Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Southern Feasting!

So I went to a local farmers market last Wednesday, and it was so awesome!!! There were people selling sweet potatoes, homemade breads, okra, bitter melons (what!?) and all sorts of other things that i had never heard of before. Including something that looked like lettuce....but it was spicy!
The nice farmer that I bought the sweet potatoes from gave me 2 bitter melons to try them, but they went bad before I could cook them!!!
Anyways, I ended up coming home with okra, sweet potatoes, the bitter melons and my roommate bought some pineapple bread. It was delish.
In honor of these Southern foods, I decided to cook up a storm! Fried okra, and sweet potato & okra ....stuff. hahaha, I dont really know what the second one would be. It looked like it would make a great pie filling!!!
Ive only had fried okra from Shane's Rib Shack. And ohmygod. It was amazing. So i attempted to recreate its goodness....they must have a secret ingredient.


For the batter part, I used some flour, some red pepper flakes and some (okay, a lot) of curry! You could kiiind of taste the spiceyness.
I sliced up the okra, then dipped them in an egg (scrambled-like) and then in the flour. Then they were put onto the pan, which was full of hot oil! (Deep frying is not my thing...as you can tell by the burnt okra pictured above.)
It was fun, but I dont think Ill be trying that again anytime soon...they weren't nearly as good as the ones from the Rib Shack!

Sunday, September 20, 2009

stuffed green peppers. mmmmm.

Ive been wanting to make stuffed peppers for the longest time....so I finally did! And they were yuuum.

Ingredients:
green bell peppers (or red. yellow. orange. ANY!)
barley (or rice. cous cous.)
onions
one tomato
a can of red kidney beans (or black. or corn. or garbanzos....really just any legume)
one apple (fun, no??)
some celery
minced garlic
curry powder
hot sauce (if you want it...)
some spicy brown mustard
a dash of balsamic vinegar
dried oregano and parsley
salt and peppa

I cooked the onions, garlic, tomato, apple, and some of the celery in a skillet with all the spices. Meanwhile, the barley was also being cooked. The oven was set at about 350. Cut around the stem of the pepper and pull out the stem and all of the seeds from the inside. Once everything is cooked a little, you can go ahead and mix the barley with the veggies (including the rest of that celery!) and the can of beans all together. Then cut the peppers open (unless youve got mad skills and can put the stuffing into the peppers without tearing them!), and spoon the mixture into the peppers.....put them in an oven safe dish, and set them in the oven for about half an hour or an hour....just check up on them every once in a while, and they should be fine!! Oh! Feel free to sprinkle some cheese on top of them, too!
VOILA! you now have....
STUFFED PEPPERS!
:]

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Truffles

"When grandma used to make truffles, she would never give me the recipe. Probably because I was too short to reach the stove, and she didnt want me to burn my face off!" -Josh

Today, we made truffles! We decided to keep it simple, because we'd never made truffles before.....and we covered some in powdered cocoa, and some in chopped almonds. They came out delicious, and tasted like REAL truffles! (like from a store or something!)
Here's how we did it...

What you need:
1/2 cup of heavy cream

1/4 cup of butter
16 ounces of bittersweet chocolate

some cocoa powder & some chopped almonds for decoration!

Steps:
First, we chopped the bittersweet chocolate pretty finely, and put it in a bowl.....




next, we heated up the heavy cream and the butter in a medium saucepan (stirring, to make sure the cream didnt set.)....at the first signs of bubbles, we removed the cream&butter mixture and poured it into the chocolate, stirring it, and melting it. This made the ganache.



We covered the ganache with aluminum foil, and let it sit in the fridge for ........about 4 hours. Don't take it out too early, because sometimes it takes a little longer for it to set. After this, we just rolled the ganache into little balls, and covered them in cocoa powder and some in chopped almonds. Another thing to try would be to re-refrigerate the ganache balls and heat up a little bit more chocolate and cover the cold balls in the melted chocolate, and then roll THAT in the cocoa powder. (we didn't do that.)


TADA!!!

We had a bunch of left over chocolate, so we decided to make ....chocolate covered strawberries!
We just melted the chocolate in the microwave, and dipped the strawberries (and anything else that we had in the kitchen. everything is better with chocolate!) in it.........so good!