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Author: Livia N

Comforting Cabbage and Ground Beef … Casserole?

I mean, it has all the makings of a good casserole. It just needs some egg noodles and a casserole dish. But I guess making it for just me it’s more in the “skillet” category.

Plated final dish with a saucy mix of cabbage and minced beef

So I had roughly diced and boiled a head of cabbage, and I still had about a pint of leftovers from that.

I also had half a can of diced tomatoes left from making shakshuka. Ground beef was what I’d thawed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but when I the a pound of ground beef, I usually split it into quarters and use one loose for that day’s meal, and I make the other three quarters into hamburger patties and refreeze them.

So this was my starting point, and then I went to see what other people online were doing with these ingredients – and the results were almost universally soup. I was not feeling like soup. So this is winging it.

I started off browning the meat with some onions and diced serrano peppers, and then I minced and added three cloves of garlic.

There’s some “tagine spice” in my cabinet that a friend brought me back from France. It smells more like a sweet curry powder than a ras el hanout, so it feels weird using it in either context. But this seemed like a great reason to use up a tablespoon or so. And then I added about a tablespoon of flour and stirred everything well until all of the flour was sticking to the meat and had cooked a bit.

And then I added liquids – the leftover canned tomatoes, some nut milk, and I decided to count the cabbage as kinda liquid, too. After stirring everything thoroughly, I made sure everything came to a boil to cook the starches. And then I stirred it again and let it simmer until most of the water had evaporated and the sauce was very thick. I did have a moment of my ancestors (well, my mother) telling me that this dish needed a dash of Worcestershire sauce, but I don’t have any, so ancestral advice was ignored. But if you’re inspired by this, it probably wouldn’t hurt to add some.

Re: nut milk – I had impulse bought some pistachio milk (unsweetened!) because I’d never seen it before, and Even though it’s delicious and fancy, it’s always a struggle getting through that much of any kind of milk before it goes bad. So I was delighted I found an excuse to use it, too!

It was delicious! I was so full!

n-layer dip for dinner

A plate full of dip

It’s hard cooking alone to go through an entire can of refried beans in one sitting, and I happened to have about 2/3 of a can left.

So the bottom later on this plate is about half a can of refried beans (yes, your math is correct, there will be more beans in my near future). I microwave it for about a minute. Then when I was stirring the beans, I also mixed in some fresh diced serrano pepper. And then it got microwaved for another 30 seconds.

The beans got topped with a layer of salsa (chipotle-flavor generic salsa from Aldi’s that I thought would be comparable to Giant’s, but it was not as good)

Above that – I had peeled and diced (slightly smaller than a centimeter dice) a small sweet potato. That was sauteed in oil for a few minutes, and then I added a diced half onion (white in this case, but whatever color). Near the end when I was pretty sure all the potato was cooked through and was just adding color, I added two minced cloves of garlic and Penzeys Southwest seasoning. Once the garlic was cooked and the potatoes had some brown edges, it became the third layer for the dip.

Then I minced some scallion greens and some parsley to top the sweet potato layer.

I finely diced (because I didn’t want to wash the shredder) some sharp cheddar cheese. Once that was on top, I popped the dip back in the microwave for another 40 second to get the cheese a little melty and the layers playing together.

I had a container of beet & cabbage shred in the refrigerator, and that was a good choice for the next layer.

So the seventh later was shredded lettuce. And then I had some strained yogurt that was more over to the side than an actual layer.

And I ate it with a fork and some tortilla chips.

Kimchi fried rice with spam

Kimchi fried rice with spam and am egg on top!

Okay, not spam. But I’ve been watching a lot of spam appreciation posts, so I decided to try some. But I bought the cheap knockoff version from Aldi’s

Cooking the luncheon meat

I cubed it and fried it. And decided that was too much, so I also pulled about a third of the cooked meat out and refrigerated it for future omelets and quesadillas. I also tasted it, and it mostly tasted like nothing – hot smooth fatty nothing. So I will have to retry with the actual name brand product.

I think cooked some diced onion and carrot in the rendered fat.And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

With rice and kimchi in the skillet

And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

and then I fried an egg and put it on top!

Beets & Candles

Beet Shred

After a long week of several friends visiting and going out to fancy restaurants and eating rich food, it’s a relief to have a pickled salad hanging out in my refrigerator waiting for me.

I call this my beet shred (it has been on this blog before), but what started as misreading/misremembering a recipe is pretty much a simple salad of all the purple things together at once.

Shredded purple cabbage, thinly sliced purple onions, sliced raw beets, and some red wine vinegar.

It’s great as a taco topping or fancy side salad with a vivid presentation. But it’s also just comforting to eat on it’s own (or over rice).

Menorah with a blue and a white candle

Tonight I lit candles for the first night of Hanukkah. The last two years I’ve been using the fancy menorah of my childhood, but I’ve also been missing this small one made out of gears (which move!) that I picked out and bought for myself when I established a household of my own.

Untamed weekend with friends

Soft tofu with some condiments

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!

Large skillet full of fried 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.

Tofu dish on the side of the fried rice

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.