What was/is your evening meal? What's your favorite meal?

Weird improptu meal last night...
My daugter came over (she's a vegitarian) she bought a butternut squash, we had some sweet chestnuts left over from christmas... I found a recipe on the web.... basically a chestnut, onion, garlic and mushroom pasta sauce. Pasta doesn't agree with her, so we had it with rice, surprisingly tasty. Followed by a load of roasted veg which we'd slapped on a tray in the oven with a good slop of olive oil (squash, celery, peppers, tomatos, onion....nice bottle of white wine with it (+ a bit in the sauce).
Finished it off with some mince pies I'd made at Christmas and put in the freezer uncooked...slapped 'em in the oven, Mrs Cat made some custard.... mmmmm

Del

Just love those roasted veges - all sorts - I usually use olive oil with garlic in, & eat with grilled spicy meaty bits & naan bread (I'm a dedicated omnivore) .

Hey John,

Sorry, I just lost my appetite. I know what haggis is, but at this point I'm afraid to know what (a) swede (should that be capitalized?) is!

Maybe I'll post something later when I can think about food again.

Mike

'S ok, Mike, that's 'swede' with a small 's'. It's a root veg, looks like this:

For some reason they're known as 'turnips' in Scotland (hence 'neeps').

(BTW - if you google for swede images, turn SafeSearch on or off (as you choose - but be warned)).

Looks like a snadgies

Now turnips (that's what we call 'em here too) I like, as I do most veggies. My Grandma used to cook them sometimes when I was a kid. Parsnips too. Mmmmmm!

My favorite meal has probably got to be (guess my appetite's coming back!) corned beef and cabbage (with potatoes and carrots too) - but cooked right! OK, I'm going to market now - will be back later!

Bon Appetite!

Mike

My pic. wasn't the best - there's a difference between what the English call turnips:

- these purple & white jobs, which are nearly white inside,

and the thing the English call swedes and the Scots call turnips:

- a much browner thing on the outside, yellow inside.

"corned beef and cabbage (with potatoes and carrots too)" - I call that corned beef hash - another of my favorites! Enjoy!

Hi John,

Rutabaga maybe?

Yea, probably is. Hence the name.

Looks like what's called a turnip on this site.

The swedes I buy on my visits to the UK are very yellow inside, the outside coloring I am not so sure of at this point in time.(its been a while)

Are we mixing up Turnips with Swedes?Surely that two different veggies?

"swede" is short for Swedish turnip, really.

....and sadly very difficult to find in Germany!!!

My whole family loves them.

Parsnips are also difficult (not impossible) to find and are small and unappealing to look at!!

They're called swedes as a shortened version of "Swedish Turnip", to distinguish them from the "English" turnip (which is smaller and white and tastes quite defferent).

Due to the translation problems, I cooked "English" turnips with haggis, until my scots bf and I went to the supermarket together and played "Identify the Veg".

Here we eat a lot of seafood. The Blue Crab being specialty of the area. With corn on the cob and a few cold ones to wash them down.

After saying that I thought no a rib-eye and salmon on the barbie with roasted potatoes.

No heck just so much good stuff to choose from.

Now you got me wondering what i want to eat for dinner.

I grilled venison sausage. It was about 10 degrees F.

Sounds a bit cold. Usually when I have grilled sausage, it's served at more like 140°F .

Thanks John, I left out an important word, (outside)

The sausage was hot to the mouth.

Looks like everyone has covered some of my favourites. Haggis is fantastic ( and seems to have a lot of devotees on CR4 for some reason), but I'd advise the unwary not to touch the garbage served in some establishments ( it's immediately noticeable because it looks like slices from a sausage shape (which it is). Full enjoyment requires the accompaniments (neeps etc).

Last night I had a beef casserole. Mrs Kris cooked, so it wasn't that exciting ( OMG - she'll shoot me.). She has an unfortunate tendency to use those horrible ready made sauces. We tend to share the cooking 50:50 depending on who's doing what.

During the week we generally keep it fairly simple. The humble potato gets used a lot -it can be used in so many ways. The bonus is that if there are left over new potato's or mash, I enjoy scoffing it for lunch the following day. When I cook in the evening, I always plan what left-overs I can arrange, so as to save me time the next day ! Bubble and Squeak is 'lush' as the younger ones would say, and a poached egg to go with it is Heaven.

I have a weakness for baguettes filled with bacon and avocado, but an unfortunate hasty-eating experience at Waterloo East Station left me minus a crown.Ooops, Sorry - I've gone all lunch-time.

If we're doing a 'traditional' Sunday dinner, Roast Lamb will have me salivating in no time at all. All those nice roasted vegetables go down real good with it. I don't do afters, except for Tiramisu, or Custard*.

*It must be an alarming Yellow colour. To discust even further, I like the Devon Custard that comes in tins. It's not unknown for me to sit down with just tin and a spoon. French 'Creme Anglais' looks like baby sick.

Left over mash...plus....tinned tuna..spring onions...chilli...ginger..(anything else you have hanging about or herbs from the garden)... fry it up...Thai fish cake..excellent.

Will deffo give that a go!

Do you have it with stir-fried veg?

Have it as a starter or snack, or salad, stirfry veg would work well. It is really tasty..ooh I forgot the lemon juice... it can make quite a spectacular impression as a starter with a bit of rocket and a lemon wedge.. go for that chilli and citrus hit...mmm.

My fave flash bit of cooking was when I was doing some stir fry tiger prawns with loads of ginger and garlic for an old school chum (of the female variety) the wok flared up like in a pro kitchen...I kept my cool and just blew it out... shesaid 'did you mean to do that?' 'Of course!' It was so tasty she wiped the wok out with a bit of bread ..all that nice caramelly, ginger, garlicy oil...yum

sounds like a dog's breakfast!

Nice ! All those little extras you find hanging about make it real fun - you never get exactly the same thing twice, but it's always real tasty. Bugger measuring spices, I just do it by touch, so to speak. Worcester sauce is handy to keep in the cupboard.

Gentleman's Relish on some nicely buttered toast. That's tasty at any time of day.

Concur on measuring - pinches and tosses are my measurements when cooking - not by touch, exactly, more by taste. Wooster sauce - y'all have a much better product that I can occasionally find in the 'ethnic' section of groceries where there are large ex-pat Brit colonies. HP Sauce! Wunnerful stuff on mashed peas. Would your 'Gennulmun's Relish' work on toast that was buttered maliciously? Just wondering...

There is I believe a "Tinned" version of Haggis that you can have by Mail order. Do not ask me how it tastes as I have never made the comparison.....maybe someone else has....

But Tinned has got to be better than nothing!!

There's an outfit in Minneapolis, Minnesota that ships frozen "TV" dinners of lutefisk. If this tinned haggis is at all comparable in flavorfulness to them, I'm thinking no haggis might be better. But if I had a point of contact, I might give it a go the once... (hint, hint)

Worcester sauce and HP are both, IMO, essentials in the kitchen. If I get low on either, I start getting twitchy & have to get back-up supplies PDQ.

This sounds very iffy, but if you get desperate tell us how it tastes.

There was a programme about Worcester sauce on Radio 4 earlier this week - the real stuff takes about 18 months to make. The ingredients first have to mature, steeping in vats of vinegar, then they mix it all up & mature it a bit longer.

The final produce has a 'use by' date. This is apparently a legal requirement, because it's a foodstuff. In fact, it lasts more-or-less indefinitely, & gets better the longer it's matured.

Discovery & rise to popularity were accidental - a couple of chemists (Lee & Perins) were asked by some chap just back from India to make up a recipe. They made it, & the guy took some away. They tried their product, declared it 'orrible, & put it in the cellar. A while later (when it had matured), someone came across it & tried it. The rest is history ().

I got a book someplace that gives the low-down on such stuff. It has real good deatail on the ingrediants/manufacture of stuff like Worcester, Cola, KFC etc etc. If time permits I'll try root out some more foody facts.

Found that book, Here is snippets.

In 1982 People Magazine visited L&P's site, and observed 35, 6000 gallon vats. Whole anchovies get dissolved ( bone and all) in the mix.

Various manufacturers use stuff like cayenne, black pepper, allspice, coriander, cloves, mace, crushed pickled walnuts, brandy, mushroom, brandy, sherry. The salient ingredient is Asafoetida ( aka 'Devils Dung', hence not put on the label !). It's described as like a six-foot-carrot, a little of which goes a long way ( 5 to 160 ppm).

Some recipes contain beef/pork (boiled and dissolved into the mix.). Those that display a circled U ( described as a parve) are indicating that they may contain fish (ie the anchovy).

L&P deny use of Pork, and Heinz and Cross & Blackwell declined to say. L&P is aged for 2 years.

My Sauce <groan - blame the spell checker > is a bit aged -'Big Secrets' by William Poundstone, 1986.

Oh, crikey - if you can get fresh horshradish root, and have access to a wooden cask to ferment it in, why can't you find Wooster sauce? I concur on the 'iffy' part, I don't recognize some of those ingredients as likely part of store-bought Wooster...

I'll see if I can find a recipe for Nuk-Mam, a Viet Namese fermented fish sauce for y'all to whip up, since cookery seems to be a widespread hobby here. It's great stuff - but you need to be pretty far out in the country so's not to offend the neighbors whilst it gets right...

Ahh.... balut! In the Navy we called it "Eggs with Legs!" Didn't care for it much myself. The roasted monkey kabobs were much better!

...and do not forget the "1000 year old eggs" in China, they are buried for long periods underground after being packed in various things first. They look and smell exactly as you might expect I am told!

Here is a reference and a color picture to really put you off your next meal!!

Century eggs

Update - some minutes later.....

I just saw that these had also been already mentioned somewhere else, but I will leave it otherwise untouched as nobody posted an accurate link as far as I could see!!

Great minds think alike?

I somehow did not see yours, maybe we posted at the same or similar time?

"baguettes filled with bacon and avocado"

I know I could do a net search on this, but it may not be the same as what you know it to be. Can you go into a little more detail? Sounds really good!

Mike

Most Brit train stations sell stuff like that. My local Deli does a mean one. It's exactly like it says on the tin really. Crispy fried bacon + slices of Avocado. The saltiness of the bacon, and the creaminess of the avocado complement each other nicely. Probably screws the Cholesterol levels up if you over-indulge.

My tooth-loss experience was due to the rapidity of chomp-down on the crusty Baguette. Nothing for others to fear.

Ooh - gotta try that! Three of my favorite foods in one sandwich!

The baguettes filled with bacon and avocado sounds good. If you love avocado enough to paythe $1.50-$2.00each for them you might like my favorite tuna sandwich.

Squash up a couple of avocados with some lemon juice and either Pico de Gallo spices or Cajun spices. Mix your tuna up with a bit of mayonaise. Spread the freshly made guacamole (avocado) on some toasted French bread, lay on a thick layer of the tuna, top off with some barbeque potato chips (I prefer Lay's kettle cooked), top off with the other piece of toasted French bread, and you have the ultimate tuna sandwich. You'll need a large napkin.

I can sympathise, I lost a crown last night & what hurts the most is knowing how much it will cost to replace it. Still, the steak with new potatoes in herby butter & peas was tasty.

My angst was all the worse because I was on route to a meeting.

Last night was grilled chicken breasts (marinaded in a bit of Teriyaki sauce and ginger).

"And how/why can almost anything be off-topic in this, of all threads?"

Agree totally - anything (remotely food-related) goes, here. So keep away from that OT checkbox!

I've been going through the thread, trying to pull a few of the more relevant self-declared OT's back on topic. Trouble is it takes 5 votes, & I've only got one .

Midge was the Otter who starred in the book/film Ring of Bright Water. In the end some guy whacks her over the head with a spade ! 'Owner' is distraught, but Midge had (unknown to him) mated, and the pups came and found him. Oops, It's Mij. They both had a hard time eating Whale meat.

It would have been better written so:- " 'otter ", the joke would have been better understood I feel.....

The French also cut off leading "h's" to a great degree too, they just sound better than the Cockney method though!!!

Ah, haggis - I sing it's praises! Unfortunately, I sing only from memory. Impossible to get these days. Last night was a left-over roast of beef with onions and carrots (the parsnips were all gone) with mixed vegs and a salad. The final installment is sitting here in my lunch tote. More later concerning favorites. And now for something totally different...

Speaking of Burns...did you hear about the fellow who invented a time machine? Being a huge fan of Rob't Burns' poetry, he took himself back to that time and place (it also teleported, of course). Upon his return, the lab staff was astonished at his reappearance with two saucy wenches accompanying him. "Who are they?", they asked. With a wink, he said: "Ah, lads - hae ye no heard o' the pair o'doxies o' time travel?"

Went for one of Small's favorites tonight - fish fingers, rice & peas. Fish was "Alaskan pollock" (according to the packet) - Small won't touch cod, having been indoctrinated with the idea that they're on the way out. Fair do's, but how long 'til these pollock are in the same state? (hope I didn't spoil anyone's appetite).

POLLACKS !!!! to all concerned!!

You know how to make a scottish lassie very home sick, and its Haggis Neeps and Tatties. I had Caesar Salad not quite the same

Hi, Spitfire,

Don't know whether your emphasis Tatties was to highlight my spelling 'totties', but I was using the Fife pronunciation. Should really have been 'to*ies', where the * represents a glo*l sto*.

OK - There's been so much talk aboot Haggis, and apparently it is very good, that I am wondering - could anyone explain the specifics of Haggis; what it tastes like (I'm not expecting anyone to say chicken!), etc. To me, the composition sounds disgusting but I may be willing to try it depending on the feedback I get from this post.

I'm cooking corned beef & cabbage tonight. With the leftover potatoes and cabbage, I am definitely going to try the "Bubble and Squeak" with maybe a bit of corned beef added. (Thanks Kris!)

Um, no, can't say it tastes in any way the slightest like chicken... And while it may sound disgusting, so would hot dogs if you knew what was in 'em. Actually, done right, it's very tasty, and it tastes like...well...haggis. Anybody else have a similie?

Nearest thing I've had (for flavour) is probably faggots (wipe that smirk off your face ). I've never had anything really like Haggis.