) and then, with great joy, she opened up her jar of Prego and poured it over the noodles. She was so proud and happy - we just complimented her and thanked her for a truly memorable evening.
Yeah, with you on that.
And in that spirit, three stories on me and one on my dad.
- Early in my baking career, I was getting pretty good at making biscuits. My mom had a new oven, so I put the biscuits in to bake. A little while later, a strange smell was coming from the oven. The biscuits were white and uncooked, but there was smoke. I took them out and discovered that, while they weren’t browned on the outside, they were charcoal on the inside (and a bit of smoke had escaped from their tops, staining the tops a very faint gray). To this day I’m not sure what happened. My two guesses are that I used pure gluten instead of flour, or I somehow set her hifalutin oven on its microwave setting instead of its conventional setting.
- I was at a friend’s house, and he was proudly making mushroom stroganoff for dinner. It came time for the sour cream, and he couldn’t find it. “Oh,” said a passing roommate, “Sorry, I ate that.” Dude had been hungry, so he’d sat down and eaten an entire container of sour cream. My friend was freaking out. “It’s fine,” I said. “I bet you can substitute mayonnaise for sour cream.” He did, and I lost the bet.
- I was at my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving and wanted to try a recipe for spicy sweet-potato fries. Already that’s a kitchen fail, because at Thanksgiving nobody wants any goddamned spicy sweet potato fries. Not content to have a simple failure, I tried to roast a bunch of hot peppers in a frying pan, and ended up filling the kitchen with tear gas. It was remarkable.
And the story on my dad happened soon after my parents separated and he was trying to learn to cook. A recipe called for sauteed diced onions, which, c’mon, how hard could that be? It turns out that dried onion flakes heated in a dried saucepan results in a tremendous amount of smoke.
mmmmm salt grilled NY strip steaks!
Cast iron frying pan, scorchingly hot with a thick layer of rock salt, toss the steaks in for 5 minutes on a side. Nom. Navy SEAL I used to live with did his steaks this way, phenomenal. [And there is a medieval technique for cooking eggs, take a shovel, layer of salt, make wells in the salt and heat over the forge, crack the eggs into the wells and hold over the coals and cook :p]
Saint Cad, you are stealth bragging. You sound like a very good cook, your SIL sounds like a pretty good cook of the every day family variety. Every day cooks have to cook with what they’ve got in the pantry, and it all has to get done in the 45 minutes between coming home from work, and the moment when the family starts making their own P&J sandwiches or starts picking up the phone order pizza.
If I were her, I don’t think I would be very encouraged to cook better by your attitude.
When I was high school age I was over a girlfriend’s house. Her (older) brother asked her to make him something to eat because he was hungry. She dismissively told him to make a can of soup. An hour or so later there’s a commotion in the kitchen.
Her brother had put the whole can of soup in a pot with a little water, unopened.
I’ve heard you can roast a chicken in rock salt. You’re supposed to add just enough water to the rock salt to make it sticky but not dissolve it. Then you pile it all over the chicken. You want to have a thick solid coat that seals the chicken in. Then you put it in the oven. The heat will melt the salt into a solid coating and prevent any juice from leaking out. When you’re done cooking, you can just crack off the salt shell.
The chicken was raw. And after making the “soup,” I have no idea what was done with the chicken. But we sat around the table eating this liquid. My friend and I were trying not to laugh, as we did our best to swallow some of the crap and compliment the chef. It was basically slightly salty hot water with a vague taste of indeterminate poultry. I don’t remember whether any of us got sick, but I know we survived.
My neighbor many years ago told me that his wife wanted to surprise him with roast duck. She found a recipe and somehow had the idea that she was supposed to pour brandy on top of it, rather than incorporate it into a sauce. So she dumped about a half bottle onto the thing and shoved the pan into a 350 gas oven. When the burner ignited to bring the temp back up to snuff, it pretty much destroyed the duck and blew the oven door open.
I had another colleague who loved bean soup. His wife had zero grasp on cooking techniques, but knew that she hated the resulting fartfest from making the soup. So she asked the neighbor guy if there was anything she could do to reduce the explosions. He told her (with a straight face), that she needed to gut all the beans to release the gas. He came home to a very frustrated and weepy wife and had a few words with the neighbor.
The same colleague came into work one morning with some serious bandages on his fingers. His wife, who was Filipina and didn’t have a firm grasp of English at that point, was trying to chop up meat in the blender and of course the thing jammed. So John tells her "Okay, I’m going to unclog it, but DON’T turn it on when I’m doing it. Of course the inevitable happened, slicing two fingers to the bone. After he told me the story I asked why he hadn’t unplugged the thing. “Didn’t think of it.” :rolleyes:
My own tear gas story: while seasoning fajita meat in a very hot pan, I picked up a plastic bag of piri piri powder (very hot ground red pepper) and, being too lazy to walk over and get a spoon, attempted to sprinkle some into the pan from the bag. A giant clump hit the sizzling fat and I honestly thought I was going to die as a result. To this day the slightest amount of that gas in the air when I’m cooking makes me feel like I’m having an asthmatic attack. :smack:
Why on earth did you willingly eat something strained through a raw chicken?! :eek:
Hah - my brother did much the same thing. He added the “cheese” to the boiling water when he poured in the pasta. In his defense, he realized immediately what he’d done.
My cousin volunteered to man the grill at a cookout and was about to put the cheese on the uncooked side of the burger before flipping them (so that the cheese would be between the girll and the meat) until I stopped him.
Wow. And here I thought you were right and I had made a “worst-case scenario” error. I’m pretty, well, not exactly food safety conscious when it comes to eating, but even I would not eat something strained through a raw chicken.
Never seen this done with chicken, but have used it for whole fish several times. Works wonderfully.
I have done it with chicken. The recipe I used (from a Culinary Institute of America cookbook) said to add some egg white to the salt to help hold it together. The end result was an amazingly delicious, juice, tender bird.
Of course, it required a bit of work to crack that mound of salt open, it was pretty bricklike. I seem to recall we had to whack it a few times with our sharpening steel.
Side note: The box of rock salt from one grocery store says “useful for ice cream etc”. The bag, from the other store, also said that. However, it may not have said “rock salt”. Unfortunately I wasn’t paying attention when I tore it open and poured it into the bowl with the egg whites… and I found that not only was it not rocklike, it contained bits of what looked like gravel.
A quick trip to the other store, for more eggs and the right kind of salt, and dinner was back on track.
To your palate, maybe. Sounds fine to me. A bit on the salty side, maybe, but bfd. It would probably taste better than a lot of the things I’ve had served to me cooked “The Right Way.” Pro tip: there is no Right Way to cook things, only ways you and your food audience do or don’t like. You don’t like the way she cooks things, and that’s okay; she probably doesn’t like the way you cook some things, so it all balances out.
Also, if you offered me the sort of look down your nose “help” you seem to offer your sil, you would be cordially invited, at the point of my chef’s knife, to get the fuck out of my kitchen. Yes, I use margarine instead of butter. I like it better that way; if it ain’t good enough for you, there’s bread and peanut butter in the fridge, and an assortment of jams in the fridge. Knock yourself out.
Apparently, the roommate wasn’t much of a chef, either …
The salt used for making ice cream is just added to the ice water bath outside the container. It never comes in contact with the ice cream.
So when a bag of rock salt tells you it’s useful for making ice cream, it’s the equivalent of saying it’s useful for salting driveways - ie it’s not useful for any normal food preparation.