The Kitchen | Risotto

Planet Tokyo The Kitchen Planet Tokyo RISOTTO [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] Risotto turned out really nice. Made it up as I went along. Ingredients:  onion, ham, garlic & ginger paste (lazy), 1/2 tsp chilli powder, 1/2 tsp smoked paprika, 2-3 tsp paprika, fennel seeds, pepper, tomato paste, white wine 3/4 cup, stock 7 cups, 2 cups rice (rinsed); and any vegetables, plus wedge of butter and handful or so of Parmesan cheese, at end.  I threw in grated carrots, forzen peas. It's quick, easy, tasty & economical.

The Kitchen - Beef Burgundy

Planet Tokyo The Kitchen Planet Tokyo Beef Burgundy Boeuf Bourguignon Using this recipe as a guide.  Slight variation, but pretty much along the lines of this.  Used a Cabernet Sauvignon.  Tasted nice, but I couldn't drink more than a couple of sips.  More than I would have spent on something for cooking (I'm not the shopper here, which is kind of cool ... don't miss it one bit), but it tastes nice and the sauce tastes nice, too. Stove top browned and prepared, then tipped into slow cooker. Cooked on a high temperature to get it done in time, but it's something that can be set to slow maybe in the late morning or even done overnight and reheated when needed. It smells so good. Tastes good, too. Dipped bread in, while I was stirring.  :)  Didn't need stirring ... I just couldn't help fiddling and tasting. Will serve with mashed potato and crusty bread. I like a thickened sauce, so my meat cubes were covered with flour before browning and then I made a flour roux before I deglazed the pan with red wine, and adding stock and tomato paste, ahead of throwing the meat into that (together with the chopped mushrooms) and pouring all of that into the slow cooker (containing several quartered and browned onions, browned halved cloves of garlic, and browned carrots, sliced capsicum (which I wanted to get rid of) and herbs (fresh thyme from the garden and dried bay leaves). Seemed like there might not have been enough liquid at first, so I poured in another cup of beef stock on top. A little more liquid than I anticipated (which is what happens when things cook down), but it's no problem.  Plan to pour in a cornflour slurry, to thicken my liquid over the next hour or so, although it's quite acceptable as it is now.  I just like it thicker. The shopping instructions I gave were for gravy beef, or for some cheap cut of beef roast or beef cheek (which I've never tried, but it's a budget meat).  We wound up with a blade roast that was on special, and we trimmed and cubed that. Braised Beef Cheeks in Red Wine sounds much like a Beef Burgundy. Cinnamon is the variant.  Served on mushed peas.  Next on my plan is Stroganoff, using pork loin, which I've not done before.  We usually have Beef Strog. Wow, the Beef Burgundy was really nice. Ate too much. Got really lazy sitting in front of TV for a change. Somehow got hooked on renovation and real estate shows selling the capitalist dream. Watched one after the other, interrupted by annoying ads selling more of the same ... and fantasy cosmopolitan 'intellectual' eye-wear ... LOL) , often skipping the local/national spin altogether. Who are these ads for, a PR (propaganda) fantasy 'multicultural' capitalist consumer 'cosmopolitan'? Got me thinking about the pointlessness of our existence and the pursuit of all manner glittering things, and then you die. Bored with myself. Been meaning to change my eyebrows. Did that after my long session of vegetating in front of the TV I normally don't watch. Now I have myself a new pair of eyebrows and a new me. LOL Kitchen is a disaster area. I don't know what I used all those pots for. Might crash out after a microwave warmed coffee and a cigarette out the back. I like this every now and then ...  Brand New Key https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FPn5noN_qs

The Kitchen

Planet Tokyo Beef stirfry -  made up as I went along - was today's selection, as there's only so many nights in a row we can eat Butter Chicken.  LOL Had to get rid of the refrigerated vegetables.  Opted for stirfry to do that, although a stew was tempting.  Thought maybe like a Beef Burgundy based stew.  But I'd left it late and I wouldn't have had a cooking wine.  Stirfry seemed the more economical option. Forgot the garlic, in all the prep and batch frying saga of getting stirfry together.  Must be going senile. Tried something different:  stirfried French fries to throw into the mix.  Difficult cooking the potato off.  Went in the microwave ... but sort of got stuck together and turned limp and unappetising looking.  Still threw my chips in, along egg, onion, carrots, capsicum, cauliflower, cabbage shreds, fried rump steak strips and an improvised sauce:  light soy, Kecap Manis, Char Su sauce, chilli paste, tomato sauce, splash of water, few drops of sesame oil (later thickened with cornflour slurry). Tastes nice.  Could have maybe done with a bit more sauce.  But it's OK, considering I just made it up as I went along. The prep and small batch frying everything takes forever, but I cook enormous proportions.  Batch frying makes all the difference, as the food gets sort of charred and wok smoked instead of steamed as it would do cooking in big batches. I got the vegies out of the way, tipping those into a stainless steel bowl as I went along.  Meat was last.  Batches again and tipped into separate bowl, so that I could then give the meat some time to soak in the sauce, before tipping all the vegetable into the sauce, which I have thickening in the wok by that stage. The wok smoking I did yesterday has seasoned my wok nicely.  It was a breeze using it, all the way through the meat batches. Same shit, different day. F*cking assh*le. Threw back who knows how many drinks while I was preparing the meal. It has gone from relaxed and normal to arguing with a d*ckhead who is insisting to me that I am the problem and that he's not drunk, while he's indulging in conducting himself like a poorly behaved adolescent and talks absolute sh*t at me and then argues and argues and argues and argues, like he's suddenly sprouted a vagina. The personality change in him and the change in his demeanour disgusts me, while the argument takes me to the edge of tolerance. It rapidly turns into an argument. He's cocky and full of sh*t and he just won't let up. Full of absolute sh*t, escalating argument about sh*t. I can't f*cking take a minute more of him. This is how just about every day with him is. It will begin OK. It ends in sh*t. Now it's muttering loud enough for me to hear from the next room. Obviously, it's something that's supposed to be insulting. It's his favourite form of torment. Having already argued and already going from composed to wreck in the space of minutes of dealing with this pissy moron, I will try not to react. I feel sick. I feel extremely tense and shaky. It's impossible to imagine continuing to live with this insanity. My fucking existence thrown into chaos by this assh*le, who drinks for no sane purpose and imposes this on me. Refusing to blow in the 'breatho'. Mouthing off at me. It's psycho, saying "I won't do any test for you, you c*nt." So much for the claim it's not drunk. We seriously can't live together. This is insane. He's off his head. The stuff he's rambling doesn't even make sense. I'm freaked out and shaking. Took me forever to find the device, because he wouldn't find it himself.  Wasn't even sure what I was looking for.  Finally found it, half expecting to get a whack for my troubles, but determined to know the reading.  Last time this happened a few days ago, I'd let it go.  But I'm curious.  I want to know what it takes. Meanwhile, he's playing Ramone's 'Psycho Therapy' loudly on his mobile, just to aggravate me, I guess.  Or he finds it funny.  No idea. Finally got him to blow:  0.87.  0.087 Muttering that I'm a 'Nazi c*nt' (for having insisted he blow in tester).  Now he's muttering about 'Nazi feminists'.  That would be any female that doesn't want to take crap, I'd say. So we went from perfectly amicable and at peace to entirely at odds, and having an insane disruptive 'argument' that wasn't even really an argument about anything real or material ... it was just mayhem and unpleasantness for no reason, that erupted while I'd joined him to watch some TV program. Just him being unpleasant, overbearing and at odds, displaying a degree of aggression or hostility (without reason) that I found quite unpleasant (although it was displaced); and being unwilling to pipe down, even when I've clearly expressed that I've had enough and erupted in an outburst of my own by this stage. All that changed in the 'before' and 'after' mayhem scenarios is his alcohol intake (which isn't even all that much, I would think). I find this particularly stressful, because I feel I need to decide what I'm doing in future. I can't just keep repeating this.  But there seems to be no getting this through to him. All quiet on the Tokyo Front. Felt so upset that I went to bed and tried to sleep, but I couldn't.  Lay there feeling really anxious and freaked out for ages.  Overwhelmed and really emotionally charged. At one stage he came in, flicked on the overhead light, swore at me, gathered up whatever he'd left on top of the bed.  This was really uncalled for, as I wasn't arguing with him or anything; I'd retreated. Told him that if this kept up, we'd both be homeless.  Said he didn't care because he's got a swag.  LOL ... I'm sure he's not serious, but the problem is that we *will* wind up homeless if this keeps up. Lay there feeling sick and really worried.  Kept personalising what had happened, like it was a deliberate attack on me or something.   Began wondering what sort of 'sick individual' would deliberately do this to someone. But I don't really think it is as deliberate as it seems to be at the time, after I've had time to calm down.  However, highly charged arguments usually follow a deliberate act, in so far as it is a deliberate act to get into a state that leads to what I guess is disinhibition that usually precedes the dramas; so, in that sense, it is a deliberate act. At the height of feeling overwhelmed and emotionally flooded and wired, I feel like I could just about have a breakdown.  I feel this more keenly than I have before. Eventually got up to do a kitchen clean.  Sort of feeling teary, but I don't cry.  The crying part of me is generally blocked.   Resumed reading Coleman's book about Tavistock Institute.  But felt too guilty to focus on that. My companion's still engrossed in Ramones videos, but he's got earphones in now. It's taken me something like 4 hours to calm down and to wonder WTF even happened. I don't understand what happened. We were on good terms earlier, it was all calm, we were getting along (I even got a present) ... and then everything just sort of exploded out of nowhere. I think it's highly emotionally charged scenes I can't handle.  Suddenly, it was high intensity and high-energy, out of nowhere and unrelated to anything that was happening, and my angry protests just sort of fuelled that (instead of putting it to a stop), and it just got more highly charged, unpleasant and chaotic. At the time and for some hours later, I found it really distressing, infuriating, emotionally disturbing. Before that, I had an anxiety sort of mounting.  Suspected alcohol was being consumed and I'd hoped to avoid exactly the scene that was played out ... only I wasn't expecting one just out of nowhere, like that.  But I suppose that's where all these scenes always come from:  it's like a wildfire set off by some small spark. I don't know what I could have done differently. "You should have kept your mouth shut", he says.  He's dreaming.  It's not as though one person can be sort of wired, high-energy, disinhibited and sort of aggressive (or aggressive-appearing), and that the other person in close proximity (and disturbed by the dynamic etc) can just ignore it like it's not happening and ignore that their angry protests are met with more of the same. It is impossible not to react and then not to get more distressed if angry protests are met with more of the same sort of arguments, insults and high-energy drama that's suddenly erupted. Even so, once the dust had settled I found myself feeling guilty wondering if I was maybe me:  was it my fault?  Woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. First act of the day was accidentally dropping my coffee cup (which luckily fell in the sink and didn't break).  Spilled coffee all over the kitchen cupboards and floor.   Barely a mouthful left, but I took that outside so I could have a cigarette. Tried to discuss things, but I'm not being heard.  Walks off mid-way during my attempted discussion to fuss with kitchen cleaning, when I'd mentioned I'd lost my coffee.  That annoyed me.  Anything to avoid addressing what has to be addressed, matches the various subsequent denial manoeuvres that I'm also familiar with. Conceded that he'd had too much to drink.  But it's like dealing with a lunatic, because I still cannot get a promise out of him not to drink around me again.  The 'controlled' approach to drinking that he proposes (and he was already supposedly exercising during the months of these same dramas) is exactly what I told him it would be:  a failure.  But, no matter how many dramas we have (and no matter the mental breakdown I'm about to have), he refuses to do the rational thing and simply stop drinking.  He's going to drink less, he says.  But his record so far demonstrates that this is lunacy, and that this not within the means of control once it is under way as a habit. So I'm stuck playing Russian roulette with a lunatic, unless I'm prepared to make us both homeless now.  That's pathetic and I'm a prisoner. I don't understand why he will not just stop drinking in my presence.  Point blank refuses, even though we will be homeless because I cannot cope with this.  It's not like it's a big ask for him to drink elsewhere; but he refuses to do this, even though it is proven that he is capable of desisting and that the zero alcohol approach works well. His refusal to stop subjecting me to this leaves me feeling like I'm dealing with a lunatic.

The Kitchen - Murgh Makhani

Planet Tokyo The Kitchen Planet Tokyo Murgh Makhani Butter Chicken (Punjabi) [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB']  [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] Yummy and easy.  Lazy way:  just browned the chicken ahead of preparing the gravy, instead of the more involved job of marinading and grilling the chicken. Very good for what was an impromptu job. Prepared about 1.2 kg chicken and did lazy estimates of my ingredients. There will be some frozen meals out of this, which is a bonus. Getting whining from the resident beeeeeeeeeep, who helped himself to another plate, even as he was complaining.   Whining that it's "not creamy enough".  It's heart attack food:  butter, cream, yoghurt, and it's as creamy as I'm going to make it. The beeeeeeeeeep who didn't cook this meal, then starts giving me instructions and entering into a 'debate' where there can be no debate.  It's my dish.  It's done.  It's my take on the dish; and it is what it is. No wonder I don't like cooking any longer. If I have to cook, I think I prefer Indian curries. So easy to do. South-east Asian curries are more fuss and more expense (unless you maybe go to a fresh produce market for special ingredients). Used different recipes as an inspiration. This is an example recipe that's a bit more involved than what I did, but it gives an idea of ingredients. What I did was made up a blender fine slurry of onion, garlic, ginger (and would have thrown in green chillies had I used them).  Not every recipe calls for onion, but I like it.  Threw in a tin of tomato, as I was worried my pasata wouldn't be enough for the quantity I was preparing. Once my chicken was browned, I drained off some of the oil and butter I had estimated for the job and I threw in the bay leaves, cinnamon and other dry spices (eg. cardamom, cumin, coriander, cloves, nutmeg, fenugreek seeds, dried methi (fenugreek), chilli powder).  I think next time I would be selective with this part, as not everything needs heating through (and there is risk of 'pan stick' and having to watch for it, doing it this way, instead of dumping spice into a paste or wet slurry) - eg. the powdered ingredients which, instead, could go into the slurry.  Onion/garlic/ginger (and extra tomato, in this case) slurry is then dumped in and cooked off a little.  Other spice ingredients go in; dump in tomato paste; yoghurt, cream; honey (if using) and throw in browned chicken pieces.  Some recipes use blended cashew seeds (or poppy seeds soaked for an hour or so and blended), blended into a paste with a little water.  I had some ground cashews on hand in the refrigerator, so I used that to get rid of the cashews.  Simmer for whatever.  I simmered for 20 and then another 20 because the rice wasn't put on, as I'd expected.  It looks like a dollop of butter can go on top on serving, or perhaps a dollop into the main body of the dish before serving.   My favourite part of this dish is the dried methi.  The dried methi smells so lovely.  My hands still smell like curry, but I don't mind smelling of curry.  LOL Some guy's pictorial here.

The Kitchen: Refried Beans

Planet Tokyo The Kitchen Planet Tokyo Refried Beans [RIGHT-CLICK IMAGE, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK IMAGE, 'NEW TAB'] We're having one of my frozen chilli con carne meals, either in wraps or with rice. Planning on making refried beans, using this recipe as inspiration (combined with other ideas). Refried Beans Purée beans blender fry:   onion, sugar, + salt, till soft add garlic & cook, abt. 1 min (scrape into blender with beans) Intend to adapt with: *oregano *caraway seeds *paprika / smoked paprika *cumin heat skillet until smokes add puréed beans & cook when thickens, add ketchup Worcestershire & mustard Optional:  add cheese Not sure if I'll bother with the blender, when I can use a potato masher ... and I like some texture in the beans. This is just a rough idea of what I'm doing. I'm looking forward to this:  I love beans. Listening Tous Pour L'un Mongol Invasion Dabke Mix 2013 - PalestineATW

Singapore Noodles

Planet Tokyo The Kitchen Planet Tokyo Singapore Noodles [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] [RIGHT-CLICK, 'NEW TAB'] Going with this recipe as a general guide.  Too lazy to bother measuring etc ... will just go by eye and trial and error. There's egg, as well ... but I've lost my photo.  LOL May have got carried away with the amount of water for mixing the Madras curry powder.   Yes, a little too much liquid.  Less liquid (and more curry powder) in the curry 'paste' next time ... or maybe just curry paste in a jar (if there's any).  Also, maybe less soy.   Fatter noodles.  These are too thin for me ... I like more texture. *Have to do egg Western style, because I can't do egg properly in a wok.  Means another dish to wash ... but it's still yummy.  :)

The Kitchen

The Kitchen Chicken Mushroom Sauce [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] COMMENT Ran out of sour cream. Did combo of sour cream & yoghurt to make up sauce and threw in small amount of sugar. Think I prefer sour cream or runny cream, but it's not bad. Chicken nice and tender.

Planet Tokyo - The Kitchen - Thai Green Curry

The Kitchen Thai Green Curry Stage 1  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] If I get any more unwanted kitchen 'help', I'll need sedation  Stage 2  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]  [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE] Used this recipe as a basic guide & did my own adjustments. Almost a disaster.  Sprinkled eggplant with salt to draw out bitterness & rinsed after a while.  Either I didn't rinse properly or the eggplant has absorbed salt.   The curry was already adjusted pretty much to how I wanted it, so it made for surprise saltiness.  Countered that with couple of scoops of brown sugar.   Occasional bits of something in there that are too fibrous for my liking.  Not sure what it might be.  Perhaps the lemongrass or the galangal hadn't processed properly?   Not a bad result.  But I think I need to work on my paste. It's a lot less fuss using Mae Ploy green curry paste, but it tastes like they've changed the flavour of their paste.  I'm not into the new ingredient, and I haven't liked any other brands of green curry paste, so I thought I'd make it from scratch. I just used the recipe as a basic guide and instead of carefully measuring, I went by feel.  But I haven't quite developed a good feel for Thai.  It took a bit of adjustment and tasting to get a good balance. That's yesterday's left-over rice. So we're having Indian crossed with Thai.  Really yummy rice.  Just tossed in whatever I like, using the Jeera rice recipe as a base. That's done and there's enough there for several frozen dinners.  Freezer's full of various dinners.  The problem with that is that I only like the curries and the chilli con carne but curry every single night isn't so big here.   *Two litres of yoghurt is just about gone.  Tomorrow might be yoghurt day.  I couldn't be bothered now.