What's For Dinner #57: The Keep On Keepin' On Edition - May 2020

Reading all day and a good dinner? Sounds great to me!

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Greek night - again! Stifado with homemade bread. Used leftover whey from yogurt making; bread was nice & tangy, but needed something. Maybe a T of additional sugar, a little less salt, or a longer rise. Dunno :woman_shrugging: ETA, it was liberally slathered with butter after photo. In HO parlance, TPSTOB.

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Ribs, collard greens, and baked rosemary fries. The ribs came from Texas via my imperfect produce box. Nice and smokey. I cooked the collard for several hours with bacon and onions. Bourbon for DH and a glass (or two) of Malbec for me.

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That pork is flat out gorgeous.

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Yeah, unfortunately both of which I don’t care much about. BF likes waffles but he rarely eats bfast and we don’t have a waffle iron anyway. :frowning:

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Happy weekend!

Tonight was takeout Italian again - Neapolitan pizza, lasagna, arugula salad, tiramisu. I roasted some cauliflower to go with.

Last night I tried a new GF pizza crust for the kids. 3 medium pizzas and the 4th portion turned into a little boule. Best yet, but I now have the flours to make my own flour blend from scratch so that will be the next try.

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@naf
This is just gorgeous!

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It’s quite simple to make, but so good. The recipe I used suggested heating up pandan leaves with coconut milk, I couldn’t find right now. But I would say it was still delicious.

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@paryzer
All the photos from your dinner are superb. But this one is breath-taking:
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We love sticky rice and mango. Your composition is better than any restaurant. I use pandan extract that I bought ages ago in an Asian grocery store. I’m sure it’s all fake but it does impart a nice flavor.

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Well, you being @TheLibrarian, that “reading all day” would be right up your alley, right? :wink:

Actually, been to SE Asian many times, but I have no idea the taste of pandan leaves on its own. Some says it is kind of like vanilla but less strong. I’ve never come across pandan extract, will try to see either frozen pandan leaves or extract is available.

Andrea Nguyen adviced against using the extract though.

Indeed

@paryzer Should blow it up and hang it in a room.

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I just tasted my extract plain. It is vanilla-like but more floral. Maybe closer to Tahitian vanilla extract than Madagascar but without the alcohol burn of extract. I think there’s a coconut background flavor. Having never knowingly tasted real pandan I’m not sure how chemically the extract tastes compared to the real stuff. Maybe I can find the leaves someday and do a taste test.

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Thank you @RedJim and @naf! The beet salad was as good as it looked. It had a fresh black garlic clove, pickled daikon radishes, nice creamy ricotta cheese, with some unusual colored beets.

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Exactly!

Interesting, the flavour profile. Maybe due to this, it is often used with coconut, savoury or sweet.

To be honest, I don’t recall using the pandan extract when making mango sticky rice. I use coconut milk and brown sugar. I’ve only used it when making plain rice as an accompaniment to other things.

Now you’ve got me started on a mission for pandan leaves. I wonder if it can be grown in a pot?

Good idea! I see seeds and seedlings in ebay.

I used David Thompson’s book Thai Food recipe, it was used to make coconut cream: heat the coconut cream with pandanus leaf, add rice flour and salt (mixed with water) and stir until thick, then add sugar and stir till dissolved.

He has another black sticky rice recipe that needs 3 hours to steam!

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Not dinner but wanted to share. I’d say our first attempt at crepes was a success. This was a team effort: BF made the batter (I did add a splash of Havana Club rum) and chocolate ganache while I did the cooking, filling, and plating. We had been watching a lot of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin lately and were inspired. These were absolutely delicious. Looking forward to trying different variations, such as some savory fillings next time.

I posted to Instagram and tagged Jacques Pepin’s account and he actually responded saying “Looks good”. I must say, those two words made my day.

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