Cooking On Sundays

I love soup.

I get these days of “well, what do I have?” and then it goes from there to the soup pot. One of the most awesomest things about soup is that anything can go in it.

Several weeks ago someone gave me some meat that was never clearly identified. It’s clearly a chunk of beef, but from what part of the cow, I’m not certain. Knowing the people involved, I suspect it came from the shoulder.

I threw it in my freezing promising to use it someday. That was many weeks ago. Finally, I got sick of stumbling over that chunk while reaching for ice cream, and pulled it out.

I’m not that good at cooking with meat so I asked everyone I could think of about it. The suggestion I followed was a “cook it on low all day long”. The only problem with this is that we are approaching spring and really what I want to do is go outside and play all day long, and having a boiling pot making it hotter inside only amplifies this effect.

So I did that. After about an hour (much faster than I predicted!) it was soft enough to cut, so I pulled it out and chopped it into bite sized chunks (because I have this weird american habit of all food must be small enough to eat).

Back in the pot, threw in salt, cayenne, onions, scallions. I also threw in two huge sprigs of rosemary.  In a blender I pureed bell peppers, jalapeños, left over cabbage, and lemons. I didn’t tell anyone about these secret ingredients, and I wanted them out of the fridge before they tried to make friends with me. Tossed this “broth” into the soup, keep cooking.

I wanted this to be more like “stew” than “meat with water” so I looked for things that would thicken the broth. Since I always seem to have a large supply of lentils on hand, I dumped a bunch in. I also have barley! So this became lentil, barely, and beef stew.

I still have veggies left, noticeably, I saved a bell pepper, I have some celery, so I chopped these up, and in they went.

After last week I promised myself I wouldn’t put any cumin in it.

This was tasty! Actually, I would recommend something spicy added to it, and of course, I didn’t add enough salt. On the day I made it, I put out my collection of hot sauces, however most people didn’t use them. They did use the salt though. Since then, when I throw a bowl of it in the microwave, I usually put in sriracha, that garlic helps it a lot, and a lot of salt.

In the end, I suppose calling it “rosemary beef stew” would be a better name, but “mystery meat” is far more fun to have as a title.

Oh–and before I forget–on the side, we served a fabulous salami, cheese, and cracker plate on the side.

Also, despite the lack of pics today, I actually have been making pics. Pics will soon appear!

It’s there now.

I apologize to you, gentle reader, for falling off my blogging duties. I kept up my cooking duties, as I would have had screaming hordes (actually we only had about five) complaining about lack of food.

So anyway, I hope you didn’t starve last weekend wondering where you might find a tasty recipe from, and I promise never to do it again. Unless someone buys me a trip to Tahiti or somewhere where I will not be cooking. Actually you might take that as a threat because I might buy myself a ticket to Costa Rica and go out to eat on Sunday for a change. In the meantime, we’ll try to keep it on its regular schedule.

Hm, any one want to send me to somewhere exotic and buy me dinner?  A donation button will appear soon.  All proceeds are guaranteed to send me somewhere I’ve never been before.

We’ve got a a triple hitter here, especially with the salad being bigger than the entree, and the cake being fancy enough to impress everyone….

We started with salami and mushrooms.  Really, my friend made these, and it literally was just fancy salami and some portobello and criminy mushrooms.  The ingredient list is already done!  It was just stirred fried in olive oil, and that was that.  We kind of didn’t make enough, despite usual cooking style, although I suggested we throw everything else in there too, we didn’t.  Also, I almost forgot to mention, we boiled some pasta to go with this.

I made a salad where I did live up to my reputation of “everything goes in it”.  I planned on following this butternut squash salad recipe, but in the end, I only used the salad dressing.  In this salad I put:

• Garbanzo beans
• String beans
• Green cauliflower (I think it’s advertised as “broccoflower” or something)
• Half a red onion
• A bunch of cilantro
• Green bell peppers
• The remains of a small red cabbage

I steamed the cauliflower just a little, boiled the garbanzos enough that they were cooked, but I just did this so that they were soft enough to eat, and I did this ahead of time so that it was a cold salad.

And I made a tahini dressing out of:

• Tahini (in a jar) (I didn’t make it)
• Finely chopped garlic (one of these days I’ll get a press)
• Some of the onions above got into the garlic, so they were finely chopped as well
• The juice of three lemons
• Olive oil
• Salt

I mixed with the quantities in the dressing until I feared that I wouldn’t have enough lemon juice to balance it if I added any more tahini, and while straight the salad dressing was not the best.

Then the cake.  I didn’t really make the cake, I just helped pour and such, so I might suddenly hand the keyboard to raven, but the cake, if I remember, started something like this:

• Half a block (not stick, like two sticks) of butter
• A block of fancy dark (60%) chocolate (9.7 oz, I think)

I’m stealing this.  So the recipe came off the inside of the chocolate wrapper, because I had planned to make this cake and been thwarted by Stanza’s kitchen.  (You might have noticed that he doesn’t seem to go in for precisely measuring things; he doesn’t have a measuring cup, and there’s no way I’m making imprecise buttercream by hand.)  I needed an emergency easy recipe.  Fortunately for all of you, Scharffen Berger (the Co-op had fancy chocolate, what can I say) puts the recipe online.  You need:

• One brick of chocolate, 9.7 oz, give or take a smidge
• 7 oz of butter. (Half a brick, equivalent to 7 tablespoons.)
• Five eggs
• A cup of white sugar

I whacked the chocolate into little pieces with a knife that was probably bigger than was wholly safe (I’d recommend a hammer instead; this was one thick brick of chocolate.) Then I melted the butter and the chocolate together - they recommended a double boiler, but I was feeling lazy and this chocolate has enough cocoa butter that it was okay in the microwave.  The eggs and sugar went into another bowl until the liquid chocolate was done, at which point they all got mixed together.

The recipe is one of those chocolate cake recipes that tells you to bake it in another pan full of water.  We tried this and found - panic panic! - that our newly acquired springform pan leaked, so I dried the batter out as best I could while Stanza tried to see if the pan could be made non-leaky.  Finally we gave up and cooked the thing without the second pan of water, but with a piece of tinfoil underneath just in case.  Three-fifty for an hour and a half.

The finished product was not the best looking cake ever, since it was kinda flat, so I thought I’d make it prettier by covering the whole thing in homemade whipped cream.  I halved the amount of sugar I normally put in whipped cream and added a little vanilla, because the cake was really sweet.  There was some old nutella in the cabinet, so I mixed a little milk into it and spread that on top.  (The cooking style around here is perilous and catching, let me warn you.)  Then I covered it in whipped cream and chopped some hazlenuts up for the top.  Done, and it even looked fairly impressive.  Everyone certainly said it was tasty enough - but how can you go far wrong with that much  chocolate involved?

Following the ideas of this post, I have come to realize that no matter how much of a stretch something is, you can call it a taco if you put in quotes.  Rather than justifying my reasoning for calling it chili, I decided it was easier to put into quotes.

I started with this recipe for vegan white bean chili, and realized I had no white beans, so I used black beans and pinto beans instead.  I had some garbanzos I wanted used up, so I threw them as well.  And halfway done, deciding I wanted it thicker, I threw in some lentils, figuring they would be tasty and dissolve into something thicker.

Without further ado, here is the ingredient list:

• Black beans
• Pinto beans
• Green lentils
• Garbanzo beans
• Two serrano peppers
• Two anaheim peppers
• One yellow onion
• Garlic
• Celery
• Carrots
• White onions
• Frozen okra
• Frozen corn
• Frozen snozzberries (just kidding)
• Three bell peppers
• Five scary dried red peppers
• Oregano
• Paprika
• Chili powder
• Sliced peppered salami that a friend gave me
• Some corn flour
• Some other spices to taste

I soaked the garbanzo, black and pinto beans from the night before - well, actually, I soaked the garbanzo beans about a month ago and didn’t use them and they’ve been living in my freezer ever since.  That’s why I was using them.  I drained the beans, then I blended one and a half bell peppers, the spicy peppers, half the onion, and half the garlic, and put that green soup in the pot with the beans.  I set that to boil for an hour or two, added the spices, and worried that I’d added too much.

I drank a lot of wine and chopped the other vegetables into little pieces.  The wine is why I can’t remember exactly what spices I put in.  At some point I was figuring the chili wouldn’t thicken appropriately, so I added lentils (there was still enough cooking time that they would dissolve into tastiness) and corn flour (I read that on the chili recipe linked above).  This did thicken it enough that it was appropriate.  I added some carrots at this point too.

Further towards the end I added all the vegetables.  I kept finding random things to add; it kind of got out of hand.  I had a bag of frozen okra in the freezer, frozen corn, at some point it felt like I kept digging further back and I kept finding odder things (though I did use up all the turnip greens on a non-Sunday cooking day; those would have been in here too but I found an empty bag instead).

At the very end I added the salami which I carefully cut into quarter-circles.

While it was very spicy, and I did kind of go wrong with “too much spices such that it didn’t taste like anything”, I think if I hadn’t said “I’m afraid it’s too spicy”, I think people wouldn’t have thought it quite too spicy.  The spicy-eaters are fond of everything spicy and gobbled it up without yogurt and sour cream; the non-spicy-eaters feasted on the spinach salad instead.

We’ve changed the server that cookingonsundays is hosted at, or more accurately, changed the virtual server it’s hosted at.  Also, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of wordpress.  I was hoping these changes would make the website a little faster but it looks like I’ll have to explore other options for making this website faster.

I was inspired by this entry at bread-and-honey, and I had a surplus of broccoli to use, which I though would go great in it.  But of course, I can’t really follow directions, so if you go read that post and then compare my recipe, you’ll find that they don’t match up very well.

But I made a good effort!  In fact, I acquired tarragon and fennel explicitly for this soup.

The fennel came out so strong that it quickly became fennel soup.  However, it was not overpowering, and in fact was very tasty.

Anyway, the ingredient list looks something like this:

• Half a yellow onion
• One large leek
• Half a bulb of garlic
• About six small zucchinis
• Two broccoli crowns (they were cheaper than the rest of the broccoli)
• A box of Trader Joe’s “Creamy Corn and Roasted Pepper Soup”.  It has been sitting in my closet for about half a month, and I was looking to add creaminess, and maybe that would do it.
• Dried fennel, tarragon, arbol peppers, salt, and black pepper, all ground together
• Olive oil and butter
• A small amount of corn starch

I carefully followed the directions of sauteing the onion, leek, and garlic in the pot before making the soup.  Of course, I use so many ingredients, that this filled the pot up about two inches!  Giving them a little time to cook (almost ten minutes, which Alicia thought would be too long), I added the zucchini, which filled the pot to about half!  Well, those zuchinni are never going to saute like that, but I like my veggies crunchy, so that’s fine by me.  I added some water and took some of the zucchinis (and some of the broccoli stems too) to the blender, and pureed enough to make the broth green.

At this point I realized I forgot to acquire cream.  I debated using milk, when I found the box of soup in the closet.  I know it is the highest form of cheating, but I really don’t care, and dumped the entire contents of the box in the pot.  I’m not sure if the box of soup has cream in it, but it is a perfect smooth creamy consistency which went far in the soup.

I also found I had no flour, according to the recipe.  I put a little corn starch in it–I wanted the thickening effect, but I really don’t like corn starch, it has a flavor that makes me think of hot and sour soups.  I basically put in so little it did nothing, and gave up looking for thickeners.

I realized at this point there isn’t much in there that really needs to cook, so I waited for it to warm and put all the spices in a grinder and hit the grindy button.  Here the fennel really came out–the tarragon I could have left out, but the fennel gave it a really nice smell.

This was a really tasty soup.  However, there was an interesting effect between when it was hot, and how it was the next day–fresh from the pot, it was almost too spicy, and seemed to need salt, which I alleviated by putting lots of saltine crackers in it.  The next day, the salt ratio seemed perfect, but I added tabasco to get the heat back.  I’m not sure what caused this effect.

Diligent observers of CookingOnSundays may have noticed some downtime during this week.  We will have the sysadmin taken out in to a back alley and beaten with a stirring spoon.

As of this moment, I have no idea why the website went down, but I figured since it went down on a Wednesday and back up on a Saturday no one would have noticed.  Except, of course, this was the week I tried to post my recipe on that Wednesday.

Assuming no more problems, we should be back on schedule.

So I was browsing all sorts of random web pages, looking what to make next, when I stumbled upon this page, and thought everyone likes cheezy rice.  However, I didn’t really make it at all what that web page suggests, using a lot less cheese (for some reason me and my friends go light on the cheese) and a lot more veggies.  It went something like this:

• Two poblano chilies
• One anaheim chili
• Half a broccoli
• Half a cauliflower
• Onions, garlic
• A whole bunch of rice
• Half a bunch of cilantro
• A small wheel of “farmer’s cheese” that I found at the supermarket
• The only bell pepper I found in the store that I thought was worth taking home
• Some oil, some butter

I took all the green ingredients and threw them in the blender.  The bell pepper, being orange rather than green, and was very tasty, I thought this may be even more perfect not blended, so I didn’t, and was bemoaning my lack of a green bell pepper for blending.  I blended them all up and added water to smooth it a little and make my blender a little less cranky.

I put this “green liquid” into a large pan with a bunch of rice, added some butter, and cooked as per normal rice.  Now, I’ve been using a rice cooker for a very long time, and the only reason I didn’t use my rice cooker is that it’s simply not big enough.  My method for cooking rice kind of goes like this–bring to a boil (with rice in water), turn down to very low but hot enough so it keeps the heat, put the lid on, and don’t take the lid off to check–the steam will go into the air rather than the rice if you do this–so what I do is listen for the boiling.  The second I don’t hear the pot bubbling anymore I take off the rice.

While I’m doing this I chop all the veggies.

I’m not as good as this as I used to be, so I ended up with a brown layer on bottom.  No matter, I caught it quickly enough so that the burnt flavor did not spread to the whole pot of rice, but my dishwashers will be angry, anyway I put the rice into a lasagna tray, and added all the vegetables.  Then I shred the cheese and cover the whole mess with cheese, and put the tray into the oven.

Hm, dinner will be late today.  The website says it takes twenty minutes to bake, and I did leave it in there for twenty minutes, but they are a bunch of liars.  The cheese was melted and some things were slightly baked but it lacked the well baked-crunchy corners style.  But since I was running late anyway I served it then, though I think another twenty minutes would have been good.

I also did a spinach salad.

It was tasty, though this is not my most fabulous dish ever, it was a quick and easy thing to do!  A couple days after, I tried a similar experiment in my rice cooker–ran everything through the blender, all the veggies and rice into the rice cooker, let it go, and hey–tasty!  Didn’t bake or cheesify it for myself, though, I just took that blend to work.  I do have to say this is not filling–which makes it difficult “take to work” food–though perhaps if I added tons of cheese that might work better.

And one more thought before you attempt this at home–don’t, in a room full of mexicans, pronounce the “h” in “horno”.  I said (in thier ears) “arroz al-jorno” and great laughter ensued.

Due to time constraints I will be unable to type up my dinner in a timely manner.  Please accept my apologies, dear reader, and as soon as I get back to my notes I will write it all up, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday.

I’ve been talking big about making pozole for a long time, especially considering how many people were offering to help me make it.  Pozole is a mexican pork-hominy (white corn) soup that is really tasty.  Unfortunately, every recipe I was reading online seemed to indicate that it would take a really long time to cook, starting with the infamous line “boil the pig’s head for three hours“, but really it seemed that I needed to start the night before, or at least soak the hominy.  Some web pages talk of shucking the corn yourself; I was thinking to buy the dried hominy and just soak it over night, but really what ended up happening is I’m at the market three hours before dinner is meant to be on, my friend says we can do it, and I’m not quite convinced, but let’s do it–after all, using a can does take a lot less time.

Also, in all this, I learned how to make a salsa!  That will appear lower down.  First the pozole.  This comes in three parts:  boil the hominy, boil the pork, and put out lots of condiments (this is where the salsa comes in).

For the main ingredients, they are simply

• A humongous can of hominy (also called pozole (both the dish and the grain are called pozole), white corn, maiz blanco)
• A pound of pork shoulder
• Sal mucha, er, lots of salt.  We actually didn’t use as much as the original recipe said.
• Some ground cumin
• A head of garlic, all peeled, for each pot (this turns out to be two)

For the condiments, we used:

• A bunch of radishes, chopped into small parts
• A bunch of green cabbage, chopped into bits small enough to add to soup
• Chopped white onions
• Key limes, chopped (and large discussion over what are limes and lemons are, and how they are said in differing languages)
• tortilla chips
• The aforementioned salsa, which will be detailed below.

For the condiments, just put everything in bowls, and set out to let people customize thier soup.

For the hominy, dump the contents of the can in a large soup pot, add salt, cumin and a head of garlic, and set to boil. Once it gets boiling, turn it down so it stays hot and simmering for two hours.

For the pork, put in another large soup pot, with enough water to boil it, put in a head of garlic and some salt, and again, cook for two hours.

Once the pork is done (it will change color), take it out, and dump the broth into the pozole pot.  Then pull the pork, that is, pull the pork into little pieces.  Put the pork out as if it were a condiment too.

Ah, how can I forget abuela’s secret part of the recipe?  The big secret, I was informed, was after things are cooked but not quite before you are done, pull the garlic out, mush it up until it is a paste, and stir it back into the soup.

Now here, the soup is done, and it’s basically a “build your own soup”.  Put as much meat and other condiments as you want in a bowl, and cover with soup!  My take on this is that it’s not a soup!  I wanted to throw the meat and salsa into the same pot, and let people’s luck determine how much they get.  I was willing to concede on the rest because it would substantially alter the crunchiness of veggies if they were soaking in the soup.  The mexicans managed to convince me that it would not be authentic enough if we did that, and even americans were smart enough to be able to make their own soups.

To make the salsa, we use the following ingredients:

• 50 grams of arbol chilis, with the stems carefully removed
• A cup of wine vinegar
• Some salt
• Only about half or less of a head of garlic
• Enough water to boil the chilis in

Boil the chilis for 20 minutes with the garlic.  After you are done, dump some (not all!) of the water, add the vinegar, put in a blender, and spin.  Now I have to point out, from experience, be careful doing this.  I had everything in the blender, put the lid on, blend–and the lid came right off and went everywhere.  Thinking it was just a matter of not holding the lid down hard enough, I tried again–the lid came off, and I got salsa all over my face.  All I can say is that it is a good thing I wear glasses.  While I was washing my face off, someone else managed to get the salsa blended, but be careful–my suspicion is that hot water makes the seals on the blender not as tight and the lid a lot harder to hold down.  After blending, strain the seeds out, and there is a lot of liquid in the chili mush–we have a nice colander that we filtered it through, then “squished” the chili mush to get more liquid out.  I saved the remaining mush to for further spicy experiments and put the salsa out with thre rest of the condiments.  Yummy!

I also added a spinach salad to this.  Since I make spinach salads so commonly in the winter, I am not going to detail it here, however, I will note that I added many of the “condiments” to the salad.  Furthermore, some of us were just adding the salad to the soup as if it were yet another condiment.

The soup was fabulous!  I want to thank all the people for helping me make it.  More importantly, I want to thank them for not letting me dump the salsa into the broth, as I don’t think anyone would have eaten it.  It was well reviewed all around, and further, someone brought home made pie and ice cream for dessert!  Oh my gosh this stuff is wonderful.