cellio | Entries tagged with food: recipes

I'm currently thinking of November 8 for the party.

I'm having fun with the Small Worlds project (that six-degrees-of-separation experiment). Tonight I got a new target, instantly knew whom to send it on to, and decided to try my luck again. And I instantly knew whom to send that one on to, so I tried again. That's when the site told me "no more targets for you". Oops.

None of my chains have reached targets yet; the longest chain so far is four people (not counting me). I have seen no targets living in Europe, though a couple in North Amaerica and some in places much more remote. How peculiar. Only one target has sent me to Mapquest to figure out where the heck that country is.

Tonight we went to an SCA pot-luck dinner. I needed to make something that could be served cold (Shabbat issues), and when browsing a cookbook I came across an allegedly-Turkish recipe for stuffed peppers (vegetarian) that specifically said to serve them cold, so I decided to try it. (Yeah, peppers aren't SCA-period, but the host had already announced he was serving chili. We don't always strive for authenticity.) They came out well and were popular; I'll have to make them again. I used red and orange peppers; I loathe green (bell) peppers. Because there was also an informal "hot food" theme going, I also stuffed a couple jalopenos and some other small hot peppers. (They were mislabelled in the store, so I don't know what they were. But definitely not the advertised banana peppers.) The stuffing is rice with onions, raisins, pine nuts, dill, mint (that surprised me), tomato, oil, and lemon juice (and salt and pepper). I realized after I'd made them that this was not dissimilar in principle from stuffed grape leaves. Mmm, grape leaves. I've never made those.

Shabbat services went well this morning. Today's torah reader did a good job with both the reading and conducting the service. We went longer today (she gave more of a drash and also read haftarah); some people complained that it was too long (violated their expectations), so we'll have to see how this works out over time. I won't be there next week (SCA conflict), alas. I feel bad when I miss this minyan, and especially now when we're doing something new that I'm shepherding. I'll get someone else to collect data and feedback for me next week.

The new season of Enterprise is off to a reasonable start so far. I hope they can actually pull off this story line convincingly; we know (because it's Trek and because this series is a prequel) that the good guys will ultimately succeed in reversing the Xindi attack on Earth. Now from what we know so far, the Xindi are operating from the vantage point of several hundred years in the future. Thus, they ought to already know what happened when they took on the Enterprise. It must be the same timeline, because if tinkering with the past creates a branch and an alternate reality, nothing they do can change the future they come from. I just hope the authors have spent more time thinking about this than I just have. :-)

We're up to "Acts of Sacrifice" in the B5 reruns. When the episode started I found that I remembered it entirely for its silly (non-arc) plot, and not for the serious (arc) plot. I enjoy watching Andreas Katsulas (G'kar); even under all the makeup and prosthetics and stuff, he can convey oodles with just a look sometimes. And everything comes through a lot better on a 32" TV and a DVD than it did on a 25" TV and videotape.

We ended up with a small group for the NetBill dinner last night. (NetBill was a past job, and most of us were/are friends.) One person ended up not being able to come at the last minute, and all the SOs turned out to be unavailable, so it was just four of us. It was a fun gathering, though, and people stayed until sometime after 1am.

Because the dinner started before Shabbat ended, I did a combination of pre-cooking and using the crock pot on a timer. Since Dani was away at a convention, I didn't need to use the crock pot for lunch. (I just ate cold foods instead.) I adapted a recipe I've previously made in the oven for the crock pot and it came out well.

What I did:

Brown chicken breasts in a skillet in hot oil. Put them in the crock pot, and in the same oil cook chopped onions for a couple minutes (cooked but not thoroughly limp). Throw those into the crock pot, along with diced apples, raisins that have been soaked in water, curry powder, a little honey, and white wine. Cook.

(I did all of this Thursday night, including cooking the pot for a couple hours on high to make sure the meat wasn't raw. Friday I set the crock pot on a timer on low and put the pot back in on Saturday around noon for a 7:30 dinner.)

Proportions: 8 chicken breasts, 4 small white onions, 4 small apples, about 0.5C raisins, about 2T honey, about 1T curry, about 2C wine. This was more liquid than was actually necessary, but that's hard to judge with crock pots sometimes, especially when they're full as this one was. I think I would have preferred a little more of both apples and onions, but the pot was full. If I made this with 4-6 pieces of chicken I'd probably keep the amounts of everything else (except wine) the same. I deliberately kept the curry level mild; this was not hot and zippy but was quite tasty. (I also didn't use one of the hotter curries.)

I'm pleased with the way the lunch I improvised for today came out.

I had thawed out the last chunk of that veal roast I bought for "vam" experiments. (We have since abandoned those experiments, at least for now.) Thursday night's D&D game went later than I'd expected, so I didn't do anything with it that night. Friday morning I put it, a can of chicken broth, half a can of water, some (frozen) carrots, spinach, barley, dried onions, one cut-up potato, salt, pepper, and oregano into the crock pot, set it on low, and went to work. (This was more liquid than I thought it would need, but I also wouldn't be home to monitor it.) I figured I'd cut up the meat into smaller bits when I got home; my eventual goal was stew, not a roast in liquid.

When I got home the meat was very tender and practically fell apart for me while I was cutting it up. (Result: smaller-than-planned pieces.) I put all of this back into the pot, along with one cut-up leek (I'd forgotten the leeks in the morning), more salt and pepper, and more spinach. This went into the fridge until the timed reheat this morning.

The meat was tender; sometimes my crock-pot stew is too tough, though I've never used veal before. The flavors mingled nicely. And it wasn't too much liquid, as it turned out. Next time I'll leave out the potato, and I might try rice instead of barley.

Embla is two for two with the attic renovations. Today I came home to find that the door to the attic was closed, with her on the other side of the door. And much of the floor freshly painted. I didn't explore for kitty footprints in the paint. (And this is after I told the contractor that the cats like to hide up there...)

Last night's D&D game was fun. It looked like it was going to be a "sideline" story, just a random adventure and excuse to play with some new toys, and it turned out to be part of the overall story. I thought that was nifty. It looked like Ralph meant for it to be a little more threatening than it turned out to be; calibrating adventures has got to be hard.

Someone described to me an easy sauce for salmon: take sour cream and dijon mustard in approximately equal quantities, mix, spread over salmon, bake. (I always bake salmon wrapped up in foil so it doesn't dry out.) We had this tonight and it was tasty.

According to fitday.com, I get more than the RDA of most vitamins (300% of Vitamin A this past month, 240% of Vitamin C, a few other high numbers, and most others in the 100-120% range). There are two exceptions: Vitamin D at 52% and Vitamin K (what the heck is that?) at 33%. They do not, however, provide the next step in useful feedback: what foods would change that.

(While I'm being statistical, over that same month I've averaged (daily) 80g of protein, 57g of fat, 210g carb, 19g fiber, with saturated, poly, and mono fats being pretty much evenly split. I don't know if this is actually good.)

I was a little disappointed by tonight's "West Wing". The topic of parental degeneration (Alzheimer's) is hard to do well in 43 minutes, but I've come to expect the nearly-impossible from this show and this time it didn't quite work. Oh well. (On a related note, we borrowed "Sports Night" tapes recently; I hope to sit down to watch several episodes in the next few days. Right after Shabbat, perhaps.)

I got some much-needed QA resources at work today, and this has done much to increase my confidence in a part of my work for this next release. Yay, QA!

This evening we went to an SCA household dinner. The theme was "old foods"; since I had failed to come up with any ideas around the "green and fuzzy" theme, we opted for what we hoped was entertainingly-faked documentation instead. We knew the host likes devilled eggs (as do I), so we told her we were bringing "devilled dodo eggs", and brought a facsimile of the recipe in the original hiroglyphics to prove it. Ok, maybe Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve" isn't really a primary source. :-)

I wanted to color the eggs in some way, just to give them an unusual appearance. I thought that I would get a purple hue by simmering them for a few hours in beet juice (with some white wine to help leech out color), but what I actually got was brown, not purple. Which was ok -- just unexpected. (I boiled the eggs, then rolled them around to crack the shells, and then simmered those. I completely peeled one egg to act as a color indicator, so I could check progress easily. On the other eggs I got a nice mottled effect.)

I have seen deep purple hard-boiled eggs. It's a striking effect with devilled eggs -- a nice contrast to the yellow filling. I wonder whether the process involved natural agents or chemicals.

We should take a turn for dinner sometime in the next several months, so I would like to grab a date around Purim and do "disguised foods". As part of this, I need to hit up my friend Yaakov for his "ham" recipe; I visited him for Purim last year and had this, and it was a remarkable imitation of real ham! I'm especially impressed because I'm pretty sure Yaakov has never tasted the real thing. (He called it "vam", so I infer that it's really veal. I don't actually know; Yaakov can say "here, taste this" to me and I'll do it without further questions.)

The newest issue of whatever that cooking magazine is called has a recipe for a chicken "enchilada" that more resembles lasagna Mexican style. (You layer tortillas, meat/bean/sauce mixture, and cheese a few times.) I've made "tuna tacos" before and that has worked ok, so I tried substituting tuna for the chicken and otherwise following the recipe.

In general it was fairly tasty, but the tuna didn't quite work with the enchilada sauce and salsa. I wonder which would work better, using fake meat or just leaving out the meat and maybe adding some other vegetable into the mix. (It wouldn't really be Mexican without the cheese, I suspect, so leaving *that* out isn't an option.)

Current Mood: curious

The sys admin/owner of my shell provider has been having a rough time with some recent upgrades and stuff, and I feel like I've asked him more than my fair share of questions even though I was trying to stay out of the way. So I asked:

By the way, what is your non-hardware vice of choice? Chocolate? Cookies? Booze?

His response was "chocolate rum cookies" (nothing like hitting all the categories :-) ). So I'm in search of a recipe that (1) is tasty and (2) will ship well. I'll also consider purveyors of same, especially if they'll figure out how to pack perishables for shipping.

Any suggestions?

Monica

weekend short takes

dinner last night

veal "stew"

short takes

food tricks

(no subject)

recommendation needed

Expand Cut Tags

Syndicate