wtf is okra?

It is a southern US delicacy. A 3" to 4" long green pod that can be boiled whole, cut and stewed, or fried. However, do not cut and boil or it WILL slime. If boiled, served with butter, salt and pepper. It's one of my favorite veggys, nex to broc.

Finalday

Until that final day. /Keith Green
Edited by - Finalday on 1/30/2004 9:17:16 AM

Cassoulet or maybe a bollita instead... it's a close second. Japanese style shiitake mushroom rice. Italian-American style meat loaf.

I have several fav recipes that I churn out for my gannets..

Roast beef Wellington with roastie spuds, minty peas, parmesan coated parsnips, stuffed field mushies, clove-seasoned carrots julienne (long sliced to you) home-made Yorkie puds (with lard) and Uncle Taw's yummy thick proper Bisto gravy (no fooking instant gravy granules in my house, ta)

Uncle Taw's 3 hrs steamed sponge pudding with cinnamon, nutmeg, Golden Syrup and a marmalade topping, served with oodles of proper custard, made with powder and milk (no cr*p instant or ready made custard thank you)

Curries, a speciality of the Taw cuisine, you can't go far wring if you put the spices in first with onions thenadd the meat onto that and put some canned tomatoes in, then add fresh coriander and garam-masala in for the last 15mins, oh yeah some coconut milk and ground almonds always go down well. Add yer chillis to your taste at the beginning.

Stuffed sweet peppers, love this and its so easy to do, halve and deseed sweet red long peppers, then cut up some Mozzarella (the proper buffalo Mozz not that cheap sh*t) stuff it into the peppers and sprinkle with garlic salt, oregano, basil etc and some porcini mushrooms. 5 mins and yer stuffing yerself!

amongst others...

Uncle Taw's venison casserole
Uncle Taw's sweet roasted gammon joints
Uncle Taw's beef and onion and beer pie
Uncle Taw's chestnut and sausage meat stuffed poultry
Uncle Taw's pork loin/leg/shoulder with PERFECT crackling

and of many other yummy tasty filling high-calorie high-fat low-fibre goodness from Uncle Taw's Kitchen of Self-Indulgence..

..the thing is, it's all the yummy stuff from when we were kids and no-one gave a monkeys about diets and that drivel, and I bet you can almost smell em from my description..here's a nice piece of pork going in for the roasting..




mmmmmmmm....don't let any sophisticated Manhattanites* try to sway you with fancy foreign muck that's all style and no substance from their posh city centre restaurants. Come to Staffordshire and eat suet, and other good working class proletarian grub, like sausage and mash, or roast pig's liver and onions.



Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/30/2004 10:50:47 AM

Unfortunately the best I've managed with nothing out of a can was an attempted pizza I made with some friends on a barbecue with some leftovers. We were asked to come along to this barbecue thing and we all assumed it was to come along and eat, but no we had to help out, and at the end there was barely anything left and we were starving. We took some bread dough and spread it out over a plate, finished up the ketchup bottle for the tomato and chopped up the last remaining sausage for some meat topping. Then we slid it off the plate and onto the grill. Needless to say, it was one of the foulest things I've ever tasted. The dough was charred on the bottom and still soft on top. The ketchup was overpowering and the few bits of sausage was the only vaguely nice thing to eat. Needless to say it was plenty of fun trying to make it.

Taw, that pic makes me hungry, drool, drool...

About like a roast I did that had knife cuts in it that were stuffed with a clove of garlic, green onion and pepper in each hole with about 20 holes done and then cooked for about 2 hours. Dang near ate it all myself.

Finalday

Until that final day. /Keith Green
Edited by - Finalday on 1/30/2004 11:08:50 AM

OK Taw, I'll bite but being at work, I have no access to my kitchen to send you a shot of what may be cooking. Just because I have the great good fortune to be exposed to a multitude of cultures doesn't mean that I some kind of a Ponce de Leon you know.

Cassoulet, dear Uncle, is a VERY proletarian (albeit French) dish. It's basically beans with bits of browned duck, pork sausage and beef, veal, chicken or any other "meat or poultry" you care to toss in and seasonings. VERY hearty, but it still trumps you on the fiber.... from the beans you see.

Bollita. It's Italian. It's like a cassoulet except no beans and fewer seasonings. You have to cook up other stuff to go with it, like a polenta, gnocchi or a light mushroom rissotto, stuff like that, and veggies like maybe escarole aglia olio.

If you haven't had the rice, don't knock it. And it is meant to go with other things like, say, a nicely broiled salmon steak with a slightly sweet miso sauce and braised nappa cabbage.

And what's so posh about meat loaf?

I bet you my curries as good as yours anyway. <sniff> How intriguing, coconut milk. I'm surprised that you didn't opt for a cup of heavy cream as well. Sounds like one of those typically toned down English things. Is that really a curry?

listen Mr Nouvelle Cuisine , just because a recipe is originally pleb in origin don't mean it's a passport to working-classness, look at gazpacho soup or ciabatta bread, once staples of the workers now appropriated by the bourgeoise. Anyway a good ol' British stew with dumplings knocks spots off all that stuff! (ok theyre all quite nayce really but I ain't gonna say that anything foreign could possibly be better than anything British am I?)

I've had plenty of shii-take muchrooms and wild rice. very pleasant but not very filling, even with all-you-can eat sushi and 3 bottles of hot saké.

Curries are of course quintessentially British, your sad transatlantic attempts to replicate the experience of a British curry night in a balti house after the pubs close are a spectacle to behold. heed the following rules...

Order the hottest thing on the menu to impress your mates and the two girls from Wolverhampton you picked up outside the chip shop/taxi rank
Order 4 times as much lager as you think you'll need
Start a fight with anyone who looks smaller than you on a nearby table
Raise your voice by 30 decibels minimum and pretend youre called Keith
Take one mouthful of your curry, scream and drink as much lager as you can while simultaneously vomiting onto the flocked wallpaper
Tear said wallpaper (now stained) off wall and use in combination with tablecloth to remove all traces of plutonium from tongue
Threaten to kill/maim/hospitalise waiters and manager who try to stop you while saying "call dam Police" in urdu/gujarati/bengali/pashtun
Wake up in cells with very bad headache, no money, ulcerated tongue, several bruises, cuts, and a black eye, with the sound of sitar music in your head while being taken to the Magistrates court...

..and you wish to emulate this unique experience with your urbane Manhattan sophistication and designer frippery? for shame, man!

btw I do go for the heavy cream but me Mrs likes the coconut milk, which should of course be limited to the Deccan/S.E.Asian cuisines that of course I know nothing about being thoroughly working-class and only eating British food.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 1/30/2004 11:36:32 AM

Errr. No. Not THAT type of curry eating.

Besides, that's also what dining out on Thai cuisine seems to have devolved into... not that I've lately had the freedom to try chatting up anything in a skirt while lickered-up or not. And.... no.... not you in a skirt blechhhhh.

thai pffft pretentious indians is all they are

I make great curries! I use whole spices and grind them myself, and that adds the real flavour. My roasts, risottos, and especially my Jumbalaya are critically acclaimed! Cheesecakes are my specialty though.

that'll be wombat dopiaza then and eucalyptus cheesecake.

*Shakes head* You're getting predictable guv . What about your food, Taw? Standard British fare; meat and vegetables. How exciting!

taw, when i get out of college in 8 years, im inviting you to my house to teach me how to cook, my parents have never cooked anything quite like that

- Wolf_Demon - aka wolfy, wolf, king of odd, king of spam, and twonk