Coalfish à la bordelaise, courtesy of Käpt’n Iglo.
A salad of lettuce, carrots and 1/2 apple with a dollop of yoghurt.
The white was properly chilled now.
ETA 2020-04-29 (because for no more than two consecutive posts rule):
Smoked trout filets (it said Oncorhynchus mykiss on the wrapper, I hope that’s correct) with two kinds of horseradish (creamy, hot) and ohmygodit’s sourdough1)!!!
Salad as before as I still had the other halve of that apple.
1) Or, as it’s called around here, “bread”. Rye & wheat mix (on a sliding scale or ratios) is the default (Graubrot), followed by rye (Roggenbrot), followed by wheat (Weißbrot), followed by Schwarzbrot, wich is also rye but so dark it’s basically borderline Pumpernickel.
If you use rye and and want your dough to rise, sourdough is the way to go.
(A couple of years ago my dad tried to bake a Roggenkastenbrot and failed in an interesting way. It thoroughly failed to raise at all, and while slicing it he seriously considered using powertools at some point. Everybody tasted it. For fear of damaging our dental work the method to do that was to break off a little bit and pretend it was a lozenge until it was soft enough to chew it a bit. The rest of the bread was broken up into little bits with a hammer and fed to the segulls a couple of days later on a day trip to the seaside. Every seagull that snatched a bit of bread out of the air lost a noticeable amount of height right after catching it.)
If the label was honest, it is indeed Rainbow trout – specifically steelhead (which is a salmonid). However, some food producers are sometimes… how shall we say… less than honest. Short of DNA testing, it is often hard to know for certain. Odds are in your favor, though.
If I have but one rule to offer about cooking it is this: unless you literally cannot afford to replace your ingredients and doing so means you will literally starve – do not be afraid to fuck up.
Cooking is not chemistry. Some elements of baking are, but the kitchen is more forgiving than the lab (save a few fringe cases).
So go ahead and combine some weird things. Use ingredients off label. Just make sure things are cooked to a safe temperature. You might stumble across something delicious. Or disastrous… but then you know what doesn’t work.
Brought to you by literally throwing some barely thawed chicken thighs, a take-out packet of soy sauce, some bottled lime juice, miso paste and water (measurements? what measurements?) in the InstantPot and pressure cooking for 11/2 hours. (And it worked).
I made it (for the most part; see below). Very good
I didn’t have any vanilla, which would add to it I’m sure. And I didn’t have apricot jam for the top, which would have added to it too. It definitely would be nice with a fruity accompaniment of some sort.
Sound advice - some of my go-to dishes and techniques started out as experiments. I’ve avoided disasters so far, but more than once I’ve found I needed to tweak something the next time.
It’s all fun and games until you find yourself hauling out multiple, full garbage bags of jelly & ketchup packets. (This happened to my mom, trying to clean out my grandparents’ attic.)
Love it. You don’t see pasta alla sarde in the US very often outside Italian neighborhoods, but it’s one of the underrated basic pasta recipes (like carbonara and caccio e pepe).
This is one of my favorite parts of cooking - I love the process of tweaking and troubleshooting! It drives my husband crazy when I start critiquing my creations, but I genuinely enjoy hypothesizing about what impact my proposed changes will have. This is probably why I like baking as much as I do.
