A Fine Day

I made butter!  That's right, I made home-made garlic and coriander butter.  It looks like this:

Okay, so it doesn't look like much, but it's delicious.  It's pretty easy to make, just pour some cream into a jar with garlic, coriander, and a pinch of salt, and shake it until you've got butter.  There's some buttermilk left over, but I just poured that down the drain since I didn't want to make anything out of savory buttermilk.  The butter's pretty amazing though, here's some on some French bread:

I've been eating that stuff all night.

I made some spring rolls yesterday, but I didn't get any pictures of those.  I just pulled the recipe out of my head, because it seems the original link to the recipe is no longer valid.  I'll try to get pictures next time I make them.  Believe me, I will make them again.

More Holiday Fun

All right, I finished the pie today.  Here it is:

Looks pretty tasty, but I probably won't try it until tomorrow night.  I hope it's good.  This is one of my favorite pies, apple and cranberry with just a little bit of almond extract.  I basically adapted it from this recipe in combination with the basic apple pie recipe in "The Joy of Cooking".  I just look at these recipes to find out cook times and about how much sugar and flour goes into the filling.  The rest I just sort of make up.  This means that my pies always taste differently. 


I also made the crab salad with rocket from the "400 Appetizers" book.  I was lucky in that I didn't actually have to dress any crabs.  I was able to buy two dressed crabs from Sainsbury's for a very reasonable price.

All I had to do was remove the meat from the shells, and get to work.  The recipe was pretty easy to follow, and before long, I had two plates of crab salad on rocket.  This is a little sad, because I had to then eat both plates alone.  Crab salad doesn't last too long, and I didn't have anybody to share with readily available.  I guess I could have just made one big plate, but two looks better.  Here's the prettier one:

I wasn't too impressed with the flavor.  Maybe I'm just not much of a crab person, but I felt that it was just a little bland.  There were just too many flavors mixed up in there, and the rocket and lemon completely overpowered whatever crab taste wasn't covered up by the Tabasco sauce in the crabby mixture.  All-in-all, I wasn't impressed.  If I were to make it again, I'd probably use some fresher crab and fewer ingredients.

Next up is recipe number 329, Amaretto Soufflé.  Looks like I'll need to get a soufflé dish.  I've also got this nice link to some flour tortillas.

Holiday Baking

Ahh, the first day of my Christmas vacation!  I spent most of the day just lounging around, watching season 4 of "The Venture Bros."  After I got tired of that, I went out, bought a ton of groceries, and got started on my baking. 

I made three things today: pie crust, eggnog, and brownies.  The pie crust is just your basic flaky pastry dough from "The Joy of Cooking", only for fat I went with a combination of lard, butter, and vegetable shortening.  I did that mostly because I had some lard and butter I wanted to finish off, and I like to have the shortening in there; it makes the dough lighter.  The pie crust will get used when I make my apple-cranberry pie tomorrow.  If you want a picture, it looks like this:

So the pie crust isn't much to look at.  I'll give you more enticing pictures once it's part of a pie. 

Then I made eggnog.  This stuff is awesome.  Here's a link to the recipe.  This is some good stuff, but be warned, the recipe doesn't make much.  I doubled it, and this is all it made.

Still, it's so rich, you won't want to drink too much.  Try using it in place of milk in a milkshake--so good, you'll want to cry.

Finally, I made some rocky road brownies.  I referenced these in a previous post, but linked to a different page.  They're basically the same recipe, but this one's the original.  I haven't tried them yet, but they contain plenty of chocolate and sugar, so they're bound to be tasty.  Here's what they look like:

In the U.S., I only ever heard of rocky road as a flavor of ice cream, but apparently it's a pretty popular snack over here, made with chocolate, marshmallows, and walnuts.  I don't know what I'm going to do with these brownies now that they're made.  I'm bringing the pie to a Christmas dinner on Saturday, so these are basically just going to sit around the house.  I hope I don't eat them all too quickly.

A Quick Dinner

So here's a novel thought:  bacon stir-fry.  Okay, so a quick Google search tells me that it's not that novel, but still, I'd never heard of it.  Anyway, I've got a refrigerator full of prime stir-fry vegetables, and I need to get rid of them before they go bad.

I gathered together some chopped bacon, sweet peas, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, and some old spinach. 

Then I fried it all up in some sesame oil with some soy sauce and Chinese five-spice.  Throw that on top of some rice made with chicken broth, and you've got a tasty dinner.

I know what you're thinking, looking at that first picture.  I get it.  I shouldn't have raw meat next to the raw vegetables.  While I wouldn't suggest that anybody emulate my lackadaisical handling of raw meat, I will defend myself by saying that everything was thoroughly cooked before consumption.

Eggs and Toast

Well, I was working late tonight, so when I got home I needed to blow off some steam.  I've been waiting for the weekend to make the breakfast cups, but I was anxious to make me some bacon, so I went to work.

The recipe calls for 3-inch discs cut from six slices of bread.  It doesn't say what to do with the rest of the bread.  It also calls for the yolks of six eggs, but doesn't give much thought about what to do with the whites.  I put those together with the leftover bacon grease and some cheese to make this delicious snack:

Awesome and delicious.

By the time I had finished my tasty snack, the breakfast cups were done.  They look pretty good to me.

They taste good too, but honestly, my little snack was just as good, if not better.  Hooray for breakfast for dinner!

Next Recipe

Next recipe is number 256: Crab Salad with Rocket.  First off, it says it serves 8, I think I'll quarter that.  Secondly, it calls for "Dressed Crabs".  I had to look that one up; a dressed crab is a crab still in the shell, apparently.  I just need to buy a couple of those, pull all the meat out of them (avoiding the "dead-man's fingers"), and mix it with a bunch of crap to make a salad, including, of course, some rocket (arugula) leaves.  Aside from the crab part, this sounds pretty easy.

Don't forget though, I still have this recipe to make.  I'll probably do that this weekend.  I'll get to the crab next week.

Chocolate Fun

Ok, so after I made the salmon rillette, I felt I still had enough time to do more cooking.  Jingnan had left me with a box of delicious chocolate truffles, which she said she couldn't find in the UK.

As you can imagine, they're pretty tasty.  I thought I'd try my hand at recreating them, so being the lazy bastard that I am, I went for the simplest recipe I could find to start out.  I found this one.  It calls for chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder, all of which I had, and the prep seemed pretty easy.  I even thought I'd be clever and add a teaspoon of vanilla to the cream.  All in all, it was pretty easy to make, with the exception of getting my hands really messy.

The truffles came out looking all right, but when I tried them on Monday, I discovered that they were a little too chocolaty.  I know what you're thinking, "But Matt, how can anything be too chocolaty?"  Trust me, truffles made out of 85% cocoa dark chocolate and rolled in 100% cocoa powder turns out to have just a little too much bite.  Plus, I felt that they were a little too hard.  I definitely want to make these again, with a few changes:

1:  Use some lesser dark chocolate; maybe I'll drop down to 65% cocoa solids.
2:  Add a little extra sugar or flavorings, I might even add more vanilla.
3:  Use an pastry bag with a big tip instead of rolling the truffles in my hands.  This will make them look more like the ones on the box, and I won't have to wash my hands five times while I'm making them.

If you're curious about what they looked like, here they are chilling in the refrigerator:

That's the rillette in the back right there, cooling so it would be nice and creamy on Monday.

Finally, because I'm some kind of chocolate and cream freak, I made some hot chocolate to help me wind down from all the cooking.  Actually, I had some cream left over, and an old half-empty can of sweetened condensed milk (SCM) that I needed to get rid of, so I thought I'd better use them before I gave in and just threw them out.

I've never tried making hot chocolate with SCM before, but believe me, I will again.  That stuff is awesome!  I just heated up the cream, SCM, and some milk to thin it out, and pored it over some Green & Black's organic dark chocolate, and the results were delicious.

That picture does it no justice, but this one might give you an idea of the flavor:

Anyway, Green & Blacks is now my favorite dark chocolate purveyor.  I had a couple of pieces before I melted it in the cream, and I was throughly impressed.

Some Completed Cooking

Well, I finally got some cooking done on Sunday. 

First, I made the Rillette.  It's a lot of work: you have to sauté some celery and leek in butter, add some salmon fillets and wine and cook until tender:

After that, you have to strain and reduce all the juices, cook some salmon trimmings, let it all cool, remove the skin from the fillets, and mix everything together in a bowl with some fromage frais.  If you don't know what fromage frais is, don't worry, you're not alone.  It turns out it's a lot like reduced-fat cream cheese, which is what I used, only I accidentally got the kind that's pre-seasoned with pepper (which I didn't even realize was a product until I opened the tub and wondered why it had all these black specks).  Anyway, when it was all done, it looked a little like this:

I tried it, of course, and basically it tasted of salmon.  Now, I'm a great lover of salmon, so I rather enjoyed it, but it made me wonder what all that work with the sautéing and reducing was for, when it probably would have tasted just as good if I had cooked some salmon and mixed it with a bunch of butter.  Maybe my palette just isn't refined enough to truly enjoy the experience.  Here's a picture of me enjoying the experience anyway:

I brought it in to work today, and it was a big hit, so I think that it was an overall success. 

I also made some dark chocolate truffles and some hot cocoa on Sunday, but now it's my bed time, so I'll have to tell you about them tomorrow.

Wasted Weekend

Well, it looks like I won't get as much cooking done this weekend as I'd hoped.  I have to go to work on Saturday and babysit my experiment, so there'll be no eggs and bacon in toast bowls or salmon rillettes tomorrow.  I go to the climbing center on Sunday morning too, so I won't get time to cook until Sunday evening.  That should give me just enough time to make the rillettes to bring to work on Monday.  I'll post pictures then.

More on Rillettes

If you're anything like me, you have no idea what a Rillette is.  Thankfully, Wikipedia is here to help. 

It seems that a triditional Rillette is made of salted, cured, and slow-cooked pork that is shredded and mixed with fat to make a delicious spread.  Sounds pretty good to me.  Whether or not the salmon rillette turns out well, I may look into finding some pork rillette somewhere.

Anyways, it's a triditional French dish, which is pretty obvious from the name.  I hope to make the recipe this weekend, and then I'll be able to tell you what it's like.  I'll take some pictures too.

My First Post

Hello everybody,

I recently got this book from my friend ->

She likes all the pretty pictures inside, and I like to cook, so together we decided it would be a good idea for me to make these recipes and post the results online.  With this book, and the magic of StumbleUpon, I'll have plenty of recipes to work on.

The book, titled "400 Appetizers & Party Recipes", has what I'd say are about 338 recipes that are actually things I'm going to cook.  I'm no good at picking, so I've made a little program that will randomly select a recipe for me to make.  The first recipe my little program has picked for me is #128, Salmon Rillettes.  I've also got a recipe from The Noshery for some tasty-looking little breakfast bowl thingies.

I'll let you know how everything turns out.