Month: December 2024

So I messed up last weekend and tried to make shakshuka for friends, only to realize I had run out of the good feta cheese. So I came up with a plan and tried to ask the halal grocery store that has meal delivery if when I ordered the turkey bacon and egg platter could they maybe send me the feta (which is about the same price)? And I hoped and I waited, and I got the turkey and egg platter. Alas.

So I but it the bacon for nibbling, but I put the eggs in the refrigerator and poached fresh ones for the shakshuka.

But I had three random fried eggs.  But I also had leftover cooked rice!

Fried rice sounded like the best answer

So we diced carrots, Korean green radish, onion, garlic, ginger, Chinese sausage, and some scallions. And the fried eggs (cut up with some kitchen scissors).

We (and by we, I mean my friend @senorgrouch ) started cooking the hard vegetables first, then most of the other ingredients, and then the rice, and the eggs got added in with a handful of scallion greens.

Finished off with a sauce of 2 teaspoons of soy sauce, 4 teaspoons of shaoxing wine, and a little drizzle of sesame oil.

It still needed more salt, and we added Laoganma at the table.

We wanted a little more protein with dinner, but also wanted something simple, so I made sliced and dressed some soft tofu with Laoganma, soy sauce, black vinegar, bonito flakes, and sliced scallions.

---

And then the next day I made pork rib and lotus root soup for when my friend T also joined us.

Several months ago I made a clear gelatinous stock from pig feet and froze it. So I used two quarts of the stock.

Weee! had 2 pounds of precut pork rib meat with soft bones. I started with rinsing the meat clean in cold water, then I parboiled them in water and rinsed off any foam. Then that went into the stock

This was my first time using fresh lotus roots (instead of the packaged kind), and they were easy to clean and peel.

And then I followed thewoksoflife’s advice to simmer everything for four hours. I put my oven to 220F and let it cook slowly. Their dipping sauce suggestion was also a good choice. And after I had dipped the solids, the broth did benefit from stirring in an extra pinch of salt.

Like a red tomato sandwich only totally different.

I was pulling out the dead tomato plants and putting them out with the trash (because composting them increases the risk of spreading diseases to your future soil), when I decided that a few more of the unripe tomatoes were big enough to harvest and eat. But they’d been out long enough to go through a couple freezes so they needed to be used right away.

I still have no functional oven, so the bread (multigrain) was toasted in a skillet on the stovetop. Then I put mayonnaise. I considered mustard and I’m not sure I made the right choice. At least one of the pieces of bread should have had mustard, I think.

In a separate skillet, I cooked the three pieces of bacon. That’s really just like one slice. When I open a package of bacon, I’ll slice it into thirds and freeze batches of 6-8 of these slices in containers. Because, yes, I have had bacon go bad before I could get through a whole package. Also these shorter pieces are easier to fit into an 8″ skillet.

After I pulled out the cooked bacon to drain on napkins, I cut up a hot pepper (small unripe poblano) into pieces and fried that in the bacon fat. Then those pieces went on a slice of bread and got covered with slices of sharp cheddar.

Then I sliced and fried the green tomatoes in the bacon grease. These are not traditional fries green tomatoes with a milk wash and batter and all. I’m just cooking them to take some of the unripe sharpness out and to soften them.

So the tomatoes go on the cheese (to get the cheese a little melty with the residual heat of the tomatoes), add a grind of black pepper, and don’t forget the bacon slices before closing the sandwich.

Next to the sandwich, I had a bowl of ramen with a lot of vegetables: a but if parsley root I grew in a pot over the summer, some carrot and daikon radish that I had quick pickling in the refrigerator (see recent entries), and three cabbage leaves cut up into sections. And there’s an egg poaching in the soup.

My friend Asa introduced me to rib flap meat, which has a bunch of contractive tissues but is very richly flavorful. She made it for me with some miracle of pan frying and it was amazing.

But when I found some intercostal beef fingers, I knew I would play it safe with braising.

I had also recently bought a seasoning mix for beef soups and some mushroom seasoning granules, so I used both of them with some beef broth to because the meat for a few hours (with a diced onion).

The end result was incredibly tender pieces of meat, which I pulled out of the liquid and refrigerated it separately. The next day, I popped the fat that had separated and solidified of the top and froze it separately.

For the first meal, I was very tired and hungry, so I made instant mashed potatoes, reheated some of the meat to go on top.

Then I made gravy from the reserved fat, pre-toasted flour, and some of the braising liquid. I then seasoning it with salt, soy sauce (at the end), black pepper, and some thyme.

Second dish – I had some wide and thick rice noodles, and I used them to make some soup.

I diluted a little more than half of the remaining braising liquid with water. To make sure the small potatoes were cooked through, I parboiled them in the noodle water while it was coming up to a boil. Then I sliced the potatoes in half and put them in the soup. I also cut up a carrot and a radish and cooked them in the soup.

When the noodles were ready, I filled the bottom of a bowl with them and laid out all of my soup components on top of the noodles so I could take a pretty picture (also so that I wouldn’t splash everywhere when filling the bowl).

Then I poured in as much of the liquid as would fit and had a delicious meal. (And saved the amount that didn’t fit)

A few days later, I tried the same soup with a few modifications. I melted a little of the reserved fat and started by cooking some ginger slices. Then I added a generous spoonful of tomato paste and melted that into a little bit of the reserved liquid. Once the tomato paste was smooth, I added in the remaining braising liquid and topped up with water. Then I did the same parboiling with the potatoes, but sliced them a little thinner. I had put the rest of the carrot and radish up in my refrigerator with some vinegar for a quick pickle so I used the vinegary vegetables in the soup.

I assembled everything with the wheat noodles and poured the soup over.

So now I have left about half of the fat and about a pint of mixed leftover gravy from the first meal and leftover broth from the third meal. Everything was tasty. Would make again.