What are you cooking?

[jaylach]

Having a kielbasa sandwich with a four cheese pasta. May add some shrooms and mayhaps corn to the pasta but will decide that when doing. Not sure if I'm going to have the kielbasa with just mustard or if I'll 'dress' with some chopped and sautéed onion and bell pepper.

 

[gwand]

It is my birthday today so the wife is taking me to a Basque restaurant that specializes in a 40 ounce bone-in rib eye steak grilled over an open wood fire.
We will share that steak of course with another couple. Then it will be back to healthy eating.

 

[jaylach]

It is my birthday today so the wife is taking me to a Basque restaurant that specializes in a 40 ounce bone-in rib eye steak grilled over an open wood fire.
We will share that steak of course with another couple. Then it will be back to healthy eating.

 

[simonas]

Just put a couple of potatoes in the oven to do baked potatoes which I will put loads of butter in after an hour and a half salt and black pepper and tuna, mayo and sweetcorn mixed in

 

[jaylach]

Simple tonight. A couple of 1/4 pound Filet Mignon ground to burger patties. Brown them with some shrooms... well a LOT of shrooms. Put that on a holding plate and make a packaged brown gravy and add back the meat and shrooms to simmer. Will go with mashed taters with parmigiano cheese, pepper and garlic with corn mixed in the taters. Sort of like a faux Salisbury Steak.

 

[jaylach]

Made what may be the perfect burger. I love grilled onion on a burger but also like the crunch of a raw onion so I did both. First the burger was ground Filet Mignon and the onion was a red. I cooked the burger just enough to char both sides and then pulled off the heat. Cut a slice of red onion probably about 1/3 inch thick and caramelized one side in the burger juices and butter then flipped and put the burger on top and covered to finish cooking the burger to medium/medium rare with Swiss cheese on top. Ended up with a perfectly cooked steak burger with the onion being like grilled on both sides yet with a crunch in the middle. It was totally awesome!

 

[jaylach]

Doing some prep for freezing so I figured that I'd share a way to save a little money...

I use a lot of red onion and bell peppers. Most likely you can buy bags of both at your local grocery in the freezer section which are fine but at a higher price. It is cheaper to buy such items in packaging that holds multiple items but then they sort of tend to get soft and not as good as new by the time all are used. I do this and freeze.

Red onions and bell peppers: Prep to diced, strips or however you want and put spread out on a cookie sheep with nothing covering. I suggest lining the cookie sheet with foil or parchment paper to make the finish easier. Just put the cookie sheet in your freezer and let freeze. You may think that this is going to cause freezer burn but it won't as the stuff won't be in there long enough. Take out of the freezer and toss around to separate some that may be clumped. This is where lining the cookie sheet with foil or parchment paper comes in as you just crinkle it up to do the separation. Now just bag and toss back in your freezer and you are good to go. The onions/peppers should remain mostly separated to where you can just dump out what you want. I do this in my chest freezer which is REALLY cold to the point that it will freeze a tray of ice cubes in an hour. For my situation 20-30 minutes on the cookie sheet is long enough.

At least with white button shrooms you can also do this but not quite the same. If you freeze raw button shrooms the texture WILL change making them not all that good for a fresh salad. However, if you partially saute the shrooms, they will be fine for future cooked preparations.

 

[jaylach]

Doing simple tonight. Plain old cheeseburger with Swiss cheese and sauteed shrooms and red onion. As a side it will probably be pepper jack risotto cakes. The risotto cakes are an Omaha Steaks thing that I have not tried yet. One of those toss in the oven and bake things.

 

[gwand]

I saw beautiful fresh whole flounder on sale This afternoon. I poached it gently in butter, olive oil and garlic. It was delicious.

 

[jaylach]

I saw beautiful fresh whole flounder on sale This afternoon. I poached it gently in butter, olive oil and garlic. It was delicious.

Sigh, I wish I could eat more fish but just can't except for a few exceptions which flounder, along with orange roughy, are two. Mayhaps the difference is that they are salt water fish. I just can't eat fresh water fish out of a store as I was spoiled by the cold water lakes in northern Ontario where I'd catch small mouth bass, walleye or pike, hit the shore and filet and cook. Since those times store bought fresh water game fish just don't taste right. As an example, if you like lemon on a fish, small mouth bass has a tint of a lemony flavor when actually fresh caught yet even just two hours on ice and that flavor is no longer there. Fresh caught walleye (pickerel) is my all time favorite as to beer batter frying but it still has to be fresh caught. Put it on ice for a few hours and the flaky texture just goes away.

Hmmm, thinking about it all the store bought sea food I still like are all salt water. LOL! If I could afford I could eat a pound of scallops.

 

[Myrkk]

A lovely rainbow trout with some steamed veggies. Nom.

Possibly not the right thing on a fish keeping forum, but I’m looking forward to some nicer weather so I can get out fishing again. It’s so hard to find places that aren’t 100% catch and release nowadays though and I really don’t like catching fish for “sport”.

 

[davros]

Pssst- don't tell the tanks...- We went out for fish'n'chips

 

[gwand]

Three couples are joining us for dinner tonight at our place. I have some saffron so I decided to make paella. Unfortunately, my wife cannot eat shellfish therefore, I am making a meat-based paella. I am using chicken thighs, sausage, and veal cubes which I will sauté first in olive oil and smoked paprika. In anticipation of making this dish, I bought Bomba rice, which is the rice used in making paella in Spain. At the end of cooking I will add a few cups of green peas and diced pimentos.

 

[jaylach]

Three couples are joining us for dinner tonight at our place. I have some saffron so I decided to make paella. Unfortunately, my wife cannot eat shellfish therefore, I am making a meat-based paella. I am using chicken thighs, sausage, and veal cubes which I will sauté first in olive oil and smoked paprika. In anticipation of making this dish, I bought Bomba rice, which is the rice used in making paella in Spain. At the end of cooking I will add a few cups of green peas and diced pimentos.

Interesting. Let us know how it turns out. I don't recall ever having paella but am still a little surprised that you are using chicken thighs instead of breast meat. Doing a little looking I found that white fish is also considered a good substitute for shrimp. I'm totally interested in how it is with the thighs as they are moister and have more flavor than either chicken breast of white fish. As a note white fish is commonly used in imitation scallops, crab and shrimp... Until looking didn't even know they made imitation shrimp.

Hope that your dinner turns out fantastic!

 

[Myrkk]

We’ve taken to using chicken thighs in cooking too. Much more flavour.

When we kept our own chooks, the flavour of them was far above anything you can get out of a store today. Really took me back to my childhood. Sadly we have neighbours now so can’t keep cockerals, otherwise we’d be self sufficient in chooks. It is a pain to clean them but really makes you appreciate where your dinner comes from.

Interestingly it’s quite cultural as to which part of the chicken is prized. Here in the UK everyone wants breast meat as it is seen as the “best” bit. My Chinese friends think the legs are the best as they’re the most dynamic bit of the animal and have better energy “Qi”.