You caught me! I’ve been tinkering with Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Halal Cart Chicken and Rice with White Sauce recipe for years now. I’ve just about got it where it’s foolproof for my gf and I these days. Few changes here and there to suit our tastes–subbing in chicken breast and changing the spices around are the big ones. Combo’d with a handful of other things, it makes a ton of great food for a week :)
Is that a breakfast bagel in the middle? If so I’ll take one!
Traditionally it’s served with a bunch of chopped iceberg lettuce and tomatoes and topped with lightly grilled pita bread, then you mix it all together into an amorphous giant mass and eat it. The lettuce adds a nice crunch.
They also have a shockingly hot red hot sauce. I love hot food, and this stuff isn’t messing around.
Whoa … that market is nice!!! I’m jealous, Eric.
Yeah. Using that little egg skillet I linked above, I’m making myself cheesy sausage egg bagels most days. The frozen spicy sausage patties from Walmart are just about the perfect size and fry up crisp on the outside, juicy inside in like 4 minutes flat, so I use those.
I normally go with a slightly nicer salad of romaine, roma tomatoes, red onions, cucumbers, feta, and a kinda spicy-tangy dressing, but I got lazy this week and didn’t chop my tomatoes till they went bad, so oops.
That hot sauce, I think, might be harissa, or some variant on it. I’ve got a tube of it in my fridge from, ummm. . . fuck knows? how many years ago that I’m a little afraid to use, hah.
It has the thick consistency of harissa, but it’s like, much hotter. Some people on the internet think it’s just harissa with pure capsaicin extract added.
Man, I just kept reading & drooling. I think I’m going to try out that spicy Mediterranean slaw. And then the Falafel and then … I just want to cook and eat that entire list.
I’d eat that breakfast bagel, but come on Armando, you’re gonna fucking kill yourself. That thing looks like a heart attack on a bun.
I’m worse at self-preservation than the fuckin pandas, man.
(PS as prepared, yes, it was 1,000 calories. then again, all I had yesterday was that thing, a Zaki, and some pita chips, so maybe not immediate death!)
At my last site, we had a member of our our clinical team completely go off about pandas and why they should be allowed to die. Well he made a comment about hating pandas and of course I had to ask how someone could hate such animals and then he went into the tirade of having to help them eat and procreate and well just exist.
It was pretty funny just like your remark and that gif below it.
Fuck gluten free flower!
Or gluten free pizza.
I made sushi for wife and daughter. And they helped!
The most important ingredient. Cook the sushi rice in a rice cooker, then plop it into a wooden bowl. Add in a heated mixture of rice wine vinegar, sugar and salt, then ‘cut’ the rice – meaning spread it out with a slicing motion to cool as gently as possible – no broken grains!
Assemble the goodies: rice, nori sheets, and other ingredients: sliced carrot, pepper, avocado, cucumber. We do not have any way to get sushi grade fish (the only kind you want to eat raw) so we used some smoked salmon and crab meat. I made a siracha mayo topping, and we also had toasted sesame seeds, wasabi and of course soy sauce.
Then everyone made their own rolls however they like. It was hard to mess up. The medium sized blue bowls are just water, for dipping your fingers after your spread the rice onto the sheets. You need a sharp knife to slice the rolls, and you need to to wet the knife after each slice with a damp towel to keep it from getting gummy.
I also made (on left) an arame/edaname salad.
All in all, it was pretty easy, a lot of fun, and quite yummy.
I’ve been playing with donburi recently, both oyako don and katsu don. I make chicken katsu with some regularity, because the kids like it, and it’s relatively easy, so for chicken katsu don, it’s just a matter of making absurdly too much so that I have leftovers the next day. I’ve had to play with the quantities of soup base and egg to dial into what I think it should look like, but I think I’ve mostly figured that part out.
I forget to take pictures. Maybe next time.
Had a leftover grilled Tilapia, so I made some Indian dosas, homemade salsa with Harissa and rice wine vinegar, sour cream with masala, to make International Frankenstein Fish Tacos! Wish I had some dill or fresh cilantro…
#tacotuesday
Just a note. Some of the very best vegetarian Indian food I ever had was at Govinda’s, a restaurant attached to the Hari Krishna temple in Manhattan. My first wife was an ex-devotee and knew people there. We’d eat there on a weekly basis, amazing stuff. They also had a free meal every Sunday afternoon for anyone that came by.
This looks great! As I’ve been diving deeper into Japanese cuisine, I’ve thus far shied away from sushi. Just feels like one of those meals that’s going to be so much trouble, and might not get anywhere near the quality I enjoy from my favorite places. . . but you’re really giving the itch!
I am wounded that you did not share this with me, man :P
I made some shrimp chowder with corn, carrots, and potatoes, plus bacon-and-parmesan-roasted brussels sprouts and savory buttermilk cornbread.
The chowder is a pretty obnoxious story in trying to improve upon the relatively not-legit, but very-fast chowder recipe I did the first couple of times that my gf really liked without going hyper overboard and doing Serious Eats’ insane chowder recipe.
So I start out by cooking off some onion and celery in butter in my big stockpot. The intent is to cook them down, add flour to make a roux, add enough water to simmer them and blend them down (gf hates the feel of onions and celery pieces in her food), then add milk, salt, potatoes, and carrots, simmer till cooked, then finally add in the corn and shrimp at the end, along with the remaining seasonings, some cream, and a bit of cheese for old time’s sake.
Unfortunately I was out late working with my mentee in our local RPG Meetup’s GM Mentorship Program on her D&D session for next month, so I got a late start and was basically chopping vegetables “live” as they went into the pot (while simultaneously trying to get the cornbread and sprouts going), and this lead to some errors.
First, I kinda started to, erm, let’s charitably call it “caramelize” the onions and celery. Panicking over the dark bits and fearing a veer toward bitter flavors, I poured my 3/4 cup fo water in, forgetting to add the flour completely. Fuck. This shit ain’t gonna thicken itself. Do I make a separate roux and dirty another pot? No, running out of burners as it is. Fuck.
So I dump the contents of the pot through a strainer. And send the caramelized-onion-and-celery-infused butter and water slurry down the drain. Double fuck.
Damp veggies back into pot with new butter. Cook off most of the moisture. Add flour and stir into a roux. Have gf bring an increasingly frustrated me new water. Mix it into the roux. Forget to turn down the temperature while I turn back to finish peeling my potatoes, which had decided to sprout in the pantry this week while I spent most of the evenings too sick/tired/busy to cook.
Turn back to see that the water/onion/celery/roux mixture has immediately turned the texture of mashed potatoes. Triple fuck. In goes milk, slowly stirred into thin out the rapidly searing-onto-the-pan paste. Have gf grab the immersion blender I forgot to take out. Blend down veggies to nothing. Add in remaining milk, potatoes, carrots, and salt. Phew, okay, things are fine. Lid on. Still forget to turn down temperature.
While I dice up parsley for the chowder and halve my sprouts and get ready to chop some bacon, I hear the lid clattering. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. Milk has come to a boil and gloriously split into a grainy, watery mess while cooking the potatoes through. Realize that I must now Kenji this shit and blend the potato-starch-enriched milk in order to emulsify the fats back in. Quintuplefuck.
Realize I don’t have easy access to a big, sturdy, heat-resistant enough bowl to strain the boiling milk into to remove the potatoes and carrots and my gf is getting real tired of being called away from her work and into the kitchen to help (sextuplefuck), so slowly scoop them all out with a ladle through a strainer. Add the drained off liquids back into the larger quantity of chowder still in pot. Retrieve head of immersion blender from sink. Remember to rinse soap off of it. Blend potato-starch-laden broken-milk tragedy chowder back into some semblance of creaminess for several minutes.
Add shrimp, corn, seasonings, and some Monterrey Jack to the pot. Bring back to a simmer, carefully this time. When the shrimp are cooked, add back in the slightly overcooked potatoes and carrots, sprinkle in parsley and pour in the heavy cream. Re-simmer. Serve alongside cornbread–which wound up going back into the oven 4 times over the course of its 45 minute bake (recipe called for 25-30, fucking liars)–to starving girlfriend at 10:30PM.
Proceed to finish chopping bacon and start cooking the sprouts dish for myself. SEPTUPLEFUUUUUUUCK
But hey, the chowder was really goddamned fucking good.
My New Chowder Recipe (less fuckups)
Final, ideal recipe:
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp Unsalted Butter
- 1 medium Yellow Onion, diced
- 2 stalks Celery, diced
- 2 tbsp All-Purpose Flour
- 1/2 cup Water
- 3 cups Whole Milk
- 2 tsp Kosher Salt
- 1 1/2 lbs Gold Potatoes, peeled and chopped
- 2-3 medium Carrots, diced
- 1 tsp Black Pepper
- 1 1/2 tsp Old Bay
- 1 1/2 lbs Shrimp
- ~1 cup Yellow Corn
- 1 cup Heavy Cream
- 1 cup Monterrey Jack Cheese
- 2 tbsp Parsley, chopped
Directions
Melt butter in a large stockpot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add in the onions and celery and saute, stirring, for about 4-5 minutes, until softened and translucent. Mix in the flour, stirring well, and cook–continuing to stir!–for about 2-3 minutes to cook off the raw flour flavors.
Add in the water, stirring well to fully incorporate the roux, and, if you’d like a less-chunky chowder, use an immersion blender to blitz the veggies (you may need to add some milk, too, depending on the width of your pot and the design of your blender). Add in the milk, stirring well, as well as the salt, potatoes, and carrots.
Bring the mixture to a bare simmer and lower the temperature to maintain it. Cook for about 10 minutes, or until the potatoes and carrots are almost cooked. Add in the pepper, Old Bay, shrimp, and corn and simmer for 3-4 minutes until the shrimp are cooked through. Add in the cream, cheese, and parsley and bring back to a simmer, stirring to incorporate.
Serve with cornbread and maybe some oyster crackers if you remember that you’ve got some, unopened, in your pantry from early this year (you won’t).
The only reason I’d make sushi at home would be to do interesting things with the flavoring the rice. If you have very specific non-fish combinations you want, that works too, but I have no problem with fish, and you’re not going to get a better quality of fish than sushi restaurants will.
Well, that and maybe making pressed sushi, which is typically very hard to find, but that requires some specific ingredients, and I don’t usually want it that badly.
Yeah, my biggest issue here is related to this. Our local H-Mart sells some pretty damned decent sushi-grade tuna and salmon on the regular. But it’s like $25-30/lb, obviously doesn’t have much of a shelf life, and my gf and I can only consume so much sushi. For a party, where friends are chipping in to cover costs, I’d probably do it as a novelty. . .
. . . except I hate making something for a crowd I haven’t perfected for myself already. It’s sort of a catch-22 at this point :(