Geekfood Mk2.

[Wiggy]

Quinoa and Chicken Chili

Tried this a couple of times, and it's pretty damn good (as Berk and Wife can attest!)

You will need the following:

2 tins chopped tomatoes
1 tin red kidney beans (the recipe I found said to use black beans, but I couldn't find any in the supermarket)
1 tin sweetcorn
1 green and 2 red chillies, finely chopped
1 red pepper, diced
1 pint chicken stock (3 oxo cubes in boiling water will do )
1 to 1 1/2 tsp Chili powder (choose your amount depending on how much spice you like)
1 tsp cumin
1 garlic clove, finely chopped OR 1 tsp crushed garlic in a tube (I got this from Tesco)
1 cup washed quinoa (about 250ml measured). Check the whole foods aisle for it
2 chicken breasts, whole

Put everything in the slow cooker and leave for 6 hours. Come back an hour before you want to serve it and remove the chicken breasts; use two forks to pull them apart and return them to the cooker.

Serve either on its own or with a little sour cream or cheese, to your taste.

[tandino]

Chorizo soup/stew - Taken from the awesome "Leon" cookbook with some personalisations. It's fed us for 3 days in the past, but I'd say it's good for 4 servings (eat two and freeze two)

You will need:

175g tin of pinto beans in water/brine
75g dried black turtle beans (I didn't use these because I'd never heard of them and didn't have any in - made no difference)
250g good-quality raw chorizo sausages (for this I used Tesco Extra Special Chorizo Sausages)
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 red pepper, medium diced
3 cloves of garlic, sliced
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced (I used two as we love red onion in the Tandini household)
1 x 400g tin of tomatoes (chopped preferably)
1-1.5l chicken stock (I used 1l of knorr and it was fine)
1/5 savoy cabbage, chopped (fuck that - use half if you're not using the black turtle beans it's tasty, crunchy and great filler)
A big handful of coriander, chopped (I'm one of those odd people that can stand the taste of fresh coriander (it doesn't taste to me like it does to you) - it was fine without)
Salt and pepper

Time to prepare & make
60 - 90 minutes

What do?!

Dice the chorizo into medium cubes and get your oil warming in a deep, thick saucepan. Sizzle the chorizo on a low heat until it has browned and the red oil starts to seep out. Keep a close eye on it though as it can turn to burn very quickly.

Stir in your spices, red pepper, garlic and onion; turn the heat up a bit and cook until the juices run mostly clear and all the ingredients are well mingled together. Season with sea salt.

Add the tomatoes, let it all burble together for around 10 minutes, then add a litre of stock and reduce on a well-maintained simmer for 20 minutes.

Drain the beans, keeping about half a litre of the water/brine, and then stir the beans, water/brine and the cabbage in well. Cook for another 20 minutes, letting the soup simmer down to a pleasing thickness, and turn off the heat for a bit of a rest. Give it five minutes with a lid on to let the flavours settle.

Check the seasoning and consistency, letting it down with the remaining stock if you fancy, and stir in the chopped coriander before serving. Also if you want it a little spicier, I used a teaspoon full of spicy season-all for super tasty results

Serve with a fat piece of tiger bread.



BONE appétit!

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Just made chicken biriyani a 'la this recipe, was rather fucking lovely.

http://indianfood.about.com/od/ricereci ... riyani.htm

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Today I made

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 32816.html

With home made pasta a'la river cafe, only by hand, due to power cuts and no pasta mangle, it hurt, though the food was good.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

TiL: You can grate a bulb of garlic, skin and all if you're feeling too lazy to use a garlic crusher and need a shitload of garlic, the skin all comes off, giving you nice garlic with no effort.

[Dog Pants]

Grating garlic is effort. And usually pain and blood loss, in my case.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Pfft, it's less bad doing it with a whole bulb, if you can hurt yourself like that I bet you could burn pasta too.

[FatherJack]

Grating garlic is effort. And usually pain and blood loss, in my case.

Not if you use a small grater that you might use for nutmeg:

[Dr. kitteny berk]

This is the mise en place for 40 portions of chicken korma, for the sake of some SCIENCE!™

[HereComesPete]

Did you mean 4?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Only for you.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Bits asked about the recipe, which is https://www.hairybikers.com/recipes/chicken-korma/1615

Also, I got wheels for my minosharp last week, knives have returned to seriously sharp, is quite pleasing.

[buzzmong]

Ooooh, that looks quite nice (the Korma).

[Dr. kitteny berk]

It is, fucking easy too.

Protip: freeze your ginger, you can grate it on a fine edge, not a nobbly bastard. Much easier to clean.

[Thompy]

Slight tangent but rather than make a new thread...

Any advice on pans? Of the slightly-above-Agros-best-standard-but-not-too-flashy price point. Doesn't need to be a set and just some manufacturer names would be a good place to start. I'm thinking I need a small pan, big pan, average frying pan and a chuff off big frying pan with vertical sides for risotto type thing.

Totally not sure on non-stick vs non-non-stick either. Also, I spent 10 secs and skim read this. Copper with steel coating then huh? Sounds like it might be expensive.

Many taaas.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I'm always torn between non stick and not, I tend to buy non stick, but mostly because I buy expensive pans that the non stick lasts on, saying that. £4 for a crappy wok from your local chinese supermarket is always a good buy.

Mostly I use Stellar 6000, But they're only worth buying when on offer really.

Vogue Triwall pans are pretty nice, not mega cheap though.

For cheaper stuff, you can't go far wrong with a basic pan or 3 from dunelm, just shop with certain criteria;

Heavy is good.
Riveted or welded handles are a must. ones that have a crappy phillips screw in the bottom of a plastic handle will eventually, no matter how much you hope, dump hot stuff on the floor.
For durability: Stainless steel > Enamel(a'la lecruset) > Hard anodised > "non stick"

I'd personally buy a cheapass cauldron, a Stellar 6000 28cm frying pan and something like This for general use, and a shit wok, because shit woks are the best thing ever.

As an aside, I covet this, but they're silly, silly money.

[FatherJack]

My essential pans are a large saucepan/stock pot with a lid, a medium saucepan with a lid, a Wok with lid, a heavy-bottomed frying pan (which the Wok lid will fit) and a flat-bottomed square iron skillet.

The first two can be fairly cheap, though be aware that you if get ones with glass lids, that's the thing that always gets dropped. The others have to be decent (not super-expensive but definitely not the cheapest) as they take heavy punishment.

I have a thick non-stick wok (decent enough that the non stick doesn't wear off) which is good for retaining heat and a thin steel wok which is good for quick heat control (I use gas). You have to blacken the steel woks and store them with a smear of oil on them and never let washing-up liquid touch them, but they get better with age.

The heavy frying pan is non-stick, again decent enough - as my main go-to pan it's the one I spent the most on. The iron skillet is for steak mostly, it will reach incredible temperatures and since it's entirely iron including the handle, you can put it straight into the oven at the highest heat after searing each side for a minute. Worth noting that naturally the handle gets very hot.

[buzzmong]

For durability: Stainless steel > Enamel(a'la lecruset) > Hard anodised > "non stick"

Just going to expand on this, never thought my retail training would come in useful, but here goes:

There's ~6 types of pans/cookware.

Stainless Steel.
Stainless steel with copper bottoms.
Copper pans.
Cast Iron (aka, Le Creuset and similar).
Hard andonised aluminium.
"Enameled" aka painted, aluminium.

There's technically a 7th in cast aluminium, but I'm not going there, and possibly an 8th for hard andonised with copper in the bases.

Cost wise:
Copper Pans/Cast Iron -> Stainless w/ copper -> Stainless -> Hard Andonised -> Painted aluminium.

Conductivty (aka, how quickly they warm up):
Copper -> Alu -> Steel -> Cast Iron.

Heat distribution (how well the heat is spread out, alu is the worst and frequently has hotspots/coldspots on cheapo pans, all steel isn't much better)
Copper/Cast Iron -> S-Steel w/copper -> S-steel -> Alu.

Heat Retention
Cast Iron -> Steel (both) -> Copper -> Alu.

Weight (heavy -> light)
Cast Iron -> Stainless Steel -> Stainless with copper -> copper -> alu.


All from memory so might be slightly off, but I'm fairly confident it's half right.

As for pots and pans, after selling them and other brands for ages, I actually recommend the "Cook" range from House Of Fraser if you're looking for decent stainless steel saucepans at a decent price point.

My other recommendation would be to avoid non stick saucepans. Non stick frying pans are a must, but as long as you don't clean a "stick" saucepan with a metal scouring pad then they're easy to clean and fairly non stick anyway (unless you burn something do it) as they're made smooth during manufacture.
Take care of them and they'll last you forever.

[Thompy]

Cheers, I shall have a hunt around and come back. Nice that you mention Stellar. Although my parents have always had them and I've never noticed them deteriorate I wasn't actually sure if they were that good or not, especially as they make stuff to be branded by celebrities.

Large saute pans seem hard to find (I'm sure the 40+ cm one I always used was Stellar) so I read up on if risottos actually need to be kept shallow and it seems not. Not sure where I got that from. It was good for cooking family size portions of meat and fish too but I won't be doing that anyway.

I don't do woks (don't hate me), so that's ok.

My heart just stopped.

Ninja post by buzz: nice thought on the non-stick issue, kinda what I thought, and the material comparison matches what I've read, so, cool!

Btw I'm doing this because despite living in a shared house and not wanting to bring a lot of shiny new stuff in, the pots the landlord gave us are very thin and have the non-stick coating peeling off after one month. One even has a bright pink burn spot on the bottom.

[Mr. Johnson]

A little advice from someone that lives together with housemates; keep your cookware to yourself. Me and Mrs. J are finding out the hard way that you should never share cooking equipment since others don't respect stuff that doesn't belong to them. Well, these guys don't.