posted
There's been a bit of discussion in the "Ode to Mac and Cheese" on the virtues of improvising in the kitchen and it seems we have quite a few creative Hatrack cooks.
Since that thread is devoted to Mac and Cheese, I thought I'd start a new one on the broader topic of innovative cooking.
Do you enjoy modifying recipes or even making them from scratch? Have you recently stumble on a new combination of flavors that was surprisingly good? Have you discovered a new way you can use one of your favorite kitchen utensils? Are you looking for new things to try in the kitchen or perhaps trying to modify your diet.
If so, this is the thread for you.
To start off, I'll describe what I did for dinner last night.
Last night I made cassava and potato gnocci. I made the gnocci using ~ 2 cups of grated cassava, an equal amount of mashed potatoes, 1 egg, 1/2 cup of ground rice, 1/3 cup of split pea flour and about 1/2 tsp of salt. While rolling the gnocci, I filled them with a bit of garlic paste and parmesan cheese, then boiled them is salted water.
I put about 3/4 of them in the freezer and then sauteed my serving in ghee and garlic before adding a tomato sauce and freshly grated parmesan cheese.
Delicious!
I would have preferred using riced potatoes but I left my ricer back in the states. As a result there were a few potato lumps in the gnocci.
I was wondering if the food grinder on my kitchen aid mixer could be used to rice potatoes. Has anyone tried it?
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To rice a potato (or other vegetable) you force it through a mesh of small wholes about the size of a grain of rice. Ricers come in a variety of styles but they all end up doing the same thing.
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Ooh! Good question rabbit! I was thinking recently about trying to make gnocci, but I don't have a ricer and really don't want to buy one. I'm almost certain I have the food grinder mixer attachment though. Hmmm...I have potatoes in the house at the moment too.... Perhaps I'll get brave today or tomorrow and try it (and, of course) post the results).
I love modifying recipes. One of my very favorite things to do when modifying a muffin/cake/etc. recipe is to substitute applesauce for oil (if something calls for A LOT of oil - like zuccini cake - substitute out half or 3/4 of the oil). It makes the thing moister and is a great way to cut down on the fat without losing texture. I've been having fun recently going through some of my recipes and tweaking them (and slowly posting the tweaks on recipezaar).
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We had 'patatas a la riojana' tonight for tea, which is bascally potatoes boiled with local chorizo sausage ( that's the riojana bit, i.e. from the Rioja region next door).
Simple, filling and so yummy I had two helpings.
It doesn't usually get more complex than that in our house. We eat quite simply, but with good fresh ingredients. That way the food does the talking and you don't need to get too fancy.
However my sure-fire, emergency 'cripes we have unexpected guests for dinner' recipe is confit de canard with puree of potatoes and caramalised pears.
This translates as open a can of duck confit* (roast duck preerved in duck fat), remove the fat and slap them the oven for 15 minutes while you make the mashed spuds. The pears come in a can and are drained and put in a frying pan with butter and brown sugar on a medium heat for as long as you have.
It looks good, tastes better and is minimum effort. The caramalised pears idea is an invention of my own due to a lack of apple compote one time...
Serve with a good strong red wine - or non-alcoholic beverage of your choice.
Not sure about mixers doing rice potatoes - what are they? (the potatoes - I have read of mixers...)
* Available across the border in France for six Euros a pop; "cheap as chips" as a well known, chirpy psuedo-cockney TV chef might say.
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I haven't been doing much cooking lately... I did totally wing some lemonade the other day because my daughter insisted on using ALL the juice she had juiced from ALL the lemons she picked.
I think if you had a sufficiently wide hole the potatoes would be okay going through the grinder-- I've seen people do it for corned beef hash on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, so I don't think it would hurt the potatoes too much to do it that way-- they might be a bit less fluffy but it would at least eliminate lumps...
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The two recipes were fudge and cheesecake. I don't know why I set off "Once" in it's own sentence, like we only ever did it once. I combined the recipes once. My husband makes it several times a year.
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So what do you get when you combine a fudge recipe with a cheesecake recipe? I can sort of imagine this it it was a no bake cheesecake and a non-boiled fudge recipe.
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For the college students among us, you can vastly improve the flavor of ramen by picking up a tin of Coleman's mustard and some soy sauce. Only use about half the flavor packet, and add in some mustard/soy sauce to taste. I use about a half a teaspoon of mustard - which gives it a nice kick - and just a little soy sauce since the flavoring is already so salty.
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A few things I've stumbled across - none are original to me, but they're great for improvising:
Browning a tablespoon of tomato paste before deglazing when making a pan sauce can add wonderful color, depth, and richness. If you can cook with alcohol, use white wine (preferably whatever you would serve at dinner) to deglaze and then reduce it to an essence (barely liquid) to complete the magic trick. I first used this technique when making cioppino.
Good Andouilli or Chorizo can be used to spice a lot of stews, soups, and sauces. It's a quick way to add a lot of flavor to dishes that can stand up to it. I've used it to great effect with seafood (see cioppino) and with mustard greens. Browning slices of the sausage, saving the slices, and deglazing the little bits is good, too. Plus you can use the sausage for something else.
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I once was most of the way through making banana bread batter before I realized my roommate had thrown out my bananas for attracting flies (they had been sitting for a while). I compensated by putting in a fair bit more yogurt and spicing it with nutmeg and something else, I think. The result wasn't as good as the banana bread would have been, but it was tasty and I was pretty pleased with it.
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Improvisation with baking that results in something edible is impressive. Tasty even more so.
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I do most of my improvisation with baking, but then I'm forced to because I can't used regular flours (Celiac disease). However, its not just for that reason. I did a lot of improvised baking even before I was diagnosed, an experience that has benefitted me greatly.
I'll have to have you over sometime for one of my improvised cakes sometime Dag.
Are you planning to be in the Caribbean anytime soon?
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If you don't have mustard and soy sauce, a few dashes of Tabasco or a packet of taco sauce from Taco Bell can also make the ramen quite a bit more tasty, IMO. Heat and vinegar, it's almost like a cheap, nutritionally deficient version of hot and sour soup.
I love making chili and soup because I can basically wing the whole thing, no measuring required. I make a mean New England-ish clam chowder. I like it buttery but not too gooey/thick (use some butter, milk, and chicken stock), with lots of clam and aromatic vegetables (leeks, onions, celery, whatever i have) and pepper (black, white, cayenne), sometimes a little coriander. It's really easy to make it to taste - just add things gradually...add the clams at the end (but the clam juice early so you can take its flavor into account). Red potatoes of course, they provide the right amount of thickening once they get soft. For variety I've tried adding roasted sweet corn - good, but a little on the sweet side - or chopped bacon - making it just a little smoky and even more rich.
With chili I go way darker and less tomato-ey than pretty much any variety i can buy in a can. Lots of pasilla and/or ancho chili powder, dark beer, carmelized onions, black beans. Mmm. I think I'm going to try browning some tomato paste for my next chili, thanks for the tip Dagonee.
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I love improvising in the kitchen, although I haven't done much of it recently (fighting off depression takes about all the energy I have, which sucks, but there it is).
As I posted the other day in the mac and cheese thread, I tried out sage and shallots in the bechamel and it worked really well.
I try to keep an herb garden going, but in the winter its tough. My sage plant survived really well moving indoors, and thats why sage went into the mac and cheese. I have a strong affinity for fresh rosemary, and basil, so those herbs end up in a lot of my food, whether it seems appropriate or not, when I have those herbs alive in my kitchen.
I've tried modifying Bobby Flay's 16 spice rub, but it didn't really work that well. There's a reason he chose the chiles he did, and unfortunately none of them can really be replaced without reducing the quality of the rub. Also unfortunately, getting a hold of those chiles costs an arm and a leg up in the northeast.
Simple modification of a pan sauce for a strip steak recently, replaced bourbon with vodka. Worked out well. beef stock+heavy cream+vodka+ lots of freaking pepper. Really delicious.
I have a good BBQ sauce lying around here somewhere that I've modified so much it no longer looks like the original recipe. I should really find that and make beef back ribs soon.
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I do stuff like this all the time, like adding more vanilla when I make chocolate chip cookies, and ect.
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One improvisation that turned out freaking-horrible:
I had some Absolut "New Orleans" vodka that had the flavors of pepper and mango in it. Really odd sounding but it was good to sip. (Absolut is the only kind of flavored vodka I can stand, it seems all the other brands add a lot of sugar, which to my mind results in a liqueur not vodka.)
I got the bright idea that I would combine the vodka with some sugar and butter and reduce it down to kind of a glaze for some white fish. It sounded good to me in concept: pepper, fruit, sweetness.
It tasted like some kind of cleaning solution.
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quote:'ll have to have you over sometime for one of my improvised cakes sometime Dag.
Are you planning to be in the Caribbean anytime soon?
Not soon enough. But if I get to T&T, I'd love some Rabbit cake.
quote:Simple modification of a pan sauce for a strip steak recently, replaced bourbon with vodka. Worked out well. beef stock+heavy cream+vodka+ lots of freaking pepper. Really delicious.
Hey, steak and potatoes is a classic.
quote:I should really find that and make beef back ribs soon.
Sous vide ribs is on my to-do list, and I'll need a BBQ sauce if you find it. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Innovative cooking? Well, right now we're playing the "what can I cook to use up what's in the freezer?" recipe game (tonight's result: instant brown rice + one package Morningstar Farm's Crumbles + 2 pounds frozen veggies + 1 jar salsa + 2 jars water -- very good!)
And in a couple weeks it will be the "I don't want to have potatoes or matza brei again, so what am I cooking instead?" recipe game. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I think I could eat potatoes 2-3 times a day for about 6 months before I would even begin to tire of them.
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on St. Patrick's Day I put a corned beef in a crock pot at around 1 or 2 am. I cooked it for 9 hours, took it out of the crock pot and put it in another pot and put it in the fridge while I went to a job. Then I took out the pot, putit on the stove and started to boil it again and added some cabbage. The corned beef was the most tender, melt in my mouth thing I've tasted. I wonder if it would work to do that to a pot roast.
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quote:I wonder if it would work to do that to a pot roast.
My mother makes something she calls "24 hour pot roast". Its actually cooked something more like 10 - 12 hours. She puts the roast in a covered roasting pan and then roasts it all day at a very low temp (I'm thinking its 200 F but I'll have to ask her). The meat is so tender it literallly falls apart.
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I made french bread without a recipe, because my bread book has been AWOL for a few weeks. The recipe itself was very simple, so I just took yeast, added about half my bowl's worth of warm water, and added bread flour until it looked like dough. Raised it twice, formed baguette loaves, slit the tops, and put them in the oven with a water bath on the bottom row of the oven.
Perfect, beautiful-looking loaves. The only problem, I didn't put in enough salt. Salt is my weakness at baking. It's so very necessary, but it's usually the most likely thing I'll forget or not add enough of.
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I think you're safer improvising with yeast-leavened baking recipes than with anything that requires baking powder or baking soda. The latter two depend on some pretty specific chemistry, whereas I think the yeast organisms will go ahead and digest whatever they can.
Still, bread without enough salt tastes very disappointing.
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quote:I think you're safer improvising with yeast-leavened baking recipes than with anything that requires baking powder or baking soda. The latter two depend on some pretty specific chemistry.
Not really. Its a pretty nonspecific acid base reaction. Just like everything else in cooking, if you understand the rules its not that difficult to improvise using baking powder or baking soda.
Baking powder is easier than baking soda. Baking soda requires an acid to neutralize it or it will leave a bitter taste. When using baking soda its very important to include something acidic like buttermilk, lemon juice or yoghurt in the recipe in the right proportion. When in doubt, its best to err on the side of too much acid because a slightly sour flavor is generally preferable to the bitter taste of the soda.
Baking powder is a mixture of baking soda and one or more acids (usually tartaric acid (cream of tartar) and aluminum sulfate). Since baking powder has its own neutralizing acid which is presumably premixed in the right proportions, the worst thing that can happen is that you can put in too much (causing things to over rise and then possibly fall) or too little causing things be too dense.
The big difference between working with yeast and working with baking soda or powder is one of timing. Yeast grows so if you put in too much or too little yeast, you can usually compensate by adjusting the rising time. Since most people let the bread rise until it reaches a given volume rather than for a set time, its very easy to compensate for differences in the yeast to flour ratio.
Baking soda and baking powder are moisture activated and heat activated and once they've done their thing, its over. If you put in too little soda, you can't just wait for it to rise a little longer. In fact if you do, the soda will have reacted before you start baking and you will end up with things being too flat. Similarly, if you put in too much soda you still can't compensate by adjusting the timing. Much of the CO2 is released from the soda when it gets hot (i.e. during the baking or frying process). If you put in too much soda, things will rise too much and too quickly while they are baking which can cause things to be too crumbly or even to fall.
If you look at recipes, you will see that the ratio of baking powder (or soda) to flour varies over a pretty narrow range. Once you get a feel for that range and what it means, its not to hard to improvise.
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Dagonee- I can't find the BBQ sauce recipe. I haven't used it in a while, and it may have died in the horrible "Beer on the recipe card" accident of 2007. It was mostly tomato sauce, ketchup, molasses, apple cider vinegar, chili pepper, paprika, chili powder.
Others- My girlfriend loves pasta. I mostly do my creative cooking with meat, so I find myself in a bind.
I'm lookign for simple tomato sauces to make that taste great. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
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quote:I'm lookign for simple tomato sauces to make that taste great. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Ooh, I got this one!
quote:My newest experiments have been producing tomato sauce in the time it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta. It doesn't produce deep subtleties of flavor you get from long cooking times, but it's so much better than jar sauce that I doubt I'll buy more of it. So far, here's my best. Sorry about the lack of measurements, but tomatoes vary enough that everything has to be to taste.
Put 4 quarts of cold water on high, very well salted (this makes a huge difference, especially with whole-wheat pasta). Put 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a cold large saute pan (wide surface area) with some red pepper flakes and 4 cloves minced garlic. Turn to just above medium heat. Strain two 28 oz cans of whole or diced* tomatoes in a wire strainer. You can keep the juice that strains out for later reduction - it's very useful stuff if used quickly. If using whole tomatoes, squeeze each one to pop out some of the juice. When the oil is shimmery and easily coats whole pan, add the tomatoes to the pan. They should spread out in a thin layer. Salt the tomatoes to taste and stir. If using dried herbs, add now. ( I use Whole Foods' Italian seasoning mix). Turn heat to medium high and bring to brisk simmer - we're trying to reduce water out. When pot of water is boiling, add 3/4 pound of whole wheat pasta and set timer according to directions. When 5 minutes remain, reduce heat and blend with stick blender to desired consistency. You may have to transfer to narrower bowl or pan to get more height. If you do so, you can strain the hot tomatoes to reduce some liquid. Return sauce to pan and lower to medium low. Add 1/4 tsp of sugar (it makes a huge difference). Add black pepper to taste (don't put your grinder over the steaming pan). Add chiffanade of fresh basil (you can rip by hand if you're gentle). If you timed it right, you should now drain your spaghetti. Add a small pat of butter and a large spoon of sauce to the spaghetti and mix well. This will help the additional sauce evenly coat it on the plate. Serve immediately.
*If using diced tomatoes, you can reserve a cup (strained well) or so and add when you add the sugar for some chunks and fresher tomato zip.
It's great with sweet turkey Italian sausage from Whole Foods.
When storing leftovers, put the pasta in the bottom and pour the leftover sauce on top. The extra moisture will drain out of the sauce and make for lovely leftovers.
I have a much more involved recipe that involves veal stock or demi-glace. This one is more about fresh tomatoey taste - the spices and herbs really serve to make the tomatoes pop - rather than deep layers of flavor.
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quote:I'm lookign for simple tomato sauces to make that taste great. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
I start by heating a couple table spoons of olive oil and then add garlic paste followed by sliced mushrooms. After the mushrooms are tender, I add finely chopped tomatoes, fresh basil and oregano, salt and a dash of hot pepper sauce (tobasco) and cook until the tomatoes are juicy. I then serve this over pasta with freshly rated parmesan.
The beauty of this is that its so easy to vary and fast. You can add other vegetables (like zucchini), or a bit of sausage for flavor. I like to add a some anchovy paste to it.
I don't care how you feel about anchovies on pizza, anchovy paste is delicious in spagetti sauce.
I like it chunky but if you prefer it saucier, put the the mushrooms aside while you cook the tomatoes, puree' the sauce and then add the mushrooms back in.
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posted
A friend and I actually invented a game along these lines. We'd pick a category (e.g., "dessert") then pick an amount of money (e.g. $5), then a number of ingredients (e.g., 3) and go to a grocery store and buy that number of ingredients that fit into that category, spending up to the chosen amount of money. The key was that the other person didn't know what your three ingredients were until after check-out. That way you're both surprised and you have to be creative. My favorite recipe so far was chicken made in a crock pot with marinara and mushrooms, served over baked pasta.
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Sounds like a very fun game. Perhaps we could create an online version.
We find out how many people want to participate and perhaps divide into more than one group. We select a category and a number of ingredients. I'm not sure how we'd work the price limit since things aren't priced the same everywhere.
Each member of the team sends their list of ingredients to a designated person who would forward the complete list to the group. Everyone in the group would then have to make something and post their recipe and results.
posted
Sounds fun! We have to figure out how to allow spices and such in addition to the ingredient list.
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I make chocolate from soaked raw cacao beans (or pre-ground raw cacao powder), raw coconut oil (or raw butter, and maybe some raw goat milk), and raw honey. Blend, chill, and serve. Luna 9 loves it. You don't want to use too much coconut oil. Add some extra butter instead.
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quote:Originally posted by Paul Goldner: Dagonee- I can't find the BBQ sauce recipe. I haven't used it in a while, and it may have died in the horrible "Beer on the recipe card" accident of 2007. It was mostly tomato sauce, ketchup, molasses, apple cider vinegar, chili pepper, paprika, chili powder.
Others- My girlfriend loves pasta. I mostly do my creative cooking with meat, so I find myself in a bind.
I'm lookign for simple tomato sauces to make that taste great. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
What I made last week was- 3 fresh tomatoes 1 large can of tomato past 2 pounds ground beef 2 eggs flavoured bread crumbs several cloves of garlic raw sliced mushrooms green peppers onions shredded cheese
First I sauted the onions, then I added chopped green peppers. I mix the ground beef with the eggs and bread crumbs, then I add that to the onions and green peppers, cut in some cloves of garlic, brown the meat, peel the fresh tomatoes by putting them in hot water for a while, chop those up, put them in a large pot, add the meat mixture and tomato paste with some water. Stir that, bring to a boil, simmer. Add cheese. Serve hot over pasta. Sometimes you can use itallian sweet and or hot sausages instead of ground beef or with the ground beef. It tastes interesting.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Sounds fun! We have to figure out how to allow spices and such in addition to the ingredient list.
When we played, it wasn't that you could only use those ingredients, just that you had to use all of them in the same dish, and couldn't buy anything other than those, so anything else you already had was allowed--from flour to ginger.
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Curious! I have recently tasted raw cocoa beans picked from the tree and they taste nothing like chocolate or cocoa powder.
I'm starting a project to set up a chocolate making pilot project and so I've also done some background research on this. Roasting is essential in order to get the flavor we associate with chocolate. I think you have been mislead if you have been sold "raw cocoa beans" and "raw cocoa powder" that taste anything like chocolate.
Its sort of like "raw cashews". Cashews are poisonous until they've been properly roasted.
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"Curious! I have recently tasted raw cocoa beans picked from the tree and they taste nothing like chocolate or cocoa powder.
I'm starting a project to set up a chocolate making pilot project and so I've also done some background research on this. Roasting is essential in order to get the flavor we associate with chocolate. I think you have been mislead if you have been sold "raw cocoa beans" and "raw cocoa powder" that taste anything like chocolate.
Its sort of like "raw cashews". Cashews are poisonous until they've been properly roasted."
Cashews are not poisonous. The oil in the casing around the nut itself is quite caustic and poisonous. It is possible to, using the right tool, open the cashew without roasting. However, the light roasting used to explode the outer casing doesn't actually "cook" the cashew itself. It's still raw, for all intents and purposes, IMHO.
As far as chocolate goes, the beans I get are still in their outer casing. I soak them for a day or two and peel them. They're raw, and it makes good chocolate. I can't speak for the chocolate powder. I don't know how it's processed, although it says "raw" on the bag.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Sounds fun! We have to figure out how to allow spices and such in addition to the ingredient list.
When we played, it wasn't that you could only use those ingredients, just that you had to use all of them in the same dish, and couldn't buy anything other than those, so anything else you already had was allowed--from flour to ginger.
I was just going to suggest we have a rule that you can use anything additional that you have available in your cupboards. We also need to allow people with allergies (like me) to make a reasonable substitution if needed.
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This is starting to sound fun, Rabbit. The Hatrack recipe book. It's only fair warning, though, that I mention that not everything we made in the game turned out edible. There was a jello-based cheesecake that I can only describe as being what would happen if cotton candy and Elmer's glue had a baby.
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