Donuts

Wherein Mr Ullman announces a brief break from Blogging. 

Have a donut.  Really, take two.  They are fresh and yummy.  

This is the start of the silly season at work.  For the next couple of weeks I will be creating 20 + program CDs a day, answering support questions that, to the user, seem dire but are actually quite easy to solve and trying to convince a couple of captains who spend $50,000 on P & I insurance to replace their goddamn six year old PC and not to buy a $600.00 piece of crap from Dell or HP.  I short, I won't have a great deal of time on my until the middle of June.

So unless I manage to get real lucky an make something outstanding I won't be blogging again until the 17th of June. This will also give to time to do some thinking about about this and maybe give it some sort of structure.  Maybe not.

A Good Sweet and Sour Sauce

 Wherein Mr Ullman, having been defeated by a sweet and sour sauce in the past, stumbles upon a good one while Mr Broman attempts to plant subliminal messages onto these pages.

This is a tale of a sweet and sour sauce that, after a bit more refining, will likely becomes a staple for a white fish dish.

I am not a real fan of beef simply because it doesn't interest me. While a nice steak is good with some mushrooms and what not I usually just broil beef and look for fun things to do with the salad and side dish.

Anyway, I got some chuck shoulder with the idea of cutting it up and messing around with cooking with acids. I didn't get around to it and I hate to waste food. Broiling it is then.

So I put it in the oven and spent some time trying to figure out a sauce. It was going to be a cold sauce , not one that would be cooked along with the meat. I also had a half avocado that was starting to go brown on me. What to do?

I occasionally make a salad dressing from my favorite mild horseradish sauce, some soy sauce and olive oil. In a one cup bowl I add a couple of squirts of the horseradish, four or five splashes of soy sauce and then add olive oil to get the mixture up to about ¾ of a cup. You then stir vigorously.

I made this and then added the avocado. Stirred very vigorously so that everything mixed well.

Once the shoulder chuck was cooked I spread the sauce on the meat and let it stand for a few minutes. Very tasty and worth playing around with. Served with baby spinach, snow peas and side salad.

A note from the author 

As I stated in my first post the point is not to present recipes to follow but rather to start you folks on the path to tasty combinations. Someone emailed me and pointed out that a lot of what I post here is stuff that I made on the fly. That's true and sort of the point. I do eat both regular meals that are planned and do a fair amount of what if cooking. The what if cooking is what I am writing about. While few of these things become formal recipes that all go in notebook of things tried and will be used on purpose in some future meal.

Yeah, everyone does this at least once...

 This is an easy one, the way I make camarones al mojo ajo. This is one of the few seafood dinners I did a lot when I was still back home again in Indiana.  Shrimp with toasted garlic.

There are lots of fun things about this recipe-- it is easy to expand to cook for other folk and you can add and subtract flavors when you want to play.

The two most important parts of the recipe are the shrimp and the garlic.  When cooking this for myself I use 10 medium shrimp and four good sized cloves of garlic.  Put the shrimp off to the side for awhile and chop the garlic cloves somewhat roughly, you don't want large chunks but you don't want real small ones either – say slightly smaller then the head of a thumb tack.

Place the garlic in a small skillet and add enough olive oil to fully over the bottom of the pan. Heat this to medium.  Stir from time to time until the oil starts to simmer (bubble sightly).  Reduce the heat to low and continue to cook until the garlic becomes soft (a ½ an hour or so).

Take a lime and cut it in half.  When the garlic is soft squeeze the juice into the garlic and oil and stir.  Let this cook for about four minutes, again stirring occasionally.

Get out a larger skillet  and spoon out some of the oil, but not the garlic, into the larger skillet and heat to medium.  Add a splash of white vinegar. Once the skillet heats up add the shrimp (shelled and cleaned if you haven't yet) sprinkle with salt, add some chopped cilantro and cook for about for four to five minutes.  Place this on a bed of rice or noodles (or lettuce for that matter).  I might also add some chopped orange at this point.

Take the other skillet and strain the oil from the garlic.  I take the some of the garlic and sprinkle over the top of the shrimp.  I usually retain the oil for future use.

Serve with a hearty bread.

Two Beans or Not Two Beans

Wherein Mr. Ullman admits to defeats and offers beans as a stuffing while Mr. Broman labors under the misconception that I will have a good deal of hair.

I had planned a sweet and sour sauce for a white fish. It sounded tasty. It wasn't-- it was dull. Next was a tempura with what remained of the white fish. No clues how but I managed to screw that up . Finally I tried a breaded lamb chop. That was good but I could also see how

it could be better so that is for another day.

I was talking to a lady I know and she gave me the outline for a two bean stuffing that sounded tasty. I was getting ready to do a chili so I divert some of the beans.

Following the directions on the bags I let the black and red beans soak overnight and through the work day. Once I got home I put them into a pan and added a good deal of tarragon. Tarragon is a slight herb so use a lot. I crushed and added four cloves of garlic and brought it to a boil.  I cooked it for a half hour (until soft).

In the food processor I grated two radishes, half a carrot, about a fifth of an onion and another garlic clove. I then transported them to the blended and waited for the beans to finish cooking.

Once the beans were finished I collected about a ¼ cup and put it into the blender with with carrot, radish, etc. I added a small bit of soy sauce, a small dulup of teriyaki, some oregano and spoonful of avocado. Blended until every became a chunky paste.

The only stuffable meat I had around was , sorry, chicken breast. I did my chicken book trick and stuffed. I sprinkled some cinnamon on top, closed the book and broiled for 15 minutes a side. Served with rice and cucumbers. Very tasty in itself and suggests a number of

other possible combinations.

By the way, I used the left-over bean paste in a cheese toastie the next day for lunch. Very tasty.

Making do or rather Making a Potato Dish

Wherein Mr Ullman proves he still hasn't got a hang on properly formatting these pages and Mr. Broman seems to  suggest that Mr. Ullman talks to his fridge.

One of the fun things in cooking is when you have to change what you

are doing in the middle of it. This happened to me the other night.

I had started to prep a pork meal. When I got the pork out of the

fridge I discovered that the bottom of the pork was badly freezer

burnt. I tossed that puppy out.

However, I had already started to boil the potatoes for mashed potatoes (I was trying a skin-on version) and had started the glaze I

was going to use. The potatoes could be used for anything but the half done glaze was a problem. I didn't want to toss the glaze but it

doesn't keep well.

The glaze is tasty on pork. I chop up about half an apple, some fresh chive, whatever color of chard I have, and then I dice half an onion and two cloves of garlic. I put that into the blender, add some sweet BBQ sauce and my usual two squirts of a mild horseradish sauce. Hit the chop button.

However, since the pork was out of the question what to use? I had nothing thawed. I did have a ½ pound of what a middle-brow

local-chain-owned-by-Kroger calls “cooked Shrimp-meat” (bay

shrimp).What the heck.

I turned off the heat under the potatoes to keep them somewhat firm.

I then got out the wok, put a small bit of oil in it and heated it up. Threw in the shrimp, added some fresh lemon juice and cooked the shrimp until it started to firm up. I added a couple of spoonfuls of condensed cream of celery soup and some paprika.

I put the potatoes into a mixing bowl and coarsely mashed them. I added the blender concoction and shrimp concoction with the potatoes and added some tarragon. I mixed this all together, placed it into a baking dish. I baked it for fifteen minutes at 350.

As a make do entree it was quite tasty. I think in the future I would use it as a side dish. After baking it comes out quite green. It would be a surprising tasty potato dish for a St. Patrick’s day shindig. Note after the fact that it included no food coloring.

More then a bit random....

I spent a few minutes looking up if the idiom was make do or make due.  Google seems to occasionally bless me with something totally off the wall -- second suggested link was this:  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110206165942AAD1fpF  Felt I had to share....  

Err, well...

No post this week.  I didn't get a meal worth talking about until Thursday which wouldn't give me enough time to write about it, check it, think about it and what not.  On the plus side I did get two good meals in a row so I'll have one in the hopper should this happen again.

Cheeks So Good I could Kiss 'em

Wherein Mr Ullman forgot to do his usual titchy Wherein Statement 

I really love cod and halibut cheeks. 

The problem is that they are

expensive -- $20+ a pound isn't unusual or outrageous. When I do cook them it is usually to impress someone. Since they are so expensive I use a tried and true recipe. I don't experiment here.

But I got lucky the other day. A fisherman who uses our software was

significantly grateful to give me a pound of halibut cheeks. I

decided to take a half pound and see what could be done. The other

half pound is being reserved to impress someone.

I bread and fry when I cook cheeks. I use a chickpea flour. So I

decided to use different flours and breading. Since I had them around

I used TVP, oat flour, masa harina (a corn flour used to make

tortillas), and cousous.

Putting aside the choice of flours, this is how I usually cook cheeks.

I put the fish on a cookie sheet and liberally salt both sides. Then

the cheeks are dredged through the flour making sure the cheeks are

will covered.

I cook some pasta-- usually Capellini ,Capelli d'angelo or Pillus.

Heat a cast iron skillet to high. Once the skillet heats up reduce to

medium and add enough oil to cover the bottom of the skillet. Cook

the cheeks for five minutes flipping as necessary.

Take a sweet onion and cut off two fairly thin slices. Take a mild

chard, I use green chard, remove the green leaf from the white stem.

Put the chard and onions into the blender and hit the chop button.

Put the veggies in a bowl with the pasta and toss.

At this point the fish should be cooked. Reduce heat to low. Squeeze

a half a lemon over the cheeks. Add the pasta to the skillet and

squeeze the other half of the lemon on the mix. Cover and let the

mixture warm for a couple of minutes.

So what conclusions did I come to? The oat flour was great, when I

cook the rest of the cheeks for a friend I am going to do a ½ oat

flour, ½ chickpea flour mix for the breading.

The masa harina was surprising tasty but needs a sauce of some sort.

If I were going to use the cheeks as an appetizer with a white sauce

dip I would consider using the masa harina again.

The couscous was fine but not worth repeating and the TVP (Textured

Vegetable Protein – a trademarked product that is clearly in need of a

skilled marketing professional) was pointless since it didn't adhere

to the fish well.

An update:

When I cooked the rest of the halibut cheeks for a friend I managed to screw up the pasta. Rummaging through her pantry I found some basmati rice, an aromatic rice from India. This turned out to be a winner. In fact, I plan to replace the pasta with basmati rice in my tried and true recipe.

Finally, a friend of mine has a blog about weight loss, exercise and related items.  She interviewed me which was fun. 

See her blog (and the interview with me) by clicking here