Jerry, I LOVE your avatar.
Here is a quick marinating and cooking sauce for fresh raw shrimp. I "stole" this from The Minimalist column in the NYTimes.
Ingred: 6 cloves garlic, peeled; 1/3 cup EV olive oil; 6 scallions, trimmed and chopped; 1 cup parsley, leaves and thin stems; 2 lb. shrimp, peeled. Salt and pepper to taste. Four dried chilies or a few pinches of red pepper flakes, or to taste; 1/3 cup stock (shrimp, fish, or chicken) or white wine or water. (Ed. note: I used half fish stock and half sherry.)
Heat oven to 500. Combine garlic and oil in a food processor, blend until smooth, scraping down sides as necessary. Add scallions and parsley and pulse until mixture is minced and well blended. Toss with shrimp, s & p, and chilies.
Put shrimp in a large roasting pan. Add liquid and place pan in oven. Roast, stirring once, until mixture is bubbly and hot, and shrimp are pink, 10-15 minutes. Four servings.
This is a yummy green sauce and so easy.
This has been a great thread....thought of a couple other things as people hopefully continue to explore the world of stocks: Modern versions of brown sauce, i.e. jus, made from successive reductions of unthickened brown stock, and the idea of flavour following flavour....especially with regard to consommes. For example, if I am making a lamb consomme, I start with a brown lamb stock. I make an asparagus consomme with a stock made from the ends of asparagus, plus onion, leek, a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (one of the few wines that flatters asparagus) and all that jazz. I freeze the asparagus trimmings until I have about 5-6 lbs. worth of stems, then I'm on my way
The same can be done with cooked lobster shells, and save all your shrimp shells too...shrimp stock makes an intensley flavoured bisque. Getting creative with stocks is a great way to expand your cooking repetoire, especially when it comes to soups.
cav, great ideas. I'm gonna back away here and listen and learn.
Hi All,
Kara- Glad you like the new avatar! (The thought of Calvin pretending to gag on his mom's cooking, made me laugh!
)
The shrimp sound delicious!
Cav- Good to see you!
Excellent points, I'm still working on the master posts, and any thoughts are really welcomed!
It's a ton of information and I've been working on getting the classics up, then tweaking them. My plan for this thread is to have all of the basic information up in those first two posts, then use the posts after that for tips, tricks and suggestions.
A general sauce question here. What is the best way to add curry to a sauce. For some reasons Im missing a point because some of my curries are very flavorful, and othjers are bitter. Is curry soluble in one thing and not another?
Hi farmerman,
Hate to answer a question with a question, but what are you making?
I ask because you'd use different bases for different things.
farmerman, do you always use the same brand of curry powder? That could be one factor, some are sweeter than others, and/or spicier....bitterness can also result from not cooking out the curry powder long enough. The best solution is to add it to your sauteed ingredients, cook it out a little, then add your liquid. Hope that helps.
we get our curry from Pennzys
Kara,
Just looked at this thread for the first time in a few days. The Greens cookbook is from the San Fransico restaurant of the same name. I'd love to eat there sometime. I hear it's very good.
KP
I have eaten at Green's in SF. Beautifully situated restaurant, comfortably placed tables, nice staff, and the food was fine but nothing to write home about, in my opinion. But that was my one dish, which I cannot remember a thing about except that I wasn't bowled over. I haven't looked at the book.
I have "Fields of Greens" by Anne Sommerville, who was head chef at Greens for awhile. I'm not a vegetarian but I do love this cookbook.
I have not eaten at Greens, but I have both the Greens and Fields of Greens cookbooks. Personally, I prefer the Greens cookbook. This was co-authored by Edward Espe Brown, who has a beautiful cookbook of his own, for those who are vegetarian-inclined
, 'Seductions of Rice.' I am no vegetarian, but all these books are great for those who are. The Greens cookbook has many great vegetable stock recipes. I use a variation on their mushroom stock recipe frequently.
I also have "Seductions of Rice". That has to be hands down the most boring "cookbook" ever written. Can it actually be called a cookbook? Page after page of
1 cup rice
2 cups water
1/2 tsp salt
Boil water and salt, add rice, cover and cook 15 minutes....again, and again, and again....
LMAO! 'Seductions of Rice' looked very nice on the shelf....but I must admit, I do not own it...
Personally, for vegetarian foods, I quite like Madhur Jaffrey's 'World Vegetarian' cookbook. Very good.
I have Madhur's "Quick and Easy Indian Cooking". Some of the recipes are neither quick, nor easy, but they are all really good. I posted this version on Abuzz some time ago:
2 whole skinless boneless chicken breasts, cut in half
6 green caradmom pods
5 whole cloves
1 2" stick cinnamon
1 medium onion, sliced thin
2 hot green chiles, cut in rounds with seeds left in
1" piece of ginger, cut into fine strips
Salt and Pepper
Oil for frying
Sauce:
2 Tbsp tomato paste
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp garam marsala
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
8 oz heavy cream
2 cloves garlic, minced
To make the sauce, simply combine all the ingredients except the
cream. Incorporate the cream just before using or the lemon will
curdle it.
Salt and pepper the chicken. Heat a little oil and whole spices
in a large skillet, then brown the chicken on both sides. Remove
and place in an ovenproof dish just large enough to hold the
chicken. Leave the spices in the pan. Add a little more oil,
then the oonions, chiles, and ginger. Saute until soft, about
five minutes. Arrange the mixture on top of chicken pieces.
Return the pan to the heat, add just a scant bit of oil, add the garlic and cook for 20 seconds, then put
in the sauce all at once, scraping the pan. Heat until bubbling and thickened
then pour over the chicken without displacing the onions. Bake
uncovered at 350 degrees (F) for 20-25 minutes. Remove the hard
spices and serve with rice.
Thanks for the ideas on curry. I just found an item in the Allentown Paper about dissloving curry in bubbling (but not burning) butter, apparently this is like a solvent to release the flavors more evenly.
How a bout some ideas on sweet dipping sauces We make sopaipillas a lot and we are getting tired of just honey or powdered sugar.
I like Jaffrey's book too, as well as Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, an old paperback I have....
cavfancier,
I agree that Greens is better than Fields of Greens, IMHO.
I also have the Moosewood Cookbook and the follow up book, The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, but I haven't used them much. They're a bit 70s Veggie style - lots of brown rice etc!
P
Heh heh, don't care much for the Moosewood cookbooks either, although we have em from the ancient days when wife was a vegetarian. She met me, and was soon eating steak like a saber-toothed tiger, lol. One idea I liked from Moosewood was the silken tofu mayo, although the recipe needed some serious tweaking to make it taste good. It has proven quite useful to me, and many variations have arisen in my kitchen. It is very nice with chipotle puree and fresh coriander.
farmerman, I might consider spicing up the honey a bit, with fresh thyme maybe, a bit of balsamic, maybe some fresh chilies too. Play around with it....sopaisillas are a pretty versatile fried sweet bread, so they can take some cool flavours, I would think. Red Pepper jelly maybe?
Cav, We were trying many sorts of sweet sauces on sopapillas and we hit on a very sugary ginger sauce and a mango sauce.
Does anyone have the old Vincent Price Cookbook with the recipes from many restau rrants that were big names in the 60s? (Oyster bar, Luchows, Antoines, Santa Fe RR etc) Its a really neat trip into basic fine food. IIt also had cc of menus from each restaurant.
