The Cooking Thread

Prime Junta said:

I love scallops. Over here, we can only find them frozen, and the quality is pretty variable. Lucky you!

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This guy is one of the best television food chefs out there in the US, probably the best IMO. This is his recipe for scallops and wow, it's so simple and they turn out great. It will smoke up your house/apartment, just a heads up.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/seared-scallops-recipe/index.html

Prime Junta said:

We also cook a lot of pasta; it's fast, easy, can be infinitely varied, and it's healthy (especially whole-grain pasta). For example, boil the pasta (with some salt and a splash of vinegar in the water), then drain, add black pepper, olive oil, a fresh tomato cut into small cubes, chopped fresh basil, a small clove of garlic crushed with salt and olive oil, mix all together, and grate some Parmesan, Pecorino Romano, or Grana Padano cheese on top. Yum!

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+1, I tried that for dinner. I didn't have fresh tomatoes (nor the right kind of cheese, my Swedish "Priest cheese" did fine though), but did have sun-dried ones so I put them in a bowl with some olive oil to let them soak for a while, then decided I may as well put everything except the pasta in there, along with some olives. Tasty indeed, but especially with the strong concentrated taste of the dried tomatoes, I really wish I had a glass of strong-flavored red wine.

I find myself stumbling with my cooking vocabulary, but here goes:

If I did have fresh tomatoes though, I surely would have made a bruschetta as well (Italian, so it's pronounced "brosketta"):
4 bread slices
4 tomatoes
garlic
1 table spoon tomato purrée
1 table spoon olive oil
½ tea spoon salt
basil
pepper

Cut the tomatoes and remove the watery core, then slice the pulp. Mix the pulp with garlic, tomato purrée, oil, salt, chopped fresh basil, and pepper. Don't be afraid of using a lot of the spices, the first time I tried to make it myself it came out a bit tame.

Roast or fry the bread, put the tomato mix on, decorate with some basil leaves, enjoy.

@Sir Markus, I didn't use (a) heated stone for that. I just used the oven, into which I inserted a "backblech" (use google pictures to see how it looks like) onto which I put the pizza. Between Pizza and the backblech I put something I know as "baking paper" (Backpapier), which isolates the pizza from the backblech.

Yesterday, I made another f my (to me, personally) yummy "vegetable pans", with sweet&sour sauce from a shop added.

Yesterday, I cut mushrooms and paprika (sometimes I also use tomatos and even carrots) into the pan, fried it a bit, meanwhile made rice, and added everything in the pan (including the sauce), and turned the heat off (I often work with what i call "the rest heat"). Normally, I would have used a greater variety of vegetables for that, but I was too lazy this time and didn't have much more there.

It's a bit difficult for me to describe what I mean, because I've never really learned English words for cooking. Which is why some things might sound a bit weird.

Backblech = baking sheet or baking tray. That rectangular flat thing you put into the oven with stuff on it.

I started cooking regularly two years ago. It's hard to describe to somebody who doesn't cook how easy it is to get better results than just about everything you can buy in a supermarket or even a cheap restaurant, not to mention fast food chains.
Generally you don't need magic or special tricks to create something tasty. Choosing the right ingredients, using them in the correct order and avoiding stupid actions is in most cases enough to get a quality meal. Even a seemingly complex dish like roulades is pretty easy. Simple stuff on the other hand can get pretty hard to master. See pizza.

Sir Markus said:

Homemade pizza is tough to pull off, but it can be done and if it's done right it's amazing.

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I see it a little bit different. A solid homemade pizza - better than most frozen stuff and comparable to pizzeria product - is not that complicated. It takes a couple of tries, but I bet even the first one will be a positive surprise.
Creating something clearly better, exactly the type of pizza you personally like, is surprisingly challenging. But it's definitely worth it.

A ceramic pizza stone and paddle is a great investment, and really needs to be heated to the max before putting your pizza in the oven. Corn starch is absolutely critical on the paddle while you are assembling it, and on the stone, otherwise the pizza will stick to the paddle/stone (a nightmare). I like to use Hunt's tomato sauce and good quality mozzarella. The real trick to making really good pizza at home is to get the pizza stone as hot as possible, and I'm talking searing hot., I usually keep it in there for about 45 minutes before cooking.

But I think the one major key to making good homemade pizza is the dough. Knead the heck out of the dough for 15 or 20 minutes and roll it out thin or if you want deep dish, use a cast iron skillet.

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All good recommendations. Unfortunately I have no special equipment. Only a normal oven and a baking sheet.

Essential are:
- HEAT. Even for frozen pizza. Maximum heat! Or a lot of patience.
- A pinch of salt on top. Most people forget that.

And by far the most important one:
Less is more!

The dough needs to be rolled out thin. Put a thin layer of sauce on it. Put the toppings next to each other. Mix them as you like it. But not more than one layer. Put some thought into the question which toppings should be above the chesse and which below. Don't use too much cheese because the cheese is meant to support the taste, not dominate it. When in doubt use less.

On a sidenote, I've never seen good pizza sauce in the supermarket in Germany. There is okay stuff, but making a better sauce is trivial and not much work.

edit:
I prefer my pizza crisp. Pre-baking the dough for 3 minutes does the trick.

Dropping in from France -- it's a heavy, hot day here today, even up in the hills where I am -- 33 degrees C, thunder rolling over the hills, and the kind of oppressive feeling in the air you get when you feel it wants to rain but can't quite manage.

But, nevertheless, food.

We've discovered a wonderful place for fruit and veggies here. It's actually a wholesaler for the local farmers, but one end of the warehouse has a selection of whatever has come in today, that they're selling for about half the supermarket price. All absolutely top-grade stuff straight from the farmers, fresher even than on the open market. I went slightly crazy and bought a huge pile of cherries, flat peaches (these are to peaches what wild strawberries are to strawberries; they don't travel), "bull's heart" tomatoes, cucumbers, tiny zucchinis, enormous sweet peppers (red and green) and what not.

Then we went to a locally quite well known butcher's shop/delicatessen, and got a wonderful "bio" chicken, some sausages, stuffed vine leaves, and cheeses. (The lady got extremely snitty with us because she felt that we were buying too many of the vine leaves, go figure.)

To prepare the chicken, I crushed a big bunch of garlic in a mortar, with salt, pepper, olive oil, and fresh basil from the garden. Then I made two incisions in the skin near the top of the legs, and separated the skin from the flesh with my finger, as far as I could from the legs, and also from the breasts (no incision needed there, because I could go in through the neck). Then I stuffed the garlic paste under the skin, and roast the chicken slowly in the oven in medium heat. It was a big chicken, so it took a bit more than an hour.

Joanna cooked some burghul with big, yellow raisins and almonds (first soaked in water) to go with it, and then we made a simple cucumber salad on the side -- I peeled the cucumbers, sliced them very thinly, then put them in a bowl with a bit of salt and anise leaves (also from the garden), and let "marinate" for about an hour.

For starters, we had the vine leaves plus some taboulé and "aubergine caviar" that my father had made the previous day.

And for dessert, I made stuffed, grilled peaches from what remained of a box of second-rate (i.e., ugly but good) peaches from a farmer by the roadside. I carefully washed the peaches, then removed the stone by cutting around it from both ends, leaving a hole. I stuffed the hole with a mixture of almonds, hazelnuts, raisins, vanilla sugar, and butter, and wrapped them in aluminum foil. I then put them in the gas grill at low heat for, oh, a half-hour, I guess. Served with "fromage blanc" -- I don't know what it would be in English, but it's a milk product, sort of halfway between curd and cheese, the consistency of yoghurt but softer and with very little acidity.

Sounds like you're in a cook's paradise, Prime J. Grilled peaches are about the only thing I've cooked that's similar, and I usually don't stuff them but do add a little brown sugar, butter and Courvoisier, which minus the butter is also nice on strawberries.
Two questions: looks like the burghul you refer to is what's called here bulgar wheat? I've never cooked it--what's it like? and could the 'fromage blanc' be anything so prosaic as what we call cottage cheese?

magerette said:

Sounds like you're in a cook's paradise, Prime J. Grilled peaches are about the only thing I've cooked that's similar, and I usually don't stuff them but do add a little brown sugar, butter and Courvoisier, which minus the butter is also nice on strawberries.
Two questions: looks like the burghul you refer to is what's called here bulgar wheat? I've never cooked it--what's it like? and could the 'fromage blanc' be anything so prosaic as what we call cottage cheese?

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Burghul is often called bulgur or Bulgar wheat, depending on where you come from. It's basically crushed (not ground) whole wheat that's been sieved so the grains are roughly uniform size; it comes in at least three grades of coarseness. It's cooked more or less like rice, and is quite nice as an accompaniment to pretty much anything that has sauce in it. The nuts and raisins are entirely optional. It's used a lot in Lebanese cooking; not just as a side dish but for example to make kebbeh.

And no, fromage blanc is not exactly cottage cheese; it's smoother and creamier in texture, even though it's very low in fat. However, I think cottage cheese would be a pretty good substitute. I haven't seen it anywhere other than here; the closest I've come to is Russian "syr" or Swedish "kvarg," but like cottage cheese, these are somehow "rougher" products as well. (I'm not particularly fond of fromage blanc myself, but my dad loves the stuff.)

I found these references on the Net:

[ http://www.ochef.com/352.htm ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fromage_blanc ]

I see. That first link compares it to cream cheese, which is decidedly different than cottage cheese--and seems to indicate ever eating it is not going to be a major likelihood for me,anyway. (I have been known to whiz up cottage cheese in the food processor with various herbs, and maybe a little plain yogurt, but I can't say I'm all that big on it--it's a good diet food though as a veggie dip.)

I'll check into the bulgar--anything you can put raisins and nuts in and serve with dinner sounds good to me.

Here's one of our summer basics, very American, but good when the weather's hot. You may have to adjust the quantities to taste, because honestly, I never measure anything so amounts could be a bit skewed :

Pasta Salad
Boil up some tri-color rotini in the appropriate quantity(you can make a lot, because this dish can go into the fridge and keeps tasty for several days) Or you can use penne or shell pasta.
Cool it.
Put the cooled pasta in a large bowl, and add (per about 8-10 cups cooked pasta)
1 cup marinated artichoke hearts(not necessary to drain them)
1/2 minced red onion
2-3 stalks chopped celery
small can water chestnuts, drained and rinsed, sliced
1 cup chopped seeded fresh tomatoes, or sun dried tomatoes or last resort, canned stewed tomatoes
A handful of chopped green olives or
A handful of chopped greek olives
Salt, pepper and fresh herbs to taste(I like just a little chopped basil)
Mix all these ingredients with
about 3/4 -1 cup homemade vinaigrette (or mayonnaise if preferred) enough to moisten thoroughly, but not too much (which makes it soggy.)
Optional:
2 cups chopped grilled or baked chicken breast or grilled fresh tuna separated into nice chunks--you can also used canned in a pinch.
Chill and serve.

PJ, 33 degrees C is not hot; that's a mild summer's day!! How large was your chicken if you only cooked it just over an hour on medium heat? For me, a large chicken is 2+kg and that would never cook in an hour. The smallest I've ever bought is 1.5kg and I'd want more than an hour for that too at 180-190C. We eat a LOT of chicken!!

It was 1.7 kilos. Bresse chickens are a good deal bigger, but for a "regular" one this was on the hefty side.

Hot, of course, is a relative term; it wasn't so much the temperature as the muggy, heavy feel from the thunderclouds, though. The trouble is that it limits the things I'd want to do -- it's a bit too hot for cycling, and if we go down to the towns in the valley, the temperature goes up another several degrees and gets even muggier. Not that there's anything WRONG with lounging under a tree with a cold beer...

Corwin said:

PJ, 33 degrees C is not hot; that's a mild summer's day!!

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Huh ? For someone who's used to the desert, maybe.

Here in Germany, 33 degrees Celsius are relatively hot; 40 degrees are rarely reached.

So wen are just used other temperatures here. People who aren't used higher temperatures begin to sweat at lower ones, I guess.

Strangely, where I live it rarely gets up near 40 C, but down in Melbourne where my son lives, they can get snow occasionally in winter, but get over 40 in summer regularly. We actually don't get massive temp changes from season to season where I live. Sub-tropical is pleasant all year round!!

Gorath said:

I see it a little bit different. A solid homemade pizza - better than most frozen stuff and comparable to pizzeria product - is not that complicated. It takes a couple of tries, but I bet even the first one will be a positive surprise.
Creating something clearly better, exactly the type of pizza you personally like, is surprisingly challenging. But it's definitely worth it.


All good recommendations. Unfortunately I have no special equipment. Only a normal oven and a baking sheet.

Essential are:
- HEAT. Even for frozen pizza. Maximum heat! Or a lot of patience.
- A pinch of salt on top. Most people forget that.

And by far the most important one:
Less is more!

The dough needs to be rolled out thin. Put a thin layer of sauce on it. Put the toppings next to each other. Mix them as you like it. But not more than one layer. Put some thought into the question which toppings should be above the chesse and which below. Don't use too much cheese because the cheese is meant to support the taste, not dominate it. When in doubt use less.

On a sidenote, I've never seen good pizza sauce in the supermarket in Germany. There is okay stuff, but making a better sauce is trivial and not much work.

edit:
I prefer my pizza crisp. Pre-baking the dough for 3 minutes does the trick.

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No, you cannot buy decent pizza sauce in a can/jar, at least I've never found one worth using. I try to find a 'no salt added' neutral tomato sauce, and then spice it to taste with oregano, salt, garlic etc. Crisp thin crust is great, but it can be ruined and made soggy with the ingredients. I usually simmer onions/tomato slices/mushrooms in a skillet (to get rid of the water) before putting them on the pizza if I'm using those ingredients. If you don't, you'll end up with a soggy crust and a pool of water on top.

Corwin said:

PJ, 33 degrees C is not hot; that's a mild summer's day!! How large was your chicken if you only cooked it just over an hour on medium heat? For me, a large chicken is 2+kg and that would never cook in an hour. The smallest I've ever bought is 1.5kg and I'd want more than an hour for that too at 180-190C. We eat a LOT of chicken!!

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I eat a lot of chicken as well, and I've found, at least with whole chickens, cooking at about 300/350 degrees F for about 1 1/2 hours or so works best (assuming about a 4 pound bird). It's best if it's rinsed off and then allow to dry thoroughly. Then, for the last 15 minutes or so, I set the oven to 'Broil' to get the skin nice and crispy. As of late, we've been sprinkling it with plenty of hot curry powder, wow that's tasty.

When will you Yanks join the rest of the world and use metric!! Your weight and temps mean nothing to me!!

Gorath said:

Backblech = baking sheet or baking tray. That rectangular flat thing you put into the oven with stuff on it.

I started cooking regularly two years ago. It's hard to describe to somebody who doesn't cook how easy it is to get better results than just about everything you can buy in a supermarket or even a cheap restaurant, not to mention fast food chains.
Generally you don't need magic or special tricks to create something tasty. Choosing the right ingredients, using them in the correct order and avoiding stupid actions is in most cases enough to get a quality meal. Even a seemingly complex dish like roulades is pretty easy. Simple stuff on the other hand can get pretty hard to master. See pizza.

Click to expand...

This is a really great company Penzy's Spices. I'm blessed to have one of their stores nearby, but they are one of the last companies I've seen that actually have a paper catalog and I always love when it comes (4 times a year) it's just a great catalog with recipes and a full list of what they sell.

I don't know if they mail overseas, but it's worth a try putting in a request to find out. They only sell spices, and they are GOOD. You can also download a PDF catalog, but try to get the paper catalog first, IMO.

http://www.penzeys.com/cgi-bin/penzeys/penzeyscatalog.html

Uh... what's so hard about pizza?

Here's how I make my tomato sauce:

1. Take a few cloves of garlic, some salt, some black pepper, and some olive oil. A dried chili is optional. Crush them into a paste in a mortar.
2. Take a tin of tomatoes (unsalted). Heat up a saucepan with some more olive oil in it. Put in the garlic paste and blanch (but don't overcook); toss on some dried herbs -- thyme, rosemary, oregano, for example -- then pour on the tomatoes and stir. Put a splash of white wine into the mortar (or water, in a pinch), and stir with the pestle to get the rest of the garlic paste out, and pour into the sauce. Stir again.
3. Turn down the heat, cover, and simmer.

It's dead easy and fast. Also makes for a great, simple pasta sauce.

(You can make variants, too -- add some anchovy to the mortar when making the garlic paste, finish with olives and capers, and serve with spaghetti to make a lovely spaghetti puttanesca. Or put in another chili or two and a little less herbs, and use it to make a penne arrabiata. Or add some veggies, beans, wine and water, and fish and seafood to make a Marseille-style fish soup. Or use tarragon instead of the "Mediterranean" herbs, and serve with breaded, fried slices of eggplant and rice, to make for a Balkan-style dish. Very versatile.)

I already explained the bit about the dough and baking it in stages above. With a baking stone, this will be *almost* as good as what you can buy in Rome, and way better than anything you're likely to find in stores or restaurants outside "pizza country" -- central to southern Italy or, I hear, New York.

Corwin said:

When will you Yanks join the rest of the world and use metric!! Your weight and temps mean nothing to me!!

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Probably never, I hate to say. We're kinda stubborn, and most folks here are wondering why the rest of you guys changed in first place, because of the fact that the old system seemed to do the job just fine.

@pizza: Homemade pizza is the best, that's true, especially if you have a herb garden (mixing some fine herbs in the dough usually doesn't ruin the pizza, so I tend to do that).

As the resident 'cook' I should add a recipe as well, I guess... let me think of one, I'll get back to you!

BACK! Okay, several hours later, but I had to visit my mom. So here we go:

First of all, I prefer food that doesn't leave the kitchen a mess: one chopping board, one bowl and/or pot and/or pan are enough.
Let's start with something fast and simple - olive spread. Especially fine on fresh bread, but it also goes very well with barbecued meat of all sorts.

You need:
250 g of cream cheese
30 black olives (salted, not pickled... preserved the Greek way)
1 garlic bulb

Fill the cream cheese into a small bowl. Skin and chop the garlic cloves (yes, all of them - the pieces needn't too small), put garlic in bowl, stir. A fork works better than a spoon, at least with my favorite cream cheese which is somewhat dry and firm. Then gut and hack the olives and treat them just like the garlic.
Once you have stirred enough (the mass should be a soft greyish brown), put in the fridge for about two hours (but that's not absolutely necessary - you can eat the spread right away).