In my quest to improve my Japanese reading comprehension, I've started using Cookpad to search for new recipe ideas. One poster came particularly recommended, and this is my first try at one of her recipes (with minor changes - i.e. beef instead of pork and omitting the potatoes). I was impressed by how easy this was to make, as for some reason I always imagined sweet & sour would be difficult to make at home. This is particularly vinegar-y, which I like, but if you don't you may wish to reduce the vinegar in the sauce down to 2 tbsp.
Sweet and Sour Meatballs (serves 2):
200g ground beef
1 tsp sake
1 tbsp corn starch
1 tsp sesame oil
1 section lotus root (renkon), peeled, sliced & rinsed
splash of rice wine vinegar
Sauce
100ml chicken stock
3 tbsp rice wine vinegar
2 1/5 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp corn starch
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp sesame oil
Mix the beef, sake, and corn starch together and roll into small meatballs. Heat the sesame oil in a fry pan and roll the meatballs until cooked through. Meanwhile, in a pot with boiling water and a splash of vinegar, cook the lotus root slices for about 5 minutes.
Once the meatballs are cooked, use the pan to make the sauce. Before adding the cornstarch to the mixture ensure you have made a paste with the starch and a little liquid, just to ensure there are no lumps. Reduce until thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. Add the meatballs and lotus root and stir until they are heated up, serve with brown rice.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Sweet and Sour Meatballs
Friday, April 15, 2011
Kabocha, Spinach & Goat Cheese Pie
Normally when I have people over for dinner I don't do the old-school Sunday dinner roast and potatoes (mostly because I am terrible at judging roasting times and I have a fear of serving overcooked meat). I finally decided to take the challenge however, and luckily Canadian Beef has a website that gave me exact cooking times by weight to acheive lovely medium-rare goodness. I wanted to change up the sides though, so I modified this pie slightly from Donna Hay's Seasons, which I received as a Christmas gift and is one of the most beautifully shot cookbooks I have ever seen.
Kabocha, Spinach & Goat Cheese Pie (serves 6):
tomato paste
1 small kabocha/butternut squash, peeled & sliced
1 small onion, sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 roll PC puff pastry (1/2 package), thawed
spinach
150g goat cheese
1 egg, lightly beaten
Using President's Choice pastry over Tenderflake is practically a necessity. PC comes in 2 rolls which are very easy to use, rather than the flat blocks that take forever to roll out yourself.
Preheat oven to 200C/390F. Cook onion and squash 15-20min until tender and set aside to cool. Roll out pastry to about half it's original thickness, then cut in half and place one half on a lined cookie sheet or baking pan. Spread with tomato past then top with the remaining ingredients. Place the second half of the pastry on top and press or roll the edges to seal. Brush with the egg and bake 30 minutes until golden.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Simple Pork Wrap
Celebration! I have a new computer! My old one crapped out a while ago, and I am finally getting going with my new one, but it will take some time to transfer all my photos and files over. Really it's great though because I have so much spare time to do stuff like that - haha. I have now put that task on my husband's to do list. As seems to be the case all the time now, I have been keeping things simple on the cooking side. The other day I made a pork tenderloin crusted in rosemary, thyme, oregano, and whole grain mustard. I love making little roasts because they leave me with great leftovers for lunches. I made a little variation on an old favourite proscuitto sandwich of mine.
Basically the elements end up being very similar. I used sliced pork instead of proscuitto, a pesto wrap instead of the ciabatta bun, stuck with the apple and sharp cheddar, and added in a mix of spinach and baby kale from my garden. Simple, healthy, and easy to eat with one hand (which is a major bonus for me these days since I can now do most things around my house one handed).
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Chicken, Fig and Mushroom Wilted Salad
This salad is perhaps the opposite of healthy. It is, however, extremely delicious. Also incredibly easy - made up on the fly, as it was - providing you have some pretty obscure ingredients to hand. Luckily, I had stopped by the Italian Centre on the weekend and noticed fresh figs (which I had not previously tried) and my freezer has goodies like the pan scrapings from a roast goose. Fabulous, and under 10 minutes to make.
Chicken, Fig & Mushroom Salad (serves 1):
100g chicken thigh or breast, cubed
large handful crimini mushrooms, sliced
1/4 onion, sliced
1 fresh fig, quartered
very large handful spinach leaves
1 tbsp goose fat
1/4 cup goose pan scrapings
salt & pepper
The pan scrapings and goose fat meant I did not have to spend any time worrying about flavouring for the meat. To start off, I melted the goose fat in a fry pan and cooked the onion and mushrooms until softened. Those were set aside and the pan scrapings were added to the pan with the chicken until cooked through. The spinach was topped with the mushrooms and onion and those were topped with the chicken. Then I added the fig and some good bread to mop up the drippings, and had a lovely al fresco dinner.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Pulled Pork
Does everyone get a slow cooker when they get married? I think slow cookers are like fondue pots that way. I seem to use mine in fits and spurts, but at the moment it is back in my regular dinner rotation. Why? Pulled pork! I love getting pulled pork sandwiches at pubs and restaurants. When we were down in Palm Springs this past winter it seemed to be the thing to have on every happy hour menu. There's a good reason for that, it's cheap and delicious!
The hardest part about this is just remembering to take a pork shoulder out of the freezer, and putting the slow cooker on the counter so that when you wake up you remember to pop the roast into it. Pork shoulders are fantastically inexpensive and manage to produce a huge amount of meat. The best part is that left over meat makes excellent sandwiches/wraps/quesadillas etc.
I generally do the pork roast in one of two ways. The first is to pop it in as is, turn it once or twice during the day if I have time, and just leave it cooking on low for 8-12 hours.
If I feel a bit more ambitious, I throw the roast in a freezer bag overnight with a rub of about 1/4 cup sea salt, 3/4 cup brown sugar, a couple of tbsp of cumin and one tbsp of chilli powder. Other than tossing stuff in a bag, it is the same as above in terms of preparation.
When the shoulder is all cooked, you just pull it out and use a couple of forks to "shred" it. It pretty much falls apart as soon as you touch it. I do get rid of a little of the outer fat if I see any big chunks, and I take off the skin. Some people might be a bit put off seeing the skin, but the skin and fat are where all the flavour and moisture come from. If you are a bit more adventurous, you can make crackling with the skin (we did this once, but over did it sadly). Cooked pork skin is tasty, but not exactly diet friendly. Also, if I don't do the rub, I will sometimes make a pan gravy from the drippings. If I use the rub, the drippings are a bit too salty to make a usable gravy.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Vietnamese-style Pork Burgers
I've been playing around with a recipe for Vietnamese meatballs for a few years now, and have only recently gotten close to the flavour I was looking for. For any of you trying this at home, do not think that you will ever get close without fish sauce... even if you hate fish sauce. Yes, it is one of the most rank smelling foods I've had to work with, but the umami it imparts cannot be beaten. I decided to use this to update a standard burger, and served it with sliced chinese cabbage for some crunch and thinned out Thai Peanut Sauce instead of ketchup.
Vietnamese-style Pork Burgers (makes 6)
500g lean ground pork
1/2 onion, diced
2 stalks lemongrass
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tbsp szechuan pepper
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp fish sauce
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
Blitz lemongrass and garlic in the food processor until nearly a puree, then toss in the diced onion to chop a bit more finely. Mix thoroughly with the pork, fish sauce, and breadcrumbs, adding the pepper and salt to taste. (To check the flavour, pinch off a small bit and cook in a fry pan. This may seem like a waste of time, but I find I never quite achieve the taste I'm looking for without doing this.)
Grabbing small handfuls, shape into patties. I stack my leftovers between layers of parchment paper and wrap for freezing. The remaining can be pan cooked over medium-low heat or done on the barbecue. Serve with sliced chinese cabbage and peanut sauce on hamburger buns.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Seafood BBQ
Sum-sum-summertime is here! Well, not really, but that's what it felt like today, and a perfect sunny day on a weekend is a magical thing. I took the little one for a walk, and other family members spent the day doing yard work. I had flipped through one of our many Jamie Oliver cook books the other day and decided that a nice thing to do this evening would be to do a big seafood cook-up. Sadly, the fire ban that is on here prevented me from doing it on the fire pit, but the BBQ worked out pretty well.
I have one of those BBQs with a side burner, so on that I fryed up some potatoes in duck fat. It was nice to have something a bit heavier to go with the seafood since it is pretty light. I also served it with pita and tzaziki. Cooking up all this seafood was pretty much guess work. I did some red snapper, live muscles, shrimp and some pre-cooked crab. I heated up the BBQ to high, and put the snapper in a BBQ "basket" so that I didn't have to worry about it flaking through the grates. Next I did the muscles in batches in BBQ baskets as well, and right at the end I threw the shrimp on and the crab legs to warm.
To dress it all, I threw on some knobs of butter with lime zest and juice, a finely chopped chili and some garlic.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Herb Roast
A couple of days ago it snowed here. We were all primed up for spring, and then winter returned. There is nothing that I like better on a cold day than staying in and popping a roast in the oven. Seeing as last year I froze all of my remaining herbs at the end of the gardening season, all I had to do was pull them out of the freezer and wiz them through my mini food processor with some olive oil, salt and pepper and smear it all on. For this one I used chives, rosemary, thyme and parsley. Smear the roast with the herb paste, and pop it in a roasting pan on top of some chopped onion, carrots and celery. I cook it uncovered at 450 F for the first half hour to brown it up, and then cover it and finish it at 350 F (a total cook time of 1 hour per kilo). The juices left at the end make an amazing pan gravy!
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Budget Salmon Wellington
Or, how to make 150g of salmon feed 3 people. This was a spur of the moment kind of meal, when Court & her husband invited me to stay for dinner but had no real plans. We searched the fridge and found just enough ingredients to make a delicious, filling supper. Without enough pastry to wrap these, it wasn't a true "Wellington" but we figured it was close enough. I love when random creations like this turn out to be something terrific; I'm sure we all know it doesn't always turn out that way.
Salmon Wellington:
150g salmon, cut into 3 pieces
25 shrimp
1 leek, chopped
1 large carrot, chopped
1/2 cup full cream
1/4 cup cream cheese
dill
salt & pepper
1 block puff pastry
1 egg, beaten
Put the leeks and carrots in a pan with a little bit of margarine and cook for a few minutes until they soften, then add the cream and cream cheese and stir together until melted and at your desired consistency to coat the seafood. Add dill, salt, and pepper to taste.
Next, oil 3 ramekins and line the bottom with shrimp. Layer some sauce on top, then add the salmon, more sauce, another layer of shrimp, and finally the last of the sauce. When I started to run out of the sauce I just added more cream to stretch it out a bit further. Roll out the puff pastry and cut out circles to top the ramekins, then coat with the egg wash. Bake in a 350F/180C oven until the pastry has browned.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Summer Roast Lamb
Oh summer! So lovely! Hot weather, fresh produce, eating things prepared in the simplest way possible! Well, this week we have had a little dip in the temperature, and while I am disappointed to be robbed of any of our short summer, it did provide a little reprieve in which I could think about cooking and baking again without the consequence of turning my entire home into a giant oven. As I have mentioned in the past, my husband and I bought a lamb last fall, and have been having excellent adventures in learning to cook different cuts of meat. This time around, we wanted to do a bone in leg of lamb roast, and after sourcing a lot of advice on how to do it, we finally made it happen, and the results were sublime!
My first thought was to touch base with a fellow local food blogger that is often cooking up some sort of wild game. I figured Kevin Kossowan might have some experience with a leg of lamb (or anything else) and BBQing (this is when it was still hot out). He did, but only butterflied, and I was not at the point where I wanted to work on my butchering skills, so that was a no go. Many weeks later I succumbed to Googling "How to cook leg of lamb" and found a wonderful thread on Chowhound giving me all the info I needed.
Here is what I did:
1. Sliced little openings throughout the leg of lamb and stuffed the openings with rosemary and garlic.
2. Chopped up some oregano and thyme to rub on the outside of the roast with some coarse salt and pepper.
3. Put the lamb in a roaster at 450 F for 15 minutes.
4. Turn the oven down to 350 F and cook for a further two hours.
Easy peasy. The lamb was delish - excellent texture and nice and moist. When not pregnant I would maybe do it a little more rare, but my husband and I ate a really obscene amount of meat all in one sitting seeing as this roast was so nicely done. 
If only he would have let me take more time to actually get some decent photos instead of these blurry, poorly lit ones!
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Risotto Already?
I can't quite believe that a few degrees drop in temperature makes me want comfort food, a couch, and a cozy duvet, but all I could think about today was risotto. I'm also trying to clear out my fridge before I am tempted by any more fresh summer produce, as I seem to be stockpiling without any actual eating. The kabocha squash that's been sitting on my counter for a couple of weeks seemed to fit the bill. I really was not in the mood for making any dinner when I got home, but once I got started I remembered that risotto is really no work at all - and after a long day at work it was so relaxing to just stand and stir without having to think about anything.
Squash Risotto (serves 2-3):
500g pureed squash
3 tbsp butter
1 medium onion
fresh thyme
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
100g arborio rice
around 500ml chicken or vegetable stock
salt & pepper
50g chèvre
large handful spinach, chopped
chopped walnuts (optional)
Quarter the squash and roast for 40 minutes in a 350F/180C oven, or wrap in cling film and microwave for around 5 minutes until soft. Scoop out the flesh and puree using an immersion blender, then set aside. In a shallow pan over low heat, melt the butter and cook the onion, garlic, and thyme until softened. Add the rice and cook for a few minutes, then slowly begin adding the stock, stirring constantly for about 20-25 minutes. Add the pureed squash and then salt and pepper to taste. Cook for a further 5-10 minutes, adding more stock if needed. Finally, stir in the chèvre and spinach until the cheese is melted and the spinach softened.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
PB Chicken Marinade
The rest of this week looks like it is going to be great weather for BBQing, so today I am posting my peanut butter chicken marinade recipe. It would be a bit blasphemous to call this a Thai peanut sauce, although that is what the recipe did evolve from. It's one of those things where there are a number of people in my life that are intimidated by "foreign" food, but if I westernize things enough and then just rename them something safe like peanut butter chicken, then they are a go.
I make this recipe different ways depending on the season. In winter, it becomes a frying pan meal, where I increase the amount of sauce and onions, and then serve it over rice. I can't even begin to describe how filling and satisfying it is in the winter to eat a meal that is so filled with carbs (rice) and protein (chicken AND peanut butter). Once I started making it this way I noticed that when the weather got very cold, my body actually craved it as a bulk up strategy.
Anyway, back to the summer preparation, using it as a marinade for chicken kabobs. I'm sure many of you will echo the sentiment that BBQ chicken runs a high risk of either being under cooked (pink and scary!) or so dried out that it becomes unappealing. I find these kabobs to be the solution to both issues. It is hard to undercook the chicken when it is cubed and kabobbed because unlike breasts, they are a uniform thickness, and have a nice hot metal skewer running through the middle. Drying them out also becomes less of an issue because the peanut butter marinate is nice and oily, and prevents the chicken from drying out.
PB Chicken Marinade (for two breasts worth, but can be adjusted up or down depending on how much flavouring you like - I also will cook some extra for dipping if people are into it):
1/4 onion, diced fine
1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
2 tbsp ketchup
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp milk (can use coconut milk)
1/2 tsp hot sauce (adjust to taste)
Cut your chicken into nice even sized cubes. Combine marinade ingredients in a tupperware container, and throw the chicken cubes in. Use your hands to rub the marinade all over the chicken (it still has close to peanut butter consistency, so really, it is just smeared on). Sit it in the fridge for a few hours or however long you have. Skewer the chicken cubes and smear any extra marinate all over the kabobs (or increase the liquid components and cook it on a side burner as a dipping sauce, but make sure it gets good and hot for a while since it has been in contact with raw chicken).
Cook the skewers on the BBQ at about 400 degrees for about 5 minutes a side. To be safe, cut into one of the cubes to verify that it is not longer pink in the middle. You will know a side is cooked when it gets easy to pull it off of the grill because cooked meat covered in peanut oils will come off easily, whereas raw meat will still stick.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Cooking on the Road
Brooke and I did our version of Chef at Large this weekend and packed up our kitchens for the great outdoors. Prior to leaving we planned out some meals we wanted to make, groceries were purchased, and we were very excited about the challenge this would be for us. Little did we know how much challenge though.... My husband volunteered to be in charge of packing for the trip, since it was his idea and Brooke and I had book club the night before leaving. Thinking that my husband is perfectly capable of ensuring everything on the list (yes, we even made him a LIST!) made it to Banff, I happily agreed.
Upon arriving in Banff, the discovery was made that all the non perishables and freezer ingredients had come with us, but that everything from the fridge had stayed in Edmonton - d'oh! To add to that, the additional realization was made that the connection from the camping stove to the mini propane tanks didn't match up, so we were going to have to cook 100% over the fire with zero temperature control. Needless to say, Brooke and I were annoyed after all of our planning, and my husband, in an effort to try and make it seem like a good thing said "it's like Iron Chef, but with the secret ingredient being fire! Oh, and missing a bunch of the ingredients you thought you had." Dinner on evening #1 was our first meal, and we made herbed lamb burgers (no cheese as planned), and sautéed potatoes (no roast veggies).
Ages ago we purchased a full lamb, and with it came a few pounds of ground lamb. We had been saving it for BBQ season, and there hasn't been a lot of that happening this year to date. It went into the cooler frozen, and didn't take that long to thaw once we arrived. I had brought rosemary, oregano and thyme from the garden and we chopped it up and combined the lamb with bread crumbs, an egg and the herbs and formed patties. We "fried" the patties until they were cooked through, and reserved some of the fat to use for later.
At the same time, we had chopped up some potatoes nice and thin so that we could boil them while the burgers were cooking. Once the burgers were done, we threw some garlic and the potatoes into the pan with the lamb fat, to give them some additional flavour and crisp up the outsides a bit.
Not bad considering what we had to work with!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Pasta with Smoked Salmon
Another smoked salmon meal from last week. This was super tasty and was pretty light for a creamy pasta. I used Gnocchi no.85 noodles that I picked up on sale at the Italian Centre a couple of weeks ago, but anything goes with this. Quick, easy, and perfect with a glass of white wine.
Smoked Salmon Pasta (serves 2):
200g pasta
1/2 medium onion, chopped
2 tsp butter
2 cloves garlic
60g light cream cheese
white wine
2 large handfuls spinach, cooked & chopped
4 slices smoked wild salmon
salt & pepper
Bring a large pot of salted water to boil for the pasta. While that is heating, add the onion, garlic, and butter to a small pan and cook over med-low heat for 5-8 minutes. Once the water has come to the boil, plunge the spinach in for a minute and then scoop it out with a sieve and add the pasta to the boiling water to cook. Drain the spinach and chop. While the pasta is cooking, add the cream cheese and white wine and reduce until you reach your desired consistency for the sauce. Season with salt and pepper and stir in the chopped spinach to heat. When the pasta is ready, drain and add to the pan with the sauce. Finally, stir in the smoked salmon and serve.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Smoked Salmon Flatbread
I've been eating smoked salmon all week. It's the downside to being single, I suppose - most things are sold in packages too large for 1-2 meals. Though, really, how much of a hardship can delicious wild salmon be? What I was tired of was cream cheese; I rarely eat it, so after a couple of days it started to seem a bit sickly sweet. I decided to switch it up with some goat cheese, with added wasabi to give it a little kick. This was a great 5 minute dinner, and a cold flatbread is perfect for hot summer nights.
Smoked Salmon Flatbread for 1:
1 greek-style pita or panini
2-3 slices smoked wild salmon, torn
2-3 tbsp goat cheese
wasabi paste, to taste
red onion
capers
pepper
Put the pita in the oven to crisp it up, then mix a little wasabi paste into the goat cheese. Once the pita is crisp and then cooled, add the toppings and enjoy.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Crust-less Ricotta, Tomato & Basil Torte
Recently I've been looking for recipes that will make good picnic food - i.e. they taste good unheated and travel well. I found this recipe on Taste.com.au and the picture looked so good that I had to try it. This was very tasty, but not exactly what I was looking for. Because it has no crust (gluten free!), it seemed like not the easiest thing to be packing around though it was good even cold. I would definitely make this again though! Using the food processor made it super easy to make, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a tart basically made entirely of cheese.
Ricotta, Tomato & Basil Torte:
500g low-fat ricotta
100g feta, crumbled
3 eggs
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 bunch fresh basil, chopped
350g grape tomatoes, halved
Add the ricotta, feta, eggs, garlic and basil to your food processor and whizz together until smooth. Pour into a 22cm/9" pan that has been greased with olive oil (or lined with parchment paper) and cook in a 375F/180C oven for 1 hour.
I didn't mess with the recipe at all this first time, but reduced it by 1/3 as my pan was smaller. I got lazy and only did one layer of tomatoes (about half what the recipe called for), but it would be very easy to tuck a second layer underneath first before adding the top layer. This was very, very cheese-y, so adding all the tomatoes would cut through the richness of the cheese.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Almost Pepperoni & Mushroom Pizza
My fridge is pretty much empty tonight, and I was way, way too tired to walk the the 2 (long) blocks to Sobey's. To give you an idea of just how empty my fridge is: the fruit drawer contains 1 granny smith apple, 1 lemon, and 1 wrinkled pomegranate. So, when I got home from work I did some raiding around and found in the freezer half of a sausage. Yay~ dinner!
This was pretty delicious for being made up of scraps in my refrigerator. I had one greek style pitta left in the freezer, so I used that and topped it with tomato paste - I use the squeeze kind from the Italian Centre Shop so I'm not constantly opening the little tins just to have them go to waste. I sliced the frozen sausage and cooked it on the hob, then added that to the pizza with the mushrooms. I decided to go with brie as it's pretty mild, as the only cheese I had was that or chèvre. It was then topped off with chopped parsley for colour and cooked in a 350F/180C oven for 10 minutes. Once it was cooked, my unrefined palate couldn't tell that I'd used French cheese on an "Italian" meal.
Friday, March 13, 2009
A Seriously Easy Quiche
More asparagus... but this is the last of it for this week. I have never tried making a quiche before, but I was certain it couldn't be too difficult - and I was right! I was feeling pretty impressed with myself as I ate this.
Because Boursin (I used the regular garlic & herb, but I am sure the others would be tasty as well) has so much flavour, I literally did not add anything else to this. Just the asparagus, cheese and eggs, and bam! Instant quiche. Next time I'm entertaining, this will be making a reappearance in appetizer form, possibly with courgettes instead of asparagus.
Asparagus & Boursin Quiche (2 x 4.5"):
65g asparagus, chopped
1/2 pack/75g Boursin cheese
2 eggs
splash of milk
I won't post the recipe I used for the pastry, as it didn't turn out at all and I ended up having to just push pieces of it around the cases and squish them together. Just use your favourite savoury shortcrust pastry recipe, or store bought.
Oh, okay... here's 
the pastry recipe:
150g flour
90g cold butter, cubed
1 egg yolk
pinch salt
water
It may work for you. I only had 2 regular eggs left and I had used them up for the filling, so instead of an egg yolk I used 1 quail egg. Haha, perhaps that had something to do with my failure? Bring the flour and butter together until they reach the breadcrumb stage, then add the egg yolk and salt. If you need to, you can add some water to help the dough combine.
Brush the cases with oil, lay the pastry in and all the way up the sides. Line the pastry with parchment paper and weigh it down (I used pennies as I don't have baking beans). Bake at 375F/190C for 15 minutes until pale golden.
In a bowl, whisk together the boursin and eggs and add some milk if you need to pad out the filling. I added enough milk to ensure that both quiches would be full to the top of the pastry - probably less than a quarter cup. While the pastry is baking, bring some water to the boil and cook the asparagus for around 3 minutes. Remove pastry from oven, add the asparagus and pour over the cheese & egg mixture. Bake at 400F/200C for 15-20 minutes.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Chahan - Easy Peasy Japanese-y
It seems like most of our posts recently have been about quick meals that use up leftovers. And nothing is changing today, because this does both. Basically, you can put anything you want into it as it seems to taste good regardless of the meat/vegetable combination you use. I have even used hot dogs, and it was still good.
Chahan (Japanese Fried Rice):
1 tbsp canola oil
1 carrot
3 green onions
60g chopped cooked pork
1/2 tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 cups cooked japanese rice
1 tbsp sake or mirin
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 eggs
handful of chopped greens (today I used rocket, but usually it's spinach or chinese cabbage).
Heat the oil over medium heat. Add any ingredients that need to cook first - I put the carrot, green onions and pork in now, and because I had shredded the carrot instead of chopping it this only required 1-2 minutes of cooking time. Stir in the ginger then add the cooked rice. Break the eggs on top of the rice and quickly mix everything around so the rice grains are coated with the uncooked egg. Add the sake & soy sauce then the greens, and serve.
To serve it as I have above, line a bowl with cling film, put the cooked chahan in, and overturn onto a plate. You definitely want to move fast when making this; if you let the eggs overcook it tends to be a bit too dry. Remember, the heat from the rice will keep cooking the eggs while you're plating it.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Sausage and Feta Pasta
Yup, still in the cooking slump. Pasta is right up there with stir-frys in terms of being an easy and flexible alternative for a week night dinner. It is even easier when you have made homemade pasta recently, as it cooks even faster than the dried stuff (even from frozen, you are only looking at about 4 minutes). I hit up the farmers market this Sat in an attempt to get something that I knew would be relatively fresh and locally produced so that I could get rid of some of my winter flavour blahs. Although buying meat this way can be a bit more pricey than the store, I kept it very affordable by opting for sausage. I have never made my own sausage (I don't have the stuff to do it, and honestly there are so many good ones at the local farmer's market that I don't see the need to). As the star of tonight's dish, I had some sundried tomato and chive sausage. I wish I had noted which farmer it was from, but I didn't. It was just over $6 for 10-12 breakfast sized sausage, so not bad for meat.
To start with, I get a big pot of water boiling so that it is all ready for the pasta when I hit the T -4 minute mark. Next, I grabbed a big frying pan and started to pan fry six of the sausages. When they were fully cooked, I got the pasta going, and removed the sausage from the pan to cut into smaller chunks. Cutting after cooking is the easiest in my opinion seeing as the sausage stays together, but sometimes I opt to cut off the casing and make little meatballs with the sausage filling. Once cut up, I returned the sausage chunks to the pan with some plain tomato and basil sauce (just grabbed from the pantry). I like to add the sauce to the pan because it kind of deglazes the pan a bit while warming, so that all the flavor the sausages would have left behind becomes part of the sauce. By this time, the pasta is ready to be drained, and tossed into the pan to get mixed around with the sauce and sausage. Finally, it gets plated and topped with crumbled feta (as much as you like).
The whole thing takes my under 10 minutes to make. Even on days when I am so hungry I have a bad case of grouchiness I can usually manage that much time before eating.
