Tag: coconut milk

Happy Friday! Let’s hop to it! Here’s what we had this week: 

SATURDAY
Leftover Buffet with frozen french bread pizza

Nothing to report, except that I finally broke down and ordered a new frying pan. I’ve had this 15″-inch paella pan from Aldi that I use constantly, because it’s so nice and big and I like how it has handles on both sides. 

But the metal is very thin (which is appropriate for a paella pan, but I almost never make paella), so it’s not great for frying; and I really cannot deny that we’ve been steadily eating little scraps of nonstick surface material pretty constantly for several years now. And it gets rusty if you don’t dry it after washing, which of course we don’t.  But it’s so big! And has handles!

So I bullied my money-loving heart into looking at a bunch of new pans and good used pans. Super hard to find a fifteen-inch frying pan, it turns out, except for cast iron, which I DON’T WANT. I know how to season them and I know how to cook with them. I just don’t want them, and I don’t have to explain myself! 

I settled on this fourteen-inch stainless steel one from Cuisinart, with a long handle and a short one. It cost five cents less than $40 you need to spend to get free shipping, so I also ordered a paring knife and used my new customer discount, so I got free shipping and a paring knife and a pan for less than the pan by itself. Yay!

Gosh, this is a boring story. Sorry. Anyway, that was Saturday. 

SUNDAY
Chicken caprese sandwiches, chips

Sunday I finally followed through on my dire warnings to the family (I really know how to market things) and forced everyone to sit down on Sunday afternoon and watch that 2021 Macbeth with Denzel Washington. Hoooooo boy, it was great! Absolutely wonderful. My eyes were bugging out half the time, and I gasped at least five times, and laughed several times, too, which is how Macbeth is supposed to be.

My only teeny tiny quibble is that the character of Macduff was not really anything special. You can do a lot with that role, and he really didn’t, unless I missed it. But overall, very thoroughly enthusiastically recommended. Most of the kids at home right now were not familiar with Shakespeare yet, but they followed it well enough, and enjoyed it. Corrie (who is nine) just straight up could not follow it, so she read Case Closed instead, which is fair enough. 

Next we are going to watch Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which is his take on Macbeth. We watched The Hidden Fortress last week, which made me want to see Throne of Blood, but I thought we should see regular Macbeth first. (I think we did a free trial of Apple Whatever to watch Macbeth, and then cancelled it when the movie was over.) 

When the movie was over, we had supper, which I had cleverly prepped in the early afternoon. Roast chicken with salt and pepper, tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and vinegar on ciabatta rolls; and chips. 

Actually I think we were out of olive oil. 

I forgot, I also made a sort of bread pudding in the afternoon, just for a snack. We had a pile of stale french bread from last week, and there was an unopened carton of eggnog left over from New Year’s Eve.

I know that sounds like an insanely long time ago! but it was sealed up and it tasted fine. So I tore up the bread and put it in a buttered casserole dish, mixed some eggnog together with a bunch of eggs and poured that over the bread and let it soak for a while. Then I dotted it with butter and topped it with cinnamon sugar, and baked it until it was firm, probably 35 -40 minutes.

Not stupendous, but pleasant, and I felt thrifty to have used up some old food, and the kids were surprised to have a fresh-baked little snack in the afternoon. 

MONDAY

Monday was Sophia’s driving test, and she passed! Woo hoo!

I have now taught six kids how to drive, and only four of them have hit my parked car, that I can remember, and only one of them was somehow mad at me for it. 

The next one in line to get her license is this punk

and as you can see, she already knows the basics. (SHE IS SEVENTEEN, SOB.) 

I don’t remember what we ate on Monday. Oh, ham. Plus hot pretzels and peas. No wonder I didn’t take a picture. 

TUESDAY
Thai chicken thighs, coconut rice, tomato and cucumber salad

Tuesday, I didn’t have to go anywhere besides the regular run, so I was pretty hyped to have time to try two new recipes: First Thai Tumeric Chicken (Gai Yang Khamin) from Recipe Tin Eats. For once in my life I was smart and did not tell the family that I was going to be using fish sauce, which, as we know, smewws wike cat fwow-up.

The marinade only has a few ingredients, but there are several powerhouses in there: Fish sauce, oyster sauce, crushed garlic, and turmeric, plus brown sugar and pepper. I was sadly out of white pepper (I think I used it to fend rabbits off my tulip bulbs), so I used black. 

Nice marinade. 

Then, while that was marinating, I was even more hyped to make the side dish that Nagi recommends, which is coconut rice. Now, I love coconut rice far, far more than is reasonable. I mean it’s something I think about kind of a lot. If you filled up an entire room with coconut rice and told me I had to eat my way through to the middle to rescue my child from death, I would do it, and then lovingly take her hand, ask her to hang on a second, and then go ahead and eat the rest of the coconut rice. 

The government, in its wisdom, sent me a random EBT card (which we don’t usually qualify for) because we qualified for reduced lunch at some point, but because of Covid(?), and our school (which we don’t go to; and the school we do go to doesn’t offer lunch) didn’t serve school lunch over the summer, and they felt bad about it, or something? This isn’t the first time this has happened. Anyway, I had a magic money card, so I bought a big sack of jasmine rice. I feel that the more government stupidity you can convert into rice, the better, so I got a really big sack. With elephants on it!

Here is the Recipe Tin Eats recipe for coconut rice. You have to rinse the rice, of course, and then soak it for an hour. Then you drain it, add warm coconut milk with water and some sugar and salt dissolved in it, and cover and cook it in the oven for 40 minutes, then let it rest 15 minutes before fluffing and serving. I did it exactly like she said and it turned out SO GOOD. Absolutely fluffy and light, evenly cooked, wonderfully fragrant, not sweet, but rich. Oh man. 

She also said this chicken and rice is often served with tomatoes and cucumbers, so I made up a big bowl of that with no dressing or anything, because I figured the kids might want something really straightforward. 

The chicken is simple, but it does need to be basted twice. It didn’t turn out with a thick, sticky sauce like hers did, but maybe that would have happened if I left it in the oven a little longer, or basted it more thoroughly. It was still extremely tasty, and juicy!

The turmeric was the star, and the oyster sauce and fish sauce just gave it a sort of robustness, and the whole effect was very warming and pleasant, a little bit tangy, but not aggressive or spicy; and the flavor permeated the meat. It wasn’t wildly popular with the family, but they ate it. Maybe I will experiment with the sauce and see what I can do to make it thicker. 

All in all, quite a delicious meal. 

The kids were meh about the coconut rice! Can you believe that? I was forced to eat my way through the entire roomful almost all by myself. 

WEDNESDAY
Hot dogs, veg and hummus, french fries

Wednesday is just always a day of shenanigans, so I planned a very easy meal. I even splurged on a few bags of those “quick cook” fries, which I was delighted with when I tried them one other time. Well, it DIDN’T WORK. They were just as slow as any frozen fry! Very disappointing. I was forced to drown my sorrows in hot dogs while I was waiting. 

THURSDAY
Spaghetti carbonara

On Thursday, my beautiful new pan finally arrived. The paring knife has yet to come, but I hope they didn’t forget, because I gotta pare some stuff. But look at this lovely pan:

PIC 

(There is no pic, actually, because I managed to crack the faucet last night, so poor Damien is in there putting a new one in, and I don’t want to bother him.) 

Sadly, it came after I already fried up three pounds of bacon for spaghetti carbonara; so the horrible old paella pan had a fittingly glorious swan song, I guess.

Maybe I posted this picture

with the caption “Spectacular new image from the Hubble telescope. This is a protoplanetary nebula with an unusual amount of infrared radiation. God is such an artist.”

and I guess today I should probably share the zoomed-out version, which is this:

I still think it’s pretty!

Goodbye, old pan. You were always terrible, but at least your handles didn’t fall off. 

Damien is making some rash statements about how now I can throw out the old pan. I don’t really know what he means by that. It’s something old and gross for which I have frequently professed my hatred, and he wants me to just get rid of it, like it’s garbage? What if I need it? 

He knows me, so when he saw me transforming into a pan goblin right before his eyes, he hastily suggested that maybe I could use it in my garden. And now you know the main reason I have a garden: So I can put old crap in it, to avoid throwing it away, which would give me a deep and personal pain that you might not be able to understand if you grew up flying to Hawaii for Thanksgiving and having a mariachi band at your First Communion party.

Anyway, I went out into the yard (which, unlike some people’s childhood yards, has neither a hydraulic pool cover nor an aviary) and got my new stock pot, which I recently bought for myself for a treat, and which was full of ice with feathers floating in it, because. . . look, it’s complicated. I had my reasons. I cleaned it very thoroughly. And I AM going to use my old, gross stock pot in the garden. It’s going to be a garden pot. With handles! 

You know what, I don’t like your tone. I’m not saving you any coconut rice. 

So I prepped all the bacon and the cheese and ground pepper and whatnot

Pretty pretty! and then this comes together nice and quick. YUM YUM. It’s fine for me to have seconds, because I did twenty minutes of pilates today. Well, more like eighteen minutes, with two minutes of shouting, “Come ON, lady!” 

And I didn’t overcook the pasta!

FRIDAY
Mussels and eggplant??

So Friday, I knew the kids were going to be at a library lock-in event, where they would be fed pizza, so I thought it was my chance to make something nice for me and Damien. But it’s Friday, so fish. Well, one thing and another, blah blah blah, and by the time I got to the fish counter, I was a little rattled, and came away with a pound of scallops, some fingerling potatoes, and two big eggplants. Because menu planning is kind of my THING. 

There are various recipes using at least two of those ingredients together, but I think I’ll probably just do something really simple with the scallops, like sear them and serve them with lemon butter with hot pepper flakes or something, and then maybe do fried eggplant slices.

Maybe some noodles or risotto or something. And throw the potatoes out the window! Throw them in the garden. 

Have you seen my garden? This is my garden today. 

I’m growing snow. It’s going great.  It’s organic. 

Like many people, I spent a certain amount of time this week tear-assing around the house scrubbing stuff and fixing little things. By the time we get through the last confirmation hearing, this house is going to be spotless. Which is good, because at some point, I’m going to fill the whole thing up with coconut rice. The whole thing! 

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Spaghetti carbonara

An easy, delicious meal.

Ingredients

• 3 lbs bacon
• 3 lbs spaghetti
• 1 to 1-1/2 sticks butter
• 6 eggs, beaten
• lots of pepper
• 6-8 oz grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

1. Fry the bacon until it is crisp. Drain and break it into pieces.

2. Boil the spaghetti in salted water until al dente. If you like, add some bacon grease to the boiling water.

3. Drain the spaghetti and return it to the pot. Add the butter, pieces of bacon, parmesan cheese, and pepper and mix it up until the butter is melted.

4. Add the raw beaten egg and mix it quickly until the spaghetti is coated. Serve immediately.

Print

Fried eggplant

You can salt the eggplant slices many hours ahead of time, even overnight, to dry them before frying.

Ingredients

• 3 medium eggplants
• salt for drying out the eggplant

veg oil for frying

3 cups flour

• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 Tbsp cumin
• 1 Tbsp paprika
• 1 Tbsp red pepper flakes
• 2-1/2 cups water
• 1 Tbsp veg oil
• optional: kosher salt for sprinkling

Instructions

1. Cut the ends off the eggplant and slice it into one-inch slices.
   Salt them thoroughly on both sides and lay on paper towels on a tray (layering if necessary). Let sit for half an hour (or as long as overnight) to draw out some of the moisture. 

2. Mix flour and seasonings in a bowl, add the water and teaspoon of oil, and beat into a batter. Preheat oven for warming. 

3. Put oil in heavy pan and heat until it's hot but not smoking. Prepare a tray with paper towels.

4. Dredge the eggplant slices through the batter on both sides, scraping off excess if necessary, and carefully lay them in the hot oil, and fry until crisp, turning once. Fry in batches, giving them plenty of room to fry.

5. Remove eggplant slices to tray with paper towels and sprinkle with kosher salt if you like. You can keep them warm in the oven for a short time.  

6. Serve with yogurt sauce or marinara sauce.