What's for dinner? | Page 44 | GTAMotorcycle.com

What's for dinner?

Instant pot french onion soup :D:D! I've been angling to make french onion soup for a long time with the Instant pot but there were only a few recipes and comments showed issues with them. More recently a few more recipes have come out with more reported success. For this cook I ended up combining what I found to be the best attributes of a number of recipes to make a premium version of a french onion soup. Awesome! :agave::agave:
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This cook used a few varieties of onions, fresh french bread (cubed and toasted), red wine and gruyere cheese. It also has some additional ingredients employed to further enhance the flavour profile. I'm really happy with the recipe I developed for this.


I didn't have an oven safe bowl to broil the finished product, which is highly recommended. But thinking outside the box, I figured out another method as good, and maybe better. I used a food butane torch (which I have) to brown the top and cheese instead. And sure enough this also is a known method reported on the internet for finishing french onion soup.

Cheers!
 
Another Instant pot french onion soup with some cheddar cheese added to the other same ingredients :agave:.
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Here was my Easter cook; a 8.5 lb smoked bone-in picnic ham from the Weber summit grill done in another spicy apricot glaze. Amazing! :agave::agave:
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As far as everything being cooked to near perfection, it was probably my best overall holiday meal ever :). In addition to this picnic ham which I smoked myself again using hickory, apple and cherry woods, I served grilled fresh asparagus and scalloped potatoes, amongst some smaller bites. Sorry, no pics of the other stuff. Everyone dove in.


Cheers!
 
Just made some pizza dough from scratch and currently caramelising about 6 chopped onions for an hour or so. Will use some to make a pissaladiere, a French onion tart with caramelised onions, thyme, olives and anchovies, and the rest will be used to make French onion soup. I find caramelising the onions first gives the soup an amazing taste. I make the tart and pizzas on a pizza stone on the Weber BBQ at about 500 plus. With good home made dough and this method you get the best pizzas ever. You’ll never order one again. I find the secret to good dough is a long rise time, punch down the dough gently and refrigerate overnight then roll the warmed dough out gently. Don’t overwork it or you’ll get rid of all the air bubbles that make it rise and make it light.
 
Just made some pizza dough from scratch and currently caramelising about 6 chopped onions for an hour or so. Will use some to make a pissaladiere, a French onion tart with caramelised onions, thyme, olives and anchovies, and the rest will be used to make French onion soup. I find caramelising the onions first gives the soup an amazing taste. I make the tart and pizzas on a pizza stone on the Weber BBQ at about 500 plus. With good home made dough and this method you get the best pizzas ever. You’ll never order one again. I find the secret to good dough is a long rise time, punch down the dough gently and refrigerate overnight then roll the warmed dough out gently. Don’t overwork it or you’ll get rid of all the air bubbles that make it rise and make it light.

Nice. Need more pizza recipe info as a foodie before I know what to do and try. What's the specific dough recipe and cooking times, etc. I'd like to hear it.

Cheers.
 
Nice. Need more pizza recipe info as a foodie before I know what to do and try. What's the specific dough recipe and cooking times, etc. I'd like to hear it.

Cheers.

They are all mostly the same. Look at Bobby Flay's one on the web. I read that if you overwork the dough though after punching it down to roll it out it can lose lightness. They key is letting the dough rise for a long time somewhere warm. The pizza stone also needs to be hot but not too hot or the bottom of the pizza will burn before the top is cooked. I put the stone in for about 20 mins while the BBQ gets up to heat and then the next tricky part is getting the pizza to slide off the wooden peel onto the stone in one go. Takes a few attempts before you get the hang of it and some flour on the peel helps.

Also, you can use the dough just after punching it down and that gives a light crust but it can often bubble quite a bit as it rises again in the BBQ, I quite like it like that. My wife likes thin crust pizza and that’s a bit easier after refrigerating the dough overnight.
 
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Thx for the details. I want to try it at some point.



Here's another awesome wok scratch stir fry. Made with shrimp, baby bok choy, chinese broccoli, garden carrots, red onion, sweet yellow pepper, shitake mushrooms, chow mein noodles, minced garlic/ginger in oil, sesame seeds, cashews and lots of chili flakes. Cooked in peanut oil, oyster sauce, dark soy sauce, black soy sauce (sweet) and sesame oil. This is my full-house stir fry and it's glorious! :agave::agave:
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Another new Instant pot cook, tapioca rice pudding :agave:!
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Cheers!
 
Another home-made wok stir fry. Amazing! :agave:
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This one with shrimp, sweet red pepper, onion, asparagus, carrots, shitake mushrooms, cashews, and chinese instant noodles. I'm still riffing on the sauce to add variety, and went with minced ginger and garlic, chili flakes, sesame seeds, dark soy sauce, black soy sauce (sweet), oyster sauce, peanut oil and a bit of sesame oil.
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Another weber summit grill of chicken wings and drumettes. These ones are in a red wine and shallot marinade. I pick these up whenever I see them on sale. This cook cost $4.38. :)
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:D
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Cheers!
 
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Another Instant pot cook :).
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Instant pot sous vide egg bites. These are too good to not make again and again.
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Another wok stir fry.
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This one with shrimp, sweet red and yellow peppers, carrots, cashews, minced garlic and ginger, chili flakes, sesame seeds, chow mein noodles, and a heavier riff on the sauce (more robust with additional soy sauce).

Cheers this blustery Sunday.
 
Another applewood, orange and ginger planked salmon on the weber summit grill :).
http://cedarbaygrilling.com/products/cedar-planked-salmon-full-fillet-ca/

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It was excellent! The salmon was a touched overcooked for my perfection, still it was great and just see the beauty of the meal. That grilled fresh asparagus was amazing. I can't get too much aparagus.... yet. :D
 
Had to make this again. A robust meal. Instant pot chinese sticky rice with shitake mushrooms and chinese sausage. :)
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I picked up some Mexican Chiles to work with :). These are guajillo and pasilla peppers. Very mild and lots of flavor, with earth, pine and fruit notes. They're big, around 6 inches long.
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Here is stage one of making a rub with the peppers. I also used some chipotle peppers in adobo sauce and ancho peppers to go with the guajillo and pasilla peppers. :agave:
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Here is stage 2 of the rub. Mole style at this point and blended. Its got some bakers unsweetened chocolate, raisins, nutmeg, thyme, cumin, garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, paprika, sugar, ( a touch of) cinnamon, and chicken broth. :agave:
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It's been a long time since I did this cook as I've been busy embracing variety and new meals / recipes. With a recent great sale on pork back ribs I'm back though! :)


I used the mole sauce as a rub for pork back ribs. Here is my no compromise weber summit grill version. ~ 4 hrs. Mole pork back ribs :agave:
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I cooked a second set of ribs, these were done bbq style, with a sweet dry rub then smoked with hickory, cherry and apple woods. A 4 hr cook and it was finished with Misty Mountain BBQ sauce, a national bbq competition award winning sauce. :agave:
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Here's a picture showing a cut rib cold out of the fridge a few days later. Perfectly cooked imo; a broad but light touch of pink shows the great results from 4 hours of low and slow. :agave:
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Cheers and have a great weekend!
 
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The French onion soup looks delish!

@jc100, pizza pics?

Beautiful weather yesterday, so ran some errands and threw a new battery in the bike and went for a boot....played some cards with the wife and then realised it was getting late and had to make dinner.
I threw some sausages in a pot to boil and started chopping veggies. I chopped up some potatoes and tossed them in salt, pepper and evoo and put that on the bbq. I was hoping to get them roasting, but unexpectedly they started to fry (sorta) so I kept stirring till they were partly cooked then added veggies. Threw the sausages and burgers on. The potatoes came out amazing imho and were great with the veggies.
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Sent from my purple G4 using Tapatalk
 
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The French onion soup looks delish!

@jc100, pizza pics?

Beautiful weather yesterday, so ran some errands and threw a new battery in the bike and went for a boot....played some cards with the wife and then realised it was getting late and had to make dinner.
I threw some sausages in a pot to boil and started chopping veggies. I chopped up some potatoes and tossed them in salt, pepper and evoo and put that on the bbq. I was hoping to get them roasting, but unexpectedly they started to fry (sorta) so I kept stirring till they were partly cooked then added veggies. Threw the sausages and burgers on. The potatoes came out amazing imho and were great with the veggies.
e998bb4cf64116cda78b57e85e91ec1d.jpg


Sent from my purple G4 using Tapatalk

I ate it all sorry. Lol

I'm going to see if I can get some made from bread flour instead of all purpose flour. I think it makes a difference. Once I get what I’m after I’ll post it up. I will say this though, a kitchenaid stand mixer is indispensable for me. It’s the one piece of equipment I’d replace immediately if it broke. It’s just so easy to make bread, pizza dough etc etc.
 
My kitchenaid stand mixer may outlive me, what a workhorse.

Joe that veggie/bbq fry up looks perfect. so happy we are coming back into fresh product season.

Yeah I know with current logistics fresh veggies are available all the time, but my hippy local self likes local farmers
 
Currently in Panama so I tried some local stuff....chicken in a tomato sauce with chayote salad, beans and rice with the local hot sauce, also had a plantain juice drink. My wife had a veggie meal with hand made lemonade. Came to $9 US for the two of us and very tasty and filling. Stopped off for a few local beers in frosted glasses for $3 then home to skip the thunderstorm and made guacamole with the local avocados ( totally different than in Canada..they are spherical and have rock hard skins, really need to squeeze them to see if they are ripe but they taste amazing, very creamy), then made a yucca side dish with boiled then sautéed yucca with onions, local tomatoes and garlic. Wife found a health food shop with some of the newest veggie burgers on the market so we had those too. Started the day with some Panama Geisha coffee from a local plantation. There’s another coffee farm right where we are staying in our AirBnB, we can walk to their coffee shop.
 
Ok...so not 100 ft from the house there’s a bunch of fields so I hung around this morning to see what the workers were bringing in and it was cilantro so I offered them a buck for a bunch and they gave me a big lot for free, still soil all over the roots. This afternoon found out there’s a lime tree 20ft away in a clearing and there’s an avocado tree outside the house but the squirrels keep stealing them ones that drop so I may have to buy a local one to make the world’s most local guacamole.
 

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