A week of Seafood and Egg Mcmuffins

What a long week! I had an exam and then Lovefest happened! There's been barely any time to post any of the cooking I did this week! But don't worry, I did many hours of it. This week I made my first soup, tried out my luck with bread crumbs and used fake crab. In fact there was a lot of seafood involved in this week. It first started off with A soup that is apparently very popular in South Africa. I really enjoy soup but its hard for me to find a lot of good places that make their own. There is a little cafe on the corner of my street and most of their soups are really good, but they make them with bell peppers usually. I know as a chef I should be open minded but bell peppers are a really hard thing for me to swallow. Something about the flavor really bothers me. Back to the South African mealie. All the ingredients seemed fairly simple, canned whole corn, creamed corn, evaporated milk, chicken stock, 2 tomato's, butter, onions, salt, pepper and the optional crab. I chose to use crab in my soup. I always have such an accomplished feeling when i clean out a crab and there is a huge pile of meat. I also decided to dice up some potato's to thicken up the soup. I started cooking the soup and added a little white wine to make it abit sweeter. Once the soup was created I tried it and it was a bit too salty, so i drained a cup or two of the broth, removed it and replaced it with water. Success. It tasted perfect. Now when first assessing the soup it seemed like it would be very light because the creamy broth was not very thick, so I served a lot of it to me and my roommate. On the contrary we could barely finish our soup! It was light but still extremely filling. It made probably about 5 or 6 servings and we ate it all week, I even brought some to my girlfriends house for her to try. I discovered that it was also really good with Sriracha hot sauce. Gives it a kick.

South African Crab and Corn Mealie

Hearty and Delicious

After creating this successfully Delicious soup me and my roommate decided we needed to have some good old fried foods. Now I've been reading a lot of recipes for fried foods and most of them are using Panko bread crumbs. I've been eyeing a fried shrimp recipe so I decided to make that, but while looking up a sweet and sour sauce recipe to accompany the shrimp I discovered one of my favorite things to eat when I used to order Chinese food a lot. They are called crab ragoons so I set out on an overly adventurous mission of frying. The ragoons took the longest. I bought some fake crab meat, cream cheese, gyoza wraps and panko crumbs! I made my own version of the crab ragoons and added rice vinegar, it took me at least an hour and a half to make them. Finally I started in with the shrimp and the Panko crumbs, easy frying method, flour, eggs and the Panko crumbs. We had a fried feast!

Fried Shrimp and Crab Ragoons

I had a lot of the ragoon filling left over so the next day I decided to make more for some of my friends that were coming over and they came out a lot prettier.


Fry fry fry...


And eat!

They were even better the second time around. Finally I really needed to start making some breakfast foods, and what better and easier then your own version off egg mcmuffins?! Simple and delicious. I used Canadian bacon and English muffins. The first time I made them i poached the eggs, now I prefer to have yolk when I'm eating eggs but apparently that was not the right choice in this situation. I made them again a few days later and scrambled the eggs. Much better!

Canadian Bacon with Eggs and Cheese on an English Muffin


breakfast time!

Overall a successful breakfast. Now Im back to a hopefully less busy school week.