Summer Cooking- the Reflection, part 2

During the summer, a large part of learning about cooking was taking advice from more experienced members of my family about how they like to prepare, season, and cook their personal recipes. From family on my mom's side, I learned the fine art of frying as much catfish as possible in as short of an amount of time as one can, starting with the process of breading the fish.

My personal favorite, and coincidentally the one we used to make our catfish, is the crispy fish fry mix here, which uses cornmeal and a variety of spices to leave an amazing aftertaste and a healthy amount of crunchiness with the fish.

When actually cooking catfish, the most important thing is even distribution of fish in the oil. Once the oil hits the perfect temperature, you need to get as much fish in the oil as possible, without allowing too much of the breading to fall in, but also making sure you place it in fast enough that everything has enough time to cook completely through and the breading comes out nice and crunchy.

Done correctly, the catfish comes out a light golden color and remains crispy, and from there all one needs to do is place it into a pan with a few paper towels lining the bottom of the pan to collect any excess oil that drips off. 

8/30/2017

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey's destruction, I've finally been able to get out of my house and help out with collecting, sorting, and putting together donations. Having to sit at home while most of the ways out of my neighborhood were flooded entirely, I had a lot of time to think about the impact of natural disasters and really take in all of the news coverage of the flooding and resulting displacements of people. Seeing the devastation at an age when I'm actually capable of really comprehending just how badly people are affected by severe weather only gave me the desire to get out and do something, and today has been a good start to get myself working. With Post Oak hosting their donation drive, I decided I would head over and not only donate, but stay and help organize the supplies other people were bringing. Working there really helped to serve as a reminder that there is still hope after a disaster, because even if everything is going awfully there's still a chance for recovery with people working together.

Summer Cooking- the Reflection, part 1

Over the summer, I worked on many occasions on improving my cooking, focusing on learning new recipes and then further improving them as much as I possibly could. For a large part of the second half of summer, I first learned, then gradually improved my bread baking skills, messing around with different ratios of white to wheat flour, allowing it to rise for different times, changing cook times and temperature, and adjusting the amount of time I was kneading the dough for. While cooking has always been a favorite activity of mine, if I want to get anywhere in the culinary industry I not only need to work on the quality of my cooking, but also on the speed which I can get good food out of the kitchen and onto the plates of any customer.

One of the dishes I worked on this summer was a stir fry, which I cooked alongside Caleb Han. The two of us decided to make enough stir fry for 12-15 people, since I was hosting an event at my house, and we both wanted to do something relatively simple as part of the process.

The meat portion of the stir fry was a teriyaki chicken, which we mixed with a vegetable blend containing sugar snap peas, mushrooms, carrots, water chestnuts, and more, all designed to be both healthy and filling as possible. 

 This is only about half of the meat and the vegetables mixed together- the other half is in the pan from the first picture! The hardest part of this process was making everything cook evenly, since we were working with such a large quantity of ingredients. If anything is under-cooked, it can ruin someone's day with food poisoning afterwards, and that's something I'd rather not cause anyone.

After everything was cooked, all there was left to do was mix in more teriyaki and finish cooking the rice! As most of stir fry is the vegetable and meat mix, there wasn't as much rice as there was other ingredients, but there was still enough for most people to get themselves a second helping.

1/14/2017- End of Student Heroes

As of today, my time with the Houston Food Bank has ended for this cycle. I might be signing on for a second term with their Student Hero program, where students serve as supervisors and answer questions volunteers have about the food bank and the process they're working on inside the food bank. I enjoyed the program while it happened, but now as i'm trying to improve both my grades and physical fitness I'm not sure how often I'd be able to take part in the Student Heroes program during the new cycle.

1/7/17- Computer Buying

As part of the J-Term I've chosen/been assigned to (and am very okay with being assigned to), Compute a Computer, the group is building the best computers possible on a budget of $300. As we started off the course, the overall idea shared was to build a gaming computer, and as such most of the builds we created focused around gaming performance.  However, as the week progressed and we drew closer to our MicroCenter visit, where we'd buy the first components of our rigs, I focused my build both around having a strong processor and graphics card. As we continued on into the second week, I had the goal of overclocking my computer in mind after assessing it's overall performance.