Sunday, August 18, 2013

Miso Soup

I love miso and it's so healthy and easy to make. 

Just cut up some vegetables, like carrots and mushrooms and so on. Boil them for a few minutes in some water. Towards the end of cooking, turn off the heat and dissolve in some miso paste. You can serve it with rice but I don't think you're really supposed to, Anyway, here's a photo:


For more details, see this post.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Guaca mole

You might have noticed that if you mash an avocado and add salt and pepper you have a pretty good mole. Then you need to add some lemon or lime juice to stop it from browning. And that would be good and you'd be done.

But what if you wanted to make a really good guacamole, how would you do it? Well, this is my suggestion:

Ingredients:
1 ripe avo
Lemon or lime juice
1/2 red pepper
1/2 tomato
1 red or green chilli (optional)
1 cloves of crushed garlic
1 tbsp of sour cream (or greek yoghurt if you must)
1 rasher of bacon
Tabasco sauce
A few stalks of dhania / coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:
Fry the bacon until crispy and then remove it from the pan and chop it up into tiny bits.
Finely chop your chilli, tomato & red pepper and fry that in the bacon pan. Afterwards you can also fry the garlic a little bit.
Mash your peeled avocado and mix in some lime juice to preserve the green. Add in the sour cream and the bacon pieces. Add the tomato, chilli and red pepper. Tabasco can be added just for the flavour if you already used a hot chilli.
Salt and pepper can add a great dimension, so do add that as well.

Go and enjoy that with some crumbed fish or a burger.

Fact: Avocados are also called "alligator pears" and they are classified as berries.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Cooking Quinces

Apparently quince isn't as much of a popular fruit as it once was. One of the reasons could be that they are too sour and hard to eat raw and so need to be cooked. Their toughness also makes them difficult to prepare.


The fruit are beautiful and rather like really big, hard pears, but a bit more apple shaped.



You will need a bug knife and some good strength to cut through them.



Once they have been cut into quarters or eighths you will need to take the seeds out. It's not a good idea to eat many of the seeds because they can turn into something horrid in your stomach. 



Then you can peel them.




And, because they turn brown easily like most fruit, you can keep them in some water until you are ready to cook them. 



We cooked our quinces in a pressure cooker with some sugary water. As they cook, they turn a lovely guava colour, all on their own! 

The pressure cooker was possibly not the best way of doing things as the quince ended up losing it's shape quite a lot. It was nice and soft though. We ate it with custard.




The best part was the sugary liquid left in the pressure cooker which we strained out and kept as a juice. It was really, really good. 

If you are dedicated, or bored, you could also make some beautiful quince jelly.

Roasted Shallots


Purple, raw shallots


This is the first time we've eaten shallots. We don't get them around here so often. So, when I saw them, I just got them (for my husband).

He cooked them. He said they're supposed to taste a bit like garlic, but they were mostly just like really tasty onions.

He used red wine vinegar and sugar instead of balsamic. He also used butter. This recipe says olive oil so I'm not sure if it's exactly the same one, but here it is anyway.



Golden shallots, yum.


 Black and white shallots.