What's Cooking Dad? » easy

Salmon-iridescent shark rolls with shrimp

Cooking Dad — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:44:34 +0000

Iridescent shark isn’t actually a shark, but a catfish. It is normally sold as swai, striped catfish or pangasius filet. These fish are grown on fish farms, so they are a good choice for the environmentally conscious consumer. A good, also farmed, alternative would be Tilapia.

Ingredients:
2 pangasius filets
1 salmon filet
White wine
A few shrimps
1 clove of garlic
Lemon
Salt
Pepper

Fish filets should always be rinsed with cold water and patted dry before preparation. Cut the pangasius filets in half lengthwise. Cut the salmon filet into quarters. Wrap each salmon filet piece into a piece of pangasius and secure with a wooden toothpick.

Fry the rolls on both sides for a minute, add a dash of white wine and simmer for a few minutes. Stir fry the shrimps and chopped garlic in some oil and lemon juice. Sprinkle the salmon rolls with some salt and pepper and top with shrimps and a slice of lemon.

Tomato bread

Cooking Dad — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:58:00 +0000

This week is tomato week at A Way to Garden.com.

Our tomatoes have been growing quite well and the tomatoes just keep coming, so I have more than enough of them to try out some new things.

I have baked some tomato breads these last couple of days and they just keep getting better with each try.

Ingredients
6 medium sized tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
1 big clove of garlic
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp of chopped thyme
440 grams all purpose flour
110 grams whole wheat flour
175 ml water
1 packet dry yeast

Cut up the tomatoes and add olive oil, chopped garlic, salt, sugar and chopped thyme. Spread on a cookie sheet and grill in the oven for about an hour.

Mix flour water and yeast in a large bowl and knead for a few minutes. Don’t worry if it feels a bit dry, the tomatoes still contain quite some moisture. When the tomatoes have cooled down a bit, mix them into the dough. If the dough is too sticky you can add a bit of flour. Now comes the most important part: letting the dough rise. Leave the dough in a covered bowl until doubled in size, this should take about an hour. Punch it down and let it rise again until doubled in size. Punch down once more and transfer into your bread form. Alternatively you can use a cast iron pan to bake your bread in. Preheat the oven while the dough raises for the last time. Bake at 250C (480F) for 10 minutes than turn down the heat to 160C (320F) and bake for another 20 minutes.

Ofenschlupfer

Cooking Dad — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:55:11 +0000

I recently received an e-mail from Lakshmi, a fellow food blogger, who runs the Kitchen Chronicles blog, to inform me about the A.W.E.D (A Worldly Epicurean’s Delight) German event taking place this month. A.W.E.D. is a food blogging event that focuses on the traditional culinary delights of a different country each month. This month: Germany.

When thinking about traditional German food a lot of mouth watering dishes pop into my mind. The only problem is: they all involve meat. Not a problem for me, but the A.W.E.D. event focuses on vegetarian dishes. That narrowed down the possibilities considerably. I already posted the recipe for potato pancakes, which would fit the bill perfectly, a while ago, so I had to look for something new.

After some searching I found something that sounded quite nice in one of my grandma’s old cookbooks: Ofenschlupfer. Ofenschlupfer is a traditional sweet Swabian dish that can be served as a dessert or as a main dish.

Ingredients
4 apples
4 bread rolls
250 grams raisins
2 eggs
1/2 liter milk
3 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp cinnamon
Bread crumbs
Butter
Vanilla sauce
Powdered sugar

This works best with old bread rolls, because they absorb the liquid better than fresh ones. Cut the bread rolls and apples into thin slices. Lay alternating layers into a deep greased baking pan. Don’t forget to toss some raisins into the mix every now and again and make sure you end with a layer of bread.

In a bowl, mix the eggs, milk, sugar and cinnamon and pour it into the baking pan. Sprinkle with some bread crumbs and some small pieces of butter. Bake at 175C (350F) for 60 minutes.

Serve warm with some powdered sugar and warm vanilla sauce.

Homemade tomato ketchup

Cooking Dad — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:27:24 +0000

We have been harvesting quite a few tomatoes from our greenhouse these past few weeks. Yesterday I decided to give homemade tomato ketchup a try and it was a great success! As with many nice foods, it took a lot longer to make than to eat it. I only made a fairly small batch to try out the recipe. Next time I will make a big pan full of it and freeze it smaller batches.

Ingredients
800 grams tomatoes (one 28 oz can if you don’t have any fresh ones)
1 medium sized onion
1 small clove of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
75 grams sugar
3 tbsp vinegar
1 tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon

Peel the skin off of the tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes should be put into boiling water for a few seconds followed by a ice water dip, this makes the skin come of very easily. Canned tomatoes can be easily peeled or might already be peeled. Fry the finely chopped onion and garlic in olive oil over medium heat without letting them get brown. Add the chopped up tomatoes and the rest of the ingredients and let it simmer until it’s fairly thick. Smooth mixture in a blender and chill for at least a few hours so the flavors can blend.

This ketchup will look a bit odd to most people as it does not contain any artificial coloring and thus looks more orange than the red we are used to. It’s also free of preservatives.

puff pastry with strawberries

Cooking Dad — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 15:16:07 +0000

We have a lot of fruits and vegetables growing in our garden. Strawberries are currently ripening and we can harvest some almost daily now. One can only eat so many strawberries with whipped cream, so I tried something different: puff pastry with strawberries.

Ingredients:
Puff pastry sheets
Strawberries
Sugar
Butter
Powdered sugar

Wash your strawberries and cut them into quarters. Cut the puff pastry sheets into squares of about 5cm (2 inches) and put a few pieces of strawberry on each piece. Top with a bit of butter and sprinkle with some sugar. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes at 200 C (400 F) until golden brown. Let them cool down a bit and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Spaghetti spiders

Cooking Dad — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:08:46 +0000

Today I made some spaghetti spiders with the girls. This dish is very simple to make and the kids love it, the perfect combination! The kids can also help preparing it, which they love to do.

Ingredients
Dried spaghetti
Hotdogs
Your favorite pasta sauce (sans the meat)

Cut up the hotdogs in bite sized pieces and push the dry spaghetti’s half way through. We used 4 spaghetti’s in each piece, so our spiders end up having four legs on each side. Next boil the spaghetti’s as per the directions on the package. Another great way to cook spaghetti, and any other type of pasta, is to boil it for 3 minutes, turn off your heat source and let it rest for the amount of time noted as cooking time on the package. Our spaghetti was supposed to boil for 8 minutes, so we boiled it for 3 minutes and let it rest in the hot water for another 8 minutes. This should cook your pasta perfectly al dente!

This is what they should look like when they are done cooking. Now all that’s left to do is adding your favorite pasta sauce.

Thanks to maraz_m_moroz for the original idea!

Pancakes with maple syrup

Cooking Dad — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:38:42 +0000

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.

Pita Bread

Cooking Dad — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:10:10 +0000

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.

Ingredients
3 cups of flour
1 ¼ cups of lukewarm water
1 packet of dry yeast
1 ½ tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp olive oil

Mix all the ingredients well and knead for about 10 minutes to get a firm elastic dough. Place the dough into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a damp towel. Let the dough rise until it has roughly doubled in size (about 60 to 90 minutes) Punch down the dough and divide into 8 to 16 pieces, depending on how big you like your pita breads. Let the dough relax for about 15 minutes so it will become easier to roll. Roll the pieces of dough out on a lightly floured work surface, they should end up about 4mm thick.

Bake the pita breads for about 3 minutes at 200C (400F), preferably on a baking stone that has been well preheated.

Serve warm with stuffing of your choice.

Chicory with ham and cheese

Cooking Dad — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 11:39:26 +0000

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.

After a quick wash in cold water, put a single layer of leaves in a slightly greased oven pan and sprinkle with a little sugar.

Repeat until you have used about half of the chicory leaves. Put half of the cut up ham and a little cheese on top.

I’ve put on some slices of cheese, but you can also use grated cheese. Go easy on the cheese, we will put on more later.

Continue layering the rest of the chicory leaves on top, again sprinkling each layer with a little sugar. Finish with the rest of the ham and cover with cheese. A little breadcrumbs sprinkled on top of the cheese will turn it into a crispy crust when baked.

Bake at 180C (360F) for about 20 minutes or until the top looks nice and crispy.

Basic fresh homemade egg pasta

Cooking Dad — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:18:25 +0000

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.