Foooooood

Kitchendle

It’s the 21st Century, baby!

Creamy smoked chicken, bacon and mushroom fettuccine

Ingredients

1 small onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
One pack (400 gr) bacon, cut in small pieces
One punnet mushrooms, halved or quartered

2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped
375ml Light & Creamy evaporated milk
1 tablespoon flour

1 x 400g packet fresh egg or tri-colour fettuccine
olive oil, to drizzle

2 smoked chicken breasts, cut in 1cm cubes

Instructions

1. Heat oil in a frying pan. Gently fry onion and garlic. Add bacon. Cook for 2 minutes. Add mushrooms. Cook for 2 more minutes.

2. Add basil, rosemary, evaporated milk and flour to pan mixture. Bring to a light boil, stirring regularly, so it doesn’t stick to pan. Allow to simmer until it thickens.

3. Cook fettuccine following packet directions. Drain. Drizzle with a little olive oil and set aside.

4. Add smoked chicken to pan. Cook for 1-2 minutes. Add cooked fettuccine to coat in creamy mixture. Cook for about 1 minute until food is heated through.

2012-06-13 by Foooooood Geek 2

Rosemary Chicken

Went to the Fishhoek Pick & Pay looking for vegetables, found chicken at R19.99 a kilo. Probably genetically engineered and so full of hormones I’ll start growing breasts, but hey, the price was good.

Made a marinade mix using 3/4 cup olive oil, six teaspoons lemon juice, lots of garlic, two teaspoons mustard powder, half a handful of fresh rosemary and a couple of grinds of black pepper. Marinaded the chicken in this for a day or so, then put the chicken and sauce in a corningware dish, added a handful of cherry tomatoes, and stuck it in the oven at 180 for an hour or so.

Very good.

2011-03-06 by Foooooood 0

Christmas cooking

We had the in-laws over for Christmas, and for the first time since Tanya and I’ve been together we also had the kids for the whole time (their stepmother got snowed in in the UK, only flew out this week).

Braai-ed steak (porterhouses from Constantia P&P — and they even had brussel sprouts) on Friday, with potatoes in foil in the coals, always good.

Tanya insists on turkey, this year I wizened up and brined it for only about 10 or 12 hours in 2 litres of apple juice, some vinegar, a few oranges, ginger… basically a variation on this theme (Close to, if not all, of our turkeys are imported butterballs. Brine these for too long and it gets overpowering. That happened last year. Half a day seems perfect). Of course I didn’t smoke it, I stuck it in the oven over a roasting pan with the giblets, half an onion and some water in it.

Turkey was great, so was the ham MIL brought. Gravy (stuff from pan, minus the boney bits, food processed) was excellent.

And of course there was Christmas pudding and Christmas cake and trifle (which lasted until Monday, the trfle, that is. We still have cake…).

Present from the in-laws was a pressure cooker. Used that to make a stock from the leftover turkey. This worked so well that I then made a meat stock followed by a chicken stock — I had five or six 2L ice cream containers full of frozen stock bits that I hadn’t got around to.

The beef stock went into a stew on Monday. The left-over turkey + stock will go into a risotto next week. Last night was a more mundane but still excellent pastorie hoender (I’m sure I’ve posted my recipe somewhere, but can’t find it right now… blogfodder, yay!). Tonight is a beef tomato bredie using a bunch of tomatoes I bought cheap and froze a month or so ago.

We live high on the hog.

2010-12-29 by Foooooood 1

Cholesterol Quiche

This is the kind of thing I get up to when I’m home alone.

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I had some leftover puff pastry, lots of eggs, and a tub of cream a week past its expiry date but! still good!

Started with half a kilo of spicy sausage, skinned, fried, with a coarsely chopped onion. Added to this some tomato, spices, and about half a cup of three chili chutney. While this is cooling down, blind bake the crust. Beat four eggs, add cream, mix with meat. Cheese. Don’t forget the cheese. Pour into crust.

Some people sprinkle flour on the crust before pouring the sauce in. It’s supposed to keep the crust dry or something. I did. Worked for me.

Bake until it looks OK (180 for 20 minutes worked for me).

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Almost perfect (It needs bacon. With bacon, it would have been perfect. Everything’s perfect with bacon :-)

2010-06-07 by Foooooood 1

Nostalgie

Dis ‘n eetplek. In Baron van Reede straat. Ek is nie honger nie. Glad nie. But the smell of the buffet is going to drive me to gluttony.

Kêrel langs my voel dieselfde. Bel pêlle om te kom help vreet.

Sê vir my ma ek het dapper gesterf.

2010-04-03 by Farting around Foooooood 0

3-phase redundancy

So there I was, pottering around home yesterday morning, and suddenly the lights go out. And the bleating of the UPS reaches my ear. Some inspection shows that the fridge is still working, Tamsyn is still happily playing on her computer, and all the trip switches including the big ones in the box outside are happy.

Further inspection shows that we have one phase of the three phase circuit, and even further inspection shows some very dodgy looking wiring on the pole side of the feed.

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So Tanya gets instructions to phone council and I bugger off to work.

Long story short, at 1800 it was starting to get dark inside the house, and we still had only the one phase.

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Battleshort!  I disconnected the two dead phases, and shorted all three phases together on “my” side of the mains breaker (which is the bottom of the bottom left switch in the first picture, but I did it at the input side of the breaker that feeds the garage, just because it was more convenient.

So around quarter past eight, just as I’ve put the bread in the oven [1], the crew pitches.

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Of course, they had to cut all power to fix the feed, and when they reconnected the power everything now hanging off the one phase was cold, so that tripped the outside breaker, which lead to the quickest removal of a kludge you can think of (figured I had to remove all evidence of my meddling before they came inside to look why the lights were not burning…)

[1] We had friends over, and I make Pioneer Woman‘s Marlboro Man’s Birthday Dinner (well, the pan fried steak with blue cheese sauce, crash hot potatoes, and buttered rosemary rolls part of it). With store-bought dough in my black pot, Porterhouse steaks from Constantia Pick & Pay, and lemme tellya, that blue cheese sauce is something else.

2010-01-27 by Foooooood Geek House 0

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

I mentioned the worm farm before. Turns out, if you feed them bits of tomato, you get a garden full of tomato plants. And that leads to lots and lots of tomatoes :-)

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Only one thing to do! Deb’s slow roasted tomatoes!

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Halve tomatoes (this takes a helluva long time). Cover with oil and herbs (I did this in a bowl).

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Spread on baking sheet.

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Roast for three hours at a touch over 100C.

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This took care of about two thirds of the tomatoes. Here’s the rest, covered with boiling water…

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… and skinned (this, also, is a helluva job). The skins etc goes back to the worms, of course.

I used these to make tomato bredie. Used beef, this time (a 1.1 kg hunk of silverside, cut into cubes), did the flour thing, did the space thing, and eventually did the dumplings thing. No pictures, we were too hungry by then :-)

And by the looks of things, there’s about twice as many tomatoes still on the way…

2010-01-04 by Foooooood 0

Food to make a vegetarian cry

Last night I made Pioneer Woman‘s Beef Stew with Mushrooms. And it ROCKED.

So here’s the interesting part. Right now, at the SPAR around the corner, beef goulash sells for R59.99, while corned beef sells for R49.99. It seems like a sin to cut a hunk of meat into little cubes, but it’s cheaper, so what the hell.

I knew that the corned beef would make the dish very salty, so I didn’t add any additional salt.

Used 750ml of meat stock that I’d cooked a few months ago — this is the kind of nom you miss out on if you feed the bones to the family dog :-)

Highly recommended.

2009-12-04 by Foooooood 1

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