(no subject)

[unicornduke]

I spent a lot of time relaxing on the balcony today and it was so lovely. Beautiful weather although I had to get a blanket after a bit because my legs were cold. The balcony faces mostly north and gets about 15 minutes of direct sunlight at about 8am. I moved into my bedroom about a half hour ago because someone in the apartment complex was having a very loud party and it echoed right into the living room. Haven't left the apartment except to walk Mara.

I did do some baking today, I baked the cookies I prepped yesterday and wow were they tasty. I don't know if I would call them the best ever cookies but they were a ton of fun to make and absolutely enormous and chocolatey.


(don't mind the weird angle, I was trying to see if I could take a video of me cracking open the cookie by holding the phone under my chin. It didn't work lol)

Then around noon I made the ice cream base, which is normally a double vanilla with both pods and extract but I don't generally buy vanilla pods except for this recipe and I wanted to try something different. I put 1/2 teaspoon of ground cardamom in it (I'm trying to use it up as it's rapidly losing it's strength) and it turned out very light and aromatic and lovely. A good experiment.



I forgot to take meat out of the freezer so I just ate spiced rice with vegetables again tonight. I think if I want to actually be interested in cooking things regularly I need to turn it into baking. So I think I'm going to get a savory baking cookbook and pull some out of the cookbooks I've got. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of savory things tend to be yeast breads, which I can't really do well gluten free. I miss making bread.

Comments

[unicornduke]

I could do those! I'm pretty meh about pie generally, which is why this last bunch had hard crusts. I think I need to find a new recipe or just go back to the mix I was buying at the store before because that made nice pie crusts. But that would work! I should look up some recipes.

Last night I was flipping through a baking book I've got, it's a country harvest baking book and it's about half savory, half sweet so it's got a bunch of different stuff in there. Biscuits are one thing that I can experiment with and I can also make pizza dough! So anything that is pizza or calzone or stromboli style would also work and I've got some ideas working for that. I might resurrect the sourdough starter that I had going for a bit and try doing it with that because the gluten free crusts tend to not taste like much and I think the sourdough would help it.

Recipes are key though. I've got to find some good ones. I've got all this meat so it's not a huge deal to try a bunch of different stuff. I've got so much venison still in the freezer in PA and it's already April.

[dragonlady7]

I don't know if you've encountered meat pasties (singular: pasty) or bridies, but those are also a fantastic savory baked thing-- hand pies, a Cornish and sometimes Scottish thing, notable for being wonderfully portable. I also have found that you can eat them cold-- that's a salient feature of the steak and mushroom pie as well; we normally don't reheat the leftovers, but eat them cold, and it's all kind of gelled and really lovely. Not to everyone's taste and it would probably depend on the cut of meat, but good if you're not sure what your reheating situation would be-- the point of the pasty, I think, was that a miner could take it in his box lunch.
I bet there are a billion recipes for those. They're the sort of thing I would like to eat more of but ... honestly I should try making them at the farm sometime, and find out if they really are good cold.

(Not a lunch, but a snack, in a similar vein of eat-hot-or-cold, are the most important dish of the Latvian national identity-- piragi, singular pirag, which is a small bun meant to be eaten from one hand with a beer in the other, with a yeast dough (you can use pizza dough recipes to make this, though they tend to be a little chewier than the traditional) wrapped around a filling of bacon or pork belly, and onions, cooked down. We Did Not Have Any at Easter because Dave's aunt had mistakenly assumed she had them premade and frozen but she did not and it was too late!)

[unicornduke]

hmmm, I think my venison cookbook had a recipe for cornish pasties so I should be able to give that a go. A portable food would be good for lunches especially in the summer while I'm out and about. Maybe I could make about a billion and freeze them for later since I've got a lot of stuff on hand.

I am going to give in and buy a Mockmill because I've got a ton of corn to grind for cornmeal and I can make a bunch of awesome cornbreads that can be eaten cold, but I need to grind the corn. Doing it in the handmill sucks.