Brie is quite nice. I recently had it for the sort of third time I think, and I mainly liked it :) I generally tend to go for the sort of 'generic dutch cheeses' which won't tell you a lot because they are Dutch, and I have no idea what their names are :P Mostly really delicious though :P Also: I made Slavinken with a sauce, potatoes and green beans tonight. My housemate was so impressed by it that he wants to make it for dinner tomorrow :P I guess I'm having the same dinner two nights in row xD
I made chile colorado tonight. And it was delicious. And this is how. Take dried ancho and guajillo chiles, about half-a-dozen of each. Pull the stem areas off, slit them open, and remove all seeds. Place these in a bowl and cover them with warm water to soak. Half an hour's soak will do. Once that's done, put the whole thing in a blender (water and all) and blend it for a good long time until it's fully broken up and mixed and a delicious deep dark red color. Set this side. Get a big pot that has a lid, which you'll need later. Warm it (medium heat) with a bunch of olive oil in the bottom. Add garlic to taste (you really can't easily overdo this), chopped; the pre-minced kind is fine, as is fresh. Add one good-sized white onion, chopped smallish. Stir that a bit. Add some herbs and spices; I used black pepper, a good amount of salt, Mexican oregano (Italian is also fine), ground cumin (a good bit of this, several teaspoons of it), about a teaspoon of ground coriander, a three-finger pinch of epazote (this is strictly optional), a little English mustard powder (again, totally optional; I put it in most stuff I make), and a goodly amount of Chile de Arbol powder. This is the hottest chile in the mix, so it's very much up to you how hot it should be. I probably used about a tablespoon's worth of this. Once the onion starts to look soft and glassy, add about a pound and a half or so of stewing steak, chopped into about inch-square cubes. Chuck is the best cut here, but whatever your grocery store is selling as "stewing steak" is going to be fine. Break it up and mix it in with the onion/garlic/spices mix and cook it until the steak's turning greyer, indicating that it's cooked on the outside. Then, pour in the blended chile sauce you made up there 2 paragraphs ago. Add a little more salt unless you're really trying hard to reduce your salt intake, because this recipe eats up salt and won't taste right (IMO) without it. Cover it with the lid. At this point you can either keep it on the stovetop and have to stir it every 10 minutes, or you can put it in the oven at about 350 degrees F. In either case it'll be at this stage for about an hour. 45 minutes is probably the shortest you should take here, but more like 90 minutes will create good results. You really want to break that meat down, melt the fat off into the sauce, and get it all nice. After this, return it to the stovetop and cook it for about another half hour with the lid off, stirring it regularly, while it reduces down and gets nicely thicker. Now eat. It's tasty over rice. You can make burritos with it. You can eat it from a bowl like chili (it is, after all, something of the ancestor to chili). The normal accompaniments to chili, which are sour cream or crema, cheese (Mexican or the more US-border choice of cheddar/jack) and some variety of hot salsa or hot sauce, work well with this. The amount I gave here is probably enough for 4 hungry people or a couple of meals for two, and will probably produce way too much sauce. You can increase the meat without going up all that much on the sauce, because this one makes a bit too much. Measurements are pretty seat-of-the-pants, like most of my cooking, but this tasted right.
Highly recommend this mac and cheese recipe using pecorino romano as the secondary cheese. I've made it about 4 times now, twice with gruyere, once with parmigiano reggiano and most recently with pecorino. The latter is SO GOOD, and the best thing about this recipe is that it reheats really well and keeps a lot of its creaminess without separating and becoming gross. Also I tried Applewood cheese for the first time last night, it's pretty nice. I also tried Comte while making the mac and cheese but wasn't a fan.
i just made lunch for my next three shifts at work using the traditional "throw a bunch of veg and a protein in some coconut milk" method. today's recipe included bok choy, eggplant, onions, bean sprouts, and basa. the especially nice thing about curries is that they, like chili, belong to the family of "foods that taste even better when they're been in the fridge for a couple days". tonight for supper most of us are having pulled pork that mom made over the weekend, but since she doesn't eat meat i'm making her a grilled portabella mushroom stuffed with spinach and topped with feta. mmm, feta.
Oh man, I love food. I don't always like cooking (for me it is a social activity, you cook with housemates and family so everyone contributes and hangs out and learns and does delicious things, so cooking on my own for myself feels like a chore), but I do love the results. Dad and mom are really good cooks, I learned from them, and we still try new things together and taste things and talk about what we could do to make it better. I feel like a lot of feeling comfortable not using recipes comes from learning why certain things work. Like, I learned from my parents that when sauteeing veggies, you put stuff that takes longer to cook like peppers and carrots first, and stuff like tomato last, or that garlic tends to be chopped fine and put before. Sometimes you make silly mistakes - I once accidentally curdled a dish I improvised on - but usually it works out in an instinctive level with time. For me it works because I think from a scientific view point. Salmon and avocado, nom! I would have tried some sort of bagel/toasted bread with spread cream cheese + avocado, then smoked salmon on top. Maybe some capers to add a bit of a strong flavour.
I made rice porridge today I winged basically everything because it turns out I can't use my rice cooker for porridge (or 1 cup rice to 7 cups water was too much for the poor cooker), so I opened the cooker and let it cook open for the remainder of the time I have no idea how it tastes. I will sample it in a bit.
I made french toast with the above mentioned cooked apple stuff and it was really tasty :D french toast is basically 1 egg per person participating in french toast extravaganza, milk basically eyeballing the amount, some amount of sugar to tase (or not if you do savory french toast), whisk, then butter up a pan and put bread into egg-milk-stuff and fry it. Be careful to add butter again if your pan looks unbuttered because uh... dry pan leads to pretty black french toast and that is not what you want. top with stuff. Like super tasty apple thing. or whipped cream i guess, whatever you like put it on the french toast.
I tried making stuff today. was supposed to become granola bars, but it seems I haven't quite managed to press them enough to keep them sticking together, so it's still granola, only buttery and slightly honey-sticky, but no bars. First batch of Mercurialmalcontent's Gingersnap Snickerdoodles, with my own recipe variation. Not baked yet. And that's what they look like out of the oven. I also tried making custard for ice cream, but I microwaved the egg mixture a little to long. Whoops. Oh well, sweet omelette for breakast tomorrow "_"
