Cooking

Pan fry shrimp in a bit of peanut oil, lightly salt (I had a 800g frozen pack), set aside.

Sauté 1 diced onion, 4 garlic cloves, thumb of ginger in the same pan.

Add 3 spoons curry powder mix (I used turmeric, cumin, coriander, chili) and 2 spoons of tomato paste.

Stir in 500 ml coconut milk + 100 ml water. Simmer 5–10 min.

Add back the shrimp just to heat up for a couple minutes.

Finish with juice of half lime.

For the raita - I used ~500g greek yoghurt, with a grated cucumber (drained the water), a clove of garlic, a pinch of salt, the juice from half lime, and some fresh mint. (It's very similar to tzatziki, without the dill and less garlic.)

In 2021 I turned 7.5 pounds of pork roast into canned seasoned pork with the idea that I could heat it, drain off the juice and wrap it in a tortilla. They were tasty. Today I used the last of them. But I wanted to test out making tortillas with a different flour than I normally use so as a backup I made rice. Tortillas have some scratch made chili powder for color and flavor. Rice is turkey stock instead of water. I think I like this better because I get to keep all the juice.

Bibimbap made on a bed of jasmine rice, homemade pickled daikon & carrot, sautéed sesame soy bok chet and bok choi greens from the garden, home pickled radish, thinly sliced tenderloin marinated in a homemade ponzu sauce, home fermented hot pink kimchi, farm fresh fried egg with black sesame seeds, and our house aged fermented gochujang.

I made this recipe again yesterday. https://bakinghermann.com/zeytinyagli-pirasa-turkish-leeks-with-olive-oil/#recipe

However this time I used einkorn berry as my grain. I found at my local co-op. I've used it before and really liked it. However, yesterday I looked it up, and found the results very interesting!

Apparently it's one of the oldest used grains by humans! Pretty neat! It's also delicious

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkorn

Served with toasted garlic sourdough made by a local baker.

If anyone knows where to find seeds for Einkorn, I'd one hundred percent try to grow this instead of my lawn lmao. Apparently its a pretty hardy plant

What do you do when you get handed free Yukon potatoes and lamb shoulder shank? You buy a bottle of red wine and spend three hours braising.

I used a recipe from Allrecipes and would not recommend it. It lacked the depth and color this should have had. Still good but definitely would have failed in a cooking school.

Cost per person: $2, mostly cheap wine and onion, a little for homemade beef stock I canned a while back. Can you order it anywhere? Yes Cost per person if you paid for everything: $17

Didn't have any cucumber but still made a ziki sauce anyway. Didn't have any parsley either. So this meal is way more beige than I would have liked. But it was flavorful.

My cost per person was like $1 Can you order this anywhere? Yes. And it will probably be much better. But this was still really good. Cost per person if you had to buy everything: probably close to 7.50.

Fresh baked bread, fajita seasoned pork steak, black pepper corn white cheddar. My wife likes sad limp fries and we picked up a free bag of Yukon potatoes today and they make the saddest fries so that's a win for her.

Cost per person: $1 Can you order this anywhere? Yes but no. The bread will be soft and the fries will be crisp. Cost if you paid for everything? $4.5

This one should be really easy to figure out.

Homemade crust, pepperoni, red peppers.

The crust was just flour, water and a little salt. About 1.5cm thick. Once the dough ball was consistent I coated it with more flour to prevent sticking and then pressed it down into shape.

Pepperoni was sliced off a tube. It looks kind of greasy, but it wasn't too much, and I really like that it curled up a bit. I put the oven on high broil near the end to get it to crisp up a bit.

Formerly "nanny's chicken stew" but this is my variation on it and I've been cooking it long enough that it's a decent variant.

Stew ingredients (large family - 2 adults and 4 kids so adjust to your needs):

• 5 Chicken legs
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Whatever veg you have / is on offer, mine included:
• 3 onions
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 2 large parsnips
• 6 carrots
• large bowl of frozen peas, defrosted (by volume I'd say about 450ml / a bit less than a pint)
• about 750g / 1.5lb of potatoes, skin on
• 6 spring onions (only added these as they were on their last legs)
• head of broccoli
• 1 or 2 stock cubes to taste
• Salt (I use the low sodium variety)
• Pepper
• Fresh parsley to garnish if you have it (I never do).

I will always use whatever veg is in season and cheapest though. Other frequent visitors include leeks, cauliflower and turnip, occasionally celery.

Stew Method:
Put the chicken legs in enough boiling water to cover and then some (usually ~1 per person you're cooking for) with the rosemary and thyme and very low simmer for an hour or more to get stock and cook the chicken and soften the rosemary.

While you're waiting on the chicken, prep the veg. Everything should be cut / diced small enough that it can fit on a spoon along with something else. Potatoes would be the largest cut for me.

Take out the chicken legs and start adding veg based on how long it takes to cook. In my case the first things to go in was the parsnip. Last was the broccoli and defrosted peas. Fry the onion and garlic until soft and lob them in relatively late.

I tend to be a little rushed on getting the carrots in on time so after I've diced them I steam them in the micro for 2.5 minutes just to soften them a little.

Let the chicken legs cool and using a fork remove the skin, then fork at the meat to get it off the bone. Some care is required here to avoid taking non-meat but you get good at it over time. Add the chicken meat back in near the very end.

My mum (AKA "nanny") thickens with cornflour near the end (mixed to a thin paste in cold water then added to the stew) and always adds fresh parsley at the end. I don't bother with either. edit: She also adds nutmeg into hers.

Brown soda bread scones:
400g wholemeal flour
100g white flour (you can change the 4:1 ratio for more white if you want them fluffier)
1 tsp of baking soda
Pinch of salt
~425ml Buttermilk (you can sour normal milk by adding either vinegar or lemon juice and stirring if you don't have buttermilk).

Scones Method:
Wholemeal flour in a large bowl, sieve the white flour on top, sieve the baking soda in, add salt on top.

At this point you need to put your hands into the flour and mix it by lifting and dropping through your fingers trying to get more air into it.

Make a hole in the middle, add the buttermilk. Mix, but only enough to get consistency. No kneading like with yeast breads.

It should be fairly sloppy.

Plop it out onto a floured board and flatten to about 2cm / 0.75 inches thick. Use a relatively wide glass and cut scones (push, twist, lift) or if you're fancy and have a cutter, great. :D

Put each scone on a well floured baking tray. The dough should be sloppy enough that they just fall out of the glass into your hand.

In the oven at 180C (fan) which google tells me is 355F for 22-25 minutes or so until golden brown. Add some extra temperature if no fan.

If you want a soft crust, cover with a damp teacloth after taking out of the oven. I like them crusty so don't do this.

Let them sit for a few minutes and you're done.

I would get 2 dinners for 6 out of this for comfortably under 15 euro (or one dinner and lunches etc) which is about $17 USD. It's obviously incredibly healthy and really delicious.

Chicken breast marinated in Greek yoghurt, lemon juice, paprika, cumin, turmeric, salt & pepper, then pan-seared. Served with couscous fluffed with cherry tomatoes, fresh mint & oregano.

Made these Algerian Stuffed Flatbreads

I made a different filling. Simply used leftover spicy pinto beans, and immersion blended them.

Freaking phenomenal dough, it was very easy. I'm really liking semolina breads lately. Next time I will try and get them a bit more thin, I will be practicing this flatbread again for sure

Served tonight at dinner with Turkish Leeks with Olive Oil

I love leeks, the carrots matched them perfectly.

The recipe calls for short grain rice, but I've had about 75g of farro kicking around the back of the pantry for a while, so I used it instead.

I love cooking thanks for reading :)

I was trying something different for making bread. Wife wanted fajitas. We compromised.

Mushrooms, pork steak, bell pepper, onion, carrot, broccoli, homemade chilli powder and some cumin.

Tortillas are definitely easier to work with for fajitas but the bread was really tasty.

Blackberries are coming into season. These are volunteers so they are a touch on the astringent side, not great for raw eating. Sugar helps cut that so last year I made a lot of blackberry jam. I probably have enough to get through this year so I'm looking for alternative ideas for long term storage. If not I'll make more jam.

This year won't be a big harvest as we cut down so much last year. This means there won't be enough to make wine.

I know a big part of it is making sure to get authentic curry paste. What else would I need to make something like a nice tofu curry (6/5 spicy) that would taste like the stuff I could get as takeout?

Angel hair with just enough tomato, garlic, olive oil, parm and home grown basil to stop it from being flavorless.

Pasta was like 80¢ per person Focaccia was about 90¢ per person. Can you order this anywhere? Yes.

Pork shoulder:

• Marinated in orange, lemon, lime juice, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, thyme, parsley, chilli, and cloves for ~1h.
• Pressure cooked for 25 min with marinade.
• Drained and deep-fried the meat until crispy.

Rice:

• Sauteed onion, garlic, thyme.
• Added rinsed rice (1 cup basmati), 1.5 cups water, salt.
• Pressure cooked 5 min, natural release 10 min.

Pikliz:

• Shredded cabbage, carrots, red onion, white onion, shallots, chilli.
• Seasoned with salt, pepper, lime juice, white vinegar.
• Left it sit for about 1h.

Plantains:

• Peeled, sliced, fried until golden. (- I skipped this step: smash, re-fry)
• Salted.

Apologies for bad plating. There is an image of just the rice below.

Nasi goreng is an extremely popular fried rice dish in Indonesia.

I really enjoyed this fried rice, it's probably close to the best fried rice I've had, maybe tied with kimchi fried rice.

It also tastes very similar to the mi goreng instant noodles which makes sense since they use similar ingredients.

As for the recipe, I sort of scanned multiple recipes and then winged it so its a blur for me. I know i added onions, kecap manis, light soy sauce, garlic, oil, chicken thigh, chili peppers, shrimp paste, salt, chicken broth, white pepper and msg. Not 100% sure of the order tho because i don't remember.

From what I gather nasi goreng is usually eaten with cucumbers and tomatoes for veggies but i had a lot of bok choi so i cooked bok choi separately and ate it with that instead.

I look forwards to exploring different fried rices in the future.

My standard burger. In order: potato bun, mustard, ketchup, red onion, pickles, cheese, meat patty (mix of beef and pork about 23% fat) cheese, tomato, lettuce, mayonnaise, dried chili, and the top of the bun.

Roasted potatoes, tomato soup, eggs, peppers and emergency goat cheese.

I roasted the potatoes, transferred them to a pot, took some of the balsamic tomato soup from yesterday and poured it in to simmer for a bit.

Eggs free, potatoes $1.89 for 5 pounds, tomatoes free. So using up my emergency goat cheese ($2), time to rotate stock, was the largest expense.

Cost per person: $1.30 Can you order this anywhere? No.

Whichever of you wanted potatoes in the tomato soup got your wish. Sort of.

It's taken a few days but the tomato soup is finally done. We ended up with about four quarts. We ate two of them today. Send more tomatoes.

Cost per person: $1.20 per person. Mostly in bread and cheese since the tomatoes were free and we used cheap balsamic in the soup. Can you order this anywhere? Of course. But also no.

AcMade homemade beef and bean empanadas. I baked half, pictured are the ones I fried. For the dough: La Herencia de las Viudas

She's making a sweet version, I just followed her dough technique. I used 250g local butter for the fat, made exactly as she did. I only rolled them out wiith my pin instead of the machine.

For the filling, I used a pound of 90% New Zealand grass fed beef that was on sale for $5. I guess it started with onions to fry in the pot, then a poblano pepper, garlic then a diced tomato, then tomato paste, then spices. I found some hatch green chili pepper powder at the co-op so I used that, salt&pepper, paprika, uhh.. oregano, coriander. I think that was all the spices. Added the beef to brown, then water to cover. The co op also sells dried seasoned refried beans in bulk, so I added 3/4 cup of that, oh and we have the dried new Mexican chili peppers, so i soaked them in water and immersion blended them with fresh water as well and added that in. Pretty liquid-y. So, I stood at the stove for 45 minutes, stirring constantly, letting it boil down so it would be thick. Added cilantro at the end with a bit of lime juice. Dumped it into a big bowl to cool. Edit to add at this point i also aded about a half cup of shredded cheddar and mixed it in to the filling mixture.

When the beef was cool i started stuffing and frying/baking. Used an egg wash to seal them (she uses condensed milk for her sweet version in the video). Served with guac and homemade hot sauce.

Family loved them. Good fun to make!