Love You...Love You Not...

Though the clam soup experiment had a small part taken from Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Cookbook, I decided to try an entire recipe from the book since I'd just remembered I had a bunch of dried soybeans lying around. And so, I ventured into the recipe of Soybean Lover's Rice to see if it would win me over.

In preparing it, I had high hopes as it smelled awfully enticing as it cooked away. Alas, it turned out rather bland. =( The soybeans had no soy flavor though they did have a nutty taste from toasting them which also added a bit of crunch to them. All is not a loss though. The soybean rice is actually fine as the rice accompaniment (like white rice) to main dishes yet is still able to not overpower those same main dishes. Likewise, I could see using this as the base to build on to add more flavorsa nd ingredients much like the Japanese rice dishes that are chock full of goodies (chestnuts, konnyaku, mushrooms...) and are eaten as is.

Clammy Experiment

In contemplating a new dinner menu to create for some friends, I thought it would be nice to start with an Asian-style clear clam soup similar to what I've had at our local favourite Chinese restaurant.

I started off with a bunch of asari clams. Ok, that's a good start for clam soup. ;) Now what? After much contemplation, I decided to use a chicken broth base slightly watered down to reduce the saltiness and so as not to overpower the delicate clam flavour. To add a bit of the taste of the sea, I boiled a piece of konbu seaweed until...well, the broth tasted a bit like the sea rather than chicken. ;) I'd taken this bit of knowledge from Hiroko Shimbo's cookbook which says seaweed bring out the sweetness of the clams. To continue my experiment, I decided to add some sliced ginger, a few dashes of sake and then the 1.5 dozen clams. I boiled them just long enough for them to open up before adding some thai basil and white pepper to the pot. There was no need to add salt since the broth was already salted and the clams are naturally salty (woo salty!!).

The experiment seemed excellent on the first taste test of the finished product. Alas, dinner was not yet so the clams ended up sitting around too long and got touch. =( On top of that, the soup became strangely bitter AND the ginger steeped too long in the broth and made the soup really spicy. Yikes! What a complete disaster it turned into! However, I still deem it a success as it did actually taste good when it was just done. ;) To make it more like the Chinese restaurant's version, I should add some snow peas and chopped Chinese celery to the pot for some crunch, green color and of course added flavour. Most importantly aside from all this, be sure to de-sand the clams first!! ;)

Creamy...Mustardy...Pooorrrrkkkyyy....

How can one not like porky goodness? Well...if not made well, of course. Fortunately, I made most enjoyable pork (according to my parents) in a most enjoyable way today. That is, it was nearly effortless. ;) I used the slow cooker to produce some tender, creamy goodness that resulted in some happy mouths. =9~ Hooray!

Using the recipe from the same book that produced pretty tasty and (also easy) pulled pork, Pork Chops with Onions in Creamy Mustard Sauce materialized from the pages of 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes by Judith Finlayson.

I'd made pork chops with onions in a mustard sauce before when experimenting for the Guinness Dinner that I'd cooked up for my friends. Yes, that version had Guinness of course, but it was also made on the stove top. My parents liked both though they didn't care for the dijon mustard used in the slow cooker version. With the Guinness, I'd used stone-ground mustard which I too prefer over the taste of dijon. Next time, I'll use that instead in this recipe to see how it improves.

Though this is made in the slow cooker, there is a bit of pre-cooking of the chops in the stove. However, I don't need to babysit it nor does it make a mess on the stove from spillover as with the Guinness version. The Guinness one required quite a large pan for all the chops which barely fit into my largest pan. On top of that, all the onions and the sauce in there...Ya, messy.

Despite the prep work before it goes in the cooker, it's not too many ingredients to put it all together so it's no big deal. A few notes for future reference regarding making this dish. First off, it calls for 2 onions but does not specify size or type. I'd used 2 small yellow onions (on hand and my folks like them) but 2 medium sized at least would be much better. Also, I'd used the white wine option instead of chicken stock, and I do believe it was better for it much like how tasty the Guinness version was. Lastly, I used pork chops with bones hoping the bones would add flavor. One "problem with that is the pork came out so tender, the largest chop disintegrated in half from the bone's weight! Now that's tender. ;)

A slight negative has to go to the creamy sauce as in all honesty, it would be better described as cream-based than creamy as it was a bit on the watery side. Adding cream didn't really thicken the watery stuff (pork and onions juices surely plus condensed steam from the lid I suspect). In hindsight, I probably should have let the sauce sit for a short while longer in the cooker after adding the cream to thicken it up by essentially reducing it from the continued heat.

Here's how the pork and onions looked after being removed from the slow cooker sans sauce:

After adding the creamy mustard sauce, would say it's more appetizing? Or less?

Update 8.2010
I made these again thinking they'd turn out just as good as the first time. Well, something went awry as they were terribly dry and tough. I did use stone-ground whole mustard this time which went over well, but the chops themselves were torturous to eat. The only thing that had changed (unless I messed up in a big and unknowing way) was using boneless center cut pork chops. I suspect these cuts have much less fat marbling the meat though there was a thick ring of fat on the edges which I trimmed a bit off. What an utter 180 from the first go round. Sigh. Would the 3rd time be the charm? ;D

Friend or Foe?

If you are gifted the starter for Amish Friendship Bread, is the gifter a friend or a foe with a trojan horse? You see, it's another round of this bread but it just never ends. ;) Today, I tried cheesecake pudding as the main flavouring and then added 2 handfuls of dried cranberries and one handful of white chocolate chips. As usual, I cut the sugar all the way to a scant 1/4 cup. Amazingly, I liked it! It has a very subtle fruity flavor and interestingly enough, it doesn't really taste like cheesecake. If you don't hate walnuts as I do, I suggest adding a few walnuts as I think it would be nice contrast to the fruit. =P What I particularly like about this version is it doesn't taste too artificial. I find that amazing since it's cheesecake out of a box in powder form. Nevertheless, I'm thinking maybe the vanilla and cheesecake flavours sorta melded together to enhance the fruity flavour. Also, plumper cranberries would have been better (like Trader Joe's brand) for a bigger bite of fruit and thus more flavour.

The previous versions I've made so far were lemon with lemon oil, walnuts and cranberries; pistachio with pistachio nuts; butterscotch with white chocolate chips. With the starter, I also made cinnamon buns and biscuits. Both are a giant YUCK!!! I was going to try other stuff too but forget it! I'm sticking to the sweet bread. The last bit of pudding I left are chocolate and banana. Let's see how that will turn out when I'm ready for another go.

King of Calzones

I decided to try making calzones again (it's been ages) but using a King Arthur Flour recipe. I seem to get pretty good results with their recipes so here's hoping it works! Interesting note to their recipe is that the dough is really just their Hearth Bread recipe.

The recipes makes two calzones the contents of which I decided to be...

#1 Mushrooms sauteed in olive oil with garlic. I used spaghetti sauce as the base and threw in some farmer cheese that I had on hand for the salt factor. Damn that stuff is salty!!

#2 Gravlax. Hey, I made 6 lbs of the stuff! I gotta get creative here. I threw it with ricotta cheese to balance it out.

So how spectacular are they to be worthy of being King? In this case, size matters. They were both one foot long and nearly as wide!! As for taste...not bad. There's lots of potential hiding in these pockets of dough. #1 tastes better than #2. Or maybe I'm just tired of eating pound after pound of oversalted gravlax. It'll be a while before I revisit making that! I thought I added enough cheese for both, but nope. I needed way more! The farmer cheese just disappeared into the mix as if none were added! The gravlax overpowered everything else including the bread, but was made extra salty by the ricotta. Here I thought it wasn't all that salty. Well, it was salty enough. So something to counter the heavy aspect of the salmon would have been nice. Alas, the bread was too bland for that. Maybe an herb (dill since it's gravlax?) or a veg would have been better. Either way, I won't be putting that into a calzone again unless I'm truly inspired by something. Maybe I should put in horseradish!!

Regardless of the innards, the bread was great though a bit too crunchy since it was so flat. I should have rolled it as recommended though the foldover (combover?) was given as an alternative. I could definitely make the bread part just as a loaf. I enjoyed the flavor of the crunchy crust, while there were a lot of holes on the inside "meat" of the bread. Overall though, these calzones are funny looking. =P

For dessert, I made Nigella's Chocolate Fudge Cake but without the fugde. As usual, I forego the icing part. At this point, I'm starting to lose faith in her desserts. I never found her desserts to be that wondrous, though there were a few here and there that were pretty good. The rest were mostly average, a few were just downright trash. This fell into the average spectrum. Not enough chocolate flavor. The seemingly sumptuous additions of fat in the form of sour cream provided very little to the cake aside from higher cholesterol. Though the cake was fairly light in texture (ok, the sour cream probably helped here), the lack of flavor killed its effect. It only made the cake even more bland as if I were truly eating air. However, I did enjoy the top which had a nice slight and unexpected crunch. I actually made one 8x8 square cake and then a bunch of muffins instead of a 2-tiered cake. Since I was so underwhelmed by the results, I chose not to give my friend any of the cake in muffin form.

I suppose frosting fans could say that the cake is fantastic with the sugary topping, but I must disagree. The cake part should be able to stand on its own. The frosting should merely enhance the beauty already there. Also, the cake itself was plenty sweet enough, though not quite overwhelmingly so. It was a tad over just-right. The addition of frosting would have been sugar overkill especially since it would have been in cloying fudge form. No thanks. I'll take my cake without a side of diabetes please.

Tofu-cow Patties

Well, most people know what cow patties are. They're...well...cow excrement that when plops out forms patty shapes which is retained as it dries out into hard discs that you can fling around like frisbees. Fun at farms. Anyhow, I'd purchased House brand's tofu hamburger mix from the Japanese market a while ago out of pure curiosity. It's basically just a mixture of seasonings that you mix into tofu and then fry up like a hamburger. I just had to try it out, especially the seaweed one. Mmm, seaweed hamburgers.

First off, I don't know how people can form tofu into shapes, cook them up and then serve them still in that shape. I've drained my tofu quite well, mashed it quite well, and still, my tofu never stays into any shape. It just falls apart. After a lot of careful flipping and even more loud cursing directed towards the sizzling pan, I was able to pan-fry up some tofu hamburgers. Heck, I might as well call them tofu sliders because any larger and they wouldn't be called patties.

Despite all the effort and expletives, I was absolutely disappointed hence my calling them tofu-cow patties since they were pretty well...you know. They were surprisingly tasteless even with all that MSG which came to haunt me later in the evening with an all night "drinking" binge. Splattering on some tonkatsu sauce was an improvement, but not by much. Looking into the fridge for other possibilities, I tried salsa, sandwich spreads and some leftover Heinz Chili sauce. None of them could inject interest into them. Ah well.

As a side to the tofuburgers, I rummaged around and found the only suitable item-shrimp chips. Well, at least I stayed with the Japanese theme. They do look like fries! ;) I even doused them in a bit of that Heinz Chili sauce for fun. However, it turns out they actually taste pretty good with salsa. Ha!! For the best shrimp flavour, though, they are best left unadulterated.

Ah well. So much for that dinner. At least I got an excuse to play with my food. =)

Sort of Daily Bread

As much as I love a good quality bread, I don't actually eat much bread. Buying a baguette is a challenge against time...before the bread goes stale that is. Just like my sweets baking, I've for the most part decided to always share my kitchen creations so that a) I'm not stuck eating all of it and b) I can share with my friends which is always a good thing to do. =) So in finding the Daily Bread recipe at King Arthur flour, I was excited to see a simple-to-make bread that promised to be tasty. Less work would mean I'd be more likely to have a chance to put forth the effort and time to make delicious bread! Does it live up to its name?

Well, it's certainly easy to make. I threw everything into the bread machine to knead for less than an hour before dumping into a bowl to rise overnight. This morning, I didn't have time to shape it, let rise and bake it so it continued to bubble up until mid-afternoon. I then threw it into the clay cooker gifted to me for Christmas. This thing definitely makes mediocre bread better. Imagine the possibilities! I guess I overdid the first long rise session as it didn't poof up all that much over the next hour. Nevertheless, I threw it into the oven. In about a half hour, I had crusty bread with a decent hole structure. Though the holes were on the small side, they were numerous and made a nice light contrast to the heavier crunch of the crust. It certainly smells delicious and the taste was pretty darned good for the effort...which was minimal. Though it requires that overnight rise, this is still a great recipe for bread in a hurry (to go with your Curry in a Hurry) since it's such an easy going recipe. Eventually, I'd like to try the no-knead bread so that I can really have bread on hand more or less whenever I'd like some. Fast food that's not unhealthy. I like! =)

All in all, this bread is good on its own or with a slather of butter, but I really made this bread to soak up some bagna cauda from Nigella Lawson. Yes, it's been hiding in the fridge with no mates to play with. This will make for a nice little snack now. =)