What's cooking? part 4

Last night I cooked a bulb of fennel and half an onion down to almost a paste, added a bunch of garlic, a bit of tomato paste, saffron, some pernod, some wine, and stock, cooked some fingerling potatoes for ten minutes or so and added a couple of cod pieces to just cook through. Served with crusty bread and some aioli.

Right now I'm about to make some pizza dough for later (one with sausage and onion, the other with spanish chorizo, some more potatoes, and goat cheese) and cut up and marinade a leg of lamb for a vindaloo that I'll start today and warm up again for dinner tomorrow with roast cauliflower and rice.

It's funny how different I cook and what I want to eat when it starts to be grey and rainy out.

J. made butternut soup last week, yes to curry powder. It was so delish!

joygoat: sounds really tasty, like yummmmmm

It's funny how different I cook and what I want to eat when it starts to be grey and rainy out.

no kidding! i'm a roasting baking cooking maniac all of a sudden even though i have spent the last few months just kind of assembling/arranging.

currently roasting a bunch of beets and sweet potatoes
not sure what i'm going to do with them yet

There's roasted broccoli in my near future, plus am considering making cookies. COOKIES! ME! Spice ones, anyway.

i'm making smita chandra chicken curry and potatoes. i didn't peel the ginger :o

http://i.imgur.com/50cVk.jpg

l-r: harbl, ginger

I made the most amazingly simple but delicious dinner on a compelte whim last night: took 2 big fillets of salmon, made a little foil pocket for them, drenched em in lemon juice and sprinkled fresh dill and spring onion slices on top, wrapped it up and baked them for 15 mins. Juicy lemony amazingness. Had them with some buttered potatoes and some steamed kale and csrrots, cannot believe how easy and fckin delicious it was. I wish salmon wasnt so pricey. I'd eat it way more often.

oh yum, I love salmon! csrrots too :)

too warm to cook veggies for dinnner, decided to give this kale slaw a whirl (no fennel so doing celery & red pepper for added crunchiness and adding cherry tomatoes to the mix.)
http://www.eatingbirdfood.com/2012/04/let-them-eat-vegan-kale-slaw-recipe-review-and-giveway/

kale is super-cheap atm, love having so many bunches to play with!

hey guys this is a secret but the best vegetable is actually pea sprouts

http://i.imgur.com/P8CA2.png

if you come across them in an asian supermarket buy some and do a simple stir fry!

yes! i love them wilted down a bit with garlic and peanut oil

except that unless i cut them up they slide down my throat prematurely and make me choke

love them! I put them in salads sometimes, but I've never stir fried them! I will try that.

I meant to say pea shoots

but yes a simple stir fry with garlic, maybe 30 seconds to a minute total til wilted but still bright green BOOM

sometimes I wish I was always alone forever because I cook better when I'm alone for some reason

but like to have any time alone ever these days is so rare idk

cook alone every day

kale is super-super cheap for me atm coz I am growing a ton of it. I wonder if it will keep growing now ive cut much of it back and the weeather is warming up.

Also "csrrots". tch. >_<

Well, I still haven't used the sweet potatoes I roasted, but I'm thinking soup or a mash of some kind, maybe with greens? i dunno.

The beets, however, have been wonderful! Last night I sauteed the roasted beets with kale and served with my favorite farmer's market sausage + some couscous blend thing from TJs that is my go-to easy side. Today I sauteed the beets with more kale and some leftover tofu from ? nights ago, splashed with ponzu, topped with sesame seeds, the end. It's delicious.

The beets are expecially good. Those of you who think you hate beets, have you ever tried golden beets? They have a slightly less earthy flavor and look lovely on a plate.

i love roasted beets

Highly recommend the second thing I described if you're looking for easy weeknight meals. (I know you were looking for stuff like that on some thread? I think?) Get some prepared tofu from whatever sort of store sells such things near you and all you have to do is spend ~40 min roasting the beets and you can put them in different things all week. I think this took me ~5 min to make.

Storm cooking thus far has been a smoked pork stew (onion pepper tomato garlic blackbeans hominey anchopowder) and hummus. I was never able to make really good, silky hummus until the Vitamix came into my life. So simple, sooooo good!

I picked a bit of kale and chard from the garden this a.m.; it is the tender small inner leaves, figure I should do something with them raw or very lightly sauteed.

(You can prepare your own tofu too easily, but if you're looking for ease of shopping/less time spent, prepared tofu will do.)

Mmmm that stew sounds like something I haven't made in forever. Good call. Like posole!

Yes, posole-ish! I love hominy a LOT.

Tera makes really great posole, never thought I liked hominy until she made it for me.

I need to investigate more uses for hominy--the flavor and texture is great (imo), but I've never experience it outside of grits and posole. Maybe some sort of cheesy hominy casserole with carmelized onions and some good ole Tabasco, with aged cheddar? Or shimp and grits with whole hominy instead of grits? Or some sort of corned beef hash with hominy instead of potatoes? I wonder what the texture would be like were it pureed into a black bean soup type of thing. . . so much corn, so little time.

quincie do you have a recipe for your smoked pork stew/posole? i'd like to try it!

If I don't have cream of tartar for a baking recipe and it also calls for baking soda and I do have that, does it need another rising agent or something? Can I skip the CoT?

i'd go ahead and skip it -- what's the worst that could happen, flat cookies? who cares. they'll still taste good.

I'm going to make sweet potato, brocolli and chick pea curry. Hurricanes being out the domestic in me. I'd love to make cookies or brownies but I don't have any supplies. Maybe if the shops are open tomorrow.

No real recipe. Step 1 is to smoke a shitton of pork shoulder with a good dry rub on it, then freeze it in quart size freezer bags until the urge for stew hits.

I just sauteed some onion, hot pepper (in this case some sort of longish green hot pepper I got from the indian grocer, but jalapeno, serrano, all those work), garlic. Tossed in some ancho chili powder and let it warm up and bloom for a sec. Then some canned whole tomato with a glug of the juice (say 1/2 a 28 oz can of whole peeled tomato). I had a little bit of tomatillo salsa in the fridge, so I chucked that in to. Plop in the pork and a can of rinsed hominy and/or rinsed canned black beans, add some h20 or and/or stock to get it to whatever degree of soupiness you like, simmer for a bit and S&P to taste. Sometimes it isn't spicy enough for me, so I'll chuck in a minced chipotle canned in adobo.

When ready to serve, chuck in some chopped cilantro and a lot of fresh squeezed lime juice.

thanks quincie!

quincie do you cook homemade corned beef hash?? Do you use a brisket?

If I don't have cream of tartar for a baking recipe and it also calls for baking soda and I do have that, does it need another rising agent or something? Can I skip the CoT?

― purveyor of generations (in orbit), Monday, October 29, 2012 11:51 AM

Add some other mild acid. Cream of tartar is tartaric acid - it would mix with the baking soda to create CO2 bubbles to provide the leavening.

So corned beef takes at least a week to cure in a brine! Has anyone tried this?

Jaq, I looked it up and decided to sub lemon juice because I would quite like the cookies to be lemony actually...but the substitution says 1-1/2 tsp of lemon juice for every HALF TEASPOON of CoT--in my case, that's 6 tsp of juice! Is that a lot?

pretty sure if you do 6 tsps your oven will http://i.imgur.com/uPSTw.jpg

That's a lot of lemon juice! And seems wrong. But if you want lemony cookies, it might be just the thing.

(also maybe grate in some lemon rind)

i think zest might add a better lemony flavor than juice (because of all of the liquid) but that's just my guess

I already zested and added it to the cinnamon-sugar mix that you roll them in. :) 6tsp turned out to be roughly the juice of one lemon, btw.

I saw a substitution that said 1/4 tsp lemon juice for every 1/8 of tartar. Does that sound better?

seeking navy bean advice: I am a dried bean novice.

the soup I made yesterday called for 8oz of dried navy beans and 6 cups of water. bring to a boil, simmer for 2 minutes, and then stand for 1 hour. drain, make mirepoix etc add the beans back into the pot with stock etc and simmer for 1 and 1/2 hours.

by the end of the cooking time the beans were falling apart, but they were still kinda toothsome? like, not super hard but just not at all soft like I expected. I was running out of time so I just buzzed it with the immersion blender anyway. this happened the last time I made cannellini bean soup too, they just didn't ever soften the way I expected?

do u guys soak your beans overnight, or do a hard boil method...there's all kinds of back and forth on the websites i've looked at, some ppl say no never soak overnight u don't need to and some say OMG YES ALWAYS and I'm SO confused.

I just need a good bean approach so I'm not kinda sad about my bean soups.

or do white beans just not get soft. they didn't even really seem to swell up or get much bigger either, which I kind of thought they would?

Sometimes the rapid soak method works for me, sometimes not. One method I've used is to boil them hard for a half hour, add seasonings, then put them in a low/medium oven all day. Overnight soak never has never failed me yet. I think I read once that acid halts bean softening, so never put tomatoes or other acidic things in beans until after they're tender...

yeah I read that about salt too, it toughens the skins - stupid soup called for early salt grr

think I will attempt a different soup and do the overnight soak next time

Re salt, I've heard that the tough-skin thing is a bit of a myth, but I haven't done a Cooks-Illus. style test with multiple trials.

why bcz we have LIVES, cook's illustrated, LIVES