7
votes
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!
I'm on vacation back home in Brazil for the past weeks, so lots of Pastel with various fillings, Coxinha (chicken, often with a kind of cream cheese), Feijoada (black been pork and/or beef stew) and lots of fresh delicious fruits.
Those look amazing!
I'd been thinking about trying to get into vegetarian-ish-ism. move away from most meat other than chicken (raised locally) I'd love if anyone wants to drop some of their favorite recipes. I'm generally okay with anything except mushrooms. (And I can't eat cauliflower)
I want to change up because of medical reasons and weight loss. Especially cholesterol
My wife and I went vegetarian about 5 years ago, and we've been making Kenji's Vegan Dan Dan Noodles roughly once a week since then. Not being ok with mushrooms means that recipe is out as written, but you could try substituting for beyond meat or textured vegetable protein.
Also from Kenji, the Tofu Banh Mi and Potato Pan Pizza are very good, but less of a weeknight meal.
The biggest change we noticed when giving up meat was the shift in the way we cooked and meal planned. Before, we picked a protein and then matched some sides to it. Without a main protein, we ended up making a lot more one-pot meals and curries. This was a little stressful for the first few weeks while we figured out our go-to meals, but it's second nature now.
Simple beans and rice can be delicious. I make my black beans with this recipe substituting nutritional yeast (versatile stuff can't recommend highly enough) for chicken broth. Brown rice cooked with a little salt for the base.
Cool thing is you can build a lot of other dishes off of the leftovers with only a few twists.
Reheat and add some chopped canned chipotle peppers and added some diced carrot and potato and you have a vegetarian Mexican-style picadillo.
Or just use the beans, a little lettuce, salsa, vegan cheese if your choice, on top of toasted tostadas.
So much you can do with these beans.
We recently made Mac and cheese at home and had our first success with the sauce coming together properly! We sort of mixed together some recipes, but this is the base recipe for it. It blends in cauliflower and sweet potato.
The only complaint is that it wasn't quite cheesy enough? Even though we added a lot of cheese. I'm thinking more milk for creaminess and possibly more cheese. Definitely open to other ideas though.
As a side note, we decided that we don't need to plan an entire week of meals in advance, and instead are planning about 3 at a time and picking up groceries twice a week. This had reduced our stress significantly (less of an overwhelming burden to plan that many meals at once) and helps reduce food waste if we end up dining out. We have the luxury of being very close to a Walmart that offers grocery pickup, and that makes multiple trips a week so much easier.
I have ingredients to make pork puttanesca ragu and put that over polenta. All fingers crossed I don't mess it up. It's a slow cooker recipe so it shouldn't be too easy to mess up but we'll see!
A few years ago I was given an immersion blender as a Christmas gift, but it wasn't until the last couple of weeks that I've attempted homemade mayonnaise. I'm now convinced that God and Black and Decker invented immersion blenders specifically for that purpose, as it's difficult to imagine anything else being better suited to the task.
I've been using the proportions from this recipe, and am quite happy with the results. Using whole eggs together with a bit of mustard stabilizes the emulsion beautifully. The maniac blog author recommends throwing a bit of raw garlic in as well, which I tried, but I don't think the author did. If they had, I doubt they would have told complete strangers it was a good idea. Unless you really enjoy that weirdly sharp insult that is raw garlic flavor, either roast that bulb or skip the spear-leek altogether.
It's great as a sandwich spread of course, but it really shines as a base for salad dressings and dip. Throw together equal parts mayo and sour cream, some chopped fresh parsley, a dash of lemon juice, S&PtT, and a couple ounces bleu cheese crumbles and you have a passable bleu cheese dressing, though I recommend thinning it out with some low-fat milk for better pourability. I feel like there's something missing from it though, so I'll be trying again in the not-too-distant future.
I've also tried honey mustard dressing, which is even easier: it's just a dollop of the mayo, about a third as much Dijon mustard, and then honey to taste. I'm not the honey mustard fan of the house, but even I thought that one was excellent.
My next experiment is going to be French onion dip/dressing. I think I'll caramelize a yellow onion, throw a bit of garlic in towards the end of the caramelization process (so about an hour after every recipe author says your onions will be caramelized) and then maybe some minced thyme leaves to really Frenchify it. I can't imagine it'll be anything but fantastic, but I'll come back and report after the experiment.