Tzatziki
In a Hurry?
- Remove seed and chop a cucumber
- Add garlic and blend it coarsely
- Mix in Dill, spices and greek yogurt
Tzatziki is a recipe which made me call my mom. “Hey, what exactly went into the Tzatziki you usually made”? She offered it usually at parties accompanied by a warning to everybody about how much garlic went into it. You really don’t need many ingredients and the ones that go into it are easily dealt with. Tzatziki is mostly a fight against water. We use greek yogurt since it contains way less water than plain standard yogurt.
Start by peeling the cucumber and remove the seeds. You’ll see how much water is in there, once you’ve done it for the first time. Cut the cucumber into 1/4″ slices. You could actually dry them here with a paper towel or just let them drain a bit in a colander.
Mince some garlic next and put it together with the cucumber slices. Chop it together, either in a small food processor or like I did with a hand blender. You see in the result, that there is still a lot of water, but without much impact for the final product.
Finally, add the yogurt into the mix, 2 table spoons of dill and salt and pepper to taste. I continued with the hand blender. Otherwise, you could just whisk the yogurt and the spices into the cucumber mix.
The final result is already very tasty with a slow kick of garlic in the back. But leave it in the fridge for an hour or two. Tzatziki goes well with pita chips, pita bread or just regular white bread as a dip. It is a must for gyro as long as you add fresh onions. Actually, all kind of meats will go well with it. And using it as a salad dressing is not unheard of. How about a gyro salad? Some green salad, gyro slices and topped with some onion rings and tzatziki
- 1 pound greek yogurt
- 1 large cucumber
- 4-6 cloves of garlic, to taste
- 2 Tsp chopped dill
- 1 tsp salt
- ¼ tsp pepper
- Peel the cucumber, half it and remove the seeds with a spoon
- Slice the cucumber
- Peel the garlic
- Put the cucumber into the food processor or a mixing bowl, press the garlic onto it and chop the mix.
- Add yogurt, dill, salt and pepper and mix it in
- Let the result sit in the fridge for 2 hours.
Kitchen Sink Salsa
It’s a gift, not having to care about what others think. Here’s somebody who doesn’t: Cooking for Assholes. His Title for the blog, not mine. But I have to link to one of his recent articles, just because of this:
“Where did you get the recipe?” Are you not fucking listening? I just throw shit in a bowl I think would taste good together. It’s that easy. The only time I follow instructions is when I buy furniture from IKEA. I learned that lesson the hard way.
Seems we are not alone. Even if we have to deal with an A-hole. Here’s the full article: Kitchen Sink Salsa
Linguica and Banana Peppers
My wife was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. Which adds a lot of very fortunate elements into her cooking experience. The home cooking in Rhode Island is influenced by 3 European countries. Let’s just say they could have filmed the Sopranos in any restaurant on the Federal Hill.
In a Hurry?
- Slice and dice stuff
- Sautee onions, add sausage, then peppers
- Add garlic and other spices
- Cook for 20 min
- Done
I learned how to cook corned beef and cabbage under her direction. But most interesting to me is the influence coming from neighboring New Bedford, MA, which has a large Portuguese community. Portuguese sausages in the form of Linguica and Chourico are good substitutes for somebody who grew up with Bratwurst, Polish and Vienna sausages. And it has to be Gaspar’s Sausage
That gives me obviously something to work with. That and the fact that my sister-in-law sent us Gaspar’s Sausage Gift Packs as a present “for emergencies”. One of those emergencies emerged this weekend, with lots of fresh banana pepper from the CSA in the fridge. I didn’t feel like cooking pork chops, the only fresh meet in the fridge at that point, but was staring at the Linguica in the freezer. Here comes dinner!
- 1 Linguica
- 1 pound banana peppers
- 1 medium sized onion
- 3 gloves of garlic
- pepper
- salt
- olive oil
- Dice or slice the onion.
- Slice the banana peppers into strips of 1x1/4".
- Slice the Linguica.
- Saute the onions in oil.
- Add the sausage and let them heat through.
- Add the peppers.
- Add garlic whichever way you like, minced or sliced
- Pepper and salt to taste
- Cook until peppers are soft and most of the water has evaporated
The entire composition had a sweet flavor, mostly coming from the banana peppers. They and the onions even more had soaked up some of the Linguica juices, which added an interesting flavor. I will certainly cook this again, even if I have to buy the peppers separately.
Peeling and Chopping Garlic
Here’s a write up with detailed pictures from an Irish site The Lazy Cook about how to peel and chop garlic:
Chopping Garlic can be done Goodfellas style with a razorblade. The idea there is to chop it so thin that it just dissolves when added to the oil in a pan. It looked good in the film but frankly it takes too long.
See here for the full article: Chopping Garlic – how to
It’s a nice website with only a few recipes, but certainly “Cook Like a Guy” style. However, you can’t leave comments, as there is some captcha bug.