What's cooking? part 4

the egg in vegan cakes is usually replaced by flax meal or some other pea protein-based egg sub. the crust on top of these was fine - the problem was the fudgey part was pretty minimal. what about covering the dish with foil for 2/3 of the cooking time?

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5266/5614861222_94ce2d0b2d.jpg

Yuzu pie, huckleberries.

Had to google that. Never heard of a yuzu! It looks like custard pie tho!

It is - it's just key lime pie with yuzu juice instead of the key limes. You can see where the custard separated from the crust at the edge because I left it in too long (no timer, no watch, and when I switched to HD I found out my cable box no longer has a clock on it).

The weather's calling for slow cooking so I'm gonna throw on a pot of bolognese sauce for dinner tonight. I think to change up my usual I might add a couple good italian pork sausages to the mince mixuture if I can find some quickly after work.

The only disadvantage on a weeknight is I can only cook it down for about an hour (or we'll be eating at 10pm!) but thats ok.

Made this caramel chicken tonight after my mom suggested it would be a good way to take care of surplus chicken thighs. I was worried it would taste like, you know, caramel, but it is more fish saucy rich nom.

ooh i was just thinking about something like that the other day - there's a local vegan restaurant that does an amazing caramelized chicken i was wondering if i could imitate it. what do you think i could sub for the fish sauce? i have vegan hoisin sauce... would that do?

maybe soy mixed with something else?

soy is the usual substitute i think....i also think i've seen vegan fish sauce for sale, made from mushrooms or something.

so not fish sauce really.

According to The Internet, veg fish sauce is available commercially (this link I am reading says Vietnamese stores are a good source).

http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/.a/6a00d8341ef22f53ef013487c816d1970c-500wihttp://farm4.static.flickr.com/3249/2946691780_e49aca8507.jpg

I think soy + a little of the hoisin sauce would be a good sub in that recipe if you don't want to do Asian grocery detective work.

Recipes for cherry clafouti say to leave the pits in for the smell boost. Here: "Clafouti aficionados claim (and I believe them) that as the cherries bake, the pits give off a sexy, sensual scent that is missing from the pitted version." Ok ––– is this something that actually shows up in the flavor, too? I guess you guys wouldn't know? What a mysterious world we live in.

Maybe I could do a side-by-side of both & do the science for y'all. I have to say this is the #1 most vexing part of cooking for me tho.

It does, a bit like the difference in flavor between boneless meat and that cooked bone-in. More depth or something. Have you had the Armenian pastry from Costco that's made with mahlub? That's ground sour cherry pits, slightly almondy and nutty. Leaving the pits in adds some of that.

can i use all butter for a recipe that calls for butter + shortening?

Yep, might be more greasy but will taste awesome.

hmm any way to cut down on the grease? probably not...

i just don't feel like going to buy shortening

Try replacing a few tablespoons of flour with either rice flour or cornstarch. What are you making?

how is rice flour for baking? i have some sitting round from another recipe and was wondering if it would work in brownies.

If you mix it with wheat flour, it adds a lovely short crispness. Not sure if it can be baked with on its own. Have you tried coconut flour? It makes interesting brownies.

sandwich cookies!

i have some rice flour so i'll try that.

Recipes for cherry clafouti say to leave the pits in for the smell boost.

If you want the smell and flavor without spitting pits out later, you can crush the pits with a hammer and fish the little kernel out. That's where most of the flavor is - it'll smell like amaretto. I keep a bunch of cherry kernels in the freezer - frozen cherries come pitted, so I can toss a few kernels into a cherry pie or what have you and get a fuller flavor.

For that matter, you can use the kernels of any member of the prunus family - cherries/peaches/plums/almonds - to make creme de noyaux by steeping them in vodka. You'll find a lot of blog commenters claiming this is poisonous, and a lot of responders pointing out that they've done it for generations without being poisoned; believe who you like.

The cherry kernels are a major part of the flavor of maraschino liqueur, which is why fake maraschino cherries have almond flavoring added. Likewise the relationship is why you see a lot of cherry/almond pairings in desserts.

korean-inspired pancake tonight with baby bok choy, shrimp, scallions. i think there was too much flour in my batter (half reg, half rice), but still pretty easy and not bad on a saturday night.

Yum!! I've made a lot of soup lately (veggie & potato leek) and some serious dark chocolate peanut butter chip cookies. Nothing really noteworthy though.

I haven't made much of anything, and haven't really wanted to? I feel burnt out on cooking, have been happy to eat store-bought hummus and microwave things. It's lazy, I know. But it's okay.

Supposed to take an appetizer/canape item to a party tomorrow, though, and realized I had no idea what to do. Right now it looks like ricotta with lemon and honey and thyme, on toasted rounds? Have the ingreds but just not feeling confident about it.

bruschetta's always easy!

i had a week of not being home for dinner 4 nights in a row, so i am feeling especially inclined to cook this weekend.

two things:

i made moo shu (which i've never eaten before, surprisingly) with faux chicken and it was incredibly good! and easy! and i didn't have to buy any special ingredients!

how do you guys feel about pre-peeled garlic? like, is it ok to use or substantially inferior? i'm just so sick of peeling garlic - i use garlic in almost every meal i make and the stuff i've been buying the last 6 months or so is always comprised of these tiny cloves that are a total bitch to peel. also i am lazy.

I made the ricotta spread. It tasted fine, more sweet than savory but quite nice. I packed it with ice packs and cold packs and bundled it into an insulated bag and then went to do some stuff on my way to the dinner.

5 hours later, the spread was still completely cold but the lemon juice (at least I assume that's the culprit) had turned the cheese curds completely to liquid, useless for eating with my crackers. So I carried the damn stuff all over Brooklyn for nothing. Will probably flush it away tonight.

Otoh I made my fool-proof chix & bean & tomato soup on Sat and it is predictably yum.

I started using pre-peeled garlic because the quality of the unpeeled at my grocery store was so terrible for a while - you can see the peeled stuff, so I figured if it turned out to be not so great, at least I knew it wasn't dried out and/or moldy like the unpeeled - and I've pretty much kept using it since. It's probably not practical if you're going to keep it around for a long time, but I'll keep buying it at least until the spring garlic is available here.

Maybe there's a little bit of flavor loss, but supermarket varieties of garlic tend to be so mild anyway. It's definitely not the level of loss you get from pre-chopped onion or that kind of thing.

yeah that's the other thing - the quality of unpeeled is pretty terrible, lots of times i'll discover green shoots in the cloves which then have to be cut out. i wonder how well it freezes?? they sell pint containers of peeled stuff where i shop, but i don't know how fast i'd use that much.

hmmm... i've steered away from buying it, but the last 2 heads of garlic i bought either sprouted within 2 days or were dried/moldy and i am getting frustrated. although cheap, i still don't like throwing my money away.

You can always roast the excess. I assume garlic freezes fine, though - I know ramp bulbs do.

The pint containers are the ones I've been buying - it seems like a lot, but I also find myself using one or two cloves of garlic in a lot of things where I might not bother if I had to peel them.

^^ EXACTLY - sometimes i find myself cheating and just using garlic powder bc the effort of peeling it is too much.

roasting the excess is a brilliant idea.

it takes about 15 seconds max to peel a clove of garlic? I normally take my time cooking, w/ music &c., but I'm not too fussed about not being able to get this space age pre-peeled shit. plus popping garlic open is p good fun as prep goes. yr going to have to do the gentle-lean-onto-the-side-of-the-knife & chop/grind anyway.

to conclude, pre-peeled garlic seems gratuitous from a prep stand point

i don't mind peeling garlic at all, i just mind it going bad on me (or being bad when i buy it because i'm unable to tell through the skin/husk/whatever that is).

i never used to mind it, but when the cloves are so small that i have to use 8-10 every time, it gets to be annoying.

Prepeeled garlic is a gift from providence that you should never be ashamed to use

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/8marta.jpg

When I'm buying garlic I look for heads with big ol' developed cloves, like 38DD garlic.

I've thought about getting one of these, but I'm sort of like Alton Brown about gadgets that only have one function. But it does look like a time saver.

I've always sneered @ pre-peeled garlic but I've had terrible luck buying whole cloves lately too, even the good-looking ones will open up brown & funky or break down into 100 tiny impossible-to-slice pieces.

whole heads/tiny cloves I mean

try cruching them first it is heaps easier

that's right brodie! I've had some outstanding cloves lately guys, a real pleasure to worth with.

ATTN: LA LECHERA

hey lady, i know you're a beets fan from way back, thought you might like this recipe: http://guiltykitchen.com/2010/03/17/dijon-rosemary-chicken-and-roasted-beet-salad-with-horseradish-cream/

a veganized version is currently cooking; will report back on its success or failure

it was totally delish!!

Damn! That sounds good! I don't like cream much -- what did you sub? Could I leave it out?

i used a vegan sour cream - but that dressing makes TONS so you could heasily halve it and it would make plenty for two ppl. i didn't use buttermilk either - i used soymilk and curdled it with apple cider and lemon juice.

maybe use more yoghurt instead?

oh, i also made a veganized version of the chicken on that same page and it was just... goddamn. so good.

Oh you know what? I'll just make the beet part -- I don't really like chicken or cream that much anyway. I might steal the idea of using a dijon dressing, the heat from the beets to melt the goat cheese, and then using that as a quasi-sauce. I bet that would taste good with a side of whitefish seasoned with paprika/lemon. I'm not very keen on creamy foods, but slightly melted goat cheese is a-ok with me for some reason. Feta, even. (*not* on top of the fish, haha)

Does anyone have a feta preference? My grocery has French, Bulgarian double cream, Greek, and domestic. I usually buy what's on sale, but I love the French because it's so smooth and not as one-note salty as the domestic.

the dressing is essentially an eggless mayonnaise, so it is super creamy. this was my first time roasting beets! so good! they got super caramelised and were just so much better than i anticipated. great with the avocado too.