What's cooking? part 4

I resolved to make steak and kidney pudding this weekend, so the filling is going on once I've had my lunch for the pudding tomorrow.

i made ropa vieja for dinner

:D

hey i want to make tamales! they are one of my favorite foods and i've wanted to make them for years but never have. have any of you folks made them?

nope bc i've heard they are the sort of thing you have to make a ton of and then freeze, and my freezer doesn't have that much room for tamales in it
i like them though
if you can eat it, you can wrap some corn masa around it, wrap it up in a leaf and call it a tamal

I've made them a couple of times, but last time was probably 20 years ago. A good bit of work, easy to oversteam -- I decided to leave it to the pros.

i was at the indian store yesterday looking for zaatar (the guy said "no zaatar! it's finished!") and got bulgarian sheep's milk cheese just because. turns out to be feta-like but not feta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirene. i saw this stuff at whole foods, where it is labeled as bulgarian sheep's milk feta, i think. but costs 2x more! would buy again.

very acidic and salty though!

interesting! the feta i always buy is bulgarian feta. maybe it's the same thing? much much creamier and more flavorful than most other fetas, and it doesn't have that super-chalky texture. it's really amazing. on all my salad's i just crumble some of that with some olive oil and it has the perfect amount of acidity, i don't need any dressing with it.

probably the same. definitely a fattier kind of texture. i guess the acidity varies.

i impulsively bought a bag of spelt a while back, so tonight i mashed up a couple of recipe ideas and combined it with roasted parsnip, yam, and red onion pieces, plus brown butter and a tiny bit of soy/mustard/honey glaze. not bad as a side to pan-roasted salmon.

I GOT "HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING" FOR XMAS!!!!

This book is so BIG!!! How do I do this book??? Do I just sit and read it? Do I just kind of gradually absorb it over the course of many many years?

I randomly opened it to a page and there was ~BEER GLAZED BLACK BEANS~ on the page so I made them and they were gooooooood

Exciting! I think you put it under your pillow at night and hope your neck doesn't snap at that angle.

I made lamb plov at bf's house using his cookware and seasonings and it is not good. I mean it's not BAD because it's savory rice and lamb and cumin, but everything is cooked the wrong amount, the paprika is too strong, we couldn't find coriander anywhere. I'm making it at my house next time.

Just checking: there are plentiful carrots in this plov, yes?

Oh tons! The recipes all called for browning the lamb before the simmer, though, and the lamb ended up tough in the end. I'm wondering if it's worth browning oxtails or s/thing to get the fond on the pan without pre-cooking lamb before the rice and water go in.

yeah that could work. I will learn from you and then try my own - it's twenty yeeeears or so since I made it...

Also I need to fig out what cuts of lamb? We could only find whole frozen legs and I had to hack off the meat and then trim the tendons out, which took way too long.

Shoulder or ribs?

it is freezing here in boston so i was really craving fatty fried foods, so i made beer-battered onion rings at home in my cast iron skillet. they were really amazing but i ate waaaayyy to many and felt pretty gross. it satisfied the craving though. i had this really malty winter ale which was nice with the rings.

(this was last night, i didn't make onion rings and drink beer at 10am this morning)

Pity.

i had never heard of plov, need to make bc i love uzbek, but i think a boneless leg roast is not hard to find. i always get them at costco.

i got rick bayless mexican everyday. trying to make more cookbook recipes in '15. making oaxacan yellow mole. i never ate a chayote before. it says you can use chayotes or potatoes so i'm using both because i doubled the recipe, because who cooks just one pound of chicken.

pfft one pound does not compute

One pound seems silly, but I always cook enough for leftovers on purpose.

Creamy tomato soup made for lunch, a week's worth of eggs pressure steamed, 3 heads of cabbage shredded and packed in the awesome fermentation crock I got for xmas (sauerkraut 2015 rah!). Now to grate orange and mandarin zest to finish off this year's bitter-crafting.

dang

mr veg is making baked drumsticks and i'm making white bean kale & chorizo soup for dinner

i made ropa vieja for dinner

:D

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, January 5, 2015 4:10 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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Pounding shredded cabbage down into the crock with a sauerkraut stomper (basically a short baseball bat) is more fun than I expected. It didn't juice out very much though.

I also made ropa vieja for dinner! xp

hooray!

mine wasn't very pulled-looking, but the meat fell apart beautifully. so flavorful!

made this pureed soup with roasted red peppers and these BEAUTIFUL purple carrots i bought at a winter farmers' market, i just felt like i need some color you know? lots of ginger and garlic and tumeric in it, some cilantro and mint. in retrospect i think maybe regular orange carrots would've gave the soup a better color -- it would've been an orange-red but with the purple carrots it came out this hilarious, alarming shade of reddish-purple. we told our 2 year-old that it was a "purple smoothie" because it really looked like a mixed berry smoothie. haha. it was really tasty though. as it cooled the purple color became a little muted and all the reds started to come out more, which is good. now it's more of a dark beet red.

I made something close to the Madhur Jaffrey korma recipe but with adjustments here and there bc of what I had on hand and w/o yogurt, and it's just not...right. BUT I did work out some useful things.

1. Blend the cashews in the blender, instead of trying to crush w rolling pin or w/e. It's so much easier! Add chx stock or w/e for liquid.

2. XMAS IMMERSION BLENDER TO THE RESCUE!! Pureeing the soft onions & tomatoes made my sauce an excellent texture.

Now to fix the flavor....

Had a weird duck craving so I bought a duck. Cooked the breasts saturday with sweet potato hash browns and cabbage slaw with ginger, mustard oil, and rice vinegar.

Made chinese/Vietnamese-ish (ginger, cinnamon, star anise) stock from the carcass and roasted the legs yesterday to make soup with rice noodles, bok choy and shredded roast duck topped with green onion and cilantro.

I've never cooked a duck!

i've cooked some duck legs but never the whole thing

The upside to the less-than-ideal commute I have this month is easy access to the HMART and GREAT WALL mega-Asian grocery stores. Totally gonna get a duck--it will be relatively cheap so if I fuck it up I will not be as sad as if I had bled money for a Whole Foods duckie.

I think I did breasts once and they came out really great! Don't know why I have been hesitant.

I love HMart; it's always one of my four must-visits on grocery trips to Atlanta. Too bad they don't sell the frozen young galangal there anymore.

I made a potato-ham-corn chowder today that looks exactly like yellow curry, which made me think about 1/3 of a small can of yellow curry paste whisked into it would be really interesting.

last night i made arepas topped with a tomato-chickpea thing and some portabellos with melted raclette. it lacked variety in texture but tasted really good.

cabbage slaw with ginger, mustard oil, and rice vinegar.

Joygoat, please say more about this!

I had half a head of cabbage around and just cored it, sliced it super thin, salted it for a bit and tossed it with grated ginger, some indian mustard oil and rice vinegar. Was kind of last minute and I wanted something crunchy, sharp, acidy, and pungent to go with the duck breast and sweet potatoes and it worked pretty well.

I do this kind of thing with cabbage a lot, usually with garlic, fish sauce, lime, some sugar, and chiles of some sort for a fake thai papaya salad because I can't ever find green papayas unless I travel to a place with bigger asian markets.

Thanks! I need to play around more with crunchy, sharp, acidy and pungent things. I love them.

Bittman has a recipe for onion quiche w/ bacon in How to Cook Everything and well I just happen to have an abundance of eggs and also a spare pie crust and some leftover bacon, and i'm intrigued by this but this quiche has NO CHEESE!! That sounds crazy to me! How can this possibly be as good as quiche WITH cheese? I am adventurous and want to give this the benefit of the doubt so I'm just gonna try it as is once but how odd

Just put cheese in it. Bittman isn't God.

a really typical nz dish is bacon and egg pie - which usually doesn't have cheese - and it's DELICIOUS.

i don't believe it's necessary to follow recipes to the letter unless i have no idea what to do otherwise
do whatever you want -- it's your quiche!

or try it his way
it's def not worth sweating imo

Quiche Lorraine doesn't have cheese in it.