Potatoes with Afritude 2: Electric Boogaloo

As promised in my original post on this recipe, a second try on Potatoes with Afritude, with update…

This time, the usual suspects (redskin potatoes) were cut a little bit longer…

Here are the potatoes with the spices and oil mixed in… The curry powder produces both a wonderful yellow color on the potatoes and an equally nice scent.

The unfortunate thing about curry powder, though is it makes everything it touches yellow, and that tint doesn’t go away easily (I think there’s still a yellow curry powder mix spot on the counter).

…and the finished potatoes…ready for the potluck.

This batch of Potatoes with Afritude was made for the same potluck party I made the Adobong Gulay. I’d say I’m almost there… I don’t remember if I actually mixed the spices and olive oil in separate batches like I said I would (since I was doing a lot of cooking…) , but this batch definitely had a better balance between potato and spice than the first try.

On a Fish Broiling Kick…

Yep.. we’ve been getting mileage out of our toaster oven broiler lately. Below is a quick, easy, and healthy recipe for broiled tilapia fillets that we made on quite a few occasions in the past few weeks…

Broiled Tilapia with Garlic – from Gina’s Weight Watcher Recipes

• 6 tilapia fillets (6oz)
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 tsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1 tsp parsley
• salt and pepper
• 1 lemon

Wash fish and pat dry. Line broiler pan with tin foil. Place fish on the tin foil and season with salt, pepper, oregano, and parsley. Drizzle with olive oil and top with crushed garlic. Set broiler to low and place fish about 8 inches from the flame. Cook until fish is cooked through, about 7 minutes (be careful not to burn garlic). Serve with freshly squeezed lemon juice

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Since I didn’t have regular ol’ ground pepper at the time, I sprinkled the fish with the lemon pepper that I had handy.  I didn’t exactly measure the herbs either…just sprinkled them onto the fish as necessary…

The garlic was crushed, then diced (Thanks, Dan!)…

Since I was also using a toaster oven broiler, the cooking time was increased to 15 minutes… A couple of looks at the finished product:

Adobong Gulay

While I have made a spinach version before (there’s also adobong sitaw with Asian green beans), this was my first shot at this version of adobo. It was made for a potluck party attended by classmates old and new and a few of my professors…

…Proof positive that you can adobo just about anything! The below recipe is from Bobbiy at Sparkrecipies:

Adobong Gulay

Ingredients:

• 1 large raw onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp. peppercorn
• 2 bay leaves
• 3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
• ½ cup raw potato, diced
• 1 lb. Japanese Eggplant, cubed
• ¼ cup soy sauce
• ¼ cup palm or white vinegar
• dash of black pepper
• dash of granulated sugar

Instructions: In a pan, heat oil, and then add peppercorn and bay leaves. When the bay leaves start to turn brown, add the garlic. Saute until brown. Then add the onion and fry until translucent. Add the pepper and the sugar, stir briefly to mix, and then add the soy sauce and vinegar. Lower heat to medium, and then add the potatoes and eggplant. Stir briefly then simmer, covered, around 20 minutes for the potatoes and the eggplant. They should be soft but not mushy. Add water if liquid level drops too low. You don’t want to burn this dish. You just need enough liquid to cover the ingredients.

Serve over rice. Serves up to 8 people depending on how much you want to make.

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Below are shots of the diced eggplant…Unfortunately, Giant didn’t have Japanese eggplant, but the big ol’ purple ones worked fine…

Probably my most common food shot, but… Hail to the Redskins!

I generally smash garlic against the blade of a big Japanese cleaver. Sure I can use a garlic press, but there’s something therapeutic about smashing things…

Garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorn smelled wonderful cooking in oil. Afterward, I added the onion, vinegar, and soy sauce…

While the dish might not have ended up as pretty as I would have liked, it tasted good…

I think next time, I should put the potato in before the eggplant, especially if I’m using redskins (despite what the recipe says). I also should cut the onion just a little bit larger and not process it any further.

Potatoes with Afritude…Sorta…

Sunday Morning:

Dan: You know, we have some leftover potatoes. We need to cook them soon.
Sabine: I think I have just the recipe for them…

I stumbled on AJ’s Disney Food Blog the night before, where I remembered looking at a recipe for one of Boma’s* offerings: Potatoes with Afritude. While I don’t recall having this dish when my brother, sister, and I had breakfast at Boma during our August weekend at Disney (I also am not the best at taking pictures when buffets are involved), and Dan never dined at Boma,  it seemed like a simple, tasty, and relatively healthy recipe… It was definitely worth a try.

The recipe is below:

POTATOES WITH AFRITUDE, Boma, Animal Kingdom Lodge
Yield: 10 servings

Ingredients:

• 5 lbs. Red Skinned Potatoes (any variety of potato may be used)
• 2 ounces Olive Oil
• 3 T. Curry Powder
• 2 T. Turmeric
• 1 T. Garlic Powder
• 1 T. Paprika
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Note: I added 1 T. Light Brown Sugar… (per a commenter suggestion on Disney Food Blog)

Method: Wash potatoes well, and cut into wedges. In a large bowl mix the spices and olive oil. Add the raw potatoes. Coat the potatoes with the spice mixture. Place the potatoes on a baking sheet, place in a preheated 350 degree oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Credit: DisneyRecipes.homestead.com via http://www.disneyfoodblog.com/ .

The leftovers Dan referred to were a small amount of reds. I supplemented them with a russet initially and later added another…

I wedged the potatoes the way I would when I make herbed potato wedges.

For visual reference: here are the herbed potatoes I was talking about (these are tossed in olive oil, garlic salt, and thyme and/or rosemary before baking at 350 degrees).

Back to the potatoes I was making this afternoon: I then added the olive oil and spices like I would have with the aforementioned herbed potatoes. They were then placed in a cookie sheet to bake per the recipe.

I ended up cooking them closer to 45 minutes to an hour after mixing them up at the 30 minute point and discovering the reds weren’t quite cooked all the way through.

Here’s how they looked coming out of the oven:

And a couple of finished product shots: A little closer each time…

While these potatoes certainly taste like they could come out of Boma and passed the Dan taste test, the finished product definitely didn’t look like the “Potatoes with Afritude” pictures I’d seen on Disney Food Blog or Dining in Disney.

Changes I’ll make next time:

• Cutting the potato wedges a little longer (and perhaps thinner?)
• Actually referring to the blog pictures…
• Making sure I actually mix the spices and the olive oil separately before adding the potatoes (as the recipe indicates).
• Either making sure I actually have 5 lbs of potatoes (I had about 2.5-3 lbs on hand between both russets and the reds) or doing a better job at adjusting the proportion of spices.

Things I probably won’t change:

• Adding the 1 T. brown sugar to the recipe.

You can almost bet there will be a follow-up blog post when I make my tweaks… We’ll also see which way we also end up liking best…

*Boma is a buffet-style restaurant in the Animal Kingdom Villas’ Jambo House.

Broiled Salmon With Breadcrumbs

Acquired a few years ago through a couple of friends who were moving, our old toaster was unfortunately getting a little bit troublesome. It’d often take several turns for me at “high” setting for me to even get toast to a medium brown, and while I had figured out the crumb tray, it was still a little unwieldy to clean. Crumbs would also fall out of the tray without Dan and I having opened it. While it served us well, it was the old toaster’s time to go…

*Plays taps for the old toaster*

In the past, I also hadn’t attempted to broil things using our gas stove. While the apartment’s stove had a broiler, it was close to the ground, and I’d invariably have to stoop. All of these problems were solved when Dan and I bought a new toaster oven (pictured later). Now we can toast, broil, bake, and clean things out with relatively little fuss and guesswork.

Today, I gave the new toaster oven’s broiler a try, making a variation of simple recipe for salmon that my mom originally taught me (I think there’s enough variation between her version and mine that I can safely share this one…)

Only a few ingredients are needed for this dish: salmon (steaks were used in this recipe since they were less expensive at the store, but fillets work fine, too), olive oil, garlic salt and breadcrumbs.

First, I brushed the salmon steaks with olive oil.

Yeah, I know that’s a pastry brush, but I work with what I have…

The salmon steaks are then sprinkled liberally with garlic salt (naturally, sprinkle to taste). Once done, they look like they do below:

The breadcrumbs are added last before being sent to the broiler… I tried to make sure the top was as covered as much as possible. The broiler pan ws also lined with aluminum foil and nonstick cooking spray for ease of cleanup…

Here are a couple of steaks in the toaster oven. Depending on how good your broiler is, it can stay as few as 10 minutes or as much as 20 minutes…

After spending 15 minutes in the toaster oven, the steaks are done… The bread crumbs are browned a little, and the salmon is fully cooked and ready to nom!

Salt…What Salt?!

Pandesal literally means “salt bread”, but don’t let literal translations fool you: they aren’t even remotely salty. This yeast bread is often soft, slightly sweet, rolled in corn-flake crumbs and great for breakfast.

I featured some store-bought pandesal in an earlier post and naturally was waxing nostalgic about my mom’s version. While we were visiting my parents in May, mom and I actually made some:  mom mixed and proofed the dough, while we both formed and baked the rolls.

Below, some pandesal ready for the oven…

A closeup of one before going into the oven.

When baking, these rolls become a really pretty golden brown.

Once we get this off the pan, it’ll be ready to eat!

Again, no recipies on this one (at least until mom’s comfortable with me sharing her recipes online…). At least one has a glimpse of different versions of pandesal…

Homemade “McMuffin” Swap

It’s been a while, I know… I had to take a bit of a hiatus at the end of the semester (and used the subsequent month to recover from it). Hopefully, I’ll be a little better with updating.
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In keeping with the resolution I made to myself last year to take a little better care of myself, I’ve been working out and watching what I eat.

During the workweek, I’ll take an English muffin and yogurt or oatmeal for breakfast, but on weekends I like to indulge just a little. Even then, I’d feel a little guilty about whole-hog (pun not intended) on bacon and eggs, pancakes and sausage, or their ilk…

This morning, I had several “less-guilty” ingredients on hand, making a “guilt-free breakfast sandwich out of them.

Ingredients: My regular English muffins (Thomas’s Honey Wheat, double-fiber, 1), turkey bacon (2 strips), nonfat American cheese (1 slice), and egg whites (1 egg)*.

Under the hood…

Looking inside…

The verdict?: It wasn’t greasy, it made my taste buds happy, and I didn’t regret eating it…

Let’s just say I’m not gonna miss you, McDonald’s.
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* The flavor of the bacon and cheese balanced well with the egg whites, but if you prefer your eggs a bit yolkier, egg-beaters are a great egg substitute. 2% cheese will also work well if you prefer that to nonfat.

Goin’ Bananas…

A couple of weeks ago, I baked a double-batch of banana bread. One batch was to be sold at a bake sale on campus, and the other was just for us (though the second loaf eventually was also taken to a Halloween party so that friends could help finish it off). It also was an instance of “baking as stress relief” for me…

The recipe is a family recipe, so behind the jump it goes:

Crock-Pot Beef Stew

This crock-pot beef stew would probably fall under the “semi-homemade” category, as it uses bottled gravy, dry onion soup mix (as well as the juice coming from various ingredients) as the basis of its sauce.

The base recipe is one published by the Texas Beef Council, often doubled since I have a large crock pot.

Crockpot Beef Stew

Ingredients:
* 2 lbs. lean chuck roast cut into 1-1/2 inch cubes
* 1/2 tsp. pepper
* 1 pkg. dry onion soup mix
* 2 jars mushroom gravy (about 3 cups)
* 6 small potatoes cut into 1/2-inch cubes
* 6 carrots, peeled and sliced into 1-inch cubes
* 1 carton mushrooms, quartered

Instructions:
Put the beef cubes in the bottom of crockpot. Sprinkle with pepper and the onion soup mix. Add gravy. Layer the vegetables, potatoes first, then carrots, and finish with mushrooms on top. Cover with lid and cook on low for 7-9 hours.

There are some modifications I employ: In every double-batch, I’ll cut about 8-9 redskin potatoes. I’ll also slice 5-6 talks of celery and place the pieces in the stew. I often omit the pepper, and use beefy onion soup mix rather than regular. Lastly, I use around 2 lbs. of baby carrots.

Adobong Manok (Chicken Adobo)

Conisdered in many respects to be the national dish of the Philippines, Adobo is the quintessential Filipino comfort food. It’s a simple dish consisting of something (often meat, but sometimes vegetables — sometimes both) cooked with vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns. It differs from its counterpart in Latin American/Southwestern cooking in a few ways: Tomatoes and chilles are often not found in the Filipino version, and Filipino Adobo is more akin to a stew than a meat rub.

The recipe I most often use is Corrine Domingo’s found on the Food Network:

4-5 lbs. chicken thighs
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup soy sauce
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tsp. black peppercorns
3 bay leaves

Combine all ingredients in a large pot. Cover and marinate chicken for 1-3 hours. Bring to boil, then lower heat. Cover and let simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Uncover and simmer until sauce is reduced and thickened, and chicken is tender, about 20 more minutes. Serve with steamed rice.