What's cooking? part 4

My wife and I ate some black-eyed peas, so we got that part of the equation correctly, but the greens we ate were kale and chard -- and nothing else on the menu yesterday matched the correct items according to quincie. And yet, I still expect a certain amount of prosperity for the coming year, regardless. I am an optimist.

I feel like tasty pulled pork, slaw, and corn bread is definitely a meal that heralds prosperity, so I'm quite comfortable with my life choices.

Quincie and Carl covered it. Leafy greens or cabbage to represent f-oldin' money to come to you in the next year, peas to represent coins, hominy=gold. Pork of some sort to represent, I dunno, "we may be poor, but at least we can afford to eat pork on New Years." We had barbecue, braised cabbage, purple hull peas and cornbread. Aimless, as I was taught the tradition, kale and chard totally count. I would prefer mustard greens, but I already had a head of cabbage in the house.

xp -- carl otm

As I was cooking yesterday I was thinking yesterday how southern home cooking is this weird blend of poverty cuisine and a cuisine of enormous bounty, esp regarding summer vegetables.

i had no idea there was a culinary tradition for new years day - fascinating!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-eyed_pea#Lucky_New_Year_food

We spiced up our black-eyed peas with some homemade salsa verde that I made and stashed in the freezer last September. According to that Wikipedia article adding hot sauce is traditional, so hurrah! we scored again!

I made up our hominy yesterday into posole that was especially good.

I just baked a GF cake for my partners son's bday (he's not celiac but his brother is, so its fair). I decided to try the marbling thing, which seemed simple enough:split the batter, add coco to half, blob, swirl and bake. And actually it seems to have come out ok!

As to how a GF cake mix tastes, i have no idea and dont wish to ugh. the kids involved know no better which is a bit sad.

I love the bit at the top of the thread about living & eating in France, because that is what I do! We were feeling lazy the other night & just wanted burgers (a little bit of home as we are americans) & asked at the butcher for steak haché ; the butcher just took some steaks & ground them up for us ; & they were fantastic ! a little pricier than we'd normally have paid in the usa e.g. but so much better.

we eat very simply here much of the time, e.g. last night we had our standby of lentils and lardons, with olive oil and a bit of red wine vinegar. lentils are one of the perfect foods, and french green lentils / lentilles du Puy are fab.

omg love puy lentils.

they're great in part because they hold up so well to being cooked. we eat brown & red lentils (e.g. in variations on megadarra) and they break down into mush ; which, granted, is part of the appeal! but sometimes it's nice to have lentils that maintain their individuality.

They are excellent for salad for that reason, I'llcook and chill them, toss them with oil/lemon, then have em for lunch over some greens and antipasto.

I resolved to make steak and kidney pudding this weekend, so the filling is going on once I've had my lunch for the pudding tomorrow.

i made ropa vieja for dinner

:D

hey i want to make tamales! they are one of my favorite foods and i've wanted to make them for years but never have. have any of you folks made them?

nope bc i've heard they are the sort of thing you have to make a ton of and then freeze, and my freezer doesn't have that much room for tamales in it
i like them though
if you can eat it, you can wrap some corn masa around it, wrap it up in a leaf and call it a tamal

I've made them a couple of times, but last time was probably 20 years ago. A good bit of work, easy to oversteam -- I decided to leave it to the pros.

i was at the indian store yesterday looking for zaatar (the guy said "no zaatar! it's finished!") and got bulgarian sheep's milk cheese just because. turns out to be feta-like but not feta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirene. i saw this stuff at whole foods, where it is labeled as bulgarian sheep's milk feta, i think. but costs 2x more! would buy again.

very acidic and salty though!

interesting! the feta i always buy is bulgarian feta. maybe it's the same thing? much much creamier and more flavorful than most other fetas, and it doesn't have that super-chalky texture. it's really amazing. on all my salad's i just crumble some of that with some olive oil and it has the perfect amount of acidity, i don't need any dressing with it.

probably the same. definitely a fattier kind of texture. i guess the acidity varies.

i impulsively bought a bag of spelt a while back, so tonight i mashed up a couple of recipe ideas and combined it with roasted parsnip, yam, and red onion pieces, plus brown butter and a tiny bit of soy/mustard/honey glaze. not bad as a side to pan-roasted salmon.

I GOT "HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING" FOR XMAS!!!!

This book is so BIG!!! How do I do this book??? Do I just sit and read it? Do I just kind of gradually absorb it over the course of many many years?

I randomly opened it to a page and there was ~BEER GLAZED BLACK BEANS~ on the page so I made them and they were gooooooood

Exciting! I think you put it under your pillow at night and hope your neck doesn't snap at that angle.

I made lamb plov at bf's house using his cookware and seasonings and it is not good. I mean it's not BAD because it's savory rice and lamb and cumin, but everything is cooked the wrong amount, the paprika is too strong, we couldn't find coriander anywhere. I'm making it at my house next time.

Just checking: there are plentiful carrots in this plov, yes?

Oh tons! The recipes all called for browning the lamb before the simmer, though, and the lamb ended up tough in the end. I'm wondering if it's worth browning oxtails or s/thing to get the fond on the pan without pre-cooking lamb before the rice and water go in.

yeah that could work. I will learn from you and then try my own - it's twenty yeeeears or so since I made it...

Also I need to fig out what cuts of lamb? We could only find whole frozen legs and I had to hack off the meat and then trim the tendons out, which took way too long.

Shoulder or ribs?

it is freezing here in boston so i was really craving fatty fried foods, so i made beer-battered onion rings at home in my cast iron skillet. they were really amazing but i ate waaaayyy to many and felt pretty gross. it satisfied the craving though. i had this really malty winter ale which was nice with the rings.

(this was last night, i didn't make onion rings and drink beer at 10am this morning)

Pity.

i had never heard of plov, need to make bc i love uzbek, but i think a boneless leg roast is not hard to find. i always get them at costco.

i got rick bayless mexican everyday. trying to make more cookbook recipes in '15. making oaxacan yellow mole. i never ate a chayote before. it says you can use chayotes or potatoes so i'm using both because i doubled the recipe, because who cooks just one pound of chicken.

pfft one pound does not compute

One pound seems silly, but I always cook enough for leftovers on purpose.

Creamy tomato soup made for lunch, a week's worth of eggs pressure steamed, 3 heads of cabbage shredded and packed in the awesome fermentation crock I got for xmas (sauerkraut 2015 rah!). Now to grate orange and mandarin zest to finish off this year's bitter-crafting.

dang

mr veg is making baked drumsticks and i'm making white bean kale & chorizo soup for dinner

i made ropa vieja for dinner

:D

― difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, January 5, 2015 4:10 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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Pounding shredded cabbage down into the crock with a sauerkraut stomper (basically a short baseball bat) is more fun than I expected. It didn't juice out very much though.

I also made ropa vieja for dinner! xp

hooray!

mine wasn't very pulled-looking, but the meat fell apart beautifully. so flavorful!

made this pureed soup with roasted red peppers and these BEAUTIFUL purple carrots i bought at a winter farmers' market, i just felt like i need some color you know? lots of ginger and garlic and tumeric in it, some cilantro and mint. in retrospect i think maybe regular orange carrots would've gave the soup a better color -- it would've been an orange-red but with the purple carrots it came out this hilarious, alarming shade of reddish-purple. we told our 2 year-old that it was a "purple smoothie" because it really looked like a mixed berry smoothie. haha. it was really tasty though. as it cooled the purple color became a little muted and all the reds started to come out more, which is good. now it's more of a dark beet red.

I made something close to the Madhur Jaffrey korma recipe but with adjustments here and there bc of what I had on hand and w/o yogurt, and it's just not...right. BUT I did work out some useful things.

1. Blend the cashews in the blender, instead of trying to crush w rolling pin or w/e. It's so much easier! Add chx stock or w/e for liquid.

2. XMAS IMMERSION BLENDER TO THE RESCUE!! Pureeing the soft onions & tomatoes made my sauce an excellent texture.

Now to fix the flavor....

Had a weird duck craving so I bought a duck. Cooked the breasts saturday with sweet potato hash browns and cabbage slaw with ginger, mustard oil, and rice vinegar.

Made chinese/Vietnamese-ish (ginger, cinnamon, star anise) stock from the carcass and roasted the legs yesterday to make soup with rice noodles, bok choy and shredded roast duck topped with green onion and cilantro.

I've never cooked a duck!

i've cooked some duck legs but never the whole thing