Redneck night. 2 slices of fried bolanoa, coated with a home made hot sauce. Can of chilipote chilies blended with a 8 oz. can of tomato puree. Cold slaw with home made dressing.

15 Bean soup, made with a ham bone, that simmered all day while we were at the gym. It's yummeh.

Heh, we had that too. I think I want to work on the seasonings, though. It was only okay. Or maybe I need more than just the joint of the ham.

Today was slow-cooker Posole. With cornbread. Not bad, but I added a can of Rotel w/habanoros.

Photos are HERE

So who forgot the thyme and bay leaves in the stew? Me. Please don't worry folks! It isn't too late. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, my beef stew has been saved!


Yes I will have my old fashioned comfort food and love it. Love it, love it! :)

Birthday Dinner ... Veal Parmesan Sandwich, Sweet Potato Fries, and work cake (pineapple butter cake) and momwolf cake (spice).

Well will you tell me what bay leaves are for? I do it, but never have solved this mystery.

Happy Birthday!

Beef/veggie/barley soup in progress... the boy decide not to wait and had dogs with kraut instead. The girl ate most of a container of strawberries and then puked the m right back up. She's babysitting a bowl of oatmeal now...

(no bay leaves in my soup but I was considering crisping some sage...)

Choking on.

Thank you!

Chopped kale sauteed with bacon, onions & red wine, seared pork chops, rustic bread. :yum:

Making pork chops cooked in Worcestershire sauce and mac n cheese and mashed pots....yummy for my hubby

Had to pick up scripts for momwolf, so I hit the salad bar.

Baby Spinach, Romaine Lettuce, and one of those mixed greens assortments, feta cheese, carrots, cukes, chickpeas, baby corns, dolmas, some kind of wheat berries with dried cranberries, walnuts, and other things I can't identify, egg salad and chicken salad. Oh, and I hit the bulk aisle and got some of those sesame stick crunchy things.

Although it contined more roughage, I probably would have been better off ordering a cheesesteak.

For once in my life, I stuck with the plan. I added a little beef stock to up the 'soup'-ish quality of the meal, added some dry rub to the thin-cut chops. Damn tasty, on a cold night.

Wolf -- cheese steak AND salad bar, nummy nummy...

I'm doing proper cookery for my parents at the moment. And loving it.
Some of the recipes will need to be tweaked before I make them again, but it's a case of try it and see first time round.

They're all low fat, high in fibre and designed to squeeze in as many of our 5-a-day as possible (recommended portions of fruit/ vegetables for a healthy lifestyle).

So far this week we have had Nasi Goreng (needed spicing up), Turkey Meatloaf (more turkey, less courgettes) and Tandoori Chicken (take out of the oven sooner - dried out a bit).

Today's dinner is Mediterranean Fish Stew. And coming up this week is Chicken Goulash with Dumplings, Cheesey Leeks, Tuna and Sweetcorn Pasta Bake and Roast Pork Chops stuffed with Apple.

My Mum loves it. For the last 40 years she has been in chrage of cooking everything in this house, except on Friday nights and Saturday lunchtimes (Dad's domain). Yes, my Dad did his fair share when they both worked shifts, but that meant cooking for us while she was working, not cooking for her. Now she's getting meals which she knows are good for her, cooked from scratch, and I also plan everything out in advance and make sure we have all the right ingredients and as little as possible goes to waste. Oh and I cook very different things that she would, which is always nice.

It's making me feel very good about being here.

I'd like to make a low fat anchovy sauce for serving with fish, or maybe as a side to liven up rice. I'd rather not have it oil based, use a creme fraiche instead, but the only creme fraiche sauces I've found use anchovy paste - which we don't have - instead of anchovies in oil, which we do.

Lemon and a dash of Tabasco feature in most recipes - yup, have those too.

Any ideas on how to put it together?

Rinse most of the oil off the anchovies and mash the fishies up to make your own anchovy paste?

Or...could maybe try a little 'Gentleman's Relish' ? Not sure where you'd get it, but I think the supermarket fine foods section usually carries it.

I haven't had it for years (used to love it on toast) so I can't recall what else is in it, but I think it's mainly anchovy paste.



[eta] just checked wiki. It's also known as 'Patum Peperium'. It's a secret mix of herbs spices etc, but it's min 60% anchovy. Also though, maybe try a 'fish sauce' instead? or Oyster sauce?

That just sounds naughty.

You Brits and your food names.

Good plan Limey, thanks.

I know where I can get Gentleman's Relish Dani, I'm just trying not to buy in anything I don't need on a regular basis. You know what I mean - one Jamie Oliver recipe calls for powdered mustard and it doesn't go down well and then the tin sits in your cupboard until the end of the world, when you finally consider eating it with braised cockroach.

Wolf - my Mum was talking about head cheese earlier this week. It's a dish made from pig's head and trotters, that her Grandmother made. She understood the double entendre, she just didn't understand why I couldn't get over it. Every time she said it again, I sniggered. I was out of favour for a while after that - nostalgic family stories about food are nothing to be sniggered at.

We have head cheese here too.

We don't eat it either.

But you guys have spotted dick. Somehow we managed to escape that. Maybe it had to do with not having gone through a plague and a great fire? Well, we had our great fire, I guess (Chicago), but still no spotted dick.

Jeez, wolf, it's just raisins in the pudding, and most of the pudding seems to be farina.

It's just old is all - names and words and their meanings change.
I'm more worried about the Bowdlerisation of street names going on at the moment. If you happen to live on a tiny, ancient alley called Cuntbucket Lane, because prostitutes used it as a cut through to get to the Docks, you should be proud of the history!

Still, at least there's a trend of changing pub names back to the original, after the annoying '90s trend of comedy names - Frog & Nightgown, Slug & Lettuce etc.

Hee -- I'd drink in a place called Frog & Nightgown, particularly on nights with live Irish music by live Irish musicians. All the more so if their material ventures across the North Channel, aye, the Minch.

We went to the Goat and the Tricycle, when I was in Bournemouth...

This is a fictional pub in Achewood. Surprised flint didn't post it yet

http://cellar.org/2009/dudeandcatastrophe.jpg

cheesesteak here :D (back to the original topic and all)

Just made Spiced Apple Cake as a treat. Low fat recipe I haven't tried before, but I read through the ingredients (only had to buy apples) and the method and it looked just fine to me.

All was going great! Everything as it should!

Until...

Well you see I read the description a while back. And after all it is called Spiced Apple Cake. I checked I had the right sized tin, weighed everything carefully, couldn't see how anything could go wrong. In hindsight I should have rechecked the description, which says that this is a "biscuit style" cake. Then again, maybe the person who wrote the recipe should have advised you to ROLL the two layers out. Roll them out, cut them to size, place in tin.

Nope. I "spread" or in reality squash "less than a half" of the dough - and it is a dough, think cookies, although it is not called that, it is called a mixture - into the tin. Then add the layer of pureed apple. Now... oh. Add the rest to the top and smooth out gently. But I can't! It's sticky dough, not cake mix. It doesn't smooth out, especially on a fluid layer of apple. Had I really understood the recipe, of course I would have rolled it out and cut it to size and placed gently on top. But I was following a damned recipe! It's the reason people buy low fat recipe books!

I have cut the screaming and swearing out of this. But I do feel let down, and yet personally responsible. The worst of both worlds. Mostly, I laugh at culinary disasters. And if it's someone else's I can always find something to praise and to salvage. But this time I'm afriad self pity and pathos have kicked in. I peeled six cooking apples, all excited, thinking my parents would be really impressed with me. I rubbed in the marge (something I hate doing) and got gunk under my nails. And if ONLY it had made it clear it was a rolled out dough, not a spreadable one... ah well. Sure more experienced cooks would have got that immediately (self pity again - arrrgh).

Like every single other recipe from this book, it requires amendments before trying it again. I just don't think I can be arsed. I'll stick to brown rice with beans and low fat yoghurts in future. This is the nail in the coffin of enjoying cooking :mecry:

My only consolation - the house smells gorgeous. Apples and spice and baking.
There's that at least :)

Biscuit cake non-cake.
Lump of non-spreadable-on-apple dough on top.
Small spoonful out of left corner tasted okay. But how would you serve something like that? Apart from straight into the bin.

Don't worry, I have a review of my meds tomorrow.
And yes, that is my Slytherin mug. My Dad bought it for me (?)

lol...I'm sorry. Maybe it tastes good?

Eh, presentation, schmesentation.

Looks more like beef brisket that got cold and all the fat firmed over.

Mmmm-mmmm, makes it even more appetising having that in my head :lol:

There are three possible explanations for the 'dick' part of spotted dick. One is that it is a shortened form of pudding (essentially the last syllable, softened from ding to dich/k), another is that 'dick' is a corruption of dough (like duff) and another is that it comes from the german word for thick.

You might find this amusing, from The Straight Dope:


Mmmmm....dick cheese.

'

Lesson to be learned here. Don't make apple cake unless the word "Jewish" is in front of the words "Apple" and "Cake."

Do you want to post the recipe and see if others end up with the same? The recipe could just be bad, and your cooking is perfectly fine.

I peeled the top off and blitzed the dry part. It's now a crumble topping and we will eat it tonight. The recipe is fine, as long as you don't expect the cakey part to have a cake mix texture. The bad is in the description. It's a DOUGH and should be treated as such.

Mum also says, she has never used 6 apples for anything except maybe a crumble, so a 6 apple filling for a CAKE is already an issue. Given that she raised us on home cooking, I accept her opinion.

If you are still interested I am more than happy to post the recipe. It'll be in English measurements though. If you make it better than me following the given instructions I will wilt slightly, but will accept the education.

Made Leek & Potato soup this afternoon.
Well, I had some leeks I needed to get rid of.
Seem to have made rather a lot though...

I put some Ass Kickin' Hot mustard in it. Good because it tastes GREAT. Bad because it means Mum won't help me with it.

I wonder if there are any homless shelters in need of a hot soup in the coming cold spell?!

Lunch today: red beans and rice with smoked sausage. Nom nom nom

Can you put it in single portion quantities in the freezer? That's what I'd do!

Trouble is, what to put it in.
I don't have enough tupperware, and defrosting from bags always seems to get messy.

I guess I try the bags again and just be more careful this time :)

Freeze it in muffin cups, the take them out frozen and place in bags... then when you want some, take one or two out, put in a bowl and defrost that way.

As Jaydaan says, or use the tupperware and then decant into bags ...

Not that is a great idea!
I don't know what a muffin cup is, but we have plenty of mugs I could half-fill. Only question is - can I be sure they will come out once they're frozen? Should I grease them first (slightly wary of this as it is an ultra low-fat soup).

Actually I seem to remember doing this before, in a bowl, then having to leave the bowl in the freezer for the next week...

I'm not very capable I'm afraid!

You could probably substitute individual yorkshire pudding trays for muffin cups.
How about empty yoghurt pots, margerine tubs, plastic beakers, small flower pots (!) all lined with plastic bags, then pour the soup into those - freeze and voila! Greasing them is probably a good idea all the same ...
(I expect you've eaten all the soup by now!)

If they do freeze solid to the bottom of the cup/tin, just plonk the bottom of the tin into HOT water for 10 seconds. It will thaw enough to remove the soup-sicle, and the melted soup should re-freeze to the 'sicle without any trouble. Then chuck them all into a freezer bag.

I didn't cook last night! I ordered a pizza delivery. I am not a huge pizza fan, but I now realise thats because most ofthe pizza round here is shit. I don't like the Pizza King, I don't like Balti House and Pizza Palace pizzas...and I despise frozen pizzas.

So anyway, a flyer from Dominoes hit my mat the other day and I thought oh fuck it....go on then...so twice in the last 3 days I ordered pizza. Being able to pay by card over the phone is dangerous!

So yesterday for tea, J and I shared: a 7" bacon and double cheese, a 9 1/2" Hot and Spicy, a combo box with chicken kickers, potato wedges and three different dips and a portion of two frosted waffles with dips.

Lovely. Mmm. Nicest waffles for ages.

You need a silicon muffin pan. They are non stick and flexible, you just turn them over and push whatever you've made out of each cup. Just remember to put it on a cookie sheet before filling with liquid or its hard to pick up.

More proof that Brits are just fundamentally more reasonable about their serving sizes. The smallest pizza Domino's even offers here is ten inches, and in my experience (working there for several years as a teen,) absolutely no one orders it.

Not dinner but lunch today I had a sandwich with hommus, baby spinach, tomato and cheese.

I'm so tired I thought I could do with the extra iron and vit c I might get from such a sanger.

The freezer provided our dinner tonight. I'd put up some vegetable barley soup. It was delicious.

One of my favorite "regular" recipes, boneless pork chops in a dijon mustard sauce with shallots and cream (substitute half-n-half).

Very easy, very quick, awesome delicious.

Bloodyhell, that looks tasty, Toad!

Mm HHHMMMMMMmmmmmmm!
Homemade pizza ...
Bread machine dough, topped with
tinned chopped tomatoes
chopped onion
chopped cooked beef
sliced chorizo
grated cheese
(I sprinkled a few capers on mine, too!)

Oooooooooooh, lovely!
Although... are they intentionally [ahem] darker than average?
Not judging of course, I am quite comfortable with pizzas of a more swarthy complexion...

And can I have jalapenos on mine please?

Irish Nachos. I got carried away with the cheese.

buster...would you come and be my personal chef for the next couple of months?

The dishes you've been producing here lately get my mouth watering every time!

crepes filled with ricotta and asparagus, seasoned with lemon zest, tarragon and dill, with smoked salmon on top...

buster knows his way around food. That's for sure.

Yes, they were a little dark but I've had no complaints.
Jalapenos - of course my dear!

Foil wrapped sweet taters, on rack, baking on wood heater. In blue frog pot, Le Cr*something.
I tried this in an aluminum pot, didn't seem to hold heat like cast iron. IMHO.

Le Creuset, non?