Cooking experiments gone terribly right!

[Hunter_Hawk]

@Hockey_Monkey

I made a pot roast once when I didn’t have any wine, so I dumped in a few tbsp of a sweet hot mustard and about half a jar of peach jelly.

Try baking chicken breasts slathered with a 1:1 mix of dijon mustard and orange marmalade (you’ll probably want to cover the dish for part of the time). Make extra so you can use the leftovers to make chicken salad.
I tend not to be tremendously experimental in the kitchen, but I once made a really fabulous nectarine tart just eyeballing the proportions of the filling.

Ditto for hummus, come to think of it–hummus is one of those astonishingly easy recipes (can you stir? in that case, you can make hummus), but people seem to be easily impressed by it.

[Little_Plastic_Ninja]

The fellow who introduced me to really good hummus (secret: more garlic, more olive oil) also created the most impressive leftover mashed potatoes ever. I seem to recall they involved cinnamon and a little extra butter. We baked them into scones.

I wish I knew where he was so I could marry him.

[pulykamell]

Being of Polish heritage (parents born there) and having lived in Hungary for several years, I decided that I would try crossing two of my favorite dishes from each country: pierogi and chicken paprikash. I’ve only made it twice, because it’s a pain in the backside to make pierogi, but it was fantastic.

Basically, you cook chicken paprikash the normal way (onions, paprika, sour cream, chicken, lard/oil, salt.) Remove chicken and shred. Wet the chicken mixture with some of the paprikash gravy. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper. Stuff pierogi with chicken mixture. Boil pierogi, and serve with more paprikash sauce ladled over the pierogi. I like to also garnish with fresh dill and perhaps a little bit more sour cream in drops to make the plate a bit more colorful.

You can also make this with veal instead of chicken.

[badbadrubberpiggy]

Not mine, but my father’s: The Upside Down Turkey

The first time my father made a whole turkey, he accidentally put it in upside down, but didn’t realize it. The whole time it was cooking, he couldn’t figure out where there were hardly any drippings at the bottom of the pan. He finally figured it out when he went to carve it, and couldn’t get any meat off the “breasts” (ie, the back). Flipped it over, and we had the best, juciest Thanksgiving bird ever.

It doesn’t work well if you want all the skin to be crispy, but I don’t eat the skin anyway, so I always cook whole chickens/turkeys upside down.

[don_t_ask]

@Shalmanese

Vegemite-Parmesan Cheesecake

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Go ahead. Mock us. Tease us with your mythical “Vegemite” Cheesecake. But forget about Australian of the Year, we’ll give it to some footie player instead.

[Wile_E]

@katie1341

This isn’t nearly as creative as what y’all have already posted, but one night I was going to make stuffed chicken breasts, which requires breading. I was, however, out of eggs. So I dipped the chicken in some honey-mustard salad dressing, and it turned out really, really well. I’ve done it that way on purpose a few times since.

I do something similar when making chicken nuggets. I use chicken breast or tenderloins and cut them into nugget size and then dip in ranch dressing and roll in Italian bread crumbs and then I bake them. The bottoms get a little soggy but the nuggets themselves are great, my boyfriend was really impressed. I’ve thought about baking them on a rack to see if the bottoms would get crispier.

[Athena]

@badbadrubberpiggy

Not mine, but my father’s: The Upside Down Turkey

The first time my father made a whole turkey, he accidentally put it in upside down, but didn’t realize it. The whole time it was cooking, he couldn’t figure out where there were hardly any drippings at the bottom of the pan. He finally figured it out when he went to carve it, and couldn’t get any meat off the “breasts” (ie, the back). Flipped it over, and we had the best, juciest Thanksgiving bird ever.

It doesn’t work well if you want all the skin to be crispy, but I don’t eat the skin anyway, so I always cook whole chickens/turkeys upside down.

That’s actually a pretty common trick to doing a turkey. If you want the skin crispy, just turn the turkey over in the last 30-45 minutes of cooking and voila, you have juicy breast with crunchy skin.

[Athena]

OK: my cooking experiment, which finished about 3 minutes ago.

Last week, I was at a local restaurant where we know the owners. Mr. Athena happened to mention to them that I’d just made a whole pile of chicken stock, and they asked me how I made it. I started to tell them, mentioning that I use whole chickens and wings and such because I rarely have enough chicken carcasses.

“We have tons of chicken carcasses! Want em?” asks the owner.

“Sure!” I said, and didn’t think any more of it.

Last night we went back to said restaurant. I didn’t even remember the whole exchange. Owner comes running over: “I have chicken for you!”

When we leave, he hands me a bucket, with TWELVE pounds of chicken carcasses. What he didn’t mention previously is that they were from his other restaurant, a BBQ place. They were smoked chicken carcasses.

Wow, Smoked Chicken. I wasn’t sure how that was going to turn out, but what the hell? I threw 'em in a pot and made stock with them today.

Results: pretty damn good. Not horribly versatile - you don’t want everything tasting of smoke - but for some things it’s gonna be great. It’s not horribly smokey, in fact, though it smells of smoke, it doesn’t taste really smokey.

I threw together a test batch of corn/chicken chowder using it, and oooooh my Og, it’s so good. Probably the best corn chowder I’ve ever made.

It’s gonna be great for chili, too. And heck, plain ol’ chicken dumpling soup will probably be nice with it.

I am now stock flush: in the past month, I’ve made ten+ quarts of chicken stock, 12+ quarts of beef stock, and now at least 12 quarts of smoked brown chicken stock. Holy shit. Plus the restaurant owner told me he can get me veal bones.

Just call me stock girl.