LENTEJITAS con CHORIZO !

New meal by Carlos from Madrid (Spain):

- LENTEJITAS con CHORIZO (Little Lentils with Chorizo (Old seasoned pork sausage)):



These ones were cooked with saffron instead of paprika.

Links to recipes:


http://www.euroresidentes.com/Recetas/lentejas.htm (SPANISH)

http://principiagastronomica.com/post/22
(ENGLISH)


Thanks Carlos!

brownies

3 July 2008, Kamis pagi

Semalem liat liat resep di inet, ketemu nih resep brownies...wah kyknya enak...so kepingin bikin pagi ini....
Bahannya gw tulis disini...
4 bh telur
450 gr gula pasir
225 gr minyak goreng
60 gr coklat bubuk
210 gr tepung trigu
1/2 sdt garam
120 gr kenari
85 gr coklat chip
1 sdt vanila

Cara
1 alasi loyang dgn kertas roti, oles mentega
2 cmpur coklat bubuk trigu n vanila
3 kocok telur n gula mpe mengembang msukin garam
4 masukan 2 ke adonan telur, aduk rata, masuk minyak
5 masuk kenari, coklat chip aduk rata
6 tuang adonan ke loyang panggang 35 mnit

Ubek2 di dapur, bkin adonan tuh kue, baru mo masuk ke loyang, Xiang triak nangis..walah, jadi kacau deh bikinnya...adonan luber kemana2....ancur deh nih kue...
Tapi setelah dioven 35 mnit, lumyan juga...walaupun bentuknya ga bagus...hehehe
Itu deh resiko bikin kue, disertai tangisan bebi...walaaahhh
sapa mo bantuin jaga yakkk???

Whatever happened to Tim Kelley?

July 2

About a month ago, I’m pretty sure I saw Tim Kelley on the subway. I should have said hello, because I can’t figure out what he’s doing these days.
He was quite the hot number around the turn of the century, when he was the executive chef of The Painted Table in Seattle. Then he moved to New York to become chef of Zoë for about ten minutes before leaving to travel in Southeast Asia, from which he wrote a blog called The Runaway Chef, which has now vanished from cyberspace.
Do you happen to know what happened to him?

How do you cook a 13-pound lobster?

If you want to know about how to cook a large lobster and don’t care about my personal life, scroll down to the bold type that says “How to cook a big lobster.” If you have questions, feel free to ask me.

July 2

I turned 41 last April, but last weekend my dear friend Michael Gerber decided he wanted to throw me a 40th birthday party.
Michael’s brilliant, but deliberative. Sometimes his plans take awhile.

“I have a lot of marine protein and the biggest lobster you’ve ever seen,” he said. He’s a science teacher, having majored in biology in college, and so he talks like that.

So does my buddy Birdman, aka professor David Krauss, who teaches college biology and has a new girlfriend who has an internship in Boston this summer. Michael lives in Gloucester, Mass., so it was convenient for Birdman to drive me up. And he was invited to Michael’s party, too.

So was good old Shane Curcuru. Loyal, good company and with a comfortable couch to sleep on, which I did on Friday.
Shane also took the picture of the lobster that you see above.

The party was on Saturday, and involved the four of us standing around drinking and preparing food.

Michael’s an innovative cook, so, not having horseradish, he used wasabi instead to make cocktail sauce (by adding it to ketchup), which we could use with the raw clams that he and Birdman shucked. Then they went outside to hack up scrap wood to light a fire (Michael has a stove, but he wanted to make a fire as it is more manly) over which he put a cast-iron skillet to sear scallops, which he just dusted with Old Bay.

Eating scallops in New England makes me angry, because it reminds me of how humdrum they often are in New York. Michael’s were sweet, rich, and with a great texture — just cleaving from our teeth as we bit into them.

I gave Michael grief for buying a 13-pound lobster, because, you see, large lobsters like that are important for the lobster gene pool. Unlike the smaller ones, which kind of stay put, big lobsters wander up and down from Cape Cod to northern Maine, breeding as they go. Also, large female lobsters are extremely fecund. They’re so important to the fishery that in Maine it’s illegal to sell lobster that’s longer than five inches from the rear of the eye socket to where the tail starts.

Michael says Massachusetts bans catching big lobsters in traps, but if they happen to be dragged up in a trawler, they can be sold.

“Is it male at least?” I’d asked.

“I haven’t checked,” he said, and then turned to ask Shane, who was half-dozing on a couch, ”is he serious or is he just giving me shit?”

It was a good question. None of us really had an answer.

Then he brought out the lobster. It was gigantic and paleolithic and...

... “That’s pretty!” said Michael's four-year-old son, Gilad, who was not invited to the party but he wandered in anyway.
“I want to set it free,” Michael said, suddenly squeemish, and not because of Gilad’s reaction. We’re just not accustomed to eating animals older than we are.

I suggested it probably wouldn't survive if we set it free. It had been out of the water for awhile. It seemed to still be alive — some of its parts were moving a bit — but it was sluggish.

We ended up taking it to the nearby harbor and setting it in the water to see if it perked up, but instead it started dripping something oily into the water, which isn't something healthy, living lobsters do.

So we took it back and cooked it.

(By the way, the lobster was a male.

Birdman sexed it for us. You know those little rows of fan-like appendages on the bottom [ventral] side of lobsters? On females they're all about the same size and shape, but on males the front [anterior] pair is smaller, skinny, and can be brought together to form a sort of channel for squirting reproductive material into the females, which is exactly what it’s used for.

So now you know.)

All four of us are good cooks. Shane’s a terrific baker, but he also had made me delicious omelets for breakfast that morning. Birdman’s the biggest purist of us — fish with beurre blanc, lamb with garlic, perfect crème brûlée — but also the one probably to have thought the most about the science of cooking. Michael’s into finding cool flavor combinations (wasabi and ketchup, as discussed, but he also made three different fish pâtés for us to play around with, and really, why not flavor white fish with single malt?). I’m the only one in the group who went to culinary school, but so what?

How to cook a big lobster

None of us knew how to cook a 13-pound lobster.

Birdman suggested we par-steam it and then pull out the meat and cut it up for cooking, which we did.

The little legs were perfectly cooked once the lobster turned red, and so we ate those, and they were delicious. So was the knuckle meat. Michael sautéed the claw and tail meat in butter, but some of it was quite tough. But at that point we were full anyway, so I suggested it be cooked in moist heat at low temperature until the meat softened.

August 18 update: I asked Charleston Grill chef Bob Waggoner about how to cook a 13-pound lobster when we were at the Chef’s Garden’s Food & Wine Celebration. He’s a terrific chef, but he said he wouldn’t even try to cook it.

May 20, 2010 update: I recently spoke with Michael about our lobster experience, and he surmised that the main problem was that it wasn’t a very good lobster, having recently moulted its shell, making for watery, stringy meat. Our method probably would have worked better on a better lobster.

Salad Daze

I’ve never been able to work up much enthusiasm for salad. While the concept may be great, the execution is often painfully poor. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been utterly disappointed by the quality of a salad in a restaurant.

Italian eateries are often the worst offenders. A sad bowl full of limp lettuce and a few token slices of tomato dressed in poor quality oil and cheap balsamic vinegar is not a salad. Nor is a handful of withered rocket with a few dry shavings of Parmesan cheese hastily thrown over the top.

A generic ‘salad’ is too small to be sustaining in any way on its own and too devoid of character to be an accompaniment. A salad that looks pretty is often even more disappointing because it teases you into thinking that it is going to taste good whereas, in fact, it offers no more than a few pieces of what may as well be crunchy water.

I have a friend who maintains that the most dangerous item in any kebab shop is the salad. Not because it has been sat in dubiously sanitary conditions for an extended period of time or insufficiently washed. No, salad is dangerous because it invariably ends up on the pavement just outside the entrance where it quickly becomes a slippy and genuine health hazard to the inebriated.

However, there are ways to make the salad appealing, even to people like me. Granted, they do raise the calorie content by a few thousand per cent but to transform a foodstuff from supermodel’s choice into just a super choice, one has to make sacrifices.

So, in the spirit of open-minded experimentation, I crafted myself a salad. Using freshly picked rocket as a base seemed like a good start. The sharp peppery punch that rocket offers is a perfect foundation for any number of dishes. A slice of grilled chèvre topped with some roasted cherry tomatoes and a drizzle of reduced balsamic is a personal favourite. But today I wanted something more substantial.

A while back I made some rillons – slow cooked pork belly preserved in its own fat, like a cross between confit and rillettes – which have been sitting happily in the fridge trying to fend off the occasional attack from my good self. Although good cold, these were fried in a pan until the fat began to render. Into this were added four or five new potatoes which had been pre-boiled. Twenty minutes in the oven was all that was needed to half sauté, half roast the potatoes and turn the pork into chewy nuggets of deliciousness.

The rocket wilted slightly as the hot pork and potatoes were placed on top and a few dabs of pesto and a hint of white wine vinegar helped to provide a sharp contrast and cut through the general richness. If salads were more like this, I’d eat them everyday.


www.justcookit.co.uk

Más cerca.

"Hola, desconocido..."

Alice es un personaje que me fascinó desde el primer minuto de metraje de la película "Closer". Y me fascinó por su franqueza, por su forma drástica y poética de decir las cosas. De pronto, en mi casa, yo me daba cuenta de que éramos casi la misma persona; con un corazón tan hinchado que iba a salirse del pecho, capaz de desinflarse de un momento a otro ante la decepción.

El siguiente diálogo que dejo linkeado ahí abajo lo dice todo; yo ya tuve ésa y otras conversaciones hace años, conversaciones que luego vi plasmadas en una película, sola, en mi habitación. Y seguiré teniéndola, como Alice con Dan o con cualquier otro.

En un momento de la película, Alice le dice a Dan: "He dejado de quererte. Desde ahora, desde hace un rato, no puedo mentir ni decir la verdad. Ahora ya no te quiero. Adiós, te habría querido para siempre."
Todavía me recuerdo a mí misma en aquella fuente diciendo esas palabras, sintiéndolo desde lo más profundo de mi interior.

¿Por qué determinadas situaciones te hacen sentir como el puto pastel de arándanos de "My blueberry nights"? No tiene nada de malo el pastel de arándanos, joder...

http://sapourbano.bligoo.com/content/view/111683/Frases_como_navajas_Closer.html

_______________________________

El mundo se encogía, se hacía más pequeño hasta que faltaba el aire... la infravaloración era subjetiva, pero ¿cómo luchar contra ella si era todo lo que podía sentir? No era su culpa, lo sabía; pero le afectaba, destrozaba por dentro, como si corriera lava por sus entrañas. Le secaba la lengua, impidiéndole hablar...
"Ay, si hablar fuera tan fácil", pensaba; "si te pudiera decir todo lo que quiero..."

Pero, ¿de qué valía ya decir las cosas... máxime cuando ya no quería escuchar?

KEEMA KOFTA CURRY

Ingredients:
Mutton mince ........... 1/2 kg. (or) Chicken mince
Onions ....................... 5-6 sliced
Tomato ................... 1 chopped
Green chillies ......... 2-3
Ginger-garlic paste ..... 1 tbsp.
Bread crumbs ............. 1 tbsp.
Coriander powder ...... 1tsp.
Cumin powder .............1 tsp.
Red chilli powder ......... 1/2 tsp.
Turmeric powder ........ 1/2 tsp.
Garam masala ............. 1tsp.
Coriander leaves......... handful
Mint leaves ................ 6-7 (optional)
Salt to taste
Oil
Method:
1. Fry the onions to a golden brown colour.Add the chopped tomato, 2 green chillies, ginger-garlic paste and half cup water. Let it cook. Cool it and grind.
2. Clean and wash the mince. Squeeze out the water completely.

3. In a food processor grind this along with 1 onion, 1 green chilli, mint and coriander leaves, a little ginger-garlic paste, breadcrumbs, coriander-cumin-turmeric powders, Garam masala and salt.

4. Make balls out of this mix.
5.In a flat bottomed pan heat a little oil, add the ground onion paste, salt, coriander-cumin-turmeric powders and place the koftas. Simmer for 5 minutes and turn them carefully.
6. Add about 1 cup water and cook on low flame till done. Add a little garam masala.
7.Garnish with coriander leaves. Serve with rotis / naan/parathas.