What's cooking? part 4

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.

I love the idea of this without the cheese! I like the texture of quiche but am not always in a cheesy mood. Worth a try imo.

I've done hand-cut soba noodles enough to want a pasta maker, but then I saw this thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rSdmWER6z8

i want that sobadly, udon even know

this q has been nagging me even though i would not have much use for a pasta machine: does extruded pasta have a noticeably different texture (or ew, mouthfeel, ugh) from rolled and cut pasta?

How the heck does quiche Lorraine not have cheese in it?? Thought it was always w gruyere or Swiss?

You can add cheese, and it tastes great, but the Lorraine region is nowhere near Switzerland (it actually borders Germany). The recipe I know has crème fraîche.

But is quiche a pie? :D

i'm making the rick bayless tomatillo chicken crockpot thing. smells like a big vat of salsa verde, which is good imo

I want a soba machine because we like it enough that we'd eat it three times a week. Real buckwheat noodles are fuuuucking expensive but buckwheat flour is not. The mouthfeel is superior with fresh noodles, yes. Boil them a minute and it's terrific. These are more of an udon cut, about 1/4" diameter. Tasty stuff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sexyoxen/16118022817

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sexyoxen/16117725009

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7542/16118022817_7a3a700539_c.jpg ?

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8623/16117725009_6a13d4cd9a_c.jpg !

no i'm not asking fresh vs. dried. also i think dried noodles have their place even if fresh is available. marcella hazan book says something about that. i'm saying like the noodle is pressed out from dough in the machine rather than being rolled into a sheet first then sliced like you did.

i mean i really like dried pasta

There is for sure a difference

holy god that noodle-maker upthread looks amazing, even if watching the noodle-extruding process gives me flashbacks to old play-doh ads

hi what miso should i buy and why?

Red, so you can make this:

Dice 1 aubergine/eggplant into 2cm cubes and fry in 3 or so tbsp oil for about 15 mins, with some sliced chilli. Mix 3 tbsp each of soy sauce, mirin, sake, caster sugar, add to the aubergine and cook for another 3 mins. Mix well 3 tbsp each of red miso and water, add and cook for another 2 mins. Serve with rice and spring onion garnish if you're feeling fancy. Serves two.

no i think i want yellow

or white, one of those two

i bought some barley miso impulsively awhile back and haven't opened it yet. i usu stick with white shiro miso on account of the fact that it's just SO damn versatile.
that red miso recipe up there looks awfully high in sodium (3 T soy AND 3 T miso for one eggplant seems slightly outta whack. wonder what it tastes like

gonna try and make a vegan marsala later with tempeh and mushrooms. never made it before but tasted a chicken version and i freaking loved the flavor

xp it's ok there's three tablespoons of sugar and of mirin to offset the salt! It's tasty, and simple - two out of three ain't bad.

Ok ok maybe 2 tbsp of everything per aubergine, god I've been making it long enough you'd think I could remember.

not trying to be a jerk. seems like a nice recipe i just get a little freaked out when i think about the sodium content of soy sauce. one tablespoon is roughly half the recommended daily intake of sodium (~900 mg and ~2000 mg, respectively)

How should I cook these cod filets?

i was just thinking about capers, lemon, dill, and white wine so if you have those things -- do that!

I have 1/4 of those things - lemon.

Other things I have: butter, olive oil, assorted other dried herbs spices (just no dill), canned tomatoes, beer, gin...

butter lemon and whatever herbs you have andlike sounds good to me!
maybe even add some beer?! who knows?

alternately dredge in flour + cayenne + whatever else and fry?

I think I'm going to go with the classic butter/olive oil and lemon.

stevie i have some thoughts on miso you should buy

even though you have already bought miso probably

it is just that i have made miso myself and feel somewhat entitled to an opinion #bragging

but for real though there are many different varieties of miso and many different use cases so it really depends on what you want to use the miso for. yellow or white miso is a good all around miso i think so you probably picked a good miso but red and other dark misos generally have more complexity (they are aged longer and have more salt content). that doesn't mean red is better, just that red generally has a more deeper and stronger flavor. red miso is typically more of a winter miso, and white is more of a summer and warm weather miso. they are all good though and miso in general is just pretty amazing.

Cod has probably already been eaten but I love doing this with cod fillets:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Roast-Fish-Palermo-Style

Or something to that effect with similar ingredients.

I also love sauteeing them serving over chickpeas simmered in chicken stock with some saffron and a lump of butter mashed with smoked paprika, garlic, and sherry vinegar on top. If you have chickpeas and good chicken stock (and saffron, smoked paprika and sherry vinegar I guess, which I always do) this is super fast and feels kinda fancy.

if you are going to buy miso in a store then south river miso is a REALLY good brand to buy, they make it the old-fashioned way in western massachusetts on a farm and they are what i call "first wave vegetarians" (obviously not really "first-wave" but they are the real-deal back to the land 70s hippie vegetarians) and their miso is widely available in health food stores. all their varieties are outstanding ime and you can buy red, white, yellow it doesn't matter from them, they are all good

I used to work at a health food store that sold miso in bulk from big tubs, they only had barley and brown rice and they were v dark and rich. I used to just buy a big spoonful at a time and then mix it w hot water in my mug, I wd do it like 2x a shift every shift

Oh yeah we sold that stuff plus the miso master

oh rad, those big tubs sound great!

miso master is also pretty good ime. i have been less impressed by the mass-produced smooth pureed misos from many japanese brands i see in asian grocery stores, the texture is too smooth and they are sometimes pasteurized which ruins one of the main benefits of miso.