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Post by mizuhino on May 18, 2018 21:42:29 GMT -8
If you think of food and 1/2 Prince, meat buns will probably come to mind pretty quickly. Some meat buns are good to eat, some like to do the eating (of other meat buns). I've made other kinds of stuffed buns before (such as curry bread) but for this I decided to use the following recipe: Chinese Steamed Meat BunsI made about 1/3 of the recipe as written on the website and didn't follow the recipe exactly, so I'm including the way I did it under the spoiler. But it's a good recipe that's fairly forgiving and easy to play around with a little. {Chinese Steamed Meat Buns Alteration (recipe link above)} Meat BunsIngredients: Dough: 1 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon yeast 17 ml (3 1/2 teaspoons) warm water 75 ml (5 tablespoons) milk 1/3 teaspoon baking powder 17 g (4 teaspoons) sugar a pinch of salt 2 teaspoons oil Stuffing: 1/2 pound ground pork 1/12 cabbage (I took 1/3 of 1/4 cabbage) 1 teaspoon salt 1 scallion (chopped) 1/2 inch ginger (it says fresh but I have canned ginger I keep for the juice so I used some of that) Stuffing marinade: 2 teaspoons soy sauce 2 teaspoons cooking oil 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 tablespoon Chinese rice wine (I had this already, but, if you have trouble with this ingredient, any kind of alcohol for cooking use should be fine.) 1/3 teaspoon five spice powder (I did not use this out of thriftiness. I used a mixture of cinnamon, ground clove, fennel seed, ground ginger, and red pepper in equal parts.) 1/3 of an egg 2/3 teaspoon pepper Step 1: Prepare the dough using steps 1 - 5 of the mantou recipe. (I let mine sit in the fridge overnight between steps 4 and 5.) Step 2: Chop the cabbage up finely and put it in a mixing bowl. Step 3: Add salt to the cabbage and let it sit for around 20 minutes. (The waiting didn't seem to make much a difference to me so I don't know how necessary it is.) Step 4: Drain any liquid from the cabbage mixture and mix in the ground pork, scallion, ginger, soy sauce, sugar, rice wine, five spice powder, egg, and pepper. Step 5: Mix in the cooking oil, cover it and let it sit in the fridge for 30 minutes. Step 6: Roll out each of the balls of dough to about a 4 inch diameter, fill each by putting a tablespoon or two (or more if the dough can hold it) of the meat filling in the middle of the dough, pull up the edges of the dough and seal the buns by sticking the dough together at the top. Step 7: Steam the buns for about 15 minutes, letting them sit covered for about 5 minutes after they are done. Note on steaming: I don’t have a steamer. I used to use an upside-down bowl at the bottom of a pot of water with an upright bowl on top of it to hold what’s being steamed. This is a bad idea since the water bubbles up under the bowl and pops every once in a while, which could upset the top bowl. I’ve read that some people use three balls of aluminum foil to support their bowl (a much better idea) but I have a little trivet now I can put on the bottom of the pot which holds the bowl up so it can steam smoothly. Since I don’t have a steamer, I just used a regular bowl with pieces of parchment paper to separate the pieces of dough. Since this resulted in the pieces of dough being pushed up against the side of the bowl, they didn’t come out in picture-perfect shape, but they were quite delicious. With the proportions as written, even stuffing the meat buns with plenty of meat (these were the most meat-filled buns I've ever been able to make), there was still plenty of meat left over. You can cut the stuffing recipe and still have plenty, or you can make more dough and have extra buns. Me? I fried up the leftover meat, spread some mayo on a couple of tortillas and made me some meat burritos that were pretty good too. ^_~
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Post by mizuhino on Jun 7, 2018 15:47:10 GMT -8
While eating out with the group, Prince orders five youtiao and a bowl of soy milk. I lucked out when I found this recipe for youtiao: Chinese doughnut stickI pretty much followed the recipe exactly (other than transferring the youtiao to a plate with a paper towel rather than to a colander), so I don't really have many notes. Just that, since you're just deep-frying bread, you can totally save the oil in a container and use it afterward for whatever cooking you'd like. I'm not a big fan of deep-frying, but when it came to deep-frying this bread, it was actually pretty fun. I used a fairly shallow pan and just kept rotating the bread. This bread was so fluffy and delicious so I was really happy with it. Photos under the spoiler. {Youtiao Photos (recipe above)}
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Post by mizuhino on May 26, 2019 23:49:42 GMT -8
Since I used a very loose interpretation of “roast,” I’m not sure if this should be an actual chapter or more of an “inspired by” dish, but I’m recording it anyway! In Chapter 4 of ½ Prince, Wolf-dàgē orders “espresso, Caesar salad, and a roast” with no specification as to what the “roast” entailed. Espresso is simple enough. Either you have an espresso machine or you don’t. I don’t so I substituted instant coffee in my case (lazy). (There are actually other ways, but they still require equipment I wasn’t going to purchase just for this.) I also didn’t feel like going to the work of making salad dressing or croutons since I already had them (and a mix of lettuce) so I went simple on my salad as well – for anyone who hasn’t made a Caesar salad before, this recipe (Classic Caesar Salad) is basically what it should be (my Dad makes dressing like this all the time, croutons too - this is why I get to be lazy). Now for the “roast” that left me wondering. What kind of roast could it be? I decided to go to the Chinese, feeling that his sentence was probably cut off (since everyone was ordering and the reader normally doesn’t need the meal in that detail). At any rate, I wanted at least an image suggestion, so I stuck it into Google and…the images given were mostly baked dishes on rice, like for the dish found here: 焗烤豬排飯. I’d been picturing more of the pig-with-an-apple-in-its-mouth type, but this looked delicious, so I went with it as my inspiration. Here’s what I did: {Inspired by Wolf-dàgē's Order} Inspired by Wolf-dàgē's Order(recipe for one person) Ingredients: 1/4 onion (chopped) 1-2 cloves garlic (chopped) oil for frying 1 Tablespoon cornstarch ½ cup water 1 Tablespoon white miso ½ pound pork chops salt & pepper to taste 1 cup rice (cooked) 1/8 cup cheese (grated) 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 2. Sauté the onion and garlic in oil. 3. Mix the water and cornstarch together, then add it and the miso to the pan, stirring everything together and letting it simmer until it thickens. 4. Add salt and pepper to the pork chops and fry them briefly (about 2 minutes per side). 5. Spread the rice evenly on the bottom of a small baking dish. 6. Cut the pork into bite-sized pieces and put it on top of the rice. 7. Pour the onion & garlic sauce over the pork and rice. 8. Sprinkle cheese over the top. 9. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Not what I was originally picturing, but delicious, so, worth it! I think that even if Wolf-dàgē was served this by mistake, he wouldn't mind.
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Post by mizuhino on May 30, 2019 23:18:42 GMT -8
In chapter 4 of ½ Prince, the skeletons in Second Life remind Feng Lan of sparerib soup she and her brother had eaten. There are plenty of recipes for different sparerib soups, but since I found one in English (and I had a radish to get rid of), I went with this one: Taiwanese Daikon & Pork Rib Soup Recipe. {Sparerib Soup Photos (recipe above)}My ribs weren't cut up for me like in the photos on the website (actually, I had a bit of a hard time even ordering since I didn't want more than the 2 ribs I would need to use up my daikon, the new worker was then told by his boss, "However much the customer wants, that's what you give them"), so I removed the meat from the bone and cut it up during the second step. Eh...close enough. It’s a light, simple flavor, which was quite nice! Bones in the pot: ^^;
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Post by mizuhino on Jun 26, 2019 21:47:16 GMT -8
In volume one, chapter five of ½ Prince, Prince is really looking forward to getting some gold coins in order to go out and enjoy some afternoon tea. Yum cha involves tea with some side dishes (dim sum). Since there are a wide variety of dishes this can involve, I looked up a few websites to get an idea of some common ones and ran into this lovely page: How to Order Dim Sum Like a Pro. I’m not sure what Prince would have specifically ordered, but I was sure that I had recently purchased some shumai skins and banana leaves I wanted to make use of, so I decided to make shao mai (using this Shao Mai (Pork Dumplings) recipe) and nuo mi ji (using this Dim Sum Sticky Rice Lotus Leaf Wraps (Lo Mai Gai) recipe). As usual, I changed a few things, but the recipes were great, so, though it was a little involved, it was worth it! {Afternoon Tea Recipe Alterations and Photos (recipe links above)} Afternoon Tea Recipe Alterations and PhotosFor the shao mai, I followed the recipe fairly closely, but I didn’t have black vinegar or chile paste so I used a tablespoon each of balsamic vinegar and white vinegar and substituted hot sauce for the chile paste. I had the dumplings all put on a plate in the refrigerator to await steaming and when it came time to actually steam them I got lazy and stuck the entire plate in the pan (on a trivet) to steam them. Since the plate was overcrowded, they ended up sticking together, but they were still delicious! For the chicken and rice dish, I didn’t have glutinous rice, but I’ve used it before and didn’t think it should make too much of a difference so I had long-grain white rice instead. My rice did wind up slightly undercooked, but I think that was mostly because I was late refilling the water in my pot a couple times. I used banana leaves rather than lotus (I’m not sure I could have found lotus, but I already had the banana), and I replaced the oyster sauce with okonomiyaki sauce (another thing I was trying to use up). I still don’t have five-spice powder and was planning to use five spices in equal portions again, but was careless and ended up using ½ teaspoon ground clove rather than the 1/10 teaspoon I was planning so I just added 1/5 teaspoon fennel seed and 1/5 teaspoon red pepper to somewhat of balance it out. It probably didn’t make a huge difference. I only have one trivet and I was steaming these all at once in a deep pot so I used the three-balls-of-aluminum-foil-as-a-trivet technique and it worked well. I’ll probably re-steam my leftovers. For my tea, I steeped some “Ambrosia Plum” white tea. They went together well.
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Post by mizuhino on Jul 17, 2020 23:13:49 GMT -8
I wrote this about a year ago and I thought I'd posted it, but apparently not. I'm a bit behind in posting. ^^; {I had leftover blueberries, so I decided to do mini versions of each of the pies people posted before.}Since they’re already mini, I started with shyfeather’s. I used a 1/3 recipe to make two pies, which turned out to be just right. I liked the simplicity of this recipe and the cinnamon was a nice touch to enhance the flavor. For my second set of mini pies, I followed al’s recipe in a ¼ portion to make two more pies. This was also fairly simple to follow and I liked the mention of traditional lattice as well as the cutesy option of different shapes using cookie cutters, though I do think 1kg sugar for the Sun Knight version is too much sugar even for Grisia (it would overwhelm the taste of the blueberries). I will admit he’d probably like it a little sweeter than the standard recipe, though standard was fine by me! My third set of mini pies followed kamui’s recipe, for which I used a 1/8 recipe to make my two pies, which I further separated into standard and Sun versions. I used my freezer as a substitute for freezing spells and I didn’t use very much of the vodka mix as the dough was already plenty wet just from the butter (enough that, rather than rolling it out, I just applied it to my cupcake sheet using a spatula. I finished off the standard style using the optional coating of milk and diced dried mango as a garnish as I didn’t have candied orange peel. For the Sun version, I added a little bit of honey where orange syrup is mentioned, since I didn’t have that either. With the whipped cream being a fairly standard recipe (other than Sun’s adding extra sugar and the syrup I don’t have), I lazily used canned whipped cream since I didn’t want to open a box of cream for such little pies. I love the substitutes for Grisia in this one as they seemed fairly accurate in how I picture him, and the comments as though Ice Knight is writing the recipe also made it fun. The Sun version was a little over-packed and bubbled over, so it was a bit messy, but still quite good. With the honey, the pies were very sweet with a strong honey flavor, so I think even the regular version would probably be sweet enough for Grisia. To finish off my blueberries I made chestnut’s blueberry tarts. I did a 1/6 recipe, which made 4. It was an interesting change from the standard pie and they were fairly simple to make, too. The dough was so soft and crumbly and delicious – I loved these! I’m sure Sun would too (assuming they weren’t the ones Earth messed with).
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Post by mizuhino on Jul 23, 2020 0:29:22 GMT -8
Waaay back last November I went to an Asian market that had various kinds of fish roe. Since I could get the roe, I decided to make the “Custard of the Sea” from my contest entry for vampires. (I omitted the “Moon-Curser’s Choice” since, due to a head injury I suffered a while back, I really wasn’t supposed to have caffeine. Or alcohol. And certainly not crazy drinks that combine both and are generally a bad idea to consume anyhow.) I used squid for the meat and panko for my crunchy bits. The rest of the dish was made using standard ingredients. The flavor was good, which was nice as I'm not particularly fond of seafood and I’d had my doubts, but it wasn’t really strong enough for a vampire to get anything out of it. Maybe I should have added hot sauce. Well, a vampire shouldn’t be able to get anything from it flavor-wise either way, which is why I’d focused on textures when coming up with the recipe. For the texture, the squid was really too soft to contribute the chewiness the meat was supposed to have. Probably octopus-level chewiness would be best after all. The salmon roe was okay, but it wasn’t fresh enough to really pop like it was supposed to, so that didn’t help either. Salmon roe should work, but it does need to be fresh. The panko didn’t really work well. Tempura bits or Rice Krispies would be way better. Or possibly cornflakes. The problem with the panko is it’s too small, so, when put on the custard, it can’t really add much crunch. So my texture, the point of the dish that was supposed to appeal to vampires, was a complete failure. I may try again in the future, but I’ll use different ingredients to focus on getting the desired texture. If I do that, I’ll only use fish eggs if I’m up for making the dish the same day I buy them. {Custard of the Sea photo (not in a shot glass since I couldn’t find one)}
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Post by mizuhino on Jul 24, 2020 1:54:45 GMT -8
In ½ Prince Volume 1, Ch 4, Prince and friends are mentioned snacking on bags of guazi. Literally “melon seeds,” guazi is usually sunflower seeds or melon seeds (including pumpkin seeds). I haven’t had sunflowers since I was very little, but, since I had them anyway, I decided to roast some pumpkin seeds last November to include for this entry. Roasting seeds is fairly simple either way, but I followed this recipe: Roasted Pumpkin SeedsOf course, you can always just buy sunflower seeds as well. {My pumpkin seeds}
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Post by mizuhino on Jul 31, 2020 0:22:39 GMT -8
We had chicken breast that needed to be cooked, so I decided to make Krescent's Rice Porridge with Chicken tonight. I used brown rice since my dad complains when I use white. This means it took a long time to cook and ended up very thick and delicious. I also used ginger, because we had some, but I didn't add chives since there were none in the fridge and I didn't feel like hunting the garden for some. I think cooking rice in chicken broth gives rather nice results. This was nice and simple to make, too, so thank you for that! {My rice porridge with chicken}
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Post by mizuhino on Sept 28, 2020 18:57:04 GMT -8
I picked up a pound of taro puree a couple weeks ago and used it to make a full-sized taro pie off of shyfeather's pie recipe. Obviously, I skipped the steps up through pureeing the taro, but I followed the rest of the recipe fairly closely. I didn't have any pre-made pie crust, so I used the recipe in the link, but I did have canned whipped cream that I used rather than making any. I also cooked the pie for twice the length mentioned, since it was so much larger. The pie was tasty, but filling enough that it lasted me over a week. {My purple pie}
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Post by mizuhino on Nov 4, 2020 14:46:44 GMT -8
With Lolidragon snatching a goose drumstick from the fancy dinner Prince made for Wolf-dàgē and Yu Lian, one can infer that this fancy dinner included a whole goose. I hesitated for a while, wanting to cook a goose but not having the funding or a large enough group of people to feed to warrant it. So, when my cooking day came and my dad said, “I have a defrosted chicken!” I gave up and decided to just make chicken instead. But not without looking up a goose recipe first. How to Roast a Goose seems to be a good recipe to follow if one is so inclined. Of course, chicken isn’t goose, so I did things a little differently. I used the lemon and salt seasoning on the skin, but my chicken came without guts, so I didn’t use the guts for anything. I just had slight coloring from blood, which I poured into a pot, following the rest of the gravy recipe sans meat and using a basic cooking sherry rather than Madeira wine. I also used about ½ the thyme and just a bit of granulated garlic rather than a whole head. Before cooking the chicken, I stuffed it first with a mixture of ~4 cups rice (cooked), 1 tablespoon poultry seasoning, and the other half of the onion not used in the gravy, along with some salt and pepper. I closed the bird with pins and put it and the excess stuffing into a casserole dish. I also cut up a carrot, a potato, and a piece of celery and put it in the dish around the bird. My dad instructed me to heat the oven to 425 °F before I put the bird in, reducing it to 325 °F once I do, so that is what I did. It took about an hour and a half to get to temperature, but I’m not sure how big my chicken was. Fairly small, I think. Like the size of a normal chicken before they started growing everything really big. Anyway, it turned out perfect and was quite delicious. {My non-goose}
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Post by mizuhino on Nov 4, 2020 21:44:49 GMT -8
Tonight I made a variation of listeningdaisi's Plum and Rose Parfait. I'd made meringue ghosts for Halloween so I had already used egg whites and had an extra yolk leftover (I'd used the other yolks in a tiramisu) so I was planning to make this right away, but I ended up spending a few days looking for Pocky (I failed) and I decided I should take care with the egg and heat (using steam) it with the sugar before adding it to the rest of the mixture like I did with my tiramisu. I couldn't find mascarpone, so I used 4oz of whipped cream cheese spread. Other than that, I followed the recipe for a half recipe, using Yan Yan and raspberries as a garnish in addition to the whipped cream and my non-standard windmill almond cookie. Quite tasty! It was also great for using up all the ingredients I hadn't completely used in making tiramisu. By my count, my version had to have about 1,000 calories, so maybe I should have gone with a 1/4 recipe after all. ^^; Thanks for the yummy food idea! {My parfait}
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Post by mizuhino on Apr 6, 2021 16:27:18 GMT -8
In the prologue to Volume 1 of Female Warrior, Red Cloak offers the bard a bowl of minced meat noodles. Since I already did a noodles with meat sauce recipe for ½ Prince, and since when I did an image search for "肉醬麵," the result was a lot of things that look like this, I decided to do spaghetti. I rather like spaghetti anyway. I took some inspiration from that recipe as well as this website since I didn't have access to Prego. {Minced Meat Noodles AKA Spaghetti and Meat Sauce}I started out making the tomato sauce using the Prego recipe with the following ingredients: 1/2 T minced garlic 1T olive oil 1/2 red onion, diced 1 teaspoon dried basil 1 teaspoon dried parsley 1/2 teaspoon black pepper 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano 1 teaspoon salt 1kg (~35 ounces) tomato puree 4T sugar Cooking it to the point where it boils covered for 10 minutes. While that boiled, I used: 1T olive oil 400g (~14 oz) beef ~1/2t salt ~1/2t pepper 3 tomatoes, cut into wedges (well, I had two fresh medium tomatoes and half of an old large tomato and used all three) Heating the oil in a separate pan and adding the meat and seasoning, I cooked the meat until there wasn’t any pink showing, then I took the lid off my boiling sauce and added the meat to it, scraping in the oil and everything. I also added the tomatoes to the sauce. I let that simmer for about 30 minutes. (Since the stove I was using is very hot, even on its lowest setting, that seemed a good amount to me. Also, I was hungry.) While I let the sauce simmer, I gathered my last two ingredients: 300g (~10.5oz) dry spaghetti 1 cup of freshly picked basil I boiled some water for the spaghetti and let it cook for about the 12 minutes suggested before I drained it in a colander in the sink. I added the basil to the sauce as I turned off the heat, then let everyone serve their own pasta. Mine turned out a little bland (I think the original recipe said to use some powdered chicken bouillon in the sauce for more flavor and I think that probably would have helped) so I added parmesan to the top. Though, really, in general, I think spaghetti is best when the sauce has been reheated at least once, so I usually prefer leftover spaghetti to fresh.
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