Mia's Makings

Tagine isn't one of my standard meals and it is safe to say that I'm no expert. Even so, I have to express my concern about the name of this dinner. Is it really a tagine? The other few I have made in the past have been cooked long and slow, all in one pot or oven dish. This one was very different, yet the Pinterest person who posted the recipe called it a tagine. Like I said, I'm no expert. I shall leave the name open. Make you own mind up. The recipe said to use chicken or chickpeas. Why not both? It also said that vegetarians could add cauliflower. Do you have to be a vegetarian to eat cauliflower? If so, I'm a rebel and I want it anyway! Perhaps it would be allowed if it is used as a substitute rather than an addition. Yes, I think that would be acceptable. Let's swap the couscous for cauliflower. This meal was meant to be cooked in an oven proof skillet with a lid or a Dutch oven. I didn't have a Dutch oven and although my skillet was big, it w...

A week ago I cooked a Korean meal for the first time ever, at least knowingly. They were flavours I have played with many times before, but never pinned them to this particular country. That time I marinated the meat for hours, browned it in a frying pan and finished it off in the oven. This time I used a very similar marinade, if not the same, but I cooked the meat differently. Which did I like the most? Hmm, hard to say. I liked them both. This time the meat was only marinated for 45 minutes, possibly an hour, but the marinade was used as a sauce while cooking, so none of the flavours went to waste. Yet again I swapped the rice wine vinegar for something I had at home, strawberry cider this time. I'm sure the taste would have been different if I had followed the recipe, but I rarely or never have rice wine vinegar at home. Perhaps I should invest in some, because I cook a lot of Asian food. One thing at the time. I have recently added sesame oil to my cupboard. This ...

Sometimes I find a recipe that looks great and I want to try it. When it comes to actually cooking it, I end up swapping so many of the ingredients that the result may visually resemble the original dish, but probably tastes nothing like it. This was one of those. Why were most ingredients swapped? For various reasons. Let's see... Carioca beans, which could be substituted for pinto beans - I don't like any of those, so I opted for less offensive black eyed beans. Even so, the dish tasted rather beany. Collard greens - As they are part of the cabbage family, I decided on savoy cabbage, but the supermarket substituted my order for sweetheart cabbage. It worked well. Calabresa sausages, which could be substituted for chorizo and that's what I used. Thick bacon - I decided on a less fatty option and used thinly sliced smoked ham instead. Toasted manoic flour - I had no idea what that was, but as it was used to soak up the liquid, I thought couscous would do ...