Cooking outside your comfort zone

Well I am adding Beef Pinang to my book of go to things. Cheep fast and delicious. I used fresh basil as a garnish. Put a tablespoon of peanut butter in the sauce and garnished with crushed roasted peanuts.

I also added sliced water chestnuts. Straw mushrooms. Baby corn and string beans.

What I am going to change is I am going to cut the coconut milk with coconut water by twenty five percent and use a bit less penang curry. I like heat but I also want a lighter sauce with a bit more balance. I will also cut the peanut butter back to a teaspoon.

All this is nitpicking. The basic recipe posted above is simple (ready in 15 min) and really tasty.

Bringing this thread back because it's sort of relevant to this week. 

I've grown extremely tired and irritated of the daily "what do you want for dinner" conversation, so I sat down the other night and went through the fridge and freezer, then found recipes based around what I have on hand. I came up with 16 recipes I've never had or made before, posted them on the fridge, and declared an end to the conversation for the next 2 weeks.

Tonight is going to be pork asado. It's a strange and simple Asian style pork dish that's pretty much pork, potatoes, and onion. 

Currently the pork is simmering on the stove in a mix of water, lemon juice, and soy sauce. Closer to actual dinner time, the meat gets pulled from the liquid, then *separately* the onion, potato, and pork quickly pan fried, with the liquid the pork cooked going in last to use what sticks to the pan as a sauce.

I expect to like it, but I'm not sure what the child will think. She bit into a jalapeno earlier today, so I'm not sure how adventurous she'll be at dinner. 

After dinner edit: it was decent. I wish I had another working burner or more counter space so I could have made some rice with it. No pictures, not very photogenic, but it was tasty. I was leery on the soy sauce/lemon juice liquid, but it was surprisingly good. 

I've got another one - a case where I needed to whip up a dish quickly and couldn't find much in the house. But I did find some baking potatoes, fresh garlic, a bottle of olive oil, and some frozen sausage crumbles. So I cut a potato into tiny French fries, put a little olive oil in a pan, and sauted them (didn't want to try deep frying in olive oil; that would be expensive!) with a couple cloves of chopped garlic and some Cajun seasoning powder. I added in some sausage crumbles too, but added them too early and they came out overcooked compared to the not-exactly-fries. Came out pretty well except the burnt sausage.

Since this is zombified, I started using hello fresh.  If anyone wants to try it free for a week(3 meals) I have 6 vouchers they gave me.

it helps me mix it up and not go for the old standards every night 

I will try just about anything, but I have learned that some things are just beyond my abilities, or patience- Vietnamese spring rolls need to be made by a nice old Grandmother sitting on a kitchen chair in the back of the restaurant.  Perogies require a nice Ukrainian Baba and a church basement...

There is a touch to some of those things that needs to be learned standing by your mothers knee.

Thai yellow curry, I can rock.

Timely. Tonight's adventure is attempting to substitute frozen finely grated cauliflower and sweet potato, for rice in stuffed peppers. If it weren't for the ground beef, I'd call it veggieception.

I tend to make stuff up as I go. Soups are usually made when cleaning the refrigerator, stir fry is the same. I make a pretty mean fried rice, but never the same way twice. Sometimes it's outstanding, sometimes not so much. Everything is called goulash or slop and when people ask whats in it, I tell them it's top secret and I'd have to kill them first. I never write things down so the good and the bad are long lost to the sands of time.

I saw some crab legs on sale at the local grocery. Decided to throw them in my offset smoker with some apricot wood. It was smoky, buttery perfection and, as a bonus, the dry heat made the shells brittle and I was able to extract meat with minimal effort.

In reply to white_fly :

Hmm. I've been thinking about that for a while, but never had the nerve to try it. What kind of temps and times did you run?

I've got 2 whole lobsters(9.99 each at Aldi) in the freezer, the smoker might be the ticket. 

I wish I had a better recollection of times and temps. I honestly can't remember, but the legs were already cooked when I bought them, so it wasn't much time or a very high temp.

In terms of lobster, I haven't tried smoking them, but I highly recommend grilling them. Cut them in half down the center, dip the meat side in olive oil or clarified butter and DON'T OVERCOOK THEM. The tails curl as they get more done; you'll figure out the correct amount in no time.

As I read over my post, I realized that you may know all of that. It's not meant to be condescending in any way. In any case, I think the crab legs lend themselves to smoking more than lobster.

Tonight I made a pancake in the pressure cooker. 

It came out much better than i expected, and it was nice to finally use the low pressure option. 

The recipe was modeled after Japanese rice steamer pancakes, and while I've not had those, this was pretty good.For being an inch tall and as big as the pressure cooker pot.

Streetwiseguy said:

 Perogies require a nice Ukrainian Baba and a church basement...

We sometimes get sauerkraut perogies from a group of local babcie and they're very good.

But ours are better

Cranked out a hardcore NYC cheesecake from scratch last week and loved every nibble.  My wife asked me if I was intentionally sabotaging her diet...

drainoil said:

For some reason this thread brings back memories of watching the Julia Child cooking show on PBS as a kid. For a spell I thought I one day would become a glamorous chef and make awesomely great creations. Well,,,,that never happened.

When I was about 12-15 years old many of my friends and I would watch Justin Wilson, Louisiana Cajun chef, on PBS. We are all pretty damn good cooks now. Most of us do the majority of the cooking in our households.

I like an over easy fried egg on top of grits with a bit of butter, milk/cream, salt and pepper.