Your GO TO food recepies

[Master of fact]

I know there are some good cooks out in the CMON community, i sometimes drool on my laptop reading some of LiZcam's posts on facebook.

So what do you like cooking the most.

Im very simple (leave it) scrambled egg's for me.

The best way i found is to gently fold your egg/cream mix to keep the texture silky. A bit of salt and thats it!

 

[gohkm]

It's grilled or BBQ chicken wings for me. Nothing fancier than salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon or lime juice on top. The other one I'm rather fond of is the simplest of salad dressings - lemon juice, olive oil, and some salt and pepper to create an easy vinaigratte.

 

[Chrome]

The most fun food I've made was for this new year celebration, Three dishes:
The appetizer, Mini pies filled with cottage cheese, ham, tomatoes and more cheese served with a sweet drink based on Hpnotiq and mandarin juice,
The main dish medium rare sirloin steak with pepper fried root vegetables, bearnaise sauce and ehm, this(hasselback potatoes, no idea what to call them in English)
And then I finished it off with a raspberry sorbet topped with pieces of mandarin, white and dark chocolate flakes and some chocolate sauce.

We were seven people at the table that evening so it took quite some running around since I was basically making most of it on the fly apart from the things that I was able to prepare beforehand of course.
This was the ending of an evening with fancy clothes and a visit to the Opera house.

 

[cassar]

egg banjo...sometimes with sausage nom nom nom (not complicated done in a jiffy and amazing comfort food)

 

[lono]

I have to admit, I'm a bit of a cookery freak. Some Friday nights my girlfriend goes out and I stay at home and spend 5 or 6 hours in the kitchen experimenting with dishes and trying out various stuff. She quite enjoys it, because instead of coming home with a dirty donner or chips or pizza, she can just come and sample the things I've made.

I like to mix it up. Sometimes I'll go fancy and faff, sometimes a really simple hearty dish is brilliant. And even a humble salad can be very exciting.

The last thing I did that was really good was chicken skewers coated in a blitzed mix of tahini, corriander, peanuts, chilli, sesame oil, soy sauce, honey and all manner of other spices. Once it was cooked and nicely crispy charred on the outside, i sat each individual bit of chicken in a baby gem lettuce leaf, which acts as a crunchy cup, along with a dollop of homemade mango and chilli cutney. It tasted amazing and is really funky finger food!

If I'm going simple, I make a mean spaghetti bolognaise (I find a bit of oxtail makes it way tastier, and I put a bit of fennel in to give it a certain je ne sais quoi) a really good corned beef hash and I seem to be able to cook liver really well, because even people who go "Eurgh! I hate liver" seem to find it fairly pleasant if they try it. My Malaysian monkfish curry is fairly badass too.

Cooking love runs in my family though. My dad is amazing. He never used to cook unless it was BBQ time, then about 10 years ago he got the buzz. His food tastes and looks divine. I kinda wish he'd discovered it sooner, because he'd have been an awesome chef, but as it is, he's a reasonable teacher who makes scrummy food in his spare time, which works out ok for me I guess!

 

[Arne]

My fall-back dish is a pretty flexible stew. I'm not much of a chef though. It contains... mystery stuff from the cabinets and fridge, with sweet an sour sauce usually. I think I like it because it's different every time.

Ingredients:
* A ingredient: Some kind of meat pieces, minced meat, sausages, quorn, veggie meat.
* B ingredient: Some kind of vegetable, e.g. wooking stuff, carrot, onion, paprika
* Sauce: Cream and/or milk. I prefer to use mostly food cream though, for the thickness.
* Spice: Salt, pepper, then perhaps something exciting from the spice cabinet, like some BBQ, all purpose, Tandoori, or my favourite, sweet n sour sauce, a little soy, maybe some Sambal Oelek for hotness. Garlic can work too, but I don't like cleaning the press. Sometimes I even use salad dressing, like Thousand Island. Cheese is nice, if added when the stew is done (just let it melt into it).

* Pasta/rice/foodwheat/quinoa/couscous/kamutwheat/bulgur

* Small pot with lid, small pan. Stove.

Example:

0: Hmm. Found some bottom sediments of rice and quinoa... Toss it in some water with a pinch of salt and maybe a fingernail sized stock cube.
0.5: Heat up and let it boil for some 15 mins. If times differ too much, it's okay to toss it in later. Keep in mind that pasta is generally tossed into already boiling water, but rice is not. I've found that it doesn't really matter much. Mixing different kinds of stuff feels creative and makes your meal look more personal and varied.

Meanwhile

1: Oil/Fat in a frying pan. I like using a small Teflon pan for my one person meal. Heat it 60-70%
2: Find old sausage. Chop it. Into pan when the fat is making *Fschbrlbfschblrb* sounds.
3: Oh, there's half an onion and a carrot. Chop chop. Into pan. Don't forget to stir and flip.
4: When the stuff (meat in particular) has picked up some brown frying surface. Turn down to 30%
5: Pour on the cream and whatever spices you want. Stir, let it bubble, taste, add more stuff. Soy and sweet and sour sauce can fix almost anything. I really like sweet and sour though.
6: Taste rice stuff with a fork. Ok it's done. Pour out residuum water. Taste stew. Ok it's done.
7: Dump rice into bowl. Dump stew onto rice. Eat like a viking.
8: Return to computer.

Veggie meat doesn't really need to be fried. I just heat that up with the vegetables.

 

[Master of fact]

Lono when you do your spag bol how do you stop that watery/saucy separation when you plate it up. Iv never figured it out.

 

[khavor]

One of our favorites and really simple to boot:
In a crockpot combine
3 -4 chicken breasts (about 1 1/2 lbs)
1 jar of salsa
1 onion
1 green pepper
bit of brown sugar
squirt of dijon mustard
lemon / lime juice

Just let it cook all day. You can chop it up and have burritos / tacos, or just have the chicken w. refried beans and rice. Either way easy and awesome.

 

[Chrome]

Lengthy recipe

That is something very, very common at our place as well! Best part with it is that it's virtually impossible to fail with.

 

[Dedwrekka]

"Back of the Fridge Chili"

Ground Sausage and Lean Ground Beef and whatever miscellaneous meats you have, not fish (bad idea!)
Diced Carrot, Onion, Tomato, Green Pepper
Tomato sauce (don't buy cheap, you'll never forgive yourself)
spiced with cinnamon, black pepper, allspice, pinch of garlic, and a good amount of cayenne(red) pepper (whole or powdered)

Serve with shredded cheese, and eat with celery/chips/bread/crackers or on top of pasta. Freeze and reserve.


The key to cooking is in the seasoning.

 

[gohkm]

Lono when you do your spag bol how do you stop that watery/saucy separation when you plate it up. Iv never figured it out.

I don't think that's really possible, since the water partly comes from the pasta. But you could try and minimize water use during the sauce preparation, say, by instead of using tomatoes (fresh or tinned), it might help to prepare the soffrito, then add the meat, and then add tomato paste, and just cook that off. Applying heat will rapidly turn the mixture a thick brown. Repeat the tomato paste cook-off as many times as you want - too much, though, and the sauce will just be sour. Adding sugar to at this point doesn't work too well for me, it just tastes off.

But a really good trick for the spag-bol sauce is to use some star anise and some Vietnamese fish sauce alongside your other herbs. It really underlines the meatiness of the dish.

 

[Wyrmypops]

I pretty much live on snacks, the only meals I eat other people cook for me. Though it led me to invent the Cold Dog. It's slice of bread, toasted, smeared with condiments, then wrapped around a frankfurter from the fridge.

 

[In Chigh P.I.]

I pretty much live on snacks, the only meals I eat other people cook for me. Though it led me to invent the Cold Dog. It's slice of bread, toasted, smeared with condiments, then wrapped around a frankfurter from the fridge.

haha, reminds me of the days i used to make 'poor-mans pizza' Toast, ketchup, grated cheese & anything else i could scrounge from the fridge

 

[supervike]

Home made potato soup or homemade macaroni and cheese.

mmmmm sounds so good.

 

[Shawn R. L.]

I can make a mean marinara sauce and one of my favorite appitizer's to make is little chili relleno's out of jalapeno's..........YUM!!

 

[freakinacage]

i was gonna start a recipe thread yesterday but forgot, freaky!

quick veg bake:
ingredients:
optional - ham. i use left overs from a gammon joint
veg (duh!) stuff like carrots, sweet pots (yams), cauliflower, broccoli, leeks etc. just chuck in what you have
cheese sauce. buy it if you are lazy. i tend to just mix up creme fraiche with good quality cheddar and lump that in with it
mix all that together in an oven proof dish, then cover with rough breadcrumbs (i use up old bread and sieve it into fine/rough and keep the bags in the freezer) and more cheese (i use the cheddar and parmesan)
bake
eat

 

[noneedforaname]

Margherita ice cream! I'll dig out the recipe, it's so easy a drunken, hairy, overweight sex pest can make it ;-)

 

[lono]

Lono when you do your spag bol how do you stop that watery/saucy separation when you plate it up. Iv never figured it out.

If you're finding there's quite a bit of water on your plate, it's probably down to the spaghetti rather than the bolognaise. To get really well cooked spaghetti, once it's good and al dente, tip it into a metal colander to drain, then put the colander back on top of the hot pan. Leaving it like this for a few minutes will mean all the excess water still trapped there will evaporate off thanks to the heat underneath. Drizzle the spaghetti with some good extra virgin olive oil to make sure it doesn't get sticky and you're good to go! If you want it to be really good, I recommend high quality pasta too. Try and get stuff that has a rough surface rather than the smooth cheapo stuff, because the sauce will adhere to it better.

If the sauce is going watery, you may be cooking it at too high a heat, and busting up the properties of the tomatoes in it. It should be done slowly at a low heat, and ideally for a good few hours to really develop. You may find that you get a layer of liquid separating on top (you shouldn't really be doing much stirring while it's cooking) so every so often check on it and if you see this, carefully spoon it off. It's the oily fat from the meat bubbling up, and you want to get rid of that.

Hopefully that'll help out.

And just in case anyone's hungry, here's some photos of some home made fancy tasty treats, from reasonably humble to fairly pretentiously complex (those are my favourite ones to do!)

View attachment 5407 View attachment 5416 View attachment 5415 View attachment 5414 View attachment 5413 View attachment 5412 View attachment 5411 View attachment 5410 View attachment 5409 View attachment 5408 View attachment 5417

 

[supervike]

Beautiful presentation there lono.

Looks delicous, both for the tongue and the eyes.

 

[Chrome]

Beautiful presentation there lono.

Looks delicous, both for the tongue and the eyes.

I have to agree. I believe I'll have to steal the plate idea from the second pic, I loved that one!