The Cooking Thread

Why, dte? Why?

Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.

Open one box of popcorn. Pull bag of popcorn out of plastic wrap. Put bag into microwave. Get fire extinguisher. Put out fire. Add salt until at 99% the maximum a human body an survive eating. Eat popcorn.

I have a stick of rag bologna for tomorrow, if I haven't eaten it before hand. Health food.

Ah, speaking of Pizza, my dad finished building his brick earth oven last fall. Here are some pictures from the first time we used it, at my mom's birthday party.

I've been in there myself, quite literally, filling cracks and holes with mortar. Now I know how the witch in Hansel and Gretel must have felt, and there wasn't even any fire in my case.

We had incredibly tasty chicken, several plates of pizza, Tarte flambée (or "Flammkuchen", not shown), various sorts of bread, plum and apple pie, plus loads of additional food for a nice late summer garden party. I also ate marshmallows for the first time, barbecued on a stick over a bonfire-in-a-barrel. Yumm.

Now I'm hungry. That braided thing(the plum apple pie?) looks like a work of art—too pretty to eat, but somehow I'm sure you managed.

We're treating ourselves to an oven-roast chicken with garlic, thyme, and pepper stuffed under the skin, with baked potato and turnip on the side. The chicken is French, because Finnish chicken that isn't factory-farmed in horrible conditions is very difficult to find.

@PJ: Now I'm hungry, too. Just reading about all those ingredients makes me go all — it's just too bad I can't cook.

@magerette: How about up close, with sugar on top?

You are evil. Evil.

I just get yogurt. MMMMMmmmm

Home-made red full-grain pasta with asparagus, Portobello mushrooms, and rucola (needs kitchen machine, or a LOT of elbow grease

For the pasta:
* 300 grams flour, two parts graham, one part white.
* Two eggs.
* About 75 grams of tomato paste.

Blend in a kitchen machine until smooth. Flatten and roll into a thin sheet. Cut into the shape of your choice (I made triangles). If you have a pasta machine, you can use that, of course. Boil a lot of water, add a dash of wine vinegar and some salt, dump in the pasta, and boil for 2-4 minutes (depending on how thick you made them), drain and put into an oiled bowl; pour a bit of olive oil on top and toss to stop them from sticking together.

For the rest:
* Clean and boil the asparagus. Drizzle with olive oil and wine vinegar (Balsamico or Jerez are especially good), grate some black pepper on top.
* Slice and sauté the portobello mushrooms in olive oil. When almost done, pour on a bit of white wine and add the rucola. It's done when the rucola starts looking more like spinach.

Serve with grated parmesan cheese, black pepper, and sea salt (fleur de sel is best), with a bit of bread and oil on the side.

Fresh asparagus is in season here right now and it's very inexpensive. Cleaned asparagus, peanut oil, crushed black pepper, butter and crushed garlic in a cast iron skillet is hard to beat during springtime. Add some marinated, grilled tuna steaks with fresh squeezed lemon juice, and that's yummy. Add a simple plate of steamed fingerling or redskin potatoes, and now we're talking.

Oh yes.

I really like seasonal foods. Just when you start to run out of ideas for stuff to do with them, the season ends and something else comes up.

(Unfortunately, for about six months of the year, the seasonal food over here is rye bread, root vegetables, and a catfish-like creature, which pushes the inventiveness thing a bit. Rutabaga risotto is pretty damn good, though.)

I'm fond of both rutabagas and asparagus (though I don't think combining them sounds like a good idea) Here are my two favorite recipes for each:

Rutmus*(pronounced root-moose)
Combine equal parts cooked rutabaga and cooked red potatoes and mash with generous amounts of sweet cream and butter. Season with salt and pepper. You can add garlic, if you like garlic mashed potatoes, I suppose, but it's pretty perfect just the way it is.
*I have no idea the correct Swedish spelling of that word as I learned it orally from my grandmother-please feel free to correct me.

Stir Fried Asparagus with Mushrooms
(This is very similar to Sir Markus' recipe, with a little soy sauce.)
Chop asparagus on the diagonal into pieces the size of a middle finger joint. (I'm avoiding the metrics) Slice your mushrooms—whatever variety you prefer (I like shitake.) If you like scallions, they go well in this dish, as do water chestnuts in moderation. Also a minced clove or two of garlic.
Heat some peanut or canola oil in a wok and stir fry everything. When asparagus is bright green and almost done, add enough fermented soy sauce to coat the vegetables lightly. Cover for a minute or two, then serve.

It's spelled "rotmos." Pronounced as you say. Means "root mash."

Thanks. (I 'd say it in Swedish, but I'm sure I'd misspell that also. )

Speaking of seasonal, we're about to get our garden in any day now. Fresh tomato recipes would be greatly appreciated if anybody has any favorites as we always have too many and I hate to can them. (I do make a lot of pico de gallo since we grow jalapenos as well.)

Also, we've been growing Swiss chard the last few years, and the only way I've found to use it has been in soups, where it's very good. Are there any other good chard uses?

magerette said:

Thanks. (I 'd say it in Swedish, but I'm sure I'd misspell that also. )

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That's easy: "Tack," pronounced like "tuck."

Speaking of seasonal, we're about to get our garden in any day now. Fresh tomato recipes would be greatly appreciated if anybody has any favorites as we always have too many and I hate to can them. (I do make a lot of pico de gallo since we grow jalapenos as well.)

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I love tomatoes. I can't get enough of them. Off the very top of my head, although I'm sure you know most of these:

* Caprese. Alternate slices of fresh tomato and mozzarella, add some fresh basil if you like, grate some pepper and salt on top, drizzle with olive oil and wine vinegar.
* Spaghetti crudaiolo. Cut your tomato into cubes about the size of a d6, add some cucumber also in cubes if you like, crush a clove of garlic into paste with salt and olive oil (and an anchovy, if you like), combine with freshly boiled spaghetti, grate black pepper and parmesan on top, garnish with basil.
* Tomato starter Moroccan style: slice tomatoes, chop lots of coriander, put tomatoes on a plate, the coriander on top, drizzle with olive oil, serve with flatbread.
* Lebanese breakfast: Drain some plain yogurt in a coffee filter to make labneh. Take some flatbread. Spread a generous amount of labneh in it. Add lots of fresh tomato, some slices of fresh cucumber, some very salty pickles if you like, drizzle olive oil, roll into a fajita-kind-of-thing, enjoy.
* Tomates farcies (stuffed tomatoes): Use nice, big tomatoes. Cut the tops off and remove the seeds. Stuff with… things. I like mushrooms and (boiled) rice, for example, with some herbs and pepper and things, but you can use ground meat or whatever too. Grate some cheese on top. Bake in an oven.
* Spaghetti puttanesca. (That means "spaghetti, whore style," by the way. I hear it's because the prostitutes in Naples were only let into the market when all the good people had done their shopping, so they had to make do with whatever's left.) Dice your tomatoes. Crush some garlic and some anchovies with salt and olive oil in a mortar. Saute the resulting paste on medium heat. Add the diced tomatoes, reduce. Add capers and black olives. Serve with spaghetti and grated parmesan.
* Soup. You can make just about any kind of soup from tomatoes. Make a paste of garlic, salt, olive oil, and whatever spices you like (black pepper and herbs for an Italian or Greek feel, chili for an Arrabiata kind of thing, tarragon if you want to go Serbian, fenugreek, saffron, and cumin for a Caucasian style, and so on). Saute the paste in olive oil on medium heat. Add veggies you want to sauté (e.g. onions, carrots, etc.). Add lots of diced tomatoes. Add some bouillon (veggie, chicken, meat, fish…). Add other good stuff you want to put in it: meat and bones, previously browned in the oven, early on; root veggies, grains, and suchlike a bit later; green vegetables toward the end, and seafood or fish just a few minutes before serving. You probably wouldn't want to put all of the above in one soup, but you get my drift.
* Baked tomato with tapenade. Cut the tomatoes in two, spread a nice layer of tapenade on top, bake in the oven, serve hot. If you don't have tapenade, you can make some — take some good olives (black or green), pit them, run them through a food processor (or equivalent), with a few anchovies.
* Carpaccio of tomato. Cut the tomatoes very very thin, arrange on a plate, drizzle with olive oil, grate some pepper on top, serve with bread on the side.
* Bruschetta with tomato. Peel the tomatoes (with the boiling water method), remove the seeds, and crush in a pestle (but not too finely). Rub some slices of bread with a half clove of garlic, spread the crushed tomato on top, sprinkle with a bit of salt, drizzle with olive oil, grill quickly in the oven. (Alternative: instead of using lots of crushed tomato, just rub them with a half of tomato after rubbing them with the garlic. The downside is that a good bit of the tomato goes to waste, and you don't use anywhere near as much tomato…)
* Pizza margherita. Make basic Italian tomato sauce: crush garlic into a paste with salt and herbs, sauté on medium heat, add peeled and diced tomatoes, reduce. If you have a stick mixer, you can use it to smooth it into a coulis (it's even prettier if you de-seed the tomatoes first). Spread onto a pizza crust that you've quickly pre-baked; return into the oven for a second round of baking. Take out, add slices of fresh tomato. Bake again. Then add grated cheese to taste, return to the oven, and bake until the cheese melts. (Of course, you can add other stuff too; I really like this very plain pizza, though.)
* Tabbouleh (Lebanese style): [ http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/member/views/AUTHENTIC-LEBANESE-TABOULI-1219893 ]
* Taboulé (Moroccan style): [ http://www.certiferme.com/recette/recette-taboule-a-la-marocaine-1767.html ] (in French, but I'm pretty sure Google can handle the translation, it's not that difficult).

(N.b.: Lebanese tabbouleh and Moroccan taboulé are really completely different dishes, although the ingredients are similar. The Lebanese one is green and leafy with chunks of tomato and grains of burghul, while the Moroccan one is minty, lemony, garlicky, tomato-y couscous.)

Also, we've been growing Swiss chard the last few years, and the only way I've found to use it has been in soups, where it's very good. Are there any other good chard uses?

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Fry it on a pan in olive oil with onions and garlic. It makes a very nice starter or side dish. The Lebanese often serve this as mezze (with the other sixteen dishes, of course). Uses a lot of it, though, since it shrinks big-time when cooking.

Gosh, almost overwhelming but that's a good thing. Many of those are new to me and most of them sound extremely delicious and simple to prepare. My corrupted-Swedish-American tacksa micka to you.

AFA the chard, yes I've noticed that you can fill a wheelbarrow with the stuff and it ends up being about two cups worth cooked. I never thought of frying it, so that goes on the list, along with most of the tomato recipes. (I have some of them already.) I really like the sound of the Lebanese breakfast—well except for maybe the pickles…but that's because if you want really good crunchy salty pickles here, you have to make your own and I'm too lazy now to do that.

On the stuffed tomato—I stuff them cold, usually, with seafood or chicken salad made with onions, celery, water chestnuts and mayonaise, because they ripen when it's so hot here you hate to turn the oven on. But I do make a baked stuffed zuchini when we grow those that's very similar. Unfortunately, we've had to give up on the summer squash because the squash borers are just relentless—same with eggplant and potato bugs—and we don't use any pesticides. We can usually hand-pick the giant tomato horn worms off the tomatoes, though.

They're a bit scary looking but harmless to humans (if lethal to tomatoes):

Yeah, I think the pickles are a bit heavy for breakfast too. But I really like the rest of it.

As a bonus, you can sprinkle on za'atar — it's a spice mix that contains dried thyme, toasted sesame seeds, and dried, powdered summac, which is a very acidic berry often used as a spice in Oriental cooking. If you can't find summac, squeeze a bit of lemon juice on top instead.



Those caterpillars grow up to be some pretty scary moths. They scare the willies out of me, anyway.

I'm all about fresh tomatoes; they're fun to grow too. It's almost a silly obsession for me, lol.

My wife just came back from the shop with a bag of amaranth. Any ideas on how to cook it?

I grow it as a flower occasionally and it's huge and interesting



but I had no idea it was edible. I googled it, and apparently it's able to be used for everything from greens to pasta to popping the seeds like popcorn.

It's also a rather mediocre (non-Tarja) Nightwish song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdZn7k5rZLQ