What have you been eating?

[Jubal]

Moved back to the Kitchen, and pinned.

I don't know what to eat this evening. Between bad RSI and general exhaustion and a lack of hot water for washing up, kitchen stuff is really tricky at the moment. Might be a cheese on toast night, I guess. I have mostly been keeping a normal diet up during quarantine, but everything does feel just that much more effort than usual.

[Caradìlis]

We've been having varieties of bread for dinner the last couple days, that is a very low maintainance solution to making dinner... (btw, shouldn't you have gotten hot water on Friday? Or did I get that wrong?)

[Jubal]

You are correct, I should have got hot water on Friday. The should is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

I did have cheese on toast in the end.



And today I had pasta. I feel like I'm managing to stay fed, but uninventively so.

[Caradìlis]

That food looks pretty tasty though. My mom made ham baked in bread for Easter, it's tradition... I had a lot of bread...

[Jubal]

I just had pizza today. The Jubal Food Forecast is fairly unexciting this week - I bought a new bottle of gin and some plants as bonus shopping items on Friday, so didn't get so much variety of food stuff. I also forgot to get tonic, so I ended up having a gin with lemongrass cordial for family easter drinks today - there wasn't a whole lot of taste of gin in it, the cordial was a bit overpowering, but it was nice enough.

I am getting to eat outside a bit though, which is nice, though my table seems to need constant cleaning more or less which is a pain.

[Caradìlis]

I made quesadillas yesterday... And almost lost it with the dough multiple times... Last time I'm making tortilla wraps from scratch... The quesadillas turned out nice though... We had them with wild garlic dip, which was a great combo...

[Phoenixguard09]

I've been doing grilled pork ribs with a dry-rub lately. Ground paprika, salt, cracked black pepper, chilli powder, ground cumin, garlic granules and a sprinkling of cayenne pepper applied liberally to two half-racks of pork ribs. Grill them on the barbecue for about twenty minutes all up, let them rest on a wooden board, order some chips from the fish n' chip shop down the road and serve.

I'll post some pictures one day.

[dubsartur]

The local butchers sell whole chickens for 3 or 4 Euros right now, and the local Turkish grocer has lots of fresh herbs, so I have been stuffing some chickens with things that grew or were imported to western Eurasia in 1492.  I may freeze one but freezer space in my shared housing is very limited (especially due to former roomies who forget food when they leave).

[Jubal]

My diet continues to be boring but balanced, though I'll try posting some stuff about herb/kitchen gardening soon as I'm trying to do some more of that - I have big bunches of oregano and rosemary drying at the moment. I've also got strawberry and tomato plants outside which will hopefully do well, and I planted cucumbers and didn't expect them to all germinate and now I have twelve or thirteen tiny cucumber plants and need to somehow obtain a lot of large flowerpots without breaking the proverbial bank.

In more direct food production, I did make biscuits recently which turned out overly crumbly but chocolatey and edible.

[Glaurung]

I've just had a pastel de nata (a.k.a. Portuguese custard tart) from my local bakery. It's run been by a Portuguese couple for several years, after the previous owners sold up. They do a good range of traditional Portuguese baked goods, many of them sweet rather than savoury - Portuguese culture has a pronounced "sweet tooth", as do I, so this suits me well. I've visited Portugal a lot in the past, and intend to again, so though I can't do so at the moment, this helps me bring to mind happier times, past and future.

For anyone in the Cambridge (UK) area at any point, it's the Norfolk Street Bakery. A little off the beaten track in terms of location, but worth seeking out.

[dubsartur]

Il polastro fino e bono dello libro per cuoco o Anonimo Veneziano (in traduzione inglese).  I have to say I did not mange to make the stuffing into "a paste as for fritters."

The side dish is rice cooked with saffron and chicken broth.

[Jubal]

@Glaur: Indeed I don't think I've been to that bakery - maybe next time I'm in town!

@Dubs: That chicken dish looks fantastic I never do bigger meat dishes really, the only levels I have to cater at are "party" for which meat is too much effort for the numbers or "one" in which case meat is too much effort for one person. So I've never really learned to cook chicken despite it being a major staple: I usually have some meat in my diet but only via bits of speck/pancetta/kabanossi added to a pasta, or ham or salami for lunches. But I do like those bigger meat dishes on occasion.



Some ordinary recent fare chez Jubal:





As you can see, my basic attitude to how dinner works is "cook basal carbohydrate, add small bits of other ingredients and something vaguely sauce like". The pseudo greek pasta salad (cook pasta, add chopped green olives, tomato, cucumber and feta, basic dressing made by shaking up a little bit of oil and vinegar in a 3:1 ratio) is a particularly nice option and manages to feel pseudo healthy whilst also containing cheese which is a win-win. I'm getting better at rice, too.

Also I made biscuits a little while back:



They had some structural integrity issues so I needed to bake them for longer, which turned out to be too long, but they were very edible. Super simple butter + sugar + flour recipe with raisins and dark chocolate chips mixed in.

[Glaurung]

@Glaur: Indeed I don't think I've been to that bakery - maybe next time I'm in town!

I'll try to make sure we get there. We must have walked past it umpteen times in the past - it's on my regular walking route to the city centre.

[Jubal]

More cookies I made recently:




I've also been trying some asparagus pasta recipes - asparagus seems to be a comparatively big thing in Austria, which works for me as I quite like the stuff. Using creme fraiche and lemon juice mixed as the pasta sauce with it worked nicely. Drink-wise I currently have all of white wine, fizzy water, and cordials on hand, so pfirschspritzers and kaiserspritzers are both possibilities (I'm not sure how well a lemongrass spritzer would work. I might try that sometime). Not been doing much seriously experimental though.

[dubsartur]

To celebrate getting the first proofs of my first book, I gilded a chicken (baked it in egg-pepper-ginger-salt sauce).  The original recipe in the Harleian cookbook had saffron in the sauce; I served it with saffron rice instead.  The original used ginger powder, I used fresh ginger.  The original thickened the sauce with flour until it was like fritter paste, probably so it would stay on the bird while it turned on the spit, but my kitchen is not equipped with one of those (maybe if they lent me the keep of Festung Höhensalzburg ...)  I also stuffed the body cavity with some mushrooms and onion and herbs which I needed to use up.

Some of my housemates have been cooking very elabourate dinners because of Ramadan.  I may switch my big meal to lunch so I am not in the way.