Yeah these are called "salt cucumber" in Sweden, they are very salt and have no sourness at all, very very tasty. Also very crispy

They are EXCELLENT to have on the morning sandwich. If you combine them with some liver paté its sooo good. It is actually a very popular breakfast food item in Sweden


Also katy I left the meat/mushrooms in the marinade for about one hour and then cleaned the marinade of the sides the most I could on the meat. I fried the meat for 1½ minutes on each side, they werent so thick so you don't have to fry them for that long and I like it about medium

Making different stir-frys out of frozen vegetables is an awesome way to make quick, healthy and tasty meals. I mean ideally you could always use fresh vegetables but it takes sooo much more time that if you are busy it isn't really even an option.

Liver pate and pickles sounds like an interesting breakfast. I might have to try that...

You know, frozen veggies can be better than fresh, because they are picked for flavor rather than perishability. I think frozen veggies aren't a bad move a lot of the time, as long as you stay away from the ones with a lot of salt and additives.

I hate when my house runs out of food. I literally couldn't find anyyyything to even make a base out of for anything closely resembling food, so I made this weird asian-influenced crab paella.

I sauteed 3 cloves of garlic with half a red onion, half a carrot, and half a celery stalk.
Added a teaspoon of thai chili paste, and a teaspoon of sriracha chili, salt and pepper, and some grated fresh ginger. Then I added a dash of soy sauce, some fish sauce (anchovy juice), and about a cup of beef stock.

After simmering about 10 minutes, I turned off the heat, added a handful of diced cilantro, half a can of salad-style crab meat, and a cup of cooked white rice. Stir and serve.

The solution to that, is live next to the grocery store.

Your quickie crab recipe sounds really good. I'll probably try that after the lentil soup.

Sounds kind of interesting. I've wanted to experiment more with anchovy for a while. Seems really versatile and disgusting on its own, but really good mixed with so many other things.

With Oma as my M-I-L, learning to make spaetzle was a must. The basic recipe is to throw a bunch of eggs into a bowl, (half dozen to serve four maybe?), add some cold water (just under the faucet for a second), whisk them up - but don't beat them to death, then add flour gradually until it's getting hard to stir / incorporate more flour.

Two basic spaetzle makers, this one for long spaghetti type noodles, and this one for the shorter little nubs.

I usually make the long noodles, which you press directly into a pot of boiling water.

The shorter ones can also be fried after boiling.

I'd say the family favorite is to put a bunch of spaetzle into a baking dish, cover with swiss cheese, throw it into the oven to melt the cheese, then cover with carmelized onions when you take it out. So good.

*******

I've never been much of a fish person, but we've gotten into a food rut around here. I picked up some frozen tilapia filets a while back. I fried them up tonight loosely following this recipe.

I didn't have all the ingredients for the spicy tartar on hand, so I used mayo, garlic, chili powder, lime juice, black pepper, and a sea salt blend.

Wow. So easy and pretty tasty too. They fry up in just a couple minutes. I'd definitely recommend it to beginning cooks.

Picked up some good olive oil the other day (10€ for 0.5l) and used it to make some pesto yesterday. What a difference with ordinary olive oil. Tasted so damn good. Made green pesto gnocchi served with a tomato/rucola/mozzarella salad topped with strips of rare steak. It was very good.

Sounds wonderful. I really need to make pesto from scratch some time...

I've always wanted to try some of the super pricey olive oils, but have yet to pull the trigger.

I wanna try really basic marinating of veggies for a few days to see if I can come up with some interesting tastes. I don't want to pickle... more like infuse with flavour.

Stuff I was thinking about:

Red onions in blood or sour orange juice.
Mushrooms in different vinaigrettes.
Roasted garlics in different oils.
Maybe some stuff in vodka or wine.

Does anyone know what's in those japanese cucumber salads? They're thinly sliced and almost taste marinated?

How long would i need to leave these things in the sauces to get rid of whatever heat the onions have, etc? How many days should i try to let them stew for before I eat? Do I have to worry about bacteria/mould?

Re marinating onions: it takes a lot of the harsh kick out. I sometimes marinate onions in vinegar overnight before putting them into a potato salad or other mixed salad.

Mushrooms in viniagrettes is pretty standard and successful, but mostly when I've had those they have been too sweet and it has made it an unexceptional dish that to my mind hasn't done anything interesting with the mushroom flavors. I think maybe trying this with flavors on the savory side would be much more interesting.

Also, in the yoghurt stuff I've been reading about lately, pickling in yoghurt is not all that uncommon. I have no idea what the results would be like, but it's a new and interesting idea to me, anyway.

Supa, if you check Amazon, there are a ton of books on pickling, brining, and preserving/flavoring fruits and veggies with different pickling techniques. And if you do a search of some of the online recipe sites, you'll see recipes for things like brandy-marinated cherries and such. I think we even had some recipes for that here in the lounge a while back.

Creole Jambalaya
2 Tbsp butter
2 c. cubed ham (small)
¾ c. chopped onion
2 cloves garlic minced
1 (1 lb. 12 oz.) can tomatoes
1 (10 ½ oz.) can meat broth
1 c. water
1 bay leaf, crushed
½ tsp thyme crushed
½ tsp sugar
¼ tsp chili powder
Fresh ground pepper
1 c. long grain rice
4.5 oz. shrimp drained
1 green pepper, cut large

Melt butter in large saucepan. Add cubed ham, onion, garlic, and cook until onion is tender. Add tomatoes, meat broth, water, bay leaf, thyme, sugar, chili powder, pepper, rice. Cover and bring to a boil. Reduce heat. Simmer 15 minutes or until rice is tender. Add drained shrimp and pepper. Cover and simmer 5-10 more minutes. Serve delicious.


So we start with the ham, onion, and garlic. This thing smells amazing already.


Time to add all the liquids. I realize that this pot is not nearly big enough. It was at the rim before adding the rice. So I use another pot and we've split the recipe up a bit. Hopefully this turns out all right!


Ya ha! I thought I had a bigger pot in the back somewhere. Remerge the foods into one giant pot and bringing to a boil.


Cut up some green onion and have about 5 oz. of shrimp here that was pretty much good to go other than thawing and cooking.


Final product in the giantpot.


Here's the final product in the bowl. I don't know how "creole" this is (I think not very much), but it's pretty dang delicious despite looking kinda weird.


Room for improvement: Smaller/less green pepper. Smaller so they soften more in the short time they're simmering. Less because I'm not THIS big a fan of green pepper. Next time I'm using double the shrimp if I can afford to. So good.

Also, bowls since the first have been a lot less liquidy and more solid in nature. I kind of prefer it that way as I can just focus on filling up on the substance.

Solo, first thing I thought on seeing the pics was that you left the green pepper pieces too big. That would leave a big bite of them in some spoonfuls and plenty with none. You might enjoy however much you decide to use if it were distributed much more evenly throughout the soup. So maybe more chop chop on the pepper next time?

Second thing I thought was it looked like you left the tomatoes whole. Maybe run a knife or the side of a spoon through them in the pot? Otherwise, same kind of thing as with the peppers maybe -- too much in one spoonful, none in another.

Blarg, your thoughts are right on. They said cut big for the peppers, and obviously, I took that a wee too literal.

I did leave the tomatoes whole and oddly enough that wasn't a big problem for me. The flavor of tomato was in every bite, and some just had the delicious giant chunk.

Next time, however, I probably will cut the tomatoes down, too. It was still delicious and it didn't turn out horrible for a first time (not that it really COULD considering it's just mix and boil). Good stuff.

It looks pretty tasty.

One more thing about leaving the tomatoes big -- they're kinda oddly weighted and hard to handle like that and might splash someone's shirt that way, by slipping off the spoon, if you're serving it to others.

Re: the soup thickening later on, rice tends to do that. Sometimes it's great, sometimes you might wish a soup that thickens too much had stayed thinner. But if you add water, the flavors get diluted and it's not clear if you should be adding herbs or spices too, which ones, or how much, to make up for it.

[marthastewart]If you keep a little soup stock on hand, problem solved. You can refresh soup without watering the flavors down too much by adding chicken stock to it. (Even works with beef-flavored soups.) Some people will freeze an ice cube tray full of soup stock, then bag the cubes and toss some into a soup they're making later. You can do pretty much the same by just filling some really small tupperware containers, too, and freezing those for later.[/marthastewart]

Haha. Great post Blarg. I didn't consider the rice sopping up the liquid, but obviously that's what happened. Oops.

Man that looks good SoloAJ, well minus the Green Peppers.

I have been trying to make myself try new things and things I never would like but I just can't get past the whole green pepper thing. Just too strong a taste and it reminds me too much of many fights with my parents wanting ot force me to eat the damn things and the whole house smelling like those damn things

Good for you Fish. I think trying new things is one of the keys to joy or something cosmic like that. It fights getting old. I feel sorry for people who decide what they like to eat and never eat anything different again.

2 suggestions on the green peppers:
substitute yellow or red pepper for part of the green.
chop it up and cook it with the onion. that should dilute the flavor.

onion, green pepper, and celery are the base of many cajun dishes. (like onion, celery, and carrot is for French)

I was REALLY proud of myself a couple of weeks ago. I was at a dinner and tried Calamari (I even ate the tentacles), Fried Green Tomatoes and some kind of crazy stuffed Mushroom. I would never even have tried these things before and I ended up actually liking them. I didn't like the mushroom thing as much but it was more the stuffing in the mushroom than anything there.

Thanks for the tips Nut. In hindsight, I don't know why I didn't just do that despite the recipe. I guess I was just going to follow it the first time through. Obviously a common sense good idea given that recipe, too.

And yes, yellow and red are so much more tasty. I went the cheap route for the peppers in this case, since I expected it to be a pretty minor flavor. Obviously, as cooked, it wasn't so minor.

I had a giant chunk of sirloin, so first I made these in a hoisin reduction:



then I ground up the leftovers and made these (note the dangerously delicious pink centres):

oh man oh man, that looks fantastic Supafrey. What ingredients go into the hoisin reduction? I want to try this!