Siren
2761
I didn’t do the cheese bread, but I made the soup last night. Boyfriend has a weekly tabletop RPG group (currently doing Shadowrun, if any of you are curious), and we didn’t realize the game night had been cancelled this week, so there was scrambling for dinner ideas. Our hosts have taken two years of cooking classes at the local Cordon Bleu, so I was a little nervous at doing this for them for the first time.
I used beef broth instead, to make it more like a French Onion soup. I served it, and… Nothing. As soon as the spoons entered mouths, there was absolutely no noise for at least ten minutes.
Aside from slurps. Everyone was impressed. Thanks for the recipe! It’s going into regular rotation.
Just made schnitzel for the first time ever. Pork, not veal, because it’s obviously superior. It came out pretty well:
It may not be the prettiest plate of food, but after 7.5 hours of simmering our Guiness/coffee/cocoa powder-chili con carne came out really nice.
There’s some really beautiful weather in Bergen today. When I woke up I was thinking about going hiking, but then I realised that I still have a cold, so instead of being healthy I went the opposite (and much less exhausting) route and made Swedish cookies called “havreflarn” - basically buttery sweet oat cookies with a few extra ingredients.
Shiny! Man, I wish I could take awesome food photos like you guys. As it is, the closest thing I have to a mise en place is a mess en place. :P
Had a vegetarian friend over for dinner tonight, so tried my hand at a new school of cooking. Acorn squash quesadillas, a potato pizza (which I thought was rather boring, but my friends adored), apple strudel (FUCK phyllo), and those chocolate cookies Speak with Bread posted about at the top of this page. All well-received, though the cookies baked up into one giant cookie. And were AMAZING. :D
Last night was one of our big Arkham Horror games. Normally, I just make a bunch of pizzas for the troupe but decided that I was going to carry the theme forward, so behold! C’thulu Curry! (aka Indian Gulai Sotong – a Malaysian squid curry). I suppose for effect I should have draped the tentacles over the side of the bowl:
This was my first time cooking squid–I think I did keep it in the pot a bit too long as it was a little chewy, but it’s hard to tell when squid is “done.” Unlike shrimp…
I also made Saag Paneer, which always goes over well. (I haven’t been able to master making the Paneer myself, it’s always too crumbly when I try to do it, so I just get a block of it from the indo-pak).
So we were able to devour C’thulu for a change. It was a good evening.
Nice Maglite.
Also, man, the food at our Arkham Horror sessions never looks that fancy.
The maglite was to enforce the more reluctant people to try squid.
I sort of went off the deep end, and that’s saying something considering the term “pizza surge” has come into play more than once in our gaming sessions. I don’t think I’ll do this again anytime soon because it took me away from the game for too long, but it was fun to do once.
jeffd
2769
Tonight I made Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce.
It’s very simple. Three ingredients:
- 28 oz can san marzano tomatoes
- 5 oz salted butter
- 1 medium onion, cut in half & peeled
Throw it all in a pot. Simmer for 45 minutes. Enjoy.
This was absolutely delicious. It’s a very delicate, sweet sauce. I served it with chicken parmesan, with which it was fantastic. I wouldn’t use this as like a base for meat sauce; the sweetness would get overwhelmed without more to back it up.
I’m totally gonna try that.
Why is that?
I made paneer when I started out cooking and found it to be incredible easy (if you had the room in the fridge for two boards with something heavy on top in which to press the cheese block) and something that always impressed guests - I started with a Jamie Oliver curry recipe with paneer.
looks good. I have to pieces of advice for tomatoe sauce - use whole tomatoes and let them simmer wihtout breaking them open. When they’re done, then break them open - this will make the sauce even sweeter - if you really feel like it, then remove the pips for an even sweeter and better result. I don’t bother.
Also if you have your own tomatoes, then removing the skin and pips makes for the best sauce ever, and isn’t that time consuming really (cut an X in the skin, cover with boiling water and then cold water and the skin peels right off). The quality of tomatoes (whether you buy canned or grow your own) really makes a difference - there’s 100’s of different tomatoes out there, and they really doesn’t taste alike.
Yesterday I went totally old school.
I cut 2 kilos of parsnip, swede, parsley (the root), potatoes, red onion, celery (again the root) in ½ inch squares, boiled for 3 minutes and then baked for 1 hour+ in the oven with a whole garlic and some salt, pepper, thyme and rosemary.
At the same time in a large cast iron pot I roasted 2 kilos of bones (I don’t know what you call meat on the bones in English - here it’s roast bones and cheap, because is what’s left over from the butcher), then added some flour and a pot of broth. Left it to simmer for 1½ hour, removed the bones - meat now almost falling off - and made sauce (which was more or less just adding some flour, colour and salt).
So simple, but heaven. And the kids loved the sauce and eating with their fingers viking style…
Waltzer
2772
The seeds and pulp surrounding them account for almost the entirety of the tomato’s flavor - they’re full of free glutamates. You should really leave them in the sauce.
Don’t agree, and it depend on what flavour you’re going for. The seeds are more bitter, so if you’re going for a sweet sauce, getting rid of them is good. And while the pulp should stay, the whole juicy inside will water down your sauce and getting rid of that without losing the seeds is darn hard.
Athryn
2774
Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese Filling, recipe from Joy of Baking:
Since I don’t have a large food processor, I made the cream cheese filling in my stand mixer, and it seemed to turn out just fine.
RichVR
2775
The logic of my beloved grandmother pretty much followed this. But she also said that making sauce from fresh tomatoes was wasting them. We grew our own at the time. They were made into salads with a minimum of dressing. A pinch of salt and freshly ground pepper. Extra virgin olive oil. Maybe oregano. Fresh basil, also from the yard.
Canned tomatoes and some tomato paste was used for sauce. The flavors were already concentrated. She always used canned tomatoes that were just tomato. No preservatives, no added salt or anything else.
But fresh tomatoes will make a fine sauce. You just have to cook them down for 7 or 8 hours. And you still should add a bit of tomato paste. Of course it all comes down to personal taste.
Of course a fresh sauce of roughly chopped plum tomatoes, garlic and olive oil is sublime. But it’s really in a different category from “Sunday sauce”.
I live near Zanesville, Ohio, so I bet you can guess what interesting things happened here today!
RichVR
2777
Is the monkey still at large?
Since this is about cooking, what was your point?
I’ve eaten my way through a fair bit of African wildlife, perhaps Robert is asking us for a recipe for kudu?
I made this:
Pumpkin Rice Laksa soup. I used pumpkin, hokkaido and butternut squash to get a bit more flavour.
First I made a paste of chili, lime leaves, garlic,ginger, lemongrass, coriander (stalks), five spice and cumin. This I fried with white onion for 10 minutes+. Added the pumpkin and vegetable stock. Cooked for 15 minutes and added basmati rice, cooked 15-20 minutes till the rice were done, added coconut milk and when it was boiling again I added lime juice, salt and pepper to taste.
I warmed the cleaned pumpkin shell in the oven (with the bread) and served the soup in it with coriander (leaves) and some freshly grated coconut.
Yummy.
It appears that my point is that there are too many damned (that’s interesting) threads, since I posted this in the wrong one.
