Bacon Jam

I was kinda stucked...

One of my ideas about the blog was to be ready way ahead. But I was kinda stuck.I had no idea what to do for today's post... So I dicided to go look for inspirations in a  great place to find anything these days: Pinterest! Did you know Mad Scientist Cookbook had a Pinterest Board? We do!

I go to Pinterest to find basically anything! Organizing tips, DIY beauty recipes, low carb meal ideas... All of this!

I went to look for some ideas on my pinterests of yummy foods. And found something I was looking for trying it for a long time!

You know how jam is amazing! It's gooey and soft and have little chewy bits, right?

And Bacon? What can I say about bacon! It's a food group by it's own!

And what would you say if I casually said... Bacon Jam!!

Bacon Jam

Materials

• 300 g bacon
• 2 yellow onions
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup strong coffee
• pepper
• salt

Method

Fry the bacon in a non sticky pan. Until the fat is getting crispy, but there's yet some chewy parts. 

Remove the bacon from the pan and leave at least two tablespoons of fat on it.

Add the roughly chopped onions and stir for at leat 10 minutes. The onion will be soft, chewy and smell wonderful!

Reduce the fire to low and add the brown sugar. The onion will start to release water and caramelize. Stir ocasionaly for 20 minutes.

Add the bacon and the coffe. Stir every 5 minutes until the jam is... well jam like! Season with salt and pepper. 

You can keep it in your fridge, but let it set to room temperature before eating. 

Empanadas Argentinas

So, you guys may not know, but me and husband are going to Argentina! We'll be there overt the first week of march! 9 days of travel! I could not be more excited!

Husband travels a lot because of work, but we don't get to travel a lot togethr, and this is gonna be our first trip together thie year! So, Yey!!

I was thinking, what better way to celebrate this trip than cooking argentinian food!

And what better than Empanadas! Although I have to admit that the first time I had Empanadas were in Chile, I've never been in Argentina before. In Chile they had a type of savory pastry. Filled with seared meat, saute onions, green olives and hard boiled eggs. They were called Empanada de Pino. Delicious! Everything was an excuse to have Empanadas, and I decided to bake them home for this Argentine Special!

Boy, if I knew it would be that easy, and that tasty, I would be doing this ages ago!

Meat Argentine Empanadas

Materials

Dough

2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup warm water
1 teaspoon salt

Filling

350g meat chopped in bits
1/2 shalot
1/2 yellow onion
2 garlic cloves
3 tablespoons of butter
spicy paprika
pepper
salt
4 tablespoons chive
50 g green olive
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons flour
2 eggs
1 egg yolk


Methods

• Mix the flour, salt  and butter untill well incorporated. Add the water and mix well until a smooth dough. Cover with plastic and let it rest while you prepare the filling
• Boil water to hard boil the eggs
• Chop the garlic, shalots and onion. Saute in butter untill brown and soft.
• Stir in the meat and fry well until brown. Season with pepper, salt and paprika
• Add the chopped chives and green olives and mix.
• Add the water and flour and mix until start geting thick
• Slice the hard boiled eggs and and roughly smash it with a fork.
• Open the dough in a floured surface. Cut in circles of 10 cm of diameter. You gonna get around 10 of them.
• You can put up to 1 1/2 spoons of the meat filling and top with 1 spoon of eggs.
• Wet the edges of the circles and close. Spread egg yolk on top of it and bake at 180ºC until golden brown.

Experimental observations

You can also make Empanadas filled with cheese. But this meat one is classic, and that's what I was going for.

You want to really fiil the pastry, tastes really rich and meaty like this!

If you have some leftover of the filling, save it to make a sandwich! Or eat straight from the pan... Like I, not proudly, did.

Cream cheese and bacon stuffed mushrooms

I was in the mood to make some side dish. And something I don't usually cook much. I remembered the last time I was in the market and saw some very pretty mushrooms and suddenly I got this urge for stuffed mushrooms!

I made some to eat with  the buttermilk chicken of last post. I wanted something smooth and silky but with a twist.

What's better for a twist than bacon and Gochujang? I particularly love bacon and mushrooms, any kind! Better with shimeji but any kind of mushroom is fine, this is just one of the many things I want to do with mushrooms and bacon.

What's up Doc? #2

Hello Kids! How are we today?

I'm sorry I missed the last post. So much going on right now, and had to stop for a while to think about the blog. 

I had the post, I had the pictures... I just couldn't bring myself to post without thinking it through. 

Well, this blog is something I've been gladly working on and proudly watching it as it grows. But I wanted more... More of it growing, more of you guys reading, more, more and more! And I had the passion for it:

 I just couldn't keep going without a plan. That's what I've been thinking about these passing days. Now I'm a man with plan! Except that I'm not man... But you got the idea.

It all started with the possibility to write for a big blog! A already stablished site, with thousands of readers, a great exposition of my content... But since I had to write for them a number of times a week, I would eventually sacrifice the quality and constancy of my blog posts. So I had a big decision to make: And I chose my own blog!

I chose this little space, just starting out there, with a lot to change yet... But my space! My little corner of the internet where I tell what's what. Building my own readers base, my own content, that's what I want!

So I chose you guys! The few reader, the few comments, but the lots of love! Must be some sort of single child freudian thing, but I just could not bring my self to lose the love of my readers in a sea of other writers.

And this came with the decision of investing more and more on the blog! On the backstage and on what you guys see! And maybe even show a little bit about the backstage to you!

I hope you all enjoy the on coming changes and we can all grow together!

Korean BBQ

Cooking for someone is a leap of faith.

When somebody tries your food, is a commitment bigger than telling someone to make a comment on something you wrote or drawn. Because, first of all, the person must trust you are not gonna poison them. And than, to make a judgment, the person must eat what you made! Taste it, put it in their mouth and swollow it! How big of a trust is that!? What if doesn't taste good? What if it is in fact, poisoned? What if it is poisoned on purpose?!

But what if is good? If it's good, the one that tasted it now owns you respect! And might be in fact willing to listen to what you have to say because, nobody can cook this good without something in their head!

Crunchy Cheesy Chicken Bits

This thing of going back to gym is hard!

Everything in my body hurts, except my hair! And when I get back home, all I want is a bath and my bed.

So I was looking for something I could prep ahead and just bake on the way back home. I remember the other day I was looking over some recipes I would like to try. And I remember myself wondering what was this wonder of buttermilk... We don't have buttermilk in Brazil. But aparently it's something amazing all around the globe! So let's give it a try.

Since we don't have it, I had to make it. And make buttermilk is really simple. It's so all over the internet, you have actively try not to learn it! And will be very hard! 1 cup of milk and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinager and let it sit for 10 minutes.

So, what to do with this? I decided to try with chicken. People say that buttermilk bathed chicken it's so moist and delicious I had to try

.

So How about a Cheesy Chunchy Chicken Bits?

Naan

This weekend was very busy!

We went: on a hunt for my fighting gloves, to see a music video on the making, walk on the beach at night to celebrate the first time the temperature droped to 23ºC in ages, to my family for lunch. In the mean time, I had absolutely no time to cook at all!

Lots and lots of beautiful pictures were taken during this time! My favorite was the one I took of the view of the beach on Arpoador stone. Me and husband should definetly go there more times...

Cauliflower cheese pie

I was always a huge fan of cauliflower!

Even before it became the big sweetheart of recipes that it is now. My mother always made great dishes with cauliflower: Beer batter deep fried florets, Gratin Cauliflower and her amazing cauliflower soup! And now with this blog, I felt like I owned cauliflower a homage! I've been seeing a lot of smashed cauliflower recipes all around. And they all look amazing! But I wanted to try a little bit further... Making some cauliflower cheese pie!

Guacaloco

Hello Scientists!

This saturday I had my parents at my new house for the first time! Yey! Match that with the farwell party of one of my best friends from college. She's moving to another state, transfered because of the work.  So you can imagine I was stressed out during the last week. Lots of things to do!

So, we said a proper "See you soon" to our friend. With the special appearence via Facetime of our friend that currently lives in Germany. In his honour we went to his favorite pastel place! And he cused us all the way from Germany because we went there without him.

My mom and dad loved the house! And also loved the beach that comes right across the street. We went to the beach together after seven years! That's right! You can live in Rio de Janeiro and NOT go to the beach for 7 years. I live right across it, and basically only actually go to the beach when we travel. I say Actually go, because we go all the time, at night to go for a walk, and have coconut water. But sea, beach towells, Tea from Hierba Mate and lime, straight from the barrel, you know, the whole shebang! That almost just happen when we travel.

What's up Doc? #1

Hello Scientists!

It's been a few time already I come here and tell you guys about my experiments in the kitchen, about my cooking, about the food I buy... But I never told you guys a lot about me! Sure, there is the About section, but it's just so short... I want to talk to you guys, readers! So I decided to open up a space every once in a while to talk about What's up with up, here at the Lab/Kitchen of the Mad Scientist! So I came up with the name "What's up, Doc?". Althoug the one who is really close of being a doctor is husband, not me. But I really like Bugs Bunny, so let's go with that!

I'm loving have this blog! More than I thought I would. I've been cooking everything I wanted and using the blog as an excuse! LOL Is it too early on the week to have a pinch of Sangria? No! It's for the sake of the blog!

Well, Today I bought a grapefruit for the first time. Don't judge me. We don't actually have a lot of it here. And here we call it Toranja.

Me and husband are back at a low carb diet. I'll try to keep the variety here. It's so good too cook with some kind of chalenge! You never know how carbs are so deep in your feeding, until you decide to cut back on them.

Did I mentioned that we're going to Argentina at the end of february! That means Parrillada!! And lots of Dulce de Leche... Yummmmm

Well... We'll see again at the next post! Maybe the Sangria I was talking about before...

Beerbread with bacon and cheddar

I was wondering what to do with today's recipe in the blog. My weekend was kinda busy and started with a day off at work on friday, but this is a later on story...

What happened was, I was going to have very little time to eat at home during the weekend, So I couldn't make some special weekend lunch, or a nice dinner party. And saturday morning me and husband went out on a couch shopping. Yeah... we're in our new house for almost three months and we didn't had a couch...
That is the kind of thing that happens to this hip young new couples, who think that cushions and colorful blankets on the floor are far more bohemian than a couch... Which was totally not what happened to us! We were too busy on the week days to go shopping for a couch, and too lazy on the weekends!

Somehow Korean Meatballs

I don't know how, or why... But my blog gets a lot of visitors from Korea. Trust me, this is amazing for me! I don't know how they get here, but they get, and I love it!

Husband and me, we are big fans of South Korean movies! Oldboy, The Host, Mother, Thirst... You name it, we like it! And when I told him about the korean visitors, he was as in awe as I was! So, I was looking for something korean to make, not that I wanted to teach them how to make they're food, but to show my other country visitors some of this amazing culinary.

Creamy spinach and Shitake

These passing days I was wondering how long have been since I last ate spinach! If my mother was to see me here she would say that I don't have been eating properly, that I'm gonna be anemic, etc, etc, etc...

I was also wondering how I've been getting to know so many vegetarian people and that I have to have something up my sleeve when cooking for my vegetarian friends.

So, friday I had the oportunity of cooking dinner just for me, since husband wasn't coming home so soon. And I came home form work wondering what would be the best thing I could think from the top of my head. I was floating between give in to my spinach craving or make something creamy with mushroom, when it hit me: Why don't I get both?

Rolled Breaded Beef

So, it was a busy day!

I went to work, and after not knowing what my destany would be in the afternoon, I finnaly decided I had to go to the factory. So! Incredibly! Hot! At least I did what should be done, and even got home earlier than I expected. 

I didn't really know what to do for dinner, all I knew was we were having beef. I let a few thaw, without knowing what to do with them. 

So I did what I have to do to think... I opened the fridge! Have you ever just opened the fridge and stared blankly inside it? Yeah, just pondering what to do with your life... So I pondered and start checking what I had. We have cheese (obviously), some leftover instant onion soup, and a piece of homemade bread.

New year and BBQ Special Ribs

The first complete week of this new year! Happy new year again you guys! I'm so so sorry because the last post was so short, I was literally falling asleep when I wrote it and I had to get up early in the next morning. You know, work. So that's why the post was so meh in my opinion. Let me make up with this one by telling you guys a bit about how was New Year here!

This was me two days before the NYE. We had a lot of heat, a lot of sun and suddenly rain! Could not help but had this photo.

Seasoned butter

Hello Scientists! How was everybody's New year's?

Mine was great! We hosted our first new years party and we went to Copacabana beach to see the fireworks! This new year I want to cook and blog all the way around the year! Let's experiment!

It was also the first time we invited people over to our new home. I was a little nervous because we never hosted by our own. I made lots of food and everybody seemed to enjoy! That's why the post didn't aired on monday.

I made one little thing to go along with home made bread. 4 types of seasoned butter.

It is realy easy to make and tastes delicious. Next I'll give the recipe for the four types, for each one I used one stick of butter (200g)