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What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Got the barbecue cleaned up and ready for the summer (albeit very late) and did my favourite: "grill everything" meal. This is where I prep sausages and vegetables and cook them all on the barbecue.
I can get it all cooked in about 40-45 minutes. It was the first time my son (21 mo) got to eat grilled food as well and he loved it. My favourite way to cook in the summer.
I was surprised when a friend brought raw green beans to slap on the grill at a byo-protein bbq. Turns out grilled green beans (with a little oil, salt, pepper) are delicious. Id suggest adding them to your rotation if you haven't already.
We have done the green beans once - shockingly we haven't been able to find them frequently enough at the market. We do the same technique with just about every vegetable: asparagus is especially good done this way (especially if you can get a little bit of char on them).
I've been making this combination of ramen and massaman curry that is very tasty and requires little effort. Basically, I sear off some chuck steak and simmer it in beef broth for a couple hours (the broth being the ramen base instead of the normal coconut milk used for massaman curry). Then I add some vegetables and simmer until cooked (the traditional vegetables for massaman curry are potatoes and carrots, but since the ramen noodles are providing the starch, I've been using cherry tomatoes, bell pepper, or mushrooms.) Finally, I add massaman curry paste, lemongrass, fish sauce, brown sugar, lime juice and lime zest. When serving it, I mix some peanut butter with the broth before putting the ramen noodles in, and add some crushed peanuts and cilantro on top.
When I visited Portugal, me and my partner fell in love with their pastéis de nata. They're crunchy on the outside, they have soft custard on the inside, and they're very delicious.
So I always wanted to learn how to make them so I can enjoy them at home. Well, it was a total failure.
I didn't have time to make my own dough so I bought some frozen puff pastry dough - big mistake, it turned out to be a bit too salty. I also failed to shape it into my silicone mold so I could properly pour the custard in - so they ended up with way too much dough and way too little custard. The custard ended up good, but it wasn't as fine and creamy as the one used in the authentic ones.
I'm determined to try again, so I can do them justice. But I'll have to reserve some time over the weekend so I can make the dough from scratch, properly this time. I don't know how I'll get it to be malleable enough to easily shape it into the mold, but maybe it'll work out, we'll see.
I'll also try a different custard recipe, maybe it'll end up closer to what I had in Portugal.
I've been getting into baking bread recently, originally just banana bread but my grandma has been staying with us and telling me about making (sourdough I think) bread from a living starter and gave me the bug. However there is so much out there and cooking blogs are so overwritten I feel over my head. Does anyone have any recipes or tips for someone new to bread baking?
I find this recipe from Vincenzo's Plate super easy and beginner friendly. It's one of my favourites and I still make it this way a lot today. When you get the feel of it, you can sub out the instant yeast and replace some of the flour and water with a starter instead (assuming it's 50/50 water and flour).
Brian Lagerstrom also has some great bread recipes, as does the King Arthur website.
That's awesome! I followed a very similar path -> banana and outmeal bread to sourdough. I really like Patrick Ryan's videos, particularly his sourdough and whitebread ones.
To some degree baking is science, but there is also so much feel involved. I baked so many terrible, terrible loaves before I looked beyond written instructions and started watching videos. But that is helpful too. Understanding what dough feels like as it changes. Understanding how much variation in water or flour in a recipe (know as hydration) effects the feel, moldability, and outcome of the process. And just getting use to everything.
The last thing is equipment. You probably have everything you need but there are a few cheap things that make it easier:
I've been thinking about getting something like that batard pan. My pullman loaf pan has lost it's nonstick properties and I don't want to use it because it's so hard to get the bread out I wonder how much teflon I'd be consuming. I've been using my dutch oven since, and while it makes great bread I really don't like the circular shape.
Do you have any recommendations for picking one out?
Oof, I know what you mean about the teflon. I think it's a good call to move away from it. The pan I use is the Breadtopia Oblong Baker but it was a gift so there wasn't a lot of choice involved. Overall I love it! My one gripe is that if I'm making larger loaves (like 800g flour and above) it feels like it limits oven spring and I get a tighter crumb - literally because the loaf ends up filling the volume of the pan. Otherwise I prefer it to my dutch oven. Last thought is to get a batard proofing basket if you're going to make the investment. If you're based in Europe you may have some other cool options.
If you're making sourdough specifically, I'd recommend ignoring the recipes and just experimenting. Bread is a very hands-on thing and it doesn't have to be super formulaic. There are some things that are going to be out of your control so it's more useful to learn to work within the constraints you have rather than follow a recipe written by people in different conditions. If your bread turns out less than ideal, then congratulations; you just made an artisanal loaf! It's super satisfying when you start to make loaf that is uniquely yours.
The only thing that isn't super obvious is making a sourdough starter. It's still easy, but fermenting anything for the first time always feels like you're taking a plunge into the unknown. There are plenty of guides, but the heart of it is that you basically just mix in more water and flour every day or so until the mixture is rising predictably. It doesn't necessarily have to be double in volume. If you're baking them regularly you can do an old-fashioned "hack" by taking away some of the dough after you've mixed it together and using that as the starter for your next loaf. If you put it in the fridge, it should last for a week without any need to fuss with it. I mix mine with a bit more water to make it easier to incorporate into the next loaf.
Also consider just having your grandmother help you! You've got access to an expert already who can give you hands-on instruction!
Eating: Nothing! I'm fasting until Friday and will probably do this regularly in the final weeks leading up to my wedding. It is so, so boring but the results are effective for my purposes.
Cooking: When I break the fast I am really looking forward to a nice grilled dinner - chicken and corn cobs over the charcoals! I'll probably season the chicken quite simply because I want to smother it in some UK made buffalo sauce which is phenomenal stuff! They also do tins of mackerel in hot sauce that are fantastic.
It'll also finally be time to make the bottom tier of my wedding cake for real (chocolate and salted caramel) and stow that away in the freezer.
Oats with Yoghurt and Green Tea mostly. For dinner it's whatever I like since the rest of the day is so barren with salt or sugars. But I like lentils, beans and the occasional piece of meat.
The overnight oats thread from a while back had reignighted my love of oatmeal. By coincidence I had run out of breakfast cereal and so I pulled out my trusty container of oats. I am too lazy to cook oatmeal on the stove, and it always turns out a mess when I do it in the microwave, so I thought I'd be clever and fill the electric kettle and pre-heat the water so it would microwave better.
It turns out it actually was clever. The oatmeal basically cooks itself almost instantly, and in that time that it takes to set - which is just enough to add your preferred mixins to make it fancy - it will have cooled down to just about the perfect serving temperature.
Now that I've done this I am convinced that this is the way that all restaurants must be making their oatmeal if they aren't doing a huge batch.
I've been making a bunch of bulk stuff to freeze, just for the sake of having a bunch of more or less complete meals ready to go whenever.
Most recently, I did a big batch of fried rice. I don't really follow recipes for a lot of what I like to make. I've cooked for myself for pretty much my entire life so I just sort of throw things together based on flavor profiles/what I remember working ok together.
This batch was made up of, of course, rice, and broccoli, zucchini, portabellas, onion, garlic, and jalapenos. The sauce is made out of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, and calabrese pepper paste. I also cracked and scrambled five eggs that I mixed in at the end.
Because of the sheer amount of each ingredient, I had to divide things up and sautee them each on their own. The broccoli and zucchini was cooked in butter with rice vinegar and sesame oil, salt and some black pepper. The onion, garlic, and jalapeno was also cooked in butter, unseasoned because they don't need to be. Mushrooms were in butter and sesame oil. Finally, after cooking about three cups of rice and letting it sit in the fridge for a while, I sauteed it bit by bit in more butter, adding the sauce/paste to that as I went along. Finally, in a gigantic glass bowl I didn't know we had until I found it at the time, I mixed it all together with a bowl of freshly chopped green onion and the eggs. Portioned it out, froze most of it, ate some then and there because it had been about two hours/I was hungry lol.
I've been very pleased. At the time of course it was delicious, but the frozen containers worked out great. Can just toss it in the microwave for five minutes and it's good as it ever was. I like to sprinkle Tajin on mine. My grandmother likes a little extra soy sauce. I think some time in the next week or two, I'll do a similar thing with red beans and rice. And then again with a combo of couscous, beans, vegetables and chimichurri I really enjoyed when I was just making things up for myself a while back.