Beef Rendang...

When it comes to their cooking, the Minangkabau of Sumatra are known for a dish called Rendang. I cooked up a batch tonight. Chunks of beef cooked for hours with coconut milk, a spice paste (made from shallots, garlic, fresh galangal, ginger and turmeric, dried Ancho and New Mexico chilies, toasted coconut and spices - nutmeg, coriander, cumin, black pepper and allspice), lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, daun salam leaves, and cinnamon sticks, until the sauce has almost completely evaporated, leaving a thick and luscious coating on the tender cubes of meat.

To accompany it, I cooked up some rice and made a batch of salad, acar. Shredded cabbage, carrots, cucumber, and onions tossed with a simple dressing of vinegar, water, sugar, salt and fresh ginger. Very tasty stuff.

Necessity is the Mother...

...of invention. Its one of those weeks where we are poverty-stricken a couple or three days before payday and we are having to work with what we've got in the cupboards and fridge. So...

I made a lovely red salsa this afternoon...tomatoes, onions, garlic, some of the juice from a partial can of chiles chipotle en adobo and some additional smoked paprika, red wine vinegar, and some of my homemade chile powder. We were out of hot sauce, which is a veritable crisis in our household.

I've got enough dough proofing to make (according to the recipe) about thirty homemade flour tortillas. Running out of tortillas is BAD around here...and homemade really are so much better than storebought. And we have a big batch of my homemade beans. With the tortillas, life will be good.

Some oven-baked steak fries tossed in olive oil and a simple rub of mine are finishing in the oven right now. We're going to top 'em with some cheddar cheese.

We often do some of our best cooking just before payday. Lol...

A Need to Simplify...

I started out with good intentions opening multiple blogs: My Den (for personal stuff, humor, etc), Kitchen (cooking, obviously), Garden (plants, obvious again), Training Hall (for my martial arts practice), and one for my interest in political, social, economic and environmental issues.

The first one to fold was the last one I listed. I absorbed it several months ago into The Sun Bear's Den. Since then, I opened another blog with Jonty Kershaw entitled Footsteps Along the Jade Road. In concert with my increased martial activity and the waning of the growing season, my blog, The Sun Bear's Garden, has been sitting idle. Its just too many blogs, so I am going to absorb it into my Kitchen and Den blogs: issues of growing food going to the Kitchen, other gardening issues moving into the Den.

Kebabs and Brats...

We just finished a really tasty Turkish dinner of adana kebabi and cacik on pide, with a side dish of patates bastisi. The kebabs are simple - ground beef flavored with a kofte spice mix (paprika and cayenne, black pepper, cumin, oregano and mint) and more mild-to-medium ground chile pepper, held together with egg whites. The cacik is that familiar Middle Eastern salad of yogurt, grated cucumber, mint and garlic. In this instance, I made it with labneh, the rather sour, creamy Middle Eastern cheese, which really took it up to another level. A whole-wheat pide bread was a great foil for the two. Patates bastisi is a baked dish of potatoes, onions, garlic, olives, parsley and tomatoes flavored with olive oil, vinegar, oregano, and cumin. We are nice and sated.

The other night, we had beer-soaked bratwursts on whole wheat buns, with quick-pickled onions flavored with dill, and some lovely boxty cakes, or patties, made with mashed potatoes, cabbage, scallions and bacon and pan-fried 'til nice and brown. Good comfort food. Gina and our son have both decided brats are a new favorite.