After last Sunday’s meal, the question remained about what to do with the Voodoo beer. This was an undrinkable concoction that tasted of peanuts, chocolate and an unfortunate and overpowering taste of banana. Jan suggested that it would make good banana beer bread. I have adapted my Guinness Beer Bread to include these new ingredients.
Karl’s Banana Beer Bread
Filed under bread, Breakfast, Side Dishes
[Back hand, stage whisper] “The secret is the chocolate is on the inside!”
The [trademarked chocolate and peanut butter confection] Challenge. This entire meal resulted from Myr having made peanut butter cookies from an Alton Brown recipe. Myr followed the recipe fairly closely, except that she did not have chunky peanut butter. She made do with smooth PB and added fresh chopped peanuts. Even after she had made dozens of large cookies, she still had a quarter of the cookie dough left over. When she told her mother about this, Jan said, “That would make a good pie crust and we could fill it with Claudia’s Chocolate Mousse. I also just bought a bottle of “Voodoo,” a chocolate and peanut stout. Karl, make a dinner with chocolate and peanuts!”
The Inverted Peanut Butter Cup of the Lueck Ladies
Filed under Desserts & Treats, Pies & Tarts
The [trademarked chocolate and peanut butter confection] Challenge. For the last few weeks I have been constrained by trying to make things suit a particular cuisine. With just an ingredient challenge I am free to go whole “California Fusion.” To mix and match flavors and techniques with only one constraint–it should all taste good when I’m done.
Karl’s Chicken Cacao with Peanuts and Mango
Filed under Main Dishes, Poultry
The [trademarked chocolate and peanut butter confection] Challenge. I have recently discovered dark greens. For the last two weeks I have made a collard side dish. Gee, you don’t have to cook dark greens into sludge like our mothers did! Maybe it is time to revisit kale.
To meet this week’s challenge I will have to work in chocolate and peanuts, but for this dish the greens will be the star. A little peanut butter and ground nibs to give the sauce a thickness and base should be enough.
Karl’s Kale with Mushrooms
Filed under Side Dishes, Vegan, Vegetables
The [trademarked chocolate and peanut butter confection] Challenge. My chicken dish for this meal emphasizes the chocolate elements. For my starch side dish I want to make the peanuts the star, with the chocolate element being more of a secret ingredient. I want it to add a depth to the taste without having a distinct “chocolate” flavor.
Karl’s Peanut Rice
Filed under Side Dishes, Starches
Myr has finally dragged me, kicking and screaming, to start posting my recipes on-line.
A bit of family history and cooking philosophy is perhaps in order so any gentle readers will understand where I am coming from.
My mother was a middle child in a large family. As a result, the older sisters did all of the cooking and my mother never learned “family home cooking” in her mother’s style. She liked to say that when she married my father she “could only boil an egg and make French Onion Soup.” Starting from scratch, as it were, she experimented with a variety of cuisines, frequently influenced by my father’s travels to Japan and Europe. Dad would return with tales of foods he had eaten and she would attempt to replicate the dishes with the ingredients available at the time (the 1950s to 1960s). At a time when most Americans were eating hot dogs, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, she served us Pizza , Chicken Teriyaki, and hot German Potato Salad (long before these became standard American foods).
My mother taught me her style of experimental cooking and I ran with it. When I was working in the North Sea, I paid attention to what the Spanish cooks were making for dinner. The same was true when I traveled in Europe and when we lived in Chengdu and Hong Kong. I picked up cook books the way many people pick up novels. It became a challenge to find cuisines I had not experimented with, but I was experienced enough now that I could rarely make any dish exactly as written. I always had to tinker, particularly when my wife’s health required an extremely low fat diet.
Five recipes might have the same name but have only a few main ingredients in common. I learned to read and compare recipes and select the elements that I felt should make the dish. I might take ingredients from some of the recipes and cooking techniques from the others and come up with something unique and my own. I realized recently that this is the same technique used by the “Cook’s Illustrated” staff in creating their recipes. (I am a faithful reader by the way, but I have serious issues with some of their base ecological and culinary assumptions.) Sometimes this process would produce spectacular culinary disasters, but more often than not my dishes were successful.
Myr has convinced me to begin posting my journey on this blog from time to time.
Filed under Other
karllueck
Miriam
Jabberwocky Stew 