Romantic meal

Ok, maybe not. But it is good winter food and will put hair on your chest - CHILI! Of course, I've written of this before, but never before have I so annoyingly photographed my preparations!

First, I put about 1 1/2 pounds of ground beef in my big ol' pot with 3 chopped onions and a chopped bell pepper.
Next, we prepare our panopoly of spices. Chili powder, cumin, coriander, crushed red pepper, black pepper, salt (again not pictured, I really CANNOT get her in the picture)...
And garlic, we mustn't forget lots of garlic...
And the top secret (ok, so lots of people do this, but whatever) weapon - cocoa powder...Add these all to the pot and give 'er a stir and let the spices toast a bit.
Then you add 1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes, 1 28 oz can diced tomatoes, about 1 c chicken broth, a squirt or two of Worcestershire and let it simmer for a while.
Meanwhile, I rinsed and drained a 14.5 oz can of black beans and a can of light red kidney beans and got out some frozen corn to thaw.Add those to the pot, and let them heat through. For an added twist (and to clean out the pantry) I threw in about 1/3 lb of elbow macaroni. CHILI MAC! Once that was cooked to al dente, we were ready to serve with some sour cream and grated cheddar...

MORE anniversary cake

Well, since we are pigs, the cute cake didn't last forever (two days) so I had to ensure we had MORE cake for the actual anniversary. I saw this Praline Bundt cake recipe in Southern Living a few months ago and decided to give it a whirl. I heart bundts - it is a fun word to say - fun to eat - and the cakes go far because they are so rich. Particularly when encased with sugary icing.

First, we make the batter - butter, TONS of dark brown sugar, cream cheese, eggs, your normal dry ingredients, sour cream, and vanilla - and smooth it into a greased and floured 12-cup bundt. BUNDT!While the cake baked, I made the sugared pecans. I mixed most of an egg white with about 2 1/2 c of halved pecans with 1/4 each light brown sugar and white sugar and spread in a single layer on a baking sheet.The baking sheet went into the oven under the cake for about 20 minutes until the pecans were dry and crispy.And then the cake was done. Hello naked cake. I whisked the cake away and hid it from Daisy in the laundry room.
After the cake cooled, R and I made the icing. Brown sugar, milk, and butter go in the pan over medium heat. Bring to a boil and boil for one minute.Remove from heat, add powdered sugar and vanilla. Stir stir stir until thickened. Action shot.

Then have someone else pour it over the cake so you can take pictures. Everyone take pictures of what they are cooking, right?Also have this person assist you with putting the sugared pecans on top. Very important photography. The waterfalls of praline icing represent the futility of life or something.Ta da!

Bagel bliss

A new Bruegger's Bagel opened up in town, and since I consider it the superior major bagel chain, I was THRILLED. I purchased a baker's dozen as quickly as possible and set about making breakfast magic with them.

Here we have R's magical bagel - bacon, egg, and lovely mozzarella cheese on an Asiago Parmesan bagel. Daisy jumped up and grabbed the first round of bacon from the hot pan. She apparently really wanted bacon. So a new batch had to be made. Luckily, we had more bacon.
And I have garlic herb cream cheese on a pumpernickel bagel. I cannot eat the eggs anymore, sadly. With a bacon chaser.

Who me? What bacon?

Anniversary cake

2 years...sigh...how quickly it passes. To commemorate our second anniversary we purchased a "cute cake" from the Suisse Shop - the same flavor as the cake from our wedding - swiss almond with the french meringue buttercream and a raspberry filling. Delish. The cake took a little dive off the car seat on the way home, but survived largely intact.

Here we have the promise of the cake, complete with grease spot from its tumble.
Ah, the cake, removed from its wrappings. It looks like it is trying to escape from its little tray. Poor little cake, how soon you will be destroyed.
High-yah! Chop chop! Quick slings of the blade and the cake is cut. And shortly thereafter consumed. Lovely as always.

Chicken-phany

I had a chicken epiphany last night. I've seen numerous TV chefs extol the virtues of chicken thighs over chicken breasts in terms of flavor, juiciness, and price. While shopping this week, I looked at a packet of boneless skinless chicken breasts ($8) and a bigger packet of boneless skinless thighs ($2) and opted for the thighs, throwing caution to the wind. I'm not sure I can ever go back to the boring, white, dry breast meat again.

Here are our little thigh friends. Hello.
I brushed the chicken thighs with a mixture of 1 tbsp melted butter, 1 tbsp honey, salt, pepper, and about 1 tsp dry thyme. I repeated the brushing throughout the cooking process. These chicken thighs cooked at 400 degrees for about 35-40 minutes. Maybe more like 45. They were still VERY juicy. I wasn't quite sure how long they should go.
And finally, our finished meal, with a lovely baked potato from my ginormous 15 lb bag of baking potatoes (there was a weak moment at the store a while back) and some green beans. There was a lot of buttery thyme sauce (and chicken juice) at the bottom of the casserole so I spooned that over the chicken to serve. It was super delicious and I highly recommend chicken thighs!

Breakfasting

While at my parents' in NC, I decided to sample some of my dad's homemade pumpernickel bread. But I also wanted some of the fancy strawberry jam in their fridge. And they had some cream cheese too. And fancy teas. Hmm...what is a girl to do?

Lenten post from a far away land...

While in NC over the weekend, I prepared a lovely Friday night in Lent meal for myself and my parents of crabcakes to start and dinner of mac 'n' cheese with roasted asparagus. They were a bit scared by all the picture taking, so I tried to limit myself to the highlights.

Crabcakes with easy remoulade sauce. I generally rely on the Barefoot Contessa recipe with some modifications, very small ones. Saute one red bell pepper, one red onion, several stalks of chopped celery in some olive oil. Add some Tabasco and worcestershire. Add Old Bay (if you don't have Old Bay, use a mix of cinnamon, paprika, celery salt, ground ginger), salt, and pepper. Set aside to cool. Once cool, add 1/2 pound shredded crab meat, 1/2 c mayo, 1/2 c fine breadcrumbs, 2 tsp Dijon, and 1 egg. Form into small patties - about 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter. Fry up in batches in olive oil. The best way to keep them intact is to put them in the pan and DO NOT TOUCH for at least 4 minutes. Four minutes per side will get them nice and crisp. For the sauce, mix 1/2 c mayo, a big dollop of sweet pickle relish, 1 tsp Dijon, salt, and pepper.Delish mac 'n' cheese. Grate gruyere and cheddar. Cook 1 lb pasta (I used pipettes, which were like smushed elbows), and remove from boiling water about a minute before al dente. Melt 3 tbsp butter, add 3 tbsp flour, add about 2 1/2 c milk, wait to thicken, add some salt, pepper, a TINY pinch of nutmeg (hmm) and a TON of your grated cheeses. Add this to drained pasta. Put in casserole. Top with breadcrumbs mixed with parmesan cheese. Bake for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees (or any moderate temp) until very bubbly and browned.Roasted asparagus - asparagus on baking sheet, drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper, bake in oven for 10-15 minutes. I overdid it a bit, and they got a bit soft, and a bit salty, but if you keep an eye on them you are in for a treat.

V'day celebration

Since I was departing on Friday for a long weekend away in NC, I decided to whip together a nice dinner for my sweetie, my honey, my Valentine, Mr. R. (barf away). I had a pork tenderloin and I decided to play around with, culinarily speaking.

First, I patted the tenderloin dry and smeared it with whole grain mustard. Here's a squirt of it down the middle. Then I salt and peppered it, and sprinkled it with breadcrumbs.

Here is our pork tenderloin in the pan. This pictured makes it looked blackened. I again claim camera difficulty. The tenderloin was seared in the pan on both sides, then placed in a 325 degree oven for about 25 minutes. Other recipes said 10-12 minutes, but that left me with a raw pork tenderloin. You want at least 155 degrees in the center of the tenderloin, and that's what it took in my oven.
While the pork was cooking, I dug out some apples from the fridge. Here we have a study in nude/clothed.Here are our apples chopped up in a pan with a pat of butter or two pats perhaps.
Then I tossed in some cinnamon, brown sugar, salt, and pepper. Cooked them until the apples were slightly browned and soft. Mmm.And here we go. Sliced pork with apples, some boxed long grain and wild rice on the side, and as a special treat for Mr. R, CANNED green beans. Mmm.

Raspberry buttery bliss

Back in December, while trolling the Smitten Kitchen pages, I came across this recipe for Austrian Raspberry Shortbread and was instantly intrigued. You make a shortbread dough and GRATE it? What what what? This was mystifying to me. I mean, I could see how it would work, I've made enough shortbread in my life to speak with a Scottish accent, but I just was very interested in trying out the recipe myself. Plus, I HEART linzer cookies and jam thumbprints with raspberry, so how could this be BAD?

Well, first off, I had to modify the recipe a bit because I was out of granulated sugar. So I went with powdered, but cut back a bit. I knew it would probably be ok because I use powdered sugar to make regular shortbread. I also had to simply decimate the dough in my food processor rather than grate into little threads because I couldn't find my grating disk (I need a new food processor anyway, this is a good excuse) and I couldn't face grating all that dough on a box grater. I'm too lazy. So, without further ado...
I didn't photograph mixing the dough, etc. That is rather dull. And I forgot. But here we have the bottom layer of crumbs and blobs of raspberry jam. I did heat up the jam for about 15 seconds in the microwave and just spoon it over the crumbs. I was then able to spread it with the back of the spoon. I picked up the occasional crumb, but it was ok.
Then I spread the rest of the crumbs over top and put in the oven.
Hot out of the oven! I sprinkled it liberally with powdered sugar. and into the laundry room to cool, away from Daisy's prying face, mouth, head, paws.

And there we go. A delicious, slightly crumbly dessert. This was quite tasty. I think the shredding would have made it come together a bit more, but it still held, as you can see, even with my food processing issues. Very light, much lighter than normal shortbread. Still with a delicious shortbread flavor. This is definitely a winner and may spur the purchase of a new processor!

Crunch

As mentioned yesterday, our FOS was topped with delicious crunchy croutons. As I said, just cube up your bread, in this case an Italian pan bigio (which apparently means gray bread in Italian b/c it is made with unrefined flour. Don't quote me on this). Small amount of olive oil, salt, pepper. Toss. Bake. Last night, round 2 of the croutons (we heart them, I needed more) went in the bottom of the oven while some raspberry squares baked at 350 degrees, so they hung out for probably almost 28 minutes before I finally decided enough was enough and we needed to eat dinner.

A bistro in Ohio

We are so very French in our mannerisms, mais non? Mais oui? Mr. R has been BEGGING for French onion soup for ages now, so I decided I would finally indulge his craving (is he pregnant?) and pair that with some of the leftover Christmas ham in the freezer and make little ham sandwiches.

To make FOS, you must first slice a lot of onions. Here, we have six onions and TWO sticks of butter. Delish.

An hour later, here's the same six onions and two sticks of butter. Not a lot of color sadly. I think I needed a wider pan to get more color, but I was too lazy to schlepp down to the basement to get my electric skillet. We'll make do with pale onions.

Next, let's talk to our friends Wine and Vermouth. Hello ladies. Welcome to the party. I put about 1/4 flour in with our onions, then tossed in a mix totalling 2 cups of our alcoholic friends. Then I allowed that to reduce over low heat for 10 minutes.
Then you add your broth, in this case, homemade chicken stock. About 8-10 cups. And salt and pepper to taste. And cook for however long you want it to. While the soup was percolating, I toasted up some homemade croutons using some rando bread in the pantry. Cube bread, toss with a tiny bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Spread on a baking sheet, toss in a moderate oven for pretty much any amount of time until dry and crusty and brown. The end. I also shredded some Swiss cheese. Gruyere is better, but it was not a splurge week.
Here we are - little ham sandwich alongside. I made a little mix of mayo and whole grain mustard to put on the sandwich which also featured some shredded cheddar. Delish. The end.

Cake cake cake cake

I made a cake on Saturday to celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday. He requested white cake with chocolate frosting, so I aim to please and did my research. I came across a recipe for white cake on the Martha Stewart website and decided to adapt that cake (skipping the lemon curd filling and white frosting) for my purposes. I used a French Silk chocolate frosting recipe from Miss L's recipe files, modifying it slightly to include a mild coffee flavor. And the cake turned out pretty well, if I do say so. I did SLIGHTLY overbake it, because I was vacuuming while baking (yes, I was cleaning, shocking) and I didn't hear the timer go off, so the cake was a teeny bit dry, but other than that it was tasty.For the French silk frosting, I doubled her recipe and mixed 1 1/3 c softened butter, approximately 4 c powdered sugar, 4 oz unsweetened chocolate, a splash of vanilla, and a hefty splash of instant coffee that I'd mixed with hot water. I feel like I'm missing something here, so I will verify the recipe when I'm back at my cookbook.

Gyro hero

I've posted on our gyro making before. We again went the route of grinding the lamb, etc. Which sounds horrible to the tiny vegetarian shouting inside of me. Especially when facing this on my counter.

I'm sorry lamb-friend. I didn't want to have to turn you into this.
Or this

Well, enough of that. I took the ground meat that shall remain faceless and put it in the food processor with a variety of spices and flavoring seen here - grated onion, garlic, rosemary, Greek seasoning mix, and pepper. Salt was also in there, but is not in the picture because her hair looked weird.
Then our lovely meat-paste was pressed into a loaf pan. The popcorn in the background played no role in this dish, is merely hanging out.
You then bake this loaf at 325 degrees for about an hour and a half, until the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees, then let it sit under weights (again, liquor bottles) for another 15-20 minutes (or more in our case, we had appetizers keeping us occupied). Slice VERY thinly and serve with your typical gyro toppings. This loaf will feed an army. This is the loaf of loaves and fishes fame. We fed three people on Saturday. Then us two on Sunday. Then us two again on Monday. We have at least 2 more meals left, but we're sick of it, so it is in the freezer now.