My Cooking Posts

Lokshen kugel -
(לאָקשן קוגל :in Yiddish)

Lokshen kugel is a baked casserole made from lokshen (egg noodles), schmaltz (rendered chicken fat), onions, eggs, and salt. It is an Ashkenazi dish often made for Sabbath dinners, served hot on Friday evening, or cold on Saturday.

I followed the recipe linked below. The only problem I had was that the noodles on top came out crunchy, and not in a good way. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to cover the top of the dish with foil through most of the bake, and then leave it uncovered for only the last few minutes.

Aside from the overdone noodles on the top, the rest of it was delicious, and I would definitely try it again.

Recipe: https://thehappyfoodie.co.uk/recipes/claudia-roden-lokshen-kugel/

Хреновуха!

(horseradish-infused vodka)

Infusing vodka with grated or peeled horseradish and optionally, with other herbs and spices, is a practice that has been popular in Eastern Europe - especially Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine - for over a hundred years. Many consider it to be medicinal.

I modified a recipe found at https://petersfoodadventures.com/horseradish-vodka/, adding almost three ounces of horseradish to a fifth of vodka, and adding between one and two tablespoons of yellow mustard seeds. After steeping for five or six days, I filtered all of the horseradish and mustard seeds out, squeezing all of the vodka out of the horseradish peelings. Afterwards, I added three tablespoons of honey to the bottle, shook until it was mixed well, and then chilled to 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

It works well in a Bloody Mary, or straight if chilled!

Smothered chicken!

The original recipe called for one pound of chicken, but as the package of chicken thighs I bought weighed almost three pounds, I decided to triple the recipe when I made this a couple of days ago.

Several lessons learned from this:
1. Browning for only 7 minutes (as suggested in the paperback cookbook) will likely not get the level of brownness shown on the recipe web page. This will likely require eyeballing it rather than timing it, as a specific temperature is not mentioned either.

2. I did not actually need to triple the amount of flour mixture - there was enough left over that I could have doubled it at most, maybe even made only 1.5 times the amount in the recipe.

3. Though I initially intended to use powdered whole milk for the gravy, I decided to switch instead to evaporated milk instead and used a 12 ounce can of PET milk rather than several cups of reconstituted whole milk. I liked this result and would do that again.

4. This amount needs to be stirred frequently rather than just letting it sit for the last 30-35 minutes. Whether tripling the amount made a difference or not I do not know, but a burned layer of gravy formed at the bottom of the pan that would likely not form if the mixture were stirred more during cooking.

Overall, the dish turned out well, and especially for a quick dish, it is certainly worth making again.

https://iheartrecipes.com/southern-smothered-chicken-recipe/