Birthday dinner extravaganza

I instructed my lovely husband to prepare a meal of food for me on Saturday night to celebrate my birthday (a day late). We decided on crepes with a chicken/ham/mushroom filling, building off an Emeril recipe.

Here is a lonely little crepe in the pan.
And here the crepe joins all its crepe friends on the crepe plateMeanwhile, R made a bechamel. Look at him!
Post-bechamel, he got some mushrooms and garlic and ham sizzling up.
Then mixed in the cooked chicken, stock, and cream.
Then he filled all the crepes with the lovely filling and squeezed them in the baking dish.
Hmm. What to do with this lovely pile of Gruyere??
And poured the now-cheesy bechamel over top.
And put the whole lot in the oven to bake.
And serve. And slam.

MORE Nutella fun!

I know I've blogged of the Nutella gelato before, but it bears repeating. This time we added toasted almonds, and it did add a lovely crunch. NEXT time, I made some very finely shaved dark chocolate.

Shower time

I attended a lovely bridal shower for Miss L over the weekend. We were served a lovely light lunch of quiche, fruit, and croissant. Delish. Kudos shower hostesses!

Birthday gift of meat and cheese

Miss L gave me a glorious gift of meat and cheese from the lovely Usingers company, up in ol' Wisconsin.

Here we have the package, newly opened. Miss Daisy made short work of that wrapping paper the next day, FYI. Behold - three sausages - beef s'lami, beef summer sausage, and summer sausage of indeterminate meat source. I've tried the latter and it was delish. I've also wielded the handy knife!

And don't forget the cheese! Three kinds! I've only tried the cheddar, but I give it a loud HUZZAH! HUZZAH!

Meatball superheroes

I set aside a some meat to make meatballs last week and last month had been inspired to modify my recipe by a Wellfed post on the topic. I could not do away with onion and garlic in my meatballs, so I did not adhere to the Wellfed recipe in its entirety but I did adopt two elements - adding ricotta the mixture and flouring the meatballs before frying them. Both elements were excellent ideas and will become part of my normal meatball-making routine.

To make the meatballs, I first mixed 1 cup of ricotta cheese, a handful of parmesan, one egg, a splash of milk, about 1/3 c of seasoned breadcrumbs, salt, pepper, 1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning, 2 grated cloves of garlic, and 1/2 of a grated onion. I let that sit for a few minutes to allow the breadcrumbs to soften. For the meat, I used slightly over one pound of ground beef, one-half pound of ground pork, and I randomly had about a quarter pound of ground lamb in the freezer from the gyro-making adventure, so I tossed that in (note to self - the lamb overpowered everything else, which wasn't horrible, but still, not what I was necessarily looking for). I gently mixed everything, then scooped out the meatballs and rolled in flour. Here we have some meatballs lined up awaiting their flouring, some already floured:Then eat meatballs got a lovely fry up in the skillet in a small amount of olive oil. I fried in about 3 batches, because I needed plenty of room so I wouldn't mush up the meatballs and so they'd get a nice crust. Then, they got added back into the sauce and cooked for...a while (v. technical) until we were ready to assemble the sandwiches. Cook until the meat is cooked through.For the sandwiches, I lightly toasted soft hoagie rolls, then layered on some smoky provolone, the meatballs, some more parm, then ran them through the oven again.They were served with corn, in the manner of a school lunch. But they were delish! The meatballs were VERY tender and held together well (I often have problems with my meatballs disintegrating). I was amazed at how light the meatballs were though, I think the ricotta really lightens them up! I highly recommend!

MORE Nutella goodness

I saw this recipe on Cookie Madness a week or so ago, and this is what prompted the latest round of Nutella-fever. They were our Easter dessert and I found them to be delicious, although, not particularly Nutella-y. I think the Frangelico is a key ingredient, or something else to amp up the hazelnut flavor. Will definitely use that in the future.

First, the crust must be prepared. My first recipe deviation, due to my inclinations towards a thicker crust, was to add 2 extra Oreos. I heart the chocolate Oreos, so I can't believe it would hurt. I bashed them with a rolling pin, then sprinkled them into the baking dish. I decided to forgo lining the baking dish with foil because I'm lazy and I tend to have foil mishaps. Then, because I'm so used to baking off crusts for cheesecakes, I threw this in the preheating oven for 5 minutes before I realized the recipe didn't say to do that. I don't think it did any harm, but the recipe doesn't call for it.
I got to work on the filling - cream cheese, sour cream, NUTELLA, cocoa powder, vanilla, egg, egg white, and sugar. I was strangely out of brown sugar, so I amped up the white sugar. I needed to add a bit extra because I was using dark cocoa powder. Then you pour the loveliness onto the crust and dot with chocolate chips. Ok, this picture makes the chocolate chips look sickly, but setting that aside, it does make for a nice finished product.Bake at 325 degrees for 35-40 minutes, as the recipe states, mine took, well, I'm not sure how long because SOMEONE turned off the timer, and I was engrossed in an episode of Down Home with the Neelys (my new fave Food Network show - they are SASSY!) and lost track and bit, and didn't want to OVERBAKE it, so I pulled it out, thus, the middle is, a bit moist, but in a pleasing way. It may in fact be perfectly done, I do not know. But anyone familiar with cheesecake baking will know the amount of jiggle that is acceptable. And here is our finished product - under the glaring light of a flash, but it was delightfully chocolatey (sadly, not so hazelnutty) and satisfying. Mmm.

Easter pork

I felt odd not making something at least a bit special for Easter dinner. I went out with the intention of getting some veal, but since the meat counter was closed, that wasn't happening, so crunchy pork became the meal du jour.

I followed a time-honored tradition of breading thinly pounded pork in Ritz crackers and pan frying. Here are the battered Ritz crackers:Then we breaded the pork and created a fine pile of crunchy pork to eat for many days:Then I made gravy for the pork and mashed potatoes, ignore the bad picture, the steam would NOT go away:
And all was served with some roasted asparagus. Happy Easter meal!

Waffle waffle waffle

I wanted waffles yesterday so I got waffles. This time, I just used a complete Krusteaz mix but replaced the oil requirement with melted butter and added a little vanilla. That's how I roll.

Here, we await the heating of the griddle:
Behold the mighty griddle:
Here is your payload mighty griddle:
Hmm, not quite crisp enough for me:
Ah, lovely mound o' waffles. I bow to you.
Extreme close up. Notice the butter backups in the little crevices. Delish.

Holy Nutella

I just can't speak of my love of Nutella enough. And the easiest preparation, the virtues of which I've extolled before, is the sandwich format.

Here we have our lovely jar of Nutella, waiting to be opened:
A thin layer is spread on lightly buttered bread, and placed on a hot skillet:
Then, you slice and serve lightly topped with powdered sugar. The end.
My bread slightly disintegrated there, but oh well, all ended up in my belleh.

Tzatziki dreams

Yeah, we love us some gyro action. Last night (and leftover tonight! a repeat performance!) featured more chicken gyros. Rather than bore you (I'm quite self-aware) with more pics of gyros, I decided to focus a bit more on my tzatziki sauce. I heart it. Over the last year, I've honed in on what we really enjoy in a tzatziki - I've kept the heart of it intact, at least I think - yogurt, cucumber, etc. But I've added some items.

First, we must drain our yogurt. Here we have a small container of plain, nonfat yogurt in a coffee filter, in a sieve, placed over a bowl. I used to always use Greek yogurt until I read the label and realized I could eat a carton of ice cream for the same amount of fat (not really, but seriously, who knew they could put that much fat in yogurt).The yogurt drained all day and this is what came out of one small container. Gross. More will come out if you let it drain longer.Now we begin work on the cucumbers. You don't want them to eek out juices and make your now dry-ish yogurt juicy again, so I scrape the seeds out of half an English cucumber like so:Then slice into thin sticks. You can grate it, but I like to have crunchy cucumber bits.
Then chopping the sticks into tiny bits.
So, after this exposition on cucumber chopping, you mix your small cucumbers with your yogurt, about 1/4 c sour cream, some salt, some pepper, a healthy dose of dill (I use about a teaspoon dried, more if fresh), a big splash of red wine vinegar (probably around 1 1/2 or 2 tbsp), and I go ahead and throw in my feta cheese directly into the tzatziki sauce - probably 3/4 c of crumbled feta. And there you have it. The Irish girl's tzatziki.

Meatloaf dinner

After all the weekend's festivities, Mr. R and I settled down for a lovely Sunday meal of Miss Mo's meatloaf cordon bleu and cheesy potatoes. V. comfy. V. sleep-inducing. This time, we made mini meatloaves and rolled them up with ham and Swiss in order to assist with portion control (granted, the miniloaves were still quite generous). Now if only I could control my love of the cheesy box potatoes...

Shower foods

We hosted a bridal shower for my sister-in-law to be on Saturday afternoon and evening. We had a lovely assortment of foods.Here you see a shot down the buffet - chicken wings, pizza, crudite platter, etc.Minisandwiches - a variety of flavors - chicken salad, ham salad, veggie cream cheese, smoked salmon, etc.The fab cheese platter - v. fancy schmancy with the olive pokers.Lovely ST. PAT'S PIZZA - rye crust, mustard, corned beef, and Swiss cheese!And the piece de resistance - Chocolate cupcakes with Bailey's buttercream - SO DELICIOUS! I have one more left. I cannot wait to devour it.

More braid

Following up on the chicken braid original and experiments, I decided to reinvent the braid using leftover puff pastry and braid filling. Behold the chicken pocket!
I rolled out a sheet of puff pastry, cut it into four squares, put a scoop of braid filling in the middle, and folded the corners down and rolled it over in a "rustic" (aka messy) fashion. Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes and voila! Chicken pocket.