ALFA Recipie Exchange

[zicada]

Lasagna A la zicada

This recipe uses the ragu sauce in the previous post.

Ragu sauce
Lasagna plates (Barilla makes epic ones)
Buffalo Mozzarella (optional but epic)
Fresh Champignon or other nice mushrooms

Bechemel cheese sauce:
6 dl Milk
4 tablespoons wheat flower
4 tablespoons butter
nutmeg
Some nice cheese. Anything goes here, take what you have and like. The stronger ones are usually the best.

Heat oven to 200 C
Smear your lasagna pan with some butter so things wont stick. Don't use olive oil here.

Thinly chop the mushrooms and cook on high heat in extra virgin olive oil (make sure its not so hot it starts to smoke) and a pinch of butter, leave for later.

The cheese sauce:
Melt the butter and add the flower before it starts to brown too much, and stir well.
Add a little bit of milk and keep stirring. It helps to have a second pair of hands here, and you want to be stirring constantly while adding small amounts of milk, especially in the beginning, to avoid lumping.
Once all the milk has been added, cut whatever cheese you have laying around into cubes and add, stir until dissolved.
Grate in about 1/2 tsp of fresh nutmeg.
Taste with salt/pepper. Add a little more salt than you would a regular white sauce.

Putting it all together:

Add as many layers as your lasagna pan allows for in this order.

- Ragu
- Cheese sauce
- Lasagna plates
- Ragu
- Cheese sauce
- Pasta plates
- Ragu
- The mushrooms we cooked earlier
- Layer of thinly diced buffalo mozzarella
- Layer of pasta plates
- Ragu
-- rince and repeat until you reach the top, make sure the last layer is ragu
Grate parmesan cheese on top

Cook in oven for 20 minutes (or whatever the lasagna plates you have requires)
Let it sit for about 10 minutes before cutting

Serve with a nice red wine. Barolo is great.

Enjoy

[loulabelle]

Resurrecting to share my new Awesome Cookie Recipe:

Stolen from the Joy of Cooking (1997 ed?)

Beat until fluffy:
1 stick (8 tbsp) unsalted butter
1/2 cup (granulated) sugar
1/2 light brown sugar

Then add:
1 egg
1/4 tsp salt (omit if you use salted butter)
1.5 tsp vanilla extract

This is when I start to add my own stuff:
I added
1tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon

Stir in:
1 cup + 2 tbsps all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda

Then stir in chocolate chips. I don't measure, whatever!
I've all semisweet chips or a mix of white and semisweet

YUM

Then put heaped teaspoons of awesome loaded dough onto your greased baking tray and I like to douse these in cocoa chilli powder for a little fire.

Bake at 375F/180C for 8-10mins (I've always baked for 10, my oven is gas).

Tasty, chewy yumtime for your face!!

[CloudDancing]

What I like with a West Coast feel:

Coleslaw a la Olympia w/ Fresh Grated Applesauce
Ingredients:
6 cups of chopped coleslaw (mix of tender green cabbage, purple cabbage, and shredded carrots)
4 Tablespoons of Mayonaisse
2 Tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar
1 cup of roasted sunflower seeds
2 Tablespoons of Honey
1 teaspoon of Garlic Power
1 teaspoon of Dill
½ teaspoon of fine sea salt

Mix together and let sit for at least an hour. Then top with:
2 fresh Heirloom Apples (Jazz, Cameo, Pink Lady) finely grated to a sauce consistency with a cheese grater. It makes a fine fluffy bright tasting apple sauce.

and

Salalberry Crusted Salmon

This works well with Blueberries or Blackberries but autumn Salal berries with their deep purple juice and piney taste provide one of those one of kind dishes you only get around here.

I cup of Salal Berries (picked in August/September) locally
¼ cup of honey
olive oil or butter
1 nice pan sized filet of wild caught salmon

Wash the “sand” from the Salal berries and pick off any stamens or fluff on each one. Press the berries in a sauce pan, sauteing them in butter, freeing the dark purple juice. Then reduce it to a sticky sauce.

Take your fillet of wild salmon, set fish down into the sticky berry sauce, and poach, then turning it to a high heat to get a nice caramelized purple berry crust on the fish side.

Serve with steamed red potatoes and dill, sour cream, and a nice pear cider.

and from my Dad:

Daddy Mike's Ceviche (no raw fish involved)

3 cups of cooked Crab (real or surimi)
2 cups of Baby Shrimp (drained)
1 can of clams with juice
1 Cucumber/English Cucumber chopped in small chunks
1 can of red Mexican salsa like Helado
I can of cubed organic tomatoes
1 cup of finely chopped cliantro
1 lemon squeezed for juice
1 cup of tomato ketchup (optional but I like the sweetness) or a small can of tomato sauce.
1 whole ripe large ripe avocado diced (when the flesh gently gives after being aged in a brown paper sack as needed)
1 can/cup of fresh chickpeas (drained)
El Tapatio Hot Sauce to taste

Mix together all ingredients and let sit for at least two hours. Serve with Corn Tortilla chips (scoops/wide are best.) This tastes just as good with small ingredient omissions/additions (meat or veggies.)

[Grand Fromage]

Necromancer. Gonna copy a post I already done did.

Kimchi jjigae.



A typical Korean kitchen. Enhance!



Our stuff. I use sriracha because I like my jjigae nice and hot. However adding enough gochujang to make it acceptably spicy makes it taste too much like gochujang, which is a bad thing. Sriracha adds heat and the flavor blends perfectly with everything else. I also have pork, potatoes, onions, garlic, kimchi, chicken stock, and hard boiled quail eggs conveniently peeled and packaged.



I also use pork loin instead of belly. Samgyeopsal just gets too greasy for my tastes, and I like the tenderness of the loin when it's finished cooking. Stir fry this a bit to get color on it. 350 grams if you're keeping track; I don't really measure. I'm making a lot here to eat for a few days.



Two large onions, roughly cut. I like lots of onion. Fry a bit more, then add garlic. I used about nine cloves here. Sweat those.



One kilogram of kimchi.



Kimchi action shot! This kind is already cut up a bit and I cook mine for a while, so there's no need to chop it. It takes care of itself.



One liter of chicken stock which clearly did not come out of the freezer early enough. The chicken fat there will give the jjigae its fatty goodness, instead of the samgyeopsal.



Ready to simmer.



The brand of gochujang I like, if you have a selection.



Add a generous splat. Squirt in some sriracha, stir it around, then cover and let simmer for an hour and a half.



Chop up two bigass potatoes and add them. Note the color change. Raise the temperature a bit to get the taters boiled.



Right at the end, eggs. Overall the jjigae has simmered about two hours when it's done.



Make rice. I like to fill the bottom half of the bowl with rice, then jjigae on top of it. The kimchi juice thus penetrates the rice.



Ladle it on.



And kimchi has been jjigaed.

[Ithildur]

An epic thread has been revived by Lou and an epic post necroed by GF.

I'm more impressed by GF than Lou atm though. I am positively drooling.

[Lucifer]

GF makes Ith drool..Loulabelle does not

[t-ice]

Beat until fluffy

This sentence I have to write down for later use in some adventure. (Garagos, Loviatar, Sharess... the options are nigh limitless.)

[Grand Fromage]

GF makes Ith drool..Loulabelle does not

It happens. I am bringing sexy back; I kept the receipt.

[Rumple C]

Rumping that Shake

Apple - 170 grams (1 whole apple, cored, diced)
Banana - 65 grams (1/2 Banana)
Boysenberries - 50 grams
Water - 400 mls
Wheat Germ - 50 grams



Put stuff in thing.



Blend stuff in thing. Consume.



Pro tips.

Don't overfill thing.

It's got wheat germ, which is the good part of the wheat that they mill out. It's super good for you. Drink is 350 Calories, 5 grams of fat, 15 grams of fiber, 13 grams of protein. It will also put you at 25-50% of much of your vitamin and mineral needs for the day, thanks mostly to the wheat germ. The stuff is amazing. Tastes awful though. To completely remove wheat germ taste, double boysenberry ingredients. Best drunk cold.

I drink 2 of these daily.

[Joos]

What's it like if you replace the water with milk? Does that increase or reduce the taste of the wheat germ?

[Rumple C]

I would say it probably makes it taste better. I wouldn't know though.

[Rumple C]

The other half of the solution


200 grams of mixed vegetables (from a pre-frozen pack.)
25 grams of raw, unsalted peanuts
175 grams (half a can of drained pink salmon)
1/2 a lemon



Allow vegetables to thaw in bowl until not frozen. Add peanuts. Combine until peanuts are dispersed. Drain liquids from canned salmon. for the record, this is what 175 grams of uncanned salmon looks like, lemon for size reference. A bit smaller than the average "fist".



Add salmon to bowl, break up with spoon/fork and mix into... mixture. Squeeze lemon juice over everything. Mix again. Admire those colors! Consume.



Pro tips.

Microwave veges to speed up the not-frozen process. Thawing is preferable.

Use Alaskan Pink Salmon. It is sustainable, harvested from the ocean, and mercury levels are not detectable. Farmed salmon is full of many types of nasties.

Replace frozen veges with a even mix of peas and corn. Tastes much better. Very juicy and acidic with the lemons juice, a poor mans ceviche.

Make sure the salmon has the bones and skin. These are edible! During the (factory) cooking process the bones soften, and much of the good stuff is found within the skin.

This meal is packed with goodness. Eating this 2x daily (along with smoothies above) will meet ALL of the nutritional needs (healthy fats, complete proteins, vitamins and minerals) for an adult male. Yes, ALL of them. Calcium included (from the bones). I have been eating this way a while now, and feel like a million bucks. Cravings for "bad" food (refined, fatty, sugary, salty) subside over time.

If anyone is interested in numbers, I have spreadsheets with adult male nutritional needs. Based on Australian dept of Health research.

*Please note, no cooking involved! Meal can be prepared -real- fast.

[Joos]

I would say it probably makes it taste better. I wouldn't know though.

If you're interested, I'll let you know when I try. Thanks for sharing.

[Rumple C]

I would say it probably makes it taste better. I wouldn't know though.

If you're interested, I'll let you know when I try. Thanks for sharing.

Excellent, and you're welcome.

[CloudDancing]

If anyone likes Odawalla's "Superfood" Green Shake, I figured out the way to make my own, minus Spriulina which is prohibitively expensive.

2 cups chopped Kale of any type
2 cups of baby spinach
2 cups of chopped chard (optional, but delicious)
1 stalk of celery chopped
1 carrot chopped or a cup of baby carrots
1 banana
1 cup of roasted butternut squash or pumpkin for thickness
plus
1 cup of soy milk
1 cup of water
or 2 cups of one

Put in good blender, put lid on.

Puree till everything is chopped,
then frappe' till everything is liquid.

Makes two servings or four small servings.

Has a great head! Once it settles you get a creamy foam with a pure green juice underneath. I've been drinking this for breakfast and as an after dinner snack every morning for four weeks and I lost 10 pounds so far.