Crazy weekend, with all the entertainment options!
Here's some stuff I've made, along with the recipes:
French Apple Tart:
Deceptively easy but tasty. Cooked this for my birthday party last night to big fan fare.
Recipe/Instructions:
Pie Crust: Just use this:
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/07/easy-pie-dough-recipe.html
Apples:
-3-4 medium sized apples, sliced as thin as possible. Shape doesn't really matter but I cut the apple in half and then slice them into pieces.
- 1/2 cup sugar
- Cinnamon as desired
- Some extra butter
- Apricot Jam (Optional as topping)
- Brown Sugar
Instructions:
0. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees
1. Make that serious eats dough recipe, and then memorize it for any other butter crust desert you want to make (pies etc.) Seriously, it's failproof. I usually combine the ingredients with my hand and don't wait the full 1 hour so that the dough is firm and it's fine.
2. Cut the apples up, and add the sugar and cinnamon to taste.
3. Spread the dough into a pan lined with parchment paper and arrange the apples as you like. There's no real rule of thumb, but ideally you wanna cover every part of the dough up.
4. Take about 1-2 tablespoons of butter and cut them up into little cubes and toss on top of the apples, spreading evenly. Take some brown sugar and do the same.
5. Toss into the oven for 45-50 minutes, checking occasionally. Near the end of the process, I like to toss some extra cinnamon on top for some color/flavour.
6. Take out of the oven, and spread some apricot (or w.e) jam on top. We served it hot with some vanilla ice cream and it was pretty awesome.
Beef Noodle Soup
Note: This is one of my favorite dishes to make, but the complexity can scale depending on what ingredients you have on hand. I'll try to list ingredients that I consider to be optional as such.
Ingredients:
- ~2 pounds of beef chuck roast/shank etc. Honestly cut doesn't matter all too much as you're gonna be slow cooking it for a bit.
- (Optional) Some beef bones for broth
- ~ 4-5 cloves of garlic, slightly crushed
- Few slices of ginger
- (Optional) Dried orange peels
- Dried chili peppers
- ~ 1 tsp Fennel
- ~ 2 tbsp star anise (pieces)
- (Optional) 1 Bay Leaf
- 2 tbsp (or more) Doubanjiang
- Soy sauce
- Black Pepper
- (Optional) Soy Paste
- (Optional) Cooking wine
- (Optional) Garlic Powder
- (Optional) Tomato paste (if you want a richer, semi tomato-y broth)
This dish can get really complicated really quickly, but at the very basic you're just stewing some beef with all of the spices and sauces listed above. I don't really do exact ingredients with this one, because a lot of it is going to be off of what you prefer with the broth. For example! I'm a big fan of having the broth be salty but spicy with some herbal flavor. Not as big of fan of spice? Don't as as much doubanjiang etc.
Instructions:
1. Cut up some beef up into chunks
Size and shape depend on your preference. Here's what mine look like:
2. Get your spices ready:
If you put a gun to my head, I would say that the star anise and black pepper are really the only two spices you need.
3. In a big pot, heat up some oil on high and fry up the beef chunks until cooked around. If you want to brown it, make sure the pot is rid of excess moisture. Alternatively, fry it on a frying pan before moving it over to a pan:
If you have beef bones or beef shanks, how you would manage all of these things is to boil the bones/shank in one pot. Fry/brown the beef in another frying pan, and then move all of the ingredients over into the big pot when ready.
4. When beef looks semi-cooked, add in water until the beef is completely covered:
5. Add in your spices and soy sauce/other sauces:
Sauce first:
Spices next:
Some people say to put all of the spices into a tea bag or whatever... but I'm lazy and don't think it's entirely necessary.
6. Bring the pot to a boil. When it hits a boil, reduce to low-medium heat and let it simmer for 40+ minutes. Serve with noodles for the quintessential beef noodle soup, or just add to rice or your carb of choice. In a noodle applicatio. you can add some bok choy, tomato slices and cilantro: