Mufuckin Birthday Cake

Now that I'm trying to blog more and more, I'm slowly gaining more readers (like 1 or 2 LOL) and it's slightly nerve racking lololol. Also, my posts are so TL:DR, I should fix that. Or not, fuck ya'll.

Diamond Head
From "Extraordinary Cakes" by Karen Krasne

The writing is so fucking terrible...and I regret that smiley face lol!

After making Boobie's cake and then this one, Stefy and I have no appetite to make anymore cakes for the longest time. Don't get me wrong, I love making cakes, but we made two of them in such a short period of time. Our shit isn't simple either. These bad boys take 5 - 10 hours and we basically had to sell our jizz for a week to pay for all the ingredients lololol. Nuttin for macadamias; an honorable cause. In the end, I'm glad we made this one cuz it was so fucking delicious. So much better than Bo's dry ass cake :P

So this cake had some righteous layers to it with names I can't even pronounce and for this post I'll go through each one separately.

Bittersweet Chocolate Génoise
So the "cake" portion of this cake is a chocolate génoise. After consulting wiki, a génoise is basically a cake that doesn't use any chemical leavening (like baking soda and baking powder). After reading that, everything makes complete fucking sense because the finished cake was a little less than 2 inches in height lolol. I'm pretty sure I folded the batter properly but since I've never made this before so I either fucked up really hard or I did it really well lol. I'm going to assume I made it perfectly :)

Ingredients: unsalted butter, 8 eggs, sugar, flour, cocoa powder (I used Valrhona cocoa, my cooking mentor Mr. B told me that this brand is the shit so there you go)

One of the keys to making this génoise is to get the eggs to sabayon stage or ribbon stage. What that means is that you need to combine eggs with sugar and get the eggs to look really pale, double or triple in volume and have a "ribbon" like texture. What THAT means is the eggs will be thick and drip back leaving a trail before melting back into the eggs (looking up a video would help lol). To do this you need to warm the egg mixture over a bain marie, which is whisking the eggs in a bowl over a simmering saucepan. After 4 min or so, take it off after it is warm to the touch and put it into a mixer on high for like 7 to 10 minutes and the mixture should get thick and double in volume and the rest is pretty easy!

Rum Simple Syrup
Simple syrup is pretty easy to make. Combine water and sugar and let it dissolve and thicken up but don't cook too long or it becomes caramel. To make simple syrup rum flavoured, we just added some Cap Mo' Dark Rum. Done mufucka.

Semisweet Chocolate Ganache
Another word I'm not sure how to pronounce lol! Basically ganache is an icing that is made by heating heavy cream pouring it over chocolate to melt. We used pretty decent chocolate for this cake btw. I like buying good ingredients for my food and not that Baker's Chocolate shit you find at the grocery store #hatersgonnahate. Shtack was such a hater cuz the chocolate I bought was a huge portion of the total cost lol!

Vanilla bean custard
Custard is a really hard thing to make properly and very easy to fuck up...and we fucked it up LOL. I mean our custard still tasted fine but it was lumpy lol! That usually happens when the cream is too hot when you mix it with the egg mixture. My tip for that is to make sure that the cream is JUST about to boil but not yet boiling before you mix it with the egg mixture. Our cream was boiling HUGE when we mixed it with the eggs I think lol!

Macadamia Brittle
This is a pretty interesting and delicious part of the cake. To make this, you need to combine sugar and a little bit of water (like 2 tablespoons) and bring it to a boil. Then you mix in the nuts and once you cook this mixture long enough, the sugar starts to dissolve and coat the nuts. The key to this though is to not overcook the sugar... which I did :(

Final Notes
So that's basically the cake. Oh yeah! there was also a layer of whipped cream in the cake. To break the cake down it was:
Chocolate Génoise glazed with rum syrup, chocolate ganache, vanilla custard, macadamia brittle and ground macadamia and whipped cream and then repeated for one more layer...mmmmm

- I also burnt my thumb taking the génoise out of the oven lol! I was cooling my thumb in several cups of yogurt for like 2 hours... those girls better have liked that cake! I almost died! I think they liked it though lawl
- I bought this shitty ass $5 cake leveler from Michael's which is this tool with a wire that you use to divide a cake into even layers.... fucking sucked balls, waste of money lol
- I'm pretty bad with assembling cakes. I can never get the icing to be even across the whole thing so my cakes always sink a bit around the edges... I should fix that lolol
- Stefy and I had to reach new levels of homosexuality to decorate this cake since it was for a bunch of girls. We wanted to make it pretty so I decided to put some flowers on it. BOOM. Girly.
- Lastly! We wanted to write something on this cake but I didn't have time to make the icing so we bought this tube of icing and it made it look like a special ed kid wrote on it lol! it was so shitty to use lol I didn't want to ruin the cake with the writing but we flipped for it and the coin told us to write on it.

Fuck this storyline son

Well I wanted a short post and this one turned out to be longer than ever LOL!

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta

Duuurrr. I'm forcing myself to keep writing. I think I may have like 1 or 2 fans out there which means I need to keep........ feeding them amazing blog posts :) I think there's a really shitty pun in that last sentence there. Maybe not. Please don't shoot the pianist, he's trying his best :D

Anyways, I've posted enough about drinks/desserts so I gotta prove my worth and post about some real fucking food. This one is a pretty sweet pasta.

Gorgeous Slow Cooked Pasta
From Cook with Jamie (although if you know anything about Jamie Oliver, you would know this is his recipe just by the name lol)

Why did I leave that fork there.... FUCK!

So a little background about this dish. First off, it serves 4 to 6 people and I ate this all by myself...meaning I ate this over a course of a week lol!! Fuck, it sucks not having anyone to cook for #foreveralone. Also! this dish is supposed to be made with a whole fucking duck. I love duck so much.... but it costs a million dollars for a whole duck, and its so expensive for pieces so I had to cheap out. I replaced the meat with beef and before anyone says shit about shit, I know it would've been wiser to replace it with another bird, but I felt like eating beef so fuck ya'll :D Duck would've made this dish SO much better though with the sweet and sour style #justsayin

Ingredients
Agro Dolce Sauce [the star of the recipe since there is no duck :( .....]
- Pancetta, red onion, carrots, celery, rosemary, cinnamon stick, garlic, plum tomatoes, red wine
Also, meat, parmesan, butter, orange zest and juice, red wine vinegar
And Rigatoni

Notes to Ingredients
The sauce is pretty sweet for this one, its like a new sweet and sour taste I'm not used to when it comes to pasta. Additionally, Mr. Oliver put down pinenuts and sultanas to put into the pasta. FYI sultanas is like white grapes (English snob I know lololol) I had white grapes but I opted not to put it in. It would've added to the sweet and sour taste, but adding that AND pinenuts made it seem like the dish was super busy with all these little bits and bites to eat so I took it out. I mean I had ground beef, little diced up celery, carrots, pancetta, pasta and then I'd also have these two. Meh.
Also, this is the first time I used Rigatoni pasta. Never had it before :D

Cooking
- This one is a longer cooking pasta, the sauce took hella long to reduce and simmer
- One little tip about cooking pasta (I can't remember if I've mentioned this) but when you cook pasta you should always set aside some of the cooking water. It helps when you are putting together the pasta with the sauce at the last minute and you need to "loosen" the sauce with a little water. The starchy water is a little bit more effective than just regular water
- I've always been slightly confused about the terms boiling and simmering. Seems obvious and maybe it is but there is a tiny difference and instead of trying to explain, here's a British guy to do it for me :D

That's about it for this one! I'm making another cake with Ducky this week. Hope it's awesome!

Dranks on Dranks

So here are bunch of alcoholic drinks or random fruit drinks I've made. I like play around with the garnish and presentation. Not very good yet lolol.

I made this drink up by adding a bunch of shit I had together, I think there are too many flavours so you should probably take one out. Mind you, I did invent this while I was drinking lol! I don't have a name for this one lol.

- In a shaker put in:
- Ice
- 1 oz Sour Puss Raspberry
- 1 oz White Rum
- .5 oz Peach Syrup
- Splash with Pineapple Passion Mango Dole Juice
- Shake well and garnish with a yellow cherry

Also made this while drinking. I loved this one a lot cuz got me proper fucked lol. I used alcoholic whipped cream that you can only get in the states. At first it makes it look like someone took a shit all over my drink. If you let it melt and mix together, this drink tastes awesome :)

In a small glass
- Put in Ice
- Fill it partially with Bailey's Coffee
- Splash a bit of milk
- Top with CREAM(TM) Alcohol Infused Chocolate Whipped Cream
- Garnish with a chocolate disk (I made that and it looked horrible)

This one is a special drink a friend's ex-gf liked to drink. I respect the drink so I have to post it, tasted so fucking good.

In a glass
- Put in ice
- 2 oz Havana Club (you NEED Havana club, no other white rum. Also, apparently you can put in as much Havana as you want and it doesn't make it taste bad lolol)
- Splash some cranberry, orange juice and and top with grape Crush
- Garnish with a lemon wheel
- Fucking delicious

Here is a simple non-alcoholic fruit smoothie thing I made. I played around with the garnish. It's called the "Golden Wonder"

- In a blender
- 2 Passion Fruits
- 2 Mango Nectarines (or Peaches or Yellow Plums)
- 1 Banana

I took more time making the garnish than I did the drink lololol. The one on the left is just banana with a spoon of passion fruit in the middle. The middle one is just a banana star. The one of the right are two banana bowls with passionfruit inside (pretty delicious).

Lastly, I was gonna make a layered fruit drink, kiwi at the bottom, then pineapple and grape on top. The thing I didn't realize is that kiwi tastes like absolute shit when you juice/blend it. The acids in it fucks with the taste hard. Don't ever do it. Cuz of that I just gave up and drank the grape and pineapple on its own. Still good :D

That's it for this post. I really hope I post the rest of my shit before I get lazy again lololol.

Two Colour Jello Shots

I have a lot of shit I've made in the last year that I have been too lazy to post about. I should use my new found urge to blog and blog as much as I can before I get lazy again lol.
Aside from cooking I also love making drinks/bartending. My love for this started when Quarters (now 1280) at McMaster offered a one day bar tending course that I took part in lolol. Shit was pretty fun and I've been trying to be a master bartender ever since; along with trying to be a master chef and prince of tennis :P

Two Colour Jello Shots
I made these for Rong Time's last birthday (don't think she remembers though but that's all good lol!). I think a lot of people liked them, but I was told there was one hater. I wish I knew it was good but by the time I gave them to her party, I was super drunk and could not taste/judge the quality that well lol!

I'm particularly proud of this because I think I invented this version of the jello shot. I think the other kinds of two flavour jello shots are all horizontal splits :D

You can use any flavour but the ones I made were Passion Fruit/Black Currant

Recipe

*You can make these alcoholic (like I did) or virgin

**This recipe is for one half of the jello shot meaning you have to do this twice

***If you want to make alternating colours like in the picture above, then you need to divide this recipe by half and divide out the juice, and then repeat the same thing for the second half. A little complicated, just takes a bit of math and planning lolol.

****READ ALL OF THIS BEFORE YOU TRY lololol

- 1/4 cups cold water (or your alcohol of choice)
- 1 packets of unflavored gelatin (I used 1 pouch of Knox brand gelatin which is about 1 tbsp)

- 1/2 cups boiling water
- 1 1/4 cups juice (don't use fresh juice or frozen pineapple or kiwi because it would set)
- 1/2 cups sugar (optional)

- Food colouring

Equiqment

- Ice Cube Trays and/or egg cartons or anything similar (I'll explain later)

Instructions

- Start boiling your water and put the cold water into a large bowl and put gelatine in and let it soften for about 5 min

- Add 1/2 cup boiling water (and optional sugar in) to the gelatine and stir until it dissolves

- Let it cool down and add your juice and you are ready to start assembling these bad boys

Important Notes:

- When it comes to choosing what juice you want, the key is to choosing juice that is REALLY sweet. The reason is that if you use something like juice from a juice box, it will be extremely watered down when you add 1/2 cup boiling water and 1/4 cup cold water (or alcohol). In order to balance that out you need to add the sugar or have really sweet juice. I prefer making the really sweet juice rather than adding sugar.

- What I did for this recipe is use fruit juice syrup mixed with some water, and I made sure that it was about double the sweetness. I used Monin Passion Fruit syrup and Ribena Blackcurrant syrup

- I can also imagine you could use those frozen concentrates and just add a little bit of water. As long as the juice you are adding is super sweet and concentrated then it's all good

- I added food colouring as a presentation thing. I found that regular juice is not dark enough. Especially after you add the boiling water and alcohol so I added some food colouring so that it was completely opaque.

Assembly

This is where the whole deal gets time consuming.

- Pour the jello so it fills halfway up the shot glass or fill it to the point where it covers the bottom of the shot glass and makes it way to the top when you angle the shot glass. Might be a little more than half can't remember. (I used plastic ones I found at the dollar store)

- In order to get the jello to set diagonally in the shot glass you need to place the shot glasses on an angle in the ice cube trays. This part is a long a delicate process. Just look at the picture:

- Not sure how to explain this next part but basically if you don't rotate the shot glasses while they are on an angle before they set, you will get an imperfect line. The picture is below, but basically the jello mix clings on to the dry shot glass in a weird way so by rotating the shot glass when it is angle, you wet the sides of it and the water sets in a straight line. The picture shows what I'm talking about. Sorry if that is a bit unclear.

 - Let the jello set in the fridge for a couple of hours then make the second batch and pour it into the shot glasses and put them back in the fridge (no need to put on an angle this time) and let the second half can set and dats it. Game ova.

I'll post up some pics of actual drinks I've made tomorrow or something lawl. This post got too long again.

Dobos Torte

It's been fricken month's since I posted on this thing which sucks but oh well. I figured since all my friends are busy, I got some time now to post something new lol! so bored and ronery :P

So my Boobie recently had his sweet sixteen, so I decided we had to do something special and make a cake. And if anyone knows anything about shit, they know that a cake is a minimum two man job so I enlisted my second right hand Stefy to help me lololol

Dobos Torte
From a cake book in chapters... I stole recipe lolol I wish I knew the name of it

Sucks I didn't get a picture of the cake on its plate without the wax paper and excess nuts at the bottom lol

The cake we made is called a Dobos Torte and is named after the Hungarian chef that created it. It's a multi-layer sponge cake with chocolate buttercream with a hazelnut and walnut crust. It is garnished with cake slices covered with caramel and dipped in chocolate on top. Or as my pal Fricke describes... slices of pizza on top lol! Basically, thank god this cake isn't a fucking meringue cake jesus christ lol! Also, this cake (like any cake Shtack and I make) is so bad for you lol! 1 slice might actually kill you.

Ingredients
For the Cake:
Typical shit like cake flour, salt, a million eggs, icing (confectioners') sugar, and vanilla
For the buttercream:
bittersweet chocolate, icing sugar, unsweetened cocoa powder, vanilla, and a million sticks of unsalted butter

Notes to ingredients
- Chocolate: A while ago I bought Callebaut Semi Sweet 51.8% chocolate for the other cakes I made. This time I used Lindt Semi Sweet 49% chocolate and I liked this one way better I think. I'm just nerding this up hard. I KNOW whoever would read this doesn't care about that at all...moving on
- Cake flour: So I hang out with a lot of lazy and/or cheap fucks and no one I know is as precise about cooking as I am. Point is, there is a huge difference between cake flour and all purpose flour. I cringe when I imagine a situation where someone doesn't have cake flour and they will substitute it with all-purpose cuz they are too lazy to go out and buy a new bag of cake flour. Basically, all flours have a certain % of protein content and that affects the gluten present in the flour. That gluten determines the elasticity of the product and controls how chewy it is, how much the batter/dough rises etc. Cake flour has the least amount of protein content and is much finer. Therefore they are perfect for cakes and cupcakes as it minimizes how much the batter rises when it cooks and makes the cakes "light" and "fluffy". All-purpose flour is good for bread or cookies because you need a chewy consistency and you need a dough that rises (with the help of water, yeast and kneading).
TL;DR...use the right fucking ingredients!

Cooking
Making the Sponge Cake:
- Always sift the flour when you put it in the bowl... Stefy
- We had to beat the yolks until pale and thick. Pretty generic so we had to guess what that should look like
- Then we had to mix the egg whites with some sugar until stiff peaks but I didn't get it to make stiff peaks after so long so I just gave up when it seemed thick enough lolol There's a lot of generic instructions that you have to power through. Stupid cook books.
- We only had 2 9-inch cake pans and had like 7 layers to make. Luckily these layers were so thin it took like 5 -8 min to bake.
- Protip: A lot of people just butter the pans before putting the batter in. You gotta butter AND flour the pans. The butter tends to stick and prevent cakes from rising properly so the flour helps with that. Just sift a small handful of flour on your cake pans after you butter/grease them
- Protip: Smack the cake pans on the table to get the air bubbles out. I did it but I was a scrub and didn't do it enough. You have to bang like 20 times and you can see like a hundred bubbles rise to the top. Your cake will be very flat and pro if you do this. We only did this with the last layer... the first 6 were so shitty lol!
Melting Chocolate
- As easy as it sounds you can still make mistakes. Haters out there might be so offended that I'm even writing about this lololol
- What I mean is there there are typically two methods people choose when they melt chocolate. Double boiler or microwave. Double boiler is when you steam some water and put a heatproof container like a metal bowl top of it and use the heat from the steam to melt the chocolate. This method is fine, except for the fact that you have a great chance of having steam get in contact with the chocolate and when that happens your chocolate will seize, meaning it will become hard and lumpy. Plus with a double boiler you need to constantly stir so it doesn't burn. The microwave is my method of choice because no water is involved. Just put your microwave at 50% power, melt it in 30 second intervals, take it out, stir and mix it up and keep doing it until it is melted. Make sure there is no water in your bowl or spoon or whatever :D
-Also, melting chocolate is easy when  you have even pieces. So if you have a block of chocolate then you gotta take the extra step and shave the chocolate so it is even
Making Caramel:
- Caramel is usually water and sugar but this time it had butter and lemon juice and that made it a slightly different experience lol. I hate making caramel so Stefy gave it a shot and he did it pro! He is now the caramel master.
- We had to cook it until it was "caramel" colour lawl. It took a while to cook the caramel at medium heat so we turned it up and it changed colour faster so make sure you don't over cook or it dries out really hard
- Protip: When you make caramel, it dries in your saucepan really fast and makes it hard to clean out. Just put water in it, bring it to a boil and pour out the water when the caramel dissolves. Just remember, caramel is just water and sugar :)

That's about it. Assembly is pretty easy. Maybe not but this post is long enough already. That reminds me, I need an icing spatula lolol. Sorry for the ridiculously long post. There was a lot of shit to talk about and as you can see... it was all gold :)

Walnut Covered Prawns with Ponzu Sauce

This little bitch is still alive! So much hattnin in my life I can't even hear the time to write this blog or cook anything. But anyways, after looking at the pictures for this dish, I have now decided to always plan how to garnish/present a dish beforehand. I believe presentation is accounts for 50% of how good the dish is. That and I find that garnishing and preparing the presentation of food is one of the most interesting parts of cooking so imma gangsta this shit up whenever I can.

Walnut Covered Prawns with Ponzu Sauce
From the KW Record

I made wings too but I didn't marinate them so ignore that :D

Ingredients
Crushed walnuts in a Pestle and Mortar
Panko Breadcrumbs (special Japanese bread crumbs. Found these at Zehrs of all places lol)
Typical ingredients for batter mix (flour, eggs etc)
Huge amount of oil
Ponzu (mixed with some other things like cornstarch and shit)

Notes to Ingredients
Ponzu sauce is a pretty common Japanese sauce. Its citrus based and that's all I really remember. If you've eaten enough Japanese food I'm sure you've tasted it. It's basically the same sauce as the one the ones on the chicken skewers at all you can eat.

Cooking
First step on this bad boy is deveining and peeling the raw prawns. Prob best to do this over a clean sink and a bowl and use cold water whenever you need to rinse of the shrimp cuz this bitniss gets a little finicky. So yeah, just gotta peel the shell/legs off keeping the tail of the shrimp on. Then run a knife down and take out the digestive tract. Alternatively you could poke the shrimp with a toothpick under the digestive tract and pull it out from the bottom. Pretty delicate way of doing things, its like manually deseeding grapes. Probs shouldn't do it that way lolol

Second step is to coat the shrimp and deep fry these gais

Tips
- First, there is usually an exact temperature the oil should be at for deep frying so you should try to follow it. If its too hot, you could burn the outside and undercook the inside
- make sure the entire shrimp is generously coated with the egg so that everything sticks to it properly and cooks evenly
- Shrimps cook hella fast, 1 - 2 min max. I cooked for longer and the shrimp were very hard. I'll remember for next time lolol

Happy Birthday Illie Mako

So as most of you know, I had a birthday sometime this week, who even knows. Anyways, my friends all chipped in and got me this legit 7" Japanese Santoku blade. Putting this thing in my hand feels amazing I haven't tried it out yet so hopefully it is sharp as fuck. Also, when I found out about Japanese knives, I learned that they are sharper on the right side than they are on the left, like a 70/30 distribution. Not sure why but it makes sharping this thing a lot harder if I wanna keep that edge...and I do. Fuck, gotta figure that out. Prob gotta use a stone. Anyways, Thanks gais! I love it.

Yeeeee

So, in honour of Stefy's parents leaving, I decided to write on how to cook rice since the kid had so much trouble the one time lololol.

There are 3 ways to cook rice, each more deadlier than the last.
1. Rice cooker method
Easiest way to cook rice. Rice comes out perfect every time and doesn't stick to the sides. I don't even measure anything out with rice cookers, I put some amount in, and make sure there's a bit of water above the rice (like 1cm or less) and then cook it.

2. Absorption Method
This method is exactly the same as the rice cooker basically, except you are using a saucepan and unlike your rice cooker, your saucepan wasn't blessed by a monk, therefore, you can easily fuck up your rice.

How much piggin rice do you need?
For 2-3 people, 1 cup (250 ml) rice and 2 cup (500 ml) water
For 1 person, 1/2 cup (125 ml) rice and 1 cup (250 ml) water

How can she slap?
- First, figure out how much water and rice you need.
- Lastly, put the water, rice and a pinch of salt into the sauce pan and put the stove on High and boil it for 9 - 13 minutes (with a lid of course)

3. Boil and Steam
So at this point I should point out that the way you cook rice will determine how the rice feels and tastes. With the absorption method, the rice comes out heavier (because it absorbed all the water) and stickier (because it absorbed all the starch). This method makes the rice more filling and Asian style. The boil and steam method makes the rice lighter and less sticky which is good for absorbing sauces and curries and such. Personally, I prefer this method of cooking rice, because you waste less rice. With the other method, if you have a shitty saucepan, the rice will usually stick to the sides and burn. Yeah the rice in the middle is ok to eat, but the rice that is burnt is wasted and a bitch to clean out after wards.

How can she slap?
- So with this method, it does not matter how much water you use (well there is no such thing as too much, but don't put in a teaspoon of water for 2 cups of rice you retard). Put the stove on high and bring the water to a boil (with a pinch of salt) and then pour the rice in after and cook for 8 min.
*I should point out that if you have a kettle, use that to boil the water and then put it into the saucepan saving a small about (like a cup) in the kettle for later. I'll explain that in a sec.
- Here is the tricky part, when you are done, grab a sieve and quickly pour the rice in it and catch the water that is dripping from the bottom back into the saucepan (about an inch of water). Sounds tricky but luckily you boiled the water in a kettle first. So pour the rice into the sieve, then pour the leftover water from the kettle into the saucepan and put the sieve on top.


theres a sieve just in case lolol

 - Finally, put a lid on the saucepan (it won't fit on to properly but that's ok) or cover the saucepan in tin foil and put the stove on Med-High to High and let the water evaporate and steam cook the rice for 5 to 10 min. Righteous!

Thanks again for the present gais!

Roasted Tilapia with Tomato Curry Sauce

This is the first curry dish I ever cooked. Being the scrub that I am, I have only had a handful of curry dishes so far in my life so I am very noob at all the flavours and what not. Still haven't even scatched the surface on brown food, I'm always so weary of eating shitty brown food because I would like to be able to tell the difference between pro brown and nasty mall food shit. It's like when I hear that people like Mau Du Gross Pho, I'm like shii... that food is sooo bad, I'd rather eat sauce than that... jk jk. I would never do that.

On another note, I got this recipe from LCBO Food and Drink magazine that they give out for free. Those books are really really pro. You should try and grab them when you can. It'll come in handy. Stefy you too. That way, when I forget to grab one I'll just take yours like I did the one time :D

Roasted Tilapia with Tomato Curry Sauce
From LCBO Food and Drink: Holiday 2010

I made this in Fishtown with Sam and Caitlin... as in just Sam, but Caitlin ate it too lolol. Also, this recipe called for Halibut but we couldn't find that shit, I'm guessing the encounter rate for a Halibut in the wild is probably 10% and 90% Tilapia.

Uncle Ben provided the rice and Sam made bok choy lolol

Ingredients
Marinade
- ginger and curry paste
Curry
- coriander, cumin, onion, garlic, tomatoes, ginger, cayenne pepper
- coconut milk
- mango chutney
- chicken stock

Notes to Ingredients
- Coconut Milk: This ingredient basically brings the whole thing together. Before adding the coconut milk, this just wasn't curry to me; it was just tomatoes mixed with a bunch of veg and spices. There is also coconut cream too. Other than how thick it is I'm not sure what the difference is. Maybe taste, iunno, I'll figure it out sometime. Point is... coconut milk = bowss

Cooking
Nothing too biggie with this one. At one point we had to put all the tomatoes in a blender (or Magic Bullet lawl) with all the other ingredients and blitz it until it was smooth. Not sure if its just me, but doing that felt so weird. I'm so used to putting fruit, ice and juice in a blender lololol

Tips/Things I learned
- As the name suggested, we had to roast the tilapia in the oven. With fish, you don't want to over cook it and have it dry out. Keep the light on in the oven, and when the white juices start to appear at the top you should take it out and it will be moist and tender
- I've said it before and I'll say it again, everyone should start putting the plates/bowls in the oven to warm up, shit is cash
- We used as much pepper as the recipe told us, but it wasn't spicy. I like my curry hot, so next time, I'm gonna pack in the spice :D

Mega Homemade Cheeseburgers

Mega Homemade Cheeseburgers
From Jamie Oliver's 20 min meal app

The title is what Jamie Oliver calls this recipe lololol

Waffle Fries! and nasty pickles ugh.

Ingredients (Some of them):
- Ground Beef
- onion, egg, bunch of spices
- Paremsan cheese, Cheddar cheese
- Breadcrumbs
- White wine vinegar

Notes about ingredients:
- Never bought breadcrumbs before, went to Vincenzo's and go a thing of their own bread crumbs, pretty sweet. Found it in the bakery section. For some reason I thought it was somewhere else.

Tools:

Food Processor: Needed one, still don't have a food processor lawl. I used my dad's infomercial Rocket Chef appliance which is just a shitty manual version of a food processor. Thing fucking sucked lololol.

Grill Pan: Don't have one of these either. Do want. I just used one of those silly normal frying pans

Cooking:
- Not much to say about this, mix all the ingredients, put it in the fridge for a while and then fry it huge until it looks delicious lolol

Tips/Stuff I Learned:
- Run the onion in cold water and you won't cry as much (doesn't work that well with me though)
- Leave the homemade burgers in the fridge as long as possible so that they stay together when you start to fry it

Now for some righteous stuff, everyone needs to know how to use a knife properly.

Szechuan Chicken Stir-Fry

My very first dish I made after a long hiatus of fail. Back in Grade 12 when I was learning to cook, I never made anything that was good. Barely edible and threw out most of the food. Huge noob. After that, I stopped making stuff for a long ass time, and beginning 2011 I got my springtime of youth for cooking again and got right back into it. I only wish I could talk with Mr. B again, I know so much more now and the conversations would be way more pro. That man was huge OG!

Here is the first recipe I went for:

 Szechuan Chicken Stir-Fry

From: Jamie Oliver's 20 Min Meal App (best cooking app ever)

P.s. I'm not going to be putting any recipes on here that aren't mine (i.e. from cookbooks)



Pics don't look as good as IRL.. or taste as good ROFLMAO!

Ingredients: 

(Some of the important ones)

- free-range/organic boneless chicken thighs

- szechuan peppercorns

- cilantro, ginger, garlic, scallion etc.

- dried red chiles

- sweet chili sauce
- yellow peppers

- peanuts (man, I love any dish with so many peanuts...mmmmm)

Notes for ingredients:

Here is the stuff

Szechuan peppercorns: this shit right here... hardest things to find if you don't know where too look. Anyways, this stuff is located in Chainese grocery stores in the spices sections. Another thing that makes this tricky to find is that it goes by many names in NA like, "Szechuan Pepper", "Prickly Ash", "Aniseed Pepper", and "Chinese Pepper". 

The rest is easy to find unless you have something that is the opposite of up lolol

Free range/organic meat is the best. I'll never go back and I think everyone should try it. Stuff you get at the grocery store is very weak sauce: stuff doesn't look good, taste good, feel good etc. Maybe I'll rant about this topic more in the future.

Tools:

Pestle and mortar: I bought this thing a while ago and in case you don't know what it is, its an old timey tool to crush things, like spices. These things are made of different materials but I recommend you go for the stronger ones like marble or wood and stay away from the ceramic ones and what not. Just doesn't feel sturdy to me.

For this recipe, I had to coat the raw chicken with crushed dried peppers and szechuan peppercorns. Yeah you could buy your ingredients already crushed and most of the time I do too. But when I have special ingredients and I have the opportunity to crush them myself, I do it. In the end, it is just more fresh if you use a pestle and mortar and your spices will smell great. Don't be lazy, food needs a little love sometimes :D

Cooking:
Stir Frying:
- With stir-fry, prep all your ingredients before hand (even if the recipe says otherwise) and have them ready near your stove, because with stir-fry, shit cooks fast and stuff needs to be put in at the right times. Noobs like us shouldn't be doing too much at once or you might end up doing something wrong.
- Common misconception about stir-fry is that you can cook a lot of it at the same time. Well as the man himself Jamie Oliver recommends, you should cook a maximum of two portions at a time. That way, your food actually stir-fries instead of steaming together like it would if there was so much shit in your wok.
- Constantly keep you food moving or I'll kill you
- Always use an oil that can withstand high-muthafuckin-temperatures. With stir-fry, your stove should be on "full wack" so don't use olive oil. Canola oil and veg oil should do the trick.

Tips/Things I've Learned:

- Google any ingredient you don't know. It'll help you when you search for ingredients
- With meat, you should try and take it out 30 min before cooking to let it warm up a bit. If meat is too cold and you throw it on a hot pan, itll "tense" up and become more tough. You probably want delicious tender meat right? lolol :)
- When you prepare ginger, use a spoon to scrape the skin off instead of a knife and you'll waste less ginger... I know eh? Respek.
- Warm up your plates and bowls in the oven. Shit was so cash.

For next time:
- Don't coat chicken with too much peppercorn/chilis unless I'm feeding brown people or Sher

P.S. A lot of the stuff I learn is from watching Jamie Oliver. The man is my cooking hero. Ya'll should check him out.

This is wasup

There comes a time in every man's life where he feels the need to write about stuff. A-Town writes about Pokemon on his Glitter account, Stefy writes about his feelings in his journal that no one knows about but me, and I am going to write about cooking. More specifically, I'm going to post pictures, and tips and things I've learned and all that nasty shit. 

Basically this blog is chat logs for my cooking. Gotta remember all the shit that happens so I don't fuck up with the same mistakes.

Inb4 I give up on this blog so fast

I most likely will.... but when? :)

- Mako