"Like to cook" - the second helping

[Dartz]

A simple thing, but deadly satisfying.


When you've finished your morning breakfast fryup - or if you've just taken that steak off the pan and are leaving it to rest.
Don't waste those glorious juices, redolent with essence and flavour, with the seasonings that have spalled off, with salt and smoke...
Chuck in a tin of baked beans onto a hot pan.
Add some random hot sdauce to taste - prefereable the dregs of a bottle that've been there a while
Fry the bollocks out of it until the liquid boils off and the beans are nearly mush.
Serve in a bowl, or as a side.

This has two effects.
It concentrates all the flavours of everything yo cooked into the beans
It strips the pan clean. The little carbonised shards of rasher, steak and scorched seasoning.

It's probably carcinogenic.
Your cardiologist will hate it.

It's glorious.

[robkelk]

There's nothing like quiche with spinach, fava beans, and tarragon for a meal fit for a king.

(And there's nothing like a ham sandwich for a headache. But, hey, it's the official lunch for Coronation Day.)


The King and The Queen Consort's Coronation Quiche:



(Non-embedded)

[robkelk]

Really cold brew.

Ojibway coffee company brews sweet new partnership with ice cream brand

Marsolais-Nahwegahb said this coffee ice cream is the first of its kind because it's made with cold brew rather than freeze-dried instant coffee crystals which are typically used to make coffee-flavoured ice cream.

Finally found this on the shelves - it's a premium brand and only available in the 500ml size, much like Ben & Jerry's.

It tastes like coffee. Good coffee. (With cream and sugar, of course; it is ice cream, after all.)

If you're in Canada, give it a try.

[robkelk]

BBC has a list of "cheap recipes" (their name).

Each one was costed in March 2022 to cost £1 or less per serving, assuming you have room and cash to buy some basic ingredients in bulk. Since that was a year ago, expect the price to be closer to £1.50 / US$2 per serving now.

I found this while looking for a recipe for toad in the hole, which is on the list.

[Dartz]

Pint of Guinness. Pint of Ketchup. Quarter/Third bottle of Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco for tang, Salt, Pepper and Garlic. Boil the bollocks out of it until it thickens. Add to chicken wings. Cook on BBQ

That works.

[classicdrogn]

How about some seven thousand year old cookies?

Inda gug gu-la (or "sweet cakes" in Sumerian)

Found the link in the Buffy portion of a (not really recommendable) world-hopping semi-SI fic, oddly enough.

[robkelk]

One from my boss: "Taco Burgers"

for 4 BIG burger:

1lbs of medium ground beef
4 slices of bacon
a hand full of tec mex cheese
half a big bag of doritos turned into crums
1/2 cup ish of salsa of your choice
tex mex or Cajun spices to taste

Mince the bacon. Mix all together and make burgers!

[Bob Schroeck]

By "medium" ground beef does this mean what's called in these parts "85% lean" and used to be called "ground round"?

[robkelk]

By "medium" ground beef does this mean what's called in these parts "85% lean" and used to be called "ground round"?

Pretty much, yes. Maybe a percent or two either way on the fat.

[Bob Schroeck]

Hm. Might have to try that before it gets too cold to grill.

[ECSNorway]

We don't have a particular name for this dish, but I like to call it How To Make Your Kids Love Brussels Sprouts.

Start by frying up a couple-three rashers of bacon.
While they cook, chop up about a pint of brussels sprouts.
Remove the bacon. DO NOT discard the fat that is left. Pour the liquid fat into a bowl, return about two tablespoons of it to the pan.
Fry the chopped sprouts in the bacon fat.
Chop up the bacon.
Sprinkle the bacon over the sprouts and add two tablespoons of maple syrup (the real stuff, not the corn-syrup fakes). Mix.

Serve.

[robkelk]

Earl Grey Cookies with Lemon Royal Icing

From this year's Great Canadian Baking Show

[robkelk]

The Canada Agriculture and Food Museum is a working farm, which means they end up with produce. Thus, their website has a recipe section.

Including Maple Leaf cookies (assuming you have a maple-leaf cookie cuter, but other shapes work too), Stuffed Wild Mushroom Caps, Algonquin-style moose, Bacon and Tomato Cups (use your muffin/cupcake pan for this one), Vegetarian Chili, and Gingerbread Cake. And some home-canning recipes, too.

[robkelk]

Don't know whether I'm going to make this one, but somebody else might be interested.

Orange Cream and Black Licorice Toaster Pastries

[robkelk]

Unreserved is a weekly radio show aired on CBC and Native Voice One. This week, the theme was decolonizing one's diet... but these recipies for a complete meal were freely made available to everyone, so don't worry about appropriation. We have permission to eat healthily.


Sister Salmon Cannelloni -- still has some European influences, such as flour and ricotta. Salmon and ricotta stuffed cannelloni with butternut squash rosé sauce.

Lyed Corn Berry Parfait -- before there were dairy products in North America, "lyed corn" was a traditional calcium source. Lyed corn, various berries, pumpkin seeds, maple syrup, and mint.

Sweetgrass Sweet Tea -- more a herbal tea, that can be served hot or cold.

[Bob Schroeck]

Over the past ten years or so, Peg and I have taken over the cooking duties on Thanksgiving from her mom, who has gotten old enough that making a full feast for the holiday is beyond her. We have a recipe for the turkey that we found in a 1980s-vintage cookbook that never fails to get raves from everyone. The key part of it is the stuffing, which I'm about to share.

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 cups chopped celery (with leaves)
2 cups chopped onions
1 pound bulk country sausage (we usually get Jimmy Dean's orignal flavor)
2 tart apples, cut into 1/2-inch cubes (always Granny Smiths)
1 cup hazelnuts, toasted, skinned and chopped (see below)
1-1/2 cups dried, pitted cherries (we order ours from Amazon)
6 cups stale bread cubes (if you buy stuffing mix, always get unseasoned)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried/rubbed sage
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 cup tawny port
1 cup chicken stock or broth

Heat the oil in large skillet and saute the celery and onion until soft but not browned (10 to 15 minutes). Transfer to a very large mixing bowl. (It's always best to overestimate how much bowl you'll need; the last couple years we've actually used a medium stock pot to mix the stuffing in. If you use too small a bowl, you'll end up with a lot of stuffing all over the table when you mix.)

Add the sausage to the skillet and cook, breaking it up into small chunks -- about fingertip sized. Make sure it is browned and cooked through. Add it to the mixing bowl, scraping the pan to get any bits that are sticking.

(You can do these two steps plus toasting the hazelnuts (see below) the night before; this will save you a lot of time on Thanksgiving.)

Add the apples, hazelnuts and cherries to the mixing bowl and stir thoroughly.

Add the bread cubes, toss lightly.

Sprinkle with seasonings. toss again.

Add the port and stock, stir/toss until everything is moistened. A splash more port and/or stock can be added if it seems a bit dry, but don't overdo it.

Stuff your bird with the results, both the body cavity and the neck. If you have more than will fit in your turkey, you can put it in a casserole, stir in some pan juices a few hours later, and bake at 325 F for 45 minutes. The recipe assumes an 18-to-20 pound turkey, but even with the largest bird you will have leftover stuffing.

The rest of the turkey recipe is fairly simple: Preheat the oven to 325 F. Put a large carrot, peeled and quartered, three stalks of celery halved and a large onion quartered into the pan with the giblets/neck and 3 cups of water. Rub butter into and under the turkey's skin before you stuff it; if some gets mixed into the stuffing, that's okay. Put a foil "tent" over the bird, lightly sealing it into the pan. Roast for four hours. Remove the foil tent, and then baste with a 1/4 cup of tawny port. Roast 15 minutes. Repeat the baste-and-roast three more times, for a total of five hours. Let it rest on a platter for 15 minutes while you turn the pan juices into gravy.

Toasting hazelnuts

This is simpler than you might think. There are actually two ways to do this: First, you can spread them on a baking sheet and toast them in the oven at 350 F for 3 to 5 minutes, shaking them once or twice. Or you can put them in a heavy frying pan and toast them over a high burner, shaking them every few seconds to make sure they roll and turn, again for 5 minutes or so. Either way, take them off the heat when they start getting fragrant. Don't let them cook so long they burn.

As for getting the skins off them, you can blanch them before toasting -- which you do by covering them with boiling water for one minute before draining and dunking in cold water to cool, after which you drain again and dry the nuts. This loosens the skin. Alternately, you can toast in the skins, which will loosen as part of the process. Either way, you can rub the skins off with your fingers or in a kitchen towel; paper towels work okay, too. We then use a small food processor to chop them up.

[robkelk]

An interview followed by a recipe for Tandoori Chickpeas.

Ingredient list: chilis, chili flakes, chili powder... I suspect at least one person here won't be making this one. OTOH, it's vegetarian, and one easily-changed ingredient away from being vegan.

[robkelk]

Anton Petrov - Discovery of a very Peculiar Object with a Weird Name: Dracula's Chivito
...

What's so weird about a chivito? Recipe here

[robkelk]

I hadn't heard of maghmour before today -- apparently, it's a Lebanese eggplant moussaka. Recipe here. Vegan.

[robkelk]

Discovered while doing research for a story: a recipe for chicken soup.

But not just any chicken soup. Khmer Lemongrass Chicken Soup. Can't propitiate a Cambodian roadside deity who's said to have fought against invaders with foreign chicken soup, after all.

[robkelk]

A few new recipes this week.

Vegetarian: one-pot chickpea and spinach curry

Canadian comfort food: sweet-and-sour meatballs

Vegetarian: split pea and spaghetti soup

[robkelk]

Remember when everybody was baking bread during the pandemic? These folks turned that into a business... and have shared some of their recipes.

Sourdough Sugar Cookies, anyone? ("Red Fife" is a heritage variety of wheat; I suspect one could get away with using another unsifted whole-grain flour, but the flavour would be subtly different.)

How about a Sourdough Pie Crust? I suspect it would be lovely around a savoury pie.

They have recipes for things other than sourdough, too. But what's the fun in that?

[robkelk]

Curried eggs, South Asian style

[Bob Schroeck]

So... i just realized it's been seven and a half years since I last mentioned cooking okonomiyaki... and a couple days ago I made it again for the first time since the pandemic. In that time, our preferences have shifted from Osaka style to Hiroshima style. And I just wanted to share the recipe we use.

That recipe is a video from the ever-fun YouTube channel Cooking With Dog, which still produces new videos even though Francis, the titular host, passed away nearly ten years ago:



We leave out the crispy-fried squid, as I'm not a seafood eater, and add shredded carrots -- and in the past I have also added other veggies like sliced celery when the mood took me.

Anyway, here is one of the okonomiyaki I made last week, just to illustrate:


  Okonomiyaki.jpg (Size: 108.67 KB / Downloads: 17)

It's really not hard to make, although the flipping takes a little practice.

EDIT: It also fridges and reheats well; I had half of one for lunch and it was great. If you want to make it yourself, I strongly recommend getting Otafuko brand mix and sauce from your local Asian grocery. If you have to, you can also get the sauce and mix from Amazon -- but they each cost about $1-2 more from Amazon than they do from a local grocery.