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Author Topic: Recipe and Cook's Corner  (Read 398538 times)

Offline gnash

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #435 on: October 17, 2006, 07:10:35 AM »
and omg.  You ate your BBM BBQ beans!?!?!?  LMAO!  We've practically bronzed ours!  The two cans are sitting side by side on the top shelf of the bookcase, flanked by one of Pat Sinnott's pictures and the plaque that Chucky gave me.   **sniff sniff*  It's like a mini-altar! lol.

LOL, yes -- but i saved the can. hey, we wuz hungry. ;D

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Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #436 on: October 17, 2006, 12:54:28 PM »
The recipe I follow for roasting cauliflower (you can mix with broccoli as well) is to first toss the flowerettes with olive oil, crushed garlic , salt and pounded coriander seeds (not ground). Those little explosions of coriander when you chew make all the difference.


Offline ImEnnisShesJack

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #437 on: October 17, 2006, 06:25:06 PM »
OOOh!  Sounds manifique!

LOVE coriander seed heads...tend to eat them right out of the garden when no one is watching....
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Offline gnash

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #438 on: October 21, 2006, 01:44:06 AM »
this is a 360 degree composite with my friend (in orange) at the korean 24 hour TOFU house....  btw, this should be viewed from right to left, with the menu first and the meal last.

i had the bowl of BIBIM BAP shown on the left --  a big bowl of veggies and whatnot -- dandelion leaves, odd greens and root vegetables, fresh bean sprouts, grated cucumber and carrot, tofu, shiitake, egg strips, pickled onion and other yummy things. hot rice is plopped on top, you mix it all up with spicy korean ketchup in vigorous strokes with steel knitting needle type chopsticks. just delicious.

my friend had the CORVINA/soon tofu combination: a big broiled fish alongside a spicy tofu stew bubbling in a stone cauldron...

okay and here is the kicker -- the neighboring tablemates after our food arrived were a trio of young boisterous koreans teenagers out having fun. when their fish arrived (a small fish is given as an appetizer along with all the other stuff -- kimchee, spicy raw oysters and jalapeño in a miso paste, seaweed salads, pickles, etc.) the girl, an asian britney spears lookalike, grabbed her metal sticks and deftly snatched the eyes out of their sockets. "i want the eyes!" she cried out, popping them in her hello kitty mouth. she insisted that they are good for health, and her friend (a boy in saggerz who kept playing with his cigarette lighter) said that some koreans believe eating fish eyes will help human eyesight....  so i had to try it at least once.


corvina eye, plucked out to be eaten

it was like a bite of concentrated ocean parts, a bit metallic, sorta greasy, like concentrated fish oil. kinda like i imagine squid ink tastes. odd... there was a hard ocular membrane inside that was spit out, but the girl said that should be eaten too. ummm, i didn't bother with the other one!  :-X :P ;D

i'd rather have a carrot, lol.


"Brokeback is about a lost paradise, an Eden."  – Ang Lee


Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #439 on: October 21, 2006, 04:28:06 PM »
Where do you buy food? Here are some photos from the Saturday market near us.
These are some of the vendors I patronise:




Organic veg grower




This man grows onions and garlic and drives 2 hours to get to this market.



In summer he picks wild blueberries in the mountains and sells them. (More like combs for them, as he uses a  thing with metal teeth to rake through the bushes.) In autumn he gathers mushrooms. I buy his blueberries but not mushrooms as we have plenty growing around us. Those are cèpes, called porcini mushrooms in Italy. Not sure what they are called in English. Boletus, I think.




Philippe has some of his bee hives not far from our house.



This bread has apricot and orange bits in it.



In the foreground is "ventreche" (ventre = belly). We buy this thinly sliced for bacon.



Pig hearts. (I don't care for offal, though.)



The piece of meat in background is pork roast wrapped around prunes and pineapple.



The have a poster showing the farm where the pigs they butcher are raised.



This guy mainly sells organic cheese and yogurt but this time of year also has herbs and greens.



The cheese van.



Several types of sheep cheese.



The horse meat van. (I've never tried it.)








Offline Laurentia

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #440 on: October 22, 2006, 01:35:45 AM »
First off - thanks so much for all the pumpkin input! I've been so busy since I asked, I haven't been able to catch up in here, but thanks, everyone!

About the Korean restaurant adventure  :) - there seems to be a number of eye-eating little rituals around. In parts of Scandinavia where they have much sheep (I've heard of this practice from Iceland, Norway, and the Swedish island Gotland) there's a dish called various things, but it's the cooked head of a sheep or lamb, sometimes halved so you have the sheep's profile staring up at you from the plate. Now, of course it's MANLY to ostentatiously eat the eye, so either you pick it out of the socket and eat it, or you get it served in a little glass of vodka and it's supposed to be swallowed whole with the vodka shot. The latter sounds a little less icky, I think.

Oh, Chapeaugris, what lovely pictures! I wish I had a market like that nearby! Look at those mushrooms...and the bread! They call those petit pains? Then how big are the normal-sized loaves?  :D  And 1.50 euros for a bread like that is a bargain in my opinion. It's very nice to have pictures of where the meat comes from, and that cheese van...aahh. Not so sure about the horse meat van, though...but there's quite a queue, do people prefer horse meat for some reason?

I read somewhere that the general distaste in Europe for horse meat comes from the effort of the Church to erase Pagan ways a thousand years ago. Apparently, horses were often sacrificed and the meat eaten in some kind of religious context, so the Church made it out to be disgusting and sinful. I don't know if it's true, but it's interesting, and in Scandinavia, the horse butcher used to be one of the lowest-ranking people in society even in the 19th century. There's even a common derogative that was originally the term for that job.
http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking - unit conversions for the kitchen!

Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #441 on: October 22, 2006, 04:17:12 AM »
Not many people eat horsemeat -- that's all one family in front of the stand. The tradition is kind of dying out, though it revived a bit during the mad cow scare.

I think the petit pain is the one behind the big one in the foreground.

I checked out that cooking conversion site link you put in your signature. Incredibly useful! I have American, British and French cookbooks and have to juggle scales and measurements all the time.

Offline gnash

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #442 on: October 22, 2006, 07:24:44 AM »
laurentia -- sheep eye vodka shots!! that's hardcore!  ;D  sorta like eating the worm with the tequila i guess ;)

chapeaugris, thanks for the photo field trip to the farmer's market! WOWOWOW, so that's what porcini looks like? we only find it dried here, in little shavings! i will look harder for fresh,,, i absolutely love porcini.

the bread and herbs look wonderful too....  and those big bunches of radishes... mmm. we have farmer's markets here too, or that's what we call them, where they will close off a street and vendors set out their organic foodstuffs. mostly fruit and vegetables tho, honey, hand milled soaps, candles, etc.. but i've never seen horsemeat.

luckily, california is a great place to grow green things so we do have an abundance of great markets. also, the abundance of varying cultures -- mexican, chinese, korean, japanese (i looove our japanese market, they have the best KYOHO grapes, like a glass of wine in every grape!), armenian, indian, etc. -- make for some interesting food shopping.

oh. when i was visiting japan, we were served an elaborate dinner at a grand hotel and one of the tiny dishes contained a new type of sushi.  chewy and red and raw and sort of grainy,  almost gritty, and tasted metalllic. you were to swish it in a miso/soy sauce mixture, i think, before popping the tiny morsel in your mouth. anyway, i didn't like it and only afterwards did we learn that it was raw horse meat... a delicacy!

all i could think of was spaghetti and soda-pop -- not the food, the two horses my sister and i rode back home in colorado. haven't had it since, but i do eat other meats, so i can't altogether say horse is different from cow or rabbit or.. froglegs.  lol.  but you know what, ever since i got a pet rabbit, i haven't been able to bring myself to eat rabbit stew, even tho it was one of my favorite dishes in my younger days... :-\ :-\

PS: i made the pumpkin/mango curry AGAIN... LOL. again with kabocha squash, and it's soo good. one squash two mangos. they don't even have to be fully ripe! once can of stock and one can of coconut milk, a good fragrant curry, a fried onion in some oil..... and this time i added corn that i'd shaved off from leftover cobs boiled the night before. it was good -- everything is sweet, the corn, the kabocha, the mango, and add to that the spiciness of the curry.. yummy. it's great over rice, a wonderful fall dish. i might add raisins, toasted coconuts, if i have some handy.  i think even peas might be good in this. sweet peas, of course, or maybe snow. ;)

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Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #443 on: October 22, 2006, 07:37:23 AM »
PS: i made the pumpkin/mango curry AGAIN... LOL. again with kabocha squash, and it's soo good. one squash two mangos. they don't even have to be fully ripe! once can of stock and one can of coconut milk, a good fragrant curry, a fried onion in some oil..... and this time i added corn that i'd shaved off from leftover cobs boiled the night before. it was good -- everything is sweet, the corn, the kabocha, the mango, and add to that the spiciness of the curry.. yummy. it's great over rice, a wonderful fall dish. i might add raisins, toasted coconuts, if i have some handy.  i think even peas might be good in this. sweet peas, of course, or maybe snow. ;)
Oh, you're killing me! Our market is great, but there are so many things you can't get.

I love rabbit. Once I read a French article about the Tour de France and the writer described the cyclists as being "thin as rabbits". That puzzled me, because rabbits don't look that thin. Then I realised he meant skinned rabbits, like you see at the butcher's.

Last fall while on a walk, my husband found a hare that had just expired after having been shot by a hunter, who hadn't managed to find it. It was still warm, so he brought it home. Our neighbor skinned it for us, then we hung it in the shower stall for a couple of days. Then marinated it in wine and other things for 24 hours and stewed it. It was delicious but our kids wouldn't touch it. Later, I saw an email my daughter sent to a friend in the States: "My parents are so disgusting! They found a dead rabbit on the ground and ate it."

Offline gnash

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #444 on: October 22, 2006, 03:33:04 PM »
^^  LOL.....  as opposed to finding one refrigerated in a grocery store....  ;)

yes, a fat plump rabbit *is* good eating, for some. :) ;D  i was also fond of the lime marinated rabbit dish they served at restaurant up in oakland, CA.

hmm, now i'm picturing jake as lance armstrong, in a cute furry rabbit costume...  that fuzzy little tail, hahah.  :D


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Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #445 on: October 23, 2006, 12:18:36 AM »
I bought a cookbook by a chef of a restaurant in Boston just for the recipe for braised rabbit with a sauce that contained not only spices used for game but also chocolate and chilies. It's similar to a Mexican "mole". It's incredibly good and unusual, and I serve it, along with with walnut noodles, when I want to impress French people. It's so unlike anything they've had here. Americans have such a bad culinary reputation here (the French think all we eat are hamburgers) that when I have people over for dinner I feel I really have to make a supreme effort yet not serve them anything typically French.

Offline Laurentia

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #446 on: October 23, 2006, 12:43:01 AM »
"My parents are so disgusting! They found a dead rabbit on the ground and ate it."

 :D   :D   :D   :D   :D   :D   :D   :D ...
http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking - unit conversions for the kitchen!

Offline gnash

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #447 on: October 23, 2006, 07:06:14 AM »
I bought a cookbook by a chef of a restaurant in Boston just for the recipe for braised rabbit with a sauce that contained not only spices used for game but also chocolate and chilies. It's similar to a Mexican "mole". It's incredibly good and unusual, and I serve it, along with with walnut noodles, when I want to impress French people. It's so unlike anything they've had here. Americans have such a bad culinary reputation here (the French think all we eat are hamburgers) that when I have people over for dinner I feel I really have to make a supreme effort yet not serve them anything typically French.

hamburgers! ...well, those can be good too! ;)

but oh my goodness, the walnut noodles sound amazing. who is the chef, is his recipe online do you think? i'd love to try it, with or without the rabbit.  i love the chocolate mole sauces in mexican food, a favorite type of enchilada for me, the sauce is rich and has a great texture.

:::googling walnut noodles:::



"Brokeback is about a lost paradise, an Eden."  – Ang Lee


Offline fritzkep

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #448 on: October 23, 2006, 07:54:26 AM »
For any French people who think that Americans have a bad culinary reputation, I've got two words for them:

NOUVELLE-ORLÉANS!!!

 :D

Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen, "Verweile doch! Du bist so schön..."

Offline chapeaugris

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Re: Recipe and Cook's Corner
« Reply #449 on: October 23, 2006, 02:24:50 PM »
Sweet-and-Sour Braised Rabbit with Chocolate

1 rabbit, cut up

1/4 tsp hot red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground allspice
1/8 tsp mace
Flour for dredging

1/2  cup oil
1/4 lb (250 g) thickly sliced pancetta, diced small
1 small onion, chopped
12 shallots, peeled
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tsp tomato paste
2 1/2 cups chicken stock
2 Tbsp sugar
1 cup Marsala
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 Tbsp crushed fennel seeds
1/4 Tbsp crushed juniper berries
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 oz semisweet chocolate, finely chopped



Combine the first 4 spices with flour. Sprinkle rabbit pieces with salt and pepper then toss them in the seasoned flour. Heat 3 tbsp vegetable oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat and brown the rabbit pieces on all sides. Place the rabbit pieces in a heavy pot.

Add the pancetta to the sauté pan and cook over medium heat until the fat starts to render, 1-2 mins. Add the onion, shallots, and garlic and stir them about until they start to brown. Add the tomato paste and cook for 1 more minute. Transfer the vegetables to the pot with the rabbit.

Deglaze the sauté pan with the chicken stock. bring the stock to a boil, scraping the bottom of the pan with a spoon to dissolve any crispy bits in the hot liquid. Pour over the rabbit.

Melt the sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat. Remove it from the heat as soon as it caramelizes. Stir in the Marsala and 2 tablespoons of the red wine vinegar in a slow stream. As soon as the liquid is blended with the caramelized sugar, pour the mixture into the pot with the rabbit.

Add the fennel seeds, juniper berries, cayenne pepper, and bay leaf to the pot and bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer. Cover and cook until the rabbit is tender but not falling off the bone, about 30  minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 200° F / 95° C

Transfer the rabbit to a heatproof platter and place in the oven. Reduce the braising liquid over high heat until it's thick enough to coat  the back of a spoon.. Lower the heat, add the chocolate and the remaining 2 tablespoons of vinegar and stir until the chocolate melts completely. Taste--the flavor should be a balance of sweet and sour. Add more vinegar if necessary. Discard the bay leaf and season with salt and pepper. Pour the sauce over the rabbit and serve.



This recipe is from In the Hands of a Chef, by Jody Adams who has a restaurant called Rialto in Boston (or did, when I bought the book a few years ago).