Beautiful Beer Bread

This is the same bread recipe as before, but with rosemary in the dough and red onions, roasted red peppers, parsley and tomatoes on top. It was basically an open face sandwich by the time I finished adding stuff.

Lentils a go-go

Dong-A start carrying lentils! A joyful foreigner celebrates!

- olive oil

- onion

- mushrooms

- crushed coriander seeds

- cumin

- paprika

- red wine vinegar

- lentils (these were canned, but c'est la vie ici)
- assorted colours of peppers

- parsley

- tomatoes

- salt pepper

Add everything to the pan in that order, leaving the tomatoes on just long enough to warm them and then top with a poached egg. I also added some plain yogurt after, in an effort to increase my yogurt intake 200%.

Tappa Tappa Tapas

My dinner this fine humid eve.

An assortment of meats, olives, red and golden tomatoes with a fresh loaf of crusty bread and a roasted eggplant dip. Simply, divine.

This is the best bread recipe you'll ever use. Instead of mucking with yeast which can be fickle, you use beer! Beer!

3 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 tbsp baking powder

3 tbsp sugar

1 can of your finest, cheapest beer

Then you can add flavourings as you like. Here I mixed onions, black pepper and parsley into the dough but I've also done rosemary and I'm thinking of doing an Indian inspired number next. Add some garnishes on the top and shower with olive oil. Bake on an oiled tray for 10-12-15ish minutes? I wasn't counting, just when it's cooked through and not doughy.

Served with a cold lime perrier because aren't we in Europe?!

No, we're not. We're in an Asian shoebox but Homeplus had a sale.

Buenos noches!

Ve can go vegan!

Vegans can be pretentious (no offence, but really, check yo self) and this meal is vegan but I assure you I am as salty as the earth I come from. And my father's a farmer, so I totally know about the salt level of soil.

I'm sure millet is a wonderful thing; several holistic naturopathic well being practitioners on the internet say as much. Fact: millet is high in vitamins E, C and BS. However, if you've eaten plain white rice every day of your life but really only the past year and four months even though it seems much longer...millet is the fucking bomb.

Millet cooks just like rice, but if you toast it in a dry pan it's better and also you can use chicken stock for flavour. Unless you're vegan, in which case just use tears collected from fois gras geese. Or, if you add just a titch more water and some cinnamon you can enjoy millet as a delicious breakfast cereal.

My fancy new computer doesn't have an sd card reader (tf mac?) but I put together a photo booth montage of how to make a millet based dinner.

Start with a base layer of cooked milet. It looks like something between chunky vomit and wet cement here, but not in real lyfe:

Add your veg. I roasted some peppers, eggplant, onion and garlic, but you could do anything. I also had some dried portobellas that I rehydrated and fried (the stems on mine never fully rehydrate, is that weird?).

Here I've added some raw bok choy leaves I picked from my window garden, as well as parsley, sunflower seeds and a mustard vinagrette. I never considered raw bok choy, but I didn't want to cook them because they looked so pretty and I've been waiting months to eat them. They were amazing! I hate to use 'buttery' to describe anything without butter, but they were! Buttery bok choy! Who knew! !

Then mix it up real good.

Eat dat shit!

Bean Burgers

Homeplus started carrying canned beans - huzzah! I can never plan the time to soak dried beans, and now I don't have to! Way to facilitate my laziness Homeplus, now I can make bean burgers at on a whim! Like a crazy person!

1 can kidney beans (or whatevs kind of beans you have) drained, rinsed and mashed

half an onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp flour

tsp? cumin

tsp? curry

tbsp ketchup

1 egg

Mix it all together, it'll be a little gloopy, but you can just drop it into a pan and flatten it out and it'll fry into a little burger.

The salad is tomato, corn and orange pepper with olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Chicken Pot Pie

I bought an oven! It's a tiny bit of a thing, and the whole thing shakes and hums when it's it's trying to heat itself up, but I love it so.

I don't have pie plates, so I used my Korean metal soup bowls instead. In the future I might pre-bake the bottom crust because it took a little time to get crispy on account of the bowls being quite thick.

Filling:
- Chicken (breasts or whatever) cut up into chunks and sauteed in a little bit of oil.
- Onion, celery, garlic, carrots, any other vegetables you like. Add to the chicken.
- Few tbsps of flour, stir to coat everything

- Chicken stock, add to make a thick stew-y consistency
- Bay leaf, basil, oregano- Let everything jam together in the pot a while.

Crust:
- 1 1/4 cup flour
- 1/2 cup cold butter
- 1 tsp salt
- ice water

Chop up the butter into the flour until it's pea sized chunks. You could use a blender or knives, or your hands but as a last resort because they'll melt the butter and you really want those chunks.

Add water 1 tbsp at a time until dough comes together in a ball. Cover and refrigerate for a half hour. At this point you could also freeze some and save it for another time. Look at you, thinking ahead and everything.

After it's chilled out divide the dough about 2/3 and 1/3 for the bottom and top, respectively. Sprinkle a little flour on the table and roll it flat using a rolling pin, or an empty wine bottle, or a broomstick. After every 2-3 rolls flip the dough over so it doesn't try to become one with the table.

Drape the dough inside the bowl, add filling, put on the roof. You can make some nice wavy edges, or just pinch it together roughly and say you were going for the 'rustic' look. Cut a few slits for the steam to escape then brush with a lightly beaten egg so the top comes out nice and golden. Bake at the bottom of the oven on 400f/200c (?) until the crust is nice and crispy.

Eat it already.

Tomato Soup

I love canned tomato soup, but I don't love it for 3000 won. This soup is a pretty good facsimile of Campbells, becuase isn't that the standard by which we measure all soup?

Tomato's are getting expensive round these parts, so I suggest buying the discount ones, where the hide the rotton side down in the package but you totally know it's there. Some people might shy away from eating partially rotting food, but my dad used to tell me that the mold on bread was just penicillin, so I have no qualms with cutting away the bad parts of a tomato.

Roughly chop 4 or 5 tomatos and throw them in a pot. When they've released all their juices you can blend or mash or smoosh them up a bit and add water (or milk or cream), some bullion cubes, salt and pepper and let it get jiggy for a while. Once it's groovy, add somewhere between a tsp and a tbsp of sugar to cut the acidity. Then run it through a sieve to remove the skins, if you're into that kind of thing, and you're good to go. Grilled cheese sandwhich optional, but recommended. Likewise for sugarless saltines.