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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!
I committed to cooking some Indian cooking with an aunt on some unset date. Both of us have wanted to do that for a while, since a lot of the cuisine is vegetarian, fairly healthy, stores well, and delicious.
Thinking of trying chana masala, saag aloo, or maybe some sort of dal.
Does anyone have any favorite recipes? Especially ones that might be beginner-friendly?
For beginners:
https://www.ediblecommunities.com/recipes/caramelized-onion-dal/
The onions take awhile, but that’s really the only difficult part. This one is always a winner when I make it. Her book Indianish is also full of good beginner recipes.
For dal:
https://www.archanaskitchen.com/dal-banjara-recipe-langar-wali-dal
Single pan (except the tadka which I do in a cast-iron)!
For simple chana:
https://www.archanaskitchen.com/hara-chana-masala-recipe
It says it requires green chickpeas but you can easily substitute white. Just cook them to your desired consistency if they don’t come out of the can pre-cooked (e.g., boil em till you can smoosh one easily between two fingers).
Thanks!
I went out to a nice restaurant with a girl. She told me before diner she didn't liked raw meat and then ordered some Japanese beef thing, which turned out to be almost raw. I should have asked the waiter what it was exactly because I suspected it could be thus, but I ended up eating half of it, was really nice!
Tried a new udon place, pretty good, and boba place, excellent with in-house made boba of varying flavors. Also found a new BBQ place with excellent brisket, so have some of that leftover for breakfast tacos this week.
Made my, not to toot my own horn, excellent fajitas for meal prep this week. So looking forward to that.
Fajitas are one of my favorite meal preps. For some reason eating them through the week feels like a splurge even though they are so freaking easy to prep.
Dead easy, just marinate, toss a little rub on, and I throw them on my pellet grill to get some char and smoke into them. I chop up the veggies and put them in an aluminum pan on the top rack at the same time, so everything gets done at the same time.
What other notable meal preps do you do?
Butter chicken is freaking easy as heck, and the recipe I use is heavy in ginger which just makes it for me. I also do it in a slow cooker, and it freezes well, so I can make tons of it and have it on hand for a long time (well on paper I could, but it' so yummy and we are often negligent doing meal prep weekly that it goes faster than it should). I base ours on this recipe: Restaurant Style Butter Chicken in Slow Cooker
Peanut sauce recipes are to die for in our house, and I'm currently tweaking this one: Chicken Stir Fry with Thai Peanut Sauce. It's way hotter than I like, but even so, I freaking love it. It calls for frozen veggies, but I just add whatever veggie wise (last time used a bunch of fresh green beans from the garden). This one doesn't freeze well so when it's in the rotation, we generally eat it for lunch and dinner till it's gone.
Along with fajitas these are my current favorites, but most of our stuff is fairly boring like lots of stews and hearty soups in the winter.
We've been looking for a good Butter Chicken recipe! So I'm stealing that.
I like you, you're good people.
The peanut stir fry looks great too, I'm sure my wife will be all about it too. We don't typically freeze, just make lunches on Sunday for Mon-Thurs with fend for yourself Fridays. Dinner is a bit of a rarity on weekdays as my wife and I both eat late lunches and aren't hungry in the evening.
Soup weather is something we're pining for. I have a very hearty chicken soup I make that we refer to as The SoupTM. My wife has started down the path of finding/creating her perfect egg drop soup and we'll be looking to make our own ramen as well.
Plus slow cooker chili! Which means I'll need to smoke a brisket soon as any tough/charred bits at the end of the flat get put into the freezer until it's time for chili; slow cooker brisket chili is amazing.
Any notable things you add to your chicken soup? I've been playing around with mine forever, and a couple of years ago started adding chopped fennel bulbs to the broth. It's weird because I'm not a fennel fan, but the bulbs add a distinct but soft additional note to the final soup.
Chili, I freaking love it, but all my attempts to make it are meh - edible but not memorable. Do you have a recipe you work from, or any hints to share?
Our go to winter soup is a beef lentil stew that's kind of morphed into an ugly delicious blob that we make in a 40qt stock pot. We make quite a few of these starting in fall and freezing a lot of it for when we lose power (which is a common winter occurrence). They heat up perfectly on the wood stove, and it just makes everything feel cozier. My husband says he could eat it all day everyday, but I do grow tired of it lol.
Nothing all that out of the ordinary, just make sure each ingredient is treated right. Chicken browned before introduction to the soup, roasted garlic, sautéed onions, high quality cream and butter, and since my wife likes the flavor of mushrooms, but not the texture, we chop them up pretty fine, sweat them to get all their flavorful moisture out, then hit them with the immersion blender before everything goes back in to get the flavors to meld. I may have to take the fennel idea, roast it at the same time I roast the garlic, and see what it adds.
My wife has it all in her head, but I shot her a message to see if she can write it up so I can send it your way. It's always been delicious, and spicy, we like spicy, but once we substituted the "beef stew meat" (aka tough chuck cubes) for brisket, it hit a whole new level for us. I smoke my briskets low-and-slow so the smokiness is strong without being overwhelming and really works with the chili.
I hear you on the getting tired of something train. I changed up my fajita recipe at the suggestion of a friend earlier this year and it went from pretty-darn-good to, per my wife, "holy crap we're having this again next week"! But after two solid weeks of fajitas it was time for something else. Where are you geographically, if you don't mind me asking? I'm in Texas and even with this past February's state-wide power troubles, we've never lost power here for more than a couple of hours (and that was when someone crashed into a utility pole down the block) as we're on an essential part of the grid with some emergency services. So food storage isn't top of the priority list here.
I'll also take details on that beef lentil stew if you're sharing.
Most of my soups start with a bone broth, so I save bones throughout the year in the freezer. The day before I make a stew, I'll slow roast (225 f) a couple of the cheapest roasts I can find with whatever veggies I have on hand, and we'll have that for dinner, saving the majority of it for the stew. I'll also start thawing out bones and drippings that I've saved up.
Ugh, let me start again as if we are starting from a recently roasted piece of bone in beef.
I cut all the remaining beef (cubing as I go) off the bone, trimming the fat and any cartilage that didn't melt during the slow roast, and put in fridge. I put the bones and fat/cartilage in a strainer with full sprigs of rosemary, bay leaves, celery, and onions. Put the strainer in a pot of salted water, bring to boil, then cut heat down to a simmer, add turmeric and garlic powder, cover let it do it's thing for the next 8-10 hours. When that's done, I take the pot to the sink and pull out the strainer, throwing everything in it away, and put the pot of broth back on the stove.
I puree the veggies from the night before (usually carrots, bell peppers, onions, fennel bulbs, whole cloves of garlic and etc) with the drippings and add them to the pot with chopped carrots and potatoes, lentils, tomato puree, summer savory, crushed garlic (a lot), red pepper flakes, smoked paprika, bay leaves, salt, pepper (this is the base of my flavors, but really anything can be added here). Bring to boil and then simmer, covered for about 20 minutes. (Sometimes I have to add water here. If I do, I'll usually add a mix of the vegetable and beef Better than Bouillon to the water.)
At the ten minute mark I test the flavor, letting the liquid cool down to room temp before tasting. I've found it's easier to correct flavor mid-way through than at the end.
When the lentils are done, usually so are the potatoes and carrots. This is when I add canned corn, frozen green beans, kale or collards, and the beef that I've cubed from the roasts. Bring it back to a boil, turn off heat, and remove from burner. It's done.
I can't really tell you how much of what I add since I make such huge pots of the stuff.
Oh in reply to where we live. We live in western Washington. We have high winds and large trees, and two of our three substations have one source of power. I always joke and say, "If god even thinks about farting, we'll lose power." It used to be amazing when we lost power because of the absolute silence, but we've been inundated by a lot of wealthy folk who have full house generators the sound of which has taken away the magic of walking around after a storm. We've always enjoyed the power outages - excuses for not being able to log into work (husband), board games by candlelight, winter grilling or wood stove cooking (I learned how to make bread on top of the wood stove!), storytelling, concerts and plays put on by the kids - everyone congregates in front of the wood stove where it's nice and warm. Outages are a part of life where we live and only became a big deal in the last decade or so when developments were built that didn't give heating options for when the power was out. I don't like living here anymore.
Chili recipe!
My wonderful wife said this recipe is the basis for the chili, she adjusts the spices a bit for our tastes/her mood. We don't chop the onions and peppers as finely as instructed as we like more texture/chunk, we don't bother with grinding our own meat either; just buying a package of stew meat and a package of ground beef. The stew meat also gets fall-apart tender in the slow cooker so we've never cut it into smaller pieces like the recipe calls for. When adding brisket it'll replace the ground beef, but we've also had it all brisket and all stew meat before, so choices there are up to you as the ground beef isn't a star of the show. And finally, we like it spicy, so there's always at least one diced jalapeno added to the mix, more than one if a taste test says the pepper is on the underachieving end.
That looks really good, thank you! The next time beef is our protein choice, I'll give it a go.