Home cooking

Made bacon-turkey soup last night based on the generous servings of turkey, potatoes, and corn from a local restaurant in my home town, plus bacon, onion, and green veg. from around the house. It was quite acceptable.

Random thought: The first recipe was probably barbecued meat, but the second was probably stew, closely followed by soup. What do you think?

Recipes: Texas red chili

Ripe jalapeño pepper, cooking onion, chili poblano pepper, & red bell pepper

I’m going to have to try this recipe for Texas red chili. It’s all (organically raised) meat, herbs, and condiments, and uses bales of cumin. Could be interesting!

You can buy their special spice mixture on the campfiremeals.com website. It contains all organic smoked peppercorns, chipotle, guar gum, natural hickory smoke flavor (soybean oil, natural flavor), and sunflower oil.

For more about chili peppers, see The Learning Channel Cooking: How to cook chili peppers.

Recipes: Ow Yuk Sung

This is a kind of faux Chinese food. We got it out of a magazine in the 1960s and have been serving it ever since.

Ow Yuk Sung

• 1 – 1.5 c. rice
• 3/4 lb (400 g) raw hamburger or other minced meat
• 1 cooking onion
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1/2 lb. of green beans
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2.5 tablespoons corn starch
• water as needed

1. Clean the green beans. Wash, remove stem end, cut into short lengths, e.g. 1 inch (3 cm).
2. While you make the rest of this, cook 1 – 1.5 cups of dry rice by your preferred method. I microwave it, 5 minutes to heat the water and 14 minutes on lower power to cook the rice, using a rice:water ratio of 1:2.5. If you use salt, 1 teaspoon of salt.
3. To speed this up, boil two cups of water separately. While it’s heating….
4. Cut onion into slivers. Oil a heavy saucepan and start frying the onion.
5. Peel and chop garlic and add it; continue heating until the onion is translucent and turning golden.
6. Add the hamburger and cook for three minutes, stirring to break it up into small chunks.
7. Add 2 cups of boiling water and the soy sauce. When the mixture starts to bubble, add the green beans. Cook until the beans are bright green and tender, 5 – 7 minutes.
8. Mix the cornstarch with a little cold water. Add it to the beans & meat gradually while stirring until well mixed. Cook gently until the sauce turns thicker and shiny (a few more minutes).
9. While the sauce is thickening, pour the finished rice into a large serving bowl. Use the back of a big spoon to form the rice into a smooth lining for the bowl.
10. When the sauce is ready, pour the mixture into the bowl of rice and serve to your delighted guests.

This serves four and reheats really well.

Stove vs. fire alarm

I am cooking meat. I bought chops and roasts on sale Now cooking them to slice, freeze, eat. As soon as I had them in the oven, the fire alarm went off. There’s something wrong with a loud, annoying alarm that is so sensitive it goes off whenever you cook something.

I cancelled the alarm and opened the doors, so the furnace started. I turned down the furnace and opened the kitchen window. I hope that provides the right balance of fresh air and cooking vapours for our sensitive alarm and my delicate hot-house skin.

I am also trying something new: putting a bed of sliced potatoes under the meat to catch drippings, prevent boiling fats from splashing around and, I hope, producing a few servings of delicious potato. AND I’m cooking the pork bones into soup stock.

Finished: three pairs of pork chops with potatoes, labelled and in the freezer; enough roast beef for seven sandwiches sliced, weighed, packaged, labelled and six of them frozen plus four servings of potatoes in beef gravy, three of them frozen. I had pork chops and potatoes for supper and I just turned off the stock to let it cool. I usually go from one week to the next without red meat or much meat at all so this will be a treat.

Victorian Christmas pie

The traditional Christmas pie is made with four birds, so it reminds me of the famous “turducken” recipe. It is made in a pie mold lined with pastry and then stuffing. Then a deboned chicken, then a deboned duck, then the breasts of partridge and pigeon. It’s topped by bacon, then more pastry and some decorative bits of pastry. The pie is cooked in advance and eaten cold.

Comrade PhysioProf’s polenta and shrimp

I’ve been thinking about using polenta as a meal’s starch, when along comes Comrade PhysioProf with grilled shrimp and polenta.