Thanks—and thanks for the guidance. I’m closer than, say, California, or Texas, but it would still probably be either cold or spoiled by the time I got there. :P
JonRowe
3142
Picked up an Anova on amazon (on sale for 139 today) with a gift card I got for some weekend work I volunteered for. Excited to try that out, going to go to Costco to buy some frozen seafood and steaks!
Let me know how it goes Jon! I might get one of these things for my wife for her birthday, because it’s a kitchen gadget that doesn’t require much storage and it might even give good results, so, hey!
Timex
3144
I made a thing, which I don’t really know what I’d call it.
I have recently gotten a wafflemaker, and have been seeing the various things by the “Will It Waffle?” guy. Turns out, everything waffles, and it’s awesome.
So I was going to make a variation of MaPo, but decided to do some other stuff with it. Now, I think I’ve posted before, I tend to go with variations of MaPo that are in line with Ming Tsai’s, which is to say I usually put in vegetables, because I like vegetables. But with this, I decided to make something which really isn’t MaPo, but the flavoring was pretty much the same.
The thing I did though was waffle the tofu, which ended up essentially grilling it, while also compressing it. The end result was really good, but also very different from normal tofu, especially what you’d normally have in MaPo where it’s real smooth and silky. After waffling it, the Tofu took on a very dense, meaty texture. I’d definitely recommend this to folks who don’t like tofu’s normal texture.
Then I cut it along the grid and tossed it into the rest of the food.
And added some chopped up gai lan.
And it turned out really good. The flavor was very ma-po-ish, but the texture was very different.
nKoan
3145
Interesting use of the waffle maker. I’m going to have to give that a shot.
RichVR
3146
I love dense tofu so I really have to dig out the waffle iron for this.
Timex
3147
Continuing the waffle iron adventures, I have made stuffing waffles.
That is, stuffing, which is cooked in the waffle iron.
And yes, they turned out awesome.
Got a pot of authentic Mexican grandma style carnitas simmering on the stove right now. Smells like heaven in here. :D
I made Texas style (I.e. not traditional Czech style) kolaches. Sweet soft dough with meats and cheeses inside.
They were pretty good, despite yeast-risen breads still freaking me out a bit. (You leave them alone and they…change). Also, I made then in -1 degree weather instead of 80 degrees and 90% humidity, so they were slightly off but still, a solid effort.
Now I’m trying to find where I can get breakfast sausage sized hotdogs (“links”) for the next time I make them, which is harder than you’d think.
Tonight I made curried lentils and rice with fried onions and tomatoes:
Pretty tasty and quite simple, from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Fast.
This is the skillet stage of the chicken and dirty rice I made in the crockpot last week (not pictured: chicken and rice, since those are both introduced at the crockpot stage and not that photogenic really), from America’s Test Kitchen’s Slow Cooker Revolution:
White beans, sausage and greens (with garlic) from How to Cook Everything Fast, the first time I made it:
And the fancy Chinese-style ramen from Slow Cooker Revolution, some time back:
Malkav–looks freakin’ tasty, mate! Good spread of dishes, too. That How to Cook Everything Fast book is more intriguing than I’d like to admit–which brings me to my own contribution:
Spent two nights (the whole nights) making:
[ul]
[li]Slowcooker BBQ Pork (with some Sweet Baby Ray’s)
[/li][li]Seasoned Ham-Hock Infused Southern Greens
[/li][li]BBQ Baked Beans w/ Bacon
[/li][li]Creamy-Sweet Coleslaw
[/li][li]Buttermilk Chicken Tenders
[/li][li]Sweet Buttermilk Cornbread
[/li][li]Oven-Roasted Garlic-Rosemary Potato Wedges
[/li][/ul]
GF doesn’t much care for the first half of the list, so I roped her in with the chicken, fries, and cornbread (plus some frozen green beans I tossed together real fast). The smell of the baked beans was drivin’ her nuts (in a good way), so I hope to overcome her distaste for beans and get her to try 'em before they’re all gone.
Leftovers should get me through the weekend and on into next week just barely, and my gf will eat on the chicken again tonight and use the cornbread as a snack alongside her other food.
Best of all, the leftover bacon and buttermilk set us up for a bitchin’ breakfast on Saturday :-D
Sounds good. One of the reasons I wish I had a long term relationship is to have more people to feed. (Might sound a little backwards but you can only make so much food and still get it eaten, by yourself, which really inhibits how often I can try new stuff or make spreads like that.)
And I can really recommend How to Cook Everything Fast. Lots of great recipes with plenty of variety, generally each with variations that can completely change the profile of a dish (e.g. from Italian influences to Mexican or Indian) and sometimes things you can do to speed it up, or increase the flavor if you’ve got more time, plus recommended side dishes (which have their own chapter in the back). But the thing that really sets it apart from other cookbooks I have (including the original How to Cook Everything) is that he doesn’t hide the prep work in the ingredient listing. Instead, he has the prep instructions staged into the recipe at the optimal points and denoted in a different color of text. As someone who finds prep usually the most time-consuming and labor-intensive part of cooking, I really appreciate that. My main quibble is that he’s a little too excited about making everything yourself and using fresh ingredients. Mostly this means whenever he tells you to use ginger or herbs he has you use fresh and lists them in quantities based on that assumption that don’t convert easily to an amount of dried or preminced or whatever. I’m sure he’s right that this is the best tasting way to cook, but I can’t be arsed to deal with raw ginger and fresh herbs are extremely perishable, more expensive than the dried stuff in many cases, and most importantly, my groceries only stock a few specific kinds. I’ve never seen fresh rosemary at any of the three, for example, which Bittman calls for regularly.
Timex
3153
Get fresh ginger in a tube. It’s the way to go if you aren’t using Ginger every day.
Can’t, as we previously established, but I’ve found minced ginger in a jar on Amazon, so that works. My complaint is that “one inch fresh ginger” is not terribly helpful in determining how much pre-minced to use. I usually just dump a big ol’ glob in because if it uses ginger to begin with, I don’t see it being ruined by more ginger.
nKoan
3155
I have no basis with which to back this up with, but I go with 1 tbsp of preminced (or frozen, I use frozen), since I figure my tablespoon is about 1 inch diameter. Sometimes I add two since I like ginger.
Timex
3156
Yeah, I’d generally say one tbsp of minced ginger equals one inch.
Which seems to be about what people mean by “thumb sized piece,” though my grotesquely oversized thumbs would disagree with that measurement.
Similarly, I wanna know what sorta baby-ass tiny garlic people are mincing that it takes them three cloves to get a tbsp. I mean, I’m not buying that elephant garlic or anything, but 3 cloves for me winds up being a ton of garlic.
Then again, I friggin’ love garlic, so I don’t mind :-D
My wife and I met in Russia, both of us chancing to study abroad in the same semester in college. Since then, we’ve had a fascination with all foods Russian, but only infrequently enough time to make traditional Russian stuff in the traditional ways. So, last year, I ran across a recipe in a four-ingredient cookbook, which I spruced up a bit. I’m posting it now because I made it two nights ago; I would post a picture, except I forgot to take one and we finished the pot too fast. Despite being a half-hour soup instead of an all-day soup, it nevertheless reminds me of the borsch we had in the office building cafeteria across from the university in St. Petersburg.
“I’m not insulting you, I mean the herb.”
That made me laugh.
I love making borsch. You just made me want to roast some beets and make a big batch of it for me and my girlfriend and her son. Very nice!
-xtien
Timex
3160
That Borsch recipe looked pretty good and easy. I may try it.
I’m also considering what I will waffle this weekend.
Because something is getting waffled.
