51 posts tagged “vegetarian”

Was going to use commercial puff pastry, but ended up with puff pastry cups, rather than sheets... So I had to make my own faux puff pastry. It has been a while since I've done this, and I ended up mixing it too much, grinding the butter down too much. So it wasn't nearly as puffy as it should have been. But it was still fairly decent.

The recipe calls for sliced red onions and garlic to be cooked in a separate pan, and then mixed in with fresh herbs. The suggested herbs were, specifically: basil, thyme and parsley. I can't grow parsley, but basil and thyme, yeah — we've got that. So that's it.

At least I sorta figured out why the camera's flash wasn't going off. Heh.

Clearing out the last remaining tomatoes, I decided to completely improvise. To the point that I don't clearly remember exactly what I did. It was just a standard mirepoix with tomatoes added, plus typical Thai things like fish sauce and kaffir lime leaves — and plenty of other things, I'm sure. I've got some in the freezer, that I will add coconut milk to when I thaw it, because this soup was a little too sharp. It would probably be much better when rounded off and softened a little with the sweetness of coconut milk.

A really nice mixture of cumin, coriander, chiles, cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric, coconut cream and kaffir lime leaves. The cashews were both roasted and added as a garnish, as well as being ground to a paste and used as a thickener, as well as a flavoring. Very nice, hot and sweet.

Nothing much to say about this one — except that although making soup can be pretty time consuming, it's well worth it because the frozen leftovers makes for an extremely easy meal...

Well, nothing to say here — just the plain glory of aloo gobi.

This dish normally makes use of bonito flakes to create the broth, but I had none. So I made one from discarded shrimp shells instead (I never throw that stuff away anymore; they go straight in the freezer). Also, I marinated the tofu in soy sauce and toasted sesame seed oil and sautéed them before adding them to the soup, along with noodles, scallions and cilantro.

Apart from making the broth (which was time-consuming, but very simple), this was very simple and easy. Mind you, if I'd try to serve this to Gun (from Tampopo), I'd probably get my arse kicked. So there's an awful lot of room for improvement. But it really is kind of satisfying to eat this with chopsticks, while slurping the soup from the bowl.

Tofu is starting to grow on me. I've never actively disliked it, but it has neither taste nor texture — there's nothing to like or dislike, really. But you can marinate it and add whatever flavor you want to it, and you can sautée it to create a somewhat crispy crust. It's easy to work with. And I realize that there are countless others, much more exciting things that can be done to it.

Had a bit of a mishap with the noodles, mind you. My grip on the lid slipped as I poured the water out, and the noodles followed the water down the sink. Talk about a sinking feeling, seeing them things skidaddling down the drain like that — voilà; dinner's served: Schezuan tofu, but yeah, I decided against the noodles at the last minute. It didn't really create a balanced meal, you see... Not with the tofu. No need for noodles with this meal. Nope. D'oh.

The charred edges look a lot worse than they actually were. Simple, tasty stuff. Puff pastry, tomato paste, onion and garlic. Bake. Done. Nothing very special, but very easy and damn tasty.

Vegetable curry with a sauce from onions, homegrown tomatoes, some leftover, homemade Thai style curry paste, adjusted with some homemade, leftover Indian style curry spice — and whatever veggies we had laying around. This, I figured, would be just an easy, lazy Sunday meal. I figured wrong...

First off, with all these tomatoes going ripe right now, I'm always trying to find a use for 'em. And in one of the few cooking shows I bother watching anymore (Molto Mario) I saw him peel and de-seed tomatoes for a sauce — this would work great for a curry. First off, I used so many tomatoes that they cooled the water down too much, so they didn't get blanched properly. This made peeling them a nightmare. Secondly, it's a de-seeding tomatoes is a horrible mess.

Then there was an awful lot of peeling and chopping, of course. Onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, tomatoes. Took far more time than I expected. And finally of course, there was the prolonged simmering required for this type of a stew. So Sunday dinner was served way late. I really hate screwing up the timing like that.

Still, it was very tasty when it was finally done. And it's also nice to see that it is easy to create curry pastes and dry spice mixes that are far better than anything you can buy in a store. And it's even nice when you can bring them out and use them like this — without using commercial stuff, and be all Semi-Homemade etc.

Whoa, some of these suckers really are striped. It's a wonder, how these things can be done. Makes me wonder what carrots would look like today, sans William — the loyalists marchers in Belfast would have to call themselves the White Men or something...

The tomato season is coming to an end. I wonder what it'll be like, using supermarket tomatoes again. Hopefully, not too bad.