Month: October 2024

So there i was with a freshly picked cauliflower and some thawed ground beef looking for inspiration, and I found myself drawn more to the tex-mex casseroles, but diet culture has completely messed up recipe searching because it was very difficult to give recipes that included cauliflower and rice, but not ‘rice’ made out of cauliflower (which is great sometimes, but not what I was looking for.

So I ended up winging it and adding extra carbs out of spite (and deliciousness) and then ended up not having room to add the cauliflower.

I started with a personal size ceramic pot and opened up a can of diced tomatoes and mixed some with #penzeys Southwest seasoning. I put some on the bottom of the dish, added a small flour tortilla, and added more tomato to thoroughly wet the tortilla

Then I added a layer of refried beans (from a can) and some cheese.   I mixed together some leftover rice, hot sauce, and more of the tomatoes

Over a layer of the rice mixture, I added another tomato-ed tortilla

I cooked together a quarter pound of ground beef, fixed onion, a diced poblano pepper, some diced bell pepper, and some mixed garlic.

I added a generous amount of Southwest seasoning and a little (1/4 cup?) alfredo sauce from a jar.

On top of the layer of the beef mixture, I added a little more refried beans.

And then I added a top layer of a tomato-ed tortilla and covered it with cheese. And baked it in a 350F oven for 20 minutes. I did not bother with broiler time to brown the cheese, but one could.

when it came out I topped it with a little parsley. It was warm through but would have be enough even better if I’d left it to heat longer. But it was delicious enough that, again, I didn’t bother. And you can see the pretty layers as I cut into it.

Overall – very pleasing!

I spent all summer growing 1 cauliflower, and I didn’t even take a fashion picture of the final product.

It’s a pity because I don’t think I ever want to devote garden space (at least not while I have limited space with a porch garden) to they again. I tried eating the leaves like collard greens as it was growing, and my body did not like that. I’ve successfully done that in the past with broccoli, so it could just be that I’m getting more sensitive to large quantities of green leafy vegetables over the years. But it wasn’t a plant – for me – that provided any food through the summer while it grew and took up space.

Also it was very hard to keep pest free. I washed the leaves every night, but toward the end of August on I kept seeing white butterflies near there so I knew they were laying eggs, and I kept searching the leaves and not finding eggs or caterpillars. So I just washed the leaves as well as I could and was puzzled. All summer I managed to find and pick off maybe three caterpillars.

But when I harvested, I found that it was just that the leaf spacing was perfect for them to hide out by the stem between the leaves where it was really hard to get to. So points off for being hard to manage pests without insecticide.

But I did get one lovely head of cauliflower. And I put it in a big pot of water and pulled tiny caterpillars off of it as they came out. After about three hours of (intermittent!) cleaning, I nibbled on a floret and it was significantly more flavorful fresh than store bought! But I still put it in plastic and let it sit in my refrigerator for a day before more cleaning before actually using it in a recipe.

So I started with (purple) onions and (orange) peppers and then added the cauliflower florets. And then I pondered whether I wanted to make it vegetarian or add a protein.

I grew up in a household that didn’t cook seafood because my father didn’t like the smell, but I’ve been trying to experiment and learn how to cook it, so I’d bought some salmon portions at Aldi’s with some fairly unimpressive results. I think that’s because starting with thinner steaks was increasing the level of difficulty. So this was the last of that package, and it being thinner meant I could quickly get it just thawed enough that I could cut it with a cleaver into pasta appropriate chunks!

I don’t remember if I set aside all of the vegetables on a plate while I cooked the salmon or if I started a second skillet, but I did cook the salmon separately too make sure I could see that so the frozen pieces behaved properly and got a little sear on all sides.

I also boiled some penne.

Then I put the salmon and the cauliflower together and added alfredo sauce from a jar. And some of the pasta cooking water to loosen it up. And then I decided I also wanted the taste of a bit of tomato pasta sauce, so I also added about a quarter cup from an already open jar in the fridge.

It all came together very satisfactorily!

Don’t try this at home! This was a calculated risk that I took when I was cooking food only for my own consumption.

But I had the ingredients, so I decided to make one of Apicius’ recipes as close to the original as possible.

Just to get it over with quickly, the two poisonous ingredients are pennyroyal and rue. Pennyroyal is in the mint family and can be pretty easily substituted with similar herbs to get the same taste. Rue, however, tastes like nothing else and is  good at sharpening and brightening foods that would otherwise be rich and heavy.

So I started off with the lentils and some water – boiling them and skimming off the scum.

I added green onions, instead of leeks because I didn’t grow leeks in my tiny porch container garden. It also isn’t the season for fresh cilantro, so while I had some frozen and used it, I also supplemented with parsley (which is abundant in my garden).

Then I mixed together ground coriander, pennyroyal, asafetida, mint, rue, a little vinegar, honey, and fish sauce. (See picture above) And then I slowly added defrutum and more vinegar to thin it out.

I also sifted in (while the lentils were boiling) some toasted wheat flour to thicken – this is how my southern relatives thicken stews at the end of cooking if the roux ended up not quite thick enough using a product called Wondra. It’s basically precooked flour – both for food safety and because that helps it clump less. I today my flour until it’s caramel colored because that also makes the process of making a roux for a dark gravy go significantly faster.

After serving in the bowl, I dressed it with some olive oil (which you can’t really see in the picture) and freshly ground black pepper. And I did like it with some added salt as well.

I usually make this thicker and next to a chestnut paste, because those two recipes are often considered together, and serve it as a dip. It’s also very good as a soup. I think I could go even lighter on the lentils to make a thinner soup… but then I might also cheat and try making it with a lamb broth instead of plain water. That would make it closer to the delicious lentil soup at a local Yemeni restaurant.

Good news – I did not die (or have horrible cramps or anything more than one would with regular high fiber dinner)

Tonight’s dinner was steak and potatoes.

The potatoes are small yellow ones from Aldi’s that I cut in half. I start off boiling/poaching them because otherwise I always get the outside too cooked before the inside is cooked, and this both slows me down to give them more time and provides more even heat.

Once the water cooks off (or I get impatient and pour the water out), I add fat. This time I added a chunk (1tsp?) of bacon grease from my freezer. Then I let the potatoes cook and color for about five minutes before adding diced onions and peppers (a poblano from my garden ). Stir it enough that nothing burns and sticks to the skillet. Once the onion is soft, I can add minced garlic. I also added dried thyme (from my garden) and paprika, black pepper, salt, and Penzey’s Spices’s Turkish Seasoning.

The steak was cooked in a hot cast iron skillet starting about when the garlic went into the potatoes.

It’s actually half a steak. I cut off some strips with ambitions toward making a stir fry later in the week