Taco Pie

I made my infamous taco pie for dinner tonight. Soo good. The ingredients are shown above. Ground beef, taco seasoning, onion, green pepper, tomato, cheese, shells, and spicy death sauce.


I started out by frying some onion and green pepper and browning the ground beef simultaneously.


Once that was done I dumped the veggies into the beef and added the taco seasoning and spicy death sauce. I suppose you could add some beans to the mix too. But, like most things beans give me gas, so I chose not to :P


I also added some chili powder and some "secret ingredient". I then simmered everything until most of the liquid was gone.


Once that was done, I layered the shells and the taco beef mixture in a casserole dish. If you use your casserole dish as much as I do you may want to wipe out the dust first. (I think this was actually the first time I used it). Then I threw some tomatoes and shredded cheese on top and baked the whole thing for about 20 min or so.


And here it is! It was pretty tasty and I ended up eating more than I should have. Soooo full now. The good news is I still have over half of it for leftovers this week. I probably won't have to cook again until the weekend. Nice.

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.

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.

Then you need all of this:

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)

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:

Then you use puff pastry like the one seen below.

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.

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?

Naan bread from scratch!

This was from the 14th. Again, I just didn't get around to posting this until now.

I love naan bread and since I can now make some pretty good curry, I figured I'd try making my own naan bread :)

Of course, I looked to the Internet for guidance, and I found this video of how to make naan bread. It called for 200g of flour, which was problematic as I don't have a kitchen scale. Again, looking on the Internet, I figured that 200g flour = 1.25 - 1.5 cups of flour. I used something in between. I found that the dough was really dry and I had to keep adding milk and yogurt to make it work, but maybe I just used too much flour :p.

It didn't turn out quite like naan bread, but it was quite tasty! I really like bread, especially fresh bread :). I don't think I rolled the dough thin enough. I didn't want to roll it too thin b/c the video warned me not to.

Naan bread and curry from scratch!!!

A closer look at the naan bread

Once I perfect the naan bread, I'm opening up my own Indian restaurant.

Fried udon

I made this on the 10th, but kept putting off the blog post. It's not the first time I've made fried udon, but it's the first time I'm documenting my process.

Ingredients: shrimp, carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, and udon. I should've chopped up some onions too.

Put a little water and oil in the pan

Add the udon. I only ended up using 2 packages.

Cook until the udon breaks apart

Add the veggies. A spatula is easier at this point rather than chopsticks.

Add some frozen veggies for more colour if you want

The water will evaporate. You may need to add more oil. You can use a bit of sesame oil instead of regular oil. When the veggies are pretty much cooked, add the shrimp, or other meat, or nothing for vegetarian.

Seasoning: sesame seeds, dark soy sauce, white pepper, chives, sesame oil, parsley flakes, and light soy sauce. I just add a bit of everything. I don't know whether to use dark or light soy sauce, so I use both. Dark seems to give it the colour and saltiness and light gives a bit of a sweet taste. If available, use fresh green onions and parsley instead of the jarred chives and flakes I used.

Done

The final product. It was tasty!

Meat Sauce

I begin with my meat sauce. Below are the vegetables I use. Onions, celery and carrots are standard, add hot chillies if you like spice.

Wash and dice vegetables. Heat oil. I try to cook as light as I can, add enough oil so that you can swirl the pot once and the floor of the pot will be covered with a uniform thin layer. Also, add salt and pepper to the vegetables. I try to go light on the salt too. This all goes on at medium to high heat.

Once the vegetables our soft. Add ground meat. You can use chicken, veal, beef, whatever... no fish. I think that would be nasty.

Keep meat and vegetables at medium to high heat. Let the meat brown in the vegetable mix. Once it's pretty well cooked through it should look something like this:

Then add canned tomatoes and tomato paste. If you use whole tomatoes like I did then while the sauce is cooking you have to press it with a potato smasher every now then.

After adding the tomato stuff you're basicly done. All that's left is the seasoning. Add as much basil, oregano, salt, pepper, parsley as you desire. You can cut up and add more hot chillies if you like. Leave the sauce on medium to low heat for atleast a half an hour. The longer the better.

Final product:

Ok, so the last pic wasn't actually the final pic. There was some potato smasher action in the pot afterwards to get the meat sauce less tomato-chunked. If you don't add meat you can make a really good smooth tomato sauce by putting it through the blender after it's cooked but still warm. You can use diced tomatoes and save yourself some hassle. This sauce takes a while to make but you can use it for many things.