What Have You Cooked Recently?

Damned if I know how I ended up with five calamansi bushes, but I'm now scrambling for recipes to use all this fruit. So far, the runaway favorite is key lime calamansi pie with whipped coconut cream. It's really lovely.
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I made some fantastic burritos last night. Haven't had anything with cilantro in awhile so I was pretty stoked about it. Also for it being fall, the grape tomatoes have been delicious and super cheap.

Also did a shrimp fest with my best friend tonight. Just bummed we didn't have tartar sauce.
 
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I baked a spiced apple cake with salted caramel Swiss Meringue buttercream.

Recipe available here if you’re interested. You’ll need to have intermediate baking skills and a stand mixer. I also added some freshly grated ginger, allspice and chopped toasted pecans to the cake batter.

It took a fair amount of work, but it was a huge hit at Thanksgiving dinner! There wasn’t a single crumb left because people were scraping off whatever they could from the cake board.

On the down side, my family now expects me to make desserts for all future gatherings...

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Ndnd said:
I baked a spiced apple cake with salted caramel Swiss Meringue buttercream.

Recipe available here if you’re interested. You’ll need to have intermediate baking skills and a stand mixer. I also added some freshly grated ginger, allspice and chopped toasted pecans to the cake batter.

It took a fair amount of work, but it was a huge hit at Thanksgiving dinner! There wasn’t a single crumb left because people were scraping off whatever they could from the cake board.

On the down side, my family now expects me to make desserts for all future gatherings...

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That is an impressively level cake. Did you cook the layers in a bain-marie?
 
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Durable Mike Malloy said:
That is an impressively level cake. Did you cook the layers in a bain-marie?
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Thanks! First I weighed out the batter in each of the cake pans, to make sure it was perfectly divided amongst all of them. Then I put cake strips around the sides of the pans before I put them into the oven. (Wilton makes them, or you can DIY it with a long strip of tin foil wrapped around damp paper towel)

The cake strips prevent doming, so there’s really no need to trim/level the layers at all!
 
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Durable Mike Malloy said:
Damned if I know how I ended up with five calamansi bushes, but I'm now scrambling for recipes to use all this fruit. So far, the runaway favorite is key lime calamansi pie with whipped coconut cream. It's really lovely.
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Do you can/preserve it at all? I've got a giant pear tree near me so learned to can a couple of years back. It's a pain to do the first time, but it's nice to have fruit all through winter
 
Ndnd said:
Thanks! First I weighed out the batter in each of the cake pans, to make sure it was perfectly divided amongst all of them. Then I put cake strips around the sides of the pans before I put them into the oven. (Wilton makes them, or you can DIY it with a long strip of tin foil wrapped around damp paper towel)

The cake strips prevent doming, so there’s really no need to trim/level the layers at all!
Click to expand...
Now that I have an oven with decent temperature control, I'll have to give cake strips another try if the results are that nice! My parents cook with wood, and I've always had pretty crappy ovens, so if I wanted level layers, I had to go with the full bain-marie. Although it's convenient to have the tub of hot water to hand for washing up, it's still enough trouble that I almost never bothered to do it.

Fliddaroonie said:
Do you can/preserve it at all? I've got a giant pear tree near me so learned to can a couple of years back. It's a pain to do the first time, but it's nice to have fruit all through winter
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You know, I've always thought of home canning as a great engineer's hobby, because it fits right into that sort of optimization mindset. It's a habit I grew up with, since my family mostly ate from the garden. I've had to re-learn best practices for food safety along the way, though - my mom thinks all these unsafe old recipes and methods are perfectly fine, because she's been doing it the wrong way since before there was a right way and hasn't gotten sick from it yet! There's a whole list of things I've stopped eating at my parents' house because of this.

What do you make with your pears? We only ever put up peeled halves in syrup, which is just about the most boring form of pears.

Where I live, it's too cold for calamansi to grow year-round outdoors, but the fruit stay good on the tree for a ridiculously long time if conditions are right. I can put one bush in strong window light and have fresh fruit well into the winter months, but the other four have to go in less-ideal places and needed to be harvested before I moved them.

I think I'd get the most mileage out of frozen juice, but freezer space is the limiting factor. I've also made marmalade, but one good-sized batch is already more than we'd probably like to eat. I'm considering making a syrup and canning it, since I have plenty of basement storage space for canned goods. Once picked, the fruit doesn't stay good for all that long, and it's not a great one to send to the community food pantry because not a lot of people around here know what to do with it.

Next year, I'll probably prune three of the bushes down to a more manageable size and see if I have more luck in giving them away. Even if you don't use the fruit, it's a very pretty ornamental plant - it also blooms twice a year and the flowers smell incredible.
 
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Made some Skyr yoghurt last night and jesus fucking christ I need a freaking knife to carve this shit up its so freaking thick and rich. Also I got a fucktunne of whey from the filtering process which im going to probably use to brine some chicken in a day or two
 
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It's going to be hot this week, even though it's still spring, so I've just started making some Kongnamul Japchae and Kongguksu.

Japchae is always best with beansprouts.
Kongguksu is amazing.

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Soy malk, Somen, Cucumbers etc and Ice Cubes. I'll probably also make some kimbap or onigiri or something/other banchan, but I'm sorted, so fuck you 39c degree "spring" weather.
 
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Definitely missing Asian markets. Today I did a full Japanese meal consisting of;
- miso soup ( shitty because there's only packets and you can't get paste here)
- tamagoyaki ( slightly shitty - there's no mirin here but I did ok)
- pork katsu. ( Easy as fuck so no worries there )
- rice ( fun fact - Mexican stores carry the same short grain as the giant bags I bought at Asian markets back home)

I miss ethnic markets in general here. Making due is sort of fun though..
 
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Made chili for the first time this fall. It's one of the recipes that stays in the book once it gets warm and comes out again in the fall. Made enough to have dinner, make up 4 lunch portions, and have a large enough container to freeze for further dinner and possible lunches.

So. Much. Chili.
 
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