Author Archives: tom

Bacon wrapped, feta stuffed dates

Three dates, wrapped in bacon, stuffed with feta

We were out collecting groceries for an upcoming entry for the blog when Edna was inspired. She went into the Middle Eastern market to get fresh mint since the stuff they had at the supermarket was crap and came back with a hand full of dates. She was inspired.

We’d already gotten the bacon simply to be decadent, but seeing the dates there on the shelf triggered something mystical (or might I say “crazy”?) in her eye. She had a plan that involved them together.

The pitted dates

1 package of dates (about 3/4 of a pound
1 package of bacon (about a pound)
some feta cheese (one package, whatever you get)

Yeah, this may well be the loosest specification for ingredients that we’ve ever done but hey, it’s all rock and roll over here!

Preheat the oven to 350.

Pit the dates. Stuff feta cheese into them so they’re as full as can be. Wrap each date in a strip of bacon and put them on a cookie sheet or something similar. (They may drip a bit so something with turned up edges is safest for your oven.)

Ready to go into the oven

Put in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the bacon is cooked. If you’ve ever fried bacon you’ll know what it should look like. Pro-tip, they should look like the top photo in this post.

Spicy carrot avocado soup

Carrot avocado soup in a bowl While we were waiting for the Moroccan beef stew to cook we realized we were starving right away and didn’t want to wait two hours so we whipped up this raw vegan soup that’s heavily inspired by the “I Am Divine” recipe in the I Am Grateful book of recipes. It’s pretty quick and of course juicing the carrots and lemon yourself gives you the freshest possible flavor. We actually doubled the below recipe but I’ll give this version because it fits, barely, in a standard blender.

Basil basil everywhere.

2 c. carrot juice (2 – 2½ lb. of carrots through the juicer)
2 avocados
1 tbsp. minced ginger
4 tsp. lemon juice (half a lemon juiced)
½ jalapeno pepper
½ tsp. chopped garlic (one large clove)
¼ tsp. cayenne pepper
15 large basil leaves
4 tsp. olive oil
5 mint leaves

Yummy avocados, perfectly ripe.

Put it all in a blender. If your blender isn’t super fancy it might be worth doing the ginger through the mint leaves in a food processor first and then put that all into the blender with the carrot juice and avocados.

The soup in the blender.

Enjoy straight out of the blender.

Pouring the soup into a bowl

Acapulco style shrimp cocktail

a.k.a. Cóctel de Camarón estilo Acapulco

Shrimp cocktail with a corn chip in a pretty glass.

The end result.

2 lb. shrimp, deveined and cooked
4 tomatoes, finely diced
1 bunch cilantro, diced
3 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
1-2 c. of the ketchup for the masses
salt to taste
1 tbsp of garlic powder
2-3 c. seafood broth (see below)
1 serrano pepper
4 tbsp. Tapatío or favorite hot sauce
6 medium avocados
1 cucumber

Shrimp is yummy.

Add clams, oysters, and/or baby octopus for further excitement.

Making the shrimp broth with a bit of serrano.

Making the broth; the serrano end really stands out.

After removing the shrimp tails, put them (the tails) in a saucepan with two to three cups of water to make the broth. Add the other bits of veggie to suit your taste; Edna tossed the serrano end into the pot too. Bring the water to a boil and simmer for a couple of minutes to infuse the water with the essence of the shrimp. If you’re cooking the shrimp or other seafood in the first just save some of the broth from that. When done, remove the solids from the broth.

Everything but the broth.

Mix everything in a big bowl and serve. For clean eating, serve on romaine lettuce or some sort of veggie chips; more traditional eaters will prefer tostadas or crackers. Be sure to bring the bottle of hot sauce to the table too so that everyone can jazz it up. Extra bonus points if you can take the Tapatío in your eye.

Completion!

Ketchup for the masses

Ketchup!

Edna was inspired to make shrimp cocktail last night so this morning we did some running around to get ingredients. A key component of this cocktail is ketchup but store bought bottled ketchup is all jacked full of stuff that nobody really should be eating so we made our own. We started with a base from elsewhere on the web but of course had to tweak it since what we were left with really just didn’t taste much like ketchup quite honestly.

4 lb. tomatoes, diced
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
½ c. unsweetened apple juice
a couple of shakes of cayenne pepper
3 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 bay leaf
½ tsp. whole cloves
1 tsp. celery seed
1 tsp. black peppercorns
½ c. lemon juice
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. garlic powder

For the apple juice we chose to juice a couple of Braeburn apples instead of using store bought juice. That’s just our bag.

Tomatoes diced, onion and garlic next to come.

The primary ingredients.

Put everything up to and including the vinegar into a soup pot and bring it to a boil. Wrap all of the spices (from the bay leaf up through the peppercorns) in some cheesecloth or a proper spice bag if you have one and toss it into the boiling mixture.

The spice bag.

After it’s boiled down about 50%, pour in the lemon juice and fish out the spice bag and let it keep boiling for about ten more minutes. Check the flavor; at this point we just didn’t feel that it was tasting like ketchup so we added the salt and garlic power; adjust these to your liking.

On the stove.

Once you’re done boiling it, pour it into a blender and smooth it out. Allegedly it’ll keep about a week in the fridge or you can freeze it.

Tangia mrakchiya!

A.k.a bachelor’s stew marrakesh

eatingfancy0012

I’ve had this Cooking at the Kasbah cookbook for a while, I got it for Christmas one year and have made a few of the recipes in it. In thinking about things that would be fun to do for the blog, this was one of the first things that came to mind; it’s relatively simple to make and pretty tasty. Of course, we’ve got to put our own special twist on it to avoid things that we really shouldn’t be eating at this time.

2 tbsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. sweet Hungarian paprika
2 tsp. ground turmeric
2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp. ground cumin
4 garlic clove, minced
2 tsp. salt
½ c. vegetable oil
3 lb. lamb shoulder, cut into chunks and trimmed of fat
1 c. broth, beef or veggie
3 lb. yellow onions, peeled

The spices in their respective containers.

The spices, ready to go.

The book lists the nutmeg as optional but let’s be serious here. Nutmeg is awesome. I tend to be pretty liberal with the spices and the ginger and nutmeg are two in this recipe that I really let fly. Let your nose be the guide and punch up the spices that resonate for you by as much as 50% over what’s listed.

The lamb prep should be trimmed of fat; we actually cut it up into chunks and cut out the bones but realized afterwards that we really should have left the bones so we threw a few in. Go ahead and leave it all on the bones. Beef works well in this recipe too, by the way.

The original recipe calls for small golf ball sized onions but I can never find them in the supermarket so I just get a pile of yellow onions and cut them into quarters.

Start the oven preheating to 350°F once everything is ready to go.

The spice mix just needs oil now.

Put everything up to the oil into a small bowl and mix it up. Drag the lamb through the spice mix so it’s well coated and put it aside.

Running the lamb through the sauce.

Swish the broth around in the remaining spice mix and hold it aside.

Arrange the onions in a flat layer on the bottom of a dutch oven. Lay the meat over the onions and pour the broth and spice mix over it all. Cover it and put it into the onion until the meat starts breaking apart easily; 2½ to 3 hours.

The whole thing in the oven.

The original recipe calls for a mint garnish and plenty of crusty bread but Edna and I just ate it as it came out of the oven. It was pretty good but it needed something to take the place of the bread. Serving it with brown or black rice is a good option if you’re also avoiding bread.

Ready to eat.

It was good but not great; we’d give it 6 or 7 out of ten. With rice it probably would have been marginally better but it really does call for a side of bread. Adding some fresh lemon juice at the table offset some of the fatty feel of the dish. Substituting beef for the lamb changes the character so that it stands on its own a bit better but I found it more flavorful with the lamb. Another modification I might make is to put a bit more meat in, maybe another pound, because that’s always the first thing to go.

The pot in these photos is called a doufeu. It’s cast iron and the indentation on the lid allows you to load it up with ice so that the juices inside condense quickly and drip back down into the food. I use it in place of a dutch oven all of the time and I’ve always loved the results.

Hello world!

The completed salmon wrap.

This afternoon Edna and I were working as we usually do on our own projects when she came to ask me the not-unusual question of the day, “what are we having for lunch?” I hadn’t really considered it; I mean, I realized that I’d become hungry without noticing it but I hadn’t really thought about it. When I was on my way to her place this morning I passed In-N-Out as I often do and that got stuck in my craw and I really couldn’t get the sweet succulence of an all-American double hamburger out of my mind. Sadly that would not do.

Both Edna and I have recently committed ourselves to eating better. There are a whole host of reasons behind that, we have our own reasons and we have some in common. She’s doing much better at it than I am though (and truth be told this is one of the primary reasons I like going to her place to work) and we’ve been talking about our options for a couple of days. So I went over and grabbed the first cookbook off of the shelves and started flipping through it. Inside of the Atkins for Life Low-Carb Cookbook I pretty quickly came upon a recipe for Crunchy Salmon Salad Wrap that looked awesome and it inspired us for this day’s lunch.

We kicked around a number of ideas for what we wanted to turn the inspiration into and we really went off into the deep end but it turned out really well. So well, in fact, that it inspired this blog. We both love to cook but when the pressure of needing to cook comes up it’s all too easy to lose your mind and just fall back on an old standby. …like going to In-N-Out instead of turning on the stove.

The key ingredient is caught wild, not farm raised. We actually couldn’t get enough so had to do some farm raised, you can see the different color of the fish toward the front since it’s dyed.

The grand plan that we had was to do salmon wraps but to use fresh salmon instead of canned and then to just use romaine lettuce as the wrapping medium so we could avoid the tortillas that the book suggested. Look for wild caught fish too over farm raised, it’s better for you, better for the environment, and it tastes WAY better. Edna thought that it would be great to do a sesame ginger sauce of some sort, too, so I looked one up online and we doubled it but otherwise did it as presented. Food N Whine has a discussion about a fantastic Sweet Soy Ginger Sauce which is basically just a bunch of stuff put together in a bowl and stirred. It should keep for a few days in the fridge and I think it’ll go great with a lot of different things.

½ c. soy sauce
½ c. mirin
1 t. grated or minced garlic
2 t. grated ginger
4 t. sesame oil
2 t. Sriracha

That’s it; mix it up and you’re good to go.

Then we tried to make mayonnaise. Yes, I can only say we tried. Edna’s blender must be the loudest blender ever created and it was running forever. It seemed like things were going well but… It just never whipped up. We’ll try again though another day and let everyone know what we did wrong. She dug into it a little later and it appears that our egg yolks may have been too cold. We’ll see if that holds next time we give this a shot.

The wraps themselves then are pretty flexibly built at the table by the consumer, that way folks can get exactly the balance they want from the flavors within. This is messy food to eat, so have plenty of napkins available.

A good-sized salmon steak; a pound per person should more than sufficient (and will leave you leftovers for later!)
vegetable oil for frying the fish
salt and pepper
Soy Ginger Sauce from above
mayonnaise
a cucumber
two carrots
some red cabbage, maybe an eighth of a head
some dill
romaine lettuce

The great thing about cooking as a team is that one person can run the stove while the other does washing and cooking prep. Edna is the fry master generally so she just took that role and… well, I was thinking I might have done something but I think I just cleaned up after her as she rocked all of the slicing and dicing and salad shooting.

Using the salad shooter to grate carrots.

Shooting salad.

The salmon steak should be cut into strips about an inch wide. Hit them with some salt and pepper and throw them into the frying pan with a little oil. We like to leave the skin on and leave the fish a little rare but since it’s right there in front of your eyes, let them be the judge of when it’s all done enough for you.

A pile of fish.

Jardiniere or julienne the cucumbers and grate the carrots and cabbage. Put this stuff in a bowl, it can all mix together and will as folks serve themselves. Put the dill onto a small dish and put some mayo on another small dish. Mixing the dill into the mayo may actually be even more effective now that I think about it. Put out the lettuce and the fish and have at it.

The mix of vegetables that goes into the wraps.

The vegetable mix.

The way we were doing it was putting some mayo into the lettuce leaf, laying a slab of salmon onto it, then adding the vegetables and putting some soy sauce onto it all to top it off.

It was a-maz-ing.

10/10, would make again.

Eating Fancy

You've got to eat. You might as well make it interesting.