It's starting to get colder here, so it's time to make soup! I made the sotanghon, chicken and mushroom soup from Pinoy Cook tonight and it was wonderful; really easy and really filling. (The wonderful-ness of it all was helped along by the Global santoku knife we bought yesterday...)
I was way too hungry after making it, so no photo this post... maybe I'll post one tomorrow if the leftovers look presentable.
One of my favourite things about cooking is that with practice, it gets easier and easier to smoosh multiple recipes together, substitute ingredients at will and still end up with something super tasty.
We picked up some frozen handmade wagyu beef ravioli from a local farmer's market on Saturday so I made a sauce based on this recipe. I had to substitute based on what was in the fridge - vine ripened tomatoes took the place of the roma tomatoes in the sauce, and baby roma tomatoes were used as garnish instead of cherry tomatoes - but the results were fantastic.
In kind of unrelated news...
I appear to be allergic to crustaceans. I am not very happy about this and have requested a challenge test to find out just how allergic I am. This means no prawns, crab or lobster until the test though, which could be anything up to three months away (sob).
And for Easter, I ended up making Gourmet Traveller's tiny chocolate fudge cakes. I have no photos because they ended up disappearing in all of five minutes!
I'd never bothered to segment an orange properly for a recipe before this one, but it made all the difference! I used this illustrated tutorial to figure out what to do, and owning a small sharp knife and half-decent knife skills took care of the rest.
The resulting pudding was not exactly what you'd call healthy, but damn it tasted and smelled good!
Next weekend is Easter so I'm trying to figure out what to make... I know it has to feed a bunch of people and it has to involve chocolate.
Risotto isn't hard to make, per se; you do need to measure your ingredients and stir it constantly for half an hour if you want it to turn out just right. Less intensive ways to do it are by baking (this recipe is NICE. Rich, but nice) and with a rice cooker (which I plan to try as soon as my boss gives back my awesome new cookbook).
This is probably the fifth or sixth time I've tried making risotto and this try was perfect! The creme fraiche works beautifully with this particular recipe, too.
My husband and I were incredulous that the recipes in Cooking Guide could taste good when made as is, so we've decided to try out recipes and review them with photos until we get sick of the whole exercise.
We tried the saltimbocca first, and while it doesn't look so crash hot it tasted great! Substituting ground sage for the fresh sage leaf and speck for the prosciutto didn't mess with the recipe much at all.
Our lack of a meat tenderiser combined with a lack of respect for the recipe's insistence on the meat tenderiser is where things fell down a bit - getting the speck and the veal to stick together needed a bit more of a beating. Didn't affect the taste though! ;)
I'm an occasional Gourmet Traveller reader. I say "occasional" because it's definitely not aimed at me and I tend to read it for the pictures more than anything else. A random selection of its content would include Rolex ads, Tetsuya Wakuda selling you space-age cooktops, monthly recommendations for random spas in far-flung countries, reviews of extremely fancy restaurants (okay, so that part speaks to me) and amazing recipes that take me at least two hours when I do decide to tackle them.
It was nice to see them release a "fast food" issue in February, though I'm sure that was absolute blasphemy for their regular readership! We made this delicious tart in just twenty minutes and ate it all in another ten, and I'm not even a big fan of onions.
Pork adobo is... where to start? It's not the national dish of the Philippines, but it's certainly a flagship dish. Because the cooking base is vinegar, it's hard to describe the taste or compare it to any other dish. But mention pork adobo to anyone who's had it and they'll melt into a puddle before you. It's the ultimate year-round comfort food. It's also fairly cheap, easy to prepare and can be left largely unattended while cooking, which are three pluses for almost anyone!
I discovered the Pinoy Cook blog a while ago and although I've used the odd recipe or two, it hasn't been regular reading (until now). I gave the pork and mushrooms adobo recipe a whirl this time, and while my dark soy sauce must have been darker than most, it tasted absolutely wonderful. The best part is that we have leftovers, and they'll taste even better tomorrow night.
Mains are very much on the pricey side for lunch but at least they're unique... apparently the restaurant's got a great reputation for breakfast, which I may have to make the trek for one day!
As a bonus, I ended up drawing a plate of them into my daily fanart post on Fanart-A-Day, a new LJ community I'm a member of.
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Recent Comments
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Komala said:
Hiya! Foodblogs are great for finding recipes to match whatever ingredients I've got left :) Try FoodBlogSearch, it's amazing. read more
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Luda said:
Looks delicious! I've only recently discovered the wonderful world of food blogs and now can't stop reading. I'm loving 101... read more
on Tomato, olive and onion tart
on An ode to adobo