What Have You Cooked Recently?

Sweet pies.

Two weeks ago,
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Week ago.
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This week.
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Have you ever pounded a chicken breast flat and wrapped it around a sausage? Me either, we should both try it out sometime. I wonder if broiling, braising or roasting would work best?
This got me thinking of a dish I used to make a lot because it makes tons of leftovers. We called it Fancy Chicken. I've heard it called Republican Chicken. I'm southern so there is NOTHING healthy about this, but it involves a bed of like Armor dried beef, you know like "deli" chipped beef, chicken tenders or strips of thigh wrapped in bacon which are slightly fried before adding so that the bacon crisps a bit, otherwise it's limp and disgusting. So you layer those strips in then you top it with a mixture of sour cream, cream of mushroom and cream of chicken and of course whatever seasonings you want. Pop it into the oven and let it cook through. I know, I know, it sounds DISGUSTING. Let me tell you, though, it's amazing over rice.

Thank whatever is in the universe that I learned how to cook healthily because that shit is my heritage. I may make it tonight. Nah, I won't. But, maybe...
 
Another Adam Ragusea recipe, this time Tandoori chicken.

We just got back from a trip and I decided to try this in the oven. I would really recommend following his grill steps instead

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Its really tasty, but it smoked up my kitchen and I think on the grill it would taste better with some charcoal. It was very easy to make as well, but I had to buy most of the spices from Amazon, luckily I have enough of the spices to make this ten times over.
 
Made these tonight, not quite what I planned to do but they tasted really good. Can’t see it in the pic but I also made a kalbisal filling (Korean-style boneless beef short rib). The rice seasoning was surprisingly good as well.
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I made some technical mistakes that should be easy to correct next time. Rice a bit overdone, soy sauce messed up the aesthetics, and the nori strips could’ve been more even. Next will be miso yaki onigiri, maybe one with tuna and chives
 
Made these tonight, not quite what I planned to do but they tasted really good. Can’t see it in the pic but I also made a kalbisal filling (Korean-style boneless beef short rib). The rice seasoning was surprisingly good as well.
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I made some technical mistakes that should be easy to correct next time. Rice a bit overdone, soy sauce messed up the aesthetics, and the nori strips could’ve been more even. Next will be miso yaki onigiri, maybe one with tuna and chives
I feel like onigiri have fallen by the wayside because of anime and weebs ruining their reputation, turning them into some kind of international symbol for autism. They probably get jammed into cartoons all the time just because they're easy to draw and the characters can have them packed and eat them with one hand while standing. They deserve respect alongside tonkotsu, sukiyaki, sushi and every other Japanese dish that gets taken seriously, but only when the people handling them do so with respect.

Thank you for not just mushing some rice together with a strip of crooked nori in order to post cosplay selfies with it to some insufferable weeb group on social media. This kind of treatment goes towards repairing this dish's reputation.

I hope you try a sweet teriyaki chicken (or steak) filling with plenty of shredded spring onion and a touch of ginger. I think you'll find that onigiri with teriyaki, onion and ginger taste even better after several hours in the fridge, or even the next day in a packed lunch due to the way the flavors mingle with the rice. Please be careful when using any filling with mayo (like spicy tuna mayo), as hot rice can cook the egg in the mayo, packing the rice around the filling can cause the mayo to ooze out from between the grains of rice, and it can get really iffy with the rice if it's not served and eaten within a couple of hours.
 
Decided to do the bread again but with a twist. Same Adam Ragusea recipe with some extra ingredients.
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Jalapeno, cheesey garlic bread! Its pillowy and soft inside with a nice crust. My wife describes it as the best bread she has ever had and I have to admit, its pretty damn tasty. Only change I would make next time is to add more cheese, I was just using whatever I had in the fridge at the time. I will post Adams full recipe below, with my changes highlighted in bold. This serving is huge btw, we probably wont eat most of it, the whole loaf is as big as my dutch oven. Next time I am freezing half the dough.

I have been very intimidated by baking in the past, but the results of this recipe have encouraged me to keep experimenting. Its almost foolproof because you aren't really measuring anything, and with the dutch oven it cooks to the exact temperature each time.

2 cups (474mL) water,
divided in two 2 teaspoons (10g) salt (based on the Morton Kosher I use)
1/8 teaspoon dry yeast (two small pinches)
bread flour (you'll need maybe 5-6 cups, 500-600g, but this recipe is not based on firm quantities) I used all purpose
a little whole wheat flour, if you want (I like to replace maybe a tenth of the white bread flour with whole wheat — I just eyeball it)
2 teaspoons of sugar
Can of lager
Shredded cheese, whatever you like, I used a whole bag of vegan stuff
4 Jalapenos
Diced Garlic 2 heaping tablespoons



The night before you want to bake, mix a poolish by combining half of the water (1 cup, 237mL) I used the can of beer here instead of water and added the sugar with the yeast and enough flour to get a thick batter / pudding consistency. I think a wooden spoon is the best utensil to use for this, but whatever spoon you use, use something rigid. You can just leave the spoon in the poolish overnight. Cover the poolish and let it ferment 8-24 hours.


About four hours before you want to bake, uncover the poolish and mix in the remaining cup (237mL) of water, salt, and as much flour as you can stir in with a spoon (no hand kneading). Again, you can leave the spoon in there. Cover and let rise/hydrate for about an hour.

Check it again and see if you can stir in a little more flour now that the previous addition has hydrated. When you're done, you can get rid of the spoon. Cover and let rise/hydrate for another hour. These next steps I do in the bowl, just to keep the mess contained, FYI.

Dice 3 Jalapenos, mix with garlic and cheese onto dough. Sprinkle the dough with a little flour to keep it from sticking to you. Grab one side of it and pull it out until just before it's going to tear, then fold it back in on itself. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and repeat until you've done this four total times. Position the dough so that the seems are on the bottom and the smooth surface is on top. Try to knead the cheese, jalapeno and garlic into the dough during the folding process, this worked for me but you could probably also add that mixture into the previous step

Cover and let rest for about 20 minutes. Do the whole folding and stretching procedure again, rest 20 minutes, and then do it a third time.

The following instructions are for baking this with a dutch oven. If you're using a baking sheet with a heat-safe metal bowl, skip to that part now. Get a sheet of parchment paper, crumple it up into a ball, un-crumple it and stuff it down into the bottom of your dutch oven. Transfer in the dough, smooth-side up. Cover the dutch oven (but not with the lid). Put the lid in your oven and get it heating to 500ºF/260ºC (some people get better results with slightly lower temperatures, but every oven is different). Let the dough proof for about a half hour while the oven heats up. When the dough is looking puffy, score the surface — I find a few quick, confident slashes with a serrated knife work ok. I used scissors to score the dough, cut the last Jalapeno and push into the top of dough, dotting around the surface. Put the dutch oven over a burner on your stove, turn the heat on high, and cove it with the hot lid from the oven. When the side of the dutch oven feel hot (it should just take a couple minutes), transfer the whole situation to your oven and let bake for a half hour undisturbed, so as to not let any steam escape. Carefully remove the hot lid, reduce the heat to 450ºF/230ºC and let the surface of the bread brown while the interior finishes baking, 10-20 more minutes. You can test the interior with a thermometer — anything in the neighborhood of 200ºF/93ºC is good. Let the bread cool before slicing.
 
It's been a long time since I had enough time to really sit down and experiment, and with prices rocketing I've been hesitant to get really creative at risk of waste. It's not like I'm destitute or anything, but I can't stand the thought of sending something to the composter if I can avoid it. So after spending months slipping back into the rice bowls and breakfast for dinner habit, harvest season has come back around and I have a chance to experiment at zero cost once again.

My first experiment so far has been chokecherry jam. Chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) are a really popular shrub along roadways where I'm at. Naturally a suckering bush, most of the local ones are cut to grow into small trees. People, myself included until now, usually avoid them assuming they're unpalatable ornamentals. After trying some while on a walk though I realized they're delicious, and after a lot of Brave Search™ing I identified them. The leaves in the Canada Red garden variety turn a deep purple in mid-summer, making them easy to recognize.
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The berries themselves are very tart, with a plum-like sweetness owing to the fact that they're very closely related to common plums. Some older, softer berries seem to lose that tang and just have a sweet plum taste, but I've noticed that birds and ants have a lock on singling them out before you can grab them. Once collected they're dick easy to make jam from: for the juice just cover the berries in water, bring to a boil for a half hour, drain, mulch the remnants with an immersion blender, add water and boil again, drain. The few recipes I checked used wild collected fruit, which I assume is juicier than landscaping stock. It took me about 3 cups of berries per cup of juice, far more than the 1 1/2-2 cup estimate I kept seeing, but it tasted fine all the same. Afterwards simply return the juice to the pot, heat, and mix in however much honey or sugar or other sweetener you want. They're high enough in natural pectin that unless you want it super gloopy you don't seem to need any at all.
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I tried taking a photo to illustrate the pleasant purple color and naturally thick consistency but it just looked like a crime scene. Imagine congealed blood coating a very sad slice of toast. Or a sea cucumber barfing it's guts out onto a plate. It was tasty though, so that's neat. If you live somewhere with a lot of chokecherries I really recommend taking the time to pick some; despite the simplicity it's some of the best homemade jam I've made to date.

Apples are also beginning to ripen, so my next plan is to collect my own apples along with crabapples from one of the local parks to try making apple flour. It's an idea I came up with a few months ago while making an apple pie that seems to have already been done by other more creative people, so I'll nip at their heels and see what I can whip together.
 
PIE! PIE! PIE!
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I haven't made pie in a good long while, I remember it being a massive pain in the ass but this time it wasn't nearly as hard. I've gotten a lot better at baking in recent years, and if you use a food processor to pulse the dough it's a big help. Only annoying part of the process was pitting all the cherries!

End result had a great flakey crust, the cherries weren't overly sweet and still had some tartness, and also still had some fruit texture rather than just a goopy jam consistency.
 
Started another batch of bone broth in my slow cooker. This time it's pork bone broth from neck bones and feet (for the sweet, sweet collagen). Roasted the meat and some aromatic veggies and then put them in the crock pot with bay leaves, peppercorns and turmeric. 9 hours in and it's smelling good.

I'm going to try beef next. I'm also curious about turkey bone broth next time we cook a turkey here. The farm co-op near me has a variety of other soup bones I could try sometime too. Like bison, lamb, maybe even deer if that would work in bone broth.
 
Completely unintentionally I made
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Grill season is fading away and stores are selling their grill meats cheap so I bought some that was premarinated at a very nice price. Some brands have a good marinade, others are mediocre. Turns out this one way too salty for my taste so I went back into the kitchen and cut up half a tomato/avocado and put it on top to dilute the salt. It was really good and looked very pretty.
 
Sweet pies.
Right in the feels. This looks 100% like something my grandma used to make for me. She usually filled those with cherries or apples.

On topic: I've made a huge apple pie with streusels because the in-laws thought it was necessary to throw a shitload of apples at us. I'm not even mad, I have apple pie. :lol:
I've based mine on this recipe here, can fully recommend it, it turned out great: https://thefoodcharlatan.com/dutch-apple-pie-recipe/
 
Right in the feels. This looks 100% like something my grandma used to make for me. She usually filled those with cherries or apples.
I've made a new batch with apples and apple jam. They look more like buns, but still they smell like Heaven.
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This is my rip off of the Chicken Salad Chick's recipe.

What you need:
3 pounds of chicken tenderloins. Breasts are fine too.
Dry Ranch seasoning power.
A jar of Better Than Bouillon roasted chicken flavor.
Salt.
Pepper.
Celery chopped real, real fine. Gonna need a gadget, regular knife won't do.
Duke's Mayonnaise. You can use a different mayo I guess since it isn't a huge factor in the overall taste. But yeah, Duke's.

You're going to put your chicken in a pot with water and plop a fair amount of the Better Than Bouillon in. You're going to poach the chicken for about 20 minutes. Since you are a smart cook, you are going to strain and save the eventual broth in a jar for another dish. Also you need it anyways.

Once the chicken has cooled, you can use your mitts to get in there and just grind it all up real fine. Pour some of that broth into the chicken mixture until you're almost at the point of it binding. That's when you want to add in just enough mayo to create the right texture. Using mayo alone results in a sort of dry, bland chicken salad. You need the broth for flavor.

Then you toss in five table spoons of your dry ranch seasoning, four table spoons of your gadget chopped celery, one teaspoon of salt and one teaspoon of pepper. This is for a large batch.

This base recipe will allow you to alter the flavors just like Chicken Salad Chick does. Some of their salads use pickles instead of celery. Some use buffalo sauce. Some use grapes and walnuts. Experiment.
 
I am sure this does not count as cooking but I made chicken korma a couple of days ago and had a serving left. I also had some mixed green veg that I bought yesterday in the reduced to clear bin. I took those green mixed veg and added them to the leftover Korma. It was really good. I think in the future if I make korma again I will add veg to it. The chicken was also from the reduced to clear bin. I think overall both meals cost £3.75. The first time I had a load of cauliflower rice with it. Trying to go low carb again.
 
Decided to do the bread again but with a twist. Same Adam Ragusea recipe with some extra ingredients.

divided in two 2 teaspoons (10g) salt (based on the Morton Kosher I use)
1/8 teaspoon dry yeast (two small pinches)
bread flour (you'll need maybe 5-6 cups, 500-600g, but this recipe is not based on firm quantities) I used all purpose
a little whole wheat flour, if you want (I like to replace maybe a tenth of the white bread flour with whole wheat — I just eyeball it)
2 teaspoons of sugar
Can of lager
Shredded cheese, whatever you like, I used a whole bag of vegan stuff
4 Jalapenos
Diced Garlic 2 heaping tablespoons



The night before you want to bake, mix a poolish by combining half of the water (1 cup, 237mL) I used the can of beer here instead of water and added the sugar with the yeast and enough flour to get a thick batter / pudding consistency. I think a wooden spoon is the best utensil to use for this, but whatever spoon you use, use something rigid. You can just leave the spoon in the poolish overnight. Cover the poolish and let it ferment 8-24 hours.


About four hours before you want to bake, uncover the poolish and mix in the remaining cup (237mL) of water, salt, and as much flour as you can stir in with a spoon (no hand kneading). Again, you can leave the spoon in there. Cover and let rise/hydrate for about an hour.

Check it again and see if you can stir in a little more flour now that the previous addition has hydrated. When you're done, you can get rid of the spoon. Cover and let rise/hydrate for another hour. These next steps I do in the bowl, just to keep the mess contained, FYI.

Dice 3 Jalapenos, mix with garlic and cheese onto dough. Sprinkle the dough with a little flour to keep it from sticking to you. Grab one side of it and pull it out until just before it's going to tear, then fold it back in on itself. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and repeat until you've done this four total times. Position the dough so that the seems are on the bottom and the smooth surface is on top. Try to knead the cheese, jalapeno and garlic into the dough during the folding process, this worked for me but you could probably also add that mixture into the previous step

Cover and let rest for about 20 minutes. Do the whole folding and stretching procedure again, rest 20 minutes, and then do it a third time.

The following instructions are for baking this with a dutch oven. If you're using a baking sheet with a heat-safe metal bowl, skip to that part now. Get a sheet of parchment paper, crumple it up into a ball, un-crumple it and stuff it down into the bottom of your dutch oven. Transfer in the dough, smooth-side up. Cover the dutch oven (but not with the lid). Put the lid in your oven and get it heating to 500ºF/260ºC (some people get better results with slightly lower temperatures, but every oven is different). Let the dough proof for about a half hour while the oven heats up. When the dough is looking puffy, score the surface — I find a few quick, confident slashes with a serrated knife work ok. I used scissors to score the dough, cut the last Jalapeno and push into the top of dough, dotting around the surface. Put the dutch oven over a burner on your stove, turn the heat on high, and cove it with the hot lid from the oven. When the side of the dutch oven feel hot (it should just take a couple minutes), transfer the whole situation to your oven and let bake for a half hour undisturbed, so as to not let any steam escape. Carefully remove the hot lid, reduce the heat to 450ºF/230ºC and let the surface of the bread brown while the interior finishes baking, 10-20 more minutes. You can test the interior with a thermometer — anything in the neighborhood of 200ºF/93ºC is good. Let the bread cool before slicing.[/SPOILER]

For some reason I cant edit my own post. I have done this twice since posting for a party and for our own consumption. I heavily overstated the cheese. I used an entire 1lb bag for the party and it was tasty, but it was way too much cheese for the loaf to handle. I recommend only about 8 ounces of cheese max, so about half a pound.
 
Some eldritch transcultural abomination that is a mix of no-bake cheesecake, tiramisu and pancake cake (блинный торт) with chocolate oat milk and coffee for pancake batter. Turned out pretty tasty.

Did you choose the oat milk to make it vegan? If it is a vegan recipe could you share it? Theres dairy allergies in my family so anything dairy free I try to save to try later.
 
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