Cooking

Basically Philly cheese steak over fries.

The steak was free.
Cost per person was $2.44

I've had a hankering for a reuben lately and corned beef brisket is still on sale. I whipped up some marble rye while the brisket cooked. So much better than store bought, at least around me.

$3.47 per sandwich

Don't know if it's a thing but I make Beefgur for my wife each evening. Beef tartare then pressed into a patty and seared like a burger before serving so still juicy inside. Then always chucked on tomato, onion, and cheese.

She hates the name but loves the taste lol

Corporate freezer fries. Wolf Brand Chili. Cheddar.

Cost per person: $5.50

Cost to make it from scratch would be about half that.

Took forever but it was savage.

I made it from this recipe. Substituted wine for extra stock.

Don't know if it's a thing but I make Scromelette for my wife each morning. Scrambled eggs on very low heat then folded into an omelette before serving so still creamy inside. Then always chucked on smashed avo.

She hates the name but loves the taste lol

Cucumber is better than lettuce on a BLT.

Cost per person, $5.10 8 oz of bacon per person.

This is the first time ever making beef cheeks. I don't even remember if I've had it before, but it was amaaaaazing. Just falls apart and so melty. You'd think it was marbled with fat to make it that way, but I think it's all of the connective tissues (collagen?) in the cheeks that just melt when you cook it for hours.

At hour 7, I rolled the cheeks over in the juice, and the fork was like a hot knife to butter 🤤

I don't know how my butcher got such big cheeks (lol..) but they were over 450g raw.. So I slow cooked them on high for 9 hours. Worth it.

My plating was no bueno, but you can zoom in and see how luscious the meat is. My stick blender also carked it part way through, so I ended up with bits of unblended carrot, onion, and celery in the gravy. Mashed red potatoes and green beans on the side.

Going to bed happy tonight.

https://www.recipetineats.com/slow-cooker-red-wine-beef-cheeks/

Bechamel sauce made with mild cheddar.

Cost per person $1.86

She wanted salad with pizza. I wanted pizza with salad.

I wanted to use up the last of the anchovies from the anchovy butter. She hates anchovies.

Total cost is $11 but there is a price per person asymmetry so it's not $5.50 per person.

I have a hangover. I bought these little single slices of spam in a CVS on a trip to the US recently. You also need to get Pam imported from the states as you can't buy it here. There were also frozen hashbrown triangles baking in the oven at the time of this photo, and a slice of sourdough bread in the toaster.

My first attempt at a quenelle... Needs practice, but not a bad go

My partner surprised me with a Yuto Omura's Japanese cuisine cookbook. I've been trying his recipes from his site (https://sudachirecipes.com/) and YT channel for about a year now. Every single recipe of his I tried has been an absolute slam dunk, sometimes helping me solve a particular recipe I've been trying to dial in for years (or decades). "Hm, sure, I'll get around to buying his cookbook at some point."

Oh, wow, I wish I'd gotten this book sooner.

There are elucidating primers and explanations, beautiful photographs, and just enough text to get you to your destination. The book + site + YT channel are force multipliers for each other. Even though I was using his website a lot, there are some recipe refinements in the book as he found tweaks and improvements. Yamitsuki (https://sudachirecipes.com/izakaya-salted-cabbage/), for example, has some tweaks in the book that I would have never imagined on my own.

And if you've never made yamitsuki, do yourself a huge favor. The website version of the recipe has been my most requested side ever. That shit gets mowed. down. Every time. Omura isn't kidding when he calls it addictive.

In addition to the great content, this is one of the best designed cookbooks I own: lay flat binding, two bookmark ribbons, a serious index (rather than an afterthought jammed into as few pages as possible), and a matte finish on the pages so that your fingerprints don't muck up the images. A lot of thought went into making a cookbook that people would want to use.

Edit: two words.

The ramen is made using a chicken broth and a spicy miso tare. Toppings I've chosen are shiitake mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, scallions, menma, egg and pork chashu.

The ramen is incomplete. It should be complete tomorrow but I couldn't wait to try it so I made myself a bowl.

What is incomplete is the egg still needs to marinate, the pork belly needs to both marinate and chill. Otherwise it was already pretty good.

As always my main complaint with making ramen is that the amount of time and waiting you need upfront is very high but if you make a lot of servings the average time per bowl isn't terrible.

Inspired by an interaction I had in the comments of the bread community recently.

The dough is exactly this recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe

Cheddar cheese stuffed between the edge of the dough and the pan to make a crisp on the crust

Sauce is basic tomato sauce from a can, garlic, basil, salt, and a bit of lao gan ma

Random smattering of salami from a costco charcuterie package

Low moisture mozzarella with a bit of parmesan added the second it came out of the oven

Anchovy butter is the perfect salty compliment to rich goose egg yolk.

Eggs were free. Bacon $2. Anchovy butter on scratch made bread: $3.40 Cost per person: $5.40

It's March and we all know what that means, St. Patrick's Day. All the grocery stores are running deals on brisket, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots.

I was able to score corned beef brisket for $3.49/lb, 8lbs of potatoes for $1.49, cabbage for $.79/lb, and carrots for $.99/lb.

$3.03 per person.

been guided by this recipe for quite a while:

recipe

I usually use ground beef; we buy from a Mennonite butcher @$8/lb (CAD), so not sure how that compares with bulk or supermarket pricing, but the whole thing would cost ~$12 CAD

I was recently struck with a half-baked idea to make a corned beef Wellington.

The inspiration is basically that I have a beef tenderloin sitting in my freezer that I was planning to make a beef Wellington with soon

And St Paddy's Day is coming up, and I was also debating on doing a corned beef.

I have some experience curing meat, I've made my own bacon and corned beef from scratch in the past, so this isn't totally out of my wheelhouse.

But I've never attempted to corn a beef tenderloin (and from my limited googling, I'm not sure that anyone else has ever been crazy enough to try it either) so I'm not too sure what that process will do to a tender cut like this.

I'm also looking for some inspiration on how to sort of "Irish" it up a bit (yes, I'm aware that corned beef isn't particularly Irish, it's still made its way into the Irish American diet as a St Paddy's thing)

Normally I flambe the duxelles with some cognac, so I'm figuring I'll swap that for some Irish whiskey

I also normally wrap some prosciutto between the pastry and duxelles as a bit of a moisture barrier, I feel like maybe there's an argument for using some thin-sliced bacon for that instead (probably back bacon if I can get my hands on it, but that's not easy in the US) and maybe wrap some cabbage into it as well

I normally serve it with a green peppercorn sauce, so I figure I'll work some Guinness into that.

Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this. Anything else you would or wouldn't do with this idea? Has anyone ever been struck by madness before and attempted to corn a tenderloin?

Edit: still brainstorming, maybe some sausage or black pudding (also a tough thing to find around me) mixed into the duxelles?

Basically a carbonara with extra steps - fry your guanciale cubes, set aside. Reserve the fat from the guanciale. Then, fry the meat from a fennel salsiccia, add a bit of passata. Mix cooled down guanciale fat with pecorino and egg yolks in a bain marie to create a creamy sauce. Precook pasta for half the time it takes to fully cook it. Add pasta and a little pasta water to pan, finish cooking pasta until all dente. Combine with sauce, fried guanciale and serve with parmeggiano cheese and fresh black pepper.

Whole wheat sandwich bread, sharp cheddar, Sriracha. Mayo for the grilling.

Large can of crushed tomatoes, homemade turkey stock, butter, onion, oregano, basil.

Cost per person: $2.25

We knew it was goose egg season but hadn't found their nest. This morning it was visible. 7 eggs. Probably less than a week old.

I'm going to have to change dinner plans this week now that I have gose eggs available.

Goose egg facts:
Three times the size of a chicken egg.
Chicken eggs are 30% yolk.
Goose eggs are 50% yolk.
That means the yolk is the size of 1.5 chicken eggs.
This makes them perfect for dippy yolks with fresh baked bread.
Boil time for a firm white and liquid yolk is one minute per ounce, so probably 6 to 7 minutes. Have an ice bath ready when you take them out of the water because they will continue to cook until you open them up.
They are great for baking. But not ideal for omelets because of the higher yolk content.

You get about one egg per female goose every other day. We have three females. So we will have about 10 eggs per week until they stop just before summer.

If a snake gets to a goose egg before we do that snake probably won't have to eat for a month.

Time to make some crusty bread, buy some salted butter, and I crazy. Maybe some anchovies too. Anchovy butter on crusty bread dipped in goose yolk is very tasty.

Oh its nice! The homemade stock was entirely gelatin...ized, so it sluurped out of the jar, which amused my easily amused self!

Super large tortillas filled with stir fried onions and carrots, sour cream, cheddar and pepper sauce.

Thought about opening a can of beans but decided against it.

Cost per person $2