In a Hurry?

• Baste squash halves with oil
• Add pepper and salt
• Roast in an oven
• Scrape out the flesh and add spaghetti sauce

There I was, feeling a bit peckish, thinking about that honey melon in the fridge. I grabbed it, took my kitchen knife and started cutting, wondering about that big stem and how hard it was to cut it in half. Well, it turns out that I have no clue when it comes to fruit or vegetables. I was cutting into spaghetti squash, not into some honey melon. Of course, I didn’t want to let it go to waste and had to look up how to deal with it and found a plethora of recipes. Most of them tell you to treat the squash as spaghetti and add something you would add to spaghetti as well. Impatient, as I usually am, I picked up ideas for ingredients on the handful of websites that I had visited in the process. I had a plan for the sauce: Onions, garlic, tomatoes and the green onions I had left from that orange chicken experiment.

Preparing the squash is simple. Most of the websites suggested roasting it in the oven. That’s what I did. Cut the spaghetti squash in half, scrape out the seeds and soft bits with a spoon. Baste the cut side and the scraped out core with some olive oil and add salt and pepper. Line a baking sheet with aluminum foil and place both halves on it, cut side down. Roast it for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees.

For my sauce, I diced a small onion, chopped some garlic into pieces, opened a can of diced tomatoes and sliced my green onions. I did have fresh tomatoes, but I somehow hate to cook them. They usually go into a salad or get sliced for a burger or a sandwich. 30 minutes into the roasting of the squash, I started to sautee the onions in oil, added the garlic and a bit later, I added the diced tomatoes. I waited for this to cook through and added the green onions at the end, not giving them any chance to get soft or even burn.

I took out the baking sheet and turned the squash around. There was steam coming out from underneath the squash, but I could avoid it. The fork went into the squash without resistance and I started scraping the flesh out and transferred it onto the plates. I added my sauce and topped it with some grated cheese. Good stuff. The squash had a slightly sweet and nutty flavor and was a bit crunchy, call it al-dente. It’s quite nice as a summer dish, certainly not as heavy as the typical winter squash.

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In a Hurry?

• Forget about it, it's way to complicated
• TL;DC too long, don't cook

Here’s another success story! Not! For a couple of days now I’ve been thinking about chicken recipes. And I actually tried some of them: Last week I had chicken breast marinated in a lemon juice and olive oil mix. The result was interesting, but nothing much to talk about. Later, I tried myself on a honey mustard chicken in the crock pot. That got way to dry and left a sticky mess in the crock pot. And today, I found this: Orange Chicken. Sounds easy, especially if you have experimented with orange and lemon sauces before.

But once I had lined up the ingredients, I started to get annoyed. For starters the recipe asked to batter the chicken pieces and then deep fry them. I have trouble breading chicken breasts and pork chops, because it is such a slow process. My ADD keeps me from rolling two dozen pieces of chicken in egg and flour and then slowly drop them into the oil. I just put the pieces in a plastic bag, added some flour, salt and pepper, rolled it around for a while and pan fried it.

What’s worse is the sauce. Go back to the recipe’s list of ingredients where it says Orange sauce and start counting. A dozen different ingredients, and water even twice: Orange and lemon juice, soy sauce, vinegar, I am not going to repeat the list here. It’s a recipe not fit for this blog. Even if it turned out well. Ginger actually helped with that. If you really want to give something an Asian touch, add ginger. Soy sauce is just not subtle enough. And the recipe actually helped me getting closer to conquer the rice. But that’s for a post somewhere down the road, once the results stabilize.

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In a Hurry?

• Remove seed and chop a cucumber
• Add garlic and blend it coarsely
• Mix in Dill, spices and greek yogurt

Tzatziki is a recipe which made me call my mom. “Hey, what exactly went into the Tzatziki you usually made”? She offered it usually at parties accompanied by a warning to everybody about how much garlic went into it. You really don’t need many ingredients and the ones that go into it are easily dealt with. Tzatziki is mostly a fight against water. We use greek yogurt since it contains way less water than plain standard yogurt.

Start by peeling the cucumber and remove the seeds. You’ll see how much water is in there, once you’ve done it for the first time. Cut the cucumber into 1/4″ slices. You could actually dry them here with a paper towel or just let them drain a bit in a colander.

Mince some garlic next and put it together with the cucumber slices. Chop it together, either in a small food processor or like I did with a hand blender. You see in the result, that there is still a lot of water, but without much impact for the final product.

Finally, add the yogurt into the mix, 2 table spoons of dill and salt and pepper to taste. I continued with the hand blender. Otherwise, you could just whisk the yogurt and the spices into the cucumber mix.

The final result is already very tasty with a slow kick of garlic in the back. But leave it in the fridge for an hour or two. Tzatziki goes well with pita chips, pita bread or just regular white bread as a dip. It is a must for gyro as long as you add fresh onions. Actually, all kind of meats will go well with it. And using it as a salad dressing is not unheard of.  How about a gyro salad? Some green salad, gyro slices and topped with some onion rings and tzatziki

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“Where did you get the recipe?” Are you not fucking listening? I just throw shit in a bowl I think would taste good together. It’s that easy. The only time I follow instructions is when I buy furniture from IKEA. I learned that lesson the hard way.

Seems we are not alone. Even if we have to deal with an A-hole. Here’s the full article: Kitchen Sink Salsa

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I learned how to cook corned beef and cabbage under her direction. But most interesting to me is the influence coming from neighboring New Bedford, MA, which has a large Portuguese community. Portuguese sausages in the form of Linguica and Chourico are good substitutes for somebody who grew up with Bratwurst, Polish and Vienna sausages. And it has to be Gaspar’s Sausage

That gives me obviously something to work with. That and the fact that my sister-in-law sent us Gaspar’s Sausage Gift Packs as a present “for emergencies”. One of those emergencies emerged this weekend, with lots of fresh banana pepper from the CSA in the fridge. I didn’t feel like cooking pork chops, the only fresh meet in the fridge at that point, but was staring at the Linguica in the freezer. Here comes dinner!

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Chopping Garlic can be done Goodfellas style with a razorblade. The idea there is to chop it so thin that it just dissolves when added to the oil in a pan. It looked good in the film but frankly it takes too long.

See here for the full article: Chopping Garlic – how to

It’s a nice website with only a few recipes, but certainly “Cook Like a Guy” style. However, you can’t leave comments, as there is some captcha bug.

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So you’ve entered into the world of barbecue. You’re cooking up some good shit. Your food has become the talk of the town. People are lining up to eat your ‘cue. Feels pretty good huh? Sure, you can walk the walk – but can you talk the talk? Can you shoot the shit while working your pit?

Like any profession or hobby, we barbecue gurus – wait that’s probably trade marked – we BBQ pitmasters have our own ways of speaking. Do you know the lingo?

Here’s the full article: Tuesday Tips: Barbecue Lingo I’ll have half a rack, fries and hush puppies. And some slaw.

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Let’s have a look what we have to deal with: Cooking, boiling, broiling, grilling, frying, roasting, baking, sautéing, steaming. Now for the research on the subject: http://goo.gl/cRffx

Cooking is the generic term for it all, which is already the first stumbling block, because in German, it has the same meaning as boiling. Boiling is cooking something in water brought to a boil, which usually happens around 100C or 212F.

Let’s call broiling a technicality and skip to grilling which is done on a grill, which in German is a rost. Rost is called a false friend, something that sounds familiar in the other language but has a different meaning. But let’s go back to grilling, which is applying heat to the subject, usually meat, with the grill keeping the meat from falling into the fire.

Frying is difficult, since a frying pan translated means roasting pan, which makes you want to get your head banged by one. Frying involves cooking in various amounts of oil. Sautéing covers the pan in a thin film, you need a good deal more for frying, and when deep frying, your subject, usually twinkies, is submerged in it.

I think roasting is grilling in a pan or on a baking(!&?%) sheet in the oven. Your subject is often basted in tasty goodness. Casseroles, in the oven, without a lid are baked. Baking in general applies to cakes, pastries and pizzas. In short, a lot of it involves dough, except for baked potatoes.

Steaming involves boiling water. The resulting vapor cooks the food while we try to keep the water away from the food. Back home, steaming involves German engineered pots, which makes it far more complicated than necessary and mostly overcooked.

But I still don’t have a term for cooking something in a casserole dish with the lid on.

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