What did you cook/eat today (March 2018)?

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I didn’t cook it but I certainly ate it.


Korean bbq chilli chicken with cheese.

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This was amazing. We were in the suburb of Eastwood in the north east of Sydney.

It was served with “banchan” - small dishes of pickles, kim chi, rice, and a spiral pasta salad in a sweet mayo with chunk of cucumber & apple.

We ordered a garden salad & fries to go along with it. The fries with the spicy chicken sauce was amazing.

The fellow that owns the place threw in a free dish of DIY rice balls that are served with a glove & scissors. The closest flavour is sushi with a tinned tuna filling & toasted sesame seeds. It’s quite a skill to roll them one handed and I do not possess that skill.


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That’s the DIY rice balls in the silver bowl.


I bought a daikon to make into pickles and I will be giving the chicken & the DIY rice balls a trial run at home shortly.
 
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Pressure Cooker Beef Bourguignon. There are some times when it's best not to "just wing it" when making something. Baked good certainly fall into that category. Beef Bourguignon probably does, too. I had made an overly complex (but tasty) Sous Vide Beef Brisket Bourguignon during the Cook-along. It just so happened that I had everything I needed, so I decided to make it again. Exceptions were beef shoulder instead of brisket, and I couldn't find pearl onions, so I used standard yellow onions.

I didn't have a lot of time, so I used the pressure cooker. I remembered what the ingredients were, but I was too cocky to look at the proportions. This is what the cooker looked like after having sauteed the onion and garlic in bacon grease, and then letting the floured beef chunks roll around a bit.

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If you know anything about pressure cookers - and this recipe - you'll see why I knew I was in trouble here: there's not enough room for 2 pounds of beef, a pound of mushrooms, and everything else. A pressure cooker needs to be no more than 2/3 full; by the time I added everything, it was a few inches from the top. So, after mixing it well, I removed half of the contents and cooked that for 12 minutes. I repeated this with the remaining half.

The end result is excellent, but the beef is a bit overcooked (I think I could have gotten by with 10 minutes). Part of the problem - surely - was that there was so much beef that it was tricky to roll it all around to get it browned on the surface...this meant that some parts got overcooked in the process. And, there's more broth than I'd prefer, since I was concerned with not having enough liquid in the cooker (which can lead to disaster).

Not bad...but I think I'll measure next time.
 
The Late Night Gourmet said:
The end result is excellent, but the beef is a bit overcooked (I think I could have gotten by with 10 minutes). Part of the problem - surely - was that there was so much beef that it was tricky to roll it all around to get it browned on the surface...this meant that some parts got overcooked in the process. And, there's more broth than I'd prefer, since I was concerned with not having enough liquid in the cooker (which can lead to disaster).
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The end result does look good. I still haven't mastered pressure cookers but your logic sounds right to me re the meat. The thing I hate about them is that you can't open the lid to check how its cooking!
 
morning glory said:
The end result does look good. I still haven't mastered pressure cookers but your logic sounds right to me re the meat. The thing I hate about them is that you can't open the lid to check how its cooking!
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This is somewhat of a misconception. You can remove the pressure cooker from the heat, cool it down, and carefully remove the lid to check how things are going. I've done this when I'm not sure how quickly something is cooking: I'd rather undercook it than overcook it. Then, you can reseal the pot, bring it back up to pressure, and continue.

The 12 minutes I used was what someone else did for this preparation (maybe they like their steak more done than I do?)
 
Yes, I use the cool it down check, and then reheat if necessary, especially with beans. I also do this when I'm in a hurry with a multi-step preparation and I don't want to wait for it to cook the regular way.
 
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The Late Night Gourmet said:
I've never tried making beans...I understand that they need a LOT of head room (i.e., no more than 1/2 full).
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Well, soaking them overnight helps with foaming and supposedly you can also use a tad bit of oil to keep down the foaming. You also have to make sure the vent is clear when cooking beans because if they foam bad it can clog. It took me years to not be afraid of the pressure cooker as I saw the results of an overloaded pressure cooker explosion on a woman wearing a girdle and a polyster pantsuit in my early teens, but that's the only way I cook dried beans now.
 
Chicken chilaquiles. No pictures because they just aren't pretty, a very rustic, kind of messy dish. Tortillas cut in strips and fried. Chicken seasoned with S, P and cumin, sauteed until done, cooled and shredded. Onions, fresh chiles (poblano or Hatch), garlic, tomatoes, and I added tomatillas tonight because we had some left over from another meal, all chopped and sauteed until done, seasoned the same as the chicken. Chicken stirred in, mixture covered with Mexican melting cheese, covered with crema, sort of a Mexican creme fraiche, covered and warmed until cheese melts. Served with the fried tortilla chips. This was one of my better ones, don't really use the recipe anymore, but I think I'll add tomatillos from now on.

This also can be a vegetarian dish, just leave out the chicken. We actually first started making this from a vegetarian Mexican cookbook.
 
I found leftover chicken cutlets in the fridge, so I cut one in half, nuked it, then put the halves on burger buns with a good dollop of Stonewall Kitchens Curried Mango grill sauce.

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On the side I had some of the new Doritos flavor, Blaze. Hoo boy they're good ans spicy.

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buckytom said:
On the side I had some of the new Doritos flavor, Blaze. Hoo boy they're good ans spicy.
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I shall be on the lookout for those (although it will probably take months or even years for them to arrive in our neck of the woods).
 
The Late Night Gourmet said:
I've never tried making beans...I understand that they need a LOT of head room (i.e., no more than 1/2 full).
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I've never had any issues in cooking dried beans/peas which is what I mostly use our pressure cooker for. I have often forgotten to soak them first, though they are better soaked first. Cover in water and just cook. I've not found the need to come even half way full in our pressure cooker with beans/peas but I guess pressure cookers must vary in size? (I'm usually adding the cooked beans to something else though rather than making everything in the pressure cooker.

Ours is an Ikea one, is 6l in size. Even 2 packets of dried chickpeas (so that's a kilo of dried chickpeas) haven't been a problem for it, though usually I only cook 1 packet (500g dried weight) at a time and given they only taken 25-30mins at 800m altitude to get really soft chickpeas, it's no big deal if I need to cook a second batch (at least for me it's no issue).
 
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