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JHO, yes. You need to thaw them out first. I was like you in that I tried my first fried shrimp when I was in college, waited until my 20's to try crawfish and ate my first oyster when I was 36. I grew up in Louisiana, but I was always sensitive to food with a pungent smell. I still won't eat sock toast (salt rising bread) or any cheese that smells like dirty feet. But every seafood I have tried since I really dug. Once you open up to it, it won't gag you anymore. Maybe get drunk or catch a slight drinking buzz because that's usually when I'm willing to try things I wouldn't otherwise eat (a little liquid courage).
The main thing when cooking shrimp is to not overcook them because they will become tough and rubbery. All it takes is a couple minutes tops in a sautee pan. I have an assload of recipes for shrimp, but because you don't eat them I'm not going to bother digging some of them up. Best advice is to marinate them in some lime juice, lime zest, garlic and spices (preferably peppery ones and black pepper) and olive oil. Heat up a pan with olive oil and butter and then when hot, dump in shrimp and spices and sautee. 4 minutes with shrimp is probably too long. If the pan is hot, they'll cook in less than 2 minutes with one flip to make sure you have both sides covered. It's really that easy. You'd probably be surprised to know that you can barely smell fresh shrimp. It's not a fishy/seafoody kind of smell. It's a shrimp smell if they're fresh. Since you have frozen, they've probably already got the heads off and are deveined and may or may not still have the tail on.
Anyway, after you cook, a good move is to remove the shrimp, deglaze the pan by pouring in some white wine and allowing that to reduce by at least half and then maybe wisk in a pat of butter or two and then pour that and the shrimp over pasta. It's really easy.
I'm staying with my daughter for the weekend which means yes, more salsa. The changes we made this time was to use 5 ears of corn (4 roasted, 1 raw), found a pack of Fresno Chilies, used about 7 sweet peppers (the yellow and red ones) and upped serranos to way more than we usually use. We also added pineapple for the first time. Only thing it's missing is avocados since I haven't put any in yet. Those will be in a bit.
Grilled shrimp to go with the salsa and it was pretty great. Because the salsa intensified overnight I made cilantro lime crema which was sour cream, lime zest, lime juice and cilantro. That was the cooling agent. Shrimp was tampered down heat wise and marinated with olive oil, black pepper, garlic, cilantro, sherry vinegar, lemon zest and juice and smoked paprika. I grilled over hickory charcoal. We served with the crema, salsa, full cilantro leaves, toasted tortillas and lime wedges. I’m far from a great cook and kind of suck and make lots of mistakes. But this was a 9. Every bite was money and everyone else raved. So that was cool. Cake was a cannoli cake which was decent but should have been better. It was from a good local independent store bakery but eh
Post by potentpotables on May 11, 2020 17:07:34 GMT -5
Made an entirely vegan dinner last night. Roasted chickpeas and broccolini with olive oil mashed potatoes. For the potatoes, I parboiled potatoes with garlic, then mashed with the olive oil as the fat.
For the chickpeas/broccolini, you need a can of chickpeas and a bunch of broccolini, and then I spiced them using both the zest and juice of a lemon, a teaspoon of smoked paprika, and salt/pepper to taste. Roast at 400, but the broccolini won't take as long as the chickpeas if you like cruchy/crispy chickpeas, so you want to start the chickpeas first.
I made black bean soup for the first time last night. Flavor was good but I was a little too aggressive with the immersion blender and it was a lot closer to cream of black bean soup than I would've liked. Lesson learned.
Post by abefroman1 on Jun 22, 2020 16:45:04 GMT -5
Splurged on a wagyu beef strip steak for Fathers day, worth the $35 for the 12oz cut. Dad loved it, managed to talk him into medium-rare even though he's a medium guy. Made chimichurri with it
Looks great abe. We had some prime ribeyes from Costco but unfortunately dad had to grill because the family professional grilled had to work (at a grill). Best chimichurri I have ever had is at a local Argentinian inspired steakhouse. We have tried a few different ones and i always prefer ones heavy on cilantro rather than parsley. Who’s recipe did you use?
I just included the essentials (olive oil, garlic, red wine vinegar, fresh parsley and oregano, and chili flakes). Added in some fresh mint as well because I saw that on TV once.
There is a brazilian sandwich shop in town that has the best chimichurri I've had, wish I knew their recipe.
I've been needing to go to Laplace (pron la plahss) for a while. It's in St. John Parish about 30 miles upriver which was heavily settled by Germans and French in the 1700 and 1800's.
We don't have any retail smokehouses that I know of in New Orleans. So if you want smoked meats without having to smoke them yourself, that's the closest area to get it. They have 3 places I know - Jacob's, Bailey's and Wayne Jacob's. All are pretty excellent. You can order from them online, but the prices with shipping are just too high whereas you can go in the stores and see what they have in stock and get what you want much cheaper.
I was reminded of this because somebody made me some red beans the other day and used andouille and tasso in it. You can get that packaged here (Veron, Richard's, Savoie's) from the grocery, but it's not the same. I find when you want to step up the game as to whatever you are cooking, better ingredients make the difference and add a depth maybe I didn't think I was capable of. That applies to almost anything from properly ripened tomatoes in a salsa or red sauce, smoked meats in dishes like red or white beans and rice, gumbo or jambalaya, fresher fish or whatever. Certainly smoked meats can flavor anything you're cooking. Jacob's uses 100% pecan wood which is my favorite base wood for bbq or grilling. It works just as well for smoking.
Here's a photo of andouille from Bailey's which I think shows the difference between andouille and other types of smoked sausages. Andouille has more salt and cayenne pepper than traditional smoked sausage, and the meat is usually cubed instead of ground. Can be pork or beef or both (or even other meats such as chicken or turkey) and usually has a good bite/chew to it.
For anyone who doesn't know tasso, it's a super spiced flavoring ham (actually shoulder) you can use like bacon or panchetta to flavor dishes. It usually has a cayenne exterior/rind.
Inspired by waking up thinking about smokehouses, I decided to make salsa today. My neighbor grows tomatoes and hooked us up. I could either eat them raw with salt or do something with them. We had a couple limes and 1 1/2 serranos so it was easy enough to just go to the store and grab 5 jalapenos, 2 poblanos, 3 ears of sweet yellow corn, cilantro and a peach. I've been wanting to try a peach, but my daughter is finicky for mangoes, so we usually use them. She isn't here, so I did a minimalist style consisting of:
8 small ripe tomatoes (fresh) 2 toes of garlic (fresh) 1 bunch of chopped cilantro (fresh) 3 slices of white onion (fresh) 1 peach (fresh, skinned) 1 1/2 serranos (fresh) 2 poblanos (roasted) 3 ears of sweet corn (2 roasted, 1 raw) 6 jalapenos (5 roasted, 1 raw) couple dashes of red wine vinegar salt, pepper, cumin, ancho powder, cayenne to taste zest and juice of 2 limes
It needs to sit and mingle for a day or so, but it's easily one of the best ones I've made so far. I'm encouraged that they keep getting better and better.
We will hopefully be grilling some steaks with a Japanese-Vietnamese bent today. We will sometimes grill with Mexican ideas like jalapenos and cebolla (onion). Today, I am hoping the grill master here (not me, one of my kids) will do it the way I want which will be marinating the meat for a short time with ponzu, garlic, ginger, scallions, fish sauce and brown sugar or honey. I think if we do that, we can get that flavoring into the beef. I usually prefer coarse salt and pepper only, but every once in a while you gotta switch it up if you think you have an idea that might work. This is probably an idea that would lend itself better to thin strips cooked on a grill pan, but hopefully my I'll buy if you cook & fly offer will entice him to take care of this shit. I'll report back later if we can pull it off and how it was.
Post by piggy pablo on Jul 11, 2020 1:14:19 GMT -5
I'm gonna make some chili based on the old Chili's recipe that I love. Got a pound of ground chuck and two pounds of whole to cube up and stocked up on all sorts of spices that we were missing. Should be pretty simple overall, but I don't *love* the way my family makes chili, so I'm hoping I can do it well enough that we change recipes lol.
Also been doing a coconut chicken curry recently. Was doing it with a bunch of substitutions (extra curry powder for cumin, no fish sauce) but went all out and got a huge wine-sized bottle of fish sauce when I only need a teaspoon or two for a batch of curry. So if anyone knows some good ways to use fish sauce, I'm all ears. I also bought some coconut milk today to make some more. A few days ago I had put a couple cans of Goya coconut milk in my cart online. I ended up going with a different brand before checking out today.
I'm gonna make some chili based on the old Chili's recipe that I love. Got a pound of ground chuck and two pounds of whole to cube up and stocked up on all sorts of spices that we were missing. Should be pretty simple overall, but I don't *love* the way my family makes chili, so I'm hoping I can do it well enough that we change recipes lol.
Always looking for new chili recipes if you can share:
I'm gonna make some chili based on the old Chili's recipe that I love. Got a pound of ground chuck and two pounds of whole to cube up and stocked up on all sorts of spices that we were missing. Should be pretty simple overall, but I don't *love* the way my family makes chili, so I'm hoping I can do it well enough that we change recipes lol.
Also been doing a coconut chicken curry recently. Was doing it with a bunch of substitutions (extra curry powder for cumin, no fish sauce) but went all out and got a huge wine-sized bottle of fish sauce when I only need a teaspoon or two for a batch of curry. So if anyone knows some good ways to use fish sauce, I'm all ears. I also bought some coconut milk today to make some more. A few days ago I had put a couple cans of Goya coconut milk in my cart online. I ended up going with a different brand before checking out today.
My daughter had just picked up some Goya empanadas which she loves the day before the statement. She also said no mas. I have no idea what else to do with fish sauce except to add a little here and there to dishes for funkiness. I generally can't stand it, but we used it in last night's marinade because I knew we needed it. Turned out to be the juice of a lime, juice of half an orange, soy sauce (store we went to didn't have ponzu), crushed garlic, minced jalapenos, finely chopped green onions, fish sauce, canola oil, sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. Marinade smelled exceptional, and I was pretty proud of if. But in the end, we didn't marinate it long enough. The hour or so allowed some of the flavors to seep into edges of the different cuts of meat (we had strips, filets, ribeyes and a bottom round) and into some of the fat creases, but it could have used several more hours. In the end, they tasted like grilled steaks with a hair hint of the marinade. I suppose an alternative would have been to brush more of it on while grilling which might have worked. But I'm always leery about putting a salt based marinade (soy sauce) on meat for several hours as you don't want to leech too much moisture and flavor out. IDK. We'll definitely be making it again because you want to be able to get the flavors you want out of your cooking.
If you have a subscription to The Washington Post, there's this article that lists fish sauce as the MVP of:
Post by potentpotables on Jul 11, 2020 19:22:49 GMT -5
Our CSA has provided us with a head of cabbage three of the last four weeks. One of the only things we don't know what to do with naturally. So tonight, I cut a head into "steaks", seasoned with olive oil, crushed red pepper, lemon juice, salt/pepper. Grilled medium high heat for 5 minutes per side. About to try it now...
Our CSA has provided us with a head of cabbage three of the last four weeks. One of the only things we don't know what to do with naturally. So tonight, I cut a head into "steaks", seasoned with olive oil, crushed red pepper, lemon juice, salt/pepper. Grilled medium high heat for 5 minutes per side. About to try it now...
Yeah, heads of cabbage are random. Best advice is to use them for vegetable soup. If you eat meat, which I don't remember if you do, cook them down with some type of salt pork and serve over rice. Lots of people stew it as well. I'll eat it. Kimchi is the best thing, but I think you make that with napa.
Hey Pablo, by the way - how was the chili? And what type do you make, Texas Red?
Oh, haven't done it yet. Probably going down tomorrow. Since I just got groceries I'm gonna go through HEB's pre-packaged stuff that I got first. They make these salmon filets and stuff them with a bunch of crab meat. Not frozen, so I gotta eat it before long.
Hey Pablo, by the way - how was the chili? And what type do you make, Texas Red?
Eh, fuckin meat was spoiled. Today was the sell by, so it really shouldn't already be smelly. I'm calling them tomorrow. I took pictures and left it in my freezer. Not a small hunk of meat to throw in the trash and let rot til trash day. Poor cow.
Pretty pissed at this HEB rn overall. Last time I went there and I got a pickup order for tofu and tempeh, that's it, and two of the five pounds of tofu I bought were spoiled. So twice in a row I've been sold rotten food that I didn't have a hand in selecting. You could smell the tofu outside of the package.
We have a really bomb neighborhood bar and restaurant known as Revel. It's run by the foremost cocktail expert in the city and his wife. I took Jake Jortles there when he was in town visiting several months back, and he would vouch except he doesn't read this thread. My daughter loves their peanut butter burgers. That was a thing back at an old French Quarter bar, Yo Mama's. I never tried one there, but people used to say how good they were. It didn't make sense, but they loved it. Anyway, Revel's is a riff on Thai flavors which they get from the celery/carrot slaw, beef, sweet chili sauce, peanut butter, brioche and basil/mint/cilantro mix. She wanted to eat that, and so she decided to go ahead and buy all the ingredients. So this is what we did:
Grilled the burgers (and slightly toasted the brioche buns on the grill) which was the meat with a little kosher salt, soy sauce and a few shakes of fish sauce. After the last flip, we put peanut butter on them to melt. I forgot to pick basil off the plant, but I chopped up mint and cilantro. We had no experience with pickling, so my child who is a cook found a recipe for quick pickling. We probably should have used rice wine vinegar because of the inherent Asian flavor. But he didn't think about that and just made a pickling liquid out of vinegar, herbs and spices and possibly some citrus (?). We boiled and slightly reduced and poured over raw strips of carrots and celery as well as finely chopped jalapeno and a red and a yellow sweet pepper.
We had Asian for the 4th time this week, haha. I got a char siu rib banh mi from Banh Mi Boys. It's pretty good. I wish they would have used beef rib instead of pork rib, but regardless. Dong Phuong Bread, cilantro, jalapenos, daikon and carrots along with some cucumber. I hate mayonaise and french butter, so I never get those spreads. Also, banh mi's traditionally come with some type of liver or fried fois gras on the sandwich owing to colonial French influences. I always get mine without it because I don't like liver in any form. But this place is younger and more up to date and combos between banh mi's and po-boys or twisted type versions of both if you want creole-viet-American or whatever. I was always glad for the Vietnamese culture that we have, and as I've said before, my kids and their generation eat the shit out of pho and banh mi's as a regular part of their diets (along with Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc.).
Post by piggy pablo on Jul 17, 2020 4:28:58 GMT -5
I only ever go to Taco Bell anymore because it's got a fairly robust set of vegetarian options, for a fast food place, for when I'm pretending to be a vegetarian. If they got rid of the spicy tostada, the spicy potato taco (this is a recent discovery and it's pretty solid. Something I'm gonna start making myself at home. It's just fried seasoned potato chunks, lettuce, cheese and the spicy cream sauce on a soft taco.) and triple layer nachos, that pretty much ends that. I can waste money ordering nachos bell grande with no meat and they'll always have the ingredients for cheesy bean and rice burritos, but I dont want to play their new "sub black beans for meat and everything is vegetarian" game.
The 7-layer burrito isn't vegetarian, but that going away would be a true gut-punch to the community.
Anyway, since I'm sorta back to square one making chili, what cut of meat do yall think I should use if I really want to elevate it beyond ground chuck? I'm gonna go to the grocery today, not messing with delivery or curbside, just gonna go when no one will probably be there. I'm thinking mostly diced chuck, like 3/4, and then the rest brisket to sort of vary it up? Both take awhile to cook tender enough, but I've got time.
I did make the spice blend and it is similar to Chili's. Idk how many people eat chili at Chili's anymore or know that it's a thing, but that was their calling card when they started out. It has a distinct flavor that is heavy on garlic/garlic powder.
I only ever go to Taco Bell anymore because it's got a fairly robust set of vegetarian options, for a fast food place, for when I'm pretending to be a vegetarian. If they got rid of the spicy tostada, the spicy potato taco (this is a recent discovery and it's pretty solid. Something I'm gonna start making myself at home. It's just fried seasoned potato chunks, lettuce, cheese and the spicy cream sauce on a soft taco.) and triple layer nachos, that pretty much ends that. I can waste money ordering nachos bell grande with no meat and they'll always have the ingredients for cheesy bean and rice burritos, but I dont want to play their new "sub black beans for meat and everything is vegetarian" game.
The 7-layer burrito isn't vegetarian, but that going away would be a true gut-punch to the community.
Anyway, since I'm sorta back to square one making chili, what cut of meat do yall think I should use if I really want to elevate it beyond ground chuck? I'm gonna go to the grocery today, not messing with delivery or curbside, just gonna go when no one will probably be there. I'm thinking mostly diced chuck, like 3/4, and then the rest brisket to sort of vary it up? Both take awhile to cook tender enough, but I've got time.
I did make the spice blend and it is similar to Chili's. Idk how many people eat chili at Chili's anymore or know that it's a thing, but that was their calling card when they started out. It has a distinct flavor that is heavy on garlic/garlic powder.
I can't remember the last time I ate Taco Bell. Ever? I like the idea of the cubes of chuck and brisket. I realize you are in Texas where beef is king, but maybe also get some pork shoulder to flavor it up a little more ala pozole? I also love fresh peppers in my chili, so besides the spice mix, hopefully your recipe calls for lots of them. I love pozole so fucking much that I need to start trying some recipes of it soon. Another alternative would be cubing up some ribeye. I use that whenever I make beef stew because of how flavorful it is. But chuck and brisket can get there too with enough time. Shoot a picture and review up of whatever you make.
Post by piggy pablo on Jul 18, 2020 22:06:09 GMT -5
I used to do the little ramekins of nacho cheese at Taco Bell as a shot when I was a kid. My mom got mad at me so I started taking them into the bathroom lol.
