So what have you cooked lately? (Year three!)

Yesterday and tonight: Strawberry marmelade. (It's currently *resting*.) This is my first attempt at making a marmelade. I'm a bit paranoid as the writers (of the recipe book) are extremely strict about using non-blemished fruit. That said, I hope this work, cause then up is an apple marmelade. Might try this tonight as well. And later on I will atempt a banana marmelade.

I also made a meatloaf (from a children recipe book) with some carrots in it. As a side dish a veggie sauce and boiled potatos in the skin.

Hmm. I think as long as you cut out the bad bits, you're fine. Surely the point of making jam is (or was in ye olden tymes) that you can use up your about-to-rot glut?

Cauliflower zucchini (?) chick peas curry. Very VERY good. Even if I forgot to add a bit of yoghurt.

gosh, i've been really delinquent again lately. i've boiled dumplings and made salads and the like, but nothing much beyond that. i did some stuff while we were in the country for the 4th of july weekend, but it wasn't very complicated - mainly just grilling fresh vegetables and fish. tonight we're having flat iron steak (also known as top blade steak), which i just threw into a marinade of soy sauce, molasses, key lime juice, garlic, oil, and rice vinegar. i've never tried this cut before, but the butcher (a dead ringer for 50 cent!) sold me on it.

http://therealdjwreck.com/catalog/images/WRECK-REALBEEF-FRONT-72.jpg

HA!

Baked rice (with mushrooms, carrots, onion, spring onion, bell pepper, ham and egg).

It cooled down a bit outside, so roasted a chicken for dinner tonight. I've been really uninspired about cooking lately. I did make a weird but tasty breakfast this morning though of leftover roast pork cut into medium dice and pan-fried until crispy, then added some rough chopped roma tomatoes while I made up two small french omelets. Squeezed a lime over the pork/tomatoes, and topped the omelets with the mixture.

Flat cake (see other thread). :-(

Gah, I am just not cooking these days. Pizza is about it for things that need a hot oven, otherwise it's "let's just chop something up and call it a salad". I am being a cooking enabler though - an officemate needed inspiration for some lamb so I brought her tagine spices and home-preserved lemons and the loan of a Moroccan cookbook.

Roast chicken, carrots roasted on the chicken fat, broccoli stir-fried with pine nuts and chilli and a sp[ot of herb risotto on the side.

Spinach with red onion, ham 'n' bacon over pasta. Not bad, but it won't be repeated too quickly unless I'm in dire need of some iron. ;-)

How do you preserve your lemons, Jaq? Do you manage to give them that sort of musky flavor that the real Moroccan ones have? Mine always wind up just tasting lemony and salty -- wonderful slivered on bread with olives and/or cheese, but lacking that note that makes a tagine complete.

I need to try a real Moroccan one! Mine remind me of lime pickle without any heat (so some cumin-like notes). There's something earthy in it, but not really pronounced. I used quartered Meyer lemons (had too many from produce delivery boxes) layered with koshering salt in a glass jar, left for 3 - 4 weeks in the pantry and turned every few days, then eventually put in the fridge.

Maybe it's the kind of lemons they use.

Was yours more of a dry cure rather than a brine?

Next I want to try making smen.

Much more a dry cure - I packed the layer with salt and squeezed the juice of maybe two in. For the first couple of weeks, the salt just looked damp. Even now, the salt/juice is a thick, opaque goo rather than a brine. I'd bet the type of lemon is a big contributor - I was reading about citrus species plasticity somewhere (Harold McGee's blog maybe?).

erm, layer(s) with salt

Eggplant parmesan, with fresh basil. Tomatoes, eggplants, basil, all from my garden. My favorite time of the year.

Great to see that there are people doing their own preserving too -- my extra tomatoes are sun-dried (very easy to do when you live where it gets to 100+ most days in July and August) or canned, and my eggplants are turned into babaganoush or relish and frozen.

(A new ilxer, still perusing the boards for the first time. Other then I Love Music, which is why I joined, an active I Love Cooking board is definitely the place I'd want to hang out . . . )

I can't find a good plasticlemon.jpg.

Paula Wolfert says "In Morocco they are made with a mixture of fragrant-skinned doqq and tart boussera lemons," mmm.

Hi Kenny!

Hi Kenny and welcome! Are you in the southwest?

A Lebanese friend of mine would char his surplus eggplants on the grill, peel then freeze the pulp to make babaganoush later. My current treatment for extra tomatoes is homemade tomato paste - I've made it up two years in a row now. I'm also especially proud of the air-dried ham we just opened last month (after 18 months of aging).

Wow -- meat preserving is more then I feel up to at the moment. I tried to can some chicken & squash soup I made with my excess yellow squash last year and failed -- thought I'd followed the rules but I guess not. I don't have a pressure canner, I use the hot bath method, so I think meat is simply out of range, and I've never eaten much dried meat.

I did buy a split-half of beef (quarter of a cow, 90 pounds) from a local organic farmer a month ago, though. I split it with two other families, so there was 30 pounds in my freezer. I live in farm country, so that kind of thing is available if you know where to look.

I live in Merced, California (north of Fresno), which isn't quite the southwest . . . it's a funny hybrid. It's desert weather in the summer -- 105 days, 70 nights, no humidity at all -- but it rains heavily in the winter and the snowmelt from the Sierras supplies water all year, so it's a good place to put farms, unlike the desert. Nearly 100% of the almonds grown in the US are grown within 30 miles of me, and plenty of other stuff as well.

There are days when I actually kind of miss the North Valley/Central Valley summers. (I used to live in Redding.)

Last night: salad nicoise. Little gem lettuce mixed with arugula, cherry tomatoes, steamed green beans, steamed baby new potatoes, all tossed with red wine vin+oliveoil+dijon vinegraitte. Topped with a couple of hard-boiled eggs, sliced, and the good tuna. Brilliant.

I do like a good nicoise, particularly as an excuse to scran large amounts of boquerones

I've had quite the cooking frenzy today:

vanilla ice cream with a bit of creme fraiche for a bit of tang
Potato salad with a mayo, creme fraiche and buttermilk dressing (also chives,radish and spring onion)
Green beans with a lemon vinaigrette
apple, blueberry and blackberry crumble
baked bean pie that Vic's finishing off as my insanely hot hands make pastry handling troublesome. (it's not as ghastly as it sounds hopefully - it's homemade boston style spicy beans topped with grated cheddar in apie crust..... could go either way)

oh and my first attempt at cornbread too, which looks pretty damn ok

I am intrigued by bean pie. Very intrigued. It all sounds pretty good (I am craving variety after spending the entire day knocking out roasts), the crumble in particular.

Argh, did a double-grind of about 8 lbs of pork shoulder + back fat for bulk sausage today. Still have to mix in the spices/salt and package it up in 1/2 lbs for the freezer, but needed a break. Bean pie sounds delish - I'd be tempted to do one up in the hotwater crust, like a pork pie. In the small size though, not the giant type.

I've got lamb to make up into a faux-tagine tonight and Mr. Jaq brought home some peaches that would be nice in a clafouti. I'm going to be traveling next week again, so even though it's damn hot and muggy I want to cook.

They're unorthodox, but yesterday I made modified samosa-calzones (wheat pizza dough with samosa filling) for future lunches:

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1138/897478418_b1dd31d4f7.jpg

not exactly cooking, but I made pesto from a giant handful of home-grown basil today. Just pignolias, basil, olive oil and salt. Next time, some garlic goes in.

the bean pie worked great, just the right side of stodgy, but it held together very well. The cornbread I made was a bit dry tho.

Last night was my first ever mac and cheese, now that went well.

Beef Skewers. Another major summer thing. A friend is in from Oakland for a few days and yesterday I marinated beef overnight in a Cuban marinade (rum, orange & lime juice, oregano, cumin, salt & pepper) and skewered it with tomatoes, squash, onions, peppers. Served on a bed of couscous. The beef was from the split half (90 pounds) we bought from a local ranch about six weeks ago; the veggies either from our garden or the local CSA.

This time of year essentially everything I cook comes from our garden or a local farmer I know. That's been the one greatest thing about moving from the California coast into the Central Valley three years ago. (For music, it's been crappy; for food, it's been great.)

last night for my dad's birthday i made a lamb pizza with grilled eggplants and tomatoes, mozzarella and feta. i wanted lamb sausage but could only find ground lamb which i cooked with onions and spiced a little. it turned out deliciously which was nice because it was so simple!

A blenderful of green gazpacho. (using a tomato variety that's green when ripe) Looks like green goddess dressing.

Spinach, scrambled eggs, bacon and potatos. I also had some bechamel sauce with it. Not a big success. :-(

A co-worker GAVE me a whole fillet of wild-caught silver salmon from his weekend fishing trip! So that's tonight's dinner, quick seared in a hot cast iron skillet in a 450 deg oven for 10 minutes - dash of salt, grind of pepper, sprinkle of lime.

Sounds good, it never does to get too fancy with good fish.

Lamb's meat (sp?) with spinach and creamy tomato sauce. DA YUM .

I am going to make tartiflette over the weekend with the last of my reblochon.

Oh and I made banana cake with banana (duh!), raisins and chopped walnuts. YUM-MY

Lamb faux-tagine last night and a ginormous dutch baby for breakfast this morning. I forget sometimes how excellent a cast iron pan is for baking things, but it only takes one crispy shelled creamy centered pancake to bring it all back.

I made my first 'proper" pancakes. I need a pancake pan as the one we have is too large. But 2 out of the three attempts were rather yummilicious.

Tartiflette in August, Aldo? It's one of my favourite things but I've always thought of it as very winter.

I had some reblochon, so it made sense. Also, using a very light white helps.

Tonight I'm making flan (vanilla and pumpkin) to bring to dinner tomorrow night. The caramel smell is all over the house.

My lunch today was a few strips of sirloin rapidly seared in oil with diced chilli and smoked garlic, mixed with cous cous and coriander, dressed with a bit of oil and lemon juice and stuffed into pittas, six minutes start to finish (the steak was the last thing I did).

That sounds delicious! Yesterday at lunch one of my fishing co-workers brought in a pile of salmon he'd cured from the last weekend's catch. I was already nuking something else up, but am ready to accept his generous sandwich offer today.

The flans (from Mark Bittman's World's Best Recipes) looked awfully wiggly at the 45 minute mark last night, and even still at the 1.25 hour mark. But we'll see how they are tonight. The caramel worked out well - I love watching sugar syrup transform as it heats up: grainy, clear and thin and small bubbles, thicker and weird quilted pattern of bubbles, giant almost fizzy bubbles, thick and golden and barely bubbling, then suddenly darker and thinner and boiling again and ready to coat a ramekin.

Oh man, I want to work in a place where my co-workers bring in piles of self-cured salmon...
Admittedly it would be a bit of a busman's holiday, but there you go. It'd be nice if the rest of them had a bit of enthusiasm.
Dinner was a quick fry up of chorizo, broad beans and onion, again with chilli and smoked garlic (from the marvellous Port of Lancaster Smokehouse, the best kippers I've ever had).

(also the purveyors of the best kippers, I should say)

I had some of his salmon on a slice of dark russian rye, smeared with sour cream and a bit of grated ginger - really really great. He's bringing in some more tomorrow! He declined to taste my air-dried ham, even after I didn't get botulism poisoning from it. I'll have to think of something else to make to pay back his kindness. It's cooling off enough here that cooking/baking sound appealing again.

I think I'm going to hit up my co-worker who has a near-industrial smoker (also, he's the ocean-fishing organizer) to smoke me some garlic, because that sounds excellent.