Tag: onion

Disclaimer: The below contains cynicism. If you think this is a kind of disease, I suggest you go beat yourself over the head with an iron.

It was Indian night, and I've never so much as had a curry.

Nevertheless, I had a great evil plan in the works: I was going to cook Indian food pretty much the same way as I cook all food, by sort of looking at a recipe on the internet and then adapting it for my own evil purposes. I was going to do this because I had zero idea what kind of spices I was going to be using, what the end result was supposed to be, and whether or not what I cooked could be considered as poison in the right jurisdictions.

The recipe starts with a cup of masoor daal, which the internet tells me is some magical, rare variety of lentil. Since I wasn't about to go on a Fancy Steve style treasure hunt just to find a lentil that probably tastes exactly the same as normal lentils, I used mealworms. Okay. Fine. I used lentils. But if the original dish was supposed to be all squirmy, everybody was going to be totally disappointed.

The instructions were to wash the lentils. I sighed heavily and hoped somebody would notice how I was pretty much martyring myself just so I could cook food invented by people who don't even eat prime rib. Unfortunately, there really wasn't anybody paying attention to me, not even me, so I finally gave up and washed the lentils. The tremendous sacrifices I make for these parties, right?

The next instructions from the supreme commander, aka The Interwebtubes, was to mix the lentils with water, cooking oil, turmeric, red chili powder, salt, onion, and tomato in some sort of pot. Whoa. That's a lot to process all at once. I'd be posting the amount of the ingredients here, but I wasn't really paying attention anyways. I finely chopped a massive onion and three tomatoes (I was making a triple-size recipe, for the gathering) and added these to the pot. Turmeric? I had that, because everything indian ever apparently needs it. For those of you wondering, it tastes yellow. The mexitexans probably say it tastes amarillo, which is a gay Texan way to say yellow. And what's this "red chili powder"? I judiciously decided this meant both red pepper and chili powder, both of which I have, because I am a man. So I dumped a lot of those in there.

Basically, after that point, I let everything cook for an hour and a half. Then I went and played video games. When the smoke alarm went off, I looked for a save point, saved my totally awesome robot ninja, and then went back to the kitchen. I was supposed to melt some ghee, which is Indian for "butter of the gods". I am not kidding. It smelled like delicious, and it comes in what looks like a Folger's can. After it was melted, I threw in some cumin seeds ("Hiss," said the seeds). In went a gallon of garlic and a metric buttload of dried chilies, which I crushed in my hands like beer cans. After everything smelled fried enough, I threw it into the lentils, mixed them all up, and was done with it.

I should mention that I was supposed to add something called asafoetida, which kills unborn babies, smells horrible, and attracts wolves. Since I know some unborn babies and not many wolves, I was going to add it, but that would have involved wandering around the smelly part of the international market, so I refrained. Instead I added saffron, which is expensive, in the hopes that it would make all the food taste like magic. Instead, it made everything smell like flowers.

Okay, I gave it a taste. But after I spit that out and gargled with bleach, I figured everything was alright. I put it in a bowl, drove over to Fancy's, and pre-dialed the ambulance. 

The Queen of Tarts is always acting all high and mighty, baking bread and cookies and I think probably even people every night. She'll casually pull out some flour and other stuff, get a bowl or something, and in twenty minutes she'll be yanking a tray of golden brown tastiness out of the oven. Her demeanor seems to say, what, bread? Oh look, here it is. Easiest thing in the world.

So, for Russian night, I decided to make a mushroom pastry. I'd show her. I'd whip up a huge plate of tasty mushroom foods and then I'd be the one who shrugs modestly. Oh yeah, those pastries? Totally easy.

I started the night before with:

• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 sticks of butter

The recipe I was following told me to cut the whole thing together with a wide knife. Not knowing what the heck it was talking about, I got a butter knife and cut the mixture together while watching Bob the Builder. By the end of it, my shoulders were totally and completely sore.

The next day, I sauteed:

• 1 lb minced mushrooms
• 1 minced large onion

I added some pepper and tarragon during the cooking process, then set it aside to cool down while I pulled out the dough.

Of course, the dough didn't look right. It kept falling apart. It was impossible to roll. So I got out the pastry knife (yeah, I didn't know we had one the night before) and cut in an additional half stick of softened butter. The dough formed a nifty ball immediately. Victory for me.

I started rolling the dough out, but it was pretty sticky, and it kept tearing in places. In fact, it took me an hour to roll out, but I learned one vital fact you'll need if you ever work with dough: flour is your friend. If your dough even begins to give you lip, cover it (and your rolling surface) with flour. You cannot have enough flour on hand. It's mathematically impossible.

Once I had the dough rolled out to about a quarter inch, I cut it into squares. I mixed a cup of grated parmesan into the mushroom mixture, put teaspoonfuls of it into the squares, and folded them diagonally. After all the little triangley things were made, they were brushed with egg yolk, sprinkled with caraway seeds, and put into a 350-degree oven for twenty minutes.

Were they good? Yeah. They were good. They were pretty darn good. But I couldn't shrug and be all modest, because my shoulders might have fallen off.

For this EU Night Russian Stuffed Eggs caught my eye as they are a twist from the common Deviled Egg, which is one of my favorite appetizers.

The recipe is easy to follow and the ingredients are all quite common. My only suggestion would be to chop the onion super fine, maybe even in a food processor or Magic Bullet. I hand chopped mine and they were a bit chunky.

Thanks to chef2mom and her professional chef skills I learned the proper way to Quenelle the egg mixture and place it in the egg. You could also use a small melon baller to fill the eggs.

This recipe was interesting as it has a mayo and sour cream sauce to go with it. I ate the eggs with and without the sauce and the sauce definitely adds to the whole flavor.

Another amazing EU Night down. Hawaiian Night will be coming next month. So, stay tuned!

Supercook is a pretty darn awesome site, where you enter the ingredients you have and it gives you a list of recipes you can make with them. It assumes you have water, salt, pepper, and sugar (sugar is a pretty big one), so I've been trying to find the largest number of recipes for the smallest number of ingredients. So far, it's butter & onions (12 recipes)...

Update: make that butter and flour (79 recipes).

Here we go! For this EU night, I decided on making Cheesesteaks. Alas, they weren't traditional, in the fact that they weren't made with Cheez Whiz (Seriously. Apparently, a hot dog vendor in Philidelphia invented cheesesteaks when he got bored with his regular faire). This is the recipe. alas. it is not exact. Why? Well because its up to you the amount of ingredients you want on the thing. Not me.

Also, note that the cut of beef required (suggested) for these is a mysterious cut known to few as "Eye of Round" Roast. In my earlier, uncertain years, I worked at a Smiths Food and Drug in the Meat department. I know quite a bit of beef from my Father and Grandfather as well, but I had never heard of this cut. I dont know why. Ask your butcher, or use a Rib-Eye steak or comparable marbled cut of beef. You can't tell the difference. Except in price, maybe, the Eye of Round is very cheap, $11 for 2.5 lbs or so. (Note: 2.5 lbs is enough to make 10 sandwiches, and thats just meat and cheese.)

2lb.      Eye of Round roast, 
          or comparable portion of 
          meat to stick in sandwiches.

8-10      Dutch style sandwich rolls (very flaky crust).

16-20     Slices of provolone cheese

?         Frenched onions, chopped bell peppers, mushrooms
          sweet cherry peppers, anything you want on there.

1         Spray bottle or mustard bottle filled with        
          clean water.

1         Bottle of Steak/Grill seasoning (optional)

Start by putting the roast, or other meat in the freezer for an hour or two. You want it frozen, but still pliable. Rock hard would be bad, and hard to cut. While its freezing, cut the vegetables, watch TV, do something.

Frozen enough? ok, get a serrated blade, yes, the type you cut bread with. What you're looking for here is to shave very thin slices of beef off of the roast. Since the beef is frozen, it should be easier to cut without tearing. After you've sliced all of the beef very thin, set it aside in a bowl. I would suggest you get a two burner cast iron griddle for this, they're good for pancakes, eggs, pretty much anything, but great for this. Lay it across one front burner and one back burner, and turn the heat on the front burner to high, and the back burner to low.

Throw a cup or so of your veggies on the front part of the griddle, and saute until desired done-ness. While this is cooking, preheat the oven to 175 degrees. If the vegetables begin to stick to the griddle, hit them with a squirt of water from the mustard bottle, it will prevent them from sticking. Once they're cooked to your liking, move them to the back of the griddle. Throw a cup of the sliced beef on there, and cook to desired doneness and again, hit with a squirt of water if it starts to stick. Once this is cooked to your liking, combine the cooked vegetables and the beef together and cook for a minute or two, blasting with water when you need to. With the spatula, form the mixture into an oval shape, and then put two slices of provolone on the oval, almost covering the meat but try to keep it off of the grill. Hit the top of the cheese with two or three squirts of water, and the steam from this will melt the cheese very very quickly.

Get one of your sandwich rolls, and cut lengthwise along one side, in the typical hot dog bun fashion. Lay the bun open side down onto the meat, and then slide the spatula underneath the entire mass. In one motion, flip the whole mess over, and you should have a Philly Cheesesteak! Yay!

I know it seems like quite a bit of work, but they are mighty tasty.

I was seriously in need of some sour cream yesterday, so I browsed the internet for a couple beef stroganoff recipes and generated something that turned out to be pretty darn fantastic.

After slicing a half-pound sirloin steak into small strips, I dredged them in flour, garlic salt, and pepper, then sauteed them in butter along with a quarter onion (diced). I added a couple dashes of Worcestershire and soy sauce (that combo is my secret weapon for meat dishes). After the onion was transparent, I added some sliced mushrooms, a shot of apple cognac (any brandy would be fine), and half a can of chicken broth. Once the whole mixture thickened, I added half a cup of sour cream, reduced the heat to medium, and let the sauce thicken.

Over buttered egg noodles, this one was pretty fantastic. There was just a hint of the apple flavor from the cognac. If I do this again, I will wait to add the steak until after the onions are done; it certainly wasn't overcooked, but I would have liked it to be a little less cooked anyways.

There was a recipe in the Kraft Food & Family magazine for pulled pork sandwiches. That gave us the idea for making our own, except by doing it without going to the store at all.

Barbecue sauce was the first part of the equation, and it's so easy to make that I make it every other weekend or so. I do cheat a little by using ketchup, but only because the tomato paste and vinegar and seasonings I'd be using would essentially be making ketchup in the first place.

Steps to make barbecue sauce:

1. Pour some ketchup into a saucepan. The ketchup will be about a third the mass of the entire finished result.
2. Pour half that volume of brown sugar in.
3. Add a few shots of worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and if you have it, liquid smoke.
4. Pour in enough apple cider vinegar to make the whole thing liquid.

By cooking this over medium and tasting it frequently, you can adjust the taste with those ingredients until you get your base sauce at the perfect level between savory and acidic. (I usually do my red pepper at this point too, so I can also adjust for heat).

There are tons of things you can add to this to make your own special barbecue sauce. For our pulled pork, I used Newcastle Brown Ale, cayenne, and onion powder. Because that's how I roll.

The barbecue sauce in this instance went with some pork ribs into a slow cooker for 4 hours, got pulled, and got stirred back in. Tart-head made the hamburger buns, and excellent they were- but you'll have to wait for her update, because I have no idea how she made them.

I obviously don't want to take up much kitchen space at EU Zero, so I prepared the lamb smear (which the lamb will be dipped in before the panko roll) here at home.

So far, the ingredients look something like this:

• 3 Tbl Olive Oil (oregano flavored)
• 3 Tbl Tahini
• 1/2 container spreadable goat cheese
• 1 tsp fresh thyme
• 1 stripped twig rosemary
• Onion powder (to replace 1/4 onion)
• Garlic powder
• Black pepper
• Paprika (just a dash)
• Soy sauce (just a dash)
• 1 tsp fresh dill
• Lemon juice

So far, it tastes rather strongly of tahini... but a lot of the flavors that come after come in notes. The goal, of course, is to augment lamb and maybe obscure the slight mutton taste, not to become the flavor of the dish. So the lamb won't be very thickly covered.

The thin coating is the reason I decided to experiment so much with this dish. I haven't seen any recipes online that suggest coating lamb with either tahini or goat cheese, so I may be well on my way to a tremendous flop.

Stay tuned.

Chicken Pot Pie.

Think about that steam curling up from the crust.

Chicken Freaking Pot Pie.

The Pennsylvania Dutch enslaved an entire nation with this rustic dish, which is one of the few meat pies enjoyed this side of the Atlantic (I KNOW YOU'RE THERE, NATCHITOCHES MEAT PIE. I will find the filthy, forbidden love that is deep fried meat pie some day).

The PD's (like they call them back in the hood) also brought us pretzels, apple butter, and funnel cakes, because they are sheer butter-encrusted evil. Their plan is to fatten all of humanity and use their disgusting man-fat to grease the largest slip-n-slide in history. But, you're not cleared for that information.

Her Tartness did the crust for this one, so I'll let her add that one.

1. I cut up two chicken breasts (p.s. - they liked it) and half a white onion (small cubes for the chicken, finely chopped for the onion). Utterly confused by what I was going to do to make these chunks into some sort of pie, I sweated the onion in a stick of butter.

WHAT? Butter comes by the stick. It's how I measure. We are a very skinny family. Bite me.

1. The chicken went in after the onion was clear, along with some soy sauce, pepper, paprika, finely chopped celery (2 sticks) and garlic powder.

2. Double barrel action after the chicken was thoroughly cooked as I unceremoniously plopped one can of cream of chicken and one can of cream of mushroom into the skillet. It sat there, jellied, like some disgusting panna cotta. I stirred it all in anyways.

3. Once it was less... upright, I threw in some mixed vegetables (frozen). What goes with mushroom and chicken? The T herbs! In went some fresh thyme (man, what I would have given for a marijuana smoker to break down those two twigs) and dried tarragon. When things thinned out a bit too much I added a tablespoon of cornstarch and stirred it in.

4. Tasting... what do I need? More soy sauce. A dab of worcestershire. Meanwhile, Tart-on was making some kind of dough as I simmered everything on low.

Magically, all those ingredients with the crust fit perfectly in a circular 9-inch baker. Turned oven to 400. Docked the crust with a fork and brushed it with one beaten egg. Put into the oven. WAITED A HORRIBLY LONG FORTY FIVE MINUTES.

1. Littleroq asked for chicken pot pie for BREAKFAST the next day. Take that, Marie Callender. I have evaded your charms.

Note: Why do I add soy sauce to so many things? Because the MSG in soy sauce makes everything taste like store-bought.