S#35: Recreate your food lust
PS oops. I meant to post this on Saturday. You kids will just have to wait extra long for the next piece of awesome.
My mum makes a dish called “coq au vin” (which is to say, “chicken in wine” – you can imagine how the French came up with THAT one). I really like it. So a few things happened lately:
1. When I cleaned out my email inbox, I found a list of my mum’s recipes.
2. As I shopped for groceries, I saw one of those “Feed your family for $10” things – for coq au vin.
My mum’s recipe had things like:
“Ingredients. . .
Enough bacon
enough mushrooms
some onion
red wine”
which was helpful – up to a point. For one thing, I’ve never cooked with red wine, and I have noooo idea how much to put in (a bottle? a cask? a teaspoon?) For another thing, “enough bacon” is an oxymoron.
So, with the less delicious but more informative recipe from the supermarket, and the bacon and mushroom recipe from mum, I made a wonderful wonderful thing.
Here’s roughly how it went (and yes, as you can tell, I’m my mother’s daughter):
Cook one chopped onion, a dessertspoonful of minced garlic, a few rashers of bacon (chopped), and three chicken pieces in a wide frypan until the chicken is brown on both sides.
While that happens, stick 400mL red wine in a microwave safe jug with about half a cup of flour (to my surprise, cornflour worked fine – it just took a lot of stirring), stirring every minute until it suddenly goes thick. Add some thyme and bay leaves and two cubes of chicken stock along the way.
Stick the chicken mixture in a casserole dish, and pour the wine mix over it (it doesn’t matter if it’s gone cold). Cook it with the lid on at 150 degrees celsius for anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour and a half, depending on when CJ gets home. Cook rice.
When you have about fifteen minutes to go, mix a handful of fresh chopped mushrooms into the casserole and take the lid off (NB: take lid off first).
If you feel like it, fry some sliced zucchini in the pan and add some chopped fetta just before serving.
Voila! Je suis riche!
I was psyching CJ up for this all week (the word “bacon” was all he actually needed), but both of us were surprised and delighted when we first tasted it.
Nostalgia = win.
Tomorrow’s entry includes a photo CJ described as “horrific”. If you don’t like seeing a lot of blood in the movies, tomorrow’s entry is not for you.
And from flickr.com:
Three-Ingredient Thursday: Christmas Salad
Fine! I confess. There are four ingredients. I snuck in the sesame oil on the basis that although it isn’t USED as a cooking fat (which’d make it a freebie ingredient according to the rules), it COULD be.
This is why I’m not a master criminal.*
The ingredients are baby roma tomatoes, baby spinach leaves**, and fetta. With sesame oil.
How to play along at home:
Wash/wash and cut/cut/mix in. Note: do not wash the sesame oil or fetta.
Now, time for further confessions.
Due to the fact that I cordially dislike baby spinach and tomatoes, and I don’t think fetta is enough protein to satisfy a human, I added more ingredients – specifically mint (huge taste difference), mushrooms (which I actually do like, though they’re not quite as bold in colour as the first three) and cold ham. My justification for today is that you can eat the Christmas salad if you like, OR you can use it as a base, and add whatever else suits you (apple and peanuts are particularly good). It’s called the Christmas salad because of the colours.
What I actually ate (and enjoyed):
This is the only salad I don’t refuse to eat. I’m hopefully getting tested this week to find our if I am ALLERGIC TO FRUIT AND VEGETABLES. Seriously. There’s a condition called fructose malabsorption which would explain why apples make me feel sick. Which is ironic, since in my case “an apple a day keeps the doctor in pay.”
And here’s another pretty pretty picture from Flickr.com:
Yes, I know, it’s not Papua.
*not yet
**mmm, tasty babies.
Three-Ingredient Thursday: Strawberry and Banana Milkshake
Fine. I admit it. I’m posting Thursday’s post on Wednesday. Today got away from me a bit.
Also, the title might kind of give away the ingredients. Luckily, I forgot to photograph them before blending them, so here’s one photo with the final product + two of the three main ingredients. Another FABULOUS way to get your fruit serves in.
In other news, here’s an extra special cthulhu from
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/19/neil-gaimans-cthulkh.html
Three-Ingredient Thursday: Breakfast Fry-Up
Oh heck yeah.
Here in Australia we call this breakfast “a fry-up”. In Britain they have “The Full English Breakfast” but I have it on reliable authority (ie, my British-born mum-in-law) that a full English breakfast must include sausages. The alternative name for this dish is “Bacon and eggs with potato”. It really does say it all.
I like my eggs poached, so I poached the egg and fried the rest (the potato went in about twenty minutes before anything else). This is a BRILLIANT way to start the day – particularly if you’re not dieting. It’s great if you’re going lactose free and only gradually getting used to the concept of soy milk on cereal (that’s soy milk in the glass – baby steps).
Tomorrow: Wedding photos! At last! And an amusing photo of Ben 🙂 Hi Ben. It’s a photo you haven’t seen yet. Sleep well tonight!
And here’s your cthulhu for today (because there’s nothing cuter than a planet-eating monster*):
*Except possibly a chainsaw. Chainsaws are super cute.
Felicity Banks 