Good thing about summer is that we can cook a lot more after work, and especially grill a lot more. These past couple of weeks have been great for cooking and I've gotten to try out a bunch of ideas I've been thinking off for ages.
(Sorry about the massive photos)
Grilled goat & chicken served with baba ghanoush, muhammara, hummus, toum, sautéed pointy cabbage and flatbread. Toum is fun to make and very tasty; it turned out incredibly fluffy but I need to reduce the amount of garlic a little. The flatbread (based on a recipe for
saj bread I got from a friend's mum) was a little wonky because I got distracted and let it rise for too long. I also don't have a sufficiently large griddle for making it properly. This is the first time I've grilled goat--other than eating whole-roasted goat once as a child, I've only had it in curries. Prepped sous vide it turned out to be tender, juicy and very flavourful. It's not easy to find goat meat in Swedish stores, but I've finally found a store out in the multicultural ghetto that carries it. The chicken was AWESOME. Grilled half of the marinated thighs and turned the other half into korma. Need to make the muhammara a little more fiery. I also ended up having to make pomegranate molasses for it and now have way, way too much of this delicious ingredient (good for glazing and for sauces). I prefer a roasted paprika & feta sauce for grilled meats, but this was great with bread.
You can make muhammara, hummus and toum very quickly, and, if you have grilled or roasted aubergines, baba ghanoush can also be made very quickly. I used the toum to flavour the other three. If you marinade the chicken overnight, two people can throw together this dinner in less than an hour.
Noodles with spinach- & coriander sauce, confit egg-yolk & shaved tamari-cured egg yolk.
This works better with real ramen noodles instead of these generic egg-noodles b/c the sauce coats the former much better so the noodles take on a vibrant green colour.
Burnt sugar & toasted cream ice-cream w/ almond praline, caramelized apples & chewy meringues.
This worked out very well although I would've preferred almond tuiles and I think it would've been better with a nice sponge soaked in something nice and also some freeze-dried raspberries.
Leftover grilled veal loin with pickled red onion and a massive scromelet.
The inside of the scromelet was similar to the legendary Kichi Kichi omurice omelet and is my new fave breakfast
I didn't get a good shot of what it looked like when I cut it in half and all the creamy delicious goodness poured out. Needs some demi-glace.
Grilled sous vide beef cheeks with salt-baked swede:
This is one of
the best grilled meats I've ever had and def my favorite way to cook beef cheeks. More traditional methods will get you that intense, beefy flavour and the gelatinous goodness, but this method will give you the same qualities in a cut that's basically like a steak.
The salt-dough crust is a new technique for me and I think I'll use it often because the results are very,
very good. The kitchen was filled with an amazing scent from the swede and the celeriac I made at the same time, combined with the scent of rosemary. It was however a pain in the ass to crack open the shell--much more difficult than cracking open a coconut. This was partly because when I tried to wrap it thoroughly some of the parts overlapped and the crust became very thick and ridiculously hard at those points.