Beef and Potato Croquettes

Ingredients
1/2 lb ground beef
1 lb potatoes
3 eggs
bread crumbs, unseasoned
oil for deep frying

Cook ground beef. If beef is too fatty, drain off half of the grease. Boil potatoes until soft then mash them until they are free from lumps. Mix cooked beef with the mashed potatoes. Scoop a handful of the mixture and compress into a patty. Beat the eggs with a bit of water to make a egg wash. Coat all sides of the patty with the egg wash, then into the bread crumbs. Heat the oil til hot. Deep fry the breaded patties until golden brown. Drain on paper towel.

Note: The grease is needed to help bind the potatoes together. An 80/20 blend should work best without draining off the grease. Also, you should be using regular old breadcrumbs, not panko breadcrumbs. This is because you can not get an even coating with panko. They are too flaky to coat the patty very well.

Note: 7-21-07: Used 85/15 ground beef and added all of the beef and grease to the potatoes. Potatoes were also mashed fine. I also used a hamburger press to even out the thickness of the patties. It worked out real well. However, the mixture is very soft and crumbly. So I put the patties in to the freezer until I could work with them without them falling apart. It worked but some still fell apart as I dipped them in the egg and breaded them. Perhaps next time, I’ll add a few eggs to bind the mixture better since just the beef grease alone isn’t enough.

Wax Paper Sheets

You could find these single cut sheets in a supermarket or Wal-mart but I'll bet you're more likely to find them in a restaurant supply shop. They are 5 inch by 10 inch sheets that have been pre-folded and placed into a dispenser box so that they pop up like kleenex. This are great for keeping individual portions separated so that they don't stick together if you happen to stack them. These sheets also work great as an alternative to paper towel in covering your foods as they heat in the microwave. The waxy surface keeps most foods from sticking and tends to keep the steam close to the food so that it doesn’t dry out so fast.

Something different to add to your bentos

On impulse, I bought some fresh brussels sprouts the other day for dinner. I decided to cook them with some garlic, ginger and turkey bacon. The result....well, since I was trying to only dirty one pan, it wasn't the success I had hope it would be. You see I choose to steam the sprouts, which were quartered, after I had cooked the bacon to a crispy texture. The water needed to steam the sprouts softened the bacon. Oh well...guess I'll have to steam the sprouts separately before adding them to my bacon next time.

And for an FYI: I tend to pick up turkey bacon mainly for the reason that it's ALL meat and there is little grease to clean up afterwards. Feel free to use regular bacon if you want.

Brussels Sprouts with Garlic, Ginger and Bacon

Indgredients
1/2 lbs Brussel Sprouts, quartered
3-4 slices of turkey bacon, sliced in to strips
1-2 cloves garlic, mashed and chopped
1/3 inch ginger, minced fine
vegetable oil (if using turkey bacon)

Quarter and steam brussels sprouts. Slice bacon into thin strips. Add bacon, ginger and garlic to fry pan along with a bit of vegetable oil. (omit extra oil if using regular bacon). Once the bacon begins to get crispy, add the steamed brussels sprouts. Cook until bacon is done and serve.

Personally, I'm not too sure how this dish would work cold with regular bacon. I would think that the grease would make the dish unpleasant cold. Your call.

Home Made Pokky -- an update

Ok...this one should have been posted ages ago but I kinda forgot about it. So here it is now.

Well...the chocolate chips melted fairly easily using a glass jar and a pot of water. Why a jar, you ask? Well...the breadsticks are longer than 6 inches and if I used a regular bowl, I'd have more difficulty in coating the upper portions of the breadsticks. So by using a relatively tall narrow jar, I would be able to coat more of the breadstick with much less effort. It also gave the added benefit that when I finished, I could cap off the remaining chocolate and store it in the fridge until the next time.
I must admit that while the chocolate firms up upon placing it in the refrigerator, it does not stay that way when it sits out. In other words..the chocolate is not tempered or not tempered properly. I can only hope that as I repeat this experiment again and again, I learn what I need to do to achieve that state. Until then...I geuss I can enjoy the fruits of my labors even if they are not perfect. After all, who can resist a sweet, salt crunchy treat. ;D

Fillers

Lately, I've been running more than a bit behind on a few things, like blogging and cooking up a variety of stuff for my lunches. It's not that I've given up on the healthier lunches but I've been cooking less Japanese foodstuffs and more from other cultures like Indian. Yeah...Curries are popular in Japan but I've been slow to try them. So that means most of my current cooking attempts have been undocumented.

I'm currently hooked on working with fresh cabbage (it's pretty cheap). I continue to make the sauteed cabbage with balsamic vinegar, garlic and cranberries on a regular basis but I tried a new recipe that said you could substitute cabbage for leeks. Well, I had bought the leeks but I forgot to read the recipe and didn't purchase enough so that's when I added the cabbage. And the rosemary (one of my favorite herbs for cooking). Big mistake. It doesn't really go together...rosemary and leek. Rosemary and cabbage might not be a good combination either. The final product wasn't completely inedible but it doesn't really work. I won't add the rosemary again when I retry this recipe.

I will admit that I made a cabbage soup this past weekend and I'm mostly happy with the result. It was very filling but slightly tasteless. I suppose I could have added a bit more salt to the pot but I hesitated to do so because the chicken base I use is salty in the high concentrations needed to really give a soup a pronounced chicken flavour. Oh well....it wasn't like I had an actual recipe for this soup. It was one of these experimental soups that shows one if one should proceed and refine the recipe. I think I will try this one again as well.

Some Success..

Well, I made my second batch of sweet stewed beans and I'm pretty pleased with the result. This time around I only used 1 cup of beans (two cups worth went bad before I could eat them all) and switched to Lupini beans versus the white navy beans. It gave me about 3 cups worth of finished cooked beans. I initially started using these beans as a desert item in my bento lunches. I found that I really liked the more complex sweetness that the beans bring versus the processed sweets. But that's really only for lunches, I've still got a sweet tooth for the normal candy and snack cakes. So I've not made any healthy ground there.

I must admit that by making bento lunches with the oriental vegatables/foodstuffs that I'm getting better nutrition (and less preservatives) than I had been. This I think is the primary reason for me NOT getting sick this winter. Plus, I'm finding it fun to learn how to cook these exotic foods. That is really my primary goal, expanding my cooking skills, in this hobby. It does, however have a major downside to it....there are more pots and pans to wash up when I get done. That, and the constant nibbling you need to do to see if you've got the seasonings just right.

On the subject of nibbling or rather tasting, I did make the seaweed salad again using the water / sugar / vinegar combination that I noted down some posts back. It was just the right sweetness to tartness that I had been looking for. I'm thinking on trying the same dressing and pickling some cucumbers and onions with dill.

Something different

I picked up a sweet potato the other day because I had picked up fresh ginger at the same time. Yeah, I know...it's not really a memorable combination but I figured that if ginger, onion and garlic could make regular white potatoes taste real good, it could do the same with sweet potatoes. Most recipes for sweet potatoes accent its sweetness by making them into pies and sweet breads. I did find a few recipes that suggested frying the darn things. Thus emboldened, I decided that I could slice my sweet potato and chose to fry it up with the garlic, onion and ginger. I must admit it did smell good while frying. Flavour-wise, the sweet potato medallions didn't quite soak up as much of the flavour I had hoped but I think it's worth trying again.