Tag: sauce

Of course, I decided to make Chicken Katsu, because it's delicious and wonderful. It all starts with chicken thighs, which I cut into manageable chunks and egg-battered with flour and panko. A few minutes in the deep fryer, and they came out delicious.

Actual people who have lived in Hawaii tell me it's not the chicken, but the sauce that makes things work. The recipe I was using has a pretty complicated sauce, and of course I added random amounts of everything instead of paying attention and got something a little too clovey.

Why did I use a recipe and not invent something myself? This time, it was because I have absolutely no clue about what the Hawaiians eat. But make the chicken part. It's fantastic. Next time, I'm eating it with barbecue sauce.

The main reason I'm posting is for the next person that searches google to try to find tvorog in Las Vegas. I searched for "Russian Market Vegas" and "Russian Market Las Vegas" and found nothing useful. Google's lies cost me $10 in wrong purchases and probably $20 more in gas. Hopefully Supercook can give me something to do with greek yogurt and bulgarian white cheese.

They don't have a web site, but their address is:
Jones Market & Deli aka Eastern European Market aka
3389 S Jones Blvd (Jones and Desert Inn, behind Winchell's)
Las Vegas, NV 89146
The girls that work there are all like hot spies.

Back to Russian night..
I made a Honey "Mousse" and Zapekanka iz Tvorog (Tangy Baked Lemon Pudding). The honey mouse was crap, so I won't even talk about it. I think maybe I needed to know something about making mousse to make it work. I blame the recipe. In fact, the recipe and the person that wrote it can assossee mayee yaitsa.

Everything everyone made was good except my honey crap. Of course mine was crap. That's right, laugh. Smekh smekhom, a pizda kverkhu mekhom, suka. Yup, fur.

Lisa's Borscht was especially surprising, because it wasn't the most disgusting thing I've ever had like I expected it to be. The kid seemed to love it.

Enough to mix with oatmeal:



My Zapekanka iz Tvorog was really good. I'm not sure if the consistency was how it should be, but it was damn tasty...
300g tvorog
Juice of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 lemon
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Separate the egg yolks from the whites, and beat the whites until fluffy. Blend in the tvorog , lemon zest and juice, and sugar to taste.
Pour the mixture into a small- medium sized greased ceramic baking dish.
Bake for 20 minutes.

Serve drizzled with a sauce made from the juice of one orange and a teaspoon or two of honey, warmed together.

Here's how it looked:

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!

We were having a birthday celebration at our house this week and it called for lasagna. I however didn't get to go shopping until just before dinner. So, when I saw no-boil needed lasagna noodles I was interested.

I did hesitate in purchasing them at first because the idea of not boiling the noodles before baking is just odd. But, I needed a recipe in addition to noodles and these noodles had the best back of the box recipe. So I decided to go for it.

It was really neat to not have to prepare the noodles. You just throw down the sauce, add on a few noodles, spread out some ricotta cheese mixture, sprinkle on cheese and repeat. Then you throw it all in the oven and out comes a really yummy lasagna.

The only tip I would give is make extra sure that you cover each noodle completely to the edge with ricotta and sauce because if you miss any of the noodle it does come out crunchy in that area. Otherwise, it is a remarkably good noodle.

I don't know why nobody ever told me that Alfredo sauce was easy to make, but I've wasted far too much of my life buying the glass jars of commercially made pasta sauce when a great alfredo is almost as easy.

Just last week, we were running a little short in the food department, so it came time to try and scrounge what we could out of what was sitting around in the house. To that end, I collected the following ingredients:

• 2 cans evaporated milk (heavy cream would be better...)
• 1/8 lb. Parmigiano-Reggiano, shredded
• Lots of black pepper
• 1 stick butter
• Garlic salt
• 1 bag egg noodles

I melted the butter while the pasta started boiling. Once completely melted, I added the milk and whisked it all together, then whisked in the pepper and garlic salt. After the egg noodles were done, I drained them thoroughly, put them in the milk mixture, and began to fold in the cheese.

That's it. The best recipes are disgustingly simple. Although, after I ate the noodles, I felt like my heart was going to explode. This is some heavy stuff, friends. Don't get addicted.

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.

Normally, when I cook, I like to find a recipe online, then cook something completely different. That way, every time I make something, it's an organic, unique recipe, and different whenever I make it. The few times a recipe comes out perfect, of course, I prepare it the same way; however, usually I'm trying to find a new way to make food.

And so today's recipe comes into play. I'd been browsing the chicken recipes in the wikibooks cookbook, and found my way to a recipe for Garlic Lemon Chicken. The thing that drew my attention was a Lebanese sauce named toum. So, after glancing at both recipes for about half a second, I was off.

The first goal was to make the toum. I knew that it involved garlic, olive oil, salt, and lemon juice; it was only about halfway through the recipe that I realized it required the oil and lemon juice to be added to the macerated garlic-salt mixture in small doses, to increase the volume. I'd also added cayenne to the recipe; the first taste, before I thinned it out with the garlic and oil, was like a garlic nuclear bomb.

I started by shucking two full bulbs of garlic and running them through the processor, then adding salt, pepper, cayenne, sesame oil (I was out of olive), and lemon juice, until I had a mighty bowl of deadly garlic paste. At this point in the recipe, my plan was to saute the chicken breasts, slather them with this liquid kryptonite, and then braise them for a scary long time.

Things changed when I noticed that the original chicken recipe called for a completely different marinade, and for the toum to be used as a dipping sauce for something else entirely. Funny how the little details kick in at the last minute. To make up for the lack of moisture (I doubted that the toum would keep the chicken moist during a long cooking time), I deglazed the skillet I cooked the chicken in with a can of chicken broth and some gin. I didn't bother reducing because (1) I needed moisture, and (2) I wanted to find a way to weaken the gargantuan garlic heat in the toum. In order to justify my decision, I found a recipe online labeled Shish Taouk Toum, which involves making chicken kebabs after marinating in a liquid that included (a tiny amount of) toum. Alright. Somebody made chicken and let it touch the Garlic Death. I was treading in somewhat charted territory. Onwards.

I put the chicken breasts into the oven, slathered with toum, and poured in my deglazing liquid, setting the temperature to 250 degrees. My plan was to make the chicken, taste it, and see if it was too strong to eat. At this point, if it were indeed too strong, I'm pretty sure my plans to fix it involved making rice.

After a couple hours on low heat, I opened the oven. The house smelled like garlic for three days. We eventually served it over orzo. Not the best garlic chicken ever, but not bad either.

Recently, I had someone email and ask, why do you call yourself a masochist? Do you like pain? And the answer is... "Yes. I love pain. The pain that is imparted by our friend Wilbur Scoville". (Actually, all that guff about someone actually emailing me is just a shameless pretense to bring up the Scoville scale.)

The Scoville scale measures how much burny you're going to get on your tongue from eating said chile. Yes burny is a word! Why not?

Since I love me some code tags, I'm going to put our version of the Scoville scale in them. Take that, Web 2.0!

15,000,000–17,000,000 Pure capsaicin
9,100,000             Nordihydrocapsaicin
2,000,000–5,300,000     Standard U.S. Grade pepper spray
855,000–1,041,427   Naga Jolokia 
350,000–577,000         Red Savina Habanero
100,000–350,000         Habanero chili, Scotch Bonnet
100,000–200,000         Rocoto, Jamaican Hot Pepper, African Birdseye
50,000–100,000      Thai Pepper, Malagueta Pepper, Chiltepin Pepper, Pequin Pepper
30,000–50,000       Cayenne Pepper, Ají pepper, Tabasco pepper
10,000–23,000       Serrano Pepper
7,000–8,000             Tabasco Sauce (Habanero)
5,000–10,000        Wax Pepper
4,500–5,000         New Mexican varieties of Anaheim pepper
2,500–8,000         Jalapeño Pepper
2,500–5,000         Tabasco Sauce (Tabasco pepper) 
1,500–2,500         Rocotillo Pepper, Sriracha
1,000–1,500         Poblano Pepper, Texas Pete sauce
600–800         Jalapeno Tabasco sauce
500–2500        Anaheim pepper
100–500         Pimento, Pepperoncini
0               No heat, Bell pepper

Scale courtesy of Wikipedia

Now, anyone who's never heard of the Scoville scale is wondering what the heck those numbers are up there. Well, basically thats the rating that Wilbur assigned each of the corresponding chiles using the Scoville Organoleptic Test. You'll never believe me if I tell you what the Organoleptic Test consisted of. Ready? Here it is. That's right, good old fashioned human test subjects. Ahh. The good old days. What peppers have I tried?

Everything on there with the exception of the Ají and the Naga Jolokia. I can't find them anywhere. But now I'm seriously considering spraying some pepper spray on my pizza at some point in the future.

Due to Tele falling ill this week, I was in charge of the Thanksgiving meal. I had no choice but to step up and accomplish the task. So, I did. I made the whole meal.

I forgot to take pre-eating pictures of the Thanksgiving table, but I did get you the after pics.

The left side of the table in clockwise order: mashed potatoes, Praline Yams, Whole Cranberry Sauce, Cranberry Relish, StoveTop Cornbread Stuffing, and HoneyBaked Ham.

The right side of the table starting from the back of the table and moving forward: Dutch Apple Pie with Never-Fail Pie Crust, Sweet Corn Muffins, Cranberry Salad, CornBread, Honey Maid Cinnamon Sticks and Bees for the fluff, Fluff with fresh strawberries, PineCone Spread with Original Triscuits.

Not pictured but included in the food lineup of the evening: Corn on the cob roasted under the broiler and Chatham Village Cranberry Herb Stuffing.

The only thing I didn't get to make was my grandma's Pumpkin Cookies. But the apple pie was so yummy it was okay that the cookies were missing.