Blog :: Recipes

I was just telling Kristen the other night that I like it when she food blogs. Since then I've made a couple of oddball things that turned out good so I'm dropping pointers to the recipes here. No pictures, unfortunately (ahem. Crashd - where is my camera?)

First I'm trying to eat brown rice so I browsed various recipes at epicurious (as per Kristen's suggestion) and found some ideas. I've tried variations on both recipes and both turned out really well - it's just taken a little experimentation to get my brown rice cooked just right (60 minutes! to get slightly al dente). Frying it briefly first yields nicely separated grains and cooking it in chicken stock gives it a lot of flavor. Adding the spinach (and fresh basil and sauteed red bell peppers last time) really makes it an awesome meal - relatively healthy, very flavorful, colorful, and easy (if a bit time consuming - you can't decide to cook brown rice at the last minute).

I'd also stumbled across 3 African recipes the other day and filed them away for for future reference. Tonight I made the Peanut Butter Soup and the Nshima (which is just a mush made by cooking cream of wheat down to a thick texture.) I was worried initially because the soup was a little thin, but chunks of the Nshima are just the thing to thicken it up. Excellent flavor - slightly sweet (due to the peanut butter) but nutty and spicy also. I did a few tweaks (no onion, a few cloves of garlic instead) and could probably make it a little spicier. Now I'll have to try the Nigerian Spinach Stew from the same page - the other two recipes are definitely winners!

Posted on August 29th 2007, 12:07 AM