This is Hot Avocado with Wine Stuffing, from Gourmet Vegetarian Cooking by Rose Elliot.
Ingredients:
Preheat oven to 230C. Magimix (or otherwise chop) the nuts, but not to a powder. I make the breadcrumbs by magimixing bread, and if I'm feeling lazy I magimix the cheese too. Keep some cheese aside, then mix together everything except the sherry, and add sherry to bind it. It needs to be quite dry, otherwise it'll lose its shape when you bake it and the cheese melts.
Stone and peel the avocadoi. (Cut them in half and twist to get the stone out. Ease the flesh out of the skin with a large tablespoon.) Brush with lemon-juice-with-pepper. Stuff the avocadoi. What you're actually doing, with this much stuffing, is heaping it onto the avocado half until it's about the size and shape of a whole avocado. This is why you don't want droopy stuffing.
Then top with the remaining cheese (and remaining breadcrumbs, if you have any) and bake 15 mins. Serve with salad, or new potatoes and a veg.
Warning: baking unripe avocados does not make them edible. If you're cooking this for an Occasion you probably want a back-up avocado, because by the time they're ripe they're occasionally quite unattractively black inside.
This isn't really a recipe at all, but I've just discovered it and melons are in season. So this is in addition to scheduled recipes.
Take half a melon. Remove seeds. Put flesh in blender. Blend. Makes a tall glass of melon juice (depending on size of melon).
Watermelon would be more palaver, because extracting the seeds is a pest. But I hear you can make watermelon sorbet trivially by freezing slices of watermelon.
Treacle toffee recipe - adapted (and translated from the American) from SOAR: Searchable Online Archive of Recipes
Serving Size: 1 newsgroup
Ingredients:
Melt butter in big saucepan (the mixture tends to creep gradually up the sides of the pan during cooking, so make sure it's a BIG saucepan. You need to allow room for the mixture to double or triple in volume, or you're going to have a very messy cooker...). Add all other ingredients. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Do not stir after sugar has dissolved. Turn gas low and allow to boil for about 30 minutes (so says the original; mine took more like an hour).
Test by dropping a spoonful into a cup full of cold water and (once it's cool enough) squidging it between your fingers; it's ready when the cold water is enough to turn the mixture brittle. Pour into greased baking tray or similar receptacle (make sure it's something that won't mind being hit with a hammer to get the toffee out again). Wash up saucepan etc. immediately or you'll regret it... Once it's cooled a bit, harden toffee in fridge. Extract from tray and break into pieces when ready (extraction method left as an exercise for the reader).
Feed to ucam.chat or similar worthy cause. Receive many thanks from all those nice Northern people, and laugh at rjk welding his teeth together.
Further experimentation reveals that 4 dessert spoonfuls treacle
produces toffee that is harder, much less sticky, not as
overpoweringly treacly, less expensive in treacle, and generally much
more like the stuff I was originally advocating. Maybe I'll make some
more for the next meet ;-)
Generic Korean Beef Dish
Generic Korean Beef Dish (or: "what to cook when you're out of ideas")
Ingredients:
Be violent towards beef. The degree and nature of the violence depends very much on the cut of beef you got in the first place. A typical 1/2kg of rump steak, not too thick, can be covered with plastic wrap and pounded with a small mallet or the handle end of a rolling pin (leave room for the meat to spread beneath the plastic) for about three minutes on each side. Pretend it is an idiot like the person who phones you up every day to ask you why the login servers are running slowly, or whoever else you would like to see on a flat surface having their muscles beaten down. (If you did get topside/silverside or some random braising crap, you will now have to pretend that the meat has committed some greater atrocity -- Bill Gates is probably too extreme, but a PHB likely is about right.) What you want is a nice, thin layer of beef, about the thickness of a CD-ROM and spread out quite a ways. (A roast will need to be butterfly-cut first, probably; a cut with a strip of braising fat may need the fat loosened, though not removed.)
Depending on personal preference and phase of moon, slice beef into either little squares or long, widish strips. You're looking to pick these up with chopsticks.
Dump soy into a bowl. Mince or press garlic and shallot (you will cry like a baby if you press the shallot, but it seems to flavour the dish better if you do) and dump into bowl. Sprinkle pepper into bowl. Plop sugar or honey into bowl and dissolve (you may need to warm the marinade at this point to ensure that honey/sugar dissolves evenly -- 15 seconds in nuclear oven will be adequate). Pour in teriyaki if you have it. Pour in booze. Pour in oil. Mix as best you can, considering that the oils suck and will rise to the top at EVERY friggin' opportunity.
Put beef in bowl. Marinade should cover meat; if not, drizzle in liquid ingredients as appropriate. Mix so that garlic and shallot are evenly distributed throughout meat. Leave as long as you have time for -- 24 hours is recommended, but if you're making this you're probably not so Martha bloody Stewartesque as to be planning your meals a whole day in advance anyhow. 1-3 hours is usually more than enough for just a random meal; you can cut that to as short as 30 minutes if you don't mind the flavouring being kind of not really there except for the soy and the sesame. For the 24 hour go, you need to stir the beef around a few times and make sure the oil isn't completely separated out.
You have two cooking options:
IDEAL WORLD WHERE EVERYONE IS HAPPY AND NOTHING SUCKS: Hibachi or other charcoal grill. 5 minutes or so each side, less if you like vaguely undercooked meat (mm). The meat will come out a bit sweeter this way, and should develop a nice, sticky outer layer.
SUCKY BUT MUNDANE, ORDINARY WORLD: Gas grill, 2-3 minutes each side -- or, if you're me, 4 minutes on one side, leaving light pink patch on the other. Marinade will be more likely to permeate meat and you won't have the nice outer layer bit; soy taste will be greater.
In both cases, slice off a bit of fat if you have a big wodge of fat; place it in the centre of the grill and watch it cook. Your meat is probably about ready when the fat takes on a dark golden crust. On both sides. Or all sides, if it curls.
Really, don't go stir-frying the meat itself; it'll just be gross.
You can toss with random stir-fry-like veggies, and/or sprinkle with sesame seeds and slices of roasted garlic. Proper Korean restaurants serve this kind of meal with raw, sliced-in-half garlic slices which you cook, along with your own meat, on a hibachi in the middle of your table. You might want to try and get some kimchee from your favourite general Asian grocery store (Oriental City in Colindale carries it).
Oh, and you want a bowl of sticky rice. None of this Uncle Ben's stuff.
Serves 2. Or 3, if you have a lot of rice.