The Menu of the Day Thread.

Yesterday was a great but simple meal - entree and dessert:

 

1) Veal milanese, fresh peas, carrots and onions in butter. 

2) Fresh cherry Clafoutis. 

Dinner for tonight:

 

Garlic Escargots in Toasted Ciabatta Boxes

Blue Cheese Cole Slaw

Fresh Fried Lake Huron Whitefish

Pomme Frites

Roasted Asparagus

Rhubarb Strawberry Cobbler over Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream

 

My wife was just diagnosed with Celiac Sprue so menus are undergoing a learning curve. So tonight was somewhat of a mishmosh.

Grilled brats with green peppers and red onions with fennel seed and olive oil

Homemade Cole Slaw

Minced Cauliflower and Green pea pancake with sweet curry, rogan josh and homemade rice flour with olive oil

Chopped up sugar free fudgesicle with sugar free whipped cream (surprisingly good and refreshing)

We just finished this friday evening's meal. Simple can be so delicious! This was also very seasonal;

1. some kind of fish, but what is it?

2. strawberries, sugar and a quenelle of fromage blanc

 

The fish is a seasonal delicatesse from my neighbouring country, Holland. They call it "maatjes". It's virgin herring eaten raw! They contain a very high fatcontent (seems up to 40%) that they will loose very soon. Now is the moment to eat them. Served them with some kind of sauce gribiche; mayo, shallot, chili, hardboiled eggs and straight from the garden; parcely, tarragon, lemon verbena, citronella and some lemon. The toast is fried multigrain bread.

 

 

 

 

 

As I may have mentioned before, where we live, food is not a big deal.  So I now make three squares a day, every day. 

Thank goodness it’s just two of us.  Today the full menu is as follows: 

Breakfast: skillet of home fries, hot Italian sausage, sweet onions, multi-colored bell peppers, soft scrambled eggs all topped with Parmesan cheese. 

Lunch: (leftover from last night) Char grilled Sirloin burgers on yummy-eggy fresh baked buns (from the bakery down the road) accompanied by a large handful of fresh baby spinach and sliced tomatoes; along side oven baked French fries. 

Dinner: Grilled chicken Enchiladas with Hatch chiles and homemade flour tortillas from the really nice lady down the street. 

Dessert: Double Chocolate Macadamia Nut Brownie (these are house made) Sundaes.  Why not guild the lily?

Made a very nice sort of nicoise salad.  Only one course but lots of stuff

thin string beans blanched

boiled potatoes

really good "date" tomatoes

fresh (fresh!) borlotti beans, boiled (the difference between fresh and dried is like the difference between fresh peas and dried)

hard boiled eggs

roast red peppers

dark meat tuna packed in olive oil

gaeta olives

all drizzled with good olive oil, parsley, salt and pepper

Fresh home made crusty bread

very simple, extremely satisfying- all on a large flat plate, with each food in a section of contrasting color, tuna in the middle

Siduri, if I could only eat one dish for the rest of my life...

I usually sear some Ahi (not traditional, I know), but I like canned tuna too.

 

My friend came up with the special for the day:

 

3) Fresh rockfish wrapped with prosciutto, seared, cooked, topped with a ...basically puttanesca without olives.

    Fried capers to garnish.

    A bit salty as you might guess, but I like salt.

 

4) Dessert was lemon mousse.

 

Not as seasonal as I'd like, but I DO like where this thread is going...

 

Edit:  Enjoyed the pics, ChrisBelgium

I don't even know what Ahi is, L4B! 

tonight I'm going to make pissaladiere (pissaladina?) just to stay in the theme of provence.  (Not for any reason, but thinking of one dish made me think of the other.)  Pizza dough, sauteed onions, black olives, washed salted anchovies (not the oil kind, these are tastier i think).  I add grated gruyere. 

 

Yes, i forgot, crisbelgium, wonderful pictures.  Do you actually plate your food like that at home?  Not sure i'd go for the raw fish, but it looked really nice. 

I love pissaladière! Somewhat the french pizza!

I always make an effort to plate nicely. It turns a smile on people's faces, but the other side is that it always has to taste as it looks or the disapointment is bigger than normal too!

And, let's be honest, as I'm also an amateur photographer, the plates have to look even prettier for the picture too.

ChrisBelgium

You got my taste buds going....

Herring..... I miss them. especially the new ones of the season!

Can't get them here.

We never used to plate them. Just go to the fishmonger, grab the little herring by the tail and eat it. No sauces or accompaniements needed.

 

Back on topic;

My menu the other day:

Starter of raw ham, salami, some olives and a good glass of red wine, followed by

Lamb chop marinated in musterd, rosemary and garlic on the braai. with potato and onion (both foil wrapped and put on the coals) and green peas.

 

 

Nice plating and photos ChrisBelgium .

 

I made sous vide strip steak with roasted elephant garlic

 

and sous vide chicken breast with daikon

 

dcarch

 

dcarch

Sounds good! If you don't mind, your pictures raised a few questions:

 

1) What kind of grid marks are those on your sous-vide steak? Looks like a fancy grill you're using? Nice! :) Never seen this before.

 

2) Seems like that steak is smothered in sauce. What kind of sauce is that? I usually serve my steak without sauce. The rare times I deglaze the pan to make a sauce, I get 2, maybe 3 Tbspn per steak, from deglazing the pan - but I've never seen that much sauce on a grilled steak!! You must really love sauce? I'm just curious how you prepared that sauce, if you don't mind sharing?

 

3) What kind of herb is that on your steak? From here it looks like it could be... chervil?

 

Thanks!

 

WOW!!  Sous-vide ? 

That’s pretty impressive for a home cook!! 

...And I second the motion,  just love the look of that sauce, please share with the class!!  My mouth is simply watering!!

I'm doing some grilled spare ribs tonight ( too lazy to do the total low and slow smoker thing today ) with a grilled shrimp and avocado salad.

Too bad my camera is broken, I'd like to post some pics. So it goes.

mjb.

Dcarch, I'm also very intrigued by some things you use. I never heard of elephant garlic. Is there some other identification for that? I seem to recognize the green herb, but I'm not sure.

It looks a bit like cicely aka spanish chervil or Myrrhis odorata?? We call it in dutch Roomse kervel, meaning Roman chervil. It has a strong but sweet anisy taste. Well, we used it not so long ago, in a béarnaise prepared in a cooking class I'm following, together with tarragon. Sauce tasted like heaven! What is it?

Elephant garlic is known as ail à grosse tête in French, it's a variant of allium ampeloprasum.

Thank you guys, you are very kind.

 

Elephant garlic, it is not really in the garlic family. Closer to leeks. It is very mild in garlic flavor, so you can use it like a vegetable. I this steak dish, I had the steak sous vide cooked medium rare to juicy fork-tender, and grilled it on super-hot charcoal each side for a few seconds. The sauce was made with beef stock, shiitake mushrooms and roasted elephant garlic. Came out very well.

 

I am a little tied of the universal rectangular grill marks. So I designed to start a new fashion.

 

The green on the chicken dish is from the tops of daikon radish. A little spicy but nice. Why throw good food away?

 

dcarch

 

My bulb is bigger than yours :-)

 

Fresh caught Chinook Salmon, on the grill, Elk back straps, local asparagus, roasted red potatoes with green beans, bacon & balsamic, caesar salad,

sourdough bread, huckleberry and rhubarb pies......lots of cold beer!  A great Pacific Northwest back yard feast!

Today I've been experimenting with trying to slow-cook eggs en cocotte in a home oven. Initial results are surprisingly promising. Once I've got them reliable, the next step is to make an edible cocotte and sit them in an asparagus soup I've been making, topped off with pecorino romano.

 

Trying to decide what to stick on top, I'm thinking some chervil but then can't decide between simply a little lemon zest or maybe some parma ham and ground walnuts.

It's tuesday evening. One of these days that you open your fridge and ask yourself what to eat. The choice wasn't that difficult, I have so much herbs now growing abundantly, so we are going to use them. Two simple dishes that anyone can make. It includes my all-time favorite pasta & pesto. So here's tonight's meal.

 

- Amuse or starter; tortilla wrap

I love to make things like this using tortilla wraps. Many times week-end left-overs are used. Just enough to enjoy while having an apéritif. Algo a picar.

This is cream cheese, mustard, capres, different fresh soft herbs from the garden (no thyme, oregano or rozemary), pepper, smoked trout and a little lemonjuice. Herbs are all cut by hand with a very sharp knife to keep them nice and fresh. I mixed everything with a fork and spread on a tortilla wrap. Roll and cut. Served it with a salad and cherry tomatoes.

As you can imagine, you can make a million variations on this...

Also, you can put all the ingredients -except the wrap of course- in a foodprocessor to produce some kind of a paté. Let it rest in the fridge and it will ferm up nicely.

 

　

- Pasta and pesto

No dought my favorite dish. I now have such a quantity of fresh basil growing and soon it will try to produce flowers, so it's time to use it again and again. What a smell!! This pesto is made with basil, garlic, salt, pepper, parmezan and.. wallnuts. Not to forget with the best olive oil you can get your hands on.

I dried the wallnuts myself. Simply put nuts in their shells away for over a year to dry. The ones I now used are +2 years old! I put them to rest in my cellar. Then remove from their shells on another blue tuesday. They will stay tasty like forever when kept out of the light in a cool space. Served with pappardelle...

　

　

 

- dessert; coffee and 1 cookie (I'm just recovering from a very painful gout attack)

Tonight's special is

 

Asian Salad with Mandarin Oranges

-mixed greens, red onion, cucumber, shredded carrot, mandarin oranges in a ginger-sesame viniagarette

 

Sweet Chili Chicken Stir Fry over rice noodles or jasmine rice (haven't figured out that one yet but I'm leaning towards the rice noodles)

-sweet peppers, onion, garlic, ginger, celery, mushrooms, and whatever other vegetables I need to use... I have a bit of an abundance of them right now and need to use them up!

YUM-O!! I love the Pacific Norhtwest!!  Marion Berries!!  Chefbuba, you da' bomb!!  When does service begin?

 

Last night’s supper, Guava Chicken and Fried Rice

(I didn’t know that there is something that people call Hawaiian Fried Rice)

We had gusts up to 45 mph yesterday, stubborn me…

I had to re-light the gas grill only once

It was all worth it though

This is a potluck type of meal that we would have at the beach with our family

ONO-licious!!    

 

I tried something different tonight.  Instead of Red Snapper Vera Cruz,

I made it with Chicken breast "tenders" that were on sale at the market (frozen). 

I'm not sure which version I like better (sorry, no pix this time).

Recipe for Guava Chicken?

Please?

These recipes were improvisations of saturday and sunday; open fridge, take some ingredients, cook...

 

Turkey and dates roulade with fennel and Jasmin rice

- Fennel; cut off tops(keep the green "hair"!)/ quarter from top to bottom straight through the core/ each quarter in 3, making sure to include some of the core which holds the chunks nicely together/ sweat in butter/ add orangejuice; 3/4 under/ add 1 teaspoon canesugar/ add fennelseeds & korianderseeds/ braise until liquid gets sticky (approx 45 min.) lid half on!

- Turkey escaloppes; flatten them a little/ make mixture of cream cheese, green tops of the fennel, handful of finely diced dates, pinch cayenne/ spread mix on escaloppes and roll/ panfry slowly

- Jasmin rice; rice, water, salt... best recipe for Thai Jasmin rice imo!

 

 

　

Cod and some kind of ratatouille

- Ratatouille; onion/ lots of garlic/ red&yellow paprika/ tomatoes/ black olives/ lots of fresh herbs from the garden/ dash of white wine/ lemonjuice

- Cod panfried; rolled in flour plus s&p/ beaten egg/ panko mixed with fresh herbs 

 

 

Edited by ChrisBelgium - 7/11/11 at 5:08am

 

Right? How good does that look? 

GEEZ!  You think that when you make a dish so many times that you have it memorized…

I had to pull out my recipe binder…

 

Guava Chicken

 

5 lbs Chicken (we use boneless-skinless thighs)

 

Marinade:

¼ tsp Five Spice

½ C Ketchup

½ C Soy Sauce (we use low sodium Aloha Brand Shoyu, THE BEST)

½ C lightly packed Brown Sugar (dark or light, whatever you have)

½ C Oyster Sauce

1 large Garlic Clove, crushed

1 12 oz can frozen concentrated Guava Nectar

 

Defrost the guava concentrate.  Combine ingredients for the marinade until all of the sugar is dissolved. 

Place chicken into a gallon sized zip top storage bag (or just a large bowl will do as well)and pour over the marinade. 

Refrigerate for a minimum of 8 hours, the longer the better, turning occasionally. 

Grill, bake, broil, use the cooking technique you prefer.   

We grill and dip the chicken into the marinade, once, as it’s turned.

This recipe always tastes better at the beach braddah!! in our humble opinion. 

 

ahaahahhaaa!

Thank you!

That's a great marinade.  Hopefully I'll have time to squeeze it into a menu before the summer is over.

Thinking pork tenderloin and jasmine rice.

 

We're doing dates stuffed with blue cheese, wrapped with prosciutto.

Chicken saltimbocca.

Olive oil lemon cake.

Nothing very exciting happening here tonight, but it's as it read....

 

Tossed green Cos salad, cherry tomatoes, crumbled ricotta chees, S&P, Balsamic vinegar dressing.

Simple fried marinated chicken thighs with youghurt, brown rice topped with sauted sliced chorizo, green capsicum (bell peppers) and topped and tailed green beans.

Dessert is whatever the others can find :> I don't usually do desserts.

 

The cooking mojo seems to have left me.  Hope it comes back.  I actually feel like geting take out- that's how bad it's got. Aargh.  I'm sure it will return.