Recipe: Piroshky

My sister and I made piroshky today. It's a Russian sort of stuffed meat bun. I think there are as many ways to make piroshky as there are people in Russia, but my brother-in-law's method includes meat, cabbage, and of course dill.

Here's a kind of sort of recipe and a how-to.

Vegetarian Spring Rolls

Tonight's dinner (not pictured) was a comedy of errors, without any of the redeeming comedic value. (Meat gone off, a burned sauce, boiling water spilled on my tummy...) I started my evening tired, hungry and not feeling that well, and now I've lost two hours, am still tired, still hungry, still don't feel well, AND I have a burned stomach. Plus a sink full of dishes to wash. Sigh.

I've not been updating to much this last while, which maybe means I'm getting tired of this and it's time to give up. Or maybe it means that I've not been happy with anything I've been making. Or maybe it doesn't mean much of anything. I don't know.

I think I've mentioned that I'd been feeling unwell for a while, well, I finally went to a doctor about it, but I'm not really convinced that his diagnosis really was the whole story. The medication I've been taking hasn't really been helping. I suppose I need to go see someone again, but I have a hard time going to clinics about things that feel wishy-washy to me - vague discomforts (I can't really call them pains, but they're so constant that it's worse than just a short sharp pain would be) to me don't lend themselves to visits to a clinic. They want Symptom A + Symptom B = Diagnosis X, leading to Treatment Y, and Patient Z out the door. I wish I could find a doctor taking new patients. Preferably not an old doctor, either, because that would be just my luck that I'd start seeing someone and s/he'd retire.

Anyway, these vague discomforts are mostly related to my stomach and the treatment I was given was Prevacid, so if I've got a problem with stomach acid, that means I should be more careful about what I'm eating. I've not felt inspired by food in a while.

Still, I finally got around to making spring rolls the other day. I don't know that I did a very good job - it seems like there should maybe be more filling so the rice wrapper isn't layered so thick and one of the spring rolls I made had a lot of tears in it by the time I got it on the plate. Still, these were really tasty - the vegetables are bright and fresh and came alive with garlic and cilantro and serrano pepper. It was really spicy (I should be avoiding that... didn't seem to bother me, though) but pretty spectacular tasting. I've got enough rice papers left to make spring rolls every day for the rest of eternity, so I'll definitely have to try it again.

A few days prior to the spring rolls, I made healthy meatloaf. This meatloaf probably had pretty equal amounts of meat and vegetables in it - finely diced mushrooms, onions, carrots, celery, and red pepper, as well as rolled oats.

It's not the most tasty looking thing, but it was really delicious, especially as leftovers with a bit of cheese melted over and a puddle of ketchup and mustard for dipping. I served it with mashed sweet potatoes, which I found tasty but too strange to want to eat often, and sautéed snap peas (delicious!) I've got most of the leftovers in the freezer, so I'll definitely be eating this again, and will probably make it again someday if I'm in the mood for comfort food.

Even though they're completely different meals, this sort of looks samey, doesn't it? I made this a few days prior to the meatloaf. It's just salmon in a very simple marinade of (mostly) orange juice and ginger, and the glaze was quite tasty, though most of it cooked away. I severely overcooked it though and didn't eat very much of the salmon because it was so dry.

And that's the backlog. Enjoyable, all. Shame I didn't get to eat any of them tonight, instead of my trashed stir-fry beef with snow peas and tomatoes...

Steak and Eggs with Fresh Salsa

This is one of my old stand-by dinners for when I want something fast and easy and lazy. I often talk about how the foods I cook are quick and easy, but this is probably quicker and easier than anything I make (with the exception, of course, of freezer food like pizza pops or leftover chili). I would guess this is a 15 minute meal, perhaps 20 minutes if I decide to make potatoes as well (as I did in this version of the same dinner - this is a prettier picture, though, so I'm reposting).

Eggs, like pasta, are always good when you're pressed for time. Better, probably, because they do cook even faster, though they aren't quite the same sort of filling/comfort food that pasta can be.

In any case, to make this all you need is two eggs, a small fast-fry steak, 1 small tomato, a garlic clove, lemon juice, hot sauce, salt, pepper and oregano. (Cilantro optional.)

Make the salsa first by dicing your tomato and crushing your garlic. Stir together in a bowl with a dash of hot sauce, a splash of lemon juice, some oregano, salt and chopped up cilantro if you've got it. Adjust seasonings to taste.

Next, heat two frying pans. In one, cook your fast-fry steak. If you want, you can slice it into strips first (or buy stir-fry beef instead). I usually by it sliced because it's easier (faster... lazier...) to eat and make that way - you don't have to get out a knife or anything (and thus don't have to wash one, either). In the other, scramble your eggs (season them first...). (I often do this by cracking the eggs in the pan and then stirring them around a lot, rather than dirtying another dish first to whisk the eggs together.)

On a plate or in a bowl, pile the salsa on top of the steak on top of the eggs. Eat and enjoy.

(If you do want potatoes with your lazy dinner, the recipe I usually use can be found here.)

Taco Salad Pitas

I'm playing catch-up a bit now, since this and a forth-coming entry are both from yesterday. Fortunately, I have no plans to cook tonight or tomorrow, so I shouldn't get too bogged down. So long as I don't go back to posting nothing, anyway.

This was a lunch I made using up some leftover meat from the last time my sister made tacos. (It's a common Saturday night dinner around here.) There isn't anything especially special about this meal, but it was really tasty. And easy. That's the best way to cook most days. The only real problem? I've now got the rest of that box of mini-pitas to use up. Or freeze, I guess. Dunno.

Greek-spiced Lasaga, Take Two

So, something like, oh, nine days ago, I said this: Tomorrow if I eat some of the leftovers, I'll try to take a proper picture.

I did take a proper picture. Too bad I didn't also post that proper picture. Well, here it is now. This picture comes with 100% more greenery than I ate the day I made the lasagna. It also has extra cheese melted over top because you can never have too much gooey cheese.

One of the nice things about lasagna is how forgiving it is, you can do so many different things and it'll still come out delicious. It's pretty hard to really mess up, unless you wind up with too little sauce (dry lasagna) or too much of anything. Anyway, this one? Definitely worth trying to kinda sorta recreate someday down the line. But maybe I'll put some spinach in it. Or add chopped vegetables to the meat sauce. Hm.

Greek-spiced Lasagna

What? That doesn't look like lasagna to you?

So I took it out of the pan too early, and it hadn't set enough, and it really just made a big, sloppy mess on the plate. But it tasted quite lovely. This was a sort of... ethnically confused, mishmash of a dish. A bit Greek, a bit Italian, a bit... stuff I had in the fridge.

When I was in junior high (grade 8, I think) I had to take a Home Economics class, where we mostly did a bit of cooking, once a week. One of the things we cooked was something called Pastitsio, which seemed to be a kind of lasagna with a white sauce. I don't remember too much about it, except that it had cinnamon and nutmeg in the meat sauce, which I can't remember being very saucy, but must have had something to keep it from drying out.

In any case, I had a sudden craving for lasagna today when I was leaving work, which was a bit funny since I felt quite sick all day and actually hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. But I went around the store anyway for mozzarella and ground beef and tomato sauce and cottage cheese. (I know, most people prefer ricotta, but I grew up on lasagna with cottage cheese, so that's what I'm used to and what I like. I'm not sure ricotta could be bought in my hometown when I was a kid.) I had intentions of doing a very standard lasagna, with nothing special about it, but suddenly remembered pastitsio and wanted that flavour. Or anyway, the part of that flavour that I could remember.

So instead of using an Italian herb mix to flavour the meat/tomato sauce, I used cinnamon and nutmeg and a bit of mint (though I didn't have enough mint to make it a noticeable taste). And it was a flavour explosion on my tongue.

Or something, anyway, I also had mushrooms in the fridge, so I sautéed a couple of those and made a layer of them as well. That was a pretty forgettable part of the lasagna, but over all, delicious. Tomorrow if I eat some of the leftovers, I'll try to take a proper picture.

Beef Madras, Aloo Gobi, and Strangely Pale Yellow Rice

I had a craving for some spicy, warm Indian food. But not from my ex-favourite Indian take-away which the Calgary Health Region's website reveals to have had (on more than one occasion) a rodent problem.

So I dug out my trusty recipe for Aloo Gobi (modified slightly from the extras on the Bend it Like Beckham dvd) and yellow rice. I also bought a jar of Madras curry paste, because it's got a great flavour that makes a really fantastic meatloaf and followed the recipe on the side of the jar (sort of).

Too bad it all tasted wrong.

I think my spices are all dead, maybe. It's like they smell like what they're supposed to smell like, but they don't seem really to taste like what they're supposed to taste like. My yellow rice? Didn't turn yellow. My curry didn't have any of the spiciness it usually has. I don't know.

I didn't have any cilantro, which did change the taste of course, but it seems more off than just missing cilantro. Maybe it'll taste better tomorrow once it's had a chance to sit and blend flavours even more?

The beef Madras tasted good, though I didn't read the instructions before hand, so I didn't know it's meant to be a sort of slow-cooked thing (I assume with cubed beef) and I ended up cooking it in a flash at the end once my Aloo Gobi was cooked through (and just needed to sit for a bit to thicken up a little). It actually did taste pretty good, but I cut back on the curry paste by quite a bit (I used 1 tbsp rather than 2, because I was concerned it would be too over-powering) and I did notice that it didn't have quite the zing I was expecting. The spices tasted particularly good on the tomatoes though, which were just cooked through - I used fresh chopped grape tomatoes rather than canned tomatoes.

I often wonder when I cook things like this if I'm sort of... breaking food rules, though that's not quite what I mean. But like.. I don't know anything about the food tradition behind real Indian cooking, I just know that I like this taste and that one, so I've put them all together, but maybe eating Beef Madras with Aloo Gobi would be like eating.... Poutine with Jambalaya. They maybe both come out of a French tradition, but one is Quebecois and the other is Cajun. And I don't think any classical French chef would claim either one. I know very little about either cuisine, but I do know enough to know that they have different flavour profiles and different cooking methods and I know that they don't really blend together. Indian food? I don't know anything about it at all.

Anyway, I guess that ultimately it doesn't matter, since I am cooking for myself and nobody else is going to come along and tell me that I've got Northern Indian that and Southern Indian this and that other dish is just made up and isn't actually Indian at all. (Or whatever.)

Steak with Peppercorn Gravy, Cheesy Mashed Potatoes and Green Beans

Another of the Sandi Richard recipes, from the new book, the title of which I don't think I mentioned in my last entry. Actually, I don't really remember the title of the book, and it's downstairs, but I'll be making something else from the book fairly soon, so once I get to that, then I'll have to remember to talk a bit more about it. Really, the book is pretty similar to the other one I've got.

Richard's focus is all on how to streamline the dinner making process so that five days out of every week, dinner can't be the most stressful part of your day. This book, and the other (The Dinner Fix) contain 10 weeks of 5 meals each - complete meals, that is. I modified this dinner, but if I'd made it her way, I'd have seared and cooked the steak first, then got started on the gravy, then I'd have put corn on the cob on to boil, and prepared a salad. Once those things were ready, the gravy would also be ready and the steaks rested, and dinner is ready to be served.

I started out with the potatoes, since they had to boil. And I felt like doing something a little bit more interesting than usual, so I added some torn up Havarti and Provolone cheese (since I could buy those by the slice at my work - I bought one 30g slice of each, and used about half of each in the two servings of potatoes that I made). Yum. All stringy and cheesy and delicious.

The beans are just steamed beans. I didn't even spritz them with a bit of lemon or add butter today. I've been having a little love affair with green beans lately. I wish the fresh ones in the stores looked a little nicer, because they always taste so much better than frozen, but these frozen ones are quite nice as well.

And then the steak. It was good, but not spectacular. I think it could have been better, but it was good enough for me to make a second attempt some day. I think next time I'll crack the peppercorns first, because, really, who wants to eat whole peppercorns? And I think the flavour would get into the gravy a lot more if they were cracked.

I think also that the gravy would have come together more easily if I'd made the full six servings, rather than 2 servings of it. It certainly wasn't bad, but I think it's one of those things that don't translate overly well to a reduction in the recipe.

Hoisin Beef with Green Beans

It's been a few days again and this is what I've come back with? Blah. One of the problems with stir-frys is that they all sort of look more or less the same. A dark sauce on vegetables and meat. And then this one has only one colour of vegetable - green beans - so it doesn't even get a bit of interest from carrots or... something.

Worse than boring, it didn't even taste that good. I didn't know it was possible to make a stir-fry sauce that was made of several ingredients but actually tasted like nothing.

This tasted like nothing. Not green beans, not steak, not soy sauce, not hoisin sauce, not chili sauce, not ginger and garlic. Just an unrelentingly sweet and salty mask for otherwise tasty things.
I knew it would be sweet - hoisin and sweet chili sauce are both made of a lot of sugar. I knew it would be salty - soy sauce and hoisin are both very high in sodium.

In this respect, I think it's the worst thing I've made from one of Sandi Richard's book. The soy sauce soup was pretty awful, too, but this was worse. Maybe I'm so much more bothered by this because I, most of us I imagine, could make a basic stir-fry in our sleep and have it taste better.

Sandi Richard does basic, family friendly recipes very well. She makes things I can imagine eating for everyday occasions. Things I could have imagined my mom making, had my mom been more inclined to try out new things. (Rather more steak and fish than my mom would ever use, but otherwise...) I have had far more successes than failures from her books, so maybe that also is why it bothers me so much. She says in her notes that her family could eat this meal again and again, but I just... why? Why would you want to? Maybe it just didn't translate well to single serving cooking, but this sort of thing usually does translate very well. So I don't know.

The rice was exquisite, though, for brown. You can see how to make it yourself here. I've made, per usual, enough for five meals, so I've got it all single-serving frozen and ready to go. Yay!

Beef, Barley and Mushroom Soup with Cheese Quesadilla

I'm still behind in my updates, but I was sure that I'd posted this before so I didn't do it yesterday, but looking through things today, it looks like this will be a first after all.

So this I made yesterday when it was cold and miserable and feeling like winter. (It's only going to get worse from here, but still.) Soup is the perfect thing for that, warm and filling and you can throw in nearly anything you've got and it's perfect. This one is mostly filled with mushrooms and barley, but it's also got a little diced steak and then the usual sorts of things - onion, celery, carrots. Tasty, that.

Steak, redone

Well, this photo is several days old now, but somehow I just haven't felt like updating and talking about it. Maybe because it's just a variation on something I cook relatively frequently (steak and eggs) or maybe I've just not been in the mood. I don't really know.

At any rate, this is my recreation of the previous day's steak, this time cooked through and served over scrambled eggs with a fresh garlicky tomato salsa. I ate it on a baked to slightly-crispy corn tortilla, up until I realized just how much I (apparently) don't really like corn tortillas unless they're deep-fried. I wound up scooping the filling off the tortilla and throwing the tortilla away. It had become slightly soggy and it just had a funny taste that seemed somehow faintly chemical to me.

The eggs cooked up nicely - I'm getting much better at making scrambled eggs with large "grains" of egg, rather than too many dried out small bits that hardly stay on a fork. I don't mind scrambled eggs like this, where the bits are big enough to properly spear on a fork.

The salsa was quite nice, though I don't particularly like the hot sauce i used to add spice. I forget the name of it, but it didn't really have much of a flavour. I prefer the old standbys like Tabasco, I guess, to some of the odder off-brand hot sauces that are out there.

Marinated Flank Steak with Spicy Broccoli and Baked Sweet Potatoes

I'm running a day behind on my posting here: this was from yesterday evening. It was one of the more involved things I've made in a while, though it wasn't really very involved. It's just that I had to make a marinade for the steak on Sunday, and obviously that extra step somehow made it seem like a nearly insurmountable amount of work.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the steak in the marinade because it looked like a ziploc bag of grass soup with a raw steak in it. Mmm grass soup. It was actually more or less equal amounts of cilantro, parsley, and basil with some olive oil, spices, and chicken stock, but was bright bright green and looked like grass soup.

I have a hard time cooking steak. Usually I overcook them, this was slightly undercooked for my tastes. I mean, it tasted great and the texture was perfect and I KNOW that steak is better like this than cooked more well-done, but I have issues with juices and so I had to close my eyes and take a mouthful without looking at the redness or else I'd have thrown it all in the garbage.

Much like I threw the sweet potatoes in the garbage. I knew before I photographed it that I wouldn't be eating them, but I wanted to add that extra colour to the plate. They were soggy. No amount of baking would dry them out or crisp them up. They were in the oven almost double their intended baking time and still they came out damp. I've made sweet potatoes like this before and not had this problem, so I'm not sure what did it this time. Shame, anyway.

The broccoli, though, yum. And the steak, too, yum. I think I'll make the steak again, but next time I'll cook it a little longer, just to get a little less juice and a little more personal comfort.

Beef and Pepper Stew on Basmati Rice

This photo is a couple days old now, and I've even finished the leftovers. But I do want to get it posted before the end of the month and also there might be something new tonight, if I can keep myself up long enough to post that new potential photo.

Anyway, this was one of those dinners where I didn't pay enough attention to the instructions - it's got a 2-1/2 hr cooking time, and suddenly it was 6 in the evening and I had to get up early for work the next day and didn't need or want to be eating dinner at 8:30/9 at night. So even though I'm about to say that this was a braised dish, it maybe wasn't quite, since I cranked the heat up a fair bit and cut the cooking time down by half.

So delicious. My succinct explanation from my flickr account is probably the best one I could give: a braised beef stew with lots of luscious red peppers (which, though not roasted, tasted as if they were) and a sweet tomato sauce.

The meat was fall apart tender and the peppers were sweet and soft and even the skins didn't bother me as they sometimes do when left on in something like this. It tasted like it'd be cooked for ages. Definitely a make again dish.

Steak and Eggs with Fresh Tomato Salsa and Fried Potatoes

I'd thought that I'd posted a picture of this particular thing before, but I don't see it anywhere in the archives here, so I guess not. I know I have a better picture of it, when I made it some time back, but it's hidden in my archives at flickr. (I haven't got a professional account, so I have a limited number of photos that can be seen at any given time.)

Anyway, this is one of my favourite breakfast for dinner meals - steak and salsa on scrambled eggs with fried potatoes. It's a simple meal, the steak, eggs and potatoes are seasoned only with salt and pepper, and the salsa is just chopped tomato with garlic, some oregano and cilantro, and lemon juice. I had to use lime juice today, though, since we've run out of lemon juice and the stuff can't be found, fresh or bottled around here.

Yum.

Spinach-stuffed Steak with Barley Pilaf

I was convinced that I'd posted a photo of this at some point in the past - this is the second time I've made it - but I can't find any entry for it, so I suppose I made it before I started this blog. At any rate, I think this photo is a much better one, since I so badly overcooked the steak the last time that it kind of looked like and had the mouthfeel of shoe leather. I kind of rolled it up the last time, though, and it looked prettier cut than this did.

At any rate, this is just a butterflied piece of some sort of steak, stuffed with sautéed spinach and onion, with a lot of spices, and then put in the oven until cooked through. I don't insist on having well-done steak anymore (I used to; I have a thing about raw and raw-ish meat), but this one was, and it was just perfect, not dry at all.

The barley... I call a pilaf, just because I don't know what else to call it. It's really just cooked barley with some herbs and onion. Barley makes a nice alternative to rice, sometimes. It's got a bit more of a bite to it, like al dente pasta, but the same sort of neutral flavour that makes a good backdrop to pretty much anything.

Caciocavollo-stuffed Burger with Peas and Fries

I'm quite a few days behind in updating because I keep taking pictures and then think they're not worth the bother of posting. I'm not really sure about this one, but here it is anyway.

This is supposed to be an Italian burger, made with ground beef and Italian sausage and served with tomato sauce and melted cheese on top, but I got distracted and stuffed it with cheese instead and forgot about the tomato sauce, which is still in the fridge, and couldn't be bothered to buy fresh sausage, since I only needed a couple ounces rather than a whole package. And yes.

It was still pretty tasty, even without all the extras.

Braised Beef with Tomato Gravy and Vegetables

We cooked family dinner again last Sunday, I've just been lazy about getting the photo up.

My sister had the difficult job of heating the frozen vegetables, my brother in law made the mashed potatoes, and I made the roast, which was not roasted, but braised. The braising liquid is actually the same as I use in my beef and mushroom stew.

Spicy Meatball Sandwich

By the time I had dinner cooked tonight, I wasn't terribly hungry anymore, but I dutifully ate my dinner anyway and it was very good, even though I wasn't very enthused about eating it. (I have issues about wasting food and didn't want to throw it away, though I do do that sometimes.)

The sauce on the meatballs wasn't meant to be a teriyaki sauce, but it sort of reminded me of one, and I think it would have been really tasty with some pineapple. It was made mostly of ketchup and sweet chili sauce, with some Worcestershire, mustard,... and some other things I can't recall. The meatballs themselves had celery seed in them, of which there was a bit too much for my taste, but would be easy to cut back on in the future. The red onion was really nice with the meatballs, but definitely some pineapple too, if I try this again.

This recipe was another from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix - I'm determined to try all the recipes from the book that I can stand. (So... eliminating most of the seafood, some of the big roast type dinners and a few that just look gross.) Most of what I plan to make this week will be from this book, and then I'll keep picking away at it after that - I've mainly got fish recipes left and fish is rarely a top choice for me when I'm thinking about what to cook.

(By the way... check out the new plate!)

Topless Steak Sandwich with Mushrooms and Caramelized Onions

Okay, it's just that I burned the top because I wasn't paying attention. (I ate it with the top anyway, but it looked bad in the picture. It was over-toasted not charcoal.)

A take on a Rachel Ray recipe. But with less of everything but the mushrooms (which I added) and some improvisation. (She really, really has the hugest meals ever. It must take a lot of calories to run that personality, but seriously. This sandwich twice over would be one of hers.)

The long version of tonight's dinner is that originally I was going to make beef barley soup with mushrooms. And then I didn't feel like soup, so I was going to make a stir-fry because the ingredients are pretty much the same, just with rice instead of barley, and less cooking liquid. (And more soy sauce. And different spices. And al dente vegetables.) But then I didn't feel like making a stir-fry, so I had to find something different, and I found a recipe for a steak sandwich in the one RR cookbook I own, 365: No Repeats.

It's a little bit spicy, with lots of hot sauce and peppercorn grill spice on the meat, and the onions are a little bit sweet and the mushrooms I just added because they would go bad if I left them in the fridge much longer and I don't think you can really go wrong with mushrooms and steak. And then crunchy toasted bread and melty cheese, which is always good, though I wish I'd had something with a bit stronger of a flavour. (A cheese with peppercorns would have been really good. Or Guinness cheddar.) I think strips of roasted red pepper would be really good, too, if I make this again. Oh, and maybe a spicy mustard. Hm.

Delicious.

Beef and Mushroom Stew with Fingerling Potatoes and Russian Salad

This isn't the best photo of this (though it's better than the last one I took almost a year ago) but beef and mushroom stew is one of the best things I cook. Yum. I wish I could remember where I found the recipe, because I've been working off a much reduced version of it and I know I don't do all the steps or use all the ingredients and someday I'd like to try it as it's meant to be. At any rate, it's very good.

These were the first fingerling potatoes I've ever bought, but I'm not much impressed. I had to peel most of them because they were a bit green skinned. But that's not the potatoes' fault. I blame President's Choice. (And why, anyway, is there a brand name on my potatoes?)