On curries, I have now idea how authentic they are, but I’ve used the Hairy Bikers Curry Book many times and it has never disappointed
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I am making beans tomatoes and bacon in the oven. Quite simple recipe I lifted from a Donna Hay book some time ago. If you ever need something that needs very little ingredients, this is it.
Just dice a chunk of bacon (50g/Person is more than plenty, 30g should be fine), rip apart a bulb (or less, but we eat one bulb with just 2 people) of garlic–leave the skin on. You need about a handful of cherry tomatoes (if you don’t have fresh, canned will do but fresh really is better). Put all the mentioned stuff in an oven-proof dish, sprinkle with thyme (fresh, dried whatever) and a bit of black pepper, drizzle with a bit of olive oil and put in the oven for about 30min at 180°C (standard pound cake temperature).
After 30 minutes add a can (400g) of white beans juice and all. Put back in the oven for another 10 min. (Original recipe calls for draining the beans and using vegetable fond instead…)
(that’s a double large can of beans, couldn’t get any others, weirdly Germans are hoarding beans–besides the usual suspects)
Put on plates and sprinkle some parmigiano on it. Serve with bread if you don’t feel the beans have enough carbs or if you want to be sure to mop up the juices. Beware the cherry tomatoes: they’ll burn your mouth, squish them before biting into them.
It’s something easy for a week-night when you’re sick of cooking anything complicated.
PS: don’t eat the garlic skins, pop the cloves out of their protective shells and eat them.
Ingredients for two:
- 60-100g diced bacon
- 1x 400g can or 400g of fresh cherry tomatoes
- 1x 400g can of white beans (or other if you like other beans)
- 1 bulb of garlic, unpeeled but broken up
- a piece of parmigiano
- thyme, pepper & olive oil
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That reminds me of the White Bean & Bacon Stew that we made for supper last night, roughly based on this recipe:
It’s so good for cold, dreary days.
The surprise win, of course, was that we originally planned to make tacos last night but, due to it being stormy most of the day, my partner decided it was definitely a good day to make stew. Which means, completely by accident, we will be making tacos today, Cinco de Mayo y Taco Tuesday!
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White beans and bacon: match made in heaven.
I’ll probably do a weird variant of Huevos Rancheros with my leftover beans tomorrow.
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Like many others, I have been abusing some of the time I have gained to bake bread.
Nothing fancy. The unbaked picture is some multigrain (20%) bread I made, and the second picture is some whole wheat (25%) I baked this morning.
The loaves get larger as time goes on due to the 2nd proofing, I think… and because I hate kneading (HATE it). I should have a stand mixer coming in the next week or so to finally take over that part of the job, but the recipe is super simple: 100:63:2:1 (flour, water, salt, yeast).
Usually it’s 100:63:2:2, but since commercial yeast has gotten harder to find than gold, I halved the yeast and increased the time a little (overnight out of the fridge… usually it’s overnight in the fridge or 4-6 hours outside the fridge).
Upsides: good consistency and flavour.
Downsides: the middle tends to “collapse” (you can see it in the largest loaf), and sometimes the air bubbles are quite large. Additionally, the crust is really crunchy, which my partner likes but I like a softer crust. The crumb is really good, though.
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Re: curries, I highly recommend anything by Madhur Jaffrey. She has a fabulous Ultimate Curry Bible which goes across many nations’ curries. But she’s also got broader books about Indian cuisine - I swear by At Home with Madhur Jaffrey and Quick & Easy Indian Cooking, as both books are focused on easy weeknight cooking, so the recipes are simple and easy to follow and have huge flavor without a lot of exotic ingredients (though they generally involve a minimum of five different spices, some of which you might not have on hand if you haven’t cooked Indian before. But spices you can generally get online pretty easily if it’s not available locally. I cannot say the same for unusual veggies and such.)
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More bread!
An attempt at sourdough - no idea if it’s edible yet.
On Indian food, this is my favourite recipe book.
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It’s not fancy presentation, but it’s tasty.
Veggie tacos and elote off the cob. A tad too much cheese in the elote, but it’s still good.
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Is there such a thing as too much cheese? 
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“First, plant your lemonadefruit tree.”
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Maybe the better way to have worded it is “not enough corn.” Haha.
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Tonight I made a pasta dish. Rice pasta; a pesto sauce made with basil leaves, pignolas, cloves of garlic, olive oil, and a little water; and sweet Italian chicken sausage and mushrooms cooked in a bit more olive oil. Boiled zucchini on the side. It came out quite well; adding a couple tablespoons of water to the sauce helps the blender produce a finer texture.
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Lockdown’s got me actually enjoying cooking again rather than just making food to get meals on the table.
Was playing around with some smoked salmon trimmings from my work and made some wee bread nests in a muffin tin, lined with the salmon, wee bit of black pepper and dill, then cracked some eggs in for some baked eggs.
Baked them right to a hard yolk just because it was first time and didn’t have timings right, but was thinking of refining it a bit by making the toast nests, then lining with the salmon after baking and dropping in poached eggs instead.
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Also been making tasty pasta dishes, flavoured oil & butter, chicken kievs etc with lots of the glut of wild garlic that’s growing locally just now.
There’s not a lot that I’m fully confident foraging so I don’t do much, but this is one that I really enjoy
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We had pizza night because when we play Gloomhaven with our friends we have to have pizza even if we play via TTS.
On a completely unrelated note (because homemade Pizza is one of the few things that I usually do not put hot sauce on since it doesn’t need it):
Does anyone know a good shop for hot sauce besides Chili Klaus (who is terribly expensive) that sends from within the EU?
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Glad to see you opted for real pizza, even if you were doing virtual gaming 
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EVERYTHING needs hot sauce…
Have you tried Holy Fuck sauce (he also does Christ on a Bike and Holy Mother of God)? Its based in the UK tho - does it count what with Brexit and so on. I’ve had it on one of his pulled pork rolls and its amazing.
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So my lovely partner and I have decided to watch “The Great Canadian Baking Show”, which is about to head into Season 3. Every Friday there are 5 of us who gather on Whatsapp to watch the show and chat.
It’s a neat little show, although we bring a level of venom to it that I suspect would shock the show organizers (the first season we dubbed “Linda’s Murder Show”, since one of the contestants, a sweet old lady from middle-Canada, absolutely had murder-eyes… and season 2 was “Surely THIS Week Timothy Gets Eliminated” until he did (far, far too late into the show) at which point it became “Mengling Is Going To Fail” for the rest of the season… and it is now “Mengling Failed” as we wait for the next season to begin).
So! One of the things they did on the show is a thing called a “crepe cake”, which I’ll be honest I don’t think is really all that special… it’s just a lot of crepes stacked on each other with filling. However, Andy (aforementioned lovely partner) loves crepes, and went head-over-heels for the concept.
As it would happen, Andy’s birthday is in May, and so I suggested a crepe cake to her, and she jumped on the idea. But I am not much of a baker, so I figured some trial runs might be wise before the big day.
Hence:
For a first effort, wasn’t bad! 18 crepes resulting in (gosh, math) 34 layers (crepe-filling-crepe-etc). My first time making pastry cream (for Canadians: imagine the stuff inside a Boston Cream. Non-Canadians: the stuff you fill an eclair with), and it turned out pretty well!
HOWEVER, I did mess up pretty significantly. The instructions were divided into 3 sections: “Crepe”, “Filling” and “Assembly”, with their own ingredients for each section. I replaced the “crepe” part with Alton Brown’s superior-in-every-way crepe recipe (doubled, but I should’ve tripled… I will know for next time), and then followed the instructions for the pastry cream. No worries, waited for everything to cool, and then began assembly, figuring that whatever ingredients were in the “assembly” section would be for icing or decorations or other nonsense I wasn’t going to do.
T’was not so.
Basically, the filling is supposed to have 3-ish cups of whipped cream folded into it to make it lighter and to let it stretch over all the crepes more easily. Whoops… end result is that my cake is pretty delicious, but also significantly more dense than it should be.
Oh well! This is why we run experiments in the first place (thanks Entrapta!).
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