Woo!

Nov. 25th, 2024 11:40 am
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Another romantasy premade book cover up on Etsy! And it's not muddy-dark like so many of the ones I see online are! Which might be a mistake if that's what sells! Wheeeeee!

And I screwed up my wrist--left, thankfully, as I'm right-handed--yesterday making over half a gallon of béchamel sauce for lasagna for our friend gathering next Saturday. I dislike the texture of ricotta and prefer the variant that uses béchamel instead, and needed to make A LOT. My right arm got tired of whisking as I was doing the slowly-pour-milk-into-the-flour-and-butter-mixture thing, so I swapped to my left. Which was apparently the wrong thing to do. Not that I knew anything about that immediately. My left---argh this wrist brace keeps hitting the control key and the windows key--my left wrist was tired, and I had to very quickly call for backup from [personal profile] myrialux instead. But I woke up this morning with something on the outer edge of my wrist hurting when I do things like HOLD MY PHONE or APPLY PRESSURE WITH MY RING FINGER (as I apparently do when allcapsing). [personal profile] myrialux hunted up one of our wrist braces for me, and I have been finding out what movements hurt.

Hopefully it'll get better shortly as I would love to make deviled eggs for Saturday, my favorite finger food. Lasagnas (yes, 3--two 9x13" pans and one 8x8" when it became clear there was too much Stuff to fit into 2 pans) are in the freezer to be defrosted ahead of time and baked, there are plans afoot for Caesar salad, as we've got a recipe we know to be good, and friends are bringing other things.

We used this recipe, which is meant to be a shortcut, faking a Bolognese sauce with jarred marinara, and zhuzhed it up with fresh herbs, a can of Mutti pizza sauce to round out the marinara (it wanted 4 32-oz jars and our store carries 24-oz jars) and one of those small bottles of red wine you can get in 4-packs. Yum! Add the béchamel, Parmesan, and two pounds of cubed mozzarella because we couldn't find the Cuisinart to round it out and I think it'll be good.

How do you misplace a Cuisinart? No idea. We don't remember tossing it (it's a little bit busted and we do plan to replace it), but apparently it was packed...somewhere? And maybe not unpacked yet? We're down to just a few boxes and thought we already got all the ones that were labeled "kitchen" but who knows?

Recipe!

Nov. 17th, 2024 07:18 pm
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Both [personal profile] myrialux and I dislike zucchini and eggplant (among other things, thanks supertasting), but have found that if offending ingredients are cooked long enough with other ingredients so that they all meld together, often the results are perfectly acceptable. And we both want to expand our culinary horizons.

I bought the cookbook Bohème Cooking: French Vegetarian Recipes by Carrie Solomon, and found this rustic ratatouille recipe, which we tried tonight. It was good! It all blended together so we couldn’t taste the individual offensive vegetables, becoming more than the sum of its parts.

Recipe under the cut.

Read more... )

Storm prep

Jan. 12th, 2024 01:14 pm
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The weather is predicted to dip below freezing on Saturday and not come over it again til Wednesday, with potential snow on Monday. I'm prepping for the worst, and given that this is Texas, the worst means frozen pipes, broken water mains and rolling blackouts. We’re close enough to medical districts that I don’t anticipate losing power for more than a few hours at a time, but still assuming we might Just In Case.

Read more... )

Mayo?

Oct. 3rd, 2023 05:42 pm
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We have a lot of a nice homemade mayonnaise in the fridge because it was simpler to make it than to go back out to the store.* And there’s a lot, like close to 2 cups, because I couldn’t make less. I tried, and it failed to emulsify.

So! What do you cook that takes a lot of mayo besides potato and egg salad? We have favorite recipes for those already. I can’t use it for sweet things like mayonnaise cake** because it’s lightly flavored with garlic.

*Power was out for a good 12 hours or so at the house while we were gone, and there’s various things in the fridge that I didn’t trust, including the opened mayonnaise. The door would have been opened by the petsitter getting the open can of cat food out.

** If you’re not aware of mayo-based baking, the resulting things do not taste of mayo. It basically replaces the fat and some liquid in the batter.

Sent from my Apple ][e

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....here's a recipe that turned out to be delicious.

Mushroom and Chicken Stew with Dill and Paprika

Cook Time: 30-45min Servings: 4 Source: Mark Bittman, "How to Cook Everything Fast", p. 264
cut for actual recipe )
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I have a perennial quest to find non-Japanese-bento recipes that I can treat like Japanese bento recipes: because the packed-lunch culture is so prominent in Japan, there are cookbooks with recipes specially developed to be stored in the freezer (affiliate link; about 1/3 of the recipes in that book are freezable) that you can just take out and either (a) pop into your lunch--which is stored at room temp--and will thaw nicely and be ready to eat at lunch time or (b) you nuke to thaw, then pack in your lunch when cooled. (You cool things that you nuke or were refrigerated and heated in the toaster oven to crisp up to reduce condensation in the lunch, which promotes spoilage.) Prepping your lunch in the morning takes maybe ten minutes, spread out in two five-minute sessions if you need to heat it up and cool it before it goes into your lunch.

Awesome. I want to do that with more non-Japanese recipes, so they mesh well with things we cook more often. I'm not particularly good at braining enough to look at a basic Japanese freezer bento recipe and see how it would work if I subbed in other seasonings and sauces, so I periodically poke around the web for recipes, especially vegetable side dishes, that freeze well.

Alas, this search is complicated by the existence of the Freezer Meal World. This is a movement that aims to simplify meal prep for moms (it's always moms) by setting aside one or two days a month, doing a big grocery run and making a bunch of dishes, mostly casseroles but there's some variation, and getting them to a point where they can be frozen. Prep on the day, however, requires that you remember 24 hours in advance that you have one of these things so you can put it into the fridge to thaw overnight, and then you have to remember an hour in advance of dinner that you did that so you can preheat the oven for 15-20 minutes, than bake the casserole for 45 minutes. Or, if it's a boil-in-the-bag type of meal (say, pasta with sauce), then you need to thaw it overnight and then gently boil it until it's heated.

This world never uses microwaves to thaw or reheat. Or maybe they do, but I've yet to run across a website with freezer meal recipes that includes microwave instructions or a separate section for nuking-friendly recipes.

In general, there's also not that many side dishes that get frozen--they're expecting you to boil some corn on the cob or use some frozen vegetables or make a salad on the day to go with the casserole you've reheated.

This is all somehow supposed to save you time. I disbelieve, when I could just make tacos on the day and use my weekend to do something else. I mean, I found these three side dishes today, which sound good, except that the "prep" beforehand saves you zero time over doing it day-of and in fact adds time because you need to thaw them overnight. They're good for preserving food you bought for later, they're good for extra stuff in the CSA box you need to do somethin with before it goes bad, but they are not, as the website explicitly says, good for saving you time: Sauteed Pineapple, Balsmic and Rosemary Grilled Vegetables, and the absolute "time saving" travesty of Baked Asparagus. Yes, I'd do that last recipe if I bought asparagus and then realized I wasn't going to have time to cook it before the tips got slimy, but that saves no time!

And it does not solve my problem, which is recipes that can be COMPLETELY cooked, frozen in single servings, and popped into a lunch in the morning, to gently thaw by lunch. (I also have a microwave available at work, but if I don't have use it, so much the better.)

ARGH. Anyway, if you have any side dishes--preferably vegetable and grains (although I'm not fussed about meat/cheese/stock in them) that you know can be frozen in single servings and popped frozen into a lunch, or nuked to thaw (since I have a microwave at work), then please, link me! It works better to eat at room temps if they're highly seasoned, as flavors blossom when heated and get more dulled as foods get colder. (I have just finished a green bean dish that contains butter and lemon zest and...yeah, needed even more flavoring.)

In return I can offer you a few of the freezable bento recipes we've collected: Google Docs link
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I took last week off work and, as it turned out, most of everything else. :)

However, here's a recipe for Tofu Salad Spread that turned out AMAZING. (From a comment I made on AskMeFi.)

cut for recipe )

Do you cook tofu? What are your favorite recipes? (Eating a lot of soy makes my hot flashes much less intense, and I'm avoiding hormonal supplements for now because my migraines were so tied to hormones, so TOFU IT IS!)
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[personal profile] myrialux and I made a fabulous soup tonight. It's from a cookbook I've owned for close to 30 years, long enough that the spine cracked (ok, the glue's not great) and half the pages fell out so I bought another copy. There's several recipes in there that are standards in my repertoire.

I'd never made this one, though. Not sure why, other than I've only recently become a Soup Person (and I still prefer creamy soups to ones made of lots of stuff in a thin broth). But our not-quite-a-CSA delivered a pound of carrots to us, and I wanted potatoes, and between me marking several recipes and making [personal profile] myrialux go through them and narrow them down, we ended up with this one.

The book is A Passion for Potatoes (affiliate link) by Lydie Marshall. There's at least one other potato-based cookbook with the same title, by Paul Gaylor. I have that one also, but it just doesn't have the same place in my life.

Cut for recipe and larger photo )
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Step 1. Make this carrot and sweet potato soup because you have a two pounds of carrots and a few elderly sweet potatoes. (Round it out with a baking potato because you only have 1 pound of sweet potatoes, as it turns out.)

Step 2. Taste. It is delicious, and tastes mostly of carrots. Season it with salt and white pepper. Overseason it with white pepper because the shaker goes... nothing, nothing, nothing, LOTS OF PEPPER.

Step 3. Eat it for dinner, and it still tastes good except that the pepper magnifies with each bite.

Step 4. A couple of days later, buy a rotisserie chicken. Shred a bunch of the meat, throw the carcass into a stockpot with whatever other vegetables you can scrounge, including the pound of carrots you didn't use in the original soup. Make stock, and use it for something else.

Step 5. Peel and cut up a potato, simmer it until it's cooked, set aside.

Step 6. Heat a tablespoon or so of oil in a pan over medium to medium high. Dump in a tablespoon of curry powder, cook for 30 sec or so to bloom the spices. (Maybe dump in some garlic as well? I don't remember.)

Step 7. Add the cooked potato and shredded chicken, stir to cover in the oil and spices.

Step 8. Dump in 4 servings of the over-peppered soup. Add a can of coconut milk. Bring to a simmer, taste, add a generous squeeze of both ginger paste and lemongrass paste that you happen to have in the fridge and which is about to expire so needs to get used.

Step 9. Serve over rice.

Turned out pretty damn good, actually. The coconut milk thinned it out so the HELLO PEPPER flavor wasn't as pronounced, and oomphing the curry in it blended it into the whole. It could certainly do with even more curry flavor, but I wasn't sure how much to add, so defaulted to a tablespoon. Might try 2 next time and see, then 3 the next, etc. It was also a good way to not be eating the same damn dish for 4 meals, since it makes 8 servings overall.
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The Dirty Secret of Secret Family Recipes. Spoiler: the secret is that most of them come from the side of a jar or box.

My own grandmother's Secret Family Recipe(tm) for potato salad isn't a secret at all, she definitely got it from the side of the Dijonnaise bottle, and I loooove it. She told me right off that's where it was from, and I love telling people it's my grandmother's recipe, waiting for the usual "Those are the best kind" type of statement, then saying she got it off the Dijonnaise bottle. :)

Recipe under cut, by the way )

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