Mind The Gap

Thanks to Ryan’s diligent efforts, and some futzing I did with the gimp, the recipe recording wiki is up, and I’ve started pouring data into it.

Woo! Data!

http://heather.unwashedmeme.com/wiki/

Now that we are over halfway through the week, I reckon it’s time to blog about last weekend. Since I remembered to stick my camera in my purse, there are many photos.

FRIDAY

Flowers seen while on a nice walk on a break at work:

Yummy dinner cooked Friday night with friends.

I can’t help but think this would make a cool wallpaper.

There was even a delicious dessert.

SATURDAY

After a quick stop by the tattoo shop (Evolve) to talk to Suzi about some work, we went over to Russ’ house, and shortly thereafter to Nathan’s house. We elected ourselves to the dinner committee and began operation Get Lost At Fresh Market, which was a HUGE SUCCESS. The food was good too.

The Rock Band was better though, and so I have pictures of it.

SUNDAY

On Sunday I went up to the shop and got the red/orange/yellow on my back touched up. It hurt. Woo!

Still <3 the camera. Go see pictures taken on and around New Years.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hmfullen/NewYear08

Made some sample cakes, to feed to friends and family over thanksgiving and solicit feedback. The purpose is to decide on wedding cake flavors as early in the game as possible.

So far:

• Lemon-Lime cake with pineapple curd filling
• Coconut Icebox cake
• Sweet Potato cake with pecan cream cheese frosting
• Devil’s food cake with peppermint butter cream filling and mint-chocolate ganache frosting

All of the frosting I sampled during construction, and the cake I sampled after leveling the layers, was very good. I may do another set of 3 or 4 flavors at Christmas time, in hopes of coming out with 3 or 4 well liked flavors in the end.

Since I would like to have the wedding cake be a big cantilevered, tiered, fancy display thing, covered in itty bitty petit fours of various flavors sitting on each tier, the job after flavor decisions will be to figure out how to adapt the cake and frosting recipes to make petit fours out of them.

I discovered that you can put basically anything in curry and it’ll be good, so basically, when I’m in a hurry to make something (or need to use up the tempeh before it goes bad) I make a curry, using whatever vegetables are around or can be quickly procured.

I bought some red curry paste at the Asian market, and finally got around to using it, the result is really more of an orange curry, but it’s very good.  Today’s occasion was that a package of tempeh in the fridge reached it’s ‘sell by’ date tomorrow, so it seemed like a good time to use it up.  I also had half a jalapeño left waiting to be used, a couple of orange bell peppers, a couple of potatoes left over from something, and some leftover bits of squash and zucchini that weren’t big enough to be used in the recipe the other parts of the unfortunate vegetables died for.

The process is pretty simple:

• Chop up all your vegetables.  Keep the peppers separate since they will go to mush if they cook as long as the others.  (I tend to chop everything up pretty small and as uniform as I can so it will cook consistently, and faster.)
• Chop up the tempeh in little blocks (like .5″ by 1″ or thereabouts)
• Brown the outsides of the tempeh in a frying pan on medium/medium-high, with olive oil, a bit of sesame oil, red pepper flakes, chili powder and some minced garlic if it’s handy.  Stir it a lot to keep it all moving around so nothing gets burnt and the browning is consistent.  This doesn’t take long, but I haven’t timed it.
• Set it off to the side when it’s done and get back to everything else.
• Put 5-6 tablespoons of the curry paste in a saucepan on medium heat and add two cans of coconut milk (they actually make a light version) and get it all mixed well.
• Leave the saucepan on medium/medium-high until it starts to bubble, then add your veggies (except the bell peppers).
• Cook for 5-7 minutes, stirring once in a while.
• Add the tempeh and the bell peppers.
• Cook for another 8-10 minutes or so, until the potatoes are done.
• Take the saucepan off the heat and let it cool until you can stand to eat it.
• To eat curry it’s really a good idea to have rice, if you use the cheap boil-in-bag kind (I sure do) it only takes 10 minutes to cook on medium-ish, so you want to put it on around the time you start adding veggies to the curry paste/coconut milk mixture.  Add some rosemary and a bay leaf to the water, it won’t really taste much different (what with the curry on it) but it sure will smell nice while it cooks, and it might taste a little better if you opted to eat the rice plain (weirdo).

Yum.  I hope I remember to come back to this post later and remember this combination of ingredients.

The annual expedition to Brooker, FL to eat mud bugs and random covered dish fare.

Ramon posted up on his cooler:

Ryan coming back from the tent where some men would periodically dump out spicy boiled things:

Shannon and Russ:

Ryan and Nathan:

One that was saved by a small boy and so escaped the fate of his brethren:

One that was not so lucky:

Shannon attempting not to have her picture taken, but alas, I succeeded:

A good time was had by all, except for the crawfish.

Today I went to the asian market with Emili and found some fun things, some of which became a partially pre-manufactured dinner. Everything is simmering now, and I think it’s going to be pretty good so I’m recording the ingredients for my own future reference if I want to make this again. Anyone else that likes curry is also more than welcome to try it out.

Ingredients

1. 1 can Maesri Red Curry Soup
2. 2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
3. 1 whole tomato chopped
4. 1 package tempeh, cut into small bits
5. rice…I used 1 bag from a package of success boil-in-bag brown rice that we had sitting in the cupboard
6. olive oil
7. salt
8. pepper
9. sriracha (sp?) or other exceedingly hot chili compound

Instructions

1. Start some water boiling for the rice…at least on my stove, getting a big pot of water boiling takes a long time so you have to start it early.
2. Chop up the tempeh
3. Combine in a pot already heated at High/Med-High
1. olive oil (pour for about 1-2 seconds…it’s probably something like 3-4 tablespoons)
2. Sriracha garlic chili paste (about 1-2 tablespoons, or more if you like things spicy)
3. about 1 tablespoon dried red pepper flakes
4. salt to taste
5. pepper to taste
4. Add tempeh
5. Let tempeh get heated all the way through in the mixture, stirring frequently
6. Add chopped celery and tomatoes (you can chop them while the tempeh is cooking)
7. Sometime during this process the water for the rice starts to boil – toss the rice in
8. Once you are satisfied that the tempeh is fairly well heated through, pour in the can of curry soup
9. The curry soup goodness is ready to go once it’s all heated through, this seems to be around or shortly after the rice gets done cooking.

If I’ve never noted it, I should now. The asian market off 13th street and 23rd ave rocks.