I saw that some recipes recommended you beat the yolks and sugar in a double boiler, cooking the yolks, but most recipes didn’t have this step. Well, neither of us are showing symptoms of salmonella, so I’m not worried.
ETA: I used decaf espresso, so that we won’t be up all night just because we had some tiramisu for dessert.
Galumpkis.
I cured my own bacon. Everything I had read online said home-cure bacon’s so much better/juicier/tastier than store-bought. Mine wasn’t.
The process was simple, lengthy but little effort involved. Rub the cure onto your belly pork, seal in a container (I used a ziplock bag), chill 24hrs then rinse, repeat over 5 days. A final rinse then hang for a week. My cure had classic pancetta flavors including garlic and rosemary, black pepper, and I used molasses sugar and celery leaf as extra aromatics.
It’s turned out extremely salty and the garlic overwhelms everything else. Extra rinsing does nothing to help, I need to poach it in plain water before it’s edible, and I don’t feel that the texture is a great deal different than if I had bought it. I love experimenting with kitchen diy and pretending like I’m a homesteader, but this was an exercise in disappointment. I could learn from my mistakes and do better next time but . . . nope. Store-bought from now on.
I do have a freezer drawer full of garlicky lardons, though. They’re pretty good on pizza.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to work through the substitutions on this, and I can’t think of a way it can be done. The two things that hold pasta and dumplings together when they hit the water are eggs and gluten. If you can’t use eggs, you can need the dough a bit to get the gluten really stringy, and that will do it (but your pasta won’t be as tender.)
Without either of those ingredients? Maybe a high gluten rice flour? And then let it sit for a bit to incorporate the liquid really well, and knead.
If you pull the dough apart it should stretch a little. If it doesn’t, then maybe just settle for pan fried gnocchi?
I like mussels and this recipe just kind of came to me the other day. It was very good, although I’m sure it can be tweaked/improved.
Clean mussels of all filaments and incrustation. Discard any open mussels that won’t close when you tap on the shell. Put an inch or less of water in a big pot for steaming, add washed bay leaf, not too much salt, the steaming basket and the mussels. Steam for a few minutes. Separate mussel meat from shells, discarding any mussels that haven’t opened and removing any remaining filaments. Filter liquid and set aside. Sauté chopped leek, add flour and let cook for a minute or two, add liquid from steaming mussels and a bit of milk and stir until the sauce thickens. Serve over spinach noodles.
Homemade baba ganoush, delicious and fairly easy but labor intensive what with roasting, deseeding and pulping. I used Sicilian eggplants, which have loads of seeds and at first it took me forever to remove them–I didn’t mind some seeds but there was almost 1/3 cup of seeds from 3 eggplants. It wasn’t until halfway through that I figured out that the seeds were almost all attached to pods inside and I could just pull out the entire pods.
I posted elsewhere that I made Thai shrimp salad this weekend. I found a recipe on a real Thai cooking channel on youtube, and used that. I couldn’t get kaffir lime leaves or Thai chilis (I used habanero instead), but otherwise I had all the ingredients.
Boy, was that good. It was tart and fiery and sweet and floral all at once. Good thing I made some jasmine rice to go with it, because all that intense flavor needed something bland as an offset.
So I decided to make eggs Benedict for breakfast this morning. I’ve ‘kind of’ made it before, using over-easy eggs. Mrs. L.A. likes eggs Benedict, and I like to feed her. So this time I decided to…
… poach the eggs. I’ve never poached an egg before. I brought a pot of water to the boil, with a tablespoon of white vinegar and a teaspoon of salt, and then turned the heat down so that there were just a few streams of bubbles coming up. I didn’t bother to look for a video or a recipe. How hard can it be? Well… I’ve been under the impression that the eggs would float. They didn’t. The first egg (a double-yolk) looked like it was falling apart. (I turned off the heat at this point.) For the other three, I stirred the pot. As each egg established its boundaries, I added another egg. After the last one, Once all four were in, I covered the pot. I left them in a little too long, and the yolks were not runny. They were not ‘set’, but they were viscous. I put the warmed ham on toasted-and-buttered English muffin halves, put the eggs on top, and put on the Hollandaise. They were good. Mrs. L.A. only ate one because she considered them ‘a lot of food’. She says she’ll save the other one for lunch.
My first attempt at poaching eggs was semi-successful. The yolks were not ‘too set’, but they would have been better if they were nice and runny.
This variation seems to have become popular. In case you can’t see the video, you cook the egg in a little sack that you make by draping a piece of greased plastic wrap over a cup, putting the raw egg in the plastic, and drawing up the corners of the plastic and tying them off.
I made cauliflower rice for the first time last night. Basically, grated cauliflower, which I sauteed on low heat, then left the lid on the pan for a while. It was surprisingly starch-like in taste, and worked well as a substitute for ordinary rice. Seasoned it up nice and plopped on some salisbury steak and gravy. Why have I not done this before? :smack:
I did a Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Dough with some butter in it as well as olive oil, cheese on the bottom, raw hot sausage, pepperoni, then sauce, and a sprinkle of romano. In a spring form pan, on a pizza stone for 35 at 450.
Slamin.