What Have You Cooked Recently?

Today's post-workout lunch is a delicious burger and fries with probably the prettiest latte I've made yet.
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Closeup of the latte, which was supposed to be a heart but I think it looks more like the Wu Tang logo.
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Last week I made very lazy single man pulled pork sandwiches. 3 pounds of pork, locally slaughtered, dumped into the crockpot before my shift at McDonalds. Drowned in Dr. Pepper and distilled water. Came back after work to drain it, shred it, douse it in BBQ sauce. Stuffed in between uncut whatever buns I bought by accident because I got trashed before shopping that Saturday prior. I was the suicide Montenegro bio-wheat thick buns that I could just clasp around my meat and eat like the uncaring lonely American beast I am. It was good. I will be making Chicken this week, WILL post pics of the delicious mess I make.
 
Not my best effort, but I figured I might as well post it. Venison steaks with a rice/quinoa mix and sautéed spinach.

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The rice/quinoa mix was just something from a bag. In the past I've done brown rice mixed with cashews, craisens, and sautéed onion to pair with venison, but I wasn't feeling the extra effort today.

I had the venison marinating overnight. I use a combo of vegetable oil, mustard, worchestershire sauce, minced garlic and some lemon juice. Usually I add red wine to the marinade as well, but I did some Canadian whiskey this time just to mix things up. I'll probably stick to red wine in the future, just because the red wine compliments it better imo.

Started the steaks on a skillet after cracking some salt and pepper over it. Did each side for a couple minutes to give it a crust, and then finished it in the oven for about 15 minutes, flipping once.

Usually I do asparagus to pair, but I had a bag of spinach lying around so I figured I'd do it in the skillet once the venison was done so that way the spinach could sop up all the leftover juice and marinade that was in there. It did this a little too well.

The spinach was really strong from soaking up all the flavor leftover from the venison. Really wish I'd done something else with the quinoa cause it was just kinda 'eh', as you'd expect from a bag, but it wasn't bad. Venison was very tender and juicy, which was the part I really didn't want to fuck up, so I'm pretty happy with it I guess.
 
Made a pot of oyster stew earlier. It's one of my favorite meals and the last time I had some was back in November of 2020, so I decided to treat myself.
How do you make your oyster stew?

I've never tried doing that and it's one of my grandfathers fav foods. I'd like to treat him.

I made some lamb chops for me and mrs tonight and I had to put up with the same fucking joke.. "they were baaaaaaaad" Mrs basso's dumb ass jokes aside, I have a pretty good system now on grill, season em and all. 20 min grill time, heat grill 5 mins on each of the 4 sides 2-5 min rest.
 
Some pasta n sausage. I made the mistake of thinking "it's been many years, maybe I don't actually dislike Italian sausage". I can now confirm that I do in fact dislike Italian sausage. This'll be a tough one to finish off but food's too expensive to not suffer through and eat it.
 
How do you make your oyster stew?

I've never tried doing that and it's one of my grandfathers fav foods. I'd like to treat him.

The ingredients I use are:

-Milk (preferably whole milk)
-Oysters
-Butter
-Salt
-Pepper
-Saltine crackers
-Hot sauce

The way I cook mine is:

-Pour the milk in a pot (I use half a gallon, gives me a few meals worth of stew) (never tried it myself, but some recipes recommend adding half and half for richer, creamier stew)
-Heat it up for a few minutes (I use medium heat)
-Add the butter, salt, and pepper after the milk starts to get warm. I've cooked this recipe enough that I don't measure the amounts, I can just eyeball it. Most traditional recipes I've seen call for about 4 or 5 tablespoons of butter, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and pepper. You can add or subtract the amounts depending on your preference. Also for the recent batch I made I used kosher salt instead of regular salt, and I liked it better.
-After stirring it for about 3 minutes, I add the oysters and stir for about another 6 minutes. At this point you could set the heat to low, it would just take a couple of extra minutes to cook.

I like to put copious amounts of saltine crackers and hot sauce in my stew. Some people prefer oyster crackers, but I don't.

There's different variations for oyster stew, but I got this recipe from my Grandma and I've enjoyed it for years.

If you'd like some more traditional recipes, here are some good ones:

Hope your grandfather enjoys it!
 
I made Mushy Peas. I’ve never seen them in person and internet recipes say you have to order marrow peas from Amazon which I will never do. However the dollar store had one pound sacks of dried round green peas so I gave it a shot.

Dried round peas, soaked overnight with a spoon of baking soda
Rinse and boil/simmer until done-this took about 20 minutes
Salt

One batch got chopped fresh mint and lemon juice, the other was finished with cream and way too much butter. They are pretty good and taste between standard split pea soup and fresh green sweet peas. Could any britfags tell me if I got this right?
 
@AnOminous you said you were going to make chicken Kiev in the Ukraine thread a few days ago. I want to hear your recipe still man!
I was just joking although after making the joke I now want to try it although I would just steal a recipe from the Internet. My goal would be not to have it dripping and looking like a food version of Chernobyl melting down. You know what I mean if you ever failed to make this dish.

Right now I am cooking swiss steak with a blend of half top round and half the dreaded eye of round, a generally unsalvageable cut. I didn't set out to do this but the measly offerings available didn't have a whole two pounds of round. I beat these mothers with a meat mallet until they were as thin as a pizza crust, then used excessive amounts of tenderizer but only for 20 minutes or so. Rinsed them off, dredged in flour and spices, browned, deglazed dutch oven, threw everything else in.

Tenderizer is really dodgy and I verged on overdoing it. It's really bad for anything that doesn't need it. With eye of round, it basically turns shoe leather into a slightly tough steak suitable for braising.

Now a long slow braise and we'll see if something can have eye of round in it and still be edible (the eye cuts actually looked reasonably good after putting excessive effort into them). Swiss steak is actually really good with a high quality chuck. But there are so many better things to do with chuck.
 
I did kind of an Indian-Lebanese mash up thing. Chicken shawarma naan wraps with fried paneer, toum (Lebanese fluffy garlic sauce), and some roasted chili sauce I whipped up:

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I highly recommend anyone interested try this, it's really good. The only thing is that some of the components are a huge chore to make, especially the toum.

I had some leftover naan the next night, so I threw together some lazy Indian-style curry. Nothing traditional, I just made a similar base to what you'd use for something like rajma or any other basic masala, and then threw in whatever veggies I had sitting around:
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Not bad. I should have made rice to go with it, but again, lazy.
 
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Russian sprat toast is one of the best lunch/snack foods out there. Some smoked, oil packed or mustard canned sardines, a home made Russian dressing of your choice and your choice of onions, tomatoes, pickles, dill or any other fitting veggies. Best with fresh black or rye bread but any will do after you toast it.
 

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