So, the Chile Crisp is, in theory, a pretty simple thing: You fry some shallots and garlic, get them golden brown and crunchy, then infuse the oil you cooked them in by frying some dried peppers in it for a minute, then blitz the peppers into chunks, and mix it all back together. I think I was trying to delay needing the cornbread, since it hadn’t even fully DRIED: the outsides had darkened before the insides desiccated! Despite the Crisp having a cooking time of 40 minutes, meaning it could be done, in totality, while the stuffing was in the oven, I decided to make it first for reasons that I cannot explain. In that I started the Chile Crisp BEFORE I started the rest of the stuffing. (which, all told, cost us 5 ounces of cornbread, through lost water and crumb) Meanwhile, I…did something stupid. I forced Nate to stop watching one of the three football games of varying degrees of unimportance he was watching that afternoon to help me by scraping off all the overly browned bits on the cornbread. Some my cornbread ended up less “dry with some browning on the edges” than, well… “very browned, veering into char”.Ĭornbread Crouton sounds like a weird Southern band. Except DON’T do that, because, fun fact, the recipe says to dry it at 325 degrees, not 400. Just throw the oven to 400 degrees, cut up the cornbread into chunks, and toss it in to dry. I MEASURED.)īut so, I began the day with a simple task: dry out the previous day’s cornbread in the oven, so it can absorb everything later. Which is about 2.5 inches under where would be comfortable for ME, a problem WORSENED by the fact that the built-in cutting board is another 1.5 inches under the lip of the counter. (And, while I know no one wanted an update: my kitchen counters are actually exactly average height. I knew in my heart that there was at least another 30 minutes of shit to do, because I am TERRIBLE at mise-en-place, partly because, as I complained in the Shaking Beef post, my counters are too low. So, Sunday rolled up, and my schedule was pretty clear: about 2.5 hours of cooking to achieve in…7 hours before an evening rehearsal. )Īnd that was the last time things were truly good. I don’t have much in either category to cover. And also, I mean, this is CORNBREAD STUFFING, and this specific recipe was invented 4 months ago. (Oh, yeah, there’s a reason we didn’t do 900 words of history and etymology: this is a full-bore rootin’ tootin’ catastrophe. That little mishap out of the way, it was time for the only part of the process that didn’t technically go wrong, and STILL wasn’t quite right. Or I suppose CALL the stores and ask, like it’s the 1980’s or something. I had to (and this may be one of the bougier sentences I’ve ever uttered) convince my brother to stop off at the Fred Meyer after an evening of theatre (Macbeth) and alcohol (A pre-show Scotch tasting), where we found all three pepper varieties needed. And because I’m a dick, I said “You know what, I’ll prove that even step TWO of the process isn’t that hard! Cornbread stuffing and chile crisp!” And discovered that my local Safeway was out of dried chiles (well, the right kind of dried chiles. And you could COMBINE the stuffing, the crisp, and more ingredients, to make a stuffing Fried Rice. You could also make a “chile crisp”, to add a little depth and heat to it. You could just make the stuffing, and be fine. See, one of the things I complained about was that people weren’t ‘stopping’ at the right point: The video has, basically, three recipes, for three “stages”. So I buckled down, went shopping, and almost immediately proved people right by being an asshole about it. I understand that’s confusing, but please, believe and/or laugh at it. The SECOND thing I would like them to do is take me seriously. And if there’s one thing I want people to do, it’s laugh at me. Long-term, it turns out basing your self-confidence on being challenged has some downsides.)Īnd so I paused the OTHER cooking plans I had, because, as my brother pointed out, it would be a dick move to prove I had the perfect Stuffing recipe 3 days before Thanksgiving, and expect you to read, shop, cook, and bask in that narrow window, so we had to make it TODAY if we wanted to be taken seriously. Hell, back in my younger days, it was something of a party trick: if someone dared me, or bet me, that I COULDN’T do something that I kind of wanted to, suddenly, not only was I IN, but it tended to go fairly well. Which is a pretty standard move for me: I will let my mouth talk a lot of shit, as long as I then at least ATTEMPT to back it up. The point culminated in point-ing (ha) out that people were over-stating how hard the Bon Appetit recipe for Cornbread Stuffing was to make, and/or convince people to eat and realizing, as I did so, that it would be quite bad form to say “You’re all being babies, this isn’t THAT hard to make”, and then not put in the effort to demonstrate how easy it was.
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