Hot Meat Express

That title sounds horrifying in retrospect. What I'm referring to is the next item on the monthly menu chart, "random chicken sandwich." So, that is what we had, but I improved on it by adding a SECOND magical meat - BACON.

First, the chicken spent the night in a lovely bath of rice wine vinegar, a splash of olive oil, some Lawry's seasoning salt, some Jane's Crazy Mixed-Up Salt, and worcestershire sauce.

Then, the first prep step was to start the bacon. I kept an eye on it, so Daisy didn't get any ideas.
Here's a lovely pile of crispy (almost too crispy) bacon. Again, Daisy thought about it, but then thought better of it (went for the wrapper in the trash instead).
Then the marinated chicken got its turn in the bacon grease.
As the chicken finished up, I started layering the buns. After toasting them lightly, a thin layer of cheddar.
Then some of my defrosted caramelized onions and roasted peppers.
Then the hot chicken.
Then the bacon (this is kind of boring, the photography, not the sandwich)
Then, aw heck, more cheese, and a run back into the still-warm oven.
Pop the top of the bun on, and we have a meal. I was craving a baked potato last night, so I split one with Mr. R and served some lovely green beans along side (tossed with shallot salt, I heart that stuff). Lovely!

Monthly menu update

We had tacos last night (beef) and will be having them again tonight. No photos, as they are boring, and we eat them all the time.

Just an FYI, I decided that since we eat a TON of caramelized onions and roasted peppers, I would do the caramelizing/roasting all at once, divide, and freeze into meal-sized portions with our lovely Reynolds Handi-Vac. I was concerned the onions/peppers would get "weird" from the freezing but they pretty much stayed the same. I will be doing this EVERY month as a prep activity.

Brownie madness

Miss L's friend Miss K asked me to bring a dessert to the b'lette party over the weekend...I needed something reasonably easy but high on yum factor, so I quickly turned to the Outrageous Brownies I've made so many times before.

First, you have to melt a pound of butter and a ton of chocolate.
Meanwhile, I mixed the eggs, coffee, sugar, and vanilla.
The small amount of dry ingredients wait in the wings.
Here is the chocolate/butter mixture a few minutes later - one frozen butter stick refuses to melt.
Once the chocolate/butter mix has cooled, it is added to the egg mixture. Mmm. Pool of chocolate.
The dry ingredients are added, plus chocolate chips and nuts if desired, and the lot is spread into a jelly roll pan, or in my case, 2 9x13 pans.Once done, cool at room temperature then put into the fridge. This helps the brownies cut into nice, even squares. Then destroy the brownies.

I don't have a final picture - they got taken away to the b'lette party and some were destroyed. Then some were destroyed at home. Only carnage remains.

Sunday roast

Ah, another Sunday, another Sunday roast. Again, all per the monthly menu chart.

Here we have a lovely 3 pound eye of round roast, resting on a flavorful bed of onion, garlic, celery, and carrot. Some shallot salt and pepper and away we go.
And after some quality time in a 325 degree oven, here is Mr. Roast now. I let it go a bit long. I need a GOOD meat thermometer and apparently, a lesson in reading it.
A slice of meat, a blob of potatoes, some crazily green canned beans (Mr. R had a rough weekend)...what is missing?
Oh yeah, runny gravy. Mmm. Gravy.
Daisy got the celery and carrots from the roasting pan. As you can see, she shares her daddy's aversion to green things. She actually took them out of her bowl.

Bistro part deux

I decided, per my monthly menu chart, to take another stab at French Onion Soup using my very wide electric skillet. I hoped to get a little more color on the onions this way. It was mildly more successful.

Here we have a lot of onions, ONE stick of butter, and some salt in said skillet.
15 minutes later.
25 minutes after that. We have more color. Then I added the flour, then the wine and vermouth as I did the last time. Salt, pepper.
I added some organic chicken broth and let it simmer for quite a while. I accidentally made it a bit too salty, but a side of crusty bread helps with that. Something still isn't quite right. Maybe I need to mix in a can of beef consomme or something as well.

Fin.

Bachelorette shenanigans

Saturday night was Miss L's bachelorette party. We hit up a few late night spots, but our first stop was Agave, a "tequileria" about 20 minutes from her hometown. There were large margaritas.
And, as you can see, a large wall of tequilas from which to choose your poison.
A live salsa band and some interesting dancers made for a fun evening!

Another gift of food!

On Friday afternoon, after a bizarre day at work, I arrived home to find this package on my steps. What could it be? It was strangely heavy and I wasn't really expecting anything, so I was perplexed.

I opened it and behold! The gift of pasta! How delightful! How exciting! Who sent this glorious gift?
Why Miss S in CO of course! It was a favorite of hers from her days living in a more easterly state. The box contained 5 pastas and 2 sauces from Rossi Pasta.

In case my schmall picture is hard to decipher, I got tomato basil garlic, wild mushroom, garlic, red wine, and spinach basil garlic pastas. And a jar of marinara and vodka sauces. I cannot wait to dive in!

Pork 'n' Peas

Meal #2 of the monthly meal menu is stuffed pork chops with peas (and b/c I love it, more stuffing). For this meal, I simply prepared some random stuffing I had in the pantry, leftover from Thanksgiving (stuffing cubes, butter, onion, celery, broth) and let it cool. Meanwhile, I pounded out four pork cutlets in order to stuff them in the future - well, not so much stuff, as fill with stuffing and tie up.

First, here are the bound up little pork cutlets, awaiting their flouring and frying. Also, they are sitting in their original packaging, because I didn't want to dirty another plate. Next, our cutlet friends go into a hot pan for browning, after a run through the flour plate.Once browned on the first side, I flip, and into the oven with the lot (350 degrees for about 15 minutes)Untie, find you side dishes, and serve! I'll admit, the pork is rather...pale looking from this angle, but it was quite nice tasting and I LOOOOVE stuffing/dressing and had to resist eating the entire pan. MMM. I wish I'd had gravy for it. Sigh.

The start of the month

So, Mr. R and I are starting a new way of grocery shopping. Industrial, utilitarian, and Midwestern in its manner, I am aiming to only go to the store once per month, with interim stops only for milk and other perishables. We rely primarily on frozen veggies, so that isn't an issue, and I've frontloaded most other perishables into the earlier weeks of the monthly menu. I am optimistic that this will be both a time and money saving plan, as our grocery bills had ballooned out of control for a family of 2 plus one spastic dog.

So, with that in mind, I planned 15 meals for the month (each to be eaten for two nights plus leftover lunches). Night one - faux lasagna (faux in that, I had penne, so I used penne instead of lasagna noodles).

First, I browned up a pound of ground beef with 2 small sliced onions, some garlic, and a TON of Penzey's pizza seasoning. This pizza seasoning was the whip. It had all kinds of delicious flavors - fennel, basil, oregano, etc - and really was tasty. Once browned up, I added in about 1 1/2 c of marinara sauce I'd made a while back (in retrospect, 2 c would have been better, even 2 1/2). Meanwhile, I prepped the creamy filling. I mixed equal parts ricotta and cottage cheese, an egg, garlic, thyme, basil, salt and pepper.
After cooking a pound of mini penne, I began the layering. A spoonful of sauce, penne, ricotta mix, repeat. SOMEONE ate all my cheeses, so I had to rely only on Parmesan on top. Then, it was ready for baking.I baked it, covered, at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Notice the lovely Do-si-Dos in the background. V integral. Then gently served (note - cannot serve slices like you can regular lasagna, penne went flying). You'll notice it is a bit dry - extra sauce would have been useful. But it is really tasty!

BISCUIT-OFF 2008

Miss M was visiting this weekend. Among other activities on our whirlwind schedule, we decided one thing would be accomplished. Between the two of us, we would make a tasty, tender biscuit. We decided to compare two recipes - an easy, three-ingredient approach from Southern Living and a more complex recipe from Martha Stewart Living (will link later). By morning's end, we would make history.

Here are our tools of battle. The Southern Living recipe required only self-rising flour, butter, and buttermilk. The Martha Stewart recipe called for all-purpose flour, cake flour, buttermilk, butter, shortening, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and a bit of sugar.
We started with the basic recipe. It came together VERY easily, it was a nice, sticky dough and the directions were fairly clear on how to work it. We formed our little biscuits and got them on the pan, ready to bake. These biscuits are friendly and like to be close together.
Midway through baking, we decided to brush them with butter to give them some color.
Meanwhile, we got the dry ingredients together for the more complex Martha Stewart recipe.
Skip ahead to the lovely much larger biscuits in the oven - these baked all separate and lonely. But they stand proud and tall regardless.
A face-off. Martha vs. Southern Living. Big vs. Small. Who wins?
Well, we needed to test. I made sausage gravy. Mmm.
A very BRIGHT picture of a Southern eggs benedict - biscuit, gravy, egg.
Regular ol' gravy and biscuits for me, thanks. Eggs are my enemy.
Oh, and wait - what about strawberry shortcake?
And the winner is....both of them. Well, perhaps the biscuit love-child of both of them. We decided we liked aspects of both. The ease of the SL biscuit, combined with the size of the ML biscuit, the sugar in the ML biscuit, plus some techniques of the SL biscuit using the lonely baking techniques of the ML biscuit...prepare yourself in the future for the uber-biscuit.