Pancakes with maple syrup
The best way to start your day is with a good breakfast. One of my favorite breakfasts is pancakes with maple syrup, lots of maple syrup!
Ingredients
40 grams butter
2 eggs
230 ml milk
210 grams flour
1 heaped tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
Melt the butter in a sauce pan or in the microwave oven. Mix in the eggs and milk. In a second bowl mix the dry ingredients and add them to the butter, eggs and milk mixture. Don’t worry if the batter isn’t completely smooth, a few lumps don’t matter.
Heat a pan on medium high heat, a cast iron skillet works best for this. The right temperature is crucial when baking pancakes. A few drops of water dropped into the pan should dance around a little before evaporating.
Pour some batter into the pan, an ice cream scoop is the perfect measure. You don’t have to grease the pan, the butter in the batter will take care of that. Depending on the size of your pan, you should be able to bake 3 or 4 pancakes at the same time. When the top of your pancakes have bubbles and start drying up, it’s time to flip them over.
A few more minutes of baking the other side and your pancakes are ready to be served. Stack them on a plate, add some butter and lots of maple syrup.
Danger Men Cooking wear
I’ve been asked about the ‘DANGER MAN COOKING’ sign in my website header image more than a few times. The original sign actually reads: ‘DANGER MEN COOKING’ but since I’m just one man, I changed it using Photoshop.
There’s a lot of DMC wear available: aprons, oven mitts, baseball caps, steak branding irons and, of course, the road sign. You can order all these items from amazon
Pita Bread
One of the easiest breads to bake is probably pita bread. It doesn’t take hours and hours of rising and there isn’t much that can go wrong. They taste good and can be eaten in many different ways.
I really love pita bread filled with kebab or gyros, lettuce, tomato and lots of garlic sauce. But pita breads can also make good breakfast bread, filled with meat, cheese or Nutella. You can keep the dough in the fridge overnight, so one big batch of dough can be used to make dinner one night and a nice breakfast the next morning.
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Chicory with ham and cheese
Chicory, also called Belgian endive or witlof, is a slightly bitter tasting vegetable that is grown indoors or under ground to prevent sunlight from reaching the plant. The lack of sunlight prevents the plants leaves from turning green. The whiter the leaves are the less bitter they taste. Chicory can be eaten both cooked or raw. I like to cook the chicory in the oven with ham and cheese.
Ingredients
3 heads of chicory (about 500 grams total)
200 grams ham
some cheese
a little sugar
bread crumbs
The most important thing when preparing chicory is to cut away the inner, solid, part of the chicory head. The center tastes very bitter and has to be removed completely.
Start by cutting the head in half from the top of the head to the base, this will reveal the solid center of the chicory head. Cut the halves once more to end up with four equal quarters. You can now easily cut out the bitter part. Make sure you remove it completely and you will end up with individual leaves.
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Mouth-watering Apple Recipes
Apple pudding, apple compote, apple jelly, apple soup and of course apple pie. These are just a few examples of the 90 apple recipes that Amy Tylor put together into one of her fine recipe books: Mouth-watering Apple Recipes – The Ultimate Cookbook for America’s most popular fruit.
I was lucky enough to be able to obtain a license to give away this great book for free! Just use the download link at the end of this post to download your free copy of the book. The book has been saved in the PDF format, so if don’t have a PDF reader already, you need to download and install it to your computer. A free PDF reader is available from Adobe and can be downloaded from here.
I have obtained give-away licenses to a few more cookbooks, but their license doesn’t allow the books to be offered as public downloads. I can, however, use them as a free gift to people who subscribe to my site. So, just use the ‘subscribe via email’ box at the top of this site to sign up and you will be send a download link to the other books as soon as I have gone through them, to decide which ones are worth your while!
You can download your free copy of Mouth-watering Apple Recipes by clicking here!
Food and Cooking Recipe Search Engine
When looking for new recipes to try out, in addition to flipping through my many cookbooks, I often use the Google search engine to find recipes on the ‘net. The Google search engine has been my longtime favorite way to search the web, but sometimes the search results contain a lot of useless sites. What if we could use Google’s search to only search through sites that we know to be good? Well, we can! Google lets you create a custom search engine that will only search the sites that you want it to.
I’ve been playing with this exciting feature and created my own little food and cooking search engine. You can give it a try here. It’s far from complete, but with your help it can become the best place to search for recipes. You can help me improve this search engine by letting me know what your favorite food and recipe website is, so I can add it to the list of sites that are searched with this search engine.
Basic fresh homemade egg pasta
Fresh pasta is very easy to make and it tastes a lot better than the dried pasta you can buy in stores. Making pasta only requires a few basic ingredients and it doesn’t take very long to make fresh pasta. You can use any type of flour to make pasta, but the best pasta is made with type 0 flour, which is a very finely sieved flour.
Ingredients
100 gram flour
1 large egg
The above amounts of the ingredients will make about one serving of pasta. If you are making pasta for 4 people, use 400 grams flour and 4 large eggs.
Put the flour in a large bowl, make a little hole in the middle and crack the eggs into it. Beat the eggs with a fork and mix in the flower a little bit at a time. When everything is kind of sticking together, empty the bowl onto a wooden board and continue kneading the dough with your hands. Put the dough into a plastic bag and let it rest for about 30 minutes at room temperature.
Sprinkle your work surface with a little flour and roll out the dough. When it has the desired thickness you can cut the pasta into little strips and cook them.
Home made play dough, safe for kids
Today I have a little different recipe. This recipe is not going to make you something you can eat, but since it uses regular cooking ingredients and is made in the kitchen, I guess it can be posted on this site.
I’m not going to lie about it, yesterday I badly needed some play dough. Never mind why, sometimes a grown man can have a dire need for play dough! Being Sunday and all, I couldn’t just go to the store and buy any of the stuff, so I decided I’d make some myself. The recipe is really simple and it uses ingredients you probably already have. This play dough is great for kids, as it is totally non-toxic.
Ingredients
2 cups of flour
2 cups of warm water
1 cup of salt
2 tbsp of oil
Mix all the ingredients in a pan on low heat and keep stirring until the dough doesn’t feel sticky anymore. You are looking for the consistency of mashed potatoes, make sure you cook it long enough or it will be sticky.
With the basic, off-white, play dough done, you can now take little portions of it and knead in some food coloring.
That’s all there is to it! Now, the only thing missing is the authentic Play-Doh smell. I never really liked the smell, but I know a lot of people love it. If you want to make your home made play dough smell like Play-Doh, there is a solution for you: just mix in some Play-Doh fragrance!
I’m not sure your play dough will be non-toxic after adding it though. The thing I find most disturbing about this product is this: the fragrance is not supposed to be used in your home made play dough. The directions read:
Gently spray on pulse points of neck, wrists, and décolleté.
What the hell is your date going to think when you show up reeking like Play-Doh???
Potato pancakes
Oh, the childhood memories… My grandmother used to make the best potato pancakes when I was a little boy. She always had to make me some, whenever we went over to visit my grandparents, and I would always help her.
Potato pancakes are really easy to make and only require a few ingredients. They can be the whole meal, or you can serve them with meat and veggies. We always eat them just with applesauce.
Ingredients:
1 kilo potatoes
2 big onions
2 eggs
2 cups of rolled oats
Salt
Pepper
Peel and wash the potatoes, peel the onions and cut into quarters. Use a food processor to turn the potatoes and unions into a thick batter. Stir in the eggs, rolled oats and some salt and pepper.
Make the pancakes by dropping a tablespoon full of batter into a well oiled hot frying pan and use the back of the spoon to spread out the batter. I love to use my cast iron skillet to bake pancakes, there’s no other pan that even comes close. Fry on both sides on medium heat until golden brown.
Best served with cold apple sauce!
Chinese cabbage with potatoes
Chinese cabbage is a very versatile vegetable. As the name suggests, you will find this vegetable widely used in Chinese cuisine, often used in stir fried dishes. There are many western dishes that can use Chinese cabbage as a replacement for various ingredients. Recipes that call for chicory or endive can be made with Chinese cabbage, but it can also be eaten raw, like lettuce. I tried a dish that I normally make with endive and I think the Chinese cabbage was a pretty good replacement.
Ingredients:
1 Chinese cabbage
Potatoes
Peel and dice your potatoes and cook in salted water for about 10 – 15 minutes. You want to use about the same amount of potatoes as you would normally eat. Cut the cabbage in quarters and remove the hard middle part. Chop the cabbage into 3 cm wide strips and add to the boiling potatoes. Pour of the water after 2 minutes and your Chinese cabbage with potatoes is done. To make it a bit richer, you can add some baked bacon to the mix.
Serve with gravy and brats or meatballs.