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I approve of this reasoning.
I did however make a much-simplified take on San Antonio tortilla. I'll tell the story in like a few days when I gather up the will.
One thing I've noted over the years is that people get really specific with alcohol but will call anything else by a really boring name.
Except cordial, but people who say "cordial" are either British or really full of themselves.
San Antonio tortilla, according to my recipe book, is a dish of sliced potatoes mixed wih chopped chorizo sausages, black olives, and green pepper, covered with eggs (how do you call it when you mix the egg to homogeneity?) and topped with shredded cheddar, thne baked in an oven. I had chorizo (which was a bit overdue so it had to go to the pot quickly), but no green pepper or black olives, so I did an approximation.
Since I improvised, it's hard for me to give numbers, so the list of ingredients will be rather undetailed.
* potatoes (many, like a kilogram perhaps)
* an onion
* a chilli pepper
* six eggs
* cheddar (ca. 250 g)
* a chorizo sausage (ca. 300 g)
* oregano
* cumin
* salt and pepper
* some oil
I think that's all.
Anyways, I got a pot (a chicken roaster? Is that the proper name?) and I generally measured how much ingredients I need by its size. I smeared it with oil, sliced the potatoes and threw some of them in, chopped chorizo, threw some of that in... Basically, I sliced the potatoes and chopped the rest. My initial idea was to make layers out of them, then pour the eggs mixed with flavouring in, and then top with cheddar - but that, I figured, would make for uneven spread of the flavouring. Also, I had more cheddar than I envisioned and felt it would be a waste if all of it was just on the top. I guess it's better to get a big pot to mix everything with the eggs and then pour the mix into the baking pot. Or be thorough and do many fine layers, perhaps. Since I already put most of the stuff in, I mixed it a bit in the pot, but fortunately it seemed to be enough.
The potatoes were raw, so I set the oven to 180 Celsius and kept it in there under the lid for like an hour, then took out the lid and let it stay for some 20-30 minutes more to dry out and get a bit of that crunch.
Ah, black olives, the best vegetable. Fruit? Fruit & vegetable.
I should talk more about food rather than harping on about politics all the time.
I was under the impression that tortillas had tortillas in them? Why are people in
CaliforniaTexas so lazy?I've found that big or small, potatoes will need quite a while to cook. My mom used to drill it into me that when you're making chips, you parboil them first, else you'll end up with a spud that's fried on the outside, followed by a layer of mush (even this part doesn't come out right!) and oddly solid in the middle.
Heh.
There's a Spanish dish, tortilla de batata or something like that. You make it out of potatoes, eggs, and onions, except on a frying pan rather than in oven. (It's great if you've just come home at 8PM and are hungry as a wolf and have an empty fridge save for some eggs, and frankly, just as good about any other time too.) This San Antonio tortilla seems to be a development of this dish.
edit: heeeeeeey, I just browsed through this thread and there isn't that much about chorizo...
I call it cheated since I used a bag of frozen vegetables. A "Chinese mix", you know. Didn't have access to bamboo saplings of rhat they're called, so I had to resort to ready-made. This also meant all I had to do was throw the content of the bag onto a frying pan and call it a day.
The more interesting part was the preparation of the meat. Take a piece of pork - the one I had was some 500-600 grams, which came out to be quite enough. I cut it into pieces - squares of some 1.5-2 centimeters ideally - and then left them to soak in a bowl filled with my homemade mead. The recipe called for sherry IIRC, but I had none, and I wanted to make some use of the stuff I made, since it wasn't all that good for drinking. For a while I feared I'm ruining the meat in the name of what amounted to a culinary experiment, but in the end it worked just good enough.
Digression: while it was my first attempt, I think a big factor in my displeasure in that mead was that I used the wrong honey. Came out bitter.
Another digression: I like to cut the meat while it is still a bit frozen inside. Like, when you take it out of your icebox and leave it to unfreeze, but start cutting before it's completely unfrozen. This makes the process of cutting much less messy, as the meat isn't yet all soft and wobbly. With soft meat, you need a really sharp, big knife to slice it neatly, and that's when there are no veins or sinews or the rest of that ugly stuff. And they always are, seems like.
So, got rid of the soaking, then fried the meat with the vegetables and as far as I remember that was pretty much all. It's not the most ambitious work I did in the kitchen, but that idea of letting the meat soak in the fluid was something I haven't tried before, so all in all I was quite interested in seeing what kind of outcome would it bring.
My ingredients were:
* ca. 100 g frozen spinach leaves
* three big or four-five small potatoes
* about a spoon of mustard seeds
* an onion
* a clove of garlic
* ca. 2.5 cm of a ginger root
* salt
* ground chilli
* frying oil
* like a half a glass of water
...and that's pretty much all of it. First, I threw the frozen spinach into a pot and added hot water from a kettle to unfreeze it. When it was no longer frozen I took out a sieve and left it to drip off the water, then reused the pot for the rest. I heated the oil in a pot and threw in the mustard seeds. (Mind you, I dried the pot before I did that. Heating oil mixed with water is no fun for the cook.) After a while the seeds began to crack, and more importantly the oil began to, you know, sizzle and stuff and mess up my stovetop, so I added the onion, garlic and ginger which I had chopped in advance. (The recipe said to crush the garlic, but I didn't feel like it and just chopped it finely.) I added some salt at this point, but just as well I might have done so later, and some chilli. It took longer than I expected, for whatever reason, but once I figured the onion is well done, I added the potatoes, chopped into cubes of ca. 2 cm of size, and the water. I let it stew for some ten minutes under a lid, then added the spinach, mixed and let it stew for some 15 minutes more. Finally, I took the lid off and let excess water boil away.
End result, tastes fine and I know a new way to make use of a potato.
Observations: the chopped ginger did not work so well; I did not really feel the taste of it until a piece ended up between my teeth. Perhaps I did something wrong, but I'm thinking if ground ginger isn't easier to use. Also, while the potatoes were neither too hard nor too soft, I've been thinking if it wouldn't be better for the dish if they were fried, then cooked. But that might be too much work, and the advantage of this dish is that it is simple.
Achievement Unlocked: Polish Cuisine Master.
In turn, you may recall that when I'm writing from memory I tend to omit the numbers.
So, a jambalaya is a Louisianan sort of one-pot stew of meat, roux and whateverelse. (For what it matters, Louisiana has two French-derived cuisines, Cajun and Creole, both of which are barely distinguishable from the other, but the locals are vehement they be regarded as separate.) Except that as far as I remember I didn't make it one-pot since I fried chicken breast, cut into strips, on a separate pan.
Anyways, the basic spices of Louisiana are "the trinity", or onions, celery stalks, and garlic. (EDIT: Lately, I remember there also was a version with green bell pepper. I wanted to add it lest somebody was confused.) I began with chopping a sh14+l04d of these and frying them in a mix of oil and butter. I removed them from the pot and onto some bowl or platter, and in their place I prepared roux. Again, a sh1a+l04d of flour and oil. Now it looked like I added too much flour and it didn't seem to get browned enough before I added the rest of ingredients, but after having done so, I increased the heat and took care to scrape the bottom of the pot frequently, and the result worked out quite fine in the end.
So, after this little flash-forward, let's now get back to the point where the roux is kinda mostly done. As far as I remember that was when I added chopped tomatoes and fried spices and the meat, and mixed like I described.
I might've also added a chopped habanero pepper or something, and probably freshly ground pepper too.
Surprisingly, it mostly worked. Jambalaya alla polacca.
So, the ingredients' list:
* mashed cooked potatoes,
* flour,
* grated cheese (I used cheddar for that cheddary flavour),
* chopped ham (I used some leftover Schwarzwalder),
* cooking oil (I think olive is preferable),
* pepper and salt.
* (ed.: and a few spoons of melted butter)
Pretty much this. Not giving the amount for each; it's simple enough that you should be pretty safe making it without preparation, just make sure that none of the chief ingredients (potatoes, flour, cheese) exceeds the others by much. Mash everything together with some oil (ed.: or butter), then shape them like a mincemeat burger, and fry.
End result, as long as the leftovers in my fridge include both yellow cheese and cooked potatoes and the ham hasn't yet gone green, then this might be my new favourite way to get rid of them.
(edited because I suddenly recalled there was butter in it)
I was about to mention that I hadn't thought of using fried eggs as a surface-making material before. Specifically, this thought was inspired by this video:
Anyhow, what you posted sounds delicious too.
* a litre of milk a.k.a. a bottle,
* some vinegar.
So, the idea is to boil the milk, then add acid and gather up the coagulated protein. I took so much care not to burn the milk that it actually took me quite a good while to get to this point, and I had to turn up the heat because it didn't seem to work otherwise. Once it was boiled though, I added like a tablespoon or two of 10% spirit vinegar. Technically any acid would work, and then you flush it out anyway, but I really wanted to use vinegar. -\_(o_o)_/-
So, I then used a sieve covered with a piece of gauze to scour it. You can gather the acidic whey for any use you might otherwise have; I thought I'm gonna boil it for whey cheese, but it felt like too much of a bother and it would probably result in a single bite of solid matter at best. Anyways, the basic concept should scale well if you're into that.
I then washed the curd with cold water, squeezed it to get rid of water and leftover whey, and left bound in the gauze under a platter, on which I put a bowl of water as a weight. Then I put that in the fridge.
End result, it worked. It's a perfectly fine piece of white cheese. The one problem is that there's nothing particularly Indian in it; perhaps I would think otherwise if I didn't rinse it, but having done so I could've bought a piece of white cheese from the nearest shop and it would work as well. Still, I'm very much pleased by the result of this experiment. Perhaps I'll cook it into some sort of curry, if find myself fed up with typical Easter dishes, but most likely I'll just eat it for breakfast and do further culinary experiments on shop-bought stuff.
--edit--
Corollary: I did cook it into a curry, but I think I underseasoned it; it failed to have the typical Indian kick. Oh well.
So here is what you'll need to make the golden risotto:
* ca. 200g of rice,
* one to two onions (depending on how big they are),
* chicken stock (one cube is enough),
* some 100 g of ground parmezan (or other similar type of cheese),
* some saffron (enough to deliver the colour),
* olive oil for frying,
* salt and freshly ground pepper.
And that's pretty much all. The amounts listed here are approximate, but there seems to be a wide range of tolerance, I'd say you can change it by 50% of the given amount and it'll work out. At worst you'll make it cheesier.
So, how to make it? Chop the onions, perhaps not too finely, in quarter-rings is enough. Fry them in olive oil. Meanwhile get a bowl, and pour boiling water onto the saffron. (This is not really necessary, but it gives the dish a nice colour and doesn't harm the taste.) When they're nice and soft, pour in some one-two litres of stock (or throw in the cube and add enough water), add the saffron with water, mix, and then add the rice so it gets boiled in the onion-stock mix. You can add some salt at this point, I added like two pinches, and while I figure I could have added a third, it was enough. When the rice was mostly done, I added ground pepper and mixed, then I added the parmezan. Here's a warning at this point, melting cheese increases the viscosity of the mix, so you might want to add it while there's still some amount of water left. Mix it well, and that's all.
I think I did the dish once without the saffron, and it had an awkward green-tinted-yellowish colour. Tasted okay though, so saffron is the first I'd remove if I had to get by without any of the ingredients, but you might want it around if you're going to show the dish off.
I ended up with like three or four portions today, so I guess tomorrow I'll learn if it refridgerates well. But I have good hopes for it.
----
edit: it's a bit dry when microwaved, but it's still good. I'd recommend eating it right away for maximum taste, sure, but the refridgerated and heated up version is not far behind, so do not gorge yourselves on it. You do fine saving up the rest when you're full, guys! (Possibly the biggest taste-gradient-over-time occurs in case of schnitzels, these are such a turn-down when re-heated in a microwave in comparison to the fresh deal that it's like a million gourmands cried in unison and were suddenly silenced.)
The recipe was rather simple, but it had a bunch of steps that made it complicated, such as blending the base stew, using specific sorts and amounts of spices, frying these spices separately, and so on. However, I have managed to reduce it to just these:
For spices, I used some ground cardamum, spicy pepper or chili, and curry powder. Cardamum was in there mostly so it wouldn't taste too much like curry powder.
So, it went like this. Chop the onions into half- or quarter-ringlets, then throw them onto a frying pan with hot oil. As they fry, add in the spices to taste. I'm not giving specific amounts since it's a matter of, you know, taste, but I did reasonably well doing it by hand so I guess it's not a sensitive part of the process. When onions are nicely soft, add the tomatoes and let it stew for a while. Meanwhile, take the chickpeas, flush them with some water, and add them in, and stew everything together for another while so the canned chickpeas are softer. That's all. Serve with, like, rice or something, or spoon it right out of the bowl.
You don't have to use canned chickpeas, but that'd mean you'd have to boil them first, and that makes for longer and messier cooking. For mostly the same reason I skipped the part the recipe I had that spoke of blending the tomato-onion-spices mix. Turned out that these weren't really necessary, as I got a decent tasty meal with all the changes I made.
To do this, you need:
* some 350-500 grams of pork tenderloin,
* a few spoons of butter,
* some 100-250 g of camembert,
* some 150 g of cream,
* a cup of dry white wine,
* few teaspoons tops of herbs, like marjoram, thyme, or whateverelse,
* freshly ground pepper,
* salt.
...And I guess that was all.
The plan's like: cut the tenderloin into pieces of like 2 cm thick and pound them down to like a single centimeter. (Watch out, it makes them expand in the other two directions, as you might have guessed.) Pepper them and leave.
Oh, and it'd be a good idea to peel the skin off the camembert at about no later than this point. The skin won't melt and fishing it out of the pan would be a mess. You might also want to keep the cheese cool for the cutting, it'll be a little less sort.
Now, take a frying pan, and melt butter on it. (You could've done it while you pounded the tenderloin, but I'd feel guilty if any of you burned the butter.) When it's all hot, fry the tenderloin on both sides. It should gain some of that nice colour fried meat gains when it is fried, but on the other hand you might want to watch it so it won't get too dry. (I'm probably not good enough to have done it properly, but I was told the meat was fine, so, I dunno.) Take it out of the frying pan, put it onto a platter, and optionally cover it so it won't cool off too much.
Here comes the sauce: take the wine and pour it onto the hot frying pan. Along with, you know, your own work with some utensil it will scoop out the sticky meat fragments and mix with the butter, and form the basis for the sauce. Let it reduce a bit, and pour the cream. The trick here is that you might seemingly have too little sauce for the pan, but in the end it worked out for me. Then, add the cheese. (Cut it into small pieces, it will melt sooner. I haven't mentioned it before since you can do it already in the pan.) Let the cheese melt, mix, add the herbs, some teaspoon or a half of the salt, and the pepper. I used like one-two teaspoons of marjoram and thyme, and as an afterthought, not more than a half teaspoon of rosemary, and it was the rosemary that gave the sauce a distinct aroma.
It's the time to serve now! A few pieces of meat for everyone, poured with the sauce, and presumably some filler like boiled or fried potatoes and the optional salad. The numbers I listed here is enough for a two- to three-person meal on its own. Served with the filler, I would rate it as enough for a Sunday dinner.
* three-four cups of cooked rice/ca. 150-200g dry rice to be boiled
* three to four green chili peppers
* two to four small onions
* a can of chopped pineapple (or get some 200-300g of pineapple and chop it)
* ca. 250g of shrimp (I don't know anything about shrimp, don't ask me, just get the generic stuff)
* ca. 500g of pork (I used ham)
* ca. 100-120g cashew nuts
* one to two green onions (the leafy end, you can reuse the root end)
* three to four spoons of soy sauce
* one to two spoons of fish sauce
* some oil
...at least, that's what the recipe told me.
Chop the onions and peppers. (Chop the onion leaf stuff too, it will come in handy later.) Get a big pan, pour in the oil, start frying onions and peppers. If the heat is low enough, then you can use the time it warms up to chop the meat into cubes of ca. 1-1.5 cm size. When the onions are soft, add the meat, fry. In my experience, meat is almost always more watery than it looks like, so let it stew until water boils off, we need it to brown it a bit.
Now, at that point the recipe said to add rice, but mine was still boiling, so I just added the cashews. They were supposed to be fried, but I had no pre-fried, so I let them fry a bit with the meat. It worked. Add the shrimp, let them stew for a while so you won't have to eat them raw, add the pineapple, then the sauces. Either let it stew for a while or mix with the rice, and add the green stuff.
End result?
...damn.
Like, it works. It's filling, tasty, and all that stuff, but it's kind of not enough to meet my expectations. I expected something aromatic, spicy, the likes of that. As it was, it was a fun way to make use of old rice, but for that, I don't really need the shrimp and cashews. (I'd use whatever was in the fridge, which wouldn't be these.) Had I kept the shrimp for something else, it would have been fine too, but I wanted to do something with shrimp, and it was this recipe that caught my eye at the time.
Also, that was the first time I used fish sauce, and it turned out it has a horrid aroma. However, the taste it leaves is better than the smell, so I can see myself use it in the future. Probably not in improvisation, but I don't write it off yet. I used two spoons, so that's why I wrote "one to two", so you may fit it to your liking.
My assessment: more greenery. Sure, it has the pineapple already, but I'd still add chopped celery, fresh pepper, or twice the green onion. Or perhaps season it to taste with all the spices the recipe did not call for.
Namely, I tried my hand at Omm Ali.
So, that's the ingredients as my recipe said:
The recipe says, heat the oven to 160 Celsius and put the dough in for some 15-20 minutes so it bakes and turns crispy, to later crush it into crumbs and mix with the rest. But that's in a minute.
Chop or grind the nuts into small pieces. (Or better yet, just buy them already diminuted.) Pour the milk and cream into a pot, heat but do not boil. Add egg and the rosewater, heat slowly and mix so that it thickens.
Then, get a pot or whatever that can go into the oven, fill it with mix of crushed filo and the nuts and raisins, and pour the milk-egg-stuff on top. Then it goes into the oven for a half an hour at 200 Celsius, and you bake it roughly until the top looks well-baked.
...so, that's the recipe. I had no filo, so I used ready-made French dough. Was a bit messy during the crushing part, but I managed, and also I reckon filo is much drier. Oh, and I multiplied the amount of ingredients by two, except for raisins, because I wanted to serve the dish to a person who doesn't like raisins. But it worked anyway, and it ended up quite decent.
(Edit: I also figured I can add the egg - or eggs, like I said - straight into the pot and then mix. End result, I had to sift the mix for clogged yolk. Mix the egg in advance, be energetic with your mixing, or preferably both. I used a spoon for mixing instead of that fancy mixing utensil, which probably mattered too.)
My assessment? You know, for something that's supposed to be a fancy Arabic dish, I expected it'd be... fancier. It's tasty. But it turned out to be pretty much a breadroll dissolved in milk and mixed with nuts and raisins, which is less impressive; next time I'd try making it with a sweet bun instead of baking all these sheets of dough. It's like, you know, I wanted a fancy exotic delicacy, and I got a childhood treat. But it's fine, don't get me wrong, and it was well enjoyed by my tasters. There's only a few things that I could loosely pass off as a complaint: that the rosewater is barely even felt at all, and that it could be sweeter. On that second part, I guess this is mostly a result of my attempt to downgrade the amount of raisins, because they drastically raise the sweetness level every time you encounter one.
In general, definitely a decent treat, although I'm pretty sure the ingredients can be replaced with cheaper ones with no discernable decline in quality.
For a more...relaxed pace,
Virgin meticulous cook vs Chad culinary speedster
On one hand, it was supposed to be one-time recipe test, and for that purpose it turned out better than I expected; I learned how baked beans are made. Also, oddly enough for an American dish, this feels like one of the most exotic dishes I've made so far - soy and molasses are hardly a common ingredient in my kitchen. On the other, I'm a bit angry that the dish's most likely unsalvageable.
That reminds me, an aunt sometimes used to bring us cans of beans imported from the US, I don't know if it's the beans themselves or the sauce they came with but they were extremely sweet to the point I couldn't eat much of it. I've wondered if it's just that brand or if that's how they typically are in the US.