To me, nothing screams holidays like the color Red. Whether it be Santa,
or his faithful helpers,
the color red brings to mind Christmasy thoughts.
So, the challenge for this round is to incorporate "Red" into your dish. Interpret this however you like. Maybe you'll want to use a red ingredient.
Maybe you'll have a totally different take.
Or maybe you'll be creative enough to think of something way outside the box. I know I'll be voting based on not just how good the thing looks, but also how the theme is applied.
I think, given the hectic nature of the holidays, that we should leave this one open until the 2nd of January.
Have fun, ya'll, and happy holidays!
So this is something I made up on the fly a couple of years ago, but everyone loves it, so it's become a thing I often bring to family parties. Heat garlic in olive oil, and then throw in raw peeled shrimp (I chose BP dispersant Gulf shrimp over slave labor Thai shrimp). Take these seasonings and throw them in: That's pepper, salt, chili powder, steak seasoning, paprika, horseradish, and fish fry masala. Cook the heck out of it. Then serve it with toothpicks to dip in blue cheese dressing. It's pretty red, and it's very tasty. You can't add too much horseradish or paprika. It lasts about 15 minutes at my family gatherings.
I'm gonna suggest extending this through the weekend, due to low participation (not naming names, mk). Holidays are busy. Get on the horse people >:-( kleinbl00, veen, Complexity, _refugee_, flagamuffin, zebra2, rjw, wasoxygen, humanodon, ghostoffuffle, rezzeJ, thenewgreen, flagamuffin, insomniasexx, Meriadoc, OftenBen, ButterflyEffect
I could use more of a deadline. I spent 4 hours at urgent care last night with a brutal, brutal earache that erupted out of nowhere. I had my last two cavities filled without novocaine but I was hurtin' so bad my blood pressure was up 20 points. They gave me 60mg of keterolac intramuscular. The really stupid part is I had to get to the urgent care via taxi because my car has a flat... and I can't use the spare I have because it's the wrong size and I've been waiting for the tire store to order me the right one for six weeks. Fuckin' comedy of errors up in this bitch. And then of course the taxi app timed out and the cabbie ran my card twice so my 10 minute cab ride ended up costing $45 and took me to the urgent care that stopped taking appointments 3 1/2 hours before closing (fuck you, Minute Clinic) so I had to walk a half mile to another one.
No objections, though I may post another submission. I dig these things, it's a great excuse to do something I love. Maybe I'll do a proper one for 3 since I was too overwhelmed with life when that one was going on.
I cooked me up some redness tonight. Here we go: First, what do you drink while creating a "red" meal? Well, beet juice of course: Well, beet juice alone would be pretty nasty so I added lemon juice and apple juice all juiced in that 1980's juicer. That thing is so loud it sounds like a plane is landing in your kitchen. While enjoying my beet juice, I roasted some red bell peppers: I peeled and de-seeded some cucumber and added the roasted red pepper after skinning it: I then sautéed some shallots, garlic, radishes and ginger and added some cumin in too. I added this to the cucumber and red pepper and then got out the ole hand blender and turned it in to soup. With the help of some salt, pepper and lemon juice. Add some plain yogurt, some dashes of hot sauce, some baked tofu and some quinoa and you've got yourself one hell of a soup. I could have added some beet to make it more red than orange, but it would have fucked up the flavor. My wife literally said, "yum" when she ate this: It seemed like a no-brainer to make a salad. Here's my take: Mixed greens, radish, raspberries, tomatoes and radicchio: Now, for the "center of the plate," I give you medium rare sirloin atop asparagus sautéed in bacon fat, thinly sliced salted radishes, goats cheese crumbles and a garnish of fresh cooked bacon:
What's holding you back from seriously cooking right now? Is it a space thing? A money thing? A both thing?
Time, space, money and inclination. Although I recall I bookmarked an "awesome meals with three ingredients" hubski post -- perhaps that's a later grubski idea. Mostly I'd rather invest the time doing other things. When my life is a bit more stable that will change. EDIT: I should say that "seriously cook" is what I call the grubski entries. I seriously cook in that I don't go out to eat and make all my own meals, and every one of them has the various food groups except meat. Depends on your definition.
Thanks! Sometimes they just look good and others they actually taste good. This one actually tasted good, which is nice.
I'm posting now, because I'm out of time. However, this project was an abject failure. I attempted to make a red velvet cake for a Christmas Eve party, and then again for a New Year's Eve party. What I learned was that cooking gluten free, which I do often and is no different than cooking with gluten, is waaaaaay easier than baking gluten free. Anyway, here is my abortive experiment. First, I mixed up the main ingredients: Then, I made my red food coloring by boiling beets for 10 minutes or so, removing the beets, and reducing the water until it was only a couple tablespoons of volume: Then, I mixed the red water with cocoa powder and vanilla: The red looks decent there, but it turns out that beet color isn't even 10% as brilliant as food coloring, so the end result wasn't exactly red: Doesn't look bad all things considered, right? Well, I tasted the batter before cooking, and thought it tasted like shit, but that maybe it would morph upon cooking. It didn't. It had a funk to it that I can't really describe, and that I would never serve anyone. The recipe I consulted called for canola oil, and I thought perhaps that the high quality canola oil I was using had a pungent taste that the white trash on All Recipes might not be used to. So, I made a second attempt with good ole Wesson vegetable oil, and that same foul taste permeated the end result, so I had to conclude that it was the Bob's Red Mill gluten free flour. I don't know what else it could be, as all the other ingredients are tasty and standard. That flour was perfect for savory things I've tried in the past, but maybe not so good for sweet things. kleinbl00, what does your wife use? Maybe you mentioned she mixes her own, if memory serves??? Disappointed in the result as I was, I'm not discouraged. Trial and error is part of the fun. F for final result, but A for effort.
Hey, at least you got something out the gate. I'm so fuckin' sick over here I queued up some Garth Brooks. ON GLUTEN-FREE BAKING So when you work with flour, there are only three or four different kinds of flour you really need to worry about, depending on what you're doing. All-purpose, bread flour, cake flour, whole wheat. What changes is the amount of gluten and the mixability. When you work with gluten-free baking, you're attempting to imitate the gluten and mixing characteristics of those four flavors using things that have no gluten. What you end up with is a constellation of different mixtures, each of very narrow purpose. More than that, they each have their own taste and consistency and you have to match up what you're attempting with the best combo of particles and flavors... 'cuz some shit be funky. You don't wanna use chickpea flour in a tart, for example. My wife has somewhere between eight and ten different kinds of flour that she blends per the instructions of whatever she's attempting. That's another important part - turning something gluten-free on your own is an exercise in trial and error. Her family has these semi-wretched christmas cookies that are basically a sugar cookie coated in icing. Converting them to gluten-free took about two hours of research (cumulative) and three attempts before she had a satisfactory result. They still have a whang of something (think it's chickpea flour) that the bona fides do not. They're also crisper and much fiddlier to work with. And again, getting there took three batches. She's got maybe four gluten-free cookbooks, as well as a subscription to Simply Gluten Free. She's adopted a few recipes out of there; these pancakes are particularly useful in that you can make up the powder, store it in the fridge for months and then use it like Krusteaz or Bisquick when you want to make pancakes. There's no such thing as a free lunch, though; that recipe of 12 4" pancakes has 2400 calories. Shit is fuckin' Lembas bread, only not filling. So I don't eat them. My 2-year-old daughter, however, who has jumped from 3rd percentile to 12th, piled away five of them last night so that's a win. As far as cookbooks, the Babycakes classics book is full of plenty of incredibly delicious, sweet-as-an-indian-donut-dipped-in-karo pastries that you can't go wrong with. As a bonus, you'll never need syrup ever again! The rest of our repertoire, unfortunately, is beat-to-fit, painted-to-match lore scraped off the Internet and modified over several iterations.
Yikes. When Garth Brooks makes you feel less like shitting yourself, you must be close to death! At the local fancy grocery store, they sell four varieties of pre-mixed gluten free flour. I'm gonna experiment with some others before I resort to mixing my own. Not saying I won't do it eventually, but I'm definitely going to try to take the easy way out before going for the nuclear option.
I wouldn't look at it as a nuclear option. I'd look at it as cooking. You can head down to Home Depot and buy a bag of Redi-Mix. it'll do okay for a patio. but if you're pouring a foundation you mix concrete differently than if you're pouring a patio or a sidewalk. It's all cement, water and filler, though. Recipes more than anything. Get the Babycakes book and notice the different way they blend shit up. I think most of their baking isn't "gluten free flour" it's "these three flours this time" and "these other two that time." it's cheaper that way, too.
'k. So santa brought a new toy: Which, when combined with "red", either means borscht, gazpacho, or some tomato-like thing, particularly when one is violently allergic to red peppers. There had been plans to photograph my wife's cranberry "salad" (which involves cranberries, pineapple tidbits, whipped cream and marshmallows) but on the day there was too much going on. And besides, no hand blender. Which means HUMANODON SAUCE REDUX Previously I've done this with heirlooms. It's f'in January so SoCal or not, we're using whatever Chile's got this time of year. There's a lot of chopping in this recipe, but we'll spare that. The truly fussy bit is the peeling of the tomatoes. I have it down to a routine - core everything, then put one in boiling water. While that one's boiling you're hosing the previous one down in cold water and peeling it in the sink. Once that's done you're taking your onion, your carrot, your basil stalks, your garlic and your bay leaf and you're sauteeing it. The stove in this apartment has two burners that are concentric. That means you've got a little burner to the right on the knob, and a little burner and a big burner to the left on the knob. "Low" on the little burner is truly low. "Low" on the big burner is PLEASE SCORCH MY SHIT WITHOUT DELAY. Notice the blackened bits. But, we soldier on, adding the tomatoes, a glass of wine, and some parmesan. Worthy of note: when I make this recipe with heirlooms, you have to hit it with like an entire bottle of wine because there's no moisture in them. Beefsteaks? Yeah, a glass was plenty. Now we have to wait a little bit. Let's see what's in the mail. NICE. How's that stuff coming along? Ehh, not quite there. We got a couple other boxes... Hey, cool! it's that $900 thing that cost you $150 to fix instead of $600 which will make it easier to sell your $2000 purchase for $5k or more! Dizzope! How's the spaghetti sauce coming? Well, we're getting there. Prolly time to whip out the widdamaker: I was hoping my daughter would be terrified of it, as she is of everything from the Roomba to the coffee grinder. She was not. Apparently genuine stainless steel whirring blades of death do not hold a candle to an RC dustbuster. Now's probably the time to make up for the oregano I forgot to put in. I grind my own meat straight into the pan; chicken plus oregano plus garlic equals yum: And we took the pan down a notch 'cuz I need that big boy: So my wife eats gluten free when she can. Ralph's had gluten-free egg noodles for $2 that claimed to be Italian. Okay, we'll try them. I just had to share this: That's right, kids - they're selling "gluten free" canned tomatoes in a "BPA free" glass jar. I kinda feel like I'm being trolled. Delicious as always, but kinda tried and true. Perhaps if I wasn't 2 days out of the ER (and hadn't spent 5 hours running errands) I might have improvised more. As it is, mangia.
side note: XCOM: EU/EW if you haven't played it already, is freaking fantastic, aside from the fact that occasionally enemies just don't spawn in the map and the mission can't/won't end. Save before every mission is my advice. I'm thinking of a 3rd playthrough, with almost 100 hours in it on Steam.
Chefs, want to make sure you didn't miss this post due to the lack of the shout-outs. kleinbl00, veen, Complexity,_refugee_, flagamuffin, zebra2, rjw, wasoxygen, humanodon, ghostoffuffle, rezzeJ, thenewgreen, b_b, flagamuffin, insomniasexx, Meriadoc, OftenBen, ButterflyEffect
Grubski is too much fun to let it just wither away. Make a voting post or lets move on with another challenge.
Thanks. I actually really look forward to these things. Today is grocery store day and having to shop without a contest in mind is less fun :)