Dinner! 2003

[SobaAddict70]

Nice photos, Jason. But for fried rice, less is sometimes more.

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broiled steak

jasmine rice

steamed broccoli

soy milk

oranges.

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midnight snack: bhel puri mix with cottage cheese, tamarind chutney.

SA

[fimbul]

Dinner the other night was an excuse to clean out our fridge before running off to a friend's party.

I braised some beef cheeks I found at the local Giant in white wine with your basic mirepoix and garlic to add flavor. Kind of dull, kind of not my thing, but not bad. If I'd chosen a more interesting preparation, I might have liked it better, but I'd never had beef cheeks so I kept it simple to see what I'd found.

Had garlicky wilted spinach and sauteed mushrooms on the side as well as some endives I cooked in a touch of bacon fat and finished with a small amount of mustard and evoo. There was also a salad and bread involved.

Not an inspired dinner, but not bad for a what my partner calls "a whomp" (a dinner comprised of stuff quickly thrown together with stuff to produce stuff that you wouldn't mind ingesting).

[beanpod]

Sunday:

Made Nigella's basic recipe for roasted chicken: 1 cut-up chicken (some pesto butter rubbed under the skin), 2 large Yukon gold potatoes (cut up into 1/2 inch dice, 1 onion cut-up roughly, a couple cloves of garlic. You can also through in a pepper or two (chopped up, of course). Put in an oiled roasting pan (EVOO is great) and put all ingredients in and drizzle EVOO over them just to lightly cover (do not drown) and sprinkle sea salt and pepper. Roast at 425 degrees F for about 45 minutes (or until all is done) and serve!! I ended up throwing on a little cilantro on top of chicken after roasting.

What a great Sunday night dinner that took 15 minutes to throw together and sit and breath in all of the roasting goodness (garlic and onions with the chicken -- yum!!).

[torakris]

Tuesday dinner needed something simple and fast after returning home from a 3 hour karaoke spree with the family.

onions stuffed with Italian sausage

zucchini, tomato and basil risotto

garlic bread

Costco apple pie for dessert

[scamhi]

Tuesday night:

Too cold to grill outside so...

Baked salmon filet with ancho-chipolte, onion, garlic, brown sugar topping.

roast asparagus

[suzilightning]

john is out of town again on business in lovely flint, mi so i cook stuff i like to eat and usually comfort food -

macaroni and cheese

venison burger(thank you erich)

mixed green salad

my friend michelle came over and we had a dessert of port and a cheese course:

white stilton with apricots served with a date/ nut bread i made

stripey jack

sage derby

cotswold with herbs

whole meal crackers

jacuzzi followed

[snowangel]

Since it was a bazillion degrees below zero, I had a freezer full of bones, and a brand-new Chefmate stock pot (to replace the crappy thin one I had) and since my folks were coming for dinner direction from the airport following a trip to Berkeley (they brought Acme made this morning), soup was a natural!

Chickeny, noodley, vegetably, beany...wonderful with fresh Acme and Hope butter.

We washed it down with cold milk (kids) and cold Pilsner Urquel (sp?). It was what we had on hand. The Pilsner was warm, chilled on backstoop for 13 minutes!

[Miss J]

Homestyle Beancurd: full of hot & beany goodness (plus some baby leeks)

Boiled Rice

A large salad of rocket, spinach and cress

Sliced oranges with orange flower water

[Varmint]

Cumin & coriander encrusted catfish with warm guacamole;

Rosemary roasted potatoes

Roasted brussels sprouts

Homemade vanilla bean ice cream with strawberries and Cointreau

Edited February 12, 2003 by Varmint (log)

[clb]

Let's go for a Dunlop takeover of the Dinner thread...

Well, I considered home-style beancurd last night but was put off by the deep frying (though maybe I should have done the bear's paw beancurd variation, which is shallow fried). Instead, traditional dan dan noodles which was pretty good but too salty (should have rinsed the Tianjin preserved vegetables more thoroughly). Stirfried pak choy with garlic. Greek yoghurt with maple syrup.

Tonight? Considering fish with chillies and Sichuan pepper (got some good fresh whiting fillets this morning), fish-fragrant beancurd (but no pickled chilli paste - any views on where to get the approved vinegar-free variety in NW London?), maybe strange-flavour chicken, more pak choy. I think I'm addicted.

clb

[Miss J]

Clb, I have to confess I ducked out on that completely by getting my beancurd already deep-fried from a Chinese supermarket. It cut down on the prep a great deal - in fact, it made for an almost-instant afterwork dinner. We only had to wait for the rice to be ready.

Edit: I use sambal olek for the pickled chili paste, which seems to work.

Edited February 12, 2003 by Miss J (log)

[Wilfrid]

Long time since I've cooked anything. Simplicity last night: mangu de platano - smooth-mashed green plantains with butter - prepared by the Beloved. A ragout of minced beef, sweet peppers, vine tomatoes, onion and garlic prepared by me. Washed down with a few fingers of 10 y.o. Laphroiag. I think we were in the comfort food zone there, and very nice too with snow still on the ground.

Chocolates and Carlos V brandy to send us to bed.

[fimbul]

Last night, I found a couple of beautiful, bone-in, pork loin chops in my local supermarket. They were a dollar or two off so they'd sell before their sell-by date, so, of course, I had to buy them and save them from ruin. The Giant down the street always has several similarly marked packages of meat, and I always feel as though I have to "rescue" something whenever I'm in there. It's as though I'm saving puppies from the pound, and I actually feel a pang at the thought of all those I'm leaving behind.

I took the chops home, seared them, bunged them in the oven, and plated them on a bed of mixed greens. I deglazed my pan with fine-chopped shallots and an old, open bottle of Liefman's frambozen (with a touch of vinegar added for zip), as well as a touch of chicken stock. Alongside, I served mushrooms and brunoised red pepper, and some green beans that were good, but not what I was after. It was one of those scenes were they turned out as I expected rather than as I had hoped. I cooked a couple of smooshed juniper berries and some coriander seeds slowly in olive oil, blanched my green beans, then removed the spices from the oil and sauteed my green beans. The green beans tasted of, well, green beans, and not at all of the spices I'd added. Ah well. I hadn't figured it would really work. I suspect that, to get a really spicey olive oil, I'd have to do more than simmer a few seeds for a short while.

[Priscilla]

Dreaming of melty crisp schweinhaxen on the spit, making do with long-time-braised hocks. Not the same, good in fact. But not the same!

Nice hocks from the pan-Asian supermarket, skin scored, bunch of sliced onions under, coupla spoons of light chicken stock from the fridge, sage leaves tucked in each little hock's fleshy crenelations, nice hit of salt (but holding off on the pepper as per LML's admonitions elsewhere). A two-day dish, expectedly. Bunged into the fridge overnight.

Next day, stovetop, another hit of chicken stock, slow heat turned everything gelatinously tender. Skin removed, cut into strips (also per LML's admonitions), back into the oven with that. Didn't get crispilicious, not enough fat on these little hocks for that, but nice enough, especially when restirred into the braise for a short time before service. Pepper added too.

Potato gratin with chicken stock and cream and nutmeg. Nice big bowl of redleaf salad with red-wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Cline 2000 Zinfandel. A old fave Bernard Clayton bread, so-called pain Italien, nice to revisit.

Homely. In a good way.

[Jinmyo]

Mmm, hocks.

Thai rice noodles with a lemongrass and pumpkin seed oil sauce and Thai holy basil and toasted pine nuts.

Gui zhi (golden Chinese mushrooms) and deep-fried tofu with Toban chile bean sauce.

Kombu knots and yuba (bean curd skin) knots in seaweed and green tea broth.

Pork tenderloins cut into three inch pieces, seared, bunged into a green curry sauce to braise. (I don't usually do tenderloin but it was half-price.)

Steamed bok choy and baby bok choy with red fermented tofu.

[col klink]

sauteed squid with guanciale, evoo, garlic, red pepper flakes and lemon juice

seared albacore in a wasabi ponzu sauce

roasted asparagus and Mexican spring onions (a large scallion and really, really good roasted)

Salmon marinated in a ginger/onion ponzu sauce, pan fried and served with the marinade reduced and with a smoked salmon, cilantro and spring onion mousse.

I ended up putting too much Mirin in the mousse and it ended up being too sweet, but otherwise everything came out great.

[torakris]

Looks like everyone was eating well last night!

The kids and I didn't get home until 6:30 last night, but since I knew I would be late I ahd set the rice cooker to be ready at 6:00 and had pulled the fish out of the freezer to defrost. The rest of the dinner came together in 15 minutes while the fish cooked:

kinme (no idea of English name) mariated in white miso and grilled

steamed broccoli served with lemon for me and mayo for everyone else (eewwww!)

soy simmered yama-kurage (this translates literally as mountain-jellyfish, they are about 1 1/2 feet in length and look like flat green beans, bought dried they swell up to about 5 times their size. Most Jaapnse have probably never eaten these as they are one of those things that are only eaten by the people who live in the area where they grow wiild. I bought them from an old woman selling them at a food stand in a tiny mountain village and prepared them the way she told me to. They almost no taste of their own, but have a nice bite.)

nagaimo (long potato? similar to yamaimo or the mountain yam) ground in the suribachi mixed with some soy sauce and wasabi and poured over the rice.

[clb]

Went for Fuchsia Dunlop's fish with chillies and Sichuan pepper (la zi yu) with more stirfried bok choy and garlic. Another fantastic dish, utterly unlike anything I've cooked before. Masses of chillies - I used about 25g of chillies to 400g of fish (at the bottom end of Dunlop's recommendation, which itself marks a big reduction on the original served, she says, at the Converging Rivers Fish restaurant in Chengdu. They use up to 75-100g of dried chillies to approximately this amount of fish).

Lots of oil, lots of chillies and lots of whole Sichuan peppercorns made for a beautiful and aromatic dish. Each mouthful had a different flavour.

And it was quick.

clb

[Jason Perlow]

I adapted Mamster's Pasta Bible Pasta recipe a bit and added pancetta and used beaten whole eggs in the sauce mixture instead of just egg yolks.

Yum.

[FoodMan]

Teusday:

Leftovers in the fridge. A piece of grilled chikcen breats, pork chop and some frozen shrimp == a great meal of fried rice made with with lots of ginger, onions, garlic, a coupla eggs and some chopped veggies. My best ever lef over fodder.

Tonight (wednesday):

Pan seared and finished in the oven fillet of fresh Mahi Mahi with clams. Served in clam broth (clams, challots, garlic white wine, parsely, chilli and butter). As a side I made a sautee of zuchini squash and fennel.

Dessert was Bread pudding with bourbon Pecan caramel sauce.

FM

Edited February 13, 2003 by FoodMan (log)

[Adam Balic]

As part of my lone struggle to revive tradional British recipes I made a Devon Squab Pie. This is a single crust pie containing layers of lamb, onion, apple and prunes, all spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon and mace. It was very good, but I did laugh as while the result looked and tasted almost exactly the same as the Moroccan and Persian fruit and meat stews that I have been making (almost an identical recipe to a Persian recipe) it felt different to eat it as we were eating a British recipe. All agree that what it really needed was a pint of stout or porter, but I'm very sure that this would not have been that case if we were in a "We are eating Moroccan tonight" frame of mind.

[Jinmyo]

Adam, what's the provenance of this dish. Sounds fairly old.

[Adam Balic]

Have seen it mentioned under that name in several sources, but this example comes from Jane Grigson's "Good Things", no information as to history (apart from similar recipes from the 16th C. book by Robert May), but on the balance I am guessing pre-reformation to Medieval, so not such I surprise that it resembles Persian recipes really.

[Jinmyo]

At least no almond milk.

[Adam Balic]

Hey, I like almond milk. Especially in Spainish cooking.