What's cooking? part 4

(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

The upside to the less-than-ideal commute I have this month is easy access to the HMART and GREAT WALL mega-Asian grocery stores. Totally gonna get a duck--it will be relatively cheap so if I fuck it up I will not be as sad as if I had bled money for a Whole Foods duckie.

I think I did breasts once and they came out really great! Don't know why I have been hesitant.

I love HMart; it's always one of my four must-visits on grocery trips to Atlanta. Too bad they don't sell the frozen young galangal there anymore.

I made a potato-ham-corn chowder today that looks exactly like yellow curry, which made me think about 1/3 of a small can of yellow curry paste whisked into it would be really interesting.

last night i made arepas topped with a tomato-chickpea thing and some portabellos with melted raclette. it lacked variety in texture but tasted really good.

cabbage slaw with ginger, mustard oil, and rice vinegar.

Joygoat, please say more about this!

I had half a head of cabbage around and just cored it, sliced it super thin, salted it for a bit and tossed it with grated ginger, some indian mustard oil and rice vinegar. Was kind of last minute and I wanted something crunchy, sharp, acidy, and pungent to go with the duck breast and sweet potatoes and it worked pretty well.

I do this kind of thing with cabbage a lot, usually with garlic, fish sauce, lime, some sugar, and chiles of some sort for a fake thai papaya salad because I can't ever find green papayas unless I travel to a place with bigger asian markets.

Thanks! I need to play around more with crunchy, sharp, acidy and pungent things. I love them.

Bittman has a recipe for onion quiche w/ bacon in How to Cook Everything and well I just happen to have an abundance of eggs and also a spare pie crust and some leftover bacon, and i'm intrigued by this but this quiche has NO CHEESE!! That sounds crazy to me! How can this possibly be as good as quiche WITH cheese? I am adventurous and want to give this the benefit of the doubt so I'm just gonna try it as is once but how odd

Just put cheese in it. Bittman isn't God.

a really typical nz dish is bacon and egg pie - which usually doesn't have cheese - and it's DELICIOUS.

i don't believe it's necessary to follow recipes to the letter unless i have no idea what to do otherwise
do whatever you want -- it's your quiche!

or try it his way
it's def not worth sweating imo

Quiche Lorraine doesn't have cheese in it.

I love the idea of this without the cheese! I like the texture of quiche but am not always in a cheesy mood. Worth a try imo.

I've done hand-cut soba noodles enough to want a pasta maker, but then I saw this thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rSdmWER6z8

i want that sobadly, udon even know

this q has been nagging me even though i would not have much use for a pasta machine: does extruded pasta have a noticeably different texture (or ew, mouthfeel, ugh) from rolled and cut pasta?

How the heck does quiche Lorraine not have cheese in it?? Thought it was always w gruyere or Swiss?

You can add cheese, and it tastes great, but the Lorraine region is nowhere near Switzerland (it actually borders Germany). The recipe I know has crème fraîche.

But is quiche a pie? :D

i'm making the rick bayless tomatillo chicken crockpot thing. smells like a big vat of salsa verde, which is good imo

I want a soba machine because we like it enough that we'd eat it three times a week. Real buckwheat noodles are fuuuucking expensive but buckwheat flour is not. The mouthfeel is superior with fresh noodles, yes. Boil them a minute and it's terrific. These are more of an udon cut, about 1/4" diameter. Tasty stuff.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sexyoxen/16118022817

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sexyoxen/16117725009

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7542/16118022817_7a3a700539_c.jpg ?

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8623/16117725009_6a13d4cd9a_c.jpg !

no i'm not asking fresh vs. dried. also i think dried noodles have their place even if fresh is available. marcella hazan book says something about that. i'm saying like the noodle is pressed out from dough in the machine rather than being rolled into a sheet first then sliced like you did.

i mean i really like dried pasta

There is for sure a difference

holy god that noodle-maker upthread looks amazing, even if watching the noodle-extruding process gives me flashbacks to old play-doh ads

hi what miso should i buy and why?

Red, so you can make this:

Dice 1 aubergine/eggplant into 2cm cubes and fry in 3 or so tbsp oil for about 15 mins, with some sliced chilli. Mix 3 tbsp each of soy sauce, mirin, sake, caster sugar, add to the aubergine and cook for another 3 mins. Mix well 3 tbsp each of red miso and water, add and cook for another 2 mins. Serve with rice and spring onion garnish if you're feeling fancy. Serves two.

no i think i want yellow

or white, one of those two