Saturday, January 29, 2011

Linden's healthy dinner made of cod and goodness



So for those of you who haven't heard, I am having some food allergies right now. This isn't anything new for me, but I think there's something new that's shown up since I came to England so I'm trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, this means two weeks on a very restricted diet. I'm not allowed wheat, potatoes, dairy, soy, and meats that are likely to have additives (so beef, chicken, pork, and farm-raised fish).

Which basically means I'm on a veggie, brown-rice, lamb-and-fish diet. I have some exciting things from before I went on the diet, but for now, it's going to be pictures of the surprisingly delicious foodstuffs I am making while I can't eat cheese (weep weep weep) or bake delicious things.

Tonight I had some zucchini, sweet potatoes, and broiled cod on a bed of basil. (This was because I had some basil I was planning to make pesto with, but since I can't eat cheese, nuts, or pasta, that wasn't really going to work. So I needed to use it up in something else.)


You may note that deepest darkest is eating toast, which makes me jealous.

Yum! Although if I were to do this again, I would use a fish other than cod, because it was a bit too firm for this method of cooking. Suggestions are welcome - it cannot be farmed fish, so it has to be from the deep sea, which is admittedly not so great for the environment. But I am balancing it by not eating chicken or beef, so I feel slightly less bad about that.

I'm planning to finish off my other piece of cod tomorrow by frying it. Sadly, I can't bread it beforehand (no flour allowed!) but I'm sure it will still be delicious. And hopefully a little fatty, I am struggling to eat enough calories, it is tragic. Six months from now when I am a roly-poly I will think back on this time and be bitter.

Grandma's taling pling jam

From Grandma and Grandpa, who have been reading the blog:


Grandma says:
I have just made some taling pling jam - look that one up (the word I mean). Maybe I will get grandpa to send you a picture of the fruit with a picture of the jam - which isn't exactly delicious (unfortunately as I spent a lot of time on it).

(For those of you who can't be bothered looking it up, taling pling is a tree that bears green fruit (as shown in this picture) and which is sometimes eaten raw, dipped in salt, or added to curry.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Xan: Sous-vide chicken breasts and carrot flowers!

I've experimented a few times with cooking sous-vide in my rice cooker.  So far it has worked out pretty well!


For those of you who don't know, the sous vide idea is to cook food in a water bath at the temperature you'd like it to end up.  This confers several advantages.  First, uniformity: normally, to kill all the bacteria, you need to cook the chicken breast to what, 165 in the very center?  By the time the center gets there, the rest of the chicken is much hotter and therefore dried out.  ick.  Secondly, at 165 even the center is dried out.  I think I used to assume this was just an inevitable property of chicken breasts, but there's another way, really!  Because, if you hold it at 140 for a long enough period of time, the same amount of bacteria will die as if you raise it to 165 for an instant.  And since the water bath will hold the chicken at 140 indefinitely, it can deliver a chicken breast that is both juicy and safe.

It takes a couple hours though.  So you need something that's going to be able to hold a temperature for a while.  This stuff is juuuuuust starting to get popular in home cooking, by which I mean there are currently sous vide machines you can buy for like $500, yee$h.  I predict you'll be able to get one for under $75 within 10 years, and that's being generous.  Pretty much all the machine has to do is monitor the temperature of the water and turn the heat on and off to hold it there...this is not rocket science.

In the meantime though, I found that on the Warm setting with the lid cracked, my rice cooker will hold a temperature of about 150 F.  And by propping the lid open the right amount with a wooden spoon, I can adjust it so that it sits almost indefinitely at, say, 140 degrees (good for chicken breasts).  It takes some fine tuning, of course, but I was actually surprised at how steady I could get it.  I don't know how common this is, sous vide in a rice cooker, but it seemed pretty obvious to me so I'm sure other people are doing it too.  For more dramatic temperature adjustments, turn it up to Cook and it will heat up pretty fast, and dropping in an ice cube will drop it 2 degrees...so it really is quite flexible and functional.

And now, the results:



Well in retrospect I really should have taken a picture of the inside of the chicken...that's really the whole point.  I guess we were too busy eating it, so maybe you can just infer that it was juicy.  The sauce was pretty good, a random blend of stuff-I-happened-to-have-in-my-fridge with stuff-I-happened-to-have-in-my-cabinets.  And lest you think I'm missing something important, the chicken was seared in a skillet after the water bath, you just can't tell because the tomato is covering all the parts that actually touched the pan.  (That said, it could have used more searing).  Oh and also, you may actually be interested in these carrots I just invented.  Technically they're pretty much cooked the same way we cook other orange things on this blog.  But there's a twist, sort of.  I hope you remember your geometry.

Xan's Carrot Flowers (not to be confused with the actual flowers that grow on carrot trees)

  • Preheat oven to 400 F.
  • Peel a bunch of medium carrots (2 per person?)
  • Cut through the fat half of each carrot along two perpendicular planes intersecting the central axis of the carrot. (If the carrots are larger, you may want to make additional cuts, perhaps going farther down the carrot)
  • Line a sheet pan with foil and spread some olive oil down.  Put the carrots on top, "tossing" them to coat with oil.  Salt and pepper the carrots to your liking.
  • Bake for 25 minutes or until the carrots are soft and browned (the tips may get a little blackened...this is okay/delicious!).  You may want to take them out after 15 minutes and turn them; the insides will now open more readily so try to rub some oil in there if you like.
I have to say, this is obviously a very pragmatic recipe designed to deal with the nonuniform shape of the carrot.  Yet my mother responds by offering me her fruit carving kit.  what?

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Xan, Kris, Cammy: Sorbet?

A few weeks ago Kris and Cammy decided they would bring over some chocolate sorbet, to test-drive their new ice cream maker.

Now, I have no problem with a test-drive. In fact, most of the time I'm trying something new myself.  Hey, if you're my guest for dinner, I am probably experimenting on you.  And so far, things have pretty much worked out for me.  But I think that's just because the things I make can't really go horribly wrong.

Ice cream can go horribly wrong.  As test drives go, this was a crash and burn.  Or perhaps a boil?  Our current theory is that a certain person mixed boiling liquid with the cooling element inside the ice cream machine, which really inhibited its ability to freeze the sorbet.

I don't know the inner workings of an ice cream machine, but suffice it to say that Kris and Cammy did not actually bring over chocolate sorbet.  They brought over chocolate soup.

But from the ashes, a phoenix.  Thanks to Nigel Slater and his disturbingly sexual cookbook which my mom mysteriously owns, I had just recently learned that you can make sorbet by sticking the soup in the freezer and mixing it up every couple hours till it's done.  Magic!




By the way, I have a really hard time mentally differentiating between short asian girls with pretty much the same name, so it's actually a little bit shocking that Cammy has not made at least an accidental appearance on this blog before.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Linden: Baked Ziti

And for those of you following along at home, I have now surpassed Xan in the name tag department. Dinner tonight was baked ziti (made with ground beef instead of italian sausage, because the English do their sausage differently, it's all "Sage" and "Cumberland", no "italian" to be seen) and carrot sticks and zucchini. I am still working on the three veggies per meal thing, but it's difficult. Unless you count onions, which are debatably full of goodness.



Now in the process of acquiring ingredients for this, I made a discovery. It is going to require a bit of explanation. There's a cheeeeese section in the grocery store, which is comprised of three refridgeratory bits. Usually, I'm either there for cheddar, or for something exotic like gruyere. All the exotics are contained in the rightmost fridge bit. Yesterday, however, I was looking for mozzarella. And discovered that the two other fridge bits contain cheddar. There is a bit of cream cheese on one shelf, and I found mozzarella squeezed into a corner and forgotten, but for the most part? All cheddar. So, you know, well done the English.



And, my plate. I also discovered that flower mode (which my friends tell me is actually called "macro", but what do they know, sometimes I take pictures with a fancy camera and that makes me an expert) works for photoing the papers I have to read for my course. So this blog has positively contributed to my academic success.


I think this recipe was missing something too, like perhaps salt or maybe it should have been slightly spicier, and definitely some parmesan would have helped. But it was still very good. And easy! And only takes three dishes to prepare. (it would be even easier if you used premade sauce. Then, it would just be, cook the meat, toss in the sauce, toss in the pasta, toss in the cheese, cook for half an hour. My way requires onion chopping and other evils, but is delicious and doesn't make me itch, although something is making me itch and I am not pleased about it.)

Now I am searching for a recipe that requires croutons and is not lettuce-based. I have one that is chorizo-based, but I would feel bad subjecting my fellow diners to that one, so I must find something else.

Linden: Zucchini Carrot Bread

Before explaining my cookings, I would like to say that I have pulled even with Xan in the number of times our name tags have been used. Now looking through, I realized that he used mine once or twice when he wanted to show me my bespectacled turkey, I thought I had better return the favor before pulling ahead with the dinner I made. Now I have been wanting to make zucchini bread, for I was curious how it would taste. And, because I wanted to shred a zucchini. It is fun! Much more fun than shredding carrots, for zucchini is soft and shreds with less pressure. However, a little less than one smallish zucchini makes 1.5 cups shredded.



It turned out well! In the bread arena, I have finally managed to cook something almost at the proper heat for the proper length of time. (Although this one took forever, more than an hour. It did smell very good cooking, though!) I cut the initial recipe's sugar in half, and I think I might use slightly less oil next time. Additionally, it was missing something, perhaps cloves or nutmeg. But overall, very tasty!

Also, and this is the best part, the bread looks very nice because of the orange and green flakes in it. Much better than the strange purpley stuff you get in banana bread. (Additionally good is the English equivalent of the name, which goes: Carrot and Courgette Bread. Rolls right off the tongue.)

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Linden: A mediocre experiment (or, Emptying the Pantry, Part Two)

Time to dust off the whisks, family members! This last week I've been getting by on whatever was in my fridge, for I had exams and papers and projects (as Mama can grumpily attest to). Concordant with this, here is my lunch from a few days ago. It was one of those experiments that you just can't predict the outcome of. Of course it had some cheese, which always improves your chances.

You know, I prefer when experiments are either really good or really awful. Sort of mediocre results just aren't exciting, and you have to eat them anyways.


(Papa told me the trick about flower mode, so now all of my pictures are going to be slightly less awful. Hey look, colorful pasta!)


That is tortellini, with a bean salad added in. I am not as good as Papa at making his bean salads, and I think this is because he puts something else into them. Mine contained black beans, chick peas, tomato, onion, avocado and goodness, with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil and pepper tossed in. It was better on the second day, and better on the third. So I tossed some in with my tortellini and it was all right. Not really used to having cheesy pasta and vinegar, but it was an interesting combination. I would have it again only if my fridge ever looks the way it did this past week.

Fortunately, the dog days are over and I now have a whole new term in front of me, and lots of cheese in my fridge.