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 have been making an extremely simple Americanized stir fry that my family loves. I make a game of putting in as many kinds of veggies as I can and routinely get 10-14 in there. You can make it with just chicken, too, if that is your preference.
Velvet your chicken or don’t
Blanch your chicken and harder veg if you want.
Stir fry everything a bit.
Add 3:1 garlic and ginger to taste
Pour in a mix of: 1c chicken broth, 3tbsp oyster sauce, 2tsp Louisiana hot sauce (i use crystal), 2tsp corn starch. (I make a lot so i double this)
Top it peanuts or dont
I know this looks basic and absurd but honestly it is so good. Great for using up veggies.
Meatballs
My family like them and to get them pre made would cost me £10-12 per kilo, to make them myself costs £6-7 per kilo.
They are incredibly easy to make - We make our own bread, so we always have a some stale bread around to use up, which feels like a double win.
I've been using a Kenji recipe (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m8sBAIdJGFw) but if anyone had some good suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Kenji's meatball recipe has everything that makes meatballs great. The panade, the egg, the salt, different cuts, etc -- that gives it such a nice tight but moist texture.
From the core elements, there isn't a lot to improve on. The only real note, too much salt will lead to a sausage texture and not enough will lead to a loose texture. This recipe has a perfect amount for me.
You can combine it with the spaghetti from The Bear, which is a super simple red sauce -- check the details here -- I make this almost every week. I'm just so happy with it.
I could not agree more with this. I am a pretty talented amateur chef, and any of the tricks I would normally incorporate into something like meatballs (i.e. a panade, getting gelatin in there) are already in Kenji's recipe.
It's also quite a resilient recipe in that I have made them without pancetta, without ground pork, and with something weird with the panade (forget exactly what) and they were still great.
i love recipes like this ---- good structural ones. Kenji is one of few where his recipes are typically so simple but deliver, too.
I love a good meatball. One of my favorite things for a while was to get a marinara w/ anchovy and a side meatball. :)
May or may not be a direction you're interested in, but I like adding cooked, drained, and mashed split red lentils to traditionally beef dishes. It adds a smooth texture + the healthiness of lentils. For something like meatloaf or meatballs, I think 1:4 lentil:meat volume is about the max without compromising the structural integrity (I can recall going up to about 1:3 in meatloaf, and I'd say that's right on the line)
That's a really good idea. I'll give that a go.
Thanks for the tip
This week we actually used Kenji's chicken chickpea burger recipe and turned them into meatballs (we added red onion and parsley). They turned out great with spaghetti and red sauce, as well as just on rice with roasted broccoli and some soy sauce.
I've not tried his chicken chickpea burger recipe, I'll have to look out for it. Thanks for the idea
He did a video on his YouTube channel and the recipe itself was in some kids magazine.
Video: https://youtu.be/XdGcXsvTYQY?si=AzjEIblQmfY_7aGB
Recipe: https://mcusercontent.com/b1ea30ff4c07c4e770929e7f7/files/090fb4b1-2b50-42ea-b545-48b0e64f4b57/ccnewsletter14workingv03.pdf
Hummus. It's incredibly easy once you have the ingredients, and so tasty. I've been experimenting with various spicy ingredients and amounts with the latest being a mix of Korean chili paste (gochujang), smoked paprika, and cayanne. Just about right this last time though maybe a bit hotter next batch to see. Excited to bring it to Thanksgiving for a snack. Would love to hear suggestions for unique additions that aren't spicy since not everyone likes spicy things in my family but want a little more flavor than traditional garlic type. Red pepper maybe?
If you like eggplant, char/roast some eggplants and blend those in there. It’s like a hybrid between hummus and baba ghanoush.
Ages ago, a store-bought hummus flavour available near me was branded as something like 'morrocan spiced' hummus. I loved it. It had the typical chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, and garlic you'd expect. But iirc it subbed part or all of the lemon juice with orange juice, and contained a warm (but not hot-spicy) spice mix I remember being cinnamon-forward, maybe cuminy? I figured out how to replicate it but it's been too long to remember details. Perhaps experiment in that direction?
The spice mix was almost certainly a variant of ras el hanout, a North African spice blend that is warm and, yep, cuminy!
Yep! It was a very simple version, but definitely in this direction :)
Awesome, will check it out
I recently started making humus because my partner likes to take it to work for lunch, but it's sooo expensive, relative to the actual cost of the ingredients. I usually make it with roasted red bell pepper--I roast a bunch of red peppers and freeze them when I can get them cheap (or grow them). I just defrost one and add it to everything else. Also roasted garlic is a nice change. And fresh chopped cilantro if you have it, but in my experience that's much better if sprinkled on top at the last minute.
Lately I'm boosting my spinach consumption. Stir-fry some garlic in oil, add in some mushrooms and once they're ready I add a mountain of spinach.
If you do a quick search you'll find that some huge number of Americans are deficient in magnesium, and spinach is a great source of magnesium.
Had something similar last night! Sliced garlic sauteed in olive oil, mountain of spinach (and some leftover tuscan kale we had laying about), salt, pepper, and a squirt of yuzu juice. Yum.
You should give 시금치나물 a try! Its easy to customize to your taste. My favorite way to eat spinach.
A very good recipe for anyone interested who doesn’t speak Korean —
https://www.seriouseats.com/korean-marinated-spinach-banchan-sigeumchi-namul
This looks delicious and I was just thinking about what to do with a bunch of spinach. But I don't have doenjang. Is there anything that can sub for it in a pinch? Fish sauce? Tamari? Or should I order some and wait to try the recipe?
Neither fish sauce nor tamari will work well, mostly because as liquids they're textually so different from doenjang, which is a paste. If you have miso or gochujchang, either one should be basically a 1:1 substitute, with gochujang obviously being spicy. If you don't have either of those... maybe go back to your tamari and do a slurry with cornstarch or dijon mustard, then add that to taste? It'll taste quite different than originally intended, obviously, but you can just call it a Japanese-Korean fusion and it should still be good. (Or Japanokorean-French, if you use dijon).
Thanks! Do you have a recommendation for a good brand of doenjang? I have zero experience with Korean food, so if I'm going to try it I don't want to ruin it by using bad ingredients.
I've had good results with this stuff, which also seems to be the most common brand at pan-asian stores. Two unsolicited additional thoughts:
my sense is that doenjang quality probably doesn't matter all that much. It seems to me to be kind of like soy sauce in that you can buy ultra-premium small batch stuff that has amazing depth of flavor, but the only reason to do that is if you're serving it by itself as a focal point. If you're cooking with it, just get whatever average brand. The O-Food stuff I linked seems to be the doenjang equivalent of Kikkoman soy sauce, so from that standpoint it's probably about right.
all of that said, if you're just getting started with korean food (and like some heat), gochujang will be a much easier ingredient for you because it's much more common in Korean recipes written for the American audience. Like 80% of Korean recipes in english will contain gochujang while maybe 10% will contain doenjang, and for fusion recipes (like these absurdly good cookies) it'll basically only be gochujang. So if you're hoping to get into korean cooking more broadly and budget is in any way a concern, I would just get gochujang and hold off on doenjang until you're sure that you're going to use it. The two are basically interchangeable, of course, so there's nothing stopping you from using doenjang in all the recipes that call for gochujang, but I'm assuming you don't want to be messing around like that if you're just dipping your toes into the cuisine.
Wow, thanks for the guidance, I will try the gochujang. I love heat, and those cookies look amazing! Around here, people eat red chile brownies and green chile apple pie, so the cookies don't seem odd at all.
You bet. If you make the cookies tell me what you think!
so I'm now a tea person... ish.
The first round of teas I'm doing are
Pretty good overall. Since I started this, I've only had one cup of coffee.
How have you found Lapsang Souchong? I've never been able to enjoy it. I've always struggled with the smoked flavours.
Have you tried Darjeeling or Ceylon? I'd highly recommend them if you haven't.
I think the Margaret's Hope is a darjeeling. They're all pretty good. For the lapsang, I looooove smoke, so that helps. I find it can be fickle with the timing, though. Too long and it has an unpleasant aftertaste. Scotch-wise, I've always liked Laphroaig and stuff -- even super peaty ones; so lapsang is right up my alley.
I really need to start taking notes on stuff, though. I didn't want to get all clinical like I did when I first got into coffee, but I think its a better approach.