What's cooking? part 4

favorite bok choy is with soy, ginger, and a tiny bit of something sweet (i've been using a tamarind simple syrup i made but you could use honey or brown sugar very sparingly).

My roommate bequeathed me some kale. Should I add it to the bok choy or cook it on its own? And how?

If you add kale to bok choy I'd start cooking that first as it takes a bit longer. On it's own I really like it sauteed enough to wilt it or braised with some liquid. I've read about chopping it and roasting it at high temps with oil and salt and want to try this because basically any vegetable tastes good this way.

As for bok choy I really love adding a squirt of hoisin at the end.

Roasting kale makes it like kale chips. Really tasty, but you get a bit tired of it after a while, a bunch of kale makes a lot.
I sprinkled it with some spicy ground chili powder, pretty good.

Warning to anyone making garlic oil: Don't store it at room temperature unless you love botulism.

http://cecalaveras.ucdavis.edu/garlic.htm

raspberry pavlova I made last week:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3509/3934920020_0acf0ecacd.jpg

such a perfect summer dessert

it was good :)

i'm thinking baout soup today. it just seems soupy.

It's very soup today. Or stew. I'm thinking about baking bread, have mixed up a biga. Also might try a batch of the red herrings from that doodad/knick knack poll thread...

aw pavlova!! makes me feel nostalgic for home

NB i don't even like pavlova, except for the cream/fruit

that seems like something i would fail at. i can never beat eggs properly.

i made cabbage/potato curry yesterday though!

mmm that sounds good.

maybe i should curry green beans tonight. i need to do something not so time consuming bc it will be lateish. maybe spend the night making soup for tomorrow. or maybe lentils. i don't know.

rosemary garlic "fries" (baked)
green salad w/ chickpeas + tomatoes + cumin, parsley, vinegar, olive oil

Saw a recipe for chicken liver mousse in the NYT this week and suddenly NEEDED to make it. Last night it was that, toasted bread, farinata/socca, goat cheese, prosciutto, arugula with lemon and olive oil, and some green beans I pickled earlier in the week.

mmmmm

Lindsey thanks for that garlic/oil link - I had no idea :(

Making a red curry with lots of veg and tofu.

I bought shiso leaf because it is one of favorite things when I eat sushi in a Japanese restaurant. Anything special I should add it to? I don't make sushi at home.

ooooh do u have a link to ur recipe, tehresa?

for curry?
i made it up.
it became yellow curry!

I made boy choy for the first time. It was really good, but I cooked the leafy part for way too long, as anticipated upthread. Do you use the whole stalk or just part of it? I cut the stalk into small strips.

So I'm doing wild rabbit with onion sauce. The first part of which recipe runs thus -

Put the rabbit into a pan. Cover it with cold water. Put in a bouquet of herbs, and pepper and salt.; Bring to the boil and simmer until done - this will not take long, if the rabbit is a young one.

I'm suspecting this just means until it's tender, but just to be sure I'm having a look around on the net and some seem to suggest as little as half an hour (which would make a mockery of the instruction to put whole onions in the water 'after half an hour', and others up to an hour.

Any suggestions?

Typically, "done" is when the joints move freely - is this a stew, or do you take the meat out and use the broth to create the sauce?

The latter - you put whole onions in to simmer with the rabbit. Then take them out after a bit, chop them up and fry gently in butter before adding some cream. The recipe doesn't actually specify to add any of the broth, but I'm going to anyway, as you would say for boiled beef and carrots.

Actually, I got the butcher to joint it, which I shouldn't have done really, I just wan't sure at that stage which recipe I was going to do. So, ah, they're moving pretty freely already.

If you don't have a meat thermometer, you could test for doneness by piercing the meat in a thickish section with a knife and looking for pinkness, starting at the 30 minute mark and checking every 5-10 minutes. If you've got a meat thermometer, just cook until it registers 180F (82C), again in the thickest part of the meat and not against a bone.

oh man i forgot i was supposed to learn how to cook rabbit this summer!

Do you use the whole stalk or just part of it?

If they're smallish, I just cut the whole thing in half length-wise and saute/steam with the cut side down. If I end up chopping it up, I slice 1/4-1/2" off the bottom, toss the stalks in the pan first and then add the leaves when the stalks are 1/2 done.

whole rabbit o_o

proper meat cooking is kind of bizarre and frankensteinish, but i guess in a lot of ways less so than pre-prep meat cooking

i made a red curry with tofu and pea eggplant; really i wanted to use the pea eggplant to make nam prik, but i couldn't find artificial water bug essence in tesco. plus i wasn't sure what i wanted to eat it with anyway. the non-vegetarian version on this one website has my ingredients photo ever:

http://www.thaitable.com/images/Thai/recipes/pictures/5Mackerel%20with%20Chili%20Sauce1.jpg

whaaaaaat? are those cockroaches?

water bug essence!!!! i've made that before. by accident.

So, I had the rabbit. Not at all bad. Next time I'll cook it for slightly less (I misjudged how long it would take for the onion to go golden), and I'll probably chop the onion up a bit more, but it was pretty pretty good, even if I do say so myself. Tarragon ftw. 18th century (or earlier) English recipes rock. See also pulled and deviled turkey (I think one of my favourite meals of all time) and Salmi.

No meat thermometer, but just tested with a fork to see how it was doing.

that should have read "my favourite ingredients photo ever", above.

apparently this is artificial contains-no-actual-waterbug waterbug essence:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/125/358519633_d83fd6f174.jpg

also: "ftw"?

Ah, I hadn't used any tarragon for a while in anything I'd cooked, but this just flavoured the onion and cream sauce and the stock perfectly. I'd forgotten its very slightly astringent fragance and it really made everything taste great. He concluded lamely.

ftw = for the win, thomp

tarragon is so so nice.

Thanks for the info about bok choy. Now, how do I prepare Napa cabbage to cook? Do you use the whole thing? I did but I think I cooked it too long. Do you only need to lightly saute it? I'm buying all of the exotic (to me) leafy vegetables I used to be afraid of.

i usually chop it and then do a wok sauté

I like a bit of char on napa, so chop it all up (I don't use the bottom 1/2-3/4") and stir-fry in hot oil (peanut is good for this, has a higher smoke point than most) w/ a dash of crushed red chilis. You can also use it fresh to make a cabbage slaw - it's a milder flavor than green or red cabbage.

I know what 'ftw' means: I was merely surprised at its deployment in a post by one of ILX's more prolix contributors. At any rate, if I didn't know what it meant, merely expanding it to "for the win" would hardly serve to elucidate

etc etc chiz chiz

i don't get to cook enough, lately.

Dear Fotherington Thomp,

Fair point - I'm not sure what pushed me to do the ftw - I think sometimes I just fancy a break from the prolixity, a foray into the internet slang king style. I always feel a guilty pleasure when I do this sort of thing - it not coming naturally.

dudes
so i am eating waterbug when i order up a curry from the thai place?!
sonofabitch! i may like it . . .

Seriously -- more info abt "waterbug essence" b/c I know i should be cool with it but...

they totally look like cockroaches, right? a big ass grasshopper was up on my porchrail the other night and i watched it closely as it made noises and thought, "should i eat this thing? no way, it's cute." but those waterbugs are a different matter

i thought waterbugs = "oriental cockroaches" meaning those big black cockroaches that can't fly and are slow. but also assuming that's not what's in nam prik paste. i hope.

When I was a kid in middle-of-nowhere rural Michigan in the late 80s, I had a friend whose mom was from Thailand and had all kinds of scary things in the kitchen, one of which was a jar of chili paste with a picture of an ant on it. She swore that it contained some sort of insects and didn't really get why we thought it was the nastiest thing ever and would dare each other to eat it.

In retrospect I'm pretty sad palate wasn't what it is today, as nowadays I'd love to eat whatever it was she was cooking then.

http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/7/76/Family_bros_pizza.jpg/225px-Family_bros_pizza.jpg

"contains-a three kind of things!"

oops
http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/7/76/Family_bros_pizza.jpg/225px-Family_bros_pizza.jpg

There's a couple of species of water bug, but I think these are the ones popular in Thailand:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belostomatidae

They only gross me out when they're carrying eggs on their back, like this little fellow here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Toe-Biter.jpg/250px-Toe-Biter.jpg

Their most common use is just fried plain as a street food, I think: I saw them a lot in Bangkok, but couldn't bring myself to try them. I think their use in that nam prik recipe is a variation, shrimp paste is more common. They're not a normal component of Thai curry, jdchurchill, although a small quantity of fermented anchovy is, which isn't really any less gross.

Dear Mr. Ratsey:

We welcome your decline to our level. Soon you will be screeching "tits or gtfo" with the best.

Dear Fotherington Thomp,

Hope this didn't sound snarky, thomp! It certainly wasn't meant to be - I was just returning the Molesworth love, but I wrote it when drunk and like so many things done when drunk it seems to have a different sound in the morning than when written.

Back to the amazing water bug discussion.

no offence taken lol