recipe Friday

[kindkit]

Doing my bit to make recipe Friday a thing, because st_aurafina said so. A lot of my cooking doesn't involve recipes, unless it's a dish I'm unfamiliar with, but I'll try.


Something I've cooked recently:

Calling it cooking may be an exaggeration, but I tried this recipe for coconut-ginger "tea" and liked it a lot. I didn't have honey so I just used regular sugar and a bit of turmeric (it colors the tea, which is a ghostly white otherwise). Nicely coconutty and gingery. Next time I think I may add a crushed green cardamom pod to the infusion.


Something I've got concrete plans to cook soon:

Today, once my bread (a yeasted cornbread) is out of the oven (or more specifically out of the pot I bake it in, which I'll need for the soup), I'm going to cook a chicken soup vaguely based on this one for white chicken chili with quinoa. By "vaguely based" I mean "I'll add quinoa to the Mexican-style chicken soup I was planning to make anyway, but I'll use chickpeas instead of white beans, chipotles in adobo instead of jalapenos, and no salsa verde since I don't have any, and also omit the tortilla chips since I don't have those either." Instead I'll put lime peel and orange peel into the soup for a nice citrus kick and eat the soup with some cornbread. I may top it with the avocado that I bought on one of those bizarre "it was so cheap" impulses (I like avocado, but avocado does not like me--I think I have oral allergies to a couple of foods and avocado makes my throat feel all ooky and weird).

Also, at some point this week, skud's kimchi pancakes. I've cooked them before, substituting preserved vegetable for the kimchee, and they were yummy, but now I have actual kimchee and I'm looking forward to trying them again.


Something I'm idly thinking of cooking in the future:

I want to get back into cooking Indian food regularly. It's a bit tricky because a lot of Indian food is complicated to cook, and I just don't seem to have a lot of energy these days. Most Indian dishes aren't difficult in a technical sense, but they require a lot of steps and a lot of time, not to mention dirtying a lot of dishes. Well, I guess that's what weekends are for. Maybe I'll cook a pork vindaloo, which is simple and has the meaty heartiness I've been craving in this cold weather.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Do you have a big cast iron pot or a slow cooker? I find that this makes many fewer dishes because you can do it all in one go, from the spices onwards. Of course, you have to cook in bulk, but most Indian food refrigerates and/or freezes well.

[kindkit]

I tend to cook in large batches anyway. The difficulty with Indian food, for me, is just that there are large numbers of steps even if you can more or less use one pan. Maybe you have to toast and grind some spices dry, then grind them with onions to make a paste. Then you cook some other spices in oil, cook the paste in the oil, add whatever it is you're cooking, finish with more spices and chopped herbs, etc. etc. My energy levels have not been good lately, and sometimes that just seems like waaay too much work.

[st_aurafina]

Yay, recipe Friday! Oh, wow, the kimchi pancakes look amazing. Do you think they'd freeze and reheat well?

[kindkit]

I haven't tried to freeze them, but I have refrigerated them overnight and reheated gently the next day, and it worked fine. My instinct is that anything egg-based may not freeze well, but the flour might stabilize the eggs enough to make it possible.