recipe weekend
Something I've cooked recently: Yesterday I finally cooked the soup with rice and chicken livers that I wanted to cook weeks ago. Being me, I didn't follow Marcella Hazan's recipe but adapted it for my own purposes. I sweated a couple of moderate-sized shallots in some olive oil, added a good glug of sherry and let it cook down most of the way, then added a BIG container of low-sodium chicken broth. (I had to make a lot of soup, because it's hard to find chicken livers in small quantities where I live, and they don't keep.) I also added a quarter cup of rinsed basmati rice and let that simmer until the rice was almost tender. Then I added a little over a pound of chicken livers, trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces, let that cook for a minute or so, then threw in a couple of big handfuls of spinach. Oh, and at some point while the rice was cooking I added a few drops of fish sauce for a little umami kick. Result = delicious.
When I went shopping on Thursday I impulse-bought some dandelion greens, which I've never eaten before. Today I blanched some for about a minute in boiling water to reduce the bitterness, drained them, then cooked them in olive oil and garlic and ate them with some of the fava bean and potato puree that I cooked a while ago and have been keeping in the freezer. I put the greens in the bottom of a shallow pasta bowl and poured the puree over them. That was my breakfast* this morning, actually, and it was yummy.
*"Breakfast foods" are not usually my preferred breakfast foods. I like bacon and eggs, and I like pancakes and that sort of thing, but not all the time. So when I have leisure for a cooked breakfast it's often some kind of food more associated with lunch or dinner. Yesterday for breakfast I had tacos, though I suppose they were "breakfast tacos" (are breakfast tacos and burritos a thing outside of the southwestern US?) since the filling was scrambled eggs.
Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: I still have a lot of dandelion greens left, so later today I plan to make a salad of dandelion greens and spinach with a hot bacon dressing. There will probably still be some dandelion greens left after that, but I have no plans yet for the remainder.
I'm going to cook a lot of bacon at once and use the remainder for a potato salad with blue cheese and bacon that is one of my favorite foods ever.
I'm also, probably tomorrow, going to cook the stir-fried ground pork and greens with fermented bean curd that I mentioned in my last food post. I suppose I could add the dandelion greens to that, although I do have a big bunch of Chinese mustard greens I bought specifically for the purpose.
Yes, I am on a bit of a greens kick.
Something I'm vaguely thinking about cooking eventually: Dunno. I should look through my cookbooks. The weather here has been changeable, which makes it hard to know what I'll want to eat in the future. Not much more than a week ago we had high temperatures close to 80 F (26.6 C); in the past week it's been much colder and has snowed overnight several times. Anyway, I have so much food in the pantry that I should probably try to minimize shopping for the next couple of weeks and use some of what I already have.
I've been wanting to bake a cake but I still have uneaten treats from the last time I baked. Mmm, I think I'll have a slice of cranberry/dried cherry cake.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
When I went shopping on Thursday I impulse-bought some dandelion greens, which I've never eaten before. Today I blanched some for about a minute in boiling water to reduce the bitterness, drained them, then cooked them in olive oil and garlic and ate them with some of the fava bean and potato puree that I cooked a while ago and have been keeping in the freezer. I put the greens in the bottom of a shallow pasta bowl and poured the puree over them. That was my breakfast* this morning, actually, and it was yummy.
*"Breakfast foods" are not usually my preferred breakfast foods. I like bacon and eggs, and I like pancakes and that sort of thing, but not all the time. So when I have leisure for a cooked breakfast it's often some kind of food more associated with lunch or dinner. Yesterday for breakfast I had tacos, though I suppose they were "breakfast tacos" (are breakfast tacos and burritos a thing outside of the southwestern US?) since the filling was scrambled eggs.
Something I have concrete plans to cook in the near future: I still have a lot of dandelion greens left, so later today I plan to make a salad of dandelion greens and spinach with a hot bacon dressing. There will probably still be some dandelion greens left after that, but I have no plans yet for the remainder.
I'm going to cook a lot of bacon at once and use the remainder for a potato salad with blue cheese and bacon that is one of my favorite foods ever.
I'm also, probably tomorrow, going to cook the stir-fried ground pork and greens with fermented bean curd that I mentioned in my last food post. I suppose I could add the dandelion greens to that, although I do have a big bunch of Chinese mustard greens I bought specifically for the purpose.
Yes, I am on a bit of a greens kick.
Something I'm vaguely thinking about cooking eventually: Dunno. I should look through my cookbooks. The weather here has been changeable, which makes it hard to know what I'll want to eat in the future. Not much more than a week ago we had high temperatures close to 80 F (26.6 C); in the past week it's been much colder and has snowed overnight several times. Anyway, I have so much food in the pantry that I should probably try to minimize shopping for the next couple of weeks and use some of what I already have.
I've been wanting to bake a cake but I still have uneaten treats from the last time I baked. Mmm, I think I'll have a slice of cranberry/dried cherry cake.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.