Sweet Reality Presents: Stuff I have cooked and shared recipe thread

[moginie]

I did home made schnitzels and a cheesy potato bake last night. I didn't even think to photograph it until half the meal was over and what would be attractive about that?

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

Magnificent PG! Outstanding. I am a little perturbed at the portion, I would normally eat about 6 times that much for a snack.

Back in the day, in another lifetime, I used to make a squid ink infused linguini with mussels, scallops, prawns and calamari.
A white sauce would accompany said delights, consisting of garlic, cream, white wine, butter and parsley.
Probably been 20 years since I’ve made that particular meal.

Tonight is exciting. Tonight is homemade sliders with beer battered chips.
Tonight, my arteries will clog up and explode, metaphorically of course.

I used to cook spaghetti nero. Marios in Lonsdale St (long defunct) always had it. I invariably ordered it. It looks full on but it is a really delicate dish where the calamari and seafood MUST be super fresh.

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

I did home made schnitzels and a cheesy potato bake last night. I didn't even think to photograph it until half the meal was over and what would be attractive about that?

Yum. Did you use veal or chicken? Super points if it was the former.

Yippee just about any cheese based vegie bake is the bees' knees.

Experimented a year ago with a leek bechemal cheese bake. Charred lengths of carefully quartered (cleaned) leek with a bit of oil in a hot frying pan, removed leek and deglazed pan with white wine ahead of making a bechamel* in the same pan. Stirred through some chunks of Taleggio** while the white sauce was still scalding hot. Placed leeks into greased oblong baking dish with sauce, sprinkled grated parmesan on top and baked in a medium oven for 20 mins or so.

* I always chuck at least one smashed garlic clove into the bechamel as it cooks then chuck out
** I am addicted to Taleggio. The problems with this recipe is that I have to restrain myself from eating all the cheese before chucking it in the sauce.

 

[moginie]

Yum. Did you use veal or chicken? Super points if it was the former.

Yippee just about any cheese based vegie bake is the bees' knees.

Experimented a year ago with a leek bechemal cheese bake. Charred lengths of carefully quartered (cleaned) leek with a bit of oil in a hot frying pan, removed leek and deglazed pan with white wine ahead of making a bechamel* in the same pan. Stirred through some chunks of Taleggio** while the white sauce was still scalding hot. Placed leeks into greased oblong baking dish with sauce, sprinkled grated parmesan on top and baked in a medium oven for 20 mins or so.

* I always chuck at least one smashed garlic clove into the bechamel as it cooks then chuck out
** I am addicted to Taleggio. The problems with this recipe is that I have to restrain myself from eating all the cheese before chucking it in the sauce.

Had to be chicken. Once again Dietary Requirement Roulette spun the wheel and came up with a number that was safe.

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

I have cabin fever big time.

With all of us under wraps and heading into the chilly nights and ennui of Easter, my thoughts are turning to a celebration of the unctuous slow cooked straggly lumps of fresh and smoked pork. My fave ex Ms B52's daughter in law has kilos of kim chi buried in earthenware containers in her backyard.

She has promised me some next week. I will mix it through my own shitty home made and under cured sauerkraut.

When I make Choucroute (check it out - there are heaps of recipes on the Net no doubt) it is always made in massive quantities. In these weird times I will do four-six food drops at the houses of friends, the fave ex Ms B52 (if the main boyfriend aint around), her son and daughter in law and various other miscreants.

Mostly Choucroute is considered as a celebration of pork but for me it is much a chance to bow before the cabbage, potato and onion.

I will give updates as I scour out the goods I want. provisionally I am planning to use a 4 litre pot and a slow cooker to test the differences in two different versions. COOKING is always a bad arse chemistry experiment.

KohPhi and others of the wimpy persuasion, be assured there is no offal on the ingredients list.

More details in coming days.

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

I am just about ready on my first batch of sauerkraut , kim chi and fermented ginger beer.

I'm delving into the hot sauce rabbit hole with the plan to grow my own peppers and make it all from my garden

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

I am just about ready on my first batch of sauerkraut , kim chi and fermented ginger beer.

I'm delving into the hot sauce rabbit hole with the plan to grow my own peppers and make it all from my garden

Fantastic. The fermented ginger is a bust arse idea to add some zing!

Will see if I can gouge out the young Korean woman's family recipe for kim chi and share here.

 

[VeinGlorious]

Guys, I can’t stress this enough, if you are talking about tasty morsels that you’ve cooked or eaten please for the love of Allah post some DAMN PICTURES!!!

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

This a chilli con carne I made a few weeks back and kept a few serves in the freezer

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

I just started a fresh batch of ginger bug tonight

 

[Cactus_]

Curried Sausages
​

Ingredients:
12 Sausages
2 medium brown onions
6 Large Potatoes
2 cloves garlic
1 Tablespoons curry powder
2-3 tablespoons any kind of flour
chilli to taste

View attachment 849578

This is a fairly basic recipe I use and adapt depending on what I've got in the cupboard.

I've made it with chicken thighs, drumsticks, Lamb and veggies although with the lamb I used a different curry powder and I marinated the meat first.

Instead of potatoes I've used yams, carrots, chic peas, lentils whatever.

Today I don't have garlic so I've used 1 teaspoon of my go to garlic powder (if you have never used it it is a game changer)

1. Peel potatoes and cut into 1cm cubes and par boil them

2. Roughly cut onions I do it as I'm cooking the meat

3. Cook off the meat in a hot pan in small batches making sure you get plenty of colour on the meat and in the pan. Make sure you don't catch the bottom of the pan as that sticky goodness makes awesome flavour for the next step Once cooked remove the meat and put it on a plate to cool

4. Cook onions until they are soft AND sweet on a very low heat. Using a wooden spoon make sure you stir them well at the start to get all the sticky good stuff left by the meat off the bottom of the pot

5. Add in curry powder and stir for 30 seconds until you can smell the goodness

6. add the flour and stir for another 30 seconds

7. Add the par boiled potatoes and stir for a bit then add a dash of the stock and stir until you can see the potatoes absorb some of the juice

8. Add the meat back in stir then add the rest of the stock cook for 45 minutes until the sauce is thick like gravy

Serve with rice generally but whatever you like really.

View attachment 849592

Whoa. That brought back some childhood memories ...

... now I’m gunna have to start my therapy all over again.

 

[Cactus_]

This a chilli con carne I made a few weeks back and kept a few serves in the freezer

View attachment 851863

Chilli looks OK. Presentation could do with a little work ...

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

Chilli looks OK. Presentation could do with a little work ...

Fair call but it was just a re-heat job

 

[Cactus_]

Great Zeus, I love the molten lava of cheese.

* My one departure from traditional Italian pizzas is doubling or tripling the amount of cheese.
* A simple grilled cheese open sanger with a chopped anchovy and a scatter of a few drained and flash fried capers.
* With chilly Autumn nights approaching there is nothing better than a big bowl of French Onion Soup - enriched by a kick-arse chicken stock, beautiful slow sweated sweet onions and a bit of fennel and garlic. The Soup mix benefits from any spare rinds of cheese chucked in to the pot and at the end a big shot of brandy. To finish just bring soup to a simmer, toast some sour dough bread and smother with cheese (to your taste). Pour soup into oven proof bowls, carefully place toast covered to excess with cheese and plonk in the oven until the cheese is volcanic.

I think we all need to liberate the cheese rounds held captive by manangatang

Not sure about cooked capers TBH. They always taste weird to me after they’ve been cooked. Or it might just be that I was using low end pickle capers rather than high end salted capers ...

 

[Cactus_]

I can’t work out which posts are official entries and which are just rambling. I held onto partial sobriety long enough to get my risotto happening and it turned out really well. THEN I got drunk. But I remembered the photo so here goes.

RISOTTO NERO by PG

This was inspired by a restaurant I went to in London once that served risotto Nero with extra sautéed calamari and tomatoes, which was nice and looked pretty. Most of the ingredients I already had to hand - just had to buy some cherry tomatoes and a calamari tube.

Ingredients:

RISOTTO
- 700 mls Home made fish stock (made from simmering cleaned snapper head and bones, celery, carrot, leek, onion, fennel in 1.5 litres of water)
- 160g vialone nano risotto rice
- 10g (2 sachets) squid ink
- 2 banana shallots very finely diced
- 1 garlic clove crushed
- 2 birds eye chillies, seeds removed and finely diced
- 100 mls white wine
- 100g squid hood, diced into 0.5 centimetre pieces
- tbsp olive oil
- 30g butter
- salt and pepper

FRIED CALAMARI and TOMATOES
- 1/2 small calamari tube sliced into rings
- handful of cherry tomatoes and tomatillos
- 1/2 banana shallot fine diced
- olive oil
- flaked sea salt
- chervil
- juice of half a lemon

So I heated the oil and melted the butter in a medium saucepan, and sweated the banana shallots, garlic and chilli for about 5 minutes until soft. Then I dumped in the rice and stirred it around a bit until coated and slightly toasted - then turned the heat up to medium and deglazed with white wine. Then I added the squid ink and stirred to turn the rice black, the wooden spoon black and the saucepan black. And the back of my thumb black where I spilled some.

I forgot to mention I had already heated the stock in another small saucepan. I then did the risotto thing, adding stock to the rice one ladle at a time and stirring until absorbed. After about 3 ladles I add the diced calamari and continue stirring, adding ladles of stock. Eventually (in spite of the international conspiracy to pretend risotto cooks in half the time it actually does) the rice is expanded and very nearly al dente. Season to taste, add a drizzle of oil, turn off hot plate and cover with a lid. It will finish cooking in the residual heat.

In a small sauté pan I heated olive oil, added diced shallot, calamari rings, cherry tomatoes and tomatillos (I grow these so have to think up things to do with them) and stirred around for 3 minutes or so until the calamari rings are cooked and the tomatoes slightly softened. Sprinkle with flaked sea salt.

I served up two portions of risotto nero topped with the calamari and squid sauté, drizzled with some lemon juice and scattered with some chervil sprigs.

I have to say it tasted awesome. Trick with risotto Nero is that any recipe which tells you to use one sachet of ink - don’t. Double it. Black rice is kind of weirdly interesting. With just one sachet you kind of get greyish rice, and grey is not an appealing colour when it comes to food. Here is a photo

View attachment 850447

Jesu Christi! That looks freakin awesome!

 

[Proper Gander]

Magnificent PG! Outstanding. I am a little perturbed at the portion, I would normally eat about 6 times that much for a snack.

Back in the day, in another lifetime, I used to make a squid ink infused linguini with mussels, scallops, prawns and calamari.
A white sauce would accompany said delights, consisting of garlic, cream, white wine, butter and parsley.
Probably been 20 years since I’ve made that particular meal.

Tonight is exciting. Tonight is homemade sliders with beer battered chips.
Tonight, my arteries will clog up and explode, metaphorically of course.

I agree about the portion. I’m a massive guts and generally smash portions that look like a scaled down Mount Kilimanjaro. I’ve been trying deliberately to downsize what with the stay at home thing. New streamlined lifestyle and all. So far it just means that I fang TimTams or cheese platters throughout the day in an unregulated fashion though

 

[Cactus_]

Do we have to have entries in by a particular day or is this going to be more of a free form food fred?

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

Do we have to have entries in by a particular day or is this going to be more of a free form food fred?

In by Sundays and weekly winners I think.

But no eliminations and maybe a scoreboard of sorts

 

[VeinGlorious]

Ingredients.
Woodfired pizza bases from some joint on the peninsula. Edit: Smoke House Pizza Kitchen, stone baked, low in salt, thin, epic, best, get, in, my, belly!
Homemade sauce with shallots and basil.
Mushrooms, sliced
Calabrese Hot salami, shaved
A mixture of mozzarella and colby cheeses.
Garlic
Basil for garnish

Sauce the base, be liberal. I said SAUCE IT?! Good.
Add salami to a fry pan with a clove of minced garlic. Lightly fry the salami just enough to make the fatty bits turn opaque, don’t overcook it, because chewy.
Take salami out of the tefal and using the oils that have accumulated pop your mushrooms in that there pan you got. Go on, I’ll wait.
Good.
Gently place your salami on that thin, saucy pizza base and be sure to spread the garlic out evenly. This is important.
Check your mushrooms, they should’ve soaked up all that oily goodness from the shaved salami.
Evenly spread the mushrooms out over the top of the salami. Great stuff, you’re almost there.
Next comes the cheese.
Add as little or as much as you like, I won’t discriminate, but do it quickly as I’m bloody hungry now!
Sprinkle some fresh basil (or if you are the dick head who left the fresh basil at the SupaIGA, dried basil will suffice) over the cheese. So much cheese. I cannot wait any longer! I must have you! You! And you’re 7 cheesy friends.

Bang.



Sexy Saturday pizza night, done right.

 

[Cactus_]

If memory serves correct Chen Kencacti rose to prominence in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne where he learned his cooking in the kitchen of his mother, Mama Cac.

Fukai: The Western Suburbs of Melbourne have Footscray in them isn’t that right?
Hartori: That’s right.
Fukai: So, do you think we can expect to see something with a little bit of Vietnamese flavour tonight?
Hartori: Well, I don’t know.
Ohta: Fuksi-san?
Fukai: Yes, what is it?
Ohta: I just thought I should let you know I just saw one of the challengers assistants go by with a packet of hot cross buns.
Fukai: Hot Cross buns? Interesting, they’re very traditional in the Inner Western Suburbs of Melbourne, aren’t they?
Hartori: That’s right.
Fukai: They’re usually served with large slabs of foie gras aren’t they?
Hartori: Ah, I think just with some butter is more usual.
Mayuko: Ooooh, I like butter. It makes my mouth so ... nice!

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

Oh boy are you all in for a treat today.


Home made Ramen!!!!!!!!!!



I made the stock yesterday. 2kg chicken necks 6ltr water simmer for 8 - 10 hours strain the liquid and put into containers in the fridge. Keep the meat and neck bones in a bowl in the fridge After about 12 hours skim the fat off the top of the stock.

That should make about 5 ltr of stock. You will need about 500ml per serving of the ramen. Freeze the rest. I'll put uo some photo's as I go, I still have some shopping to do for the dish

 

[Harvey Manfrenjensenden]

Ingredients.
Woodfired pizza bases from some joint on the peninsula. Edit: Smoke House Pizza Kitchen, stone baked, low in salt, thin, epic, best, get, in, my, belly!
Homemade sauce with shallots and basil.
Mushrooms, sliced
Calabrese Hot salami, shaved
A mixture of mozzarella and colby cheeses.
Garlic
Basil for garnish

Sauce the base, be liberal. I said SAUCE IT?! Good.
Add salami to a fry pan with a clove of minced garlic. Lightly fry the salami just enough to make the fatty bits turn opaque, don’t overcook it, because chewy.
Take salami out of the tefal and using the oils that have accumulated pop your mushrooms in that there pan you got. Go on, I’ll wait.
Good.
Gently place your salami on that thin, saucy pizza base and be sure to spread the garlic out evenly. This is important.
Check your mushrooms, they should’ve soaked up all that oily goodness from the shaved salami.
Evenly spread the mushrooms out over the top of the salami. Great stuff, you’re almost there.
Next comes the cheese.
Add as little or as much as you like, I won’t discriminate, but do it quickly as I’m bloody hungry now!
Sprinkle some fresh basil (or if you are the dick head who left the fresh basil at the SupaIGA, dried basil will suffice) over the cheese. So much cheese. I cannot wait any longer! I must have you! You! And you’re 7 cheesy friends.

Bang.

View attachment 852509

Sexy Saturday pizza night, done right.

That looks awesome mate

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

Ingredients.
Woodfired pizza bases from some joint on the peninsula.
Homemade sauce with shallots and basil.
Mushrooms slice
Calabrese Hot salami shaved
A mixture of mozzarella and colby cheeses.
Garlic
Basil for garnish

Sauce the base, be liberal. I said SAUCE IT?! Good.
Add salami to a fry pan with a clove of minced garlic. Lightly fry the salami just enough to make the fatty bits turn opaque, don’t overcook it, because chewy.
Take salami out of the tefal and using the oils that have accumulated pop your mushrooms in that there pan you got. Go on, I’ll wait.
Good.
Gently place your salami on that thin, saucy pizza base and be sure to spread the garlic out evenly. This is important.
Check your mushrooms, they should’ve soaked up all that oily goodness from the shaved salami.
Evenly spread the mushrooms out over the top of the salami. Great stuff, you’re almost there.
Next comes the cheese.
Add as little or as much as you like, I won’t discriminate, but do it quickly as I’m bloody hungry now!
Sprinkle some fresh basil (or if you are the dick head who left the fresh basil at the SupaIGA, dried basil will suffice) over the cheese. So much cheese. I cannot wait any longer! I must have you! You! And you’re 7 cheesy friends.

Bang.

View attachment 852509

Sexy Saturday pizza night, done right.

Absolute yummo.

 

[VeinGlorious]

That looks awesome mate

It was sooooo good, It’s a Saturday night tradition in casa el BlueVein, has been for centuries (years)

Absolute yummo.

The picture really doesn’t do it justice, and I was too damn hungry to take 20-30 shots from different angles for the optimum pic.

 

[Grand Uncle Horace]

I am under the weather (adverse reaction to a particular med and too much whisky). It is a miserable windy day outside and I am rugged up like a polar bear.

Have revised my plans for the day. Have dug out a slow cooker and I will make a basic comfort food pea soup with a ham hock. Might chuck in a rind of cheese for the last half hour.

Will fire it up and go back to bed.