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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!
My wife and I recently discovered tteok, or Korean rice cakes.
They're super easy to make from scratch or even buy at your local Asian market. They take 10 minutes to cook and make a great, filling meal. You can basically just throw whatever you have around the house in a pot or pan as sauce and heat them up.
They're an interesting mix of chewy, sticky and solid.
This one is a good one if you can find “wet” rice flour at your local Asian grocery store.
I absolutely love tteok. The problem is that Korean cuisine basically only ever uses it in spicy dishes, most of which are too spicy for me to eat. And I'm just not creative enough to make my own dish.
A while back I picked up a bowl of them that came with a spicy cheese sauce somewhere in my local Asian market's instant ramen section. It was so good, but it was also incredibly painful to eat.
Most Asian markets will just sell them without sauce as plain rice cakes in the cold section. You can just throw them in whatever sauce you like! It doesn’t take much creativity to throw them in some beef broth or teriyaki sauce. That’s what I usually do.
I made another excellent focaccia loaf. This time, I added some chopped kalamata olives and rosemary on top for taste and garnish. I cooked it in a stainless 1/2th pan, I made the mistake of forgetting to put parchment paper down so it stuck quite a bit to the bottom of the pan. Once I got it out though, it tasted wonderful. If I just want a quick snack, I serve it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. If I'm feeling fancy, I can get some nice Italian deli meats, make a tapenade, and go crazy with some other ingredients to make a sandwich.
I used the same recipe and portions as I did last time, the biggest difference was the pan - I used a half sheet tray last time, which came out a little too thin for my liking. I wanted this one to be suitable to be cut in half for sandwiches, so I went with a slightly smaller pan (and a slightly longer cooking time). It worked out well, and it's a good thickness for sandwiches.
I also made some cinnamon buns with cream cheese icing that came out exceedingly well.
Getting a stand mixer has been a blessing! It's much easier to decide to bake things now that I don't have to worry as much about the effort of kneading or mixing manually.
I've been trying to steadily whiten my fuggin' yellow teeth by switching from coffee (almost entirely) and black tea (woo, entirely!) to green tea. My mum got me some green tea bags with lemon from the local German discounter, and they're pretty dandy. I'm also joining my dad in his diet by having tinned soup and panini bread for lunch.
I also am suddenly Jonesing kind of hard for some of those chopped Chinese rice rolls with peanut and hoisin sauce. Ermaghad, that was the street food of kings back in the old country.
I don't cook, because I'm incompetent and I'd just end up making more work for my mum to clean up.
I made a stew on Sunday that's pretty good! It called for mushrooms, which my wife doesn't like, so we left them out, but then it turns out the wine it calls for was too much. Still tasty though. Just less wine next time.
I live in NC and there is a shocking dearth of country cooking. My favorite breakfast is fried chicken and gravy on a biscuit. NC style, which is a brown sausage gravy, appears to be dead. But there are some NOLA transplants in Asheville that have a great version even if the gravy is the wrong color, and I got some this last weekend.
I've never heard of a brown sausage gravy before. Do they use beef broth for the liquid component, or do they just use darker roux?
TBH, I'm not really sure. It's made from drippings left over after frying sausage, no broth as far as I'm aware. I've tried to make it by browning flour in a pan after making sausage and adding 1/2 and 1/2, but my attempt falls short. I don't know much about roux.
Thinking about it now, I wonder if it's made (I'll have to try this) by using milk to "clean" the hot pan after the sausage is made.
Also, it's not brown like Turkey or meatloaf gravy tends to be. But it is significantly darker than what you get at Hardee's, say. It has little bits of sausage, but not chunks. Stuff at Hardee's (and elswhere, including the stuff i got over the weekend) is made from dairy in pot, and some sausage is crumbled in to it.
Sawmill gravy perhaps? https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sawmill-gravy-recipe-1938562
It’s what I’m used to covering a biscuit
Alton brown has lousy politics, but his culinary taste and mine align nearly perfectly, so this may well be it. Is your gravy brown?
It could maybe generously be described as light brown? It gets some color from the sausage fat and can pick up some color when you cook the roux
Hmm. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting...