Recipe Reduction Regimen Results #196-197

English Muffin With Black Beans


This was cheating.  Buy a bag of English muffins, toast one and top with black beans, picante sauce from a jar, and a poached egg. You call that a recipe?
In my defense, I plead this--I cooked real black beans from scratch and added real onion, real garlic, and a dash of cumin.  The egg came from real chickens.
As expected, it was yummy. A slab of avocado and a sprinkle of cilantro would have made it Haute Cuisine.

Japanese Stir-Fried Vegetables
From Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat


Marvelous! and I didn't even have real Dashi.  Her recipe for Dashi calls for a 4x4 sheet of kombu and 4 cups of bonito flakes for 4-1/2 cups water, but the stir-fry only uses 1/4 cup of this seasoning. Since I couldn't find kombu or bonito flakes at the Asian market, I substituted a little Atlantic kelp simmered in water.



I'm sure they had both kinds of seaweed at the market, but my cheat sheet was printed in Korean characters, not Japanese.  Plus I come from western Kentucky; the very sound of "sea weed" is scary. It sounds like something that engulfs ships in the Sargasso Sea and sucks out the human marrow


I also cut the oil back from two tablespoons to one and replaced the sake because I didn't want to open a whole bottle just for this.  Not to be too provincial about it, but there's no way my unpolished palette could tell the difference between sake and cooking sherry.