Tag Archive | personal: cooking

Appppppples (did I mention apples?)

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It’s Apple Season!

so far, we’ve made “crock pot cider” (cook quartered apples until squishy, strain) and “boiled cider” (also known as apple cider syrup: boil down cider until the consistency of maple syrup). We’ve also cooked apple cake, apple coffee cake, and apple pie, apple risotto and apple-butternut soup.

Next on the list are apple sauce, apple chutney, and apple butter, as well as apple cookies, apple-and-sausage savory pies, and apple kale soup. 

Anyone have a favorite apple recipe, esp. one that cans or freezes well?

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Pickled Daikon – an update

The recipe says to wait 2 days. I tried it yesterday, and found the pickling hadn’t really penetrated the daikon completely. Today – delicious. Absolutely tasty.

However, it might actually be a little TOO sugary for me…

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Pickled Daikon

The picture above is what Daikon looks like on seed packets.

What it looks like when allowed to grow IRL is more like the second picture here. Picture that about the size of a small-to-medium butternut squash.

Now picture three of them, two ripped out of the ground by a wind storm.

That’s a lot of daikon.

Daikon, if you haven’t tried them, aren’t as bitey as red radishes. They work well in baked dishes, but, ah, it’s July. We’re not doing much oven work.

They also keep really really well. However, our fridge was getting rather full of long whitish roots.

So we pickled some!

(By “some”, I mean, T sat there with a mandoline matchsticking daikon until the salad bowl was over half full).

We used this recipe, trebled. We used a salad spinner to get the water out, after letting the daikon sit in a colander with its salt. I used half rice vinegar and half distilled white for cost, and I replaced the sake with ginger brandy, ’cause we had it on hand.

We stored them in three old salsa jars in the very-cold back of the fridge.

The pickling juice tasted heavenly. I’ll let you know how the pickled daikon taste in a few days!

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The Hazards of Being Sick and a Grown-Up…

…is that sometimes you have to make your own comfort food.

Usually, T. makes me things like broth or risotto, and that’s wonderful, but this time, I had (have) a sore throat/swollen glands, and I was seriously missing my mom’s vanilla pudding, that she used to make me when I was sick sometimes.

I haven’t lived at home in 20 years or so, and, besides, my mom’s at a yoga seminar on the other side of the country (details are fuzzy) right now.

So I had to make my own.

I used a pretty basic Betty Crocker recipe, and it turned out – not quite like my childhood (not as grainy, and a little too sweet, which could be refined tastes) – but very yummy.

And, ya know? It made me feel better for a bit, too.

(I am still taking commissions at 150 words/$1 for someone to re-up my paid DW account… I miss my icons.)

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Looking for Recipes

Including:
* Butternut Squash
* Applesauce
* Whole apples

What’s your favorite one? We have an apple cake we like a lot, which I can’t find at the moment online, sigh, and this butternut soup recipe, which we make all the time.

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Tasty Tuesday: Asparagus Soup

It’s asparagus season! And, while I can eat spear-grass steamed with lemon juice pretty much forever, T. wants a few different options.

So we made Creamy Asparagus Soup, from Cook’s Country, April/May 2010


(This is a magazine worth subscribing to, by the by).

We split this in half:
2 lbs asparagus
3T butter
2 small leeks, white and light green portions*
salt & pepper
3-1/2 c low-sodium chicken broth
1/2 c frozen peas (these make it actually green)
2 t grated Parmesan cheese
1/4 c heavy cream
1/2 teas lemon juice

The recipe calls for reserving the tips, sauteeing them first, and using them as a garnish. Next time we will skip this step

Add vegetables, chopped into 1/2″ pieces, to the butter in a dutch oven or saucier. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened (about 10 mintues)

Add brother and bring to a boil; reduce to simmer until vegetables are tender (about 5 minutes). Stir in peas & parm.

Puree in a blender in batches, or with a stick blender. Stir in cream & lemon juice and cook until warm, just about 2 minutes.


This was very tasty, and very very asparagus-y. It’s also not a meal (we went out for ice cream afterwards. That worked). But it would work well as a side with something meaty.

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Recipe Try-outs: Week One

I posted, last week, a list of Recipes I want to try..

In the last week, we tried Curried Red Lentil Soup and Leek and Cheddar Cheese Tart.

The tart… needs work. We’re going to try it again with some modifications:
* We will partially pre-bake the puff pastry shell, and form it inside a pan for better structural integrity.
* Instead of using leek spears, we’ll cut the leeks into rounds, both to better rinse them and so we can integrate the cheddar and dijon topping throughout the whole leek.

Once we do that, I’ll post the modified recipe.

The soup, on the other hand, was awesome. From Ski House Cookbook:
(we cut this in half) (directions paraphrased; I can scan in the real recipe if people would like)
1-1/2 c dried red lentils
3 c chicken broth (we used leek broth with ham stock, from the leftover leek greens)
2 T olive oil (we used bacon fat, ’cause we had it out)
1 medium yellow onion, diced (we didn’t half this part)
1t salt
1/4t cayennne
2 celery ribs, diced
2 medium carrots, diced
6 garlic cloves, diced
1-1/2t cumin
1 t curry powder
4t grated fresh ginger

Cook the lentils in broth and 3 c water for 20 minutes, or until tender (we nuked them before we left for the day until hot, then left them all day).

Saute the onion in the fat until soft, 6-7 minutes. Add everything remaining except ginger; cook for 5 minutes. Stir in the ginger, remove from heat.

Add the sauteed mix to the lentils, bring to a simmer, and cook for 30 minutes. Puree with a stick blender, or in batches in a standard blender.

Serve with a drizzle of half-and-half, some cheddar cheese, or both.

The soup used half a knob of ginger root, so we made this recipe – we added cinnamon, allspice, and possibly cloves (I wasn’t watching T.) to the dough, and I doubled the cinnamon in the cinnamon-sugar topping. Delicious!

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Recipes I want to Try, an ongoing list

Ski House Cookbook
Curried Red Lentil Soup (p. 58)
Sautéed Peas with Mushrooms and Bacon (p. 137)

Cook it Quick
Chilaly (p. 46)

Reader’s Digest 30-Minute Cookbook
Baked Cod Plaki (p. 111)
Arabian-Style Beef w/ Flat Bread (p.145)
Leek and Cheddar Cheese tart (p. 237)
Dahl (p. 252)

“Favorite Brand Name” Great Garlic Recipes
Hearty Cassoulet (p. 48)
Crab & Corn Enchilada Casserole (p. 66)
Spicy-Sweet Lamb Tangine with Saffron Couscous (p. 76)
Fajitas (p. 86)

Cooking with Spirits

First trial here: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/542969.html

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Irish Soda Bread

T. and I like cooking for the holidays.

We really do. It’s a fun excuse to try something we don’t normally do. Or something we like doing that’s a lot of work.

We have never made soda bread before, so we decided we would try that this time. We went with this site. I think it’s a bit preachy, and did not attempt to verify the veracity (heehe) of its claims, but I wanted to try a simple bread first.

(Plus another recipe we found called for a stick of butter. I am trying to lose weight here, people!)

To quote the site: The basic soda bread is made with flour, baking soda, salt, and soured milk (or buttermilk). That’s it!

So that’s what we did. Our Dutch Oven is a bit big, so I nested a round Pyrex inside it, put the bread in that, and otherwise followed the recipe completely (we did the brown bread one, the 1st recipe).

Tasty! T. thinks it needs another flavor if we do it again, and it is an immensely dense and filling dough, but it worked really well with our corned beef brisket in french onions soup.

Experiment: Success.

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Tasty (Wednesday): Two-ingredient Cake

Last week, we tried a 2-ingredient cake.

Super simple:
Box of Angel Food Cake Mix (one-packet sort, not two-packet sort)
20oz can of Crushed pineapple

Mix, including the juice in the can. Cook at 350 for 25-35 minutes. Enjoy (or frost, but we didn’t).

We then tried cooking it with strawberries instead, but the fluid level got weird and we ended up with sort of cake-mush. We shall try again!.

It’s tasty (even the strawberry mush version), and without a frosting, it’s pretty low on calories and pretty much fat-free.

<3<3<3

I’ll let you know when we figure out the strawberry version.

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