Food burbling

[kaberett]

Tonight: pasta (tagiatelle?) with lightly sauteed courgette strips + lemon zest&juice + cheese of some description. Also salad.

This week: 1x courgette fritters + bread. 1x something involving potato salad.

The Thing In The Future:
2x cheese-and-onion quiche, thyme-and-rosemary crust
potato salad (V,GF)
peas (V,GF)
Grünensalat (V,GF)

big pot o' daal (V,GF)
rice (V,GF)
yoghurt-mint-cucumber (GF)

tiramisu??? apple pie?? cake??

Timings:
make 2x quiche crusts sometime before the weekend; freeze
pick up booze, ice-cream, halloumi over next weekend/Mon/Tues
caramelise a fucktonne of onions on Wednesday night; stick in fridge
boil potatoes either Weds or Thurs

Shopping list:
onions (no, more than that)
garlic
ginger
brown flour
Tomaten
Gurke
Paprika?
red onion
leaves of some description
all the lemons
butter (no, more than that)
eggs (12 should do? maybe 18)
small potatoes
spring onions
appropriate cheese
alcohol
sorbet
moooooore fruit juice
yoghurt
halloumi
milk!
(veg oil, tomato passata)

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

Do you have a website where you get these recipes from??? I know I won't be able to make them GOOD, but I could at least try. So much of what you eat sounds soooo good.

[kaberett]

>>; Mostly I get the recipes from having been cooking for myself for the better part of 15 years and really enjoying it and consequently playing around a lot. The impetus to start came from (1) me turning veggie, and my mum telling me she would put up with it provided I cooked my own sodding food, because she already had to cater for one picky carnivore and one lactose-intolerant person and was blowed if she was going to cook three meals every evening, which, well, fair enough; and (2) at my secondary school taking a Design&Technology GCSE was mandatory; given choices of Food Tech, Textiles, something Graphic Design-y, woodwork, and maaaybe something a bit electrical??? I picked cooking, so slightly to my astonishment I have a qualification in food prep, heh. (Given the choice again I might go for woodwork these days, but that's because I'm still kinda scared of DIY and not at all of cooking; but if the trade-off was not getting to keep being this comfortable with food then... yeah, Food Tech all over again.) These days most of my main dishes (I use recipes for baking; strongly recommend Smitten Kitchen) emerge as a mash-up of things I've eaten and liked, though in addition to Smitten Kitchen I also read the Pioneer Woman Cooks pretty regularly (though she irritates the shit out of me in... a lot of ways). Sometimes if I'm wanting to make something I've eaten once that is way outside my repertoire - or if I've looked at a set of ingredients and gone "I'm pretty sure this'll work, lemme just see if the internet agrees" (which resulted in beetroot-apple-carrot soup last weekend - TOL had a pile of beets and carrots that needed using, and that household always has apples) - I will search the 'net for pre-existing recipes and pick-and-mix between, say, the 5 recipes that look most interesting to me/the closest to what I'm aiming for.

A lot of this is helped by having a completely ridiculous spice collection at this point (accumulated gradually over years); also by having been the kind of über-privileged brat who travelled very very widely w/ parents as a child (and as an adult I have to some extent deliberately sought out food I haven't had before, or at least been open to trying things when other people have suggested 'em).

Consequently a lot of my recipes are... well, I kinda keep joking about eventually, one day, writing a recipe book titled "Cook Until Done", & My Useless Ex still gives me the side-eye every time I tell him how to make something I've cooked him with "and then take some onions and the right amount of pasta for the number of people you're trying to feed..."

But! I am practising writing Actual Recipes with Actual Quantities And Timings for the sake of other people, so -- if I ever mention making something and you wanna have a recipe, let me know and I will try to work it out/type it up :-) (And as for the courgette fritters, my recipe is heavily adapted from the concept over at the Pioneer Woman; I think my own recipe is buried somewhere in my "food" tag (and for slightly easier sorting all my recipes are tagged food:description).

So. Er. Yes. That is some of the thing!

[quirkytizzy]

These are amazing links - thank you! And The Pioneer Woman seems like a great resource for REAL food. Like, food where you can tell what ingredients are actually in the dish. I have such a love for processed foods, but over the last couple of years, I've begun to appreciate simple dishes where the FOOD, not the process, is what brings out the flavor.


You would be AWESOME for cooking, what with the science background. There's an American cook show, Alton Brown. He's a huge nerd and spends huge portions of his show talking about how molecules and various atomic makeup of items interact with each other. (He was actually the only reason I passed a Science quiz in school about the different forms of heat transfer, lol.) Being a vegetarian would definitely make for an interest in cooking. When your food choices are restricted, you have to get more creative and put more effort into it, or else you'll just wind up with iceberg salads all the time.

I like that you experiment. That's what I try to do - not yet with any success, but I keep hearing that one day the effort pays off and BAM, you have a tasty dish.

Spices are something I do not understand AT ALL. Mostly as in, how to make them stick. I'll spice the hell out of something and it won't show up as flavor. A friend of mine said salt helps with that.

What do you do with your spices?

I really love these links - and now I'm combing through your food tag. Thank you!

[kaberett]

Spices: when you add them seems to be pretty key. Whole spices tend to want to get added early and ground spices tend to want to get added late. Fresh herbs late, dried herbs middling. And of course how fresh they are (especially if they're ground, which gives a greater surface area for the aromatic & volatile flavour compounds to escape) is a factor.

Salt is something I am... still learning to cook with, heh - my mum doesn't use it at all, and I'm just beginning to get the hang.

Years and years ago deborahc gave me a copy of Molecular Gastronomy for a birthday -- I still need to finish reading it. Every now and again I pick it up and read a couple and then get to Yet Another Section on meat and put it aside To Come Back To and then... fail to, so it's really slow going, heh. >>;