Pea Stew - Defrosting pt. 2

This was more of a mix-in-the-pot thing than a proper recipe. My grandma used to make something similar, I just tried figuring the ingredients by memory.

Also, I made use of the tripod we bought for the camera. No more asking love to take pictures while I cook so I don't get the camera dirty.

Here's the recipe (serves about 6):

- 3 table spoons Olive oil;
- 2 onions, diced;
- 3/4 sliced chorizo, peeled;
- 2 bay leaves;
- 600g of diced meat;
- a splash of white wine;
- 3 chopped tomatoes;
- 3/4 kg of peas;
- 1 farinheira (Optional, I only used it for the defrosting purpose);
 - Enough boiling water;

- Salt and pepper to taste.


This is a VERY caloric meal, used to be made for farmers who work all day long and need them, so if you're trying to lose weight, I'll advise you not to eat it :)


Grab a big pan, and heat up the olive oil. When it's hot enough, drop the diced onion in the pan.

 Add some salt and stir until the onion is translucent. Add the sliced chorizo.

Add the bay leaves and let the chorizo cook until lightly fried, then remove it. It should look somewhat like this.

At this point, add the meat.

Add the wine and let it cook for a few minutes.

Add the diced tomato and be patient.

This next part will take about 15 minutes. I hate waiting while stirring but it pays off, really.


It should look like this:

Add enough boiling water to the mix and put the chorizo back. Add the peas:

Put the lid on and let it cook. At this time I prepared some rice and 5 minutes before the rice was done I set this aside and added the farinheira pieces.
Instead of the rice, you can put some small sized pasta in the pan along with the peas. Grandma also used to put some beans but love doesn't like them.


Only a few things to go from the freezer. Stay tuned I'll be posting soon.

Pan-fried Shrimp, Garlic & Lemon

I'll be talking about a giveaway at the end of the post, stay tuned!

I forgot to take a picture at the bento box (tupperware actually) but I took one at my plate:

It took a bit to make this because I had to peel the shrimp and save the shells for stock. Underneath there's plain rice and the vegetables came from the freezer and sauté'd.

Shrimp with skin on, defrosted.

I decided to leave the end of the shell for better presentation.

For the shrimp, what I did was:

- Heat a pan with a little olive oil and put a small dried red pepper along with whole (slightly mashed) garlic. Let the flavour come out a bit and then start putting the shrimp (which had salt and some lemon juice) gently and flip it over until it's nearly cooked. Don't overcook shrimp or it'll feel like chewing gum.

Here's the shrimp just cooked.

As you can see, I didn't peel off the garlic because I like the flavour that it adds to the rest and prevents the garlic from burning too quickly. It's a shame whole shrimp can be so expensive. We can't really afford buy this, and this one we got was from relatives that were really nice in sharing some :D

Yesterday I was running through my RSS feeds and one of them had a "Win a Tamagoyaki pan"! I immediately read the whole post and wanted to enter the contest. I have been looking for a tamagoyaki pan for a while now and there are none available in my country :(

So, if you want to join the competition and give it a try, here's a direct link to the post. Thank you Sarah for hosting this event!

How to cook farinheira

First of all I'd like to wish you all a Happy new year!! As promised, here is the farinheira with scrambled eggs:

This is one of the various versions you can cook farinheira.





We were so hungry this was the only picutre I remembered to take before eating it.
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For those who don't know what farinheira is here's a rough explanation of how it's made and what's in it:

Mix in a bowl: wheat flour, corn flower, garlic, melted lard, paprika, ground pepper, orange juice, vinegar and water until the consistency is right. Then you grab a pork's dry intestines (used for home-made farinheiras) or plastic that resembles the same texture elasticity of the pork's intestines (use in d Industrial) and fill it to 2/3 of the total size. After separating and closing them up, they are smoked for 2-3 days and end up drying in the sun. They're still not cooked at this point, just smoked, you should cook them after this or rub in olive oil and they preserve for a year. I prefer to freeze mine since I don't have a dry dark place to put them. I do not make my own because it's a very big mess and the amount of lard is not so healthy at all.





Since mine was frozen I put it in the microwave (after cutting the metal clips on each tip) for about 2 minutes until I can remove the skin.





You should carefully remove it with a sharpen knife or rip it with your fingers. Don't try to squeeze it out or you'll lose half of the content that glues to the skin. Remember, the skin is NOT edible so make sure to remove it.



When all of it is removed, mash or cut the farinheira into chunks. Don't worry if they're too big, you'll be crushing them almost until it's ready sothe bits will get smaller.Turn on the heat. You won't need oil, even with a sticking pan like mine,because of all the lard the farinheira has.







Keep it on medium-high heat until the bits are small and it looks like this. As you can see, I did not add anything else to the pan and you can see the lard. At this point, drop some eggs inside. I used the ones I had at home at the moment but you can use more or less depending on your taste.







You can beat the eggs first if you want an even colour or put them in like this for yellow/white chunks in the middle. I didn't have time to beat them beforehand so I dropped them inside. The different colour of the egg yolks is because the large yolks were from the supermarket and the smaller ones from my grandparents' chickens which are from a smaller race, therefore lay smaller eggs.

Keep the heat on medium-high and mix it well until the egg is almost cooked. You can leave it moister or dryer by adjusting the cooking time here. I like mine well cooked. And the final version is on the top (the first picture I showed) since as I said before, hunger was stronger and soon after it was all gone.

Farinheira can also be boiled or put in a stew, but I don't use it like that so, if I eat it at some relatives' house, I'll be sure to take pictures!



Enjoy your kitchen time!



And if anyone wants the recipe for how to make the farinheira by themselves, leave a comment and I'll e-mail you with the values. I do not own the recipe but I'll translate it for you if asked.

Spinach Ricotta Cannelloni & Miso Tofu

I finally got my hands onto Ricotta cheese!

I haven't done much cooking lately because the bf was away and then we had visits, so I finally got a chance to do something.

I finally checked on the ricotta cheese price and decided to buy some to try this recipe. I have tried it in several vegetarian restaurants and was always curious to make them.So I grabbed the cheese, some spinach, an egg, mixed and seasoned it:

The challenge on filling the cannelloni came when I tried to do it with a spoon. It wouldn't go in as I expected and had some air bubbles inside the pasta. To fight that, I grabbed a freezing bag what wasn't gonna be used ever again due to sealing problems, filled it with the spinach-ricotta mix, cut a small hole on one of the corners and squeezed this inside the cannelloni. It became a lot faster and fun! I was hoping the mix would never end and I'd keep filling the pasta :D

I would recommend using also tomato sauce on top of the cannelloni, I found it kind of boring after the 4th bite or so. It had a very soft taste and i missed some surprise in the middle.This is something you can make a lot you can freeze it in individual portions for when you want to bake it. I made 2 layers of cannelloni but they always stick and I couldn't take them out without ruining the presentation. You can just prepare it in one layer with individual portions, that way it'll look very pretty even after on the plate.

Also, this week my mum bought some hard tofu for me.I was raised eating hard tofu but recently I had 1 year of eating fresh made tofu so I was very surprised by the hardness of the tofu. I'm not really sure how they process it nor the original name of this type of tofu but the store names it "Tofu cheese".

I wanted to mix the soft taste of tofu with something strong so I'd have a mild flavour, so I went with miso. I found a recipe in here and followed it, except for the rice vinegar, I couldn't get any.

The miso marinade was too strong and I ended up having to remove some of the paste on top of the tofu when I reheat it.

It was a very pleasant day in the kitchen and I even organized a shopping list with articles I can only get at a small chinese supermarket. I hope they still have those fried tofu skins (aburaage)!

Gyoza dumplings

I had this lurking on my "to do" recipe and I made it from scratch, meaning, wrappers too!

It was quite time consuming but to see the results at first try was overwhelming and they taste great.

The rest was a little color adding to the tupperware and I have no idea what goes well with gyoza but the bf wanted more than just vegetables, said he'd get hungry after a little bit.

So we have:

- Japanese rice with corn on top;

- Gyoza with cow meat and cabbage filling;

- Baby carrots and round green beans.

I made a lot of them and we ate some before we froze the rest.

These are the ones that got frozen and tossed in a bag afterwards.

The ones we ate, I remembered taking a picture on the frying pan but not on the plate, because the bf was too hungry to remember pictures

For the gyoza wrappers I used this recipe:

http://www.lafujimama.com/2009/08/time-to-wrap-things-up-homemade-gyoza.html

For the filling I edited Just Hungry's recipe:

http://www.justhungry.com/2004/08/is_my_blog_burn.html

Thank you both for sharing these recipes!

Apple Pie

So, it's apple season and I was dying to make one of those! I happened to talk to a very special friend who gave me some tips on this one, so she's the one to thank for how it turned out:

I bought the crust from the supermarket and used up what I had bought for home on friday, I had lots of apples (still have lots!) and added a cream recipe that doesn't need any expensive ingredients.

For the filling there's:

- Sugar;

- Flour;

- Eggs;

- Milk;

- Vanilla extract or cinnamon stick;

On low heat mix it until it looks consistent. It takes a while but don't turn to high heat or it won't work.

After cooling, I put it over the crust and started slicing some apples.

There are various ways to keep fruits from turning brown but I use the dip in lemon water way. It works quite well and adds a little flavour. I peeled the apples, sliced them and dipped them right after cutting into the lemon water. When I finished cutting, I dried the apple slices and gently placed them on top of the cream in a circly way. I wanted it to turn out a spiral but the slices didn't go my way.

I finished to put the slices and I thought "something's missing" Of course! Cinnamon!

Much much better. I turned the oven on, waited a few minutes (I always forget to pre-heat before I'm done with the food) and put it in the oven until the apples were golden brown.

Next time I'll make the crust myself because the pie is so tasty that the crust doesn't match the filling's flavour. I now have to store it in my secret secret stash before the bf steals it away in a bite!

Chocolate Cupcakes

I had to do something on the weekend since I'm having a little trouble on deciding what to do for the next weeks on food. I've never put thought to it, but when you try to do new things, you notice how quickly you run out of ideas. So, to fight that, I grabbed a recipe and made these!

The cakes ware still warm when I took them out because I completely forgot I had to leave home yesterday, so I had to "hurry" the process to bake a 2nd batch and had no time nor extra cupcakes to let them cool. The result? They "fell down" a little but are were quite tasty:

Maybe the reason they did this too was that I didn't fill the cupcakes enough and I thought a little weird the recipe included water, but gave it a try.

I'll be posting soon, so stay tuned. ^_^

Beet root Cannelloni

I saw this recipe on a magazine and tried it out. Usually I try, weekly, to have at least 1 vegetarian/without meat or fish meal since I can get tired of fish and meat overtime, so it's a little "experience day" where meat and fish are not allowed in the pot.

I had a lot of fun assembling this one, tho I didn't take pictures at bf's lunch because I couldn't wake up z_z too sleepy. I did take some to mine but if you don't stuff the tupperware while the cannellonis are hot, it will look very ugly and messy like this:

I put some extra cheese on it, since i ate at home. Didn't really care much for the looks but for the taste.

Here's some pictures I took while making them (which look a lot tastier than that thing!)

This is the mix I filled cannelloni with:

- Diced onion

- Diced garlic

- Cottage cheese (from cow milk)

- Diced beet root (gives the nice pink colour to the cheese)

- 2 ts grated lemon peel

In the original recipe it said one whole lemon's grated peel, but i came to doubt that when I grated half a lemon, so I put 2 tea spoons and tasted to check. If I had used more than a quarter lemon's peel I probably wouldn't be able to eat it.

So, here they are stuffed and pinkish!

Let's take a closer look:

After this, I put white sauce on top of them to cover slightly and some cheese on top to gratin.

That's all for today! Happy cooking!

How to make Lasagna

The quantities specified below are for the pyrex I use, I must warn you it's quite big, so you can adapt it by ratio to your containers. This works well for about 8 meals. I have done it bigger, but i wouldn't advise you to since I had to eat it for 4 days with 2 more friends.

Ingredients:

900g grated cheese

700g minced meat (in this case I used cow meat, but you can also make it with minced pork or chicken)

1 large onion

2 garlic cloves

2 large grated carrots

Salt, olive oil and spices

Tomato pulp, or 2 fresh tomatoes peeled and diced

Mushrooms (I used canned)

500ml of white sauce

Lasagna pasta

How to prepare it:

Grab a big frying pan or a pan and put about 2tbs of olive oil. Turn on the heat and let it warm up, but not too much. Put the garlic and let it fry a bit.

Add the onion and 2tbs of soy sauce and stir fry until the onion is half cooked.

Add the meat and let it cook, crushing the largest pieces of meat.

When the meat is cooked, add the grated carrot, the tomato paste, some spices, salt and in the end the mushrooms.

Let it cook for 3 to 5 minutes and set aside. Grab the pyrex and the fun part begins! This is my favorite part of making lasagna: layering. My oven is very old so I can't regulate exact temperatures, so as a means of precaution I start with a layer of White sauce, then cheese and only then pasta.

Then I add a layer of meat, then white sauce, cheese, pasta, meat, white sauce, cheese... You get mypoint. For the cheese lovers: You can put an extra layer of cheese between the meat and the white sauce, it'll be even more delicious ^^. When you're almost reaching at the top, end with a layer of pasta, then cheese and white sauce (you can put more cheese on top of the white sauce if you want). It should look somewhat like this and the initial picture:

Let it cook in the pre-heated oven, medium-heat, for about 40 minutes or stick a fork into the lasagna and when the pasta is cooked you can take it out.

Have fun cooking! =3