« May 2010 | Main

Teriyaki Sauce

Sunday, January 24, 2010

This is a home made Teriyaki sauce to use as a marinade or a dipping sauce.

  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 1 cup dry wine or sake
  • 1 Tbs honey
  • 1 tsp minced garlic
  • 1 tsp minced ginger
  • hot sauce to taste

Mix the ingredients in a pot and heat through. That's it. Make a big batch, it keeps forever. If you want a stronger version, use dry red wine and dark soy sauce. If you prefer a lighter sauce, use dry white wine and light soy sauce. Fresh garlic and ginger are best, but if you only have powdered garlic or ginger, that works. Don't use garlic salt--there's no point to garlic salt, really, just get garlic powder and add salt when you want it.

The things I use this marinade with most are chicken legs and lamb. When I was in school, I'd marinade some chicken thighs in this sauce for about 3 hrs, and then roast them in a toaster oven at 275 degrees for a couple of hours, then broil them a bit to crisp the skin. Every once and a while, I'll marinade a lamb roast overnight, and then grill it.

This afternoon, it was lamb cubes marinaded for a couple of hours, then put on skewers with mushroom, tomato, and bell pepper and grilled:

 

Categories: Recipes

Half full cans

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Last week, I caught a bloody awful cold and was trapped in the house for three days. Really a small problem, and the time off gave me some time to play around with software and poke around wikipedia. By sunday, I was pretty much out of fresh food and not feeling much like cooking anyway, I turned to the metalware in the panty. Progresso clam chowder, that'll do the trick, esp. with some extra clams and a bit of lousiana hot sauce. So I open the can of soup, then the clams, strain the latter, and here's what I find:

Over half the can is just filled with water/clam juice.

Now this is a can of chopped clams from Snow, but in fairness, I found the same thing in a can of Chicken of the Sea's canned clams. And this is getting to be a pet peeve of mine, since I'm finding more and more of nothing in cans and bottles of various types. The last aspirin bottle I bought was 75% volume of air, and 25% volume of aspirin, and the same is true of many vitamins and supplements.

Here's the thing--it's not so much that I'm not getting the product I expect, since my expectations are pretty low when it comes to this kind of thing. Rather, it is the waste that bothers me--this can of clams carries half the clams it could, and that means that there's about a third more metal in the can than is needed, and that the shipping costs are about twice what they could be. That's a lot of energy wasted, oil burned, fuss and muss for no real advantage. It's a shame, really.

Categories: Rants

Butternut Squash Soup

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Today was six hours of cleaning, washing dishes and clothes, going through old clothing for donations, and some cooking. Part of the cooking was this butternut squash soup--it's thick, sweet and creamy, very filling, and I had the excuse that I hadn't yet tried out the new porcelain coated cast iron pot my brother and sister in law gave me for christmas. Obviously, I'm on a soup jag, but there are worse things.

This soup is something I started playing with since I like Caroline's Zucchini Soup so much, the recipe is very similar. It works well with pretty much any winter squash.

Ingredients

  • 1 butternut squash
  • 1 small onion
  • 2-3 cloves of garlic
  • 1 quart of chicken or vegetable stock.
  • 1 tsp Thyme
  • 1 Tbs curry paste or powder. My personal favorite in this soup is yellow thai curry paste, it goes well with the sweetness of the squash.

Preparation

Cut up the onion into smallish pieces, don't worry about them being too even since we'll blend everything anyway. Put some oil into a pot, and put that on medium low. Add the onion, sprinkle on a little salt.

Crush the garlic cloves, throw away the hard papery shells. Chop the garlic and add to the pot. You want to cook the garlic and onions until they start to turn translucent. You don't really want to brown them, but it's ok if that happens. This will take about 6-10 minutes.

Peel the outer skin off of the butternut squash. This can be a pain with a regular peeler--it helps to use quick light strokes. Better is a coarse narrow microplane.

Cut the squash in half lengthwise--use a long sharp knife for this. Be careful, winter squash are pretty tough. If you hold the squash at the narrow end with one hand, you can put the tip of the knife in the middle with blade facing away from the hand holding the squash, cut down and then lever the knife flat. Then you can turn the squash around, and repeat to cut narrow end in half.

To get the seeds out, use your thumb and just squeeze the seeds loose from the mesh in the ball end of the squash. Root around a good bit, there are more in there than you'd expect. (The seeds are worth saving--you can rinsh them well, dry them out, coat with oil and salt, and roast them). Once the seeds are gone, scrape out the mesh with a spoon, working from the narrow end down to the bottom of the ball end.

Then lay the squash halves flat side down on a cutting board and cut up into 2" pieces. Put those into the pot and cover with broth. Add some water if you need to, this soup is thick enough to take it.

Add 1 teaspoon of dried thyme, 1 tablespoon of curry (more or less to taste), and grate a bit of nutmeg into the soup. Nutmeg is a great spice to buy whole, it keeps for years in a sealed bottle, and you can grate what you need when you need it. Here's a double batch simmering:

Simmer for 30 minutes on low heat.

Take off the heat. We need to blend this, just as with the zucchini soup, so use a stick blender, blender, or food processor--but this soup is hot, so be careful. Salt to taste. Here's the finished product:

Categories: Recipes

Matzah Ball Soup

Friday, January 15, 2010

Since I'm home sick with a cold today, it seemed a good time to make chicken soup. Luckily, I had a quart of chicken stock frozen. Unfortunately, I was out of root vegetables and meat, except for some salmon. So it was matzah meal to the rescue.

If you haven't had matzah ball soup, you really need to make this. My recipe is pretty much off the box with some minor modifications.

  • 1 quart of good chicken broth or stock
  • 1 quarter cup of matzah meal
  • 1 egg
  • oil
  • garlic powder
  • red pepper
  • salt

I like floaters, which are light matzah balls that pop to the surface. If you do the research you'll find that there are a lot of techniques for making floaters, such as using soda water, but really all you need to do is get some air into the batter and treat it gently.

Separate the egg yolk and white. Whisk the white in a bowl until it's nice and foamy (you can do this with a folk, but it will take a bit longer), we'll try to keep that foam intact all the way to the pot. Add a dash of salt and some garlic powder, 1 tablespoon of your chicken stock, the yolk, and 1 tablespoon of oil, and whisk that together. Next add the matzah meal and mix that up gently--don't over do it, you want to keep the foam intact. You don't want large lumps, but some small ones won't hurt anything. Once you have it mixed, put the bowl in the fridge uncovered for 30 minutes. Put a plate in the fridge, too.

While you're waiting, heat up your stock or broth. If you're using canned or boxed broth, I'd suggest adding a little red pepper and some thyme or chives.

The matzah batter will be stiff when you take it out of the fridge, but don't poke at it. Put it and the cold plate on the counter. Some people advise wetting your hands before you do this, but I think a little oil works better. Grab a spoon (I like small matzah balls, so I use a teaspoon), and spoon out a bit of the batter. Roll that gently into a ball and put it on the cold plate. You want to work quickly, since the cold keeps the batter stiff, and it gets sticky as it warms up. Here's the plate from this morning, these are about 1/2" in diameter:

Next drop them into the simmering broth. It helps to turn up the heat just before you drop them so it will come back up to a good simmer faster. Also, cover the pot, that helps them expand.

After 20-30 minutes, they should be plumped up nicely and floating about in the pot. Here's breakfast, notice that the matzah balls have about doubled in size:

Some people like dense matzah balls, sinkers, which hug the bottom of the bowl, and to make those you can use this recipe, but don't seperate the eggs or whisk anything, just mix everything up and roll the matzah balls. Sinkers are pretty easy to make.

Categories: Recipes

Caroline's Zucchini Soup

Saturday, January 09, 2010

This is a simple soup, a variant of a recipe my friend Caroline gave me years ago. It's got great color, low fat but feels creamy on the tongue, and it can be served hot or cold. It also freezes well.

Ingredients

  • 3-4 zucchini squash
  • 1 onion
  • 2-3 cloves of garlic
  • 1 quart of chicken or vegetable stock. I like Pacific Organic. Don't use bullion cubes!
  • Thyme

Preparation

  1. Cut up the onion into smallish pieces, don't worry about them being too even since we'll blend everything anyway. Put some oil or butter into a pot, and put that on medium low. Add the onion, sprinkle on a little salt.
  2. Crush the garlic cloves, throw away the hard papery shells. Chop the garlic and add to the pot. You want to cook the garlic and onions until they start to turn translucent. You don't really want to brown them, but it's ok if that happens. This will take about 6-10 minutes.
  3. In the meantime, cut up the zucchini into about 1/2 inch cubes. When the onions are translucent, add the squash to the pot.
  4. Add enough stock to cover everything, and bring the liquid to a simmer. You want to simmer the squash until it just get soft, on my stove that takes about 12 minutes.
  5. Add some Thyme leaves, I use about 1 teaspoon of dried, or 1 tablespoon of fresh.
  6. Take off the heat. We need to blend this, the easiest way to do that is to use a stick blender. Remember, this is hot stuff, so be careful! If you're not sure what you're doing, you might let it all cool down a while first--you can reheat it later. If you don't have a stick blender, you could ladle it into a regular blender or food processor. Blend until smooth, add salt and pepper to taste.

Variations

  • My girlfriend Patti likes to pour a bit of cream or half and half in this.
  • Other spices that work for me are curry powder or a combination of basil and parsley instead of the Thyme

Just before adding the stock:

Finished!

 

Categories: Recipes