what's cooking? part 5: 2017-2027

This is barely cooking, but sourdough toast with lots of butter and salt and pickled watermelon radish is such a satisfying breakfast.

Spring makes me want to eat all the radishes

if any of y'all have been thinking about rendering your own tallow i can recommend that you don't

had a lamb leg in the freezer from '22, trimmed the fat before roasting it, mentioned all the gnarly leftover fat to mr. cat who got excited because one of his ayurvedic physicians recommended him lamb fat once, for to help him sleep. can't be too hard to melt out the tallow, i figured, and it'd be a shame to waste any more of the poor critter than necessary. so i looked up some how-tos and yeah, turns out it's a simple thing to chop up the fat and toss it in the slow cooker w/ some water for a spell but ho.lee.sheeeeeep. does the process ever stank. nevar again, ugh ack barf puke

he really likes the tallow tho so maybe we can find some cute cuddly hippie shepherds nearby who raise their lambs with all the ethical whatnots before they ice them, mebbe buy some lamb tallow already made like proper consumers

I've always found lamb fat has a funk that beef and pork don't.

you bet your bippy there's funk, that's why i trimmed it off the meat (then used olive oil & ghee in its basicasfuck garlic/rosemary/lemon zest rub)

Nice!

My parents live in rural PA and have tons of ramps on their property every Spring. I made ramp pesto with ramps I dug out 10 days ago - still great.

oooooo rampy pesto sounds ridiculous delish!

we ain't there yet but if squirrel ever starts popping up in our diet i might try my hand at squirrel lard.

https://i0.wp.com/practicalselfreliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/rendered-squirrel-fat-for-cookies.jpeg

i'll have to give the brains a miss though on account of those pesky prions

is ramps wild garlic? if so I made some pesto with it the other week, it was really good! We have tons of woodland nearby where it just grows like a sea of it.
Love lamb fat, it does the best roast potatoes.

"ramp pesto" should be in tony hawk pro skater

Ramps are wild baby leeks, I believe, though I see the wiki says that wild garlic is another name. I always thought that was a separate plant. They look like mini leeks to me.

ah yeah it's wild garlic, I just picked the leaves, but the stems look good too!

They bring me a lot of joy - digging something wild out of the ground and eating it.

My market had shad roe, so I made shad roe breakfast for dinner: roasted potatoes, shad roe dredged in flour and sautéed in butter, brown butter caper sauce with lemon, with a fried egg on top.

I need some advice:

I’m making this cauliflower pasta dish tonight but I have to swap out the anchovies for something vegetarian. I have red miso but I’m not sure when’s the best time to add it - for anchovies, I’d add it to oil and garlic and fry till melted. Should I add the miso the same way or am I better off dissolving it in the reserved pasta water I’ll be adding to make the sauce?

dissolve in pasta water imo

if not vegan you can also add parmesan rind to the sauce and pull it out later for more umami type notes

I think you could fry the miso briefly just as you would for the anchovies, though it won't take as long. 30 secs at most.

But sleeve's way is fine, too.

frying it does sound good actually!

quick update for y'all, don't keep your lamb tallow in a jar identical to the one you use for ghee + lamb tallow on toast tastes baaaaaaad

any interest i had in tallow has been removed thx to this thread lol

(not really, i was not interested in tallow)

I made Assassin’s Spaghetti last week and it was AWESOME

Was so apprehensive about it because of how much attention and technique it supposedly takes but having done it it’s actually quite straightforward AND doesn’t make near the mess I thought it might

I still didn't realize how hot this pepper was, because after washing my hands three times, I used the bathroom and (apologies for TMI) realized the side of my penis that I had touched was on fire. This lasted at least 15 minutes after washing the area with soap and water.

In sum: this was a very hot chili.

xpost what is Assassin’s Spaghetti plz

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=spaghetti+all+assassina

I used the recipe from the America’s Test Kitchen app, which rules my cooking world these days

Basically you prepare some heavily diluted tomato paste in one saucepan, throw some passata (tomato puree) with seasonings into a big skillet, and then the raw spaghetti gets chucked right into the seasoned puree. You keep prodding and cooking the noodles in the puree, adding the diluted tomato water a cup at a time, folding it in - you don’t want to stir the pasta, because that will even out the texture too much - and finally after using up all the tomato water the pasta is completely full of flavor, cooked throughout but generally still al dente and seared in places so it just has this incredible bite to it. So good, cheap and relatively simple. Just takes time and attention.

interesting! sounds really good

It is the goodest

Tonight I am making Briam, a Greek dish of slow-roasted vegetables (one pan!)

Finally used some of that recently invented pasta shape, cascatelli, in a one-pan skillet pasta last night with impossible’s spicy sausage. It was awesome, really like the way the cascatelli holds sauce and is easy to fork.

our pear tree is nuts this year, soooo many

making a double batch of pear butter rn

4# fruit
2 C water
1 C white wine/champagne vinegar

bring to boil and simmer for 3 hours

add

1 C sugar for every 2# fruit
1 lemon, zest 1st juice 2nd
2 t cinnamon
1/2 t clove
1/2 t allspice

cook slow and low until you think it's done, heavy coat on spoon

I made tomato compound butter today with roasted tom/garlic/thyme, and fancy butter and some basil. Now in freezer. And two batches of kale pesto of which the most tedious part was cleaning every kale leaf of bugs or egg masses bc moths got under my kale netting. Also in freezer. Freezer’s getting full. (I need a chest freezer in my apartment.)

That pear butter with wine vin does sound really tempting, it’s just that without bread in my life it’s hard to imagine what to put it on.

put it on fresh pear slices with good cheese

mix it w/chopped nuts & yogurt?

usually we dry them but we have been lazy this year, L made fig jam but not much. the apples are coming on, the grapes will prob be here early in late September

Our 2 yo fig tree is about to go nuclear. Looking forward to using them.

I made macerated peaches (3 peaches, 1 T Sugar, 1 T Cointreau) and yogurt for dessert. It was so good.

I have never heard of pear butter. That seems like a lot of sugar! Is it basically a jam?

like apple butter, yeah!

I’m making slow cooker chili again today, but totally winging it this time based on some random ideas plus “some ingredients lying around that need to be used”

Will take notes and report back

Totally forgot about apple butter. Haven’t had it since childhood.

Fruit butters are my fave. Last week I had a bunch of peaches that were ripening faster than we could eat them in cereal/oatmeal/etc so I made a small batch of peach butter. Light on spice, a goodly amount of citric acid, good result, very peachy.

T/S peach butter vs peach moonshine

(I used to have a connection for the latter and it had frightening qualities)

peach butter sounds amazing
peaches are one of the absolute best things about summer

pork medallions in a plum, balsamic and garlic sauce with buttery mash

yes it was great but /old dmac look away now/ im more and more regretting pretty much any meal i make with basically any quadruped meat and may in time start to edge in the same direction with poultry so im marking ut a regretful 8/10

the exquisite aroma of some decent balsamic cooking over some sizzling meat is what I live for some days

So good

Chili 8/25/2024
Ingredients!!!!

6 Six-inch corn tortillas, chopped into 1” pieces, baked at 350F for 10 minutes
4 Shallots, diced
1 White Onion, diced
2 Serrano Peppers, diced
4 Dried Arbol Chiles, stemmed, seeded, and torn into 1” pieces
4 Chipotles in adobo sauce, diced
3 Garlic Cloves, crushed
2 12oz Impossible Beef
1 12oz Field Roast Spicy Chorizo
2 Tbsp Cumin
1 Tbsp Paprika
1 Tbsp Garlic Powder
1 Tbsp Coriander
2 tsp Oregano
2 tsp Brown Sugar
2 tsp Black Pepper
1 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Thyme
1/2 tsp Sumac
2 Bay Leaves
1 10oz Can Ro-Tel Tomatoes & Hatch chiles
1 15oz Can Fire Roasted diced Tomatoes
1 15oz Can Black Beans
1 Tbsp Vegetable Oil
1 Cup Abita Amber Lager or similar
2 Cups Better Than Bouillon Chipotle “Stock”

Chuck all the things into a slow cooker. Cook on high for five hours or so. Stir every once in a while to make yourself feel alive. Serve immediately with grated cheese on top, sour cream and green onions too if that’s your thing.

peaches are one of the absolute best things about summer

Absolutely
Peaches, nectarines, decent strawberries. We grow raspberries too which are great.

I made this pasta last night, which is a late summer staple when I need to use up peppers.

Pasta with yellow pepper sauce

It is amazingly rich and satisfying. If you are using green peppers or your peppers are less sweet, add a few small pinches of sugar like I usually do.

pork medallions in a plum, balsamic and garlic sauce with buttery mash

I'm gonna need it to be like OCTOBER before I can cook something this rich but hell yes.

Tombot, that is just a TON of ingredients for something that's one final mass/product (as opposed to like, a protein plus a side plus a sauce and a topping, and so on). Do you feel like an alchemist, slowly dropping grains of sumac into your bubbling concoction?