Cooking with Eowyn - Snowpocalypse
Feb. 6th, 2010 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
next_to_normalSeriously, LJ, what is going on? This place is DEAD. And I'm snowed in and I'm bored, so y'all better be posting something to keep me entertained, otherwise I'm gonna have to resort to reading my books for class, and no one wants that.
Well, if I'm going to be snowed in for three days, I might as well cook, right? I managed to get to the grocery store on Friday morning before the snow started - my boss (a bit prematurely, as it turned out) decided on Thursday night that we wouldn't open the office on Friday, since they were predicting snow to start around 10 am. Which it did, but it didn't start to accumulate for another six hours, so... oops? But I got a day off, so I'm not complaining.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a great batch of recipes. Here's what I made.
Nothing better than a hot bowl of soup on a snowy day, so I made Quick Crab Stew for lunch on Friday. It's kind of a cheaty recipe, since it uses cans of condensed soup, but I had a lot of recipes picked for this weekend and wanted something quick and easy. (I do have a real crab soup recipe, also from Paula Deen, which I will probably try eventually.) It came out a lot like New England clam chowder in color, consistency, and taste, but I'll take crab over clams any day, so it's worth it to whip this up rather than just opening a can of clam chowder. I gotta say, though, if you're gonna make it, make sure you use the right crab meat - if you get the "special" grade that's shreds or flakes of crab, it'll disappear into the soup. You definitely want the nice lumps of meat in there, plus the claw meat has a stronger flavor than the white meat.
For dinner Friday night, I tried Fettuccine with Prosciutto and Peas. Interestingly, the recipe online calls for 2/3 cup of heavy cream - the recipe in my cookbook only called for 1/4 cup, which was seriously not enough. They keep referring to the "sauce" throughout this recipe, and I'm thinking, "What sauce? This isn't even enough liquid to keep the pasta from sticking together!" So perhaps if you use the larger amount, it will come out better than mine did. Of course, if you read the comments, apparently people had some trouble with the cream curdling when the lemon juice was added. I obviously didn't have this problem, since there was barely any cream in there, but it might be worth it to add the cream at the end like the commenters recommend.
One other quibble I had with this recipe - the pasta shape was inappropriate for the ingredients. Twirling fettuccine around a fork meant the peas kept falling off the fork, and it was virtually impossible to get a bite with all three components of the dish. I ended up alternating between a forkful of pasta and a spoonful of prosciutto and peas. Maybe it would have worked better if there was actually some sauce, but I'd recommend using a shorter shape of pasta with some texture to it, so it clings to the peas more.
Tonight, I made Coconut Shrimp Soup, which also didn't go very well, but that wasn't the recipe's fault. Remember how I went shopping on Friday? Day of the blizzard, weekend of the Super Bowl? Yeah, the grocery store was practically out of food, so I ended up having to make some substitutions. They were out of fresh ginger - you wouldn't expect a snowstorm to cause a run on ginger, but there you have it - so I bought this ginger spice blend that was kind of a paste. That worked out fine. But I also couldn't find any coconut milk, and therein lies my downfall. I called my mother in the supermarket and asked if cream of coconut was the same as coconut milk. My mother: "Sure, I guess so." Well, it's not. Cream of coconut is way sweeter, and while that's awesome in a pina colada, it made my soup sickeningly sweet. I think the leftovers may be salvageable if I scoop out the noodles and the carrots and just eat it like a pasta dish with coconut sauce, but too much of the broth is just gross. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to put in all the shrimp - since seafood doesn't usually reheat well, I figured I'd just throw in one serving of shrimp tonight, and then I could add more each time I reheated it. So I didn't waste 1 1/2 lbs of shrimp, thank goodness. And my mother has accepted responsibility for this culinary failure, and has promised to google before advising me in the future.
I've got a couple more recipes to try tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have better luck than I did with this batch.
Well, if I'm going to be snowed in for three days, I might as well cook, right? I managed to get to the grocery store on Friday morning before the snow started - my boss (a bit prematurely, as it turned out) decided on Thursday night that we wouldn't open the office on Friday, since they were predicting snow to start around 10 am. Which it did, but it didn't start to accumulate for another six hours, so... oops? But I got a day off, so I'm not complaining.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a great batch of recipes. Here's what I made.
Nothing better than a hot bowl of soup on a snowy day, so I made Quick Crab Stew for lunch on Friday. It's kind of a cheaty recipe, since it uses cans of condensed soup, but I had a lot of recipes picked for this weekend and wanted something quick and easy. (I do have a real crab soup recipe, also from Paula Deen, which I will probably try eventually.) It came out a lot like New England clam chowder in color, consistency, and taste, but I'll take crab over clams any day, so it's worth it to whip this up rather than just opening a can of clam chowder. I gotta say, though, if you're gonna make it, make sure you use the right crab meat - if you get the "special" grade that's shreds or flakes of crab, it'll disappear into the soup. You definitely want the nice lumps of meat in there, plus the claw meat has a stronger flavor than the white meat.
For dinner Friday night, I tried Fettuccine with Prosciutto and Peas. Interestingly, the recipe online calls for 2/3 cup of heavy cream - the recipe in my cookbook only called for 1/4 cup, which was seriously not enough. They keep referring to the "sauce" throughout this recipe, and I'm thinking, "What sauce? This isn't even enough liquid to keep the pasta from sticking together!" So perhaps if you use the larger amount, it will come out better than mine did. Of course, if you read the comments, apparently people had some trouble with the cream curdling when the lemon juice was added. I obviously didn't have this problem, since there was barely any cream in there, but it might be worth it to add the cream at the end like the commenters recommend.
One other quibble I had with this recipe - the pasta shape was inappropriate for the ingredients. Twirling fettuccine around a fork meant the peas kept falling off the fork, and it was virtually impossible to get a bite with all three components of the dish. I ended up alternating between a forkful of pasta and a spoonful of prosciutto and peas. Maybe it would have worked better if there was actually some sauce, but I'd recommend using a shorter shape of pasta with some texture to it, so it clings to the peas more.
Tonight, I made Coconut Shrimp Soup, which also didn't go very well, but that wasn't the recipe's fault. Remember how I went shopping on Friday? Day of the blizzard, weekend of the Super Bowl? Yeah, the grocery store was practically out of food, so I ended up having to make some substitutions. They were out of fresh ginger - you wouldn't expect a snowstorm to cause a run on ginger, but there you have it - so I bought this ginger spice blend that was kind of a paste. That worked out fine. But I also couldn't find any coconut milk, and therein lies my downfall. I called my mother in the supermarket and asked if cream of coconut was the same as coconut milk. My mother: "Sure, I guess so." Well, it's not. Cream of coconut is way sweeter, and while that's awesome in a pina colada, it made my soup sickeningly sweet. I think the leftovers may be salvageable if I scoop out the noodles and the carrots and just eat it like a pasta dish with coconut sauce, but too much of the broth is just gross. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to put in all the shrimp - since seafood doesn't usually reheat well, I figured I'd just throw in one serving of shrimp tonight, and then I could add more each time I reheated it. So I didn't waste 1 1/2 lbs of shrimp, thank goodness. And my mother has accepted responsibility for this culinary failure, and has promised to google before advising me in the future.
I've got a couple more recipes to try tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have better luck than I did with this batch.
no subject
Date: Feb. 7th, 2010 08:55 pm (UTC)I make a Coconut Shrimp Curry that requires coconut milk. It's nummy. I think I'm making it Wednesday for dinner.
no subject
Date: Feb. 8th, 2010 04:37 am (UTC)