What's cooking? part 4

would they freeze well uncooked maybe?

I usually buy a family pack of boneless porkchops, and separate them into little packets of two each and freeze. They don't take too long to thaw out, and we don't keep them more than a month or two, so I haven't noticed any change in texture. Mostly I pound them for various schnitzels, though.

So I picked a big sack of mustard greens from my parents' garden yesterday, washed and stemmed them this morning and put them on to cook for dinner tonight, and decided to try a Tep-style thing for lunch: mustard stems sauteed with garlic and a bit of onion, finished with red wine vinegar and sriracha, served over/alongside cheddar cheese grits. Verdict: flavor A, texture C-

Making some homemade mac & cheese...it's in the oven right now & I am praying it turns out nom.

I once saw a lemonade stand that said:

"HO-MADE" LEMONADE

and it's so hard for me not to type "ho-made" bcz that is now how I think that word, scare quotes and all. So epically wrong!

I'm going to retro hors d'oeuvre party tonight; what is a good idea to bring that can be served cold or lukewarm?

Thin sliced boiled ham spread with softened cream cheese, then rolled up and cut into pinwheels. Spear with frilly cocktail toothpick. Add chives or chopped scallion to the cream cheese as a variation.

Those, and rumaki (chicken liver + water chestnut wrapped w/ bacon, all pinned together w/ plain toothpick and broiled until bacon is cooked - these are served hot) were my mom's standards.

guy at seafood counter sold me on halibut cheeks today by saying they were like scallops. they kind of are, but more tender?

i pan seared and then did a saute of spinach and zucchini in white wine and lemon and garlic and herbs. mmm.

Tep posted about salmon cheeks on his blog the other week, like, he bought salmon heads, and got all the meat and eyes and things out - the cheek meat did look a bit scallopy!

my dad loves getting heads and grilling or smoking them.
these were meat only and nom.

weird what's-in-the-fridge meal of quinoa "salad" (red + white), tossed with generous olive oil, fresh marjoram, tiny bit of grated parm, black pepper, and tempeh bacon bits. topped with an egg fried in the left over 'bacon' oil

woulda been good with craisins i reckon

yesterday i made penne with crumbled (turkey) sausage, porcini mushrooms, tons of spinach, pepper flakes and mushroom juice + parm and it was quite tasty. surprisingly light for a dish containing pasta and sausage.

also orange cardamom cake. oh! and fancy lemonade with lavender-rosemary simple syrup.

question: do you guys keep track of what you make? sometimes i make something once and then completely forget about it even if it was delicious. i'm not too lazy to cook all the time, but i am too lazy to write all of it down. documentation is not my strong suit. how do you keep track of what you make?

^^^was having the same thoughts last night. i really need to start keeping recipe cards or something

two things:

1) i have a recipe folder where i keep stuff i print/rip from magazines. i also occasionally write stuff down on pieces of paper and shove them in there. that's how i remember how to make chili just how i like it and the proportions for my mix for hot avena that i spent an entire winter perfecting.

2) that doesn't solve the problem of night to night, what to make? what do you want? i dunno, what do you want? that shit. so i decided to try something new. every night i will take a picture of dinner on my iphone. (posh, i know) if it's special, i can scribble it down. (this will probably never happen) then, when i don't know what to get on my monday grocery shopping trip, i can get some ideas for what to make for the week by looking at the pictures.

this is day 2 of that btw, so i have hardly proved this plan successful.

Threads in ILCooking have been very useful to me for keeping track. Special stuff that needs recipes gets put on-line somewhere, Is That...Pie or one of our blogs. Modifications to standard recipes get written directly in the cookbook.

If I find a recipe online, I generally print it out and keep it in a folder that lives on my most-used-cookbooks shelf, next to the coupons folder and the takeout-menus folder.

yeah, i have one of those too. i also get a strange joy from hearing how other people organize their most mundane things.

my cooking ideas, when they exist and are accessible, are scattered all over the place. it's hard, for me at least, to remember that my tortilla soup was delicious and oh yeah, the recipe is over there.

i am hoping that centralizing it and using pictures will help me get the ideas i need to go shopping. i don't find that cooking itself requires a lot of reminding unless it's something i haven't made in a year (ie this ridiculously tasty orange cardamom cake) or a baked good (exact measurements are not a feature of much of anything else i tend to do).

i used to take pictures of only holiday or exceptional food, but now i think doing it every day will help me remember what i eat on a normal night vs a special night.

i made How Did You Make That precisely for this purpose. it accepts photos too. it works pretty well, i just have to remember to actually do it. you can click on your name to get all your recipes or search using keywords obv.

http://howdidyoumakethat.com

yeah, see i think i even joined the howdidyoumakethat facebook group, but then i promptly forgot about it :(

This is super nerdy but every day I add a line to a text file with what I ate for dinner, what cuisine it came from, side dishes, where I ate it (if not at home) etc. The file is structured so I can cram it into a database and write some sort of front end to give me visualizations if I want (and if I ever get the time, alas).

I don't use that many recipes any more; I kind of feel like I'm "fluent" in cooking enough that I can make a pretty good number of dishes without needing a guide. But I still use recipes the first couple of times I make something new and interesting. I've got a couple of years worth of Cook's Illustrated magazines around and it's such a pain to find where recipes are that I grab each issues's overview from the web every other month and store them in text files that I can search for keywords - it tells me what issue number a particular recipe is so I can find it easily.

I have a binder full of recipes from other people and the internet to turn to, and if I just make up something I like, I figure it shouldn't be too hard to recreate. I do a lot of checking on various recipes to see how to generally do something and then winging it with the ingredients I have around, but I do actually follow recipes when I want to make something particular and good.

Yesterday I made a pasta casserole with eggplant and mushrooms, I'm hoping that and some spinach microwaved and mixed in will be lunch for much of the week(depends on how much the roommates like the leftovers, I guess). That was one of those easy things I don't actually use a recipe for, but it's not particularly fancy either, just cheap and filling. Such is my life though.

i never really use recipes but sometimes i control+f this thread, or do a search of my email because if it's something i've loved i've undoubtedly tried to push it on someone else. if i need inspiration sometimes i google "______ recipe" and then find something that looks reasonable and put my own twists on it or modify it to my likes/standards. also i track everything i eat so i guess if i really wanted i could browse through that history.

but wait a sec
for me this isn't about "recipes" -- i don't really need recipes either -- it's about deciding what to make and not forgetting about things i made in the past.

don't you guys ever have trouble making decisions about what to make for that week? i just get stuck sometimes, i guess.

basically i don't need recipes, i just need something to spark my memory.

i'm in a bad habit of doing lots of little shopping trips throughout the week because if i buy things in advance, i sometimes forget and they spoil. mostly i try to get inspired by whatever produce looks especially fresh or colorful and build something around it based on things i know i have in the fridge/cupboard or whatever else looks good. i'm pretty flexible. i guess if i had a family or less time, it'd be a lot harder. i definitely have a lot of standbys and i could probably stand to mix it up a little, though :(

see, that's my problem -- i have full time teaching job + a class on saturday, and while i don't have kids, i make breakfast/lunch/dinner for myself and my husband every day...i don't want cooking/food to take over my life so i want to be able to make a decision on monday when i do most of my shopping for meat/fish/most of the veg for the week. i can go to the produce market up the street after work, sure, but i just don't want to spend every free moment of my life doing this. i need to plan a little.

*note: monday is my day off and i do most of this stuff on monday to avoid weekend crowd/traffic.

anyway, i guess everyone just has to figure out individually what works and then do it. maybe my daily photo repository will be just what i needed.

yeah I don't use recipes per ae, but it would be nice to remember stuff I've made

I think a deck of photos of foods made would be great. Either for shuffling through for inspiration, or random close-eyes-pick-5 and that's dinners for the upcoming week.

Since I started buying groceries on-line and having them delivered, I plan much more and we are eating much better. Mr. Jaq does the dinner cooking 3 out of 5 weeknights, because he gets home way before I do. So I have to stock things he knows how to make and is interested in cooking. Then the other nights I either cook and we eat later than usual or I make something up with whatever meat I worked up over the weekend. I do spend a lot of my life cooking, esp. weekends when I bake, make stock, etc. Now that I'm not working at home and have a long commute, I'm glad to not be spending so much time shopping.

Made a beef & stilton pie tonight with handmade puff for the first time. Didn't quite puff as much as I would have liked, but think I should try the oven hotter.

this was really good and the leftovers are even better http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/health/nutrition/05recipehealth.html

Tonight I made a sweet potato garbanzo spinach tomato curry and
1) it was delicious and
2) I took a picture I did

BOUGHT YAMS 2day

ok this reminds me
did you get yams or sweet potatoes?

because the yams at my produce market are NOT sweet potatoes

they're like giant brown trunklike things

GIANT
http://www.juicingbook.com/_images/yam.jpg

I read this site a lot: http://www.taste.com.au/ and I just use it as inspiration for dinner. I'm also someone who just wings it, I'll only use recipes for things like baking, these days. But I do sometimes have a time finding inspiration. I'll be all "aw, Ive had chickpeas 3 times this week and it's too hot for cooked food WTF can I make".

i think those are sweet potatoes. they have whitish flesh.

ohhhhhhh wait. i was thinking that was a picture of something else.

i like flipping through cookbooks for ideas (and reading food blogs...more for recreation than inspiration though!). i tend to want to make one totally new recipe a week, and two that i've done before or that are easy variations, and then the other nights i eat leftovers, or buy something if i'm on campus late, or my roommates cook. so not too ambitious. today i got home a little late and was tired so i reheated some carrot ginger soup from last week, for example.

i'm giong to sauté leeks and mushrooms and maybe spinach and do a quichey type thing but i think the crust will be a hybrid of shredded potato and zucchini. i was going to do a rice flour crust but i'm tired.

sign said 'yams,' they are big trunk like things :(

We have orange and white sweet potatoes here. When I was a kid mum only ever baked the white ones and I really didnt like them at all. Once I finally had the orange ones I got the whole point. (theyre also called kumara here, assume thats the same elsewhere).

I think theres' a purple one, too? I havent tried it. The yams in that pic of figgy's look like HUGE TREES.

lol you call them kumara?? that's the maori name, i think!! ime, the sweet potato here in the US is nothing like the orange or purple kumara at home. also wtf at eating them with nutmeg and marshmellow ewwww

Kumara in the history of New Zealand

The kumara has a long history of cultivation in New Zealand. Brought here by the early Maori settlers over one thousand years ago from its Pacific Island source, it was widely grown especially in the semi-tropical regions of the North Island. Archeological diggings at the Waipoua Forest near Kaipara have revealed kumara cultivation from very early Pre-european Maori times.

The Maori managed kumara growing with great horticultural skill, making use of the ideal growing climate and controlling kumara caterpillar with the use of tamed black-backed seagulls. Kumara caterpillar could devastate a crop almost overnight, hatching in their thousands. Pre-European Maori grew several different varieties of ‘bush’ kumara, but compared to the varieties we eat today, were very small in size, being no bigger than a person’s finger.

The kumara we eat today has evolved from a larger American variety which grows on a creeping vine. It was imported in the early 1850’s, and was quickly adopted by the Maori for its superior size and taste. Over time a dark red variety developed and named Owairaka Red.

In most other countries they are called sweet potatoes. New Zealand kumara are available in red, gold or orange varieties, each with a deliciously different colour and taste. The majority of kumara is grown in Northland.

quichey!
http://i401.photobucket.com/albums/pp95/tza/utf-8BSU1HMDAwNzQtMjAwOTExMDktMTkzM.jpg

crust: mixture of purple potato, zucchini, and rice flour - baked at 425 for ~25 min or so
sautéed: leeks and green onions and put on top of crust, ground pepper and salt over it, then sautéd mushrooms and put those on top
mixed 4 eggs + maybe 1/3c soy milk and a bunch of dried spices and poured over. baked a while and then added tomato slices on top at the end.

y'all should make this, it's good and wheat-free and (i think) mostly nn-approved.

Ooo that looks tasty :D

it is very delicious and the nutritional breakdown works out pretty well :)

Ive heard of using cooked rice as a crust but grated potato and zuke is genius!