Category Archives: Reblogged from….

For posts that are reblogged from other sources

Salmon with asparagus in an Epoisses sauce

Posted on by

Epoisses is one of my most favorite cheeses–not necessarily easy to get. I don’t usually think of cheese with fish, but I want to give this a try. Now to find some Epoisses. . . .

Keith's avatarFrom Alfredo's With Love

IMG_5765

What I want to prove here is how well you can pair a cheese sauce with fish. The EpoIsses sauce is lighter than the one I would normally have with meat – and the flavour really enhances the flavours of the salmon. I used 100gm of Epoisses cheese chopped up and melted slowly in a dry pan. Then sprinkle with a grind or two of black pepper, and then add 150 ml of single cream. Gently warm through – it will thicken a little but not too much.

I served it with poached salmon, asparagus and oven cubed potatoes roasted with thyme and garlic.

If you have never thought to try this – you must. Not an obvious pairing but …..IT WORKS!

View original post

Apricot and Ginger Tarte Tatin

Posted on by

I’d love to get my hands on some really good apricots! The ginger with this sounds yummy!

Linda Duffin's avatarMrs Portly's Kitchen

Image of Howard's apricot bushes

I experienced serious fruit tree envy recently when visiting Kenton Hall in Suffolk, home of the McVeigh family and their longhorn cattle. It’s also home to Aunt Paddy and Uncle Howard, possessors of a lovingly-tended kitchen garden and crucially, of three or four espaliered apricots. Howard is rightly proud of them and says they produce a good crop of fine-flavoured fruit.

We have apples and pears, plums and gages, quince and cherries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, tayberries, gooseberries, red-, white- and blackcurrants and something Dutch I can never remember the name of. What we don’t have are any apricots, so I was well jell, as my nieces and nephews probably wouldn’t be caught dead saying. I did, however, manage to source a few punnets in our local Co-op.

Image of bowlful of apricots

Usually I make apricots into a conserve, which is without a doubt the most popular jam in the Portly preserve cupboard. This time…

View original post 72 more words

Easy Foolproof Béarnaise Sauce

Posted on by

Béarnaise sauce is great. It can be made without a lot of fuss as you see here.

StefanGourmet's avatarStefan's Gourmet Blog

DSC08400
Béarnaise is one of the classic sauces from French cuisine and it is great with steak. The traditional way of preparing it au bain marie requires quite a bit of skill, as the sauces curdles easily. It also requires you to make clarified butter first. And even though you should make clarified butter to cook the steak anyway, using a slightly different technique you can make sauce béarnaise easily with minimal risk of curdling.

DSC08398
Last night’s dinner: a nice juicy steak cooked sous-vide and then seared quickly in very hot clarified butter, hand cut fries, sauce béarnaise, a green salad, and a nice glass of Saint-Émilion Grand Cru.

There are some variation on the recipe, but the basic idea of béarnaise is a hollandaise with tarragon. Some recipes also add parsley and chervil. Some recipes use tarragon vinegar, but instead you can just as easily use the stems of the…

View original post 376 more words

Radishes: Easter Egg vs. French Breakfast

Posted on by

Radishes are a sure sign of spring to me. The ones you grow yourself will be quite different from the one you get in the plastic bags at the supermarket.

Radish sandwiches are awesome–with a little salt and European-style butter on pumpernickel (especially freshly baked) accompanied by a glass of champagne.

We don’t usually think of radishes being treated as a vegetable.  Here are some other things to do with them, e.g.  radish soup.

Sharon Rawlette's avatargettin' fresh!

I grow a lot of radishes. My husband, who’s not keen on too many vegetables, loves them. As does his father, who regularly sits down to an entire bowl, which he eats plain except for a sprinkling of salt. So every spring I make sure to put in a healthy radish patch, just to make sure I have some left for me!

Radish Varieties L: Easter Egg, R: French Breakfast

The two varieties I’ve been regularly growing for the past few years are Easter Egg and French Breakfast. Easter Egg is actually a mixture of varieties, which is one of its primary advantages. Radishes grow very quickly (mine mature anywhere from 4-6 weeks from sowing, depending on the weather), and they also quickly pass their prime. Sowing a mixture of varieties helps space out the harvest a bit, and with Easter Egg, you have that variation built in.

French Breakfast radishes mature slightly earlier than…

View original post 331 more words

Roast NY Strip Loin

Posted on by

This is a great way to do strip. If you’re cooking for one, you can use a strip steak cut about 2-2-1/2-inches thick. It gives some “leftovers” for a roast beef sandwich. It’s one way to cook roast beef for a single-serving meal with not too many leftovers.

Russ's avatarThe Domestic Man

The NY strip loin, sometimes called loin roast or top loin, is a cut taken from the top of the cow’s short loin. The short loin is located near the spine, past the ribs but before the tenderloin and round. This is a crowded area of the cow in terms of butchery, as the porterhouse and tenderloin also come from this section. In fact, this strip loin is basically an uncut series of NY strip steaks. Confused yet? Don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to break down a cow in order to cook up this delicious specimen.

We’re going to roast this loin in a method similar to my most popular post, this Perfect Eye of Round. We’ll blast the roast at 500F to create a nice crust, then reduce heat to 250F until it’s medium-rare.

Not one to leave a job half done, I also roasted…

View original post 108 more words

Homemade Chipotles in Adobo Sauce

Posted on by

I just have to pass this along–chipotle peppers are something I use rather often. I think this will beat the tinned ones from the supermarket.

StefanGourmet's avatarStefan's Gourmet Blog

DSC07025
My favorite kind of chiles are chipotles because of their smokiness. Chipotles in adobo sauce, a sauce made from tomatoes and ancho chiles, are a great condiment. I love them for instance with chicken, mushrooms and cream. Chipotles in adobo sauce are available in cans, but since I like to make everything from scratch, I wanted to try making my own chipotles in adobo. I used a recipe by Pati’s Mexican table. It wasn’t hard at all, and the result was amazing. Chipotles in adobo from a can are great, but these homemade chipotles in adobo sauce have a more complex and well-rounded flavor. I will definitely make them again. I made a few adjustments, most importantly not using fresh tomatoes because they are out of season (and even if they were in season, tomatoes here are not that great). Here’s my version.

Ingredients

DSC06983
For about 850 ml (3…

View original post 349 more words

Perfect homemade pasta every time

Posted on by

A simple recipe for homemade pasta. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, you really should get one. They are not really expensive and make a lot of cooking so simple.

homecookexplorer's avatarhomecookexplorer

This is going to be my shortest blog ever.

But it will show how you can make perfect homemade pasta each and every time.

Here is the trick. I’ll assume you have a pasta maker already.

Start by weighing your eggs (not your flour). 1 egg per person eating your wonderful ooh! and aahhh! homemade pasta.

Next divide the weight of the eggs by .6. This will be the weight of flour to use.

So if you are making pasta for 4 and your eggs weigh out to 215g, then 215/.6 = 358 which would be how much flour to add. The more precise you can be, the better will be your result.

This quite precise ratio will give you the precise amount of hydration to your dough so that when you put it through your pasta roller, it will be perfect. No extra flour needed, no extra water, no…

View original post 67 more words

A thousand names for eggplant

Posted on by

I’ve always wondered about all the different names and wide use of eggplant. Here is a great post to answer some of those questions.

Aneela Mirchandani's avatarThe Odd Pantry

Eggplant display (source: via Wikimedia Commons, user Phoebe (Own work)) Eggplant display (source: via Wikimedia Commons, user Phoebe (Own work))

Writing the eggplant post last week left me in a quandary. Since I live in the US, calling it eggplant seems natural. But then all through my childhood I called it baingan in Hindi and brinjal in English. Some of my readers from the UK will probably want to call it aubergine, while Australians, I hear, prefer the term egg fruit.

United by a common language indeed!

Well it turns out that the names of this humble vegetable have come about through a global game of Telephone (Chinese Whispers in India) involving empires and migrations of peoples. Sometimes the names have gone around the world and even come back to the source, changed, to go another round.

Intriguing.

Wight, R., Illustrations of Indian botany, or figures illustrative of each of the natural orders of Indian plants, vol. 2: t. 166 (1850) [Goovindo] (Source: http://plantillustrations.org) Wight, R., Illustrations of Indian botany, or figures illustrative of each of the natural orders of Indian plants, vol. 2: t. 166 (1850) [Goovindo] (Source: http://plantillustrations.org)…

View original post 1,372 more words

Baked Feta Cheese with whatever you are growing in your veggie patch

Posted on by

I love feta cheese–I’d never thought to do something so simple and easy for a summer lunch or supper.

Promenade Claire's avatarPromenade Plantings

The allotment sorely needs my attention right now, it will be planting time soon and a) I haven’t done any preparation and b) and even more pressing is that until today I haven’t sown any seeds.

I have a To Do List in my head – clearing the winter debris, tidying jobs abound, a new path to be cleared between the greenhouse and shed and talking of the greenhouse it’s on my to do list too!  But I’m not going to dwell on the To Do List as there’s a tendency for it to all start feeling a bit overwhelming. I remind myself this is a hobby, a pleasure and an escape from TO DO lists. Instead I accept that a busy life means it’s a case of do what and when I can and while I’m there pick a few leaves of winter greens like Chard and Kale, dig…

View original post 412 more words