Yet another sushi post. Because raw tuna is pretty much the Best Thing Ever.
Posted on: November 17, 2011
So you know how it is when someone makes a bunch of food, and you eat it and are all like, “This is awesome, you shouldn’t have?!” But the person that made it seems just as grateful to you for liking it and eating it? I TOTALLY SYMPATHIZE. If you like to make food, it’s one of the saddest things ever to only have yourself to make it for. I mean, you’d have this awesome thing to eat, but it would take you a bajillion days to eat it all. Because most things that are both delicious and homemade are rarely single-serving. And then you’ll get sick of it halfway through, and things never taste as good when you don’t have someone else to help you appreciate them. Which is why I freaking love potlucks.
My work decided to hold a potluck – on my birthday no less! So I, in typical fashion, use that as a good excuse to make sushi. I picked up about a half pound of really good tuna from the Pacific Mercantile, along with some fake crab (or krab, rather) from King Soopers. I already had some fish roe in the freezer, so I used that as well. I sliced up some avocado, cucumber, scallions, made some spicy mayo, and some tamago.
Ah yes, the tamago. You can make a fairly authentic tamago using a bread pan. For future reference, if you’re gonna use a bread pan, please use a metal one. In one of my many waves of obliviousness, I decided I could totally use pyrex on the stove. Didn’t work nearly as well as a metal bread pan, and then when I stuck it in the sink afterwards, the pan immediately did this!
Yeah, both of my eyeballs are very thankful that the pieces flew out and not up!
Anyhow, the egg turned out decent regardless of the fate of it’s container, so that was good I suppose. I had a lot of fun making this sushi, and got particularly creative as I knew I had a willing audience. So I decided to do my own version of a rainbow roll.
I think a little more rice would have made this rainbow gradient really stand out. However, the combination of ingredients made it stand out in my mouth, so it was all good.
Here’s some rolls, awaiting the cutting board.
And here’s a closeup of one of the nicer looking rolls, with assorted others in the background.
You can have a lot of fun with putting spicy mayo in a frosting applicator (a ziplock bag with a tiny hole cut in the corner will work as well) and drizzling it on rolls, topping that with a range of ingredients. Looks and tastes good! I need to get some unagi sauce and do similar things. And get some unagi as well. Tuna and eel are in a neck and neck race for which is my favorite sushi fish!
Whereupon I go to a tailgate and eat sausages
Posted on: November 7, 2011
So it’s National Novel Writing Month, meaning that I am officially a bit worse than usual at keeping this blog up to date. Never fear though, guilt saves the day! Thus, I post here rather than, you know, work on said novel. It’s all good, though, sleep is for the weak.
So anyhow, I’ve recently discovered the joys of sporting events, specifically attending Colorado Rapids games. And, tangentially, I’ve discovered the joy of organized tailgate parties. The food and beer flow quite freely, the latter of which makes for a game experience where the capacity for excitement far outreaches the capacity of my bladder.
Anyhow, the last game I attended had, amongst other things, a giant pile of sausages for the grabbin’! I am a big fan of sausages in all their forms, but have a weakness for bratwursts, so I eschewed the more traditional hot dogs and went for a a big dark wrinkly bratwurst. There were also those white bratwursts (I think they’re bratwursts, at least, or might be Italian sausage? My education is a bit limited here). The super pasty sausages, in any case, were a bit intimidating.
Mmm, bratwurst with German mustard cooked on a grill always gets an A+ from me! And, buried underneath said bratwurst are onions. This is something that me 10 years ago (or even me 5 years ago) would have been completely horrified by. But, onions are really good for you, so I’m trying to convince myself that I actually, in fact, like onions. I’m not generally that picky of an eater, but there are still certain things I can’t handle, and I dislike this fact. I feel like you are a more flexible person and can get by better in situations if you can eat as many things as possible. Who knows when you might find yourself dining with the president and you’re served an onion parfait or something – you’ve gotta be able to choke that sucker down lest you offend someone! So, I’m tackling onions for now, maybe I’ll move on to some of my greater evils (such as mushrooms, and scrambled eggs) at a later time.
There was a good amount of food left over after the tailgate, and one of the cooks/servers decided to take it upon himself to attempt plying the already full masses with yet more sausages.
Never had I been offered a giant pile of sausages in such a manner, and thus felt the need to document it here for all of posterity.
Alas, I am sad that the season is over, so looks like I will have to wait until next March to get my tailgate party fix!
Hooray for Gingerbread Waffles!
Posted on: October 29, 2011
So the best part about this time of year is the fact that there are now 23828347924 things you can buy that are either pumpkin flavored or gingerbread flavored. As I am a cheap ho, I try to not actually buy too many of these things, as I can make just as many things with the potential to be even more delicious than store-bought or restaurant versions. So I’ve been obsessed with Racine’s gingerbread pancakes for quite awhile. As I live by myself, my breakfasts generally don’t get more fancy than “cold bowl o’ cereal”, but as I recently had a friend stay the night, I decided it was time for some gingerbread madness!
So, I decided on a whim to make waffles instead of pancakes, using this gingerbread waffle recipe from allrecipes.com.
So, to start off, you mix all of these together in a bowl:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
And here’s a secret: I don’t have any allspice. I kinda don’t even know what allspice is. All the spices? Going by this logic, I could have just sprinkled in a little of every spice I owned, but I just wasn’t ready to commit to eating curry powder (or garlic) in waffles (not that dry mustard doesn’t seem a tad weird…). So, I dashed in some ground cloves and nutmeg as a replacement, as they certainly seemed appropriate.
Next, you separate an egg, and beat it together with 1/3 cup brown sugar until fluffy. Then, you dump in the following ingredients:
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup molasses
3 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
Of course, I had no buttermilk. So I used my 2% and hoped for the best. And oops, no molasses. Luckily, I had a metric ton of barley malt leftover from the last time I made granola bars, so I dumped some of that in instead. Plus some bonus honey.
And by this point, my pile of dishes involved with this fiasco looked something like this:
I soaked the measuring cup containing the barley malt super fast after this, as barley malt can be quite the ho when washing dishes, if ya get my drift here.
So you mix together your wet ingredients and your dry ingredients. There’s still that egg white left, and that gets whipped together with 1/8 tsp cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Dump that on into the bowl o’ ingredients and mix together. The recipe called for raisins as well, but I decided that walnuts would be much more delightful, so I threw in about 1/4 cups worth of smashed nuts.
Once my super sweet waffle maker was all heated up, I dumped batter on and made waffles!
I have a hard time gauging what baked goods require spray and what don’t, and apparently these waffles were the former. After the first round of waffles rather stubbornly clung to the waffle maker, I whipped out my handy dandy off-brand Pam spray and made sure that waffle iron was good and lubricated from then on out!
These were totally delicious, by the way. Super heavy, but that is the nature of waffles. I ended up heating up a leftover waffle and putting ice cream and chocolate sauce on top, and this was indeed the pinnacle of my waffle experience.
Holy Cow, the Calzones from Attivo are Freaking Awesome
Posted on: October 20, 2011
Yeah, so I haven’t posted in a week as my brain has been preoccupied with the sorts of things that apparently don’t inspire me to write about whatever the hell I’ve been sticking in my mouth lately (food or otherwise). So it goes. I’ll blame Seasonal Affective Disorder or the 1% or the Russians or something. Anyhow, I realized I really shouldn’t neglect my Dear Blog Friend, as it’s been so good to me over the years, so I will take this as a good opportunity to blather on a bit about how amazing Attivo’s calzones are.
No really, they’re freaking amazing. Especially the eggplant calzone. Straight eggplant, 3 cheeses, plus their delightful red sauce. It is magic on my mouth, soon converted into magic in my belly, soon converted to magically increasing my waistline. But seriously, these are the sorts of calzones I would happily go up a pants size for, cause they’re totally worth it.
Attivo also has some excellent floppy NY style pizza. A bit less sauce than I might generally prefer, but at $2.50 for a giant slice of cheese, I’m just not gonna complain all that much. Their subs are also delightful, I’ve had two thus far (the Pancho Villa and the Good Fella) and both were quite good (and ginormous to boot). Oh hey, and you can order online! This is a total bonus for someone like me who lacks the social graces to pick up a phone and call someplace. So, yes, I totally recommend Attivo for handling your calzone (and sub) needs.
Holy Veggie Curry, Batman!
Posted on: October 10, 2011
So I recently had the fortune to acquire from a coworker a zucchini of epic proportions. I’ve been feeding off of this sucker for weeks (well, off and on at least), and still have some left. After awhile, fried zucchini and zucchini bread just don’t cut it anymore. I don’t think I’ve never used zucchini in curry before, and decided this was pretty much the ideal time to try it!
So I hacked up some pieces of zucchini, along with some potato, carrot, and onion. I decided to go with panang curry (using about half the paste in a small can), and crushed up some peanuts to go with it. My original intent was to fry up the vegetables in the curry and about half a can of coconut milk, and add in the other can a little later, but the coconut milk had other ideas. So after the can decided to dump it’s entire milky contents into the wok, I figured “the heck with it”, dumped everything else in as well, stirred, covered the pan, and ignored it for the next 10 minutes.
In the meantime I hacked up a big chunk of cilantro. My normal preference would be to use basil for this sort of thing, but as I had cilantro and no basil, cilantro it was. There’s also the fact that, at a regular grocery store, the only basil I can generally find is a tiny amount in a frou-frou package going for around $2. Cilantro, however, goes for about $.33 for a great big fistful. I can get much more reasonably priced basil from an Asian grocery, but alas, King Soopers and Safeway are ever so much closer to me.
Anyhow, I dumped the cilantro in near the very end and, despite (or perhaps because of) the long simmering time due to my dumping in all the coconut milk all early, the panang curry came out quite delightfully.
I think panang curry is a good one to go vegetarian with, since the paste itself is made with ground peanuts, and bonus peanuts tossed in make it even more protein-tastic. I’d made some basmati rice (which if you’re gonna eat long grain rice, is a freaking awesome way to go) and the curry paired quite excellently with it.
And, I’m becoming convinced that square and rectangular plates were invented for people like me who kinda suck at doing food photography. I’ve got all of these round pans and round plates, which end up looking rather dull when I’m cropping them all to rectangles! What I need to do is not take photos of my food when I’m hungry, because the hunger gets me all distracted – who wants to focus on awesome plate presentation and lighting when your stomach is growling and your photography subject is getting colder and more congealed with each passing minute?! Oh, first world problems…
Slow Cooker Adventures and Chicken Udon Soup
Posted on: October 4, 2011
So I impulse bought half a chicken the other week. Yeah yeah, other people impulse buy Doritos and donuts and such, and I apparently buy poultry. Well, and donuts. And Doritos. So it goes. The slightly colder weather’s got me thinking about soup, so I decided to cram the half a chicken into my slow cooker and see what happens.
I just barely managed to cram that poor sucker in there. Once I did get it in there, I decided to add Bonus Flavor in the form of some cilantro stems, chunks of carrot, scallions, bay leaves, pepper, salt, and a miscellany of vaguely Italian herbs I grabbed from the drawer at random. Filled with water. And as I did all this right before bedtime, I set the timer to “slow” for 7.5 hours and went to sleep.
The next morning, I was greeted with a delightful pot of cooked chicken and broth!
Of course, I had to get to work, so I poked at the chicken with a fork a little, and left the cooker on the “keep warm” setting all day. That evening, I was all like “must…soup…now!” When one is sufficiently hungry, soup becomes a verb.
So I’m all like, “Hey, I bet this chicken and broth would be great with some udon!”
So I poured some broth into a pot with a bit of water (the broth was mighty thick, much to my delight) and added some udon, along with a bit of salt and pepper. While that was bubbling away, I chopped up some of the chicken and put it into a bowl along with some chopped cilantro and scallions. Once the udon was appropriately limp, I dumped it plus the broth into the bowl with the chicken, stirred, took a bite, and promptly burnt my tongue. Yum!
This was really pretty awesome. The udon was actually really similar to the noodles that you get out of a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. I’m thinking that maybe wheat noodles (or whatever those noodles are made of), after sitting in a can, become about as squishy as cooked udon? Not really sure! Anyhow, I’m totally gonna make this again sometime. I like being in the habit of making my own soup anyhow, as soup from a can is generally Salt Death, with the added disappointment of containing significantly less meat (and vegetables, for that mater) than I want in my soup!
My Delightful Sushi Rampage
Posted on: September 30, 2011
I’ve been on a sushi kick lately. A big reason for this is because, on a recent thrift store visit, I bought what is pretty much the Best Plate Ever. It’s a copper plate made by Del Campo in Italy which I picked up for $2. I hadn’t heard of Del Campo until I saw the engraving on the back of the plate, but doing a google search pulled up other dishes by Del Campo starting at around $300 or so. So, I’m pretty happy with that purchase. Not that I plan on trying to sell it as a.) something is worth only as much as you can convince someone else to pay you for it and b.) it’s a pretty sweet sushi plate. So, I made some fairly basic sushi-related items for dinner recently.
I had this super ripe mango that I really wanted to try to put in some rolls. So, lacking the ambition or drive to make anything super fancy, I decided to go with straight hand rolls. I also used avocado, cucumber, scallions, and fish roe. I’d also recently purchased a can of tofu pockets (which I’m sure has a Japanese name, but I totally can’t remember what that is). Tofu pockets are awesome because all you do is stuff them with rice and eat. Delightful. These tofu pockets, however, also wanted some cucumber and fish roe. The remaining mango I neatly laid in a pile. Ripe mango is so freaking good!
I had some leftover rice, plus other leftover ingredients, so I took that as an opportunity to put together a super awesome lunch.
I had just enough cucumber and avocado left to make a single roll (well, half-roll technically) of sushi, so I did that and did tofu pockets to fill up the rest of the container. I really need to invest in a decent bento box one of these days, as those are much more aesthetically pleasing than tupperware!
Pretty Much The Most Festive Furikake Ever
Posted on: September 25, 2011
So, at some point in the vaguely recent past, I found myself at the Pacific Mercantile in downtown Denver. This is pretty much the Best Place Ever to buy anything Japan-related. Well, except, you know, Japan. And I’m sure LA has some great places as well (along with a bunch of other US major cities, I’m sure). OK, so Pacific Mercantile is the best place in Colorado. Anyhow, it’s a great store to make impulse buys such as this:
What we have here is the most festive furikake that I’ve ever seen. Teeny animal heads, delightful! Furikake, for those unaware, is a Japanese mixture of dry ingredients that you can dump all over your rice and make it taste delicious. I usually get it in jar form (it’s great to keep around to dump on leftover rice) but I of course could not resist furikake in such delightful packaging as above. I will apparently buy anything if the package is plastered with happy anime-esque characters and cute animals. It’s not just me, either – I read some article awhile back about how wine bottles sell 40% better when there’s an animal on the label. Curse you, cuteness! Curse you and your dollar-taking ways!
Anyhow, I had a crap-ton of sushi ingredients lying around, but neither the time nor the desire to make actual sushi, so I decided this was the optimal time to try out my exciting new furicake. So I made rice, dumped it on a plate, and sprinkled on the furikake. I arranged around the edge some sliced avocado, cucumber, scallions, cold shrimp, fish roe, and tamago. Sprinkled on some wasabi and soy sauce, mixed together, and stuffed my face. Delightful! Can’t say that the furikake stood out in any way flavorwise, but it totally satisfied my needs.
And on a related note, I had a vision for making easy tamago. So, tamago is egg mixed with soy sauce, sugar, rice vinegar, and cooking wine, then cooked layer by layer on the stove. The outcome is delightful, but the process is tedious if you’re already dealing with a bunch of other ingredients for your future sushi feast. As I’ve recently discovered the joys of microwaving eggs, I realized you can totally do this with tamago as well. So I mixed the ingredients up, microwaved it, and indeed it was fast and delicious. Of course, as the shape of the microwaved tamago will either resemble a.) the container you microwaved it in or b.) a hacked up version of the container you microwaved it in, it’s not the prettiest solution. But, unless you’re making tamago nigiri, aesthetic isn’t really too much of a concern, so might as well go for efficiency!
The Weirdest Chai Ever from Egg Shell, Plus Mediocre Crepes!
Posted on: September 16, 2011
So, for starters, I’m gonna apologize for the fact that I haven’t actually written about anything I’ve *cooked* in many moons. I’ve got a backlog of photos on my phone, but the glut of what I’ve got to work with on my actual computer is from restaurants, and I am apparently too much of a bum to transfer said photos from my phone to my computer. I’ve also been eating out entirely more than my wallet wants me to. Anyhow, I also noticed that most of my posts about eating in restaurants tend to fall along the lines of “OMG SO AWESOME!!” So, here’s one that’s not.
There’s this place called The Egg Shell in Cherry Creek. And, I’m not a fan.
So, I crack out over chai tea. Waitress asks if I’d like a beverage and, as crack is hard to resist, I ask if they have chai tea. (I feel so redundant saying that, since “chai” actually means “tea”. Hah!) And indeed they do have chai tea. So, I order it. And it arrives, and on first glance looks quite delightful.
And then I drink it. Is it possible to make tea from seltzer water? Cause I’ve never before had tea that seemed…carbonated. It was really weird. That, and it was lukewarm. Neither hot, nor iced, but lukewarm. I mean, I drank it all, but sort of out of boredom more than anything else. Did not approve!
For my entree, I got swedish pancakes, which were essentially crepes, which came with lingonberry sauce. There wasn’t anything necessarily *wrong* with what I got, but, I couldn’t pinpoint anything about these crepes that would make me want to order them again. Indeed, these crepes were the epitome of ‘average.’
And, I suppose the worst part was the fact that the portion was pretty meagre, I was totally still hungry after that! As I ate them, I kept thinking about the awesome gingerbread pancakes at Racine’s, and the fact that they were like $2 cheaper, extraordinarily delicious, and eating half of them would fill me up more than that entire serving of crepes. I felt like the Egg Shell fit quite perfectly the negative “fancy restaurant” stereotype – small portions of average food that cost a little bit too much.
Category: Breakfast, restaurants
Tags: chai, Cherry Creek, crepes, Denver, Egg Shell, swedish pancakes
Piles of Mexican from El Noa Noa on Santa Fe
Posted on: September 9, 2011
So, as far as I’m concerned, Mexican food is crack. I don’t care if it’s traditional, New Mexican, or straight up Americanized Mexican, it’s all good. (Not that I can necessarily tell the difference between them anyhow, but we’ll just ignore that little fact). Anyhow, one thing I like about living in Colorado is you can throw a rock in any direction and probably hit a Mexican restaurant, it’s really quite delightful.
Anyhow, there’s a place called El Noa Noa that we frequent at work fairly regularly. And, as my impulsive nature dictates that I take a photo of pretty much everything I eat, I’ve got a little backlog of photos from there, which I’ll dump into this post.
First off, the ceviche de pescado. This was a veritable vat of goodness. Spicy but not too spicy, it filled me up quite well. The margarita helped, as margaritas generally do. Would totally get this again (and pretty sure I have gotten it again, in fact).
Ah, fish tacos. Totally don’t remember what kind of fish were in these suckers. Don’t really even remember if the menu mentioned the kind of fish. Whitefish of some kind, yup. Anyhow, I tried eating these babies with my hands and gave up after not too long (didn’t help that I covered them with sauces). Not that this is in any way a negative mark though – many delicious items fall apart when you pick them up. This is often the nature of delicious items, in fact. Anyhow, these were really good. I appreciated having a decent sized slab of avocado for each taco. Also, my hands totally got sticky from squeezing all those limes. I am super into the lime-squeezing scene, you see. If there is a lime near me, it must be squeezed and cause all food in the vicinity to become vaguely lime-flavored. Yum!
And now, the combo plates. I believe this was a chile rellano, taquito, and taco. Actually, if I remember correctly, I was eating this while in the midst of a rather annoying hangover, and I distinctly recall having the thought “This cheese stuffed pepper would be so much more delightful if my stomach wasn’t curdling at the thought of dairy!” Yeah….one of those days. The taquito was decent enough, though nothing too spectacular. And the taco was pretty much as delightful as your standard hard shell beef taco can be. Anyhow, pretty good combo as combos go.
And, another combo. This was, from left to right, a cheese enchilada, giant pile of rice and beans, and a mystery item I have apparently forgotten (a burrito…maybe?). So, the cheese enchilada left me a little wanting. I was sober this time around and totally ready to take on some serious dairy, but the super yellow cheese on top combined with the same super yellow cheese in the middle of the enchilada was a little too…yellow for me? Too sharp? I think I’m more of a fan of white soft cheeses as enchilada fillings, to be honest. That, and I’m a bit picky about my red sauces. I’ve yet to find a good mole that agrees with me, and the enchilada sauce had all little too much of the “weird mole” edge for me. Rice and refried beans? Standard rice and refried beans, meaning they were the regular sort of delightful. Wish I could comment on Item #3 over on the right there, but my brain has disallowed me access to that particular memory. Alas!
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