Cooking favourites
After burbling aloud (does it count as aloud in SMS? Who cares) about cooking things for later this week, I found myself (a) very darn hungry and (b) trying to think of all the things I really like to make. Since I'm bored and unable to sleep I'm rambling about the latter here.
You'd think that bit would be easy, but my mind was consumed by thoughts of, among other things, pumpkin soup. This concoction took until 11:00 pm to make, but it was well worth it (if not quite how I want it yet). Speaking of which and while I remember for next time:
- Char the garlic rather than roasting it. It's too rich when roasted.
- Control the nutmeg love.
- Use 2/3 ironbark, 1/3 butternut.
- Pureé the cannellini first.
(Yes, I love pumpkin soup. I don't make it that much, but it's something I like to have in the freezer for those late days home from work, and I enjoy experimenting with variations.)
Er, anyway ... tasty things I've done lately (or at least tasty enough to deserve revisiting and refinement):
- Mushroom crépes
- Seafood chowder
- Smoked fish pie (caserole-dish-style not full crust) with leek
- Asparagus soup (not great, but ok)
- Fennel root, tomato and celery soup
- Spicy lamb caserole
- A chinese cabbage & mung bean sprout based stir-fry that's served without noodles/rice/etc. Sooo tasty with (eg) pork strips, baby corn, mushrooms, & green beans, but you need a mega-powerful wok burner to avoid it becoming all soggy. People who go to Kublai may recognise the general theme.
- Leek, salmon and spinach pasta sauce
- Various spinach, potato, chicken and snow pea sprout salad variants. Great work-food.
- A roast garlic and roast eggplant tomato-based pasta sauce
- Chick pea, tomato & onion curry for serving semi-mooshed with toasted turkish bread.
- Potato and spinach soup. The vile pale green colour is off-putting, but it tastes pretty good.
- Green lentil curry
- Fettuccine carbonara¹ (with spinach tossed through just before serving because I just looove spinach)
- Potato and leek soup
Plus probably plenty I've forgotten. Lots of this has turned up with corn or asparagus as a starter, too. I don't really do recipes, so most of those are wholly or largely made up as I go along based on general notions of what I want to do. This is occasionally ... unfortunate ... but usually works out at least OK or very well indeed.
Of course there are also endless variations of whatever-is-in-the-fridge stir-fry, fridge veggie bin soup², freezer curry, etc, but who wants to know about that?
Things I should make soon:
- Phở Tai (For unicode-impaired readers, this is Phò or just Pho). If you don't know what it is, you're missing out, and need to find a Vietnamese restaurant.
- Lemon-marinated fish salad with spring onion & potato. (think cevishe, etc)
- Cider-marinated chicken
- Lemon cheesecake (not that baked cheesecake abomination, real cheesecake)
- Vietnamese fresh rice paper spring rolls (not fried / deep fried)
- Bean salad with corn bread
- Pea and ham soup
- Lemon Meringue pie
Things I wish I could make, but can't allow myself to at least until the shrinking effort is sorted out:
- Red mutton coconut milk curry with baby eggplant
- Pseudo-Thai style green chicken coconut milk curry with yellow squash, basil, and more coriander than you've ever seen in one place before
- Palak Paneer (a spinach curry with freshly made pressed-curd cheese). Not really possible to make without vile quantities of ghee :-(
Sigh. It's absolutely worth it, though. (Not that going without rich curries is more than one tiny bit of what I'm doing, but ... oh, so good!).
¹ This does not contain cream. See, for example: this little rant on the matter. I don't do it this guy's way (eek!) and it's probably far from "authentic" but I'm with the fellow on the cream issue.