Pineapple Curry Fried Rice
Posted on | February 6, 2010
I’ve been in the habit lately of acquiring large piles of random vegetables with no specific ideas as to how to use them. After stumbling across a recipe for fried rice that looked absolutely fabulous, I decided to have at it with all these wacky vegetables lounging around in my fridge.
I’m such a sucker for eggplant. I’m still figuring out the best methods for cooking and eating it, mind you, it’s just that they’re so cute. Try hugging an eggplant sometime, I guarantee that it’s very satisfying.
I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, so I’ll post my hackneyed list of ingredients here:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tbsp of chopped garlic
garlic chili sauce
1 egg
3 tablespoons chicken stock
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon curry powder
1 teaspoon sugar
A smattering of smashed almonds
Day old rice, not really sure how much, enough to make fried rice though, apparently
About 1/2 a large can of pineapple chunks
1 large boneless chicken breast, chopped
1/4 cup raisins
pile of chopped green onion
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
About 1/4 of a green pepper
about 1/4 cup frozen corn
one large carrot, sliced
1/2 onion, chopped
about 1/2 an eggplant, chopped
So first I chopped up a bunch of vegetables and stuck them aside in a bowl. The vegetable pile consisted of the green pepper, corn, carrot, onion, and eggplant.
In a separate bowl I mixed up some water plus chicken bouillon to make the chicken stock, then added in the chili sauce, soy sauce, curry powder, and sugar, and mixed it all up.
Next, I dumped some oil into the wok, added the garlic, then added the chicken, cooking it until it didn’t look deadly anymore. Dumped the chicken into the bowl with the raw vegetables for the time being.
At some point during all of this I grabbed a hammer and started smashing away at the almonds. This is a very effective (not to mention satisfying) method of converting whole almonds into tiny pieces of almond. Here is my workspace at about this point in the process:
Next, I cracked in the egg and let it cook in the oil until appropriately eggy. I dumped in the giant bowl of vegetables + chicken, along with the almonds, and topped it all off with a little bit of the liquid mixture. Pushed this around for a few minutes, then dumped in the rice, pineapple, plus the rest of the liquid. After this, I added in the green onion, cilantro, and raisins, cooked for another 30 seconds or so, and declared it finished.
It was rather tasty. Aesthetically, it didn’t look nearly as good as the original recipe, but I’ll blame that on my lack of shrimps (errr, along with my bad habit of not completely following directions). The essence of shrimps is to improve everything that they come into contact with, which indeed makes it a shame that Drew dislikes them. Ah well, more shrimps for me!
Sticking Tofu in the Toaster
Posted on | January 29, 2010
My block of tofu that’s been sitting in the fridge for the past several weeks was originally going to be reserved for miso soup. Thing is, I was sick recently. While being sick, I ate entirely too much soup of the instant and canned variety, as being sick = being lazy. So, being officially sick of soup, I decided the miso soup was not meant to be. There was this bag full of wheat rolls that had been staring longingly at me for quite some time now, so I decided to pair the two and make tofu burgers.
So you’re supposed to drain tofu before using it, something that I tend to completely forget about. This time, however, I remembered, and here are some precise instructions for doing so:
1. Remove tofu from package.
2. Plop tofu on a surface which is allowed to get wet (I used a pan).
3. Lay paper towel on top of tofu.
4. Lay random heavy object on top of tofu.
5. After 5 minutes, you will hear a loud clattering sound from the kitchen. Go into kitchen and retrieve heavy object that has fallen off of tofu. Tofu should have a vaguely trapezoidal shape by this point.
6. Find an object that is more bottom-heavy then the object you were previously using. Set object on top of tofu. Object should slant dashingly but, in theory at least, will not fall off. Let sit for 20 to 30 minutes, or whenever you get too hungry, whichever comes first.
So after this, slice the tofu into appropriately meaty slices. I did three, though I really could have done four. My original plan had been to bake them in the oven, but then I got this brilliant idea. A slice of tofu is approximately the shape of a slice of bread. Thus, tofu goes in the toaster. I cranked the toaster to a nice high setting, and kept retoasting the tofu until it looked appropriately crispy. This worked far better then I would have imagined. This is the first time in my entire life that I’ve managed to make tofu with an actual crisp exterior. Cooking tofu in a toaster is awesome, and I shall be repeating this method in the future.
I was only brave enough to try one slice, so the other two went in the oven, after being slickly coated with Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce. Incidentally, this stuff is pretty good. You can even try a bottle for free, by sending away for a coupon here!
So we made delicious sandwiches using some colby jack, tomatoes, and spinach:
Incidentally, the next time I make some fried rice, I’m gonna cook tofu in the toaster and then dice it up and add it to the rice. For too long have I dealt with overly-moist spongy tofu, and am looking forward to never having to deal with it again!
Delicious Guacamole
Posted on | January 25, 2010
It is no secret that I am a huge avocado fan. So much so, that this is the second year in a row that I’ve made a video entry for the seemingly annual Avocados from Mexico video contest. Incidentally, this is also the second year in a row that I did not win any money from said contest. However, they are very nice at giving consolation prizes. As a result, I have a t-shirt as well as a cookbook compliments of the contest, which I can add to the collection of last year’s t-shirt and cookbook. Well, Drew gets the t-shirts, as since they’re of the “one size fits most” variety, I’m swimming in them, but I get to enjoy the cookbooks.
This year’s cookbook prize was Mexican Everyday by Rick Bayless. A decent number of ingredients in the cookbook are familiar ones, which is good as the fewer ingredients from a recipe I recognize, the less likely I am to make it. The recipes also range in complexity. I decided to make one of the easier ones after flipping through the cookbook and having an insatiable urge for guacamole.
It’s apparently really easy for you to make guacamole. Once upon a time I, too, bought those little “guacamole seasoning” packets from the grocery store that were entirely too salty, but no more! Basic guacamole just takes a squishy avocado, some garlic, and salt. I also added in half a lime’s worth of juice, plus some crushed peppercorns.
So then I’m all like, what do I dip into this delicious concoction?! The obvious answer would be tortilla chips, but I was lacking in those. I never buy them, as the only satisfactory ones I eat are from Mexican restaurants. The ones you buy in the store are inevitably too salty. So, I decided to make do with what I did have: flour tortillas. I sliced a tortilla in half, and stuck each piece into the toaster. Toast, and then stick the other end in the toaster. Then you slice it up into wedges. This works surprisingly well.
Mmm green goo. It was so good, that two days later (“two days later” being defined as “for today’s lunch”, in this particular case) I made some more, this time also adding in some chopped cilantro, green onion, and tomato. I was so excited for lunch today that I cut up the tortilla before toasting it, then stuck the pieces in the toaster after the fact. This led to some awkward moments involving jabbing a fork into a toaster, but hey, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.
Thai Stir Fry, plus a way to find exciting new Asian recipes!
Posted on | January 19, 2010
So I had a bunch of miscellaneous vegetables plus chicken lying around, meaning it was high time for some stir-fry. I poked around for a recipe and was originally going to make this one. It was basic enough that I wouldn’t screw it up. Plus, after having visited the grocery store, I had all the necessary ingredients. However, I really wanted to add a lime, so I decided to search around for a recipe that incorporated lime. I ended up on this recipe, and more or less blended the two recipes together. Well, up until the point where I abandoned the recipes entirely and started adding things all willy-nilly, but that just kinda happens sometimes. The final outcome was better then most of my other wok experimentations, rather like a thai ginger sweet sauce:
First, I whisked together a sauce in a separate bowl, consisting of various quantities of the following:
-1 lime
-1/3 cup water + chicken bouillon
-fish sauce
-sugar
After tasting it and remembering all of the items living in my cabinet that I’ve yet to use, I added a chunk of powdered coconut milk along with more water. After tasting this, I impulse-added some coriander.
I chopped up some vegetables and set them aside in a big pile. I really like stir-fry in that you can dump in whatever’s sitting around, and it generally tastes good. Here’s what I used:
-eggplant
-onion
-red cabbage (though it really needs to be called purple cabbage, IMHO)
-green onion
-cilantro
-carrots (the remnants of a bag-o-salad, so no chopping for me!)
-celery
Next, I chopped up some ginger (probably more then necessary, but I’ve been excited about ginger lately), and stir-fried it along with some garlic in sesame oil. I added a dash of rice wine as well. Next, I dumped in some chopped chicken, along with a little of the aforementioned sauce. After the chicken had cooked thoroughly, I added in the vegetables and the rest of the sauce, plus some ground peppercorns, pushing everything around for a few minutes. I served it on some brown rice, and declared it delicious.
I’m a sucker for both Asian cooking and the Allrecipes website. Not only is there a great variety of recipes, but there are also a great deal of reviews. These are great for not only seeing if a recipe is good or not, but seeing how other people have altered a recipe based on lack of ingredients of wanting to alter the taste. It seems that Allrecipes is branching out into other countries. The very first recipe I linked to is on Allrecipes Asia, and there are several other branches as well, including Japan, China, and Germany. Not really sure why Japan and China aren’t just included in Asia, though. For some reason, the Asia site is in English, but all of the other countries (the ones that I looked at, at least) are in their nation’s own language. So I’m looking forward to thoroughly exploring the Asia one.
I will not, however, let a site’s being in another language be a hindrance to my accessing their recipes. A quick visit to your favorite Babel-type site will fix those language issues nicely. Well, kind of. For example, I inputted this recipe, only to end up with this version. While I am rather excited at the prospect of making some “California the straw raincoat rubbish dumpling which comes”, I do have my doubts as to how easy it will be to interpret the resulting Engrish from the translator.
Homemade Gyoza
Posted on | January 16, 2010
I was surprised to recently discover that Drew had never had gyoza before. Realizing that this was a situation that desperately needed to be remedied, the next time we ate at a Japanese restaurant, we got some gyoza as appetizers. As I’d hoped and/or expected, Drew deemed them delicious.
Buying them premade and frozen is a bit pricier then what we’re willing to pay for these days, so I decided to try making them instead. We picked up some wrappers and ground pork at a nearby Asian grocery store, along with some ginger and other misc. plants. I fried up the pork, and shredded up some cabbage, carrot, and ginger, dumping them in with the pork, along with some jarred garlic. I like jarred garlic, and have a massive jar of it sitting in the fridge right now. It tastes significantly better then powdered garlic and is very useful for cooking, but does not have that pain-in-the-ass-ness of chopping up garlic every time you want to cook with fresh garlic. I might feel the same way about ginger if I used ginger in cooking more then I currently do. Anyhow, I also dumped in some peppercorns, and possibly other seasonings I’ve forgotten, and pushed things around until they’d all mingled appropriately and were ready to use as filling. There’s a lot of flexibility to what you can put inside gyoza. They can be an excellent way to get rid of plants in your fridge that are up to no good.
Incidentally, if you own a food processor, use it when making gyoza filling. I do not own one, and while my filling worked out fine, there were still chunks of cabbage a tad bit larger then was really appropriate.
Gyoza are fairly easy to put together, you just plop a glob of filling in the middle of the wrapper, wet the wrapper’s edges, and then fold the wrapper up in whatever dainty or manly way that you feel is appropriate. I found this web page to provide a good guide to folding gyoza properly.
After the hour or so it took to put all these guys together, I froze most of them on a cookie tray (so they could all be dumped into a bag, put back in the freezer and eaten later), and then pan-steamed them. I set a bunch in a pan, filled the pan about 1/2-way with water, and then covered the pan to let them cook. They stuck to the bottom of the pan a bit, but aside from that, it seemed to work out fine.
Incidentally, I highly recommend making sauce to dip the gyoza in. It’s pretty easy to make, I made mine with soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, a teeny bit of chili oil, chopped green onion, and chopped ginger. Delish!
I made waay too much filling, and the remnants are currently sitting in bags in the freezer, awaiting the next time I actually remember to buy gyoza wrappers. This is definitely a recipe where making too much is not a bad thing. Deliciousness aside, it’s a long loong process of chopping things and sticking them in teeny pockets, and you feel much better about spending so much time on the process when, in the end, you have a gajillion gyoza to show for it.
Sushi made with tilapia and topped with exciting things
Posted on | January 12, 2010
So a little while back, Drew and I went to a local Asian grocery store that specialized in Japanese products. I wanted some sushi-grade fish, and being poor/cheap, decided to go with some tilapia. I already had some regular tilapia in my freezer, so I figured they could keep each other company. I recently impulse-bought some sushi from a Sunflower Farmer’s Market (which was pretty good sushi, as grocery sushi goes). And, as always happens when I eat sushi after having not done so for a bit, I proceeded to have a vicious craving for sushi that simply could not be done away with. So, the tilapia got used, along with egg (tamago), avocado, carrot, and some misc. other ingredients.
I wanted to experiment, so I sliced some of the tilapia really thin and rolled it up, pin-wheel style, into a roll (pictured on the right above). It’s pretty hard to cut tilapia into thin slices, but I persevered! Also, I think I’m getting better at making the tamago, but am still not there yet. It involves pouring thin layers of the egg mixture into a frying pan and then rolling it up, but I kept letting it cook too long, so my final tamago chunk was a mish-mash of distinct thin layers. I figured I might as well take advantage of this, so I took the outermost layer of the tamago and used it to roll up a tilapia and avocado roll, for a bonus layer of deliciousness (pictured on the left, above).
I also wanted to play more with layering things on top of the rolls. I did some avocado, and also tried tilapia. Apparently, I need a thinner, more malleable fish to do it proper.
They still looked pretty neat, though, especially with the addition of some sesame seeds and spicy tuna. There’s rumors on the internets that I should be using a separate piece of plastic wrap to make the toppings adhere to the roll, and then slice the roll before removing the plastic. This might make the fishes stick better, as well as prevent all sorts of weird bamboo mat lines from appearing in the rolls. I shall try that next time.
Next time, I think I will also eschew the tilapia in favor of a more hearty fish (say, tuna or eel), or simply some fake crab. The tilapia was…watery. And not particularly flavorful. Not sure if that’s just how raw tilapia is, or if it shouldn’t have hung out in my freezer so long. It worked fine when paired with other things, as long as there wasn’t too much tilapia, but in the rolls and nigiri where tilapia was the main ingredient, I wasn’t too happy. It was simply too wet, as well as too mushy.
Another thing: for some bizarre reason, I thought I had cucumber. I did not, so I decided to try a little bit of celery instead. Luckily I only put it into one roll, as it led to a slightly stringy roll whose flavor was overpowered with celery. Which is weird, because I never really thought celery had a big flavor in the first place.
Despite the celery and tilapia issues, everything worked out ok, because a.) the egg was delicious and b.) I overcompensated for the lack of cucumber by slicing up entirely too much avocado. Not that there can ever be too much avocado, as avocado is the Fruit of the Gods and all.
Here’s the “random jumble of sushi” platter that resulted from all of the rolling of the rollses:
So, my conclusions from this sushi session?
-Egg is awesome.
-So is avocado.
-Tilapia, not so much.
-Cutting things really thin leads to all sorts of aesthetic opportunities!
-Spicy mayo makes everything magical!
When Potatoes Go Bad
Posted on | January 11, 2010
So, remember when not too long ago, I was complaining about having entirely too many potatoes due to my inability to not buy incredibly cheap food? Well, the potatoes have risen up.
I was in the process of chopping up the almost-dead potatoes when I got the brilliant idea to make this little guy. I probably would have chopped it up immediately after that point, except that Drew seemed rather disturbed by this potato. So, due to my occasional tendencies towards schadenfreude, the potato thus sits in the kitchen, slowly rotting away and taunting Drew whenever he even thinks about getting anything from the nearby cabinets. Breakfast oatmeal will never be the same with this potato watching on with a grin as those oats get stirred.
Mary’s Mountain Cookies in Breckenridge, Co
Posted on | January 8, 2010
For the last several days, about 1/2 of all of the food that I’ve eaten could easily be placed in the category of “dessert.” This is a combination of everyone who buys me presents knowing that I like chocolate and many people that I visit disliking having bunches of junk food around after a gathering, and hence dumping it all onto Drew and I. Which I’m fine with, as I like free food. Self-control, however, is something else. Thus, my New Year’s resolution is to not gain too much weight this year. I like keeping my goals realistic.
In any case, a little while back, Drew and I ventured with his aunt and cousin up to Breckenridge. This was a pre-snow trip, more for touring the town then anything else. Lots of overpriced stores were to be found, along with a nice range of places to stuff your face at. One such place was Mary’s Mountain Cookies.
I have mixed feelings about purchasing cookies from stores. I’ve been burned too many times by Starbucks-type places, where the “meant to be dipped in coffee” argument is a thin excuse indeed for dry and boring cookies. I require soft cookies (for most cookie varieties, at least), and sometimes it’s hard to tell just by looking at the cookies as to how soft or hard they will be. I was not disappointed at Mary’s Mountain Cookies.
There were a range of cookies to choose from, all large and soft-looking. The ones on the right in that picture were what I immediately gravitated towards – cookie sandwiches, filled with frosting. There were many varieties to choose from, and Drew and I ended up splitting a cookie sandwich consisting of two chocolate chip cookies with chocolate frosting in the middle. The cookie sandwich was soft and magical and delicious. And, even better, it didn’t do that thing where the icing is super-sugary. In my old age I’ve been having more difficulty eating super sugary things, so it gives me one more thing to complain about when I eat something that causes my veins to start pulsing with sugar in a rather unpleasant and twitchy way.
Here’s an action shot of Drew chewing on the gooey cookie:
The next time I find myself in Breckenridge, I shall definitely return to Mary’s Mountain Cookies and gorge on more chocolatey soft deliciousness.
Avocado goodness, BBQ, and Burgers
Posted on | January 5, 2010
I recently got back from a looong drive from Denver to Nashville and back, and while I don’t have pictures, I do have words (just a brief few).
First of all, if you are ever in Illinois, Iowa, or Missouri, and you like barbecue, you should check out Bandanas BBQ. There’s at least one off of I-70 a bit west of St Louis, which is the one we ate at. We both got the pulled pork sandwich with a side of green beans. Five sauces to choose from (my favorites were the KC style and St. Louis style), and the meat was luscious and flavorful. The green beans were also excellent, with just enough salt added. I had a recent experience at Texas Roadhouse where the green beans would have been great were it not for the extreme amounts of salt the kitchen had decided to dump on them. Too much salt in the food might be one of my biggest pet peeves about eating out, and American food restaurants seem to do it the most. In any case, Bandana’s BBQ was awesome.
And, the burgers. It seems that, if I’m traveling with Drew, we will inevitably eat burgers at some point. He is obsessed with Steak and Shake, and so of course we ate there. They have a nice 50’s style ambiance, and the burgers are pretty good. Decent variety of milkshakes, which I pretty much always get as I am a sucker for dairy products loaded with chocolate. The fries are a little too skinny, and, incidentally, a little too salty for my tastes. Most fries that I get from restaurants are too salty for me, actually, but it doesn’t matter too much as I generally dump half of them onto Drew to eat anyhow.
Oh, and how’s this for haute cuisine: I shall now review a Burger King double cheeseburger. See, it only costs a buck. This is very useful for those of us who are poor. Drew’s current tendency for cheap fast food is to occasionally impulse buy a mcdouble from McDonalds. Now, I’d read that many franchises are not particularly happy with this particular promotion, as they’re actually losing money on the double cheeseburgers. This, of course, made me curious to try them. So, at some point when I’m attempting to sleep poorly in the back of the car, Drew goes and buys a few of these babies for a late breakfast. They’re very succulent, with similar flavoring to a Whopper but without the added mayonnaise that I always forget to ask them to hold. Mayo has it’s uses, but should not exist on a burger when ketchup and mustard are far more appropriate. To compare it to a mcdouble, the Burger King double cheeseburger has more meat, that extra slice of cheese, and sesame seeds on the bun. Contrary to what Mitch Hedburg thought, I would totally notice and be sad if sesame seeds up and went away. In any case, until the promotion ends at least, I think our new occasional impulse fast food item will be the BK double cheeseburger.
And, on a final note, I have made a flash video entry for the Avodesiac video contest. I’ve never made a video in Flash before, so it’s a bit choppy. In any case, voting starts in a week, whereupon I will probably pimp the link again in hopes that people will go and vote on it so I can win $$$!
Easy Truffles and Mint Bark
Posted on | December 26, 2009
A few years back, I decided to make truffles. The recipe was rather simple, and the truffles themselves came out looking and tasting quite nice, so I decided to recreate them again to give as presents this year.
First off, here’s the recipe for the truffles:
Beat an 8 oz. package of cream cheese until smooth. Beat in 3 cups of confectioners sugar. Stir in 3 cups of melted chocolate chips and either 1.5 tsp vanilla or the flavoring of your choice. Shape into balls, and refrigerate until hard.
Instead of vanilla, I used black walnut, almond, and creme de menthe flavoring, and used that as an excuse to decorate them in different festive ways. Before decorating them, I coated them in a layer of chocolate. Or rather, in a layer of chocolate + margarine that made them entirely too gooey. A smarter me might have just melted straight up chocolate, or looked online for a recipe. But no, that would have made too much sense. So I melted chocolate + margarine in the microwave, and then kept adding more margarine as the chocolate kept being less melty then I wanted it to be. As a result, the coating tasted more like margarine then I’d like, but still seemed to work out ok.
They ended up in various boxes I picked up at Cake Crafts in Denver, and looked more or less like this:
Or rather, looked like this before I shipped them back to Virginia. Who knows what kind of a melted mess they might have ended up as?
The black walnut truffles got regular walnuts sprinkled on top of them right after I coated them. This was the easiest topping to add. Here’s a dynamic closeup of truffles in action!
I then mixed together some icing (a bit o’ margarine plus a bit o’ milk plus a large gob o’ powdered sugar), and added green food coloring to a chunk of it. Squeezed that out of an icing tip and added green sugar crystal sprinkles for the mint truffles.
Lastly were the almond truffles. I didn’t have any almonds to sprinkle on top, so I used the uncolored icing to decorate the tops of the almond truffles with various patterns/pictures/etc.. This made them all super festive and caused my hand to get entirely too crampy. I had frosting leftover (from both almond and mint truffles), so you can see that in the background I took some store-bought chocolate chip cookies and sugared them up a bit.
It was easy to make the base truffle for these, but it was a bit of a pain to dip them all in poorly formed liquid chocolate, then top them all individually. Several days after doing this, I ended up making mint bark, whereupon I learned that it is fantastically easy to melt chocolate in the microwave, and that I never should have added any margarine in the first place to make the coating for the truffles. Mint bark is also significantly easier to make then truffles (if you’re decorating the truffles like I was, at least), so I may stick to making that over truffles in the future, to be honest.
Here’s the recipe I cobbled together from various internet sources to make it:
Smash up a bunch of oreo type cookies. Microwave about 1.5 – 2 bags of chocolate chips until melted, mix together with smashed cookies. Dump into greased cookie pan and spread around the best you can. Refrigerate for awhile. Microwave 1 bag of white chocolate chips until melted. Squirt in some mint flavoring, plus food coloring, mix. Spread on top of refrigerated chocolate, add sprinkles, let cool. Smash into pieces, and enjoy.
Rumor has it this also works great with crushed peppermint, might have to attempt that sometime.
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