(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

[dragonlady7]

Could you do meat pies or pastries?
My father's favorite dish, as adapted by my mother, is steak and mushroom pie, and it is the most amazing thing. It's just a regular pie crust, top and bottom, and inside-- well, I'll look up her specific recipe, but it's like a pound of steak cubed small and cooked with mushrooms, and it makes a kind of gravy of itself that all soaks into the pie and oh my god. I never make it because pie crust is a pain in the ass but obviously that's not a problem for you.

I also rely very heavily on biscuit-crust or dumpling-crust "pot pies" that I throw a lot of vegetables in so that I don't have to make a vegetable side dish.

I would be interested to know what else one can bake that is savory, apart from those categories!

Also the cardamom ice cream sounds fantastic, I am jello (s).

I would miss baking yeast breads too, that's about the only baking I do reliably anymore.

[graydon]

If you have a round covered baking dish -- I think Corning still makes the oval version; there are certainly cast iron ones -- you can just skip the pie crust.

I tend to do a lot of variations on "chop and saute an onion"; if there's going to be herbs they go in the fat before the onion. Then whatever goes on top (pork loin rounds, pork shoulder, beef, it really doesn't matter very much) plus some chopped vegetables or fruit or dried fruit (pork shoulder with dried apple, fresh cranberries, and cider for liquid is pretty good) then put the lid on and heave it in a slow oven. The onion keeps the meat from sticking, everything cooks nicely, cleanup is usually not so bad (this is a reason to avoid baking dishes with corners) and it's easy to both adjust to the seasonal vegetables and to make nice things. Beef roasts with just the onion (that got some thyme and tarragon) and some maple syrup and whisky over the top do well. Venison with some chopped bacon for fat and some cubed squash and something sharp -- cider, cranberry juice, lemon, wine -- can be very nice, though you want to be sure it's squash that doesn't lose all traces of structural integrity with the long cooking time for the venison.

[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.

[unicornduke]

that's just cooking though :P

I'm mostly hoping that my enthusiasm for baking will carry over into the savory things because I will spend hours and hours baking but cooking stuff is annoying.

I don't have a dutch oven or anything so deep so slow cooking a roast oven is going to be more concerning for me. Everything is three inches or shallower because they're all baking pans. But I can do pizza dough, which would include calzones and stromboli and I've got some good ideas from one of my baking books.

[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!)

[graydon]

No bread lets out the Icelandic Chicken "wrap thing in bread dough" approaches and gluten-free pie crust with structural properties is difficult. Hurm.


Don't think I've got a useful suggestion!

[unicornduke]

I'm actually unconcerned about the pie crust, I made a super hard pair over the weekend that shrunk a little and have maintained their shape very well. So that's no problem! And pizza crust is pretty easy too and it can wrap things. I just need to figure out the things that go in them.

[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.

[graydon]

If you've got the pie crust, well.

1. Publish!

2. Anything, only a little less and a little drier than you expect it ought to be.

You know when you'd put the lid on a big pot of something and wander off for awhile? That's about when it goes in the pastry. So for venison, braise until nearly tender, out with a slotted spoon, into the pastry, add the mushrooms or the vegetables raw, close up the pastry, bake. (this presumes actual vegetables; roots and tubers need some extra cooking first or to be grated. Beef and grated potato can be pretty good like this.) I'd be wanting to make sure there was enough fat in there, too; not usually a problem with beef or pork but I can see it being an issue with venison, there's a certain minimum fat content to get any flavours to blend.

[unicornduke]

I used this recipe https://www.whattheforkfoodblog.com/2015/08/17/gluten-free-pie-crust-recipe/ but just subbed sorghum flour for brown rice flour. It did turn out harder than wanted but I also made it kinda thick around the edges.

I'll be honest, I need to find recipes that are made for this kind of thing. I'm not at adjusting-and-cooking-by-feel yet haha.

Yeah, I usually cook the ground venison in bacon fat even if I don't grind bacon in. I'm going to start with the recipes in the venison cookbook because those recipes are specific enough on cook time and how/why things work that it is the perfect level for me to work from.

[graydon]

Thank you for the pie crust recipe!

Totally get the "need recipes"! Was more hoping to make one useful generalization (it goes in on the dry side) and one forward-looking statement (this works with nigh-anything).

I hope it goes well!