Helped make a delicious dinner with friends last night. We had spot prawns fresh from the dock and made them three ways.

One was raw, and they were so sweet. Including some brain sucking.

The second way was spicy with hot pepper paste, red onions, and fresh tomatoes sautéed in butter & olive oil.

The last was in a cream sauce. We made a roux and then added prawn broth from boiling heads & shells, plus cream. We added Parmesan and green peas, and added in a handful of minced, browned garlic. The nuttiness of the garlic went well with the sweet peas and cream. We served this over fresh fettuccine.

Hmm - I guess technically four ways. We took the boiled heads & tossed with hot chilli paste, garlic, red onion, peanut oil, sesame oil, and some more garlic and broiled them in the oven. Best when deep fried, but the shells do get softer & you crunch them & the lovely brains and they’re very good.

(Photo by @mightyvanilla)

I can’t wait to try this some time.

Update July 5, 2020: link replaced with Internet Archive, and then I gave it a more permanent home on AllTheBest.Recipes.

The neck was via Big Lou’s Butcher from Sloping Hills, and the cheeks were some of the last pork from Cutter Ranch that we prepped at Pete’s Meats. I grilled some neck in the summer and it was delicious.

Apparently, according to Roland, I came close to doing adobo.

The marinade was roughly as follows:

• 2 Tbsp minced fresh ginger
• 1 clove minced garlic
• ½ finely chopped onion
• ½ cup chopped cilantro
• 1 Tbsp sesame oil
• 1 Tbsp miso in ¼ cup water
• 1 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1 Tbsp spicy vinegar
• salt & pepper

Served over rice.

J.P.’s Big Daddy Biscuits Recipe - Allrecipes.com

I made this biscuit recipe for the second time tonight (again as an accompaniment to tomato soup). I need to remember to not roll them out so thin, because they actually steam from the inside and puff up nicely when thicker.

Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups | Serious Eats: Drinks.

Hanging out with Lee & Sachi in Seattle, we dove into the world of shrubs:

In any case, the sugar, acid, and optional alcohol preserve the fruit juice, and in fact that was one original purpose of the shrub. Prior to the invention of refrigeration, a shrub syrup was a means of preserving fruit long past its picking. Shrubs were popular in Colonial America, mixed with cool water to provide a pick-me-up on hot summer days.

 

A proper shrub has a flavor that’s both tart and sweet, so it stimulates the appetite while quenching thirst.

This got me thinking about drinking vinegars, which is somewhat a name for the syrup + vinegar that you make shrubs from. We had some in Vancouver  at The Union which was fantastic.

So, Lee and I concocted a shrub syrup from 2 oranges simmered in simple syrup and then added some sherry vinegar.

Lee made up a drink with Averna in it and some soda. It was pretty delicious, especially when we kept amping up the amount of sherry vinegar.

Yep, I’m a fan. And to think, it’s supposedly a summer drink.

Update July 5, 2020: I’ve gone on to make many more shrubs / drinking vinegars. Browse the AllTheBest.Recipes shrub tag »

Home-style chicken curry recipe - Recipes - BBC Good Food.

Modified with tomato paste + carrots + celery instead of canned tomato.

luckyfish posted a photo:

via a selection of Hunanese delicacies from Lucky Noodle friday; spicy shredded potatoes with garcinia cambogia extract, spicy roasted chilies, spicy cumin lamb and onions, chicken gizzards with beans and garlic and “cooling” vegetables. So delish..

This is the same Lucky Noodle that I went to. If you’re in Vancouver, you have to try this place.

Paprika + thyme, with onions, mushrooms, apple, chicken stock + white wine in the braise.

Having made this salad twice now, I wanted to make sure to keep track of the recipe.

The salad is just shredded red & green cabbage. The dressing is tahini lemon garlic, the recipe for which I found over on ohsheglows.com »

You can skip the nutritional yeast, and whipping everything with a fork is just fine, it doesn’t need to go through the blender.

Using the tahini made me think of Na’ama, who gave it to me. She swears that Israeli tahini is the best, and it’s hard to find here in Vancouver.

Just came back from my first meal at Lucky Noodle, which is a Hunan-style Chinese restaurant at 3377 Kingsway (a couple of blocks east of Joyce).

I heard about it from reading Fernando’s blog review about it, plus Roland saw the same thing and has been wanting to try it.

We missed Roland this time, but Rachael and I were joined by Mark and Andrea.

We followed Fernando’s recommendations, but with only 4 of us had to order less.

The “code” we remembered from the menu numbers was B, I, L, #73, #37, #64. The dishes were (not in the same order):

• Squid & Chinese Mushroom Hot Plate
• Lamb with Cumin
• Boiled Chicken with Special Sauce
• Grilled Green Peppers
• Chopped Potatoes with Chili Oil
• Chinese Bacon with Bamboo Shoots

The bacon was house made Hunan style - smoky & spicy.

We also had some rice on the side, to cool our mouths from the very spicy dishes.

The meal was great, and we’ll definitely be back to try other dishes.

Modified from a recipe for Hong Kong-style ketchup prawns. Except I don’t keep ketchup in the house, so it’s a chili sauce + tomato paste + agave.

Peanut oil in a wok, with 3 cloves garlic + some large chunks of ginger and a couple of kaffir lime leaves.

A bunch of green onions, and a bunch of basil. These went in after the chili sauce.

I brought back some arbol chilis from Mexico. Used a couple of tablespoons of it, then added a teaspoon of tomato paste plus a teaspon or so of agave syrup. After the prawns went into the hot oil, then I added this sauce. A couple of tablespoons of soy sauce were added at the same time as the greens went in.

Prawns cooking.

Finished product on the table. First time I’ve eaten a lot of shells, plus eaten the insides of the head. Next time, I should’ve used less peanut oil and gotten the shells even crispier before adding more sauce and greens.

This is the pickled ginger recipe I used the other day (and that lots of people have asked about). I used organic turbinado sugar instead of white, and also added some slices of meyer lemons, but otherwise stuck with the recipe / quantities.

8 ounces fresh young ginger root, peeled

1 ½ teaspoons sea salt

1 cup rice vinegar

1/3 cup white sugar

German pancakes!

These were tucked in the freezer and made a great winter meal. They weren't quite defrosted so I balanced them on the fat on the side in a cast iron pan in the oven. This melted away the lively fat on the side.

Then smothered in Dizzy Pig Jamaican Firewalk rub and seared on each side, with final finishing in the oven.

The sides were purple mashed potatoes and braised kale with mustard. Turns out Rachael doesn't like mashed potatoes when they are purple.

That well in the potatoes? Pan drippings -- delicious!

Rinse a martini glass with Islay, then make a gin martini with kelp pickle ‘juice’. Garnish with a kelp pickle and a smoked oyster.

Note: concept recipe only - no actual taste test performed.

Posted on Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes - http://foodists.ca/2009/12/29/much-ado-about-recipes.html

Chicken Marsala Recipe from Rouxbe.com

I’m facing a dilemma I’ve faced several times before. What to do about recipes?

I'm facing a dilemma I've faced several times before. What to do about recipes? We don't focus on churning out lots of start-to-finish recipes here on Foodists, mainly because it's more about sharing food experiences rather than "just" recipes. But we do share our recipes, and try and tag the blog entries with ingredient hints to help find them. Still, it's not ideal for sharing lots of recipes.

Most of my cooking using recipes falls into the "inspired by", "adapted from", or "I'm sure it'll be fine if I substitute half the ingredients" categories. But I'd like to keep track of those sources, whether it be from just the right Google search or from a physical cookbook.

And yes, I've got lots of cookbooks. At the one end I've got basics like Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer, and at the other end I've got various cookbooks from second hand or thrift stores, plus a smattering of regional cuisines purchased while traveling. While I like nothing better to sit down with piles of cookbooks all around me, engrossed in reading and dreaming of food, it's not very practical to a) easily find a recipe amongst dozens of cookbooks or b) to share that recipe. Where's my digital index for my physical cookbooks?!

I tried to solve my dilemma a while back by building my own recipe website. It does a passable of sharing links to recipes I've found elsewhere, and a pretty terrible job at inputting recipes with full ingredients and instructions. And, I really don't need to be maintaining yet-another-website.

So over the holidays, I again began looking for a great place to make my "digital recipe home".

My first stop was at Foodista. It's a startup out of Seattle that's just barely a year old, run by a friend of a friend. Foodista is unique in being a kind of Wikipedia of cooking. You can set recipes to be public, which means that anyone can edit and evolve them, whether that means fixing mistakes, clarifying the directions, or adding a note that Brand X flour needs to be used differently. I love this feature, and I love the concept of seeing the history or changes of recipes over time.

They also have a widget that links blogs to recipes and vice versa (similar to Urbanspoon). Here's an example of a Foodista widget for my favourite Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup recipe:

Foodista is still relatively new and will be evolving more features (check out my taste profile). I've already left a comment about making it easy to link in my own photos from Flickr.

Next stop was our own local recipe / learning website, Rouxbe. I've got an account from ages ago, and couldn't recall if they actually let you enter in your own recipes. They do, so I started work on entering in Shredded Short Ribs with BBQ sauce that I made over the holidays. At first, I was excited by the interface, which lets you upload a photo for each step. Ultimately, I gave up before completing and publishing the recipe, because there were too many fields and too much to fill out.

I think Rouxbe has a great interface for longer recipes, especially those with unfamiliar or complicated techniques (many of which they have video tutorials for that you can link in), and I would definitely use it for that kind of recipe. They even have a "Save as Draft" feature to make it easier to finish inputting those long recipes. Here's the embed for the Chicken Marsala that I used a screenshot of at the beginning of this post - the embed is gorgeous, but at the same time doesn't show the ingredients (which is what *I* would want out of a widget) and busts out of this blog layout: http://rouxbe.com/embedded_player.swf

Rouxbe Online Cooking School & Video Recipes

So, Foodists, help me with my recipe dilemma: What recipe sites do you frequent? How do you share / keep track of recipes that you find online? What features do you want out of an ultimate recipe website? And yes, I'm still contemplating building my own -- recipes.foodists.ca anyone? :P

So, I did a whole bunch of "experimental" baking today. Experimental mainly because a) I don't bake a lot and b) I tried tweaking a bunch of baking recipes. And by "tweaking" and "bunch", I mean not quite having all the ingredients for one recipe, so vaguely scavenging a few other recipes trying to see if I could come up with a Franken-recipe.

First up was corn bread for breakfast. Corn bread is, as far as baking goes, NOT HARD. However, I was faced with no flour, and the need for no dairy. The soy milk worked just fine. But spelt flour...

...OK, so spelt flour and me are done. I didn't really like it before, and yeah, stuff made with it is usually denser / coarser, which you have to watch for. But the main thing is, spelt flour makes stuff taste bad! Yes, it's true: I was relatively happy with how the slightly coarser, slightly crumblier corn bread turned out. Except it was infected with yucky spelt taste. *sigh*

At dinner (or rather, in the midst of cooking 2 things at the same time), I found out that all those yogurt containers in my fridge needed to have the yogurt used up so that I could use the empty containers (that, and so that fur wouldn't grow on the yogurt). The thought "yogurt cake" popped into my head, and so I looked at Lemon Yogurt Cake, Wonderful Yogurt Cake, and Simple Yogurt Cake. I also looked into my pantry after seeing that last entry about cake mixes and found chocolate pudding mix / pie filling. So that got combined with the yogurt...but a double-plus amount of yogurt...and off I went, creating a Franken-recipe for Chocolate Yogurt Cake.

I may post it for posterity as a full recipe later, as I did note it down. But, after baking, it's clear that I made a medium-rare cake. Medium rare is great for steak. It is not good for cake. Flavour is pretty good, but gooey...

Ah well, it was still fun. And I made two meat dishes to stock my freezer with, as well. Prime rib bones roasted on a mirepoix, and then simmered to make a nice and rich beef stock. 3 large empty yogurt containers for the freezer, plus a small bowl of soup for "first dinner".

Aside: how do you cool things before they go in the freezer? My apartment is small, and usually quite warm after I've been cooking and baking and such. I have a window in the kitchen, so I usually stick things to cool on the window sill. I haven't had a pigeon steal anything yet...

The other meaty item was beef stew, simmered for hours in the slow cooker. Another 5 or 6 meals worth, and all good hearty winter time stuff.

Source of all this good stuff? Famous Foods on Kingsway. An excellent, excellent store, heartily recommended for meats, bulk staples, and everything in between.