Sunday, July 10, 2011

Seasoning for Fish

Recently I had some ahi tuna steaks to cook but I didn't want to use teriyaki sauce on them. I'd felt that these steaks deserved something more or at least different. So in rummaging through my cabinates, I stumbled across some dried lemon peal or zest. Since lemon and dill often go well with fish, I'd thought I might use them to flavor my tuna steaks. So after spraying the pan with cooking spray and rinsing the fish, I began by sprinkling the tops of the tuna with the dried lemon peal, followed by the dill. That should have been it but I got the feeling that there should have been more to it. Remembering that I had two limes, I dug them out and squeezed their juice over the fish. Finally, I added a pat of butter and baked the steaks according to the cooking notes on the package. The result was wonderful and tasty with a tanginess from the citrus. It will require a bit of adjustment to fine tune the flavors but I'm willing to experiment.

Ingredients Used:
Dried lemon peal (you may have go to a specialty spice shop to find this. Once I've finished with my initial 3 ounces I'm gonna have to go looking for it as the place I initially got it from doesn't carry spices any more)
Dried Dill - easily available in your local supermarkets usually in bulk.
Fresh limes - about 1 lime per steak
Butter - just a pat per steak

That's it. I have found that my dried dill seems a bit tasteless, perhaps grinding some in my spice grinder will release the flavors or I can try fresh dill, if available the next time I cook this.

I did try this on salmon filets but it didn't seem to work as well as with the tuna. That said, perhaps stick to using this on white or light colored fish.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Lazy Tonkatsu

Aka...breaded pork cutlet. Usually I purchase boneless pork chops and butterfly them to make tonkatsu. Well...I just made a batch using pork cube steaks. The first main benefit of using the cube steak was not having to butterfly the meat. I was able to open the package and start breading the steak. Time saved there. The only real difference was the texture and my hubby felt that it was slightly better than the normal butterflyed chop.

Result: I'd rather save time so I'll make this again using the cube steak.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Lazy Milk Tea

Even though I've perfected the recipe for homemade milk tea sometimes I'd rather not have to go through the effort. So I figured that I could achieve the same things with premade tea and evaporated milk. I chose evaporate milk over condensed milk because all of the premade teas available for purchase are already sweetened. I tried this with the Snapple Peach Tea and Snapple Lemon Tea, 1 gallon sized and a 15oz can of evaporated milk. After drinking off a bit of the tea from the bottle add about half of the can of milk to the tea. Shake well. You'll have to shake or stir the tea if it sits for any appreciable amount of time. The milk solids tend to drift to the bottom of the bottle.

Result: the peach tea milk tea was tolerable, not spectacular. Now the lemon tea was a different matter. The lemon flavor was so strong that the milk virtually neutrallized the black tea flavor, leaving the lemon behind. It was so awful that I couldn't drink more than half the lemon milk tea.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

McCormick Style Poultry Seasonings

I cooked a whole chicken with stuffing this past weekend. So I decided to make my own version of the McCormick Poultry Seasoning. The back of the label lists the ingredients as: black pepper, thyme, sage, rosemary, sweet marjoram, and nutmeg.

My ratios are as follows using whole dried spices:
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon rosemary (actually just a little bit less than a teaspoon...dried rosemary is pretty powerful)
2 teaspoons sage
3 teaspoons sweet marjoram
Approximately 1/2 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg (could have been a bit more)

Place all these spices into a coffee grinder that you dedicate to spices only and grind fine.

Results: should cut back the sweet marjoram by one teaspoon, it was too strong. Bite could have also been from the unknown measure of nutmeg. I'm not too sure