Wed 3 Mar, 2010
It started out with “I’ll post next week” and the next thing I know, is a year has gone by! So I am going to cease writing fro this blog officially.
If anyone would like to take over writing for this blog, send me an email and perhaps we can work out an arrangement. Otherwise, I am going to turn off the ability for comments, and keep it as it is.
Hope these recipes have intrigued you, and filled you heartily.
Cheers,
–stanza
Sun 9 Aug, 2009
I made a tomato-based spaghetti sauce? I didn’t mean to. Really. I was following on of my uncle’s recipes for a spicy spaghetti–first add a ton of thai chilies (except I had arbol, as that giant jar of them I have is never ending where as I always run out of every pepper I ever buy) and a huge amount of garlic with too much olive oil, and you take cooked spaghetti and stir it into that…
…except before I stirred in the spaghetti, I noted my giant yellow zuchinni I paid 50 cents for was starting to get a little aged, so I chopped it up and threw it in to stir fry a little….
…and while I couldn’t resist tomatoes from the farmers market at $1/lb, I did buy a few too many, so while I can still call them tomatoes and not mush, I should put those in too…
…and hey, it resembles spaghetti sauce now! Tomato based and and everything! I sliced up a green bell pepper really fine and tossed it at about the same time I turned off the heat, and the remains of some cilantro that was threatening to go icky, and put the spaghetti sauce on top of the pasta, instead of the other way around, and covered it with hard grated cheese just like my uncle’s recipe.
And it was fabulous! I’m not sure where I went wrong, but I am generally am not a fan of the “pasta and sauce” type cooking, but perhaps that is because I don’t encounter home made pasta sauce all that often.
Sun 2 Aug, 2009
I didn’t actually make this; I’ve gotten so lazy that all I ever make is salads. And when I say lazy, last time I just bought a bag of premixed salad and put olive oil and vinegar on it. However, my industrious eaters came over early to make margaritas to reward the cook (geez thanks guys but if I’m not cooking, do I really deserve quite such a reward?) one of them raided my cucumber stash and made a cucumber soup that looked like this:
The butter went into a soup pan, and at the bottom of the soup pan the garlic and onions were sauteed. Then the garlic and onions went into a blender with the cucumbers, all blended up. Then in the soup pan went a quart of milk, which was scalded. After scalding, the blenderized contents went into the pan, salted to taste, and — almost instant cream of cucumber soup! Hack up the bell pepper into tiny little chunks, and add more to give it some crunchiness and break up the flavor a little bit. Served with salt and pepper; well, actually in my crowd we also had hot sauce on the side, but I just put ground black pepper on top, I say nothing about the taste buds of the rest of those freaks.
Tasty! Extra thanks to my soup maker. And thanks to my margarita maker too, though now the cap to my blender is broken. But the margaritas are good!
Sun 26 Jul, 2009
I was asking someone when they would update their blog, and the response was, “when do I get a new recipe?” I argued I haven’t been cooking lately (it’s too hot!) but then I noted I had a few recipes in the queue.
Well, actually this story is pretty old, but I thought trying to convince others to write is a good motivating force, so I offer you this story. It’s about a month old, maybe not quite two months old.
I was at the farmer’s market and the most appealing thing there were carrots, “spring garlic”, and basil. I had no idea what I could do with such a thing.
My friend who was helping me contemplate my decision, proposed the following idea– cream sauce, with potatoes (which I conveniently had lots of leftover potatoes).
So when I made it, it contained:
First, I put the carrots and potatoes to boil, to cook. Meanwhile, I put all the green things (this includes the garlic) in with the milk, olive oil, and flour, and stir. The reason the ingredients are listed as such is because I put all my milk in the pan, add some water and flour, realized there wasn’t enough, stole some of my roommate’s milk, realized there still wasn’t enough, and to add insult to injury, I told him it wasn’t going to be tasty unless he retrieved me cream.
This was actually a lot easier than I had imagined making–after cooking the cream and milk, and the potatoes and carrots went into an baking tray, and I put it all in the oven for a while to cook down and made a layer of cheese on top (some went into the cream for extra gooeyness), and the only real hard part was determining the appropriate amount of salt.
But we are not done yet! In fact, we are barely at the interesting point. Carrots at the farmers market come with a top full of leaves. They offered to cut them off for me, and I asked if they were edible or had other uses. They suggested that they make a good salad, except that you should boil them first, to leach out any bitterness. I also had kolrabi, which is an alien looking plant that I had not experimented with. I added to this red lettuce (to make it slightly more normal), tomatoes, cucumbers, and walnuts.
This was tasty except for the fact that by boiling the carrot tops, they were soggy and would stick together. They gave the salad a very tasty almost carrot flavor–in fact, I think my exact words were “why didn’t anyone tell me that carrot tops were so tasty!”
However, one thing I found on my internet travels afterwards is that carrot tops are considered “mildly poisonous”, although I suspect boiling them may have leeched out the “mild poison”. In any event, no eaters reported ill effects, and one went so far as to comment I “made the least poisonous food she ever encountered, so if no one was at all sick (or even mildly discomforted) I think all is well.
Sun 17 May, 2009
One of my favourite recipes lately has been take the following ingredients:
Put the dinner in the microwave until hot. Take it out, put the tortilla in the microwave for 15 seconds (more or less to preference). Put dinner in tortilla, add some hot sauce, wrap up like a burrito, and yum!
Okay so I’m totally cheating but it’s okay, because it’s tasty. :) Proper recipe will appear next week.
Sun 10 May, 2009
A few weeks ago, my friend invited me over for movies. Over movies, there is wine, chips, and mango salsa. Of course my taste buds get all snooty, declare the salsa foul, and suddenly I am determined to make my own.
I managed not to declare the salsa foul in the middle of the movie, attempting to save some grace.
But that didn’t stop me from trying to make mango salsa. I note that mexican tomatoes are on sale, and chilean mangoes are on sale. Still not cheap but after months of no good tomatoes I like this idea.
I started with this:
I threw two tomatoes, some of the cilantro, and some water in the blender (it gets unhappy if there is no water with the food). Meanwhile, I put the chilies (I used about 10-15?) and the garlic (four cloves) in a pot with some water (very little, just enough to cover) and started boiling it. The other tomato I diced and tossed into a large bowl. Some of the cilantro leaves I saved, also chopped, and put into a bowl. The blended goop also went into this bowl. After the dried chilies couldn’t be called dried any more, they went into the blender, with the water (which there wasn’t much left at this point). I learned from previous experience that boiling liquids in a blender will blow up in your face so I added a little water, the lime, about half the half-onion and blended that up too. The rest of the onion was chopped fine, and went into the bowl. The mango I also chopped up–I read somewhere you should use a less ripe mango, but now I think that is because if it’s perfectly ripe you’ll munch the mango rather than make salsa. The parts that couldn’t get chopped either went into the blender or into my mouth. I threw a bunch of mango chunks into the bowl (while saying “one chunk for them; one chunk for me”) and at the very end I was squeezing the mango pit over the blender.
All this went into a bowl and stirred up to make it look like salsa. One taste and I quickly realized it wasn’t working. So I added:
All this made it taste much much better.
A few things learned:
I’m going to try this again at some point, though I’m not sure if I’ll make it a front page post or just edit this one or pretend I never did.
Sat 2 May, 2009
Perhaps not even dinner?
As the spring emerges and soup is going out of season but most fruits aren’t quite in season yet, as well as everyone’s schedules getting scrambled (including my own), it looks like the cooking will on an ad-hoc basis for a while. It appears proper dinners will be on the way out, and “picnics”, “lunches”, possibly dinners too, and it is also probable that these things will occur on Saturdays as well as Sundays, depending on local events.
However, I will cheerfully lie to you, and pretend that everything is still happening on Sundays.
Also, a mailing list is being set up–if you would like to know when and if dinner will occur, send me an email and I’ll put you on the list. Apparently my old method of “tell everyone I run into, and expect them to tell everyone else” led to quite some confusion when I had to cancel the last two Sundays.
Sun 26 Apr, 2009
Raven back again, for more cake - and yes, this is old. After the success of the chocolate cake the week before, I wanted to make more cake, but not chocolate. I thought a lemon cake might be nice, both because the weather was grand and springy and because I was thinking of the lemon cakes at Seven Stars.
Finding a lemon cake recipe that didn’t need advanced cooking equipment that I didn’t have was a little challenging, though. Although I was really tempted by the prospect of one lemon-yogurt recipe that gave all the non-yogurt measurements in terms of the emptied yogurt cups, I ended up picking this one from Smitten Kitchen and tweaking it.
I’m the kind of person inclined to follow recipes, though, so there’s not much more to say about it…. okay, maybe there is.
I doubled the recipe, for starters, because I wanted to make enough cake for sixteen people. This was a huge amount of cake batter. It took:
I was not in the mood for squeezing lemons, and they were wanted for the curry Stanza was making anyway, so I bought a bottle of real lemon juice instead. It worked out. I did use the zest, though. The original recipe also suggested using blueberries in this, but that made it look breakfasty, and besides, I wanted chocolate. So no blueberries.
Once I mixed all the ingredients but the lemon juice, into last week’s leaky pan it - half of it, really - went. Much less leaky this time. While that was baking (350F for about 50 minutes) I poured some lemon juice in with the extra tablespoon of sugar and heated that until the sugar dissolved. I wanted the cake really damp, so I used about a cup. Baking this takes a while, so I also melted some semi-sweet dark chocolate for the planned topping, so I’d have that ready. Having only one pan, I did only one part at a time, but that ended up being for the best, as it gave the bottom layer enough time to rest that it was nice and stable.
When the cake had finished baking and set properly, I soaked it in lemon juice. Yep, soaked. This is a pretty porous cake, so it’s possib
le to pour the juice in pretty quickly, but it’s a good idea to let it sit a while afterward so it doesn’t drip or ooze when you move it to a serving plate.
The expected sixteen people had by now been whittled down dramatically, so rather than make two separate cakes, I opted to make a two-layer cake. I soaked the second layer separately before putting it on top, and for once, thankfully, I even managed to get the layers on straight. This is not a cake you can adjust without tearing the heck out of both top and bottom, so if you try it, be careful.
Basic structural success achieved, I pulled out my secret weapon, the chocolate. I drizzled melted chocolate all over the top and sides, but it still seemed to be missing something…. something decorative and lemony….
What I was looking for were the New England-style gummy lemon slices like the ones in the picture, but, as it turns out, you really can only get those in New England. (Hunh!) Instead, I used more traditional gummy lemons, cut in half.
It came out rather nicely, although there wasn’t nearly as much chocolate taste as I’d hoped. When I do it again, I’d put chocolate between the layers, as one of the eaters suggested. It was reviewed as “AWESOMZORS!!!eleventy-one!!etc…” though, so I’m pleased.
Sun 19 Apr, 2009
Since the post about indian food is still in the “technical difficulties” stage, and beet soup post has disappeared into the ether (where did it go?), I will write up the first day of the farmers market season. Farmers market! Best produce in town! Cheaper too! I bought 10lbs of apples for $4, some rabe, some turnips w/greens attached, some oyster mushrooms (in hopes they were as good as the ones bought for a couple dinners ago–which also got lost in the technical difficulties, but you don’t want to read about that dinner anyway). Oh and two humongous leeks for $1.50 (why are leeks always cheap at the farmers market but frighteningly expensive in stores? I almost refused to buy them until the vendor listed various ways leeks could be used which did not involve soup).
So this week I did not actually make dinner. It was a friend’s birthday, so I went to his house instead. Others had made burgers, sausages, falafels, chips and dip, so I made the salad. I looked at my ingredients, debated what I could do with them, and decided “anything goes in a salad!”
I steamed the rabe and cauliflower–the rabe doesn’t take much at all! and the cauliflower was barely cooked. Chopped and into the salad bowl followed by “what do I have in my closet that might work with this”, hence the walnuts and dried berries. Then I got the idea for the eggs! If I don’t use the pink eggs now, who will I show them off to (besides my awesome blog readers)? And deciding I wanted more complicated than just oil and vinegar, I went and made that dressing, which was good because my lemon had been sitting for a while and it would be sad if I didn’t use it.
I have to say I felt awkward bringing an unusual salad to a party. The people who like salads loved it–I didn’t expect it would be that well loved! The rabe was somewhat bitter, but I put in enough dried berries and cauliflower that it was balanced out. The dressing also added a good flavor.
However, I’d say more people skipped it and went straight to the burgers, than actually ate it.
Fri 17 Apr, 2009
A random “non dinner” post to make up for my recent absence. Also it is appropriately “Easter-y”.
I had found some websites regarding pickling eggs in beet juice. This seemed like a novel and odd idea, so I thought I’d try it. Most of the recipes I found online suggested using the leftover juice from a can of beets. This rubbed me the wrong way, as I would prefer to use real beets, and eventually I did find a recipe that did use real beets.
My version of the recipe went like this:
