The Food Thread

I out did myself and made a delicious paella for friends tonight.
Best thing I ever cooked.

Shrimp cooks really fast. Saute it quickly (like until it's pink on one side, flip, get it pink on the other side, so maybe a minute per side), get it out of the pan,make and reduce your sauce, then put the shrimp back in to warm through or just pour the sauce over. Also with all the acid in the sauce it may have toughened the shrimp if they sat in it for any period of time.

You may have practically ceviche'd them just with the lime juice and brine.

But yeah, I agree, they only need like two minutes, keep 'em moving.

Somebody on the food thread of the actual Tolerability Index article a few weeks back said they marinated some chicken legs in kimchi overnight, then roasted them, and that sounds just amazing.

Last night I went rooting around in the spice cabinet and I finally made this (which is actually Indian that I got at an import store) because we're running low on groceries and I wanted something vegetarian for lent (despite not practising), and what could've been a near disaster actually turned out great.

-Firstly the instructions are very small and somewhat glib so it was difficult to process
-Usually foreign instructions give you what the weight of each ingredient should be, but it just vaguely said things like 'half a cabbage' or onion, and I was worried that american veggies are probably much bigger than asian ones since we breed things to be huge and not for flavor.
-It said to use maida, but white flour worked fine and I'm sure there's probably no real difference
-I didn't have any cabbage (I don't like cabbage anyway) so I used slightly yellow kale which didn't overpower in the flavors or be tough like I feared it would
-Most of my last onions sprouted and went slightly moldy (I needed two) so I had to salvage the good parts, and I needed to 'grate' the veggies so I put those in the food processor but some parts were still chunky which made making the dough balls slightly difficult
--I also had a terrible attack of onion-eyes so I was somewhat unwilling to chop them even further.
-I had less oil to fry with than I thought I would, so I filled it in with some (actually kind of low quality) olive oil, and I know you shouldn't fry with olive oil since it burns at higher temps, but it was ok since the instructions said to do so on low heat. 
-it turned out that nearly every pot I pulled out was dirty so I ended up doing a bunch of scrubbing during the cooking
-I wanted a thicker sauce so I used two cups of water for the sauce, but then it was glue like and still powdery so I kept on having to add more water. I just now realized that UK cups are smaller by like 20%
-Before hand I cooked some short grain sushi rice which was a surprising PITA to clean and prep. I did so with the intention of using some furikake and seaweed chips to make some rice balls like onigiri, but I was so overwhelmed I just served it plain which worked out alright because the fish flakes probably would of been too much. Also the rice was perfect to soak up the sauce. {Here's a video to make onigiri if you're curious}

I didn't use peppers like it called for, and it turned out to be just the right amount of spicy enough for most people. The sauce had a really nice flavor and soaked well into the veggie dough balls and rice, so now I almost want to find out if I could just make this all by hand.

I give it two thumbs up, just prep better than I did.

/edit: since I am an idiot with hindsight, I searched youtube and it turns out they show you how to do it. Hurrrrr

Sounds like a great chili.

And these were pre-shelled, pre-deveined, by my supermarket - because I'm a wuss.

I've long heard about the shell thing, but I don't like the idea of having to peel them, especially if they're hot or have sauce on them. So I typically make a stock out of the shells and then incorporate that into whatever sauce I'm doing.

I made some tofu with a lighter, experimental marinade last night.

The night before I cut a whole pack of firm tofu, as opposed to my usual half a packet (as it was about to go if not used), into four fillets, put it in a ziplock bag. The marinade, from what I remember of what I did, was good helping of lemon juice and rice vinegar, some sesame oil, a little white wine vinegar, chopped chili, garlic and ginger, sea salt and a little soy sauce. Chucked it in the bag, and put it in the fridge overnight. A few hours before cooking, I also put in some sage and chives. Then when cooked, I fried on a mostly medium temperature for a few minutes until browning, before adding some marinade to the pan and cooking a higher temperature.

To go with it, I baked a couple of hefty potatoes, and to go inside the potatoes, I sauteed some silverbeet (or as perverts might know it, chard) with garlic and tomatoes. I separated the stalks from the leaves, sauteed the stalks for like 5 minutes or so until they started getting brown and crisp, added some garlic and shortly threreafter the leaves and the tomatoes along with some lemon juice and seasoning, and after about a minutes, turned off the heat and covered the pan while leaving it on the element for about 5 minutes. I may have given it a quick blast again with some heat before serving, but I can't remember enough to be sure.

The marinade could use work, but was decent enough to start with, the rice vinegar keeping it edible, which with four fillets could have been too much if it was overly acidic. I liked the sauteed silverbeet and tomato to go with the potatoes, although the silverbeet leaves do absorb the lemon juice quite readily.

I once ordered what was listed as chard in a seed catalog, and ended up getting a seed packet that said "silverbeet".  That's literally the only other time, prior to Great Unwashed's pervy turn of phrase, that I've seen it referred to that way.  I think we're the normal ones here. 

Yes, that's pretty unassailable reasoning. Sorry on the fish sauce recommendation then, should have caught that.

That's something I've often wondered myself and I know that what other countries and cultures consider "vegetarian" aren't by US standards. Fish sauce in Thai and Vietnamese cooking is a prime example since they both do seem to have otherwise "vegetarian" approaches. I know in Italy, too, there's been problems for vegetarians from the US going over there, asking if something is vegetarian and being told it is, only to find anchovies, or pancetta, or meat broth in there, because those are "flavoring" and not the main aspect of the dish.

So at a client meeting a few weeks ago, my thoughts wandered off to food and I suddenly realized I hadn't made sausage in several years. So this weekend I bought a 15 lb pork shoulder from costco, some pork belly, ground them up together, and then spent an interminable 4-5 hours working on them. I miscalculated the amount of meat, and made different varieties of sausage, but wound up with only 4 or 5 links of each, and only 3 links of Italian sausage, which was the whole reason I set out to make it to begin with. I used my kitchenaid sausage stuffer and it went ridiculously slow, clogging up repeatedly. I went online and found plenty of sites with people complaining about how slow KAs are, and you're better buying a separate machine to do it. Argh.

Dinner was sausage cooked over a bed of potatoes in a cast iron skillet on the grill, which almost made it all worth it. Almost.

That sucks that the sausage stuffer sucked so bad, but on the bright side, now you have an excuse to get a fun new kitchen gadget!  (You are welcome to send me any extra fresh sausages you have.  Mmmm...  What other varieties did you make, besides the scant few Italian ones?)

My culinary adventure this weekend was making fresh ricotta.  You guys, it's like a foodstuff miracle!  You heat milk, stir in some vinegar... and cheese happens.  Like, almost immediately.  I was so excited!  And it was crazy delicious!  Not very efficient, what with a quart of milk yielding 7 ounces of cheese, but still!  I'm a cheesemaker now!

I made paneer that way once! It's so cool!