Chicken Ratatouille

Aafreen Mahmood • September 22, 2009

This week we try not to offend the French population as we have a go at Chicken Ratatouille

Every two weeks, culinary noobs Julian (Laguisma) and Child (Minh Bui) get together to create some kind of perversion of a dish, and we make El Estoque eat it! This week’s dish was Chicken Ratatouille.

Send us food requests that you think we could try in the next episode by writing in the comments on elestoque.org

What else went wrong

Hello Julian (and) Child Viewers!

As you know, many things never go according to plan, and we’re no exception. With that said, here’s a little summary of what went on behind the scenes, what you (fortunately) didn’t get to see:

1. We went shopping to get ingredients that we did not already have. While we were there, we, being the noob cooks we are, got into an argument over which two pick of two kinds of parsley: Italian parsley and Cilantro parsley

2. As dutiful followers of instructions, we opted to buy the stated amount of mushrooms in the recipe. However, as we found out while chopping the mushrooms, half a pound of mushrooms is a lot of mushrooms. We didn’t need all of them. We ended up with a quarter pound of extra mushrooms.

3. Something that we couldn’t agree on was how to chop the vegetables. There were no explicit instructions on how to cut the vegetables, so we ended up with different thoughts on how to cut the vegetables. Needless to say, our vegetables had very interesting shapes and variations.

4. Never heat up water and oil in a pan. When we were measuring out the ingredients, I spilled the oil out of the dish and had to remeasure and replace it. I washed out the old oil and so when we went to heat up the oil, the water boiled and started popping and crackling. Adding in vegetables while dodging burning oil is not the most fun thing to do.

5. The last thing (thankfully) that went wrong is that while we were cooking everything, some food fell under the pan. Onto the stove. You know the part where Minh does those fancy tosses with the pans? Yeah, he’s not that good. He practiced that the day before with M&M’s. the M&M’s broke. Food cooking smells great. Food burning, not so great.