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Archive for the ‘recipes’ Category
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
One night I opened the fridge to find a wilted (but not rotten) 1/2 bunch of cilantro, some ginger and not much else. I had a rib-eye in the freezer. I always have garlic, shallots, onions in the drawer and chiles from my dad’s garden in the freezer. I threw what I had in the food processor and made this dish that turned out FREAKING amazing. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down what I did.
That’s why I have this site, if I didn’t post my recipes, I could never reproduce anything I cook! So, I tried to remember what I did. And I elaborated on it with the extra items in my fridge (greens and mushrooms). It, once again, was so delish. And I took notes. Having totally improvised this though, I left it open to interpretation with the recipe title.
Recipe: Asian Beef with Stuff
Ingredients
Marinade/Sauce:
- 2T soy sauce
- 2T fish sauce
- 3T canola oil
- Handful of cilantro (stems and all)
- 2t peppercorns
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1T brown sugar
- 2 inches ginger (peeled and roughly chopped)
- 2-3 small chiles
- ~1lb of your favorite cut of beef (I usually use rib eye)
- Big pile of saute greens
- 1 c. chopped shiitakes
- 2 shallots thinly sliced
Instructions
- Put all the marinade ingredients in a food processor or blender. Zap until it’s a soupy paste. Pour that over your steak(s). Let that sit for as long as you have. In the fridge if you have a long time. If I have an hour or less, I let it sit on the counter, covered.
- Once you’re ready to cook, shake some of the marinade off the steak(s) and cook them on the stovetop until it’s the desired doneness. I like mine still mooing. Remove the steak and let it rest on a cutting board.
- Add shiitakes and greens to the pan with a little water, if needed, to loosen the crusty steak-bits. Cook for a couple of minutes then pour in the remaining marinade. Toss once in a while until mushrooms and greens are cooked.
- Remove mushrooms and greens from the pan, squeezing them with tongs or slotted spoon to remove as much of the liquid/sauce as you can. Set aside.
- Add sliced shallots to pan and reduce the remaining sauce.
- When it’s the sauce syrupy and, well, saucy, thinly slice your steak and toss it back into the sauce.
- To serve, put a mound of rice, a scoop of greens/mushrooms and top with the beef.
Quick Notes
I can’t decide if the shiitakes worked or not. Try it both ways and let me know!
Number of servings (yield): 2
Meal type: dinner
Microformatting by hRecipe.
Posted in asian, beef, dinner, food, mushrooms, photos, recipe, recipes, rice, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Thursday, March 31st, 2011
 I don’t cook with an insane amount of cream. I hate cheese. I don’t eat offal. And I wash my mushrooms in WATER…*gasp*! I don’t understand why there is such a problem with mating water with mushrooms. They grow in the RAIN for pete’s sake!!
I went for a little walk yesterday. It’s been raining here for bloody forever it seems. We finally got sunshine on Monday! It’s been gorgeous all week. Yesterday I had time to hike up to my black trumpet patch. I don’t know who designed this mushroom garden but next time, can you not put  it on such a steep hill? The picture really doesn’t have the right perspective. One wrong step and I’m sliding down an awfully long way. I precariously perch myself on the hillside, trying to plant my feet against trees or logs or rocks, some of which slip away since the ground is so saturated and muddy! What I’ll do for these yummy fungi.
I had a wonderful asparagus soup with a couple of little black trumpets as a garnish at Soif over the weekend. I decided to run with that idea and made a potato leek soup to use as my black trumpet medium. The difference here was that I had a big pile of them so there was a huge trumpet in every bite! I love being a hunter-gatherer ;-)
But even with all that washing under running water, there was grit. I tried to fool my mouth by putting a really crunchy salt on as a finisher, but I still knew there was sand and not just salt! I guess getting sand in my soup isn’t that French either.
I’m reading Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat right now and could completely relate to Grant’s story of traveling and eating in France and Italy. It took me back to L’Arpege and it was a great meal but I was so uncomfortable I had a panic attack. I would love to have amazing food in a subway station…in a park…in a living room. Anywhere that’s not so stuffy, proper and snooty. I loved Italy for that.
Someone recently told me I don’t even need to post recipes, she likes just reading my blabbing-on posts. But I just grabbed this little plug-in that I want to try out:
Recipe: Potato Leek Soup
Ingredients
- 1/2 stick butter
- 2 large potatoes
- 3 leeks (white and light green parts only)
- 1 cup white wine
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 4 cups chicken stock
- salt and pepper to taste
- Mound of black trumpets for “garnish” (optional)
Instructions
- Melt butter in a pot.
- Add chopped leeks. Cook until they start to soften and barely brown on the edges (just barely).
- Pour in wine and add garlic. Let the wine reduce almost away.
- Add chicken stock and potatoes. Simmer until potatoes are cooked.
- Pour into a food processor/blender and puree until smooth. If you want to be fancy, strain through a chinois or cheesecloth. I tend not to be fancy!
- Salt and pepper to taste. Top with sauteed mushrooms.
Cooking time (duration): 30
Number of servings (yield): 3
Meal type: dinner
Microformatting by hRecipe.
Posted in black trumpets, dinner, leeks, mushrooms, photos, potato, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
This recipe (if you can call it that, it’s so simple!) was spawned from having too little time and energy to make anything else one night and ended up being a favorite dish in the end!
- 1 chicken, cut into 6-8 pieces…I never cook the wings, I save them w/ the back for making soup and stock
- 1 lemon
- A small handful of herbs…sometimes sage, sometimes thyme
Preheat oven to 400°. Put chicken in a baking dish. Pour lemon juice over each piece. Sprinkle herbs over chicken. When I use sage I leave the leaves whole, with thyme I use whole sprigs but crumble some of the leaves off as well. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, grind some pepper on top. Bake until done!
Seriously. That’s it. I’ve had multiple people rave about this from my 6 year old son to my 70 year old dad. It’s a hit!
Posted in amateur, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
Take the leftover chicken meat, I had 2 legs and 1 breast left, and cut it into chunks. Put it in the food processor with some sauteed garlic and shallots, some chopped herbs, salt and pepper. For the amount of chicken I had left I used 2 shallots and 2 cloves of garlic, a tablespoon or so of chopped marjoram and a tablespoon of chopped thyme. Blend that all together until it’s an incorporated minced up ravioli filling.
This was a quick weeknight meal for me so I didn’t make my pasta dough, I just used gyoza wrappers. They’re quick easy ravioli wrappers and they’re perfectly square so they’re quick to fill and fold! You only have to boil them for about 2-3 minutes on low boil so they don’t break open.
For my husband and I, I sauteed up some kale in coconut oil (a tip I got from a friend, it’s yummy!), sprinkled it with some chili flakes and served the raviolis on top of that with some butter and cheese (on his). For my son i just put butter and cheese on them. Easy for the whole family!
Posted in chicken, pasta, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Sunday, January 30th, 2011
 I let my 6 year old son pick dinner the other night. He picked steamed artichokes and grilled pork chops. I love that kid.
This is the first time I’d cooked artichokes since my interview with Jason Webley, and let me tell you, I can’t look at them the same way ever again! I felt like maybe I shouldn’t be having these with my kid!
All I do to make artichokes is to cut the top of the pointiest parts and all but about 1/2″ of the stem off with a bread knife (I find it easier to use the large serrated knife so the knife doesn’t slip). Then I snip all the thorn-tips off with my kitchen shears. Rinse them off and put them in a pressure cooker with a little water. Once it reaches full pressure I cook them about 15 minutes for large globes.
The pork chops were easier than ever since he picked the already marinated ones from the butcher. It was a simple marinade of olive oil, garlic and herbs. But then all I had to do was put them on a hot grill! Easy for mom! They were fatty and completely saturated in oil which made my grill flame up like crazy so they got a bit charred but the flavor was great.
Throw in a little garlic bread and you have a quick, easy and fun-to-eat meal. Who doesn’t like to eat their way through to the heart of a thistle?
Tags: artichokes, barbecue, bbq, grill, pork chops
Posted in amateur, dinner, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Friday, January 21st, 2011
It has been like summer here in the Bay area this week. Actually more like summer than our cold summer was!
Inspired by the sun, I thought I’d grill. This was easy and turned out to be great!
First I made a vinaigrette of:
1 large shallot, minced
1 large clove of garlic, finely minced
1/4 c. champagne vinegar
1/4 c. parsley
I brushed that over my snapper fillets (I had about 1 lb of snapper). I let that sit with the vinaigrette marinade brushed on it for about 30 minutes. You can’t do it for too long because the vinegar will cure the fish and you’ll start getting ceviche!
While that was sitting, I cooked the quinoa (1 cup quinoa, 3 cups water, boil then simmer until water is gone and quinoa is tender).
I used the rest of the vinaigrette to make the quinoa salad. I added 1/2 a cucumber chopped into 1/4″ cubes and a few chopped up basil leaves…yeah, basil isn’t in season but I bought some the other day for another dish and had some left over…moment of winter weakness!
Mix the cucumber into the vinaigrette-mixture, add some salt and pepper, and when the quinoa is cooked, mix that in too. I didn’t end up using quite all the quinoa I cooked, the ratio of quinoa to cucumber would have been off. I used probably 3/4 of it.
Brush your grill with olive oil, drizzle some olive oil on your snapper fillets and grill on med-high heat for about 5 minutes per side or until the snapper is cooked through…maybe less than 5 minutes.
Then to plate put a pile of the quinoa salad, place a snapper fillet on top and VOILA!
EAT!
I sprinkled some Kilauea Onyx salt from my newly acquired salt collection on the fish. It had a nice little crunch and also has activated charcoal in it so it went well with the grill flavor.
Posted in amateur, quinoa, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring, snapper | No Comments »
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
It’s gotten cold and rainy. When that happens, I start making more pasta and soup. More comfort foods. More warming, cozy foods. One of the easiest is usually pasta with red sauce.
2 onions, chopped
3 oz pancetta, diced (optional for vegetarians…not optional otherwise!)
Cook down until onions are soft and starting to brown.
Add 1c. white wine and 2 cloves minced garlic. Cook off almost all the wine.
Add 3 cans of tomatoes (not sauce).
Rehydrate some porcinis. I put as many into my 2 cup measuring cup as I could comfortably do. It’s not 2 cups of dried porcini per se because they aren’t packed in but they add great flavor so if you have them, use them! We have a few.
Chop up the porcinis once they’re soft and add them to the sauce. Let that reduce for, oh, awhile. You want to cook off most of the water bit of the tomatoes so you have a good thick sauce. When almost all of the liquid is cooked off add a huge handful of minced herbs. I use thyme and marjoram.
When the sauce is saucy and not watery, dump it into a food processor and zap it until its perfect.
Once again, I ate before I snapped a final picture. I wish I had smell-o-vision. This is one of my favorite smells in my house: garlicky goodness.
Posted in amateur, pasta, porcinis, recipe, recipes, self pleasuring, tomatoes | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
What do you do when your dad has 7 acres of pomegranate trees? Make pomegranate juice of course. Then reduce it into a simple syrup for use on a million things!
I seeded 6 pomegranates and put the seeds into the blender. Then pressed the blended mush through a fine mesh strainer.
3 cups pomegranate juice
1 1/2 cups sugar
Reduce until it’s the consistency you want. I think it reduced it down to about 2 cups. We put it on apple crisp (our apple tree went NUTS this year).
Tags: pomegranates
Posted in recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
Oh so easy, oh so amazing. On the advice of the wonderful Rebecca from TLC Ranch (where I get my pork and eggs) I thawed the pork loin chops I bought in brine. I put about, I’d say, 1 c. of salt to about 1 gallon of water.
 In the brine I added a bay leaf and about a dozen peppercorns.
I had 2 pork chops, 1/2 lb each. I let them sit in the brine at room temperature for about 3 hours. This could sit in the fridge overnight instead but I forgot to do the prep the day before so there ya go.
I took them out of the brine, rinsed and patted them dry. I brushed them with olive oil, ground a little pepper on them and grilled them for about 8 minutes on each side.
Perfection I’m telling you!
Before I grilled the chops, I roasted some tomatillos. I left them on the grill until they started to burst. So juicy! I put those in the food processor with a clove of garlic, a jalapeno, juice of 1 lemon, some salt and pepper and that’s it! Zap that until it’s salsa-y, then spoon over anything and everything.
Tags: pork chops, tomatillo
Posted in recipe, recipes, self pleasuring | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
4 medium cucumbers (mine were actually pickling cukes)
2 small zucchini
2 cloves garlic
3T lemon juice
A small handful of basil
5-6 mint leaves
salt and pepper
Put all that in a blender or food processor and zap it until it’s soup!
I garnished with some chopped chives, a couple of quartered cherry tomatoes and some diced cucumber.
Summer at it’s best!
Along with the gazpacho, I served a grilled piece of lingcod. Any hearty white fish will do. All I did to it was sprinkle it with salt and pepper, a little olive oil drizzle and grilled it to perfection.
When it was done I put it atop a blob (that isn’t the most appetizing word is it?) of eggplant-walnut puree, a squeeze of lemon and put a little parsley on top for color.
Tags: cucumber, eggplant, lingcod
Posted in amateur, dinner, food, gazpacho, recipe, recipes, seasonal menu, self pleasuring | No Comments »
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