SnootchyBootchykins
02-29-08, 04:49 PM
I've been splitting my online time, mostly on Althanas and half on e-mail and looking for recipes for the gaint red recipe book I bought myself for Christmas. I can remember there being a recipe thread on here once before, but it was mostly filled with little snack favorites. Now that a while has gone by and a lot of the people like me who were in high school when they started writing on Althanas have fled the nest and have learned to cook for themselves. I think. ANYWHO. Favorite recipes? I've a few to share myself.
Nacho Casserole (World famous. XD At least into Canada, since I fed it to Shadar, and he gave it the thumbs up. AWESOME for a gaming session, or a day long Althanas posting marathon. With a decent sized cass. dish, it'll feed at least 5 people.)
Need:
1 bag tortilla chips.
1 can condensed mushroom soup (think Campbells)
1 lb ground hamburger (I've made it with 2 lbs before for someone who wanted it really meaty, and it was good too.)
Shredded cheese. I usually use half a block, or 1 bag preshredded. You can use as much as you want. Cheesiness is awesome.
Toppers - Totally optional - I usually dice up some tomatoes, sautee onions, green peppers and mushrooms together, make guacamole and set out some sour cream and salsa buffet style for people to toss onto their casserole when they go to eat it. It really makes it more like nachos. I usually set aside an avacado and eat it with salt while I wait for the hamburger to brown. Yum!
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, in a skillet, start the hamburger meat browning.
In a saucepan, heat up the mushroom soup. Instead of adding a full can of water as the directions likely say, only add half a can. You want it a little thick. In a smaller skillet start to heat the onions, pepper and mushrooms if you want to have those as part of the toppers.
In the casserole dish, layer tortilla chips, 1/3 of the cheese. When the mushroom soup is heated up, put a thin layer of it over the chips and cheese then set back on the oven to keep warm.
When the hamburger meat is done, layer a little more than half on top of the other stuff in the casserole dish.
Repeat layers as so:chips, just enough to cover the layers you've just done, the rest of the meat, a thin layer of the mushroom soup (it's ok if you have some left over) and the rest of the cheese.
Put the casserole dish in the oven, should be warm enough by now. Keep an eye on it, and when the cheese is all melted and gooey, it's done. You can top it how you wish, but it's awesome alone too.
Dream Puffs w/ whipped cream and chocolate (A huge hit with the kids I used to watch, and pretty much anyone else with a sweet tooth. Bad for diabetics. Vrry bad. XD But I can't help myself anyway.)
Need:
1 cup of water
1/2 c (one stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces (If you do do the sticks, pay attention that one stick is 1/2 a cup. It's rare, I think, but there are some that have more than 1/2 cup per stick.
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
whipped cream
chocolate syrup
strawberries and/or raspberries, washed and cut up - just optional. Small pieces of banana are really good, especially with strawberry.
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line baking sheets with parchment paper, and set aside.
In saucepan, combine the water, butter, sugar and salt and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir it with a wooden spoon until the butter melts. It'll take about two minutes.
Add flour, stirring CONSTANTLY, until the dough dries a little and starts to form a ball. It'll take about 3 to 5 minutes.
Remove it from the heat, and keep stirring until the dough cools down a little.
If you have an electric mixer, it'll make this so much easier. Add your eggs, one at a time, beating it on high. Or get a strong guy to beat the eggs with a whisk/rubber spatula like fucking hell as you add them. Stop beating when the mix gets glossy, and the eggs are pretty evenly distributed.
If you don't have pastry bags, use a ziplock bag with a small part of one of the bottom edges cut off, and fill it with the dough. Your going to pipe mounds of the dough, about an inch wide and an inch high, leaving 2 inches between each mound, onto your baking sheet.
Bake until puffy and golden brown, which will take about 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on them while they're baking, they're easy to burn, and some ovens will bake faster than others. You'll know they're done not only by how they look but when you gently tap them, they'll sound hollow.
When you take them from the oven, poke a hole in them with a toothpick/skewer/small knife/rapier to let the steam escape from them, and let them cool for about 5 - 10 minutes. Basically, while the next batch is baking, leave this one alone. When you go to take that one out of the oven, that's when you can continue to mess with this one.
Slice the tops off with a serrated knife. It'll make it easier. Sawing motion, just like cutting bread. Be gentle! They'll be hollow, so fill them whipped cream and the berries, if you want the berries in it. Replace the tops and drizzle with chocolate syrup.
This recipe will make about 24 of the little suckers, and they're so yummy!
Beef potstickers w/ sweet and sour sauce (I'd say this one is for the weeaboos, but it's one of my favorite things to make, and Jenn can attest for how good it is. It take a while to make, and it's not nearly authentic asian, but a very Americanized version. Start at least an hour and a half before you plan on eating. It's fun to make with friends, and getting people to help will make it go by much faster.)
Need for Potstickers:
Wanton skins - You don't necessarily have to go to an asian market to get them. I find them pretty easily at Wal-Mart, usually by the organic food section in produce.
1 lb ground beef
1 egg
3 saltine crackers
Worchestershire Sauce
ketchup
Grey Poupon - Optional, I only add this in when I'm feeling like having a little spice
canned chicken broth - I usually load up, because not only are they uisually like 50 cents a can, if I make rice with this dish, I boil the rice in chicken broth instead of water, and add butter after it's cooked to make it really flavorful and yummy. Just for the potstickers, you might need as many as 4 cans. Also, sometimes I like to put some shredded cheese into the potsticker mix, but it's optional.
Need for sweet and sour sauce:
1/4 cup pineapple juice
1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
3 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons ketchup
1 teaspoon cornstarch, dissolved in 2 teaspoons water
Directions:
On this one, totally wash your hands. Get a big bowl, and dump the hamburger meat and eggs in it. Crush up the crackers and add them. Slop a bunch of W. sauce and a little bit of soy sauce in it. You want the meat to be wet, and flavorful, but not floating in sauce, so use your best judgement. Add a little bit of ketchup. You're basically making meatloaf at this point. The grey poupon if you want it in there, some shredded cheese if you want, and use your hands to mix everything together. Knead it like dough, don't be afraid of getting your hands gross.
Get the soap and wash the gunk off your hands and out from under your fingernails.
Okay, get a small glass of water and a few plates. A small plate for working wtih the wantons, a big plate to put the finished ones on. You also want a bunch of paper towels.
On the small plate, place a wanton skin, take a teaspoon and put a dollop of the meat mixture. Take your finger, dip it in water, and wet 2 side edges of the skin, in a 90 degree or ^ shape, get it? Now, fold over the two dry sides onto them. The wanton skins come coated lightly in flour, so the wet sides will use the flour to make an edible glue and stick the whole thng together. You'll have something that looks like a triangle. Wet the two points on either side, fold them to the other side. Wet that top point and fold it down. You've got meat wrapped in the skin. Set it aside on the plate.
You're going to want to keep moist paper towels, and with each layer of wantons, top with a sheet of wet paper towel. It'll keep the wantons from drying out while you're working, which makes for crunchy wanton edges, which isn't what we want on this recipe. Keep making those potstickers until you run out of wanton skins or meat mix. Depending on how many skins you have or how thick you pack the wanton skins (you don't want it so thick you can't close them), you'll end up making 50 - 80 of the little suckers. See why I say it helps to have someone making them with you?
In the middle of stuffing the wanton skins, you're going to want to take a break. When you do, start the sweet and sour sauce. Combine the juice, vinegar, brown sugar and ketchup in a saucepan, and bring it to a simmer. When you mix the cornstarch with water, you're going to want to stir it really good, and it'll need stirring again if you made it earlier before starting this whole shebang to disolve everything again. Add the cornstarch solution to the rest of the stuff in the pot after it starts simmering. Stir it. You'll want to stir it while it cooks, but once it's been cooking for about ten minutes, put it on a back burner on low heat to keep it warm.
Crack open a couple of cans of chicken broth. If you're making rice with this, now's a good time to start it, because you're about to get kind of busy. Heat a pan up on one of the front burners. Make sure you have a lid for it, or a plate big enough to use as a lid. Make sure the skillet gets HOTHOTHOT! The best way to tell if it's ready is to get your fingers wet and fling the water onto the pan. If it slides across and sizzles up, it's ready. Don't use a nice, brand new pot. It could get ruined. If you need a new pot, you can find a pot with a lid for like 2 bucks at Wal-Mart. Cheap enough that if you fuck something up, it won't be a huge ruin of your cookware.
Drop potstickers into the pot. Make sure they aren't touching, about an inch apart. Depending on how big the pot is, you can fit 5-10 of the little suckers on there. Count the seconds or watch the clock; let them sit there and cook WITHOUT YOU TOUCHING THEM for a minute and a half. It's hard. You'll thnk you're burning them, but it's okay. Don't touch.
After the minute and a half, dump some chicken broth on them, just enough so they're sitting it and toss on the lid to the pan. Watch the clock or count seconds again. Don't remove the top for anything for another two full minutes. The agony of smelling yummy food and wondering if it's burning is less awful than undercooked meat.
Remove the lid. The potstickers will look like little wrinkled testicles. I bet that's an appetizing thought, eh? Drain what broth is left, transfer the potstickers to a clean plate. Keep the plate in the microwave or oven to help keep them warm. Use a rag to wipe the moister from your pot, put it back on the burner. Wait until it's hot enough again; it should take long. Repeat the drop and wait process.
When you're waiting for the pan to get hot enough to do the last batch of potstickers, that's when you're going to want to take the sweet and sour sauce off the hot burner (it shouldn't have been hot enough to be simmering anyway) and let it stand aside to cool a little. It'll thicken up while it cools, but it'll probably still be thinner than the sweet and sour sauce you get at a chinese restaurant. It's all good, man. You just made sweet and sour sauce from scratch.
When that last batch is done, dinner is ready to be served. I usually put down rice on the plate, heap on potstickers to the rice and drizzle with the sauce, and a little bit of soy sauce too. A good side dish, if you're cooking dinner for someone important/special and you want it to be a full meal is some stir fried vegetables.
Whee. Lots of typing. I'll add more stuff on here if anyone is interested. But definately let me see your recipes too!
Nacho Casserole (World famous. XD At least into Canada, since I fed it to Shadar, and he gave it the thumbs up. AWESOME for a gaming session, or a day long Althanas posting marathon. With a decent sized cass. dish, it'll feed at least 5 people.)
Need:
1 bag tortilla chips.
1 can condensed mushroom soup (think Campbells)
1 lb ground hamburger (I've made it with 2 lbs before for someone who wanted it really meaty, and it was good too.)
Shredded cheese. I usually use half a block, or 1 bag preshredded. You can use as much as you want. Cheesiness is awesome.
Toppers - Totally optional - I usually dice up some tomatoes, sautee onions, green peppers and mushrooms together, make guacamole and set out some sour cream and salsa buffet style for people to toss onto their casserole when they go to eat it. It really makes it more like nachos. I usually set aside an avacado and eat it with salt while I wait for the hamburger to brown. Yum!
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, in a skillet, start the hamburger meat browning.
In a saucepan, heat up the mushroom soup. Instead of adding a full can of water as the directions likely say, only add half a can. You want it a little thick. In a smaller skillet start to heat the onions, pepper and mushrooms if you want to have those as part of the toppers.
In the casserole dish, layer tortilla chips, 1/3 of the cheese. When the mushroom soup is heated up, put a thin layer of it over the chips and cheese then set back on the oven to keep warm.
When the hamburger meat is done, layer a little more than half on top of the other stuff in the casserole dish.
Repeat layers as so:chips, just enough to cover the layers you've just done, the rest of the meat, a thin layer of the mushroom soup (it's ok if you have some left over) and the rest of the cheese.
Put the casserole dish in the oven, should be warm enough by now. Keep an eye on it, and when the cheese is all melted and gooey, it's done. You can top it how you wish, but it's awesome alone too.
Dream Puffs w/ whipped cream and chocolate (A huge hit with the kids I used to watch, and pretty much anyone else with a sweet tooth. Bad for diabetics. Vrry bad. XD But I can't help myself anyway.)
Need:
1 cup of water
1/2 c (one stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces (If you do do the sticks, pay attention that one stick is 1/2 a cup. It's rare, I think, but there are some that have more than 1/2 cup per stick.
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs
whipped cream
chocolate syrup
strawberries and/or raspberries, washed and cut up - just optional. Small pieces of banana are really good, especially with strawberry.
Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line baking sheets with parchment paper, and set aside.
In saucepan, combine the water, butter, sugar and salt and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir it with a wooden spoon until the butter melts. It'll take about two minutes.
Add flour, stirring CONSTANTLY, until the dough dries a little and starts to form a ball. It'll take about 3 to 5 minutes.
Remove it from the heat, and keep stirring until the dough cools down a little.
If you have an electric mixer, it'll make this so much easier. Add your eggs, one at a time, beating it on high. Or get a strong guy to beat the eggs with a whisk/rubber spatula like fucking hell as you add them. Stop beating when the mix gets glossy, and the eggs are pretty evenly distributed.
If you don't have pastry bags, use a ziplock bag with a small part of one of the bottom edges cut off, and fill it with the dough. Your going to pipe mounds of the dough, about an inch wide and an inch high, leaving 2 inches between each mound, onto your baking sheet.
Bake until puffy and golden brown, which will take about 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye on them while they're baking, they're easy to burn, and some ovens will bake faster than others. You'll know they're done not only by how they look but when you gently tap them, they'll sound hollow.
When you take them from the oven, poke a hole in them with a toothpick/skewer/small knife/rapier to let the steam escape from them, and let them cool for about 5 - 10 minutes. Basically, while the next batch is baking, leave this one alone. When you go to take that one out of the oven, that's when you can continue to mess with this one.
Slice the tops off with a serrated knife. It'll make it easier. Sawing motion, just like cutting bread. Be gentle! They'll be hollow, so fill them whipped cream and the berries, if you want the berries in it. Replace the tops and drizzle with chocolate syrup.
This recipe will make about 24 of the little suckers, and they're so yummy!
Beef potstickers w/ sweet and sour sauce (I'd say this one is for the weeaboos, but it's one of my favorite things to make, and Jenn can attest for how good it is. It take a while to make, and it's not nearly authentic asian, but a very Americanized version. Start at least an hour and a half before you plan on eating. It's fun to make with friends, and getting people to help will make it go by much faster.)
Need for Potstickers:
Wanton skins - You don't necessarily have to go to an asian market to get them. I find them pretty easily at Wal-Mart, usually by the organic food section in produce.
1 lb ground beef
1 egg
3 saltine crackers
Worchestershire Sauce
ketchup
Grey Poupon - Optional, I only add this in when I'm feeling like having a little spice
canned chicken broth - I usually load up, because not only are they uisually like 50 cents a can, if I make rice with this dish, I boil the rice in chicken broth instead of water, and add butter after it's cooked to make it really flavorful and yummy. Just for the potstickers, you might need as many as 4 cans. Also, sometimes I like to put some shredded cheese into the potsticker mix, but it's optional.
Need for sweet and sour sauce:
1/4 cup pineapple juice
1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
3 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons ketchup
1 teaspoon cornstarch, dissolved in 2 teaspoons water
Directions:
On this one, totally wash your hands. Get a big bowl, and dump the hamburger meat and eggs in it. Crush up the crackers and add them. Slop a bunch of W. sauce and a little bit of soy sauce in it. You want the meat to be wet, and flavorful, but not floating in sauce, so use your best judgement. Add a little bit of ketchup. You're basically making meatloaf at this point. The grey poupon if you want it in there, some shredded cheese if you want, and use your hands to mix everything together. Knead it like dough, don't be afraid of getting your hands gross.
Get the soap and wash the gunk off your hands and out from under your fingernails.
Okay, get a small glass of water and a few plates. A small plate for working wtih the wantons, a big plate to put the finished ones on. You also want a bunch of paper towels.
On the small plate, place a wanton skin, take a teaspoon and put a dollop of the meat mixture. Take your finger, dip it in water, and wet 2 side edges of the skin, in a 90 degree or ^ shape, get it? Now, fold over the two dry sides onto them. The wanton skins come coated lightly in flour, so the wet sides will use the flour to make an edible glue and stick the whole thng together. You'll have something that looks like a triangle. Wet the two points on either side, fold them to the other side. Wet that top point and fold it down. You've got meat wrapped in the skin. Set it aside on the plate.
You're going to want to keep moist paper towels, and with each layer of wantons, top with a sheet of wet paper towel. It'll keep the wantons from drying out while you're working, which makes for crunchy wanton edges, which isn't what we want on this recipe. Keep making those potstickers until you run out of wanton skins or meat mix. Depending on how many skins you have or how thick you pack the wanton skins (you don't want it so thick you can't close them), you'll end up making 50 - 80 of the little suckers. See why I say it helps to have someone making them with you?
In the middle of stuffing the wanton skins, you're going to want to take a break. When you do, start the sweet and sour sauce. Combine the juice, vinegar, brown sugar and ketchup in a saucepan, and bring it to a simmer. When you mix the cornstarch with water, you're going to want to stir it really good, and it'll need stirring again if you made it earlier before starting this whole shebang to disolve everything again. Add the cornstarch solution to the rest of the stuff in the pot after it starts simmering. Stir it. You'll want to stir it while it cooks, but once it's been cooking for about ten minutes, put it on a back burner on low heat to keep it warm.
Crack open a couple of cans of chicken broth. If you're making rice with this, now's a good time to start it, because you're about to get kind of busy. Heat a pan up on one of the front burners. Make sure you have a lid for it, or a plate big enough to use as a lid. Make sure the skillet gets HOTHOTHOT! The best way to tell if it's ready is to get your fingers wet and fling the water onto the pan. If it slides across and sizzles up, it's ready. Don't use a nice, brand new pot. It could get ruined. If you need a new pot, you can find a pot with a lid for like 2 bucks at Wal-Mart. Cheap enough that if you fuck something up, it won't be a huge ruin of your cookware.
Drop potstickers into the pot. Make sure they aren't touching, about an inch apart. Depending on how big the pot is, you can fit 5-10 of the little suckers on there. Count the seconds or watch the clock; let them sit there and cook WITHOUT YOU TOUCHING THEM for a minute and a half. It's hard. You'll thnk you're burning them, but it's okay. Don't touch.
After the minute and a half, dump some chicken broth on them, just enough so they're sitting it and toss on the lid to the pan. Watch the clock or count seconds again. Don't remove the top for anything for another two full minutes. The agony of smelling yummy food and wondering if it's burning is less awful than undercooked meat.
Remove the lid. The potstickers will look like little wrinkled testicles. I bet that's an appetizing thought, eh? Drain what broth is left, transfer the potstickers to a clean plate. Keep the plate in the microwave or oven to help keep them warm. Use a rag to wipe the moister from your pot, put it back on the burner. Wait until it's hot enough again; it should take long. Repeat the drop and wait process.
When you're waiting for the pan to get hot enough to do the last batch of potstickers, that's when you're going to want to take the sweet and sour sauce off the hot burner (it shouldn't have been hot enough to be simmering anyway) and let it stand aside to cool a little. It'll thicken up while it cools, but it'll probably still be thinner than the sweet and sour sauce you get at a chinese restaurant. It's all good, man. You just made sweet and sour sauce from scratch.
When that last batch is done, dinner is ready to be served. I usually put down rice on the plate, heap on potstickers to the rice and drizzle with the sauce, and a little bit of soy sauce too. A good side dish, if you're cooking dinner for someone important/special and you want it to be a full meal is some stir fried vegetables.
Whee. Lots of typing. I'll add more stuff on here if anyone is interested. But definately let me see your recipes too!