That looks awesome bish. My mom was English (Liverpool) and we’d have dinner like that every Sunday.
For this Sunday - A tri tip with peppers and onions.
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It was very nice. We both like our beef medium rare and the joints i get from Tesco are always nice and tendar. My Mrs isn’t fussy about a suunday dinner but i am,so i always end up cooking on a Sunday.
So your mum must have cooked you a pot of scouse.
That looks interesting, but whats tri tip.
Now that is a proper Sunday dinner Bish. My mom taught my wife how to make Yorkshire puds and gravy. She does them excellent. Once we get settled here in the new house my wife said she is doing the full roast treatment. Yum
I bake, too. It’s part of my belief that if there are things I want to eat, I have to learn how to make 'em. And many of the things I make, are to remember.
Christmas is a big baking time, naturally. Here are some examples of my baking list every year…
First, I bake a two batches of Dresdener Stollen, one at St. Nicolas’ Day (the 6th) and a second on Christmas Eve. Here is one such batch, fresh out of the oven:
Then it’s a batch of kiffels and cups. These were introduced by many of the people who emigrated to the Lehigh Valley from Central Europe. They’re made with a rich pastry dough. Kiffels are rolled into crescents (in German, Kipferln), and filled with sweet filling. The cups (aka “tossies”, from the German Tasse, a tea or coffee cup) are made in miniature muffin pans, and filled with a filling like that of a pecan pie-sugar, eggs, and ground nuts. This is a lot of work, and years ago, we organized “Kiffle Day” in our family, to get all hands on deck and crank 'em out:
And then I make a couple other German cookies. One type is the Springerle, which are flavored with anis and rolled out with rolling pins with shapes carved into them. When they bake, the dough rises-“springen”, to jump, and that’s where the name comes from, “little jumpers”. The other is Lebkuchen, German gingerbread cookies.
And I make a batch of Toll House, and chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips:
(I didn’t make the Slovak Kolach roll on that tray. That, we buy.)
At Easter time, it’s rice and ricotta pies. The basic filling is ricotta, eggs, and rice. Then we make some sweet, with candied fruit peel, cinnamon, anise, and chocolate chips; and some savory, with prosciutto, diced ham, grated Parmesan-real, fresh grated, not that stuff in a jar-and Romano cheeses, and black pepper:
As far as other baking goes, I make a banana cake, because I always have bananas and they often get over-ripe before I can eat them all. It’s my grandmother’s recipe, very simple, and I make it in the Bundform. Simple cake, simple presentation:
Sometimes I make a peanut butter icing for it:
Sometimes I make that in a rectangular baking pan, too. Nana used to make it as a layer cake, but that’s trickier. I can never get the layers even.
But like I said, these are things I like, and I make them to remember, they’re tradition.
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Amen to that! But it’s a source of debate now with my aunt and her kids. She will often use Ragu or some other jar of sauce [+o(] and frozen meatballs from the bulk grocery! She “doctors up” the sauce, as she calls it. But the debate comes about, because they all insist that my grandmother sometimes used Ragu, too. I say I cannot believe it, because when I used to go visit her on Sundays for dinner, she’d have a pot of sauce on the stove, and it had been simmering from 5 in the morning till I got there around 1. She’d meet me at the door with a hug and with a loaf of bread, and we’d go and dip a couple pieces in the sauce to taste. I just can’t believe Nana ever used a jar of sauce.
It’s actually pretty easy to make, and just tastes better than sauce from a jar. I learned the basic recipe from Nana. It’s tomato puree, either from the garden, or canned puree, when we use up what we canned the year before, about a quart; a cup of red wine; some crushed garlic; minced onion; basil, oregano, and parsley; three bay leaves; a little black pepper; and once we make the meatballs and sausage, we brown them in a pan, then deglaze the pan with a little red wine, and add the liquid to the pot, along with the meat. The chief element is time. It needs to cook long and slow, a couple hours is best.
The wife of a buddy of mine also used short ribs as the meat, and they worked, too.
Somebody please invite me over to a home cooked pasta sauce dinner! [:P] I love pasta, but I don’t have the time to cook the sauce for 5 hours after I get home - if I did, dinner would be past midnight! I will sometimes make something like beef stew, which does take 3 hours from start to finish, but a 10:00 pm dinner is my limit.
I will up front confess to being one of those beastly jar pasta users! Hey at least the meatballs are home made in the pic below.
https://flic.kr/p/bv52WV]
[/url]Meatball Spaghetti Dinner by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
Ragu is indeed a brand name, but it is also a term for a type of pasta sauce, generally one with meat, onions and tomatoes that doesn’t have to cook for a long time. Anyone wants to argue that, I will post my friend Cara C.'s family recipe (it includes brains).
Left over beef stew (the meat from it)makes great pasta sauce.
Real G, you are invited for my home made Lasagna next weekend!
I’ve been requested by my Mother-n-Law to make my Lasagna. I only make it on weekends because it’s an all day affair to make my sauce. If interested, I’ll post pictures on Sunday or Monday.
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Have you tried ready to bake lasagna noodles? I think they work fine, and certainly save a step.
Great looking meatballs.
You guys are great cooks!
Wow!! I am really impressed by your baking skills. I’ll bet that your baked goods taste as good as they look.
John
I have and I really do not like them. As much as I would like to make my my own noodles from scratch (One of these days I will, although, my wife and I have made Spaghetti noodles from scratch), I use Brailla noodles and I only boil them until they are pliable so when the lasagna bakes they soak up some of the juices.
Hogfanfs,
Thank you for the generous invite! Please posts photos so we can enjoy your lasagne vicariously! Gosh I love lasagne…
Thinking about it, Costo frozen meatballs are just convenient, not really tastier than home-made. They are also a lot saltier. I guess the frozen/instant/canned stuff typically are like that. I’m trying to eat healthier now, and it is kind of shocking how over seasoned premade stuff is.
Rock on Plastic Chefs, and keep the pics coming!
Had my wifes half-brother (long story), his wife and her brothers out over the weekend. Her brothers are new to the world of firearms…so my bro-in-law and I got em schooled up a bit. We had a BLAST!!!
After that…
Bacon wrapped backstrap…aka…woods meat, filet mignon! Also had green beans and cheesy taters…but those aint important!
Boy, I sure need to post some of my meals/food I make. 
Well I just made a cinnamon-sugar roll-up cracker. Can’t post pics though. Its been eaten. All I do to make it is to spread margerin on the “cracker”, then add cinnamon. Then broil at 450 until lightly browned.
You can make it ahead of time, too. Make a batch on the weekend, and then use it during the week, or freeze it. The longer the sauce cooks, whether all in one shot on a Sunday, or over a couple of re-heatings, the more it will mellow.
That is an excellent point! It’s also a good reason to learn to cook, so you can control things like salt, or fat, if you want to or must. When I cook, I use next to no salt-basically only what a baking recipe calls for, where it’s often necessary for chemical reactions.
If you’re watching your sodium intake, you can replace salt by cooking with wine. Many wines contain potassium chloride, and it’s the chloride that provides the salt taste, not the sodium. And wines provide a richness to sauces, or marinades.
Just don’t use cooking wines. Wines sold specifically for cooking often have sodium chloride added, which defeats the purpose. An old rule I learned, when cooking with wine, was that it should a wine you would drink. If it doesn’t taste good when you drink it, then why would you want to add it to your food?
You can also add some stronger flavors, like garlic, to help balance the flavors if you have to cut back on salt.
After you cut back on salt, you can find that packaged foods, or fast foods, taste really, really salty.
[quote user=“the Baron”]
If you’re watching your sodium intake, you can replace salt by cooking with wine. Many wines contain potassium chloride, and it’s the chloride that provides the salt taste, not the sodium. And wines provide a richness to sauces, or marinades.
Just don’t use cooking wines. Wines sold specifically for cooking often have sodium chloride added, which defeats the purpose. An old rule I learned, when cooking with wine, was that it should a wine you would drink. If it doesn’t taste good when you drink it, then why would you want to add it to your food?
You can also add some stronger flavors, like garlic, to help balance the flavors if you have to cut back on salt.
After you cut back on salt, you can find that packaged foods, or fast foods, taste really, really salty.
[/quote
Regarding wine that is labeled “cooking wine”. I was at my sister’s house and she said that she uses cooking wine. I told what you mentioned about so called cooking wine. She did not believe me so I poured her a glass of “cooking wine” and asked her to taste it. She took a drink and ran to the sink to spit it out. She immediatly dumped the “cooking wine” down the drain and said that she would never use it again. Cooking wine is low quality wine loaded with salt. It is undrinkable which is why it can be sold in the grocery aisle and not the liquor department.
I have had similar, pie crust with butter, cinnoman, and sugar, gramma call ed it “coffee cake” and was usually served with afternoon coffee or during social visits.
Johnny K and The Baron,
Thanks guys for the pointers! Now I am seriously thinking about making my own pasta sauce. I asked around and one of my co-workers told me she never uses canned or jar sauce. Plus my doctor said I have high blood pressure, after over 50 years of pegging 120/80.
On a more fun note, this is my Chex mix that I make for family, friends and co-workers at Chistmas time.
https://flic.kr/p/2d9KqGW]
[/url]Chex Mix by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
I jokingly call it “Klingon Chex Mix” because I use Japanese rice seasoning (furikake) that imparts a dirty, greenish color. A modeling buddy who is a much more accomplished cook gives us his “Federation Chex Mix” every year, so called because his version is very light colored and lightly sweetened. Mine just piles on the flavor without a care about sugar or sodium content, hence “Klingon”. [:P] Might have to join the Federation after the visit to the doc tho…
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