I’m happy to, Armando.

First I cut a bunch of corn tortillas into eighths and tossed them with a little canola and olive oil, along with a little salt. I arranged the triangles on a couple of baking sheets and let them cook at 350F for ten minutes or so. [Next time I’m going to bake a lot more, since as they sat cooling while I made the sauce and everything a lot of them…um…disappeared. Come on, I had to test the sauce as it came together somehow.]

While the tortillas crisped up I made a simple enchilada sauce. First time I’ve done that. A tbsp of oil and flour (kind of a quick roux), a couple tbsp of chili powder, 1/2 tsp garlic powder and salt, 1/4 cumin and oregano. Once mixed and aromatic I gradually added a cup of vegetable stock (could be chicken, but I often feed a vegetarian so best to use the former). Whisked it all to smooth out lumps and let it simmer for about ten minutes.

When that was done I let it sit and cool for a bit. I tossed about half a chopped onion in a skillet and let it sweat for five minutes or so, then added some chopped garlic for another five. Then added a can of black beans and let that all simmer for a few minutes.

The tortilla chips, or what was left of them, went into a mixing bowl and I tossed them with most of the enchilada sauce to coat them. I layered them in an oiled baking dish, pouring the black beans over all. I made four wells in the mixture and carefully cracked my eggs into those depressions. Added what was left of the sauce and then grated a bunch of cheese over the whole thing and put it in the oven. I expected this to take about ten minutes. Nope. The whites were still clear at this point. So I had to bake them longer until they set, by which time the yolks were solid. I don’t know. Maybe the broiler next time? I’d really like them to be smoother. Even soft-boiled consistency would be nice. Not sure how to achieve that.

The tortillas don’t turn out crispy in the end, which is why those bits aren’t pictured. But baking them first really adds a nice depth of flavor.

I look forward to trying it again and doing a bit more with the sauce. Maybe add some fresh chiles to the mix or make up a pot of my own beans instead of using canned.

-xtien

I made double breaded panko shrimp with Cajun rice. It was fairly simple and the only reason I mention it, is that it was the best shrimp Ive ever had. It came out perfect. Fresh out of the olive oil served with a slightly modified hot sauce. I ate well tonite.

Thanks for the insight, xtien! Does sound pretty tasty :-D; I kinda wanna give it a shot next month.


On the docket this week was “lazy Armando” food; I knew I had a ludicrous work-week and packed weekend planned, so I went with a few simple things that could mostly be thrown together with pre-made ingredients (though I did some legitimate cooking at week’s end).

Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork - 3.5lb boneless pork shoulder, marinated overnight in a homemade dry rub of salt/pepper/cayenne/paprika/garlic powder/brown sugar/mustard powder/cumin, then cooked in (no kidding) a liter of Dr. Pepper, with a few sliced onions scattered underneath. Shredded, then mixed with 1/2 bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s Sweet & Spicy BBQ sauce.

Sweet Coleslaw - Pre-shredded (see, lazy!) carrots and cabbage mixed into a combination of mayo, half n half, apple cider vinegar, pepper, seasoned salt, sugar, and celery seed.

Baked Beans - Bush’s Original, microwaved till well done ;)

Corn - Walmart brand, nuked with some added kosher salt, black pepper, and a pat of butter.

Ate pork & slaw on wheat buns with the last dregs of some sweet potato fries I had in the freezer at first, then swapped into plated. When I did that, I added two more food items:

Cornbread - Buttermilk, cornmeal, flour, baking powder + soda, salt, and a smidgen of sugar. Baked in a ripping hot, butter-coated cast iron skillet.

Roasted Potatoes - Skin-on reds, sliced in half and tossed in light olive oil + butter, salt, pepper, and thyme, with a few cloves of well-crushed garlic tossed in, too. Roasted till crisp on the bottom and creamy throughout.

Final meals wound up looking something like this:

“Lamb of God don’t actually like lamb, so I cooked them chicken,”

Musicians who are chefs too, and recipes too keeping in spirit of the thread. I just had to link that line somewhere. Its just great.

Man, Vegan Black Metal Chef is so fucking great. And honestly, black metal makes a great backdrop for cooking. Something about Primordial just belting out about the plight of the Irish through history makes dicing those onions a little more epic than it would be otherwise. . .


Last night was another big night for me, cooking-wise. Prepped Tex-Mex-flavored chicken (cumin, garlic, cayenne, and lime marinade), a black bean-and-corn salsa, white-and-wild rice pilaf (with toasted almonds and dried cranberries), steamed broccoli tossed in lemon and butter, and a twice-baked potato with mozzarella and butter mixed into it, then topped with cheddar and bacon and re-baked, with a final coat of sour cream and chives at the end.

That baked potato looks like the best baked potato I have ever seen.

Alright! I made biryani v0.2, and this time took pictures of the whole process, for posterity.
(oh snap, can’t put more than 10 images. Cut out some of them.)

rice preparation

The rice now complete (perhaps a bit more cooked than I would have liked for this, but it ended up working out well, so whatever), moved on to making a chicken curry thing to put into the middle layer.

Curry Preparation

And then time for assembly!

assembling final dish for baking

Baked for 45 minutes at 350, and this was the result.


I’ve cooked no end of mush recently, for baby. Chicken, sweet potato and apple mush. Red lentil and sweet potato mush. Mackerel, potato and broccoli mush. Bolognese mush. Various vegetable mushes.

And because of baby, I too have been trying to save money on general food shopping. I’ve started doing my weekly food shop online (Sainsbury’s), which makes it SO much easier to see how much you’re spending, fish out the good deals, and generally shop a lot more efficiently. That, as well as visiting the local ‘cheap’ supermarket (Aldi), to buy lower price fruit & veg. So food hasn’t been massively exciting for me the last few months - I do all the cooking in our house (ever since I caught the Mrs marinating a chicken breast in HP brown sauce), and normally make a risotto once a week, have pasta a couple times a week, rice + curry/chilli con carne once a week. We tend to get fish & chips once a week, and quite often get a Chinese takeaway on a Saturday night.

Eating out has dried up A LOT since baby too! Used to be fairly regular … now perhaps once every couple weeks(ish)…

My extended high school/college buddy group got together for our annual “guys’ weekend,” and one of the rules is: supply the makings for a meal or cook one.

So one guy went to COSTCO and got $150 worth of ribeye steaks. He then said, “Tin Wisdom, you have bored us with untold stories of this ‘sous vide’ cooking thing – time to put my money where my mouth is… via your gizmo.”

So it quickly became an interesting logistics exercise: you’ve got twelve massive steaks to cook. The sous vide recipe says cook each steak in the water bath for an hour. How to get all the meat ready and done in a reasonable amount of time for an increasingly-intoxicated house full of flatulent men?

Well, we ended up displacing a fair amount of beer from a medium-sized cooler. We filled the cooler with the hottest water we could coax from the tap and put in the Anova cooker. It took a while, but we got the water to the target temperature (129F). We had the vacuum-sealer and did an assembly-line: open bag; drink beer; season meat; drink beer; seal meat in bag; drink beer; place bag into bath; finish beer.

An hour later we fired up the grill, took the meat out of the bags and seared them in a similar assembly-line fashion.

I’ve gotta say – this was some of the best ribeye I’ve ever had. I managed to get the searing just about perfect with a really professional-looking cross-hatch pattern. The steaks were perfectly medium-rare throughout and juicier than any meat has a right to be. Add in some bread to soak up the juices, corn on the cob and a token salad to round everything out.

The caveman-like grunting from the rest of my cohort told me that it was appreciated overall.

In terms of ravioli from scratch, very nice! However, my wife bought a pasta maker, I said we’d never use it, she said blah blah and it was a healthy squabble…

We made pasta twice, and I must say, it is a mountain of work for absolutely ZERO payoff. You can buy boxes of pasta for 99 cents (not even on sale!) that is pretty much just as good… just has no water in it, for easy transportation, and stays fresh forever! If you want fresh watery pasta you can get it from the deli section, also cheap! Little to no difference in taste. Making past is like going back to the stone-age for fun. We should scrawl our messages into clay tables and carry them to a ‘forum’. I said we made it twice, the first time to learn how and waste our time for something that tasted the same, the second time to waste more time to prove it tasted the same.

The past maker has been in our basement gathering dust for years.

That was my rant :).

I love how you accidentally or on purpose keep leaving the ‘a’ off of ‘pasta’ in that post about not making pasta. Paging Dr. Freud.

Many years ago a couple friends invited us over for fresh pasta. They described hanging pasta all over the house so it would dry. Over chairs and whatnot. At that point I figured I’d probably never make fresh pasta.

-xtien

He had pasta in his past!

Many years ago a couple friends invited us over for fresh pasta. They described hanging pasta all over the house so it would dry. Over chairs and whatnot. At that point I figured I’d probably never make fresh pasta.

-xtien

Don’t drape mine over the toilet seat. That’s a pasta in your closet.

In unrelated news, I spent all day cooking a ton of tasty South Indian food, making extra since I was gonna bring some to my weekly Pathfinder game tonight, since one of my players had called out and another had offered to host us at his place.

Then two more of the guys canceled in rapid succession and I had to can the session entirely. Now I’ve just got to eat all this delicious food by myself (how tragic).

I hate to say it, but fresh pasta is better than dried for certain applications.

I recently started buying fresh noodles from the refrigerator instead of dried noodles, and there is a world of difference. There’s a couple of caveats:

  • I use this mostly for “chinese spaghetti” (not my recipe, but close enough), where I want a very specific chewy texture on the noodle. For many other dishes, it doesn’t matter.
  • Freshness is relative. I buy a bunch of packages and just toss them in the freezer until I need them, and they’re still great.

I’ve never made pasta from scratch (my mother would make dumpling skins from scratch when we were younger, which I guess is conceptually similar to ravioli). We buy store bought skins now though.

I got a set of the Kitchenaid Pasta Makers for Xmas a few years back and… I’ve used it a handful of times since then. It’s not horrifically difficult to do, and the pasta DOES taste a little better fresh than dried.

But man is it time-consuming: between making the dough, flattening it properly and finally cutting enough noodles to feed the whole family, you’re talking multiple hours before you actually start, you know, cooking.

I think that’s the thing with fresh made pasta… It tastes a little better, especially in terms of texture.

But not nearly better ENOUGH to justify the effort it takes to make it. At least not to me.

I think there’s a good reason that a lot of Italian restaurants only do house-made pasta for specific dishes (ravioli and pappardelle, usually), as those are the places where the difference can be easily appreciated.

Watching MasterChef. They had to make an egg yolk ravioli, Ramsay’s favorite pasta. It’s fresh pasta around a single, unbroken egg yolk. Cooked for literally 90 seconds. The yolk stays liquid. The sauce is browned butter. And a single leaf of (cooked) sage on top.

I will be making this and documenting it. No ETA, but I must try it!

Try making that with store bought dried pasta. :^)

I love that you posted this.

Even as I wrote above about not ever wanting to try to make fresh pasta because blahblahblah, I thought of this episode. It was so thrilling watching them try to execute that dish. I’m getting pretty good at eggs, but that…hoo boy. That’s major league.

The only way I’d ever think of trying to make fresh pasta would be for a stuffed application, especially ravioli, which I love so much and have never made. As weird as it sounds, I’m too intimidated by the idea of getting all the air out properly! That’s such a weird mental barrier, but there it is.

-xtien

Edit: YES. Please do document this, RichVR!

Christien, I’m in agreement here. I can’t fathom going through the process for fresh pasta to just make linguini. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be kick ass linguini, just that the effort to pleasure ratio would be off by a bit. My only use for the pasta maker is for those things like ravioli, manicotti, papardelle, and such that need thin pasta. OTOH my mom makes manicotti by using a batter in a cast iron skillet like crepes. I’ll never make anything better than that. Having said that, I wonder what lasagna with fresh pasta would be like. I’m going with gummy and dense. So there I will give the win to dried lasagna sheets. In fact I’ll call that a knockout. UNLESS, the lasagna was prepared ala deconstructed or post boil without baking. Putting fresh pasta in any kind of casserole will destroy the reason for the freshness. It will become paste. OTOH, using freshly cooked fresh pasta and layering it with lasagna ingredients is called a $40 dish in any upscale restaurant. ;-)

Note here: Please do not use “no-boil” lasagna sheets unless you know how to balance the liquid absorbed by the pasta. And if you make sauce that watery… you can keep it.

Sorry for going off. BTW the store bought pasta thing was not directed at you. Just a joke. Much respect.

Oh, I knew it was a joke, Rich! I also like the point you make about the value of fresh pasta for that application.

I also love this post about your mom, especially the manicotti she makes. Manicotti is one of those things I’ve not had as an adult, because I had negative experiences with it as a child. Like lasagna. I did not care for ricotta as a kid, so I shy away from anything I think might contain it. Which I don’t think includes manicotti, but I associate it for some reason.

I have come to love lasagna without ricotta, and I’ve actually made it with that weird “no-boil” sheet stuff you warn against above. I used the recipe on the box I got from Trader Joe’s–I know, I know–and I loved it because I put a bunch of spicy sausage in, and the recipe calls for mascarpone instead of ricotta. I’ve never had a problem with the sauce getting watery, but I have had a problem with the dish coming out too oily because of the sausage.

All that said, you describing your mom’s manicotti makes me really want to try manicotti again. Thank you.

-xtien