What's cooking? part 4

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!

thanks! i vaguely remember my mother making some kind of potato crust for something as a kid. i don't even remember what the filling was bc i loved the crust so much. the zucchini addition was my own stroke of genius, i'd like to think, but i'm sure someone's done it before.

for dinner tonight, i made rice/vegetable pasta with anchovy/chili/garlic/kale.
it was gooood. the rice pasta is probably not nn-approved but every once in a while, i really want pasta.

yeah i've decreased pasta intake a lot in the past few years but sometimes i just want it. there's nothing like pasta texture.
gonna try potato/zucchini crust sometime, maybe soon

rice pasta texture is not quite as satisfying as reg pasta but i compromise.

ok so i think i solved my problem
i created a set on flickr of food pics and i will upload my daily photo to this set for later browsing.
name of dish goes as the title and any special ingredients/proportions/instructions go in the description and show up when i click on the picture.

i can browse from a computer or my phone too
we'll see how it goes!

What do you guys think of Cooking Light magazine? I made a recipe of chicken and butternut squash tangine, but I think something was missing. It could have been sweeter.

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

― how rad bandit (gbx), Monday, November 9, 2009 8:38 P

dudes
them look like wutz called yucca imo

i want to make some of those soon, this recipe is looking good to me -

http://noteatingoutinny.com/2009/11/06/sweet-potato-gnocchi-with-arugula-and-hazelnuts/

will report on how it comes out! probably just doing spaghetti squash w/tomato sauce tonight though, i am wanting a simple warm vegetable meal.

My one gripe about Cooking Light is that they are heavy on artificial sweetners and the low-fat/fat-free versions of stuff like cheese and sour cream. No thanky.

I like cooking light about 65% of the time. Hate the stupid makeup/exercise/fancy 'fithouse' bs and how they recycle recipes a lot. I do like their "variations on noodles in a bowl" type articles and the cake recipes are usually pretty good. I think it's worth a suscription for the photos and a few recipes per issue.

Tonight I'm making the cod provencal recipe tehresa posted but with tilapia and dill instead of cod and thyme.

mmmm!

i made some salmon w/ dill and mint last night :)

love dill!

thinking of something cioppino-esque this week.

made my spaghetti squash with tomato sauce and it was good. roommates were not that hungry, so i'm ecstatic about the huge bowl of spaghetti squash left over and all the ways i can eat it for lunches.

maaaan you guys mae me want some fish though.

Tza I am totally gonna try your quiche base technique for myself, in fact I think I will try it tonight!

Did you pre-bake the crust and then add the filling?

O wait you said you did. Dur.

I think mine will contain some of the silverbeet I have grown myself - some of the leaves look ready to pick, and I'll add some chives and rosemary also from me garden. And then i'll do mushroom and roast capsicum.

So for dinner tonight i'd planned on making some tandoori chicken with the left over tenderloins. Except, when I went to the 7-11 they had no yogurt so I had to make do with sour cream. And except, when I got home I discovered i actually had no tandoori paste in the fridge. Argh!

So I made a patchwork marinade of sharwoods korma paste, thai tom yum paste (for the onion/lemon flav), a dash of wocestershire (for the tamarind), lemon juice and sour cream. Let em sit for an hour then fried them in the pan til slightly blackened.

It weren't standard tandoori but damn, it was nice!

sounds like a good idea, trayce! addition of herbs and stuff would be a++ in that crust!
xpost

I didnt make it last night (obv, lol), as I was out of potatos except for a few wee chat ones. No good for grating. I'll have to pick up some nice fat desirees after work and do this thang. I'm dead curious to see how my home grown silverbeet will taste. :D

If a soup calls for harissa (Moroccan hot paste) is it worth it for me to go out of my way to find it?

You can just make your own if you have garlic, cumin, coriander, caraway, red chiles, or some combination of those. Grind up in oil w/ salt. You could probably substitute sambal oelek if you have a jar of that.

making cioppino tonight!!!!

i am feeling sniffly and cold and wet. this is gonna rock.

i made the sweet potato gnocchi with spinach, garlic, and walnuts last night and it was v. v. tasty! (fairly labor intensive though, i was going to make a double batch to feed the roommates but gave up after maybe half, as they weren't all home anyway. which means sweet potato pancakes coming up soon.)

Been way too hot here to do anything involving ovens :( So no quichez.

i want to try that gnocchi.