Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook
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KitchenKatalog: Blog 263
Saturday, March 22, 2014, 08:20 PM
I wanted a fast and high protein meal after a century ride and this is the best I came up with. I cut a whole in a ham steak and cooked an egg in it. I think I cooked it a bit too long but it wasn't too bad. Certainly did the job of being so much protein. However, I could probably have skipped doing the egg in the ham steak. Next time, I'll just fry an egg separately.
I also had roasted asparagus. I roasted it at 450 for 15 minutes. I do not know if it was too long/too hot or if it was the fact that this was really old asparagus, but it was very, very mushy. Oh we'll, it was still good enough
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7696, 2014-03-22_202034
Thursday, March 20, 2014, 08:25 PM
I made a pretty simple meal. I roasted (2 lbs) of brussel sprouts and 3pieces of smoked turkey sausage. I sliced the brussel sprouts and roasted them along with the sausage for 30 minutes at 400°F. The brussel sprouts were fine but the sausage got over cooked. Next time, I will do the sausage for the last ten minutes or so.
The seasonings were mostly salt, pepper, garlic powder and rosemary.
Other than trimming and slicing the brussel sprouts, this was a fast and very easy meal. Eating two pounds of brussel sprouts was a bit much and would be enough for lunch the next day (but with more meat) in the future.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7692, 2014-03-20_202524
Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 07:08 PM
I made a chicken-cabbage stir-fry of sorts. It was actually inspired by the egg rolls last week.
I started by making shredded chicken. In the past, I pressure cooked it but this time, I just poached it. I used ~2/3 lbs of chicken. Most sites said to simmer for 10 minutes and let it sit in the water for another 10-15. That is basically what I did with broth (Osem since its easy) with additional spices
While the chicken simmering, I chopped half a head of cabbage, half a bunch of dino kale, and two small carrots. Once it was finished poaching, I sautéed 1/2 an onion in a bit of olive oil. I then added 4 cloves of chopped garlic and a good amount of grated ginger.
I added all of the veggies then a bit of the poaching liquid to steam and wilt the green. I added some oyster sauce, sriracha, teriyaki sauce (the thin stuff, not Soy Vey) and a few other seasonings.
I used the mixer to shred the chicken and added that.
Overall, it was actually really good. It made a decent amount of food with a lot of food. The oyster sauce smelled pretty bad but actually tasted fine in the mix.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7688, 2014-03-19_190827
Tuesday, March 18, 2014, 04:04 PM
I made a pretty simple meal. I roasted two (!!) pounds of french green beans. I tossed them with a little bit of olive oil then (too much) Penzeys Sandwich Sprinkle. I simply roasted them for 15 minutes at 450. This was a lot easier than sautéing! Next time, I will go much lighter on the seasonings.It was very salty. I like using the french green beans from Costco since you don't really have to cut off the stems.
I also sautéed about 2/3 lbs of shrimp with a little bit of olive oil and some salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and garlic powder. The shrimp were not shelled as I had thought but I just pealed them while I ate. They were pretty good though maybe a bit overdone.
Not a lot to this meal except a large mass of green beans.About 20 minutes total and much of that time was passive!
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7680, 2014-03-18_160435
Monday, March 17, 2014, 11:04 PM
Meredith and I made the pretty standard lentil taco stew. We went a bit heavy on everything to make a bit more. We also tried an experiment: we had some leftover bacon fat from the morning so as used that. It made it smell good but the flavor was a bit out if place.
We also separately sautéd two jalapeños (forgot them sooner) and added that. It made the apartment fill with jalapeños burn. Ouch.
It made enough for two dinner and two lunches.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7673, 2014-03-17_230426
Monday, March 17, 2014, 07:59 PM
We had a pretty simple breakfast: BATs (Bacon, Avocado, Tomato) We had Whole Foods' Black Forrest Bacon which we baked at 350 until it was crisp (Best bacon and best method to bake it). We also had a not-quite-ripe avocado, tomato slices and Brummel and Browns. The bread was a few slices of rye from last week's meals and small (slightly stale) rolls from Whole Foods.
Simple and good meal.
Original Wordpress ID and Date: 7669, 2014-03-17_195902
Sunday, March 16, 2014, 11:05 PM
We made African Peanut Soup with Meredith's regular recipe. The recipe is originally from 2013-11-09 except that we forgot all of the seasonings and skipped the peppers (hence why in the main thing, I said they were optional). However, despite forgetting these things, the soup was incredible! This is only my second time having it and I do not recall the last time exactly, this one was amazing!
We used a mixture of Better Than Bouillon and Osem. Also, it was a bit salty so we added another cup of water. We went heavy on the ginger and the peanut butter (hence those notes too). I also think that doing it in the cast-iron dutch oven and a really long simmer helped!
We also had a dozen oysters on the half shell. I am not totally sure what variety they were but e bought them at Fresh Market. They were not as good as ones we have had from Whole Foods. When I shucked them, they didn't seem to have much liquid ("liquor") though they seemed to be better later (how? I don't know...). Meredith and I each got a funky ones but the rest were...okay. Our stomachs still feel fine so I guess that says something.
This page was converted from Wordpress with a custom script by Justin Winokur. Most links and images should still work. However, if any links are broken, see the HTML (or Markdown) source to try to deduce the intended destination.
Original WP Post ID: 7658
Original WP Pub Date: 2014-03-16_230538
Sunday, March 16, 2014, 08:26 PM
Meredith and I made hamentashen to celebrate Purim.
We used my dad's dough recipe except we used coconut oil instead of butter. We used the extra-virgin kind to still give it a coconut flavor. (We used the TJ's brand). Anyway, different web sites suggest different ways to use it. Commenters of this Kitchn Post say to use 1:1 for volume. This StackExchange post says that butter is 80% fat whereas coconut oil is 100% so compensate accordingly. Coconut Oil Online says it is roughly 92% by weight of butter. I went with the latter since it seemed like a good mix. It follows The Kitchn's volume advice and is easy to do by weight. Two sticks of butter is 1/2 lbs ~= 227 grams so I used 209 grams.
We refrigerated it first to make sure it was solid (melts at 76F). I then creamed it as the recipe said. I was afraid of it getting too warm and melting so I stopped a bit early. This was a mistake as I found a few (some rather large) chunks of coconut oil in the dough when I was rolling it out. It was still very good so clearly either the dough was forgiving or it was the right amount of fat.
As per the suggestion on the page, I chilled the dough after it was made (about an hour). I do not have any experience with the original butter version but this was really, really hard to work with when that cold. It would crack and be hard to spread. I found that the second rolling where it was warmer was easier so I took the rest of the fridge. That helped a lot.
The dough held up very well. As you can see from the various photos, most held their shape well. It had a good crumb and almost reminded me of short-bread. Plus, you could really taste the coconut flavor which I_really_ liked!
On the note of the dough, I found 18 minutes was the right amount of time to bake them!
2014-03-18 Note: I had a few later and they were cold from being outside. The coconut flavor_really_ showed through when they were cold!
We made quite an assortment of fillings as noted below. We did run out so we resorted to some no-sugar-added cherry pie filling. However, that wasn't very good so we eventually stopped and just made cookies.
The other fillings are noted below
Took a large handful of blanched almonds and a bit of cardamom. I used the magic bullet to finely chop it and then I mixed in a large dollup of Trader Joes Fig Butter. I may have used a_bit_ too much cardamom but the filling was very good. This was my favorite!
Similar to the above but with pecans and coconut flakes finely chopped. I then mixed in Trader Joe's Mango Butter. A bit on the sweet side but it held up well and was different
This was Meredith's creation. First, she used the blender to combine about a 1/2 tsp of dried lavender buds with 1 tbsp sugar. She then cook 2 small (1/2 pint I think) containers of berries on the stove with 2 Tbsp water. As it cooked down she added 2 more Tbsp sugar. Towards the end , she mixed 1 Tbsp corn starch with the lavender sugar and added that. There wasn't enough lavender flavor so we crushed another 1/2 tsp of lavender and added it. The lavender flavor didn't come through as much until it cooled but then you could really taste it.
I was worried it wouldn't be thick enough to hold up but I was wrong. It worked out really well and was a nice (new) filing. We will make this again and use it for other things!
Meredith had this idea before I had read that halva was sometimes used as filling. We 3 Tbsp toasted black sesame seeds (not an easy thing to do because you cannot tell when toasted by looking at them) and then we ground them in the Magic Bullet until the released their oils and became like a paste. Then we added 2 Tbsp of honey and blended.
This worked out well even though it looked like tar filling. Unfortunately, there wasn't much. We only got 4 cookies out of it. We'll use more next time. It really did have the taste of Sesame Halva though!
I had these leftover from a while ago and I managed to not eat them (I put a sign on them that says "NO" so I don't!). I finned a few with either a mixture of the two, just health, or with heath on the others. They didn't really work. You can see in some photos that they drooped. I did use them to top the cookies at the end.
The fruit butters plus nuts really worked well. I would expand that with others. Maybe pumpkin butter! Or apple butter. Also, maple bacon filling would be interesting but probably sacrilege
Some general notes we figured:
Below are a bunch of photos:
This page was converted from Wordpress with a custom script by Justin Winokur. Most links and images should still work. However, if any links are broken, see the HTML (or Markdown) source to try to deduce the intended destination.
Original WP Post ID: 7623
Original WP Pub Date: 2014-03-16_202658