Prawn Cocktails

Yum yum prawn cocktail! I don't know about you, but these are one of the things I look forward to the -most- when I go to an asian restaurant for some 'exotic' dining. Exotic in that I have no idea how they manage to make half of the delicious things they do. I'm having a very ....asian themed cooking thing at the moment, thus, prawn coctail! For this you will need:

400g of prawns, frozen, raw and peeled. Make sure that they are such, and not 'cutlets', prawn cutlets still have the shell on the tail. Add or reduce as determined by how many people you are serving. Around 9-13 decent sized prawns per person.
1 tsp of butter
2 cloves of garlic
1-2 leaves of iceburg lettuce
1 1/2 TableSpoons of Mayonaise
1-2 tsps of tomato sauce
1/2 tsp of worchestershire sauce.

Peel the papery shell off of the garlic, chop off the 'hard' end -- that's where the head of garlic used to be -- slice and dice and chop both of the cloves into small pieces, the smaller the better, as it lets more of the garlic's oil out to flavour the prawns.

The butter is purely to stop the prawns (or shrimp, I guess, but they are TINY) from sticking to the bottom of the frying pan. Fill said pan up with the prawns, making sure that they're fairly evenly spread out, and put the lid on. Walk away! ...Nigh literally. You only have to stir them periodically, to make sure that they're not sticking. They start out grey in colour, so how do you know when they're cooked? When they're all pink!



See? In the process, there are little pink bits from where I've stirred. Don't be alarmed if you end up with a LOT of water in the pan. It's come out of the prawns as they've thawed, and it's not like you're making a sauce with the water and butter :)



When your prawns are around 3/4ths cooked you can start preparing the sauce and garnish for your prawn cocktails. The mayonaise, worchestershire sauce and tomato sauce, remember that you want it to be a fairly pale pink colour, so tailor the mixes of liquid colour accordingly! Not muuuuuch worchestershire sauce. In the first mix, it was too dark so I added more mayonaise, thusly;



Cocktail sauce mixed, slice up the lettuce leaves. For this, put the smaller inside the larger, fold and wrap them in amongst each other like ...well... a wrap. Burrito, if you want the spanish version, and start slicing from one end -- end, not side. The smaller part of the thing. Slice it finely, so that each cut is about a half a centimetre thick, or less. Chop chop chop, and put the lettuce in two small bowls -- arranged similar to a birds nest, with walls that can let the lettuce be seen, and provides a bit of a support for the prawns.

Take said prawns off of the heat, and serve, placing them on the lettuce.



Adding the sauce last. It's best if you wait about five minutes or so, before serving up the prawns, so that they cool down a little. -- Warm lettuce is not very nice. All in all, it is quick, simple, and very easy to make, and it makes for a wonderful entree to a larger meal, or a snack for when you're not -really- hungry, but you want to eat something and it's around dinner time.

Deliciousness Delivered.

How to Shell A Crab!

No real recipe! Just practicality. Today, I shall show you how to shell a crab so you can have fun eating the crustacean!

Step one: Have a whole crab.



Step two: Remove the legs and claws.





Step three: find the 'pull here' tag.



Step four: Pull the 'pull here' tag and use it to lever the upper portion of the crab away from the lower, splitting the shell in two. Discard upper shell.





Step uh, five: Locate the gills and remove them. They are poisonous!





Step six: Wash! Run the bottom of the crabs shell under water to wash away any remaining goopy bits and clean your hands too!



Step seven: Break lower shell of crab in half, tugging off any non-meat parts that are 'excess' on the lower shell, mainly around the back legs and where the 'pull here' tag was. Arrange on a plate if you like, or just dump it, get a pair of crab claw crackers, or nut crackers, and feast!



It is easiest if you break the grippy part of the claw, and use one of the pincers to hook and fish the meat out from inside the shell. Also, if you want to catch/cook your own crab, make sure it is -alive-. The gills rot incredibly quickly and will toxify the whole crab! Yes, it has to be dropped into boiling water alive and cooked for 15-20 minutes. ....Much easier, and nicer, if you buy your crab from someone who cooked it for you!

Deliciousness Delivered!

Beef Jerky -- In the oven

Beeeeeeef jerky! -- yes yes I know it's got white powder. That's flour. This is my first attempt, and I am sharing where it worked and where I failed with you people so that you don't fail on your first attempt too! Even if the setup is -incredibly- easy.

For this you'll need:
500g beef steak (lean, preferrably, though rump does just as well)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or more if you want it spicy!)
~1 handful of plain flour

Preheat your oven to 90 degrees celcius -- you don't want it very hot, because the idea is to dehydrate the meat, not cook and crucify it into charred strips.

Pull out your steak, cut away as much of the fat as you can (and gristle if you got a crappy cut) and cut your beef into strips, roughly the same width, thickness and length. To unify the dehydrating times and remove as much variance as possible.



Put the spices/seasoning into a bag, add your slight amount of flour, and the meat. Hold the top of the bag closed and shake the living daylights out of it to cover the strips with the seasoning. With the flour, less is more. It is merely there to stop the seasoning from becoming overpowering and making the meat taste blech. The flour -will- cook in the oven, so you don't have to worry about the raw flour taste.

If you have a roasting tray, which has a rack above a fat catcher thing, use that as the best choice. Make sure the rack is -clean- however, lay the bottom of the tray with paper towels to catch any drips, and lay your strips of seasoned meat out on the rack, tapping off excess flour in the process. The more flour that is on the strip, the higher chance of it -retaining- moisture, and that is not what we want.



Now, you put it into the oven and 'forget' about it. This takes a LONG time. I put mine in for 3 and a half hours, and they were still a little hmm, soft in the middle. Four, five, six and some recipe's I've seen recommend 8 to 10 hours dehydrating. Either way, if you're not sure, poke them with a knife. If the meat squishes, they're not done.

Once they -are- done, take them out of the oven, and leave them to cool down completely. Then, you can eat, or seal them away. Heat introduces moisture in an airtight container, which allows bacteria to grow. If done properly, and completely perfectly, beef jerky can keep for up to two years like this. :)

Deliciousness ...almost delivered. They tasted delicious still slightly warm! Once in the container though... well, there was too much flour alas.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I know I know, it doesn't look like much! I was lazy and used instant noodles rather than pasta -- I felt insanely guilty because I managed to eat so -little- of the feast. My goodness. So much! But, spaghetti does just as well as a replacement for the instant noodles (and the recipe I was following actually -called- for that so...) but either way, it tasted really really nice.

You will need:
2 chicken breasts (around 500g of chicken)
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 a carrot
1/2 brown onion
1/2 red onion
5 spring onions (the one I used was home grown, and goodness me did it produce a lot of disks as you'll see!)
2 full sticks of celery
2L liquid chicken stock
1 tsp of butter
1 tsp of oil
1/2- 1 cup of corn
ditto for peas or any other frozen vegetable you want.



Oooh ingredients! This is for the vegetable part of your soup. What you'll want to do is put your chicken stock in a BIG pot and top it up with water, enough that all the vegetables are covered and able to move freely. Don't turn it on yet though! You don't want to cook these for very long, elsewise -everything- will taste of celery. (I'll recap this later when I actually -did- it in my cooking)

First up you'll want to slice your chicken into strips. This is easiest with a really sharp knife, and slice -along- the body of the breast, against the grain, to make sure that the raw chicken doesn't run away from you! Once you have done that, resulting in pieces around 2-3 cm wide and 5-15cm long (don't stress too much on length, so long as they're all around the same thickness and width) put the raw chicken on a plate.



Now, hygiene! Very important. Raw chicken carries with it a high risk of salmonella. This is bad for you! It'll make your belly very very unhappy with you for daaaaays. So what you need to do, and this is -essential- is after you cut raw chicken, you wash the cuttingboard, -and- knife -and- your hands in hot water and soap. You should do this every time you go from cutting vegetables to meat, or vice versa. It is not -such- a big deal with steak, or lamb, or most things not poultry, but it is very very important for chicken. So! Nice clean cuttingboard and knife and we're good to go!



Now, this is when I chopped up the vegetables. Scroll up if you want the picture! I just basically sliced and diced the onion into smaller pieces because I like my onion more for flavour than to actually -eat-, and I cut this with the thought of 'eating with chopsticks' in mind. Hence, cut your carrot in half, slice one of those halves in half again lengthwise. Put the flat side of the carrot on the cutting board and slice along the carrot to make carrot 'sticks'. Chop off the root of your spring onion, peel off any dead leaves, or 'crispy' layers on the white root of the thing, then using the back edge of your knife and keeping the tip to the cuttingboard, -carefully- slice your spring onion into disks. Your non-cutting hand should be doing the moving of the onion, so that the knife is going straight up and down. Slice two stalks of celery into roughly even pieces, removing the leaves in the process, and the stems of the leaves as well. Slice along the celery length, cutting each section into halves or thirds, depending on how wide they are. You don't -have- to use as much celery as I did, depends on your preference. It is just that celery is 'negative food', it takes you more energy to digest celery, than what you get -out- of it.

Slice and dice and mince your garlic, put the butter and oil in a fryin pan, add your chicken and garlic, stirring regularly to make sure the chicken is nicely seasoned with the garlic. Be careful though, chicken breast -does- dry out rather quickly and sneakily, so keep a closer eye on it the closer you get to serving.



Now that is what you want your vegetable pot to look like. Looots of water. Looots of vegetables! You can now put on water for the pasta -- spaghetti etc -- if you are going with the pasta route. Your chicken should be evenly white by now, about half cooked. Put the vegetables and water on to start heating up, dumping in your frozens at the same time. When this pot boils -- the bubbles are coming large and often and it's doing the bubbling sound -- that is when, ideally, you serve up the whole lot!

What I ended up doing however, is turning off the heat once the vegetables had boiled, putting on the kettle for hot water -- instant noodles, remember? -- pour half of the water into one of the cups of instant noodles, and half in the other cup, topping both up with the hot water, and the seasoning, putting the vegeables in while I left it for the three to four minutes, turned off the heat for the chicken as well.

Once the time was up, chicken went into the top of the cup, and it was served!

Yummy, lazy chicken soup! No seasonings or anything other than the stock and garlic. :)

Deliciousness Delivered. (kinda, I don't really like soup -_-)

Turkey Buffalo wings!

No picture this time, alas, because I didn't think of sharing this until -after- they were eaten. Bad me!

It's really rather simple though, as I have already covered the buffalo wing sauce here: http://deliciousnessdesired.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/buffalo-mash-of-deliciousness.html

Except instead of using chicken wings, I used turkey. Oh my goodness. So big! And due to the huuuuuuge size disparity, it is slightly difficult to find something appropriately sized to marinade the wings in. I went back to what the original recipe had, as my 'marinade' being a sauce. You will need:

1.2kg of turkey wings (around 4)
Buffalo Sauce
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce (a generous galooping)
1/2 tsp tabasco sauce
6 Tbsp chilli sauce -- I used Siracha. I recommend you use less if you are not fond of the spice. This thing ambushes!
6 Tbsp sweet chilli sauce -- A decent sort, that has flakes of chilli and the seeds visible in the mix. Alternatively, one hot chilli, sliced with half the seeds retained whole, and
6 Tbsp of honey. Less or more depending on how flaming you want this.
Seasoning
1 cup of flour
2-3tsp of garlic powder
1/2 tsp of powdered chicken stock.
Blue cheese dip
3 tsp of sour cream
1 1/2 tsp of light mayonaise
1 tsp garlic powder
2-3 tsp finely grated blue cheese (strongly flavoured)

Toss all the sauce ingredients in together -- that's from the cayenne pepper to the honey -- and mix them in a bowl until well combined. Or straight into a small pot, to heat them up and blend the mixture nicely, this is the last thing you do, the heating by the way. So the bowl is fine to set them aside for safe keeping.

Put the flour, extra garlic powder and chicken stock on a dinner plate, mix them in together and then place one wing at a time on the flour mix. Rub it thoroughly into the skin and flesh, ensuring you get all the folds and sneaky places. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celcius (I -think- that is 270 farenheit, but don't quote me on that) while you finish rubbing this flour stuff into the skin.

Line a tray with aluminium foil, two or three layers if you don't want to wash the tray -- which is really the idea -- and put your floured wings in the tray, tapping off the excess flour back onto the plate.

Put them in the oven for 30 minutes per side. Chop up and make a garden salad, if you desire, lettuce, tomato, cheese, carrot, cucumber, while you're waiting for the wings. Heat up your sauce, when the oven dings for the last time, take the wings out, leave them to rest as you set up the other food for preparation -- You can also make the blue cheese sauce.

To do this you get a -small- bowl, one for teeny little things, put the mayonaise, sour cream and garlic powder in, mix them together. Grate the blue cheese, using the smallest holes -- the ones you use to get skinny spiral curls of parmesan cheese, rather than the normal ones for cheddar -- and mix this into the sour cream mixture. You can add more, or less cheese depending on your taste preferences, but the whole thing should be smoothe and delicious looking, like a professional made it! ...All because you grated the cheese, rather than breaking off the crumbly stuff.

Salad, sauce, dip, wings, and extra plates for it all go on the table, and it's self serve of deliciousness! I'm not sure if I slightly overcooked the turkey, or if it was the flour, but the skin was deliciously crunchy and mmmn, so good. This'll serve about 4, one turkey wing per person, added with the salad, is more than enough to satisfy. ...Sure you'll be a little nibbly, but that is good, means you're not over full! And if you want more, have more salad. Tastes good either way!

Deliciousness Delivered.