Monday, February 12, 2007

Breakfast Skillet Wraps

I made myself a tasty breakfast this weekend. (It was actually an afternoon thing, but it was the first meal of the day, so it still counts as breakfast.)


I started out by cutting up some sweet potato and throwing it into the frying pan.


Then I added some green pepper and onion as well as some random spices.


I also cut up and added some breakfast sausages I found in a ziploc bag in my freezer. I think they were pork, but they may have been turkey. Who knows? I threw out the box a long time ago and don't really remember. (I like to subdivide food into single person portions before I freeze it.) They did have a slight maple flavour.


And finally I threw everything into a wrap with some shredded cheese and salsa and ate it all burrito style. It was pretty tasty if I say so myself. I was contemplating adding some scrambled eggs to the mix, but I'd had a few drinks the night before, and didn't really think that would be a good idea. Maybe next time.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Beef Patties

Here is another recipe. I used to do this kind of thing for lunch but now I'll only do this kind of thing for dinner. It's basicly seasoned ground beef in puff pastry.

First you need ground beef, lamb, chicken, turkey... tofu? Don't know, haven't tried tofu. Try it and let me know.

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Then you need all of this:

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Basicly you throw however much you want of whatever you have in the meat. I use various hot sauces, dijon mustard, ginger and garlic paste, soy sauce, worchestire sauce, brown sugar, cornstarch, salt and a little oil. Missing in this picture is baking soda and freshly ground black pepper which I forgot to include into the picture. Your aim should be to include hot, sour and sweet flavours. You can emphasize whichever taste you prefer (I prefer hot) but it's important to have all three. If you add soy sauce go easy on the salt. Cornstarch gives the meat some stiffness and baking soda makes fun fizzing noises and helps with the whole marinating process.

Once mixed it should look something like this: (sorry, think it's out of focus)

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Then you saran wrap the bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight.

The next day you fry the meat. You should not need to add oil. You added a bit to the meat mix and that should carry you through. Should look something like this:
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Then you use puff pastry like the one seen below.

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Then you cut the pastry into squares, put the meat in the middle and fold over to form triangles. Then you bake them and get the final product as seen below.

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Sunday, February 4, 2007

Chindian fried noodles

I've been asked if I was Chindian before - a mix between Chinese and Indian, though I think she meant Native American. Anyways, this cooking experiment is fusion food with Chinese and "real" Indian.

I got the idea from who I think was the owner of Charisma East Indian Restaurant in Winnipeg. Upon discovering that me and my family was Chinese, he said that in India, a big trend was fusion food with Chinese food. Apparently, using Chinese noodles with Indian spices is big and he was contemplating adding it to his menu.

I completely made this up as I went along. I figured that I still had the jar of Indian curry and I had instant noodles. Why not try and make some fried noodles?

Ingredients: curry and instant noodles



Put some water and oil in the pan. More water required than the fried udon b/c the instant noodles need to be reconstituted. This wasn't enough water as I had to add extra water later.



Add the instant noodles



Cook the noodles until they break apart and is no longer hard



Spoon in some curry



The finished product


It was ok. Not that flavourful. I also put in too much oil as I was afraid of the noodles sticking and I was having problems getting the curry paste mixed in. I probably should've added the curry paste earlier when there was still some water in the pan, though the noodles were crispy, which was nice. The excessive amount of oil combined with the concentrated nature of the paste, it ended up being pretty heavy. It seemed like I needed something else in there. Maybe I should've made it more like real curry by having the noodles in a soup-like base. I don't think the curry paste is supposed to be eaten without adding additional stuff. Maybe I was supposed to use other Indian spices for the fusion dish. I also may have used the wrong type of noodles. Got any ideas?