Dinner 2023

[C. sapidus]

 

Chicken escabeche with white onion, carrots, garlic, pickled jalapenos, cider vinegar and chicken stock, seasoned with Mexican oregano, allspice, and black pepper.

 

Mexican green rice (arroz Poblano) with Poblano chiles, spinach, cilantro, flat-leaf parsley, white onion, garlic, and chicken stock. Mrs. C and I agreed that this is our favorite version of a frequently-made dish.

 

Mrs. C made a particularly tasty batch of roasted asparagus with lime juice.

 

@Kim Shook I would love to dive into that quiche and biscuits. Lovely fruit salad, too.

[Honkman]

Really good smoky chicken salad from one of Diane Henry’s cookbooks - chicken breast marinated for 24 hours in a mixture of orange juice, hoisin sauce, soy sauce, dry vermouth, five spice powder, crushed cardamom, garlic and orange zest - then broiled in the oven. Mixed with baby spinach, mizuna, oven roasted red peppers, briefly cooked snap peas, sautéed shiitake mushrooms and cilantro. Served with a vinaigrette made from the concentrated marinade, olive oil, lime juice and some honey.

[Dante]

Taco Bake (basically inverted nachos)

[liamsaunt]

Nut and panko crusted hake, carrot and radish puree, and sautéed pea shoots

 

[Shelby]

@Kim ShookI'm biscuit challenged but I'm going to try those out!

 

@Ann_Tbetween you and @Chris Hennesyou're making me want to try my hand at deep dish pizza.  

 

It was nice enough to do some steaks outside a few nights ago.  Tried out a new salad mix that uses Everything Bagel seasoning.  It was meh.

 

 

 

Venison meatloaf

 

 

Roasted chicken with @Mmmpompsroasted potatoes and @Jaymessquash

 

 

I did the nopales last night.  We've never had them---we LOVED them.  Definitely will be doing more of these.

 

 

Cut up and boiled in salted water until tender

 

 

I roasted poblanos, onions, jalapeños and garlic.  Whizzed that up with a jar of my tomatoes.  Added cumin, Mexican oregano, salt, pepper.  Heated up.  YUM.

 

 

Made beans.  Used leftover steak and made a fajita type thing with the delicious tortillas from that Mexican grocery store.  Had one avocado so supplemented it with a bit of cream cheese and made guacamole.  OH and cheese stuffed poblanos baked in the sauce.

 

[weinoo]

 

Boudin Blanc w/sauerkraut and juniper. At Corner Bar. Very good.

[Duvel]

13 minutes ago, weinoo said:

 

Boudin Blanc w/sauerkraut and juniper. At Corner Bar. Very good.

Legit 🤗

[Pete Fred]

Peanut and sweet potato stew from Melissa Thompson's Jamaican cookbook 'Motherland'...

 

 

I had no red kidney beans so subbed in flageolet beans which was all I had to hand.

 

It was good, but lacked some acidity. A splash of lemon juice and a sprinkling of sumac lifted it for my taste.

[Ann_T]

3 hours ago, Shelby said:

 

@Ann_Tbetween you and @Chris Hennesyou're making me want to try my hand at deep dish pizza.  

Thanks Shelby.  I don't think either Matt or I will make another one.  Just not the style of pizza either of us like. 

[MaryIsobel]

5 hours ago, Shelby said:

@Kim ShookI'm biscuit challenged but I'm going to try those out!

 

@Ann_Tbetween you and @Chris Hennesyou're making me want to try my hand at deep dish pizza.  

 

It was nice enough to do some steaks outside a few nights ago.  Tried out a new salad mix that uses Everything Bagel seasoning.  It was meh.

 

 

 

Venison meatloaf

 

 

Roasted chicken with @Mmmpompsroasted potatoes and @Jaymessquash

 

 

I did the nopales last night.  We've never had them---we LOVED them.  Definitely will be doing more of these.

 

 

Cut up and boiled in salted water until tender

 

 

I roasted poblanos, onions, jalapeños and garlic.  Whizzed that up with a jar of my tomatoes.  Added cumin, Mexican oregano, salt, pepper.  Heated up.  YUM.

 

 

Made beans.  Used leftover steak and made a fajita type thing with the delicious tortillas from that Mexican grocery store.  Had one avocado so supplemented it with a bit of cream cheese and made guacamole.  OH and cheese stuffed poblanos baked in the sauce.

 

We had nopales on our last visit to Mexico. They were served as a side dish. I think they may have been brined but not pickled - we really enjoyed them. Some of the Mexican grocery stores have a person in the produce department who was shaving? de-prickling? de-scaling? nopales. They wore gloves and goggles.

 

 

[Kerala]

Fish pie, with some input from Gordon Ramsay, and all the better for it!

 

[C. sapidus]

 

Tequila shrimp and pasta with ancho and pasilla chiles, garlic, Mexican oregano, rice vinegar, flamed tequila, heavy cream, and cilantro.  This has a deep chile flavor that I have been craving.

 

Green bean salad with shallots, cilantro, and lime and tomatillo salsa dressing

[Shelby]

24 minutes ago, C. sapidus said:

 

Tequila shrimp and pasta with ancho and pasilla chiles, garlic, Mexican oregano, rice vinegar, flamed tequila, heavy cream, and cilantro.  This has a deep chile flavor that I have been craving.

 

 

 

Green bean salad with shallots, cilantro, and lime and tomatillo salsa dressing

 

This looks incredible and right up my alley.  I'll be googling for this recipe for sure.  Plus it's such a pretty color  

[C. sapidus]

5 minutes ago, Shelby said:

This looks incredible and right up my alley.  I'll be googling for this recipe for sure.  Plus it's such a pretty color  

 

Thanks! Tequila shrimp and pasta is based on a recipe in 'Cocina de la Familia' by Marilyn Tausend and Miguel Ravago

Edited March 8, 2023 by C. sapidus (log)

[haresfur]

My first carbonara along with over-large greenbeans from the garden fried with toasted almonds. A friend gifted us this piece of home-cured porky goodness and I cheated and used parmesan instead of pecorino. Whole eggs since the most Italian recipe I found was adminant that you don't need to a dd yolks. I got a bit too much pasta water in but it was still creamy and not curdled so I'll call that a win. 

 

[Ann_T]

Taco Tuesday.

Pork (Carnitas) on homemade corn tortillas. (Matt made the tortillas).

 

Made a pitcher of Sangria. My favourite drink with Mexican.

[Honkman]

Simple potato salad with crispy bacon, macerated red onions, parsley and a vinaigrette made from bacon fat, olive oil, apple vinegar, lemon juice and zest

[rotuts]

@haresfur 

 

Carbonara  is a favorite dish of mine

 

That slice of porky goodness looks terrific.

 

you've done it proud in your carbonara.  

 

you don't need to add yolks

 

but if you do , you will notice them for sure ! 

[Anna N]

 

Sautéed split Smokies and yu choy. I am totally addicted to chilli crisp.

[liamsaunt]

Pan roasted swordfish, sautéed watermelon radishes, sweet potato puree, and kale.

 

[weinoo]

We enjoy Japanese curry rice, and I recently received a shipment of freshly milled rice and a few other things from The Rice Factory. 

 

 

Always playing around with the vegetables; classically, you see onions, carrots and potatoes (3 types in this batch). Had some mushrooms, so they were sautéed and dropped in, as well as a test with a couple of string beans added towards the end. House-made chicken stock is the liquid.

 

 

And instead of chicken, half a marinated duck from Wu's (not the standard roast, this duck is much less sweet/salty, and I think it's steamed); reheated and deskinned before adding it to the pot to heat up. Then the curry roux (also house-made) gets added.

 

 

Something quite comforting about it all. (Either that, or in a previous life I was a Japanese housewife).

 

Oh - with this rice, freshly milled 2022 crop, one needs to be careful with the amount of liquid used. Normally I weigh the liquid as I find it easier, but I just eyeballed this batch, and it was a tiny bit overcooked.

 

On the side - oshinko, made with a packet of that stuff on the left in the top photo.

[Kim Shook]

@Shelby – you really should try the biscuits.  I promise they are simple to make.  Just remember to dust your scoop with flour – this is VERY sticky dough. 

 

@Kerala – I love the idea of fish pie, though I’ve never had one.  I just did a quick BBC GoodFood search and discovered that a package of mixed fish for fish pie is sold in Britain.  Is this awful or convenient?

 

Ok, have a seat.  It’s time for another episode of “Kim Bitches About A Cooking Fail”.

 

There are a few things that well versed home cooks seem to have down.  Among those things are pasta and pizza.  I have never had any luck with either of those.  BUT, I had some “fresh” mozzarella I wanted to use up, so I decided to try pizza again.  I use the quotation marks because it wasn’t truly fresh – it was the packaged, sliced Bel Gioioso soft mozzarella that is labeled fresh.  It is soft, but not that almost oozy stuff that’s packed in water.  Anyway, like I said, I have a history with pizza dough.  A history of it becoming the most resistant to stretching bunch of stuff I’ve ever handled.  To try to avoid that, I bought at ball of the already made up at Publix and found a set of instructions online.  As instructed, I let the dough sit out for an hour before trying to roll it out and I heated my oven to 450F.  The website recipe that I was using said to pre-bake the stretched dough before topping.  Stretching the dough brought back bad memories.  No matter how much I rolled and stretched and knuckled, it seemed to snap right back.  I finally got it stretched out to a somewhat reasonable size (developing major gluten, I guess, from all the handling).  I didn’t measure, but I’m guessing it was about 12-inches.  I put it in the oven on my pizza stone (I know it’s ridiculous, but I’ve had a pizza stone in my oven for years – sometimes I’ll crisp bread on it, but mostly it just sits uselessly in there) and after seven minutes, this is what I pulled out of the oven:

This can’t be right.  That thing looked like a badly risen round loaf.  I pressed it down as much as it would go and proceeded to top it, as instructed.  I brushed the edges with olive oil, spread about 1/4 cup of tomato sauce in the middle, topped with Boar’s Head sandwich pepperoni, the aforementioned mozzarella, and a shower of Parmesan.  I shoved it back into the oven (which had been raised to 500F) for about 10 minutes.  This was the state of the pie at that point:

That excrescence at the bottom left was a burnt bubble.  Bubbles are perhaps my favorite part of a pizza, but this was just black and sad.  I waited 5 minutes to cut it and in that amount of time, it cooled off enough that the cheese was chewy and didn’t stretch at all.  I forgot to get a cross section photo until the 7^th when it was cold, but it didn’t change much:

 

It was dense and chewy (not in a good way).  On a positive note, it all tasted good.  I wouldn’t mind so much if we lived somewhere we could get great pizza, but the pizza here is, at best, good.  There was also salad:

Sigh. 

 

Dinner last night was an easy version of “veal” Parm.  Aldi seasonally stocks some decent frozen pork schnitzel.  It’s raw and breaded and you fry it.  We had some left and I was inspired.  Mr. Kim’s plate with fettucine and broccoli:

It also helped use up more of that “fresh” mozzarella.  It melted a little better this time.  My plate with Alfredo sauce instead of marinara on the pasta (better for my potassium intake), though I did put a dab of the marinara on my “Parm”. 

[Ann_T]

Greek Ribs, roasted potatoes and green beans.

Done in the oven.

[Kerala]

10 hours ago, Kim Shook said:

@Shelby

 

@Kerala – I love the idea of fish pie, though I’ve never had one.  I just did a quick BBC GoodFood search and discovered that a package of mixed fish for fish pie is sold in Britain.  Is this awful or convenient?

It is literally 300g of raw smoked haddock, salmon and cod. I've bought separately in the past, but the quantity is just right for a family meal. Of course, I add a pack of prawns or scallops. So - convenient!

 

Sorry, Shelby, I couldn't edit you out for some reason.

[liuzhou]

Beef Fried RIce with Lao Gan Ma

 

 

Edited October 10, 2023 by liuzhou (log)