Stuffed Mushrooms

This was fun because it was created while we were at the grocery store. I just said to Cory, “Hey! Wanna make stuffed mushrooms?” And he agreed, so I made it all up and we took it home to cook. Let me just say YUM.

As a side note, we used about 15 large mushrooms (maybe 3 inches in diameter?), but the stuffing would have filled twice that many. Because of this, I will be writing 30 mushrooms in the ingredients section, but I recommend baking only one tray at a time (15 is perfect for filling a 9×13 glass baking dish). So, if you need lots of hors du-oeuvres or something, this would be perfect.

Also, I am the James Bond of food puns: mushroom CAP (I was trying to be Toad).

AND, as an extra shoutout-type thing, I hope Mr. and Mrs. Burnsington like that we added the process pics ^_^
Onward to the Recipe!

The method behind the nomness

My dad asked early in the life of the blog how we choose our countries and recipes. So here it is!

We pick the countries by spinning a globe and placing our finger down. If it is too close to the country we just picked we spin again, and if it is in the ocean we try to find the closest country to our spot. I suppose if we land on the United States we will try to discern what state we landed on to pick food from, or at least try to do a food from that general region.

We choose a recipe by just Google-ing for authentic recipes from that country. We try to avoid recipes with pre-made ingredients, if possible (as we did with our curry). The only major obstacle in choosing a recipe, other than the general cost of the large meals, is getting any ingredients that aren’t commonly found here. Luckily there is an Asian and Mexican market on Main Street, which should hopefully have the majority of the spices and food stuffs we need to make meals. If any of our recipes call for local ingredients we may have to substitute things (if possible).

So far we have only come up with two countries, both that feature large food dishes due to the family culture. I’m hoping for our next country to have meals that are slightly smaller, to mix things up a bit.

–Cory

Masterpiece Chicken

This is something I created last night that combines a delicious fried chicken taste with lemon basil sauce. Cory had the lemon basil idea, and I took all his ingredients to make “the best thing he’s ever tasted.” We also made herbed potatoes and a side of corn + peas. Everything went wonderfully together. So, please try this out and let us know if you enjoy it as much as we did. (We both ate two pieces of chicken and probably could have eaten more… thank god there wasn’t any or we might’ve exploded).

Recipe

Burma/Myanmar

Burmese (or Myanmaran?) fried pork curry =’ed delicious.

It took a long time to make, mostly because of the simmering for an hour part, and Cory didn’t exaaaaaactly understand my way of measuring rice* so he put a tiny bit too little, resulting in slightly al dente rice; but the only other downside was that turmeric turns things yellow. But, it IS curry, so we should have expected that. The only advice I can give you is that if you try this dish, use dark utensils and pots/pans because anything else will become a yellow version of what it once was. Just to show you; we used a wooden spoon to stir… now THIS is our spoon (with reference normal spoon):

Anyway, the most awesome part of this dish to me was that it was curry, but not made-from-cubes-bought-from-the-store-curry. I always love when you can make something like that from scratch. As I said, it is delicious and you should all try it.

*My way of measuring rice is not by using measuring cups and so on. That is too much work for me. Also, I know the secret Asian way, taught to me by my ex-roommate Marisa, who learned it from her mother, who is a very cute and traditional Thai woman. The secret is this: put however much rice you want to be cooked in the pot or rice cooker, make sure it is evenly distributed in the pan, and simply add as much water as comes to the first joint of your pointer finger when you touch the tip of it to the top of the rice. In other words, add some water, completely covering the rice. When you have about an inch over top of the rice level, you can measure with your pointer finger from the top of the water to the top of the rice, and if it is ever so slightly above the first bend in your finger, then it is perfect. (Cory’s problem was that he tried this and put too little, so it was just barely touching that joint… and well, the rice was hard in the middle.)

It may sound weird, but it works and I pride myself on being an expert rice and water ratio measurer.

Also, it works nicely when you want a non-conventional measuring of rice to cook, because the directions for rice are almost always in full or half cup quantities…. and the water is usually 1 1/2 cups or something per cup of rice.. I just hate math and feel that it might get confusing when you wanted to do a different amount than that. Anyway, my rice rant is over. Go eat delicious food.