Recipe Reduction 145...142

White bean garlic stew
from fat-free vegan

Something wonderful happens to garlic and carrots when you cook them gently for a long time.  This stew called for whole cloves of garlic but after an hour simmer, they came out soft and gently flavored--loverly.  it should have been a perfect bowl of gorgeous vegetables--beans, carrots, onion and tomatoes--

But acid. Aka sour. Just a little. I think it was my tomatoes.  Not my tomatoes, mind you--if I could approach every recipe with a freezer full of home-grown tomatoes to work with, I'd consider myself a successful gardener. No, these were the discount brand of canned tomatoes at a big-box store.  Next time, I'm buying Hunts.

Red Beans And Rice
a taste of home

Funny thing about this recipe--I compared the ingredients to my standard recipe from a long ago cookbook by Talmadge, and they were almost identical.  Out of fifteen ingredients, only three differences.  Is this a plagiarism or simply a convergence?


I made some adjustments, like using less water to cook the beans and then not throwing it away with all its yummy flavor.  I put in more garlic and used a little smoked tabasco paste instead of the hot sauce it called for.  The reason for that last substitution was embarrassing--when I pulled out the three bottles of hot sauce from my cupboard, none of them looked or smelled fresh. There was Tabasco Sauce, Frank's Red Hot, and Louisiana, but they were all brown and smell tired. How long had those bottles been in there?

Years. At least.  It's not we don't use it, it's just that we don't use much of it. One bottle lasts a long time and we had three.

The Red Beans came out good. Not great, but as always, better than store-bought.


 

Chili con queso

Horrible and I can't even guess why. I already had a recipe for queso, so this failure isn't worth writing about.  Stupid of me to save it; stupider to try it.  It's gone.


Hot and sour cabbage
 from The Seventh Daughter by Cecilia Chiang

Good!  Nothing more than toasting a few dried chiles in oil, adding shredded, salted cabbage and wilting it, then tossing with some home made chile oil.  I'll make again.

But I can't help wondering if this was supposed to be a fermented dish...?  She tells you to keep the cabbage covered with the oil and store in the refrigerator, but wouldn't that make more sense if you were going to let it ferment for a while?  I suspect the original dish wasn't refrigerated at all.