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Comments
Aaaaaaaaaaaah.
I've never fried bread dough myself so I can't be sure how that goes but I'm glad you came out the other side of it okay.
Also, the only song about food poisoning I know.
After having some serious dental stuff earlier this year I had some serious issues even thinking about going back, but obviously I had to go back and I was pretty fine with it, so you'll probably get over it.
So, I will assume you know how to make dough for tart. I made it from scratch one or two times, but the most recent time it turned out you can buy ready-made dough, already in the right size and shape for the dish. (Apparently there are normalized sizes for pastry.)
So, prepare a dish for making tarts, whatever's the name for it, smear it with butter or some other fat so the dough will not stick, and place the dough in it. Now, for a single tart of this size, you will also need the following:
* four big onions
* about 1 spoon of dried thyme
* an egg
* 120 ml of milk
* a few spoons (1-2?) of olive oil (I used vegetable oil and came out fin though)
* about a teaspoon of ground nutmeg
* poppy seed
* salt and pepper
Chop the onions into half-rings, heat up the olive oil in a frying pan and throw the onions in there. Add thyme, fry until the onions get all glassy and soft (you may add salt at this point to soften up the onions for that), and when they're ready spread them on the tart dough. Mix the egg with the milk and pour the mix onto the tart, so the onions will be covered and bound by it once it gets heated. I like to grab the whole dish and shake it a bit, so it will spread more thoroughly. Add nutmeg and poppy seed; for the latter I did not give a set amount, since I did it by hand and eye - just spread it out so there's enough to taste and it's evenly distributed.
You may add salt and pepper at about any point, but I'd recommend to do it early, like straight on the onions or something, so the pepper won't interfere with the aesthetic effect of poppy seed.
Heat up your oven to 220 degrees Celsius and bake the tart for some 25 minutes and you're done. Serve preferably hot, but it's a bit like pizza in this regard - it tastes fine as long as it doesn't freeze your face off. I quite like it - hard to mess it up, no hard-to-obtain ingredients, so on. So, altogether, it's highly recommendable even for beginner-level cooking.
A pie tin or like, a more old-school ceramic-type deal.
I always find it odd when you put poppy seeds in a savoury-adjacent meal but I think that was their original use.
It sounds like a starter-quiche type recipe, which is kind of cool. Yeah I'll be sure to keep it in mind for future use*. I just hope the onions don't get too soft, because I kind of have a thing about that.
*I was thinking about getting a physical notebook to start writing all of these down for easier kitchen use because using tablets or such in the kitchen is taxing (and there's always the risk of damaging it extremely easily). I think I'll wait till we have a few more pages under our belt.
I considered putting my Milky Bar Cupcake recipe here (which, to be honest, I did get from the back of a pack of tiny Milky Bars a few years ago) but I tried making them semi-recently and they ended up noticeably dry about five or so hours after I'd gotten them out of the oven (they should be varying degrees of moist for at least 48 hours post-bake).
I feel like I made a very specific mistake, but I don't know what because I followed the recipe to the letter and I don't really have the time to experiment a bunch in the kitchen.
So, one day a peasant had observed the lords and ladies munching on donuts. Once back home, he told his wife to make some. "But we don't have sugar!", she cried. "Use molasses!" "How about flour?" "Well, use what you have!", and so on. The wife got to work, and soon the donuts were ready. The man grabs one, salivating, takes a bite, and spits out. "Yuck! How do them lords can eat this crap?"
...in other words, I'm inclined to guess over time it became pretty removed from what the Greeks would know by this name. The catch is that the salad tastes fine, regardless of how much is the recipe we've got here removed from the original.
My ingredients were:
Yeah, even the recipe I've got called for breast, but I got leg, so I made changes to what I consider already changed.
First, chop garlic and the meat into small pieces and fry them together in the pan, covering generously with spices. I tried to remove all the non-appetizing parts of meat because I'm obsessive-compulsive like that, which I guess removed some of the meat as well. At first, as the meat was a bit watery, I got sauce, but in time in thickened. Afterwards I fried it for a little while longer so it got slightly crispy, but it's up for you to judge on that. As it fried I chopped everything else into small pieces and put it in a big bowl. Once the meat was done, I put it on a plate covered with a few paper towels to remove the excess fat and cool it down. Then, I added it to the bowl, added mayonnaise and mixed. Done.
Now, some thoughts I had. One, chop the cabbage into thin slices, like, half a centimeter thick, thicker is less comfortable for eating. Two, I think it could see more spices. The recipe called for ketchup, I added a bit harissa paste, but it didn't seem to have much impact and I'm not sure of the outcome if it had. I also added lemon juice, with similar results. Perhaps I would have just been better with more mayonnaise, but that's for another day.
The ingredients:
* some 400 g of rice (didn't get basmati so just used plain white)
* one biggish or two small onions
* a few potatoes
* two of those little pieces of garlic, crushed
* a spoon of ground turmeric (curcuma)
* a spoon of ground cinnamon (should not have been ground, but that I am saving for tea)
* a bay leaf
* a teaspoon to a half of a spoon of ground ginger
* a teaspoon of ground cardamum
* a teaspoon or two of caraway (the recipe called for something different, ie. black cumin, but it checks out)
* like a big spoon of chopped coriander leaves
* two teaspoons of salt
* cooking oil
So it's basically rice + onions + potatoes + a sh14tl04d of spices, the last of which I believe is the norm for Indin cuisine. I wanted to make the meal somewhat bigger than the recipe supposed, so you may want to cut the numbers by half for a meal for one. Also, finding out proper English names for all these spices is a game of its own.
The procedure is as follows: wash the rice and leave in water for like half an hour (I'm not sure if it's necessary, but didn't hurt). Peel the potatoes, chop into large-ish cubes, chop the onions into half-rings, heat the oil in a pot. Once the oil is hot throw in the onions, cinnamon, caraway, and bay leaf. Fry for some two minutes. Throw in the potatoes and the rest of the spices, save for coriander. Fry for some another minute. Then throw in the rice, add coriander, and add enough water for everything to boil together. Put the lid on and boil for some 15-20 minutes. Then you may call it a day or take the pot off the heat and leave for a while. In the latter case, the dish will cook under the lid under its own heat without any fear of burning it, so it's a good idea to do so if you are not sure if the rice is ready or the potatoes are still a bit hard-ish. And that's all.
So. The taste is nice and I was very pleased with the outcome, although it came out a bit dry. If that happens to you too, you may want to add a bit more water to the pot, or add some oil to the dish on your plate. Overally it makes an impression of a filler served along with a "real" dish, like meat or something vegetable-y. If I wanted to make a fancy Indian meal out of it, I'd serve it this way, with a little bottle of sauce or olive oil on the side. But if you aren't throwing a party, it works just as fine as a meal on its own.
But more seriously, the standard for here is rice and potatoes are like, if you have one, then the other is redundant. The idea of mixing them together got me curious enough to try out the dish. So I'm kind of "do tell" right now.
Ah, Middle Eastern/Indian Peninsula cooking.
I had a schoolmate once whose mom always made her lunch, and she was always really insistent about basmati rice. We once argued because I like supermarket generi-rice a lot. I was a teenager so of course I insisted it was "Just as good". It is not, but there are other rices out there that are pretty close whilst still being pretty generic.
Outside of that incident, her insanely colorful lunches helped me learn more about the "making a whole meal out of non-meats" thing in a non-preachy way.
Also, guys, meatless samosas. I have like two recipes (one of which is a Frankenstein dessert samosa) that are like... somewhere, definitely? If I find them, I'll definitely do a post here.
Unfortunately 14w+4000xspices=nope.
* two pieces of ready-made French dough
* ca. 900g of ground spinach
* ca. 250-300g of feta-style cheese
* two cloves of garlic
* two onions
* ca. 100-150g of sunflower seeds
* a teaspoon of ground paprika
* 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon of cumin
* olive oil and butter
* eggs
* salt and pepper
Originally, it called for filo dough and pine nuts, but I had neither, so I used French and sunflower seeds respectively. Oh, and by the way, I'm not sure if the recipe meant cumin or caraway, but I went with cumin. The recipe also states you can also use cheddar or other types of cheese, but I didn't go that far and used supermarket ersatz feta.
The procedure: chop onions into small pieces and fry them in butter. When they're done - I assumed it meant to go a bit beyond the softening point and let them caramelize a bit - add crushed garlic and the cheese. You can take it off the heat, but I wanted to melt the cheese, so I let it stay there. Add the spices, mix well, add spinach and eggs, and mix. Talking about eggs, I used three of them and it worked fine; according to the recipe should have been five, but I'm wondering if that's not an overkill since three worked perfectly fine.
Meanwhile, prepare a baking pan, smear the bottom and sides with oil, and place dough in it so that bottom and sides are covered. That should take about one of the dough pieces, unless they sell it in different quantities where you guys live, but in that case I think we can use the baking pan as a measuring stick. At this point I had the whole second piece, so I cut it in two, smeared the dough on the bottom of the pan with olive, and placed a half of the second piece there to make a double layer. Then, pour the spinach mix into that. You should have the dough reaching above the level of spinach, so place whatever dough you have left on top of the spinach, and bend the leftover walls in. (I do hope you understand what I mean.)
If you used filo, take "a piece of dough" to mean seven layers, presumably smeared with olive oil to avoid gluing together. The bonus bottom layer is probably unnecessary.
Bake in 180 degrees Celsius for like half an hour, uncovered. I did not keep it uncovered, so after like first 40 minutes it still looked like nothing has changed and had uncover it to wait for like another half an hour until the dough on top was well-made.
End result, came out quite well and in rather short time. If you pre-heat the oven and avoid the issues I had, then assuming you also use pre-made dough, you should be able to make it in about an hour.
I saw that on MasterChef Australia once and I was totally going to make it (until I didn't).
Anyways, a revival of this thread has made means I should probably make good on my promise and write down a couple of those Christmas recipes I promised (even if it is a month too late).
(Also, I re-read some old posts and now I'm kinda unhappy Storm never got to divulge secrets of South American cuisine to us.)
I really like making Chicken Parmesan, but I am notoriously bad at burning cheeses-inside/on-animal-carcasses, plus the holidays are notoriously bad with all the things that are bad for you. Sausage is less bad than cheese... I think.
So for a few years I've been making sausage stuffed chicken breasts. I mean, they have cheese in them, but it's significantly reduced compared to when you're making a parm, ie much harder to screw up.
You'll need;
First of all, make sure the oven is preheated to about 200 degrees Celcius. Once the oven is up and running, cut up your sausage then go about frying it, making sure to use as little oil as possible. Fry just until you can't see any pink bits.
Now remove the sausages from the pan to drain on a paper towel. Transfer the cooking oil you just used to the saucepan and add your onion/garlic mix, sauteing until the onions start to brown. Make sure to stir a bunch so the garlic doesn't burn. Once that's done, add your brown sauce and stir. Once it's pretty evenly mixed, alternate stirring and sitting to cook until it starts to bubble.
Once that's off the heat, spice the chicken breast a bit. After that, cut the sides of chicken breast along their width. Don't go all the way through. It should be like, butterflying a fish, I say never having actually done that.
Take the sausages off the towel and, in a separate bowl, mix them with the cheese and some of the separate onion. Now stuff the chicken breast with this mix, making sure to tie it off with the twine. Sear the side you cut in the pan you used for frying the sausages, adding as little new oil as possible. Just for a bit, it won't seal fully anyways.
Pour half the sauce into your baking pan, then place the chicken breasts on it. Pour the rest of the sauce on top of them, and place a toothpick in each one. This is to ensure the foil doesn't touch the cheese and cause it to burn, so don't like, bury them in there.
Now, bake for 20-30 minutes, check at about the 25m mark (use oven gloves because hot metal foil tends to not be fun to touch). When the chicken is cooked through, they're done!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And watch out for hot steam. I dare say it's even worse than hot foil. Had that sort of an unfortunate encounter with a fried fish one day.
^
Pity.
Although I once did some sort of Bolivian street food, or at least the closest to it that I could do at that point.
* bread: Cuban bread (a white bread), pressed (with some browning)
* meat: ham, and maybe mojo (Cuban-style) roast pork
* cheese: Swiss cheese
* veggies: pickles
* condments: mayo, mustard
recipe for a homemade bad imitation Cuban sandwich:
* bread: wheat bread, pressed (by hand, between two plates)
* meat: turkey bacon
* cheese: sharp cheddar
* veggies: tomatoes, sweet relish
* condiments: mayo, mustard, sweet relish, turkey bacon microwaving juices
Also, I've been thinking about my take on Idaho stew. What nags me is how it got its name. Was it some cowboy who had a crazy, but ultimately surprisingly good idea to add coffee to beef stew? Or a professional chef, and the name came from a turn of events more poetic than simple matter of location? I dunno.
So, anyway. The way I did it required:
* 0.5 kg chopped beef
* like two carrots
* a can of green peas
* an onion
* beef stock (optional)
* a cup of black coffee
* pepper (the spice, not the other kind)
* frying oil
* from one to a few spoonfuls of flour
It's pretty simple: you chop the onion and the carrot and fry them together, then get some bowl, throw them into that bowl, and use the frying pan to fry the meat. Add the flour and mix so it's floured all over. The way I did it, the meat was watery enough so it turned out it stewed in stock of its own and I didn't really have to add anything, but you may have drier; in that case, fry it until it's nicely crispy and done, then add stock. Now you can add coffee, the vegetables and pepper and let it stew, and when it's done add the green peas (canned peas will turn into a puree if you add them too soon, but if you have fresh you probably have to add them at the onset of stewing). End result, a meaty stew with a nice aroma that is neither coffee nor beef nor pepper, but is actually quite a pleasant blend of all three.
...edit: I probably forgot about salt. But, you know how to use salt, right? You probably do. I'm leaving it up for your discretion then.
I'd cook more if not for the fact that I'm living with my parents these days and my mom hogs the kitchen. She and I would have vastly different workflows when it comes to cooking, and so I've learned from experience to just keep out of her way.
Anyway the "bad imitation Cuban sandwich" was actually my idea anyway. To be fair, the Cuban sandwich isn't actually all that adorned with distinctive complexity -- it was made to be a working-class sandwich, basically a ham-and-cheese sandwich with some specifics and twists, so you can imagine the idea was to have something that's compact, tasty, and not too messy. One of the key elements is the presence of some mustard and possibly other condiments to keep the sandwich moist and to add a bit of flavor. The roast pork also adds flavor, but I've had store-bought Cuban sandwiches that lack it; some recipes substitute salami instead for this.
But it's hard to screw up a ham-and-cheese sandwich -- it'll turn out pretty well even if you mix-and-match ingredients. Just that the sandwich I had today was a little on the wet side, partly because we used relish rather than pickles, and partly because we included tomatoes.
Très américain!
I've been wanting to post my red velvet cupcake recipe in here, but I haven't really had the time to do a long-post of that sort.
Coffee in beef stew, now that's new! I wonder if I could pull that off...
^^ The biggest problem I have with sandwich recipes is that they seem to be more complicated than they seem to be worth. I mean, when I eat sandwiches, it's usually for breakfast, and then usually you don't have time or will to do much more than slapping a slice of cheese onto a piece of bread. There's a number of ingredients that go well with each other and you usually can get up to three without much of a bother, but the sandwich recipes always seem to be more complex than that. It's a bit like preparing a simple pasta versus an exquisite dish for dinner, but with much bigger effort-to-effect ratio. But having said that, I don't write them off on principle, and like in the Muffuletto (muffuletta?) case sometimes one discovers a new set of ingredients to use.
...by the way, do you like the Elvis sandwich? The one with peanut butter and banana. Tried it out, but it didn't seem to suit my taste.
peabnut bubberpeanut butter and bananas right now. I should try that.More like, here's something left over from cooking the turkey bacon; might as well not waste it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_pimpinellifolium
Around these parts, it's called "Everglades tomato", because it's basically a tomato (just of a slightly different species) and is a naturalized plant, able to grow wild and being rather resilient to local pests as well as the wet/dry cycles and hot temperatures here.
I think S. pimpin is a pretty cool tomoat, ti grows wherever and doesnt afraid of Florida
Dish for today: carbonnade, or Belgian beer stew. I found a recipe on the Internet and rescaled it a bit. I'll give you my approximated version, here's linky if you want the original.
So, you need:
* 500g chopped beef for stew
* a beer
* some 300g finely chopped onions
* butter
* oil for frying the meat
* flour
* beef stock instant cube or how do you call it
* thyme
* a bay leaf
* salt, pepper for taste
The recipe started with frying the meat in oil. Actually that was the first time I tried doing the meat first, and I must say I like the idea - if the heat is low enough, the meat leisurely gets readied while you prepare other ingredients.
A digression: always when I do meat, it's too watery and I end up with stock of my own, which was supposed to be a problem since I was meant to get the meat roasted, but I figured I didn't care that much, so I went on.
Anyways, the meat and the self-made stock went into a bowl, while I dumped a slab of butter onto the pan and started low-heat frying the onion in it. (Recipe says it's called sauteeing or something, but whatevs.) When the onion was soft and slightly browned, I added flour and mixed it to make roux. That took a good while since I kept the heat low, but then I didn't burn it, so I do not consider it a loss. I added thyme and kept it on for another while, then added the meat back, poured the beer, added the stock cube and the bay leaf and rest of the seasonings, and let it simmer.
Another digression: I don't get the idea of bay leaf, but it keeps showing up in these recipes. I'm adding it on the principle that perhaps one day I will be enlightened to its merits.
Takes a while to get the different ingredients to blend well, but it seems not to need the two hours the recipe claims. Also, I probably committed some sort of treason against Belgium by adding lower-middle quality supermarket beer. But I was asked to make like a week-lasting amount of it next time, so I guess I managed not to botch it, wish me luck to do as good then.
I think I generally try and do red meat first, even if it means letting it rest whilst I do other things. Even if it's something very thin that'll be done really quickly. White meat (mainly chicken, I'm not big on cooking fish) I'll leave until later.
I don't have like... scientific confirmation for this, but the whole thing with recipes that take a while to cook is that the flavors should meld into each other so much that they become one... or something. Iunno, I almost always just do what the recipe says so I don't know if it really does make a difference.
Any particular reason as to why wait with white meat? Does it, like, get too dry through the early frying method, for example?
You're right. It's better to wait until near serving since it doesn't soak/up store as much oil (which is good!) which does means it dries out the longer it's left sitting (which is bad). You only dry out/overcook red meat if you're really rough with it.
The recipe they provide says:
* 350 g of French dough
* 30 g wheat flour
* 250 ml milk
* half a piece of cinnamon bark
* 200 g sugar
* 125 ml water
* 4 egg yellows or how do you call it
* 1/3 of a lemon's peel
First, you roll the dough tightly and cut it into pieces of some 2-2.5 cm width. Using ready-made dough makes the job a lot easier, so unless you are some sort of a baking purist I heartily recommend just buying it. This should give you 12 pieces, each of which goes into one of these forms for sweet buns or brownies or whatever (I hope you know what I mean). You then mould the dough to fit the edges of the form so that it makes a cup into which the filling will be poured. Smearing the forms with some oil or butter should prevent them from sticking, so it's advisable.
Now, the filling. Take a pot, pour half of the milk in, throw in the peel and cinnamon, and heat. I used a whole piece of cinnamon since I felt using only half would make it too lemony and not enough cinnamony, but it's a matter of personal preference. In a bowl, mix well the flour with the rest of the milk. Once the milk in the pot is heated, pour the milk-and-flour and mix well.
This is the part where I diverged the most from the recipe. While it told to put sugar and water into another pot and boil it into syrup, I took like a half of the supposed amount of sugar (perhaps less) and just filled the cup to the brim with water. By the way, I used cane when the recipe implied white. Then I heated the cup in a microwave, which didn't really feel orthodox, but it did the job and the sugar dissolved like it should.
Then, slowly add the sugar syrup to the pot and mix.
I probably added too much water, so I had to let it stew until enough of it evaporated and the mix thickened. Apparently it didn't hurt the result, though. What the recipe doesn't say is that at this point the mix probably should cool down a bit.
Now, get the four eggs, separate the yellow stuff from the transparent stuff, and throw the yellow into a bowl. I used the same bowl as above, just washed it a bit. Add the stuff from the pot to the bowl (through a sieve or after having removed the peels and cinnamon) and mix well - this may be a tricky part, since if you go in too hot you might boil the eggs, which is not a desired result. So do it slowly, and mix intensively.
The final step is to fill the prepared cookies with the filling, place it in the oven heated to 250 degrees Celsius, and let it stay there for some 15-20 minutes.
Yay! I love dessert! In fact, I somehow managed to pull myself out of the abyss that is all of my hobbies and make some baked custards this weekend.
I have never believed in infusing cinnamon but I ought to try it again someday.
Egg yolks?
I always use white cause I find it makes things sweeter overall, even if the recipe calls for something else. Funnily enough, I usually find cane in savoury recipes.
The fancy people say reduced.
This recipe sounds fun! But I'm not a biscuit-making person. I can do pastry really well, but I tend to overwork biscuit dough and make it really flaky... just like pastry <_<
I rarely use white these days, even though I do kinda agree with you on the issue of sweetness. I guess cane sugar is just ~*~faaancier~*~.
Thanks. Figured there is some sort of fancy way of saying that, but I could not recall it.
Also, I just learned about the existence of these things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_Coke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_butter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate-covered_bacon
But somehow I feel not compelled to try them out.