Sunday, December 9, 2012

Quick and Easy Dinner

This is one of my favorite go-to recipes for a quick, easy dinner: Stir Fried Sesame Shrimp and Spinach. No pictures, because I was hungry. It's easily adaptable for one person; I'll take one serving of frozen shrimp and then enough spinach to fill the frying pan that I'm using. It will cook down. I like to keep frozen shrimp on hand (not pre-cooked, preferably peeled by EZ peel is also fine) because they cook quickly and they're easy to prepare. It doesn't seem like a pantry staple, but there have been numerous nights where I'll just take out some frozen shrimp and whip something up. Even if I don't take them out to defrost, if I run some hot water over it takes care of it. I don't use ginger with it, since I use a ginger infused stir-fry oil, but if I have some I'll toss it in. I also don't put the chili flakes in, since I'm not a huge fan of spicy food. It's good plain, but also good with rice, which you can just make in the rice cooker. Today I added some broccoli to up the veggie content, which I got from the new Brookline winter Farmer's Market.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Pickles

One of the farmers at the BU Farmer's Market does a CSA. I don't get a season share, since I live alone, but I'll do the week-by-week. A while back, I got a bunch of pickling cucumbers. I also have pickling spices, because I'm a weird impulse shopper and I bought them back when I lived in Irvine. I had six cucumbers, which I quartered to make 24 pickles.



I made a sort of dill-half sour combo, which turned out pretty well. This is what I did for the six cucumbers.

6 pickling cucumbers
5 cups water
1/8 cup white vinegar
1/8 cup salt--many recipes call for pickling salt, but regular salt will do. I used salt with no iodine or caking agents, as that can make the brine cloudy.
1/2 tsp pickling spice
4-5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
Couple sprigs of dill


Boil water, salt, and vinegar. Quarter cucumbers, place in a jar. I used a storage jar that I had lying around. Pour mixture in jar, add spices, garlic, and dill sprigs. Put in refrigerator and let sit overnight. Eat delicious pickles.

Seriously, this was so easy and they turned out really well. I had no idea it would be this easy.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Hard Cider

Been making some hard cider recently, now that apples are in season.  It's incredibly easy. The latest batch to come out: Hints of Citrus.

1 Gal apple juice (fresh)
1 cup orange juice
1 cup brown sugar
orange zest
Champagne yeast



















Mix ingredients, wait a week or so for fermentation, add 1 Tbsp honey to jars (for carbonation), bottle.



Next batch: Raspberry cider
1 Gal apple juice (fresh)
1 lb frozen raspberries
1 cup honey
Champagne yeast

See previous recipe for details.


More to come, hopefully.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Fruit and Cream Oatmeal

Some people consider breakfast the most important meal of the day. I used to get packaged oatmeal with fruit flavors, but now I try to eat local and minimally processed food, so I just buy a box of any kind of plain, instant oatmeal (ok, so I mainly started buying it to try and lower my cholesterol with the soluble fiber). I buy instant because I don't really have time in the morning to spend 30 minutes making Irish oatmeal. Now, I know you can make a giant batch and then portion it out and reheat it, but I don't really trust how that will turn out. Also, I like to cook the fruit with the oatmeal so that the fruit juice permeates the entire bowl of oatmeal. This way you get fruit flavor in every bite. So without further ado, here is how I make my fruit and cream oatmeal.

Ingredients:
Oatmeal (I use some form of instant, generally. Right now I have Instant Irish and Trader Joe's instant steel cut, which takes a little bit longer to cook, at 8 min. When I use that, I just start the water boiling, add the oatmeal, and make my lunch while it cooks.)
Any kind of fruit (good choices include peaches, blueberries, strawberries)
Butter, half & half, some type of sweetener (I use honey or maple syrup, depending on the fruit), cinnamon, all to taste

Cook the oatmeal according to the directions on the package. I don't microwave, because I usually just end up with a mess, and as I mentioned above, I like to put the oatmeal and the fruit in the boiling water at the same time to get a consistent fruit flavor. When it's done, just spoon it into a bowl, and add the toppings to taste.

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Fresh Peas

English peas (shell peas) are in season in New England right now, although I'm not sure how much longer you'll be able to find them in the farmer's market. If you can't get English peas in the shell fresh, just buy them frozen. I thought I would pass along a tip that I learned from Mark Peel, executive chef at Campanile in Los Angeles. As you shell the peas, divide them into three groups--small, medium, and large. I like to do this in front of the TV, since it's a little tedious, but luckily all the peas in one pod tend to be about the same time, so you don't have to sort through individual peas. The peas cook at different rates, so put the large ones in first, then the medium, then the small. You'll get perfectly cooked peas every time.

Frozen Green Beans

Green beans are not a vegetable that you should buy frozen. Some vegetables, such as peas, corn, and okra (to name a few) freeze pretty well. You can buy them frozen, or buy them fresh and then freeze whatever you have leftover. Green beans are not in that category. They get really waterlogged and then come out soggy when you try and cook them. This tip is brought to you by my dinner, which hopefully will still turn out well. Also, I'll try and post it, because I think it would be really delicious with fresh beans. I know I've been really remiss in updating this blog, but I have a few issues with pictures I need to sort out. I'm also going to just start fresh and not post all the back recipes I have, because I'll never post anything new if I'm waiting to update all the backlog.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Hard Raspberry Lemonade

My brother got me a fermenter (Mr. Beer brand, basically a 2+ gallon keg with a vent and spigot) for Christmas. While my first batch of beer undergoes secondary fermentation, I thought I'd try a fermented fruit beverage. Quick searches on the internet informed me that this would be incredibly easy - make sure you have enough sugar and you're good to go. My first trial is a hard raspberry lemonade.

Recipe:
3 cans frozen lemonade concentrate (I got mine from Trader Joe's - any brand should work, just make sure it contains real sugar and no preservatives)
1 bag frozen raspberries (again, I got mine from Trader Joe's)
4.5 cups honey (given enough time, I'd experiment with varying amounts of honey - it changes sweetness and alcohol content)

Make sure all utensils and fermenter are sterilized.
In saucepan, combine lemonade concentrate with 1.5 qt water, bring to boil, lower heat to simmer. Slowly add honey, making sure it all dissolves. Add raspberries, cook until raspberries are mushy and releasing juice. Turn off heat. Put 4 qt cold water into fermenter. Add lemonade-honey-raspberry mixture to fermenter. Add more cold water to get total volume to 8.5 qts. Start yeast (put some yeast into 1 cup warm water with sugar and yeast nutrient) - I used champagne yeast (given time, will experiment with different yeasts). Pour yeast into fermenter and stir, put lid on fermenter and let sit for some time. After 4-5 days I found it had a good sweetness-to-alcohol profile, so I bottled (old screw-top wine bottle) and refrigerated (to slow the fermentation process) some and let the rest continue to complete fermentation (all sugar converted to alcohol). A future update will say how well this worked.


Note: It tasted really good straight out of the fermenter 5 days in (still sweet, a bit fizzy, alcohol probably 5-6%), which IMO would be the optimal time to serve. (I realize this would require scheduling a party to coincide with the fermentation schedule - maybe someday I will do this.)