2013 has been a delicious year so far

We've been terrible about keeping this updated. But why should that be any different than the rest of this blog's existence? But we've found it easier to take pictures on our phones and upload them to google+. And so goeth the way of technology. Eventually I'll get those over here too I suppose.  

But here are some pictures on the memory card since that delectable souffle:

Grilled pork chops, kale & brussel sprouts (Jake probably gets credit for this one)

Sasuage and corn and cilantro oh my! (Definitely a Jake dish)

Beet salad. (Me of course!)

Parboiled artichokes preparing to be grilled

Swordfish ala oh my my god

This swordfish had to GET IN M MOUTH

The final grilled Artichoke - I made a tarragon garlic lemon compound butter to dip my leaf meat into and the dipping it was good. While Jake manned the actual grill I think I get the credit for this meal.

This baked chicken is all Jake.

late night nacho snack anyone? Yes I had to make the chips first because that's how I roll. (hey, when one wants nachos one wants nachos!)

So I did this thing where I made ribs. The pork at the Amish market made me buy it. (I think I took some raw pictures on my phone) it was so beautiful one would think it was beef if they didn't know any better. I put a rub on it for a bunch of hours, and then a marinade, and then set up a water circulator on the grill and we cooked it for maybe six hours.

ribs demanded some friends so it'd be a party. We invited corn and kale to hang out and keep ribs company.

The pictures don't really capture how tender the meat was and totally falling off the bone, yet not overcooked at all. I get ALLL the credit for the ribs in case anyone was wondering.

a quick sunday breakfast of rib eye, poached eggs and hollandaise. (maybe 20 minutes from start to finish?)

I did this thing where I sliced up a caulflower and marinated it in olive oil, red wine, and garlic pepper for a couple of hours. Then I stuck it in the oven for about twenty minutes, then added paremsean and broiled it until it melted and it was good.

leftover chicken wanted to be salad for a Saturday lunch! In the above picture it's found itself stuffed into a pickled cherry pepper.

I love green beans. I love fresh green beans from the Amish market. I do not love that they sell them by the gallon and we cannot eat that many green beans weekly. I do love tossing them in some siracha and garlic powder and throwing them in the dehydrator overnight. All of a sudden it's impossible to have too many green beans.

This is .. what did I call it again. My take on a mediterranean binh mah. Because obviously. It's sort of making my mouth water looking at the picture and I'm sad that I don't really remember what I did to create this delectable concoction of awesome. I do know it was Amish ground turkey! Among you know, other things. Totally worth the effort that went into it. The problem is even when we're full, the food is so good that we get seconds. This was one of those dishes that made us eat more against our wills.

more roasted beets. This time with it's friends roasted kale and green beans. Because a roasted salad is where it's at.

My cauliflower brings all the boys to the yard.

Okay, also the kale and tofu. The components didn't really all go together on the plate, but they really were all delicious in the mouth.

What is this even?

OH RIGHT. My stuffed eggplant. This was a surprising success. I don't enjoy ground beef but I had purchased a frack ton of it in case we wanted to cook something when we had a bunch of guests. (we cooked a rib roast instead) So I had to come up with a bunch of things to do with it. The mouth (and eye) was sure that this was just full of ground beef when it really wasn't. I just did that thing I do of capturing lots of meat flavor in the vegetables. 

Mostly though, I just had to make stuffed eggplant because I'd been playing far too much of the game "Don't Starve" and stuffed eggplant gets made regularly in my gameplay style. I don't think I'd even ever made stuffed eggplant before. And I'm still trying to cook eggplant and zucchini well enough that Jake likes it. (I've recently made a lot of progress on the zucchini though)

Stuffed peppers. Quinoa stuffed poblanos. And beans, and onions, and peppers (yes peppers in peppers) and garlic and cheese and mmm. I'm not a fan of rice stuffed peppers but I still want to put things in them and bake them. The quinoa worked well. I cooked it a bit weird so I didn't love the flavor of it separately but it did it's job in the pepper.

One interesting thing with this dish - I typically hate making everything from scratch for this sort of cooking (okay most cooking) because it's too much time. The secret to weekday eating is creative use of leftovers and I'd prefer to have all the individual pieces already prepared. However ... since we didn't have any of the individual pieces, I made extra of every individual component so we then would have the extras. And it totally worked, almost all of it got cooked later. See below!

Jake found the ingredients in the refrigerator very inspiring and made what he called "deconstructed chimichangas" I personally found them pretty weird and he used way too much ground beef. (from leftover hamburgers from the aforementioned too much ground beef that I had purchased.) Points for creative use of the leftover item. Also he gets points for loving it. HE also weirdly mixed beets in with the beef and quinoa. That I didn't get. They were my least successful beets this year so he could do whatever he wanted with them in my opinion.

A few days later Jake decided to try chimichangas again, but this time more constructed ... and baked. I had made a zucchini appetizer (ie I was starving and since dinner looked nowhere near being started decided I had to eat something) and he wanted to apply the principle from my zucchini to the tortilla. So he brushed it with an egg wash and then dusted it with seasoned (cayenne) flour.  It did successfully create a crispy shell and was fun to eat. However it was still too much of that meh mush inside that I didn't love the first time around. Again though, interesting cooking experiement. and I think I did eat all of mine so I can't really complain.

 

 This dish was a triumph of mediocrity. Unfortunately putting lots of mediocre ingredients together doesn't magically make it awesome. The flavors did pair how I had hoped and it was good in that regard. But ..
So the zucchini was too old and tasted kind of like pumpkin. Then the tomatoes while good I should have peeled. The sausage was okay and the feta was way too goaty. I don't know.  Also, I made the mistake of eating all the leftover tomatoes and zuchnni for lunch the next day and stupidly drinking the cup of olive oil at the bottom of my dish before I realized what I was doing (the garlic! The garlic was so good!) and I made myself fairly ill. So ill I can still taste it and this was a month ago. ugh.

We're almost to the present day! This was just last week! Maybe even last Friday? I already cannot remember.

Go go Tofu! 

I still don't love tofu. It's the texture. But I'm not giving up on it, I feel sure I can do it. This I think would have been very successful if the grill had been hot. I pressed it for a bit then created a marinade of soy, ginger, garlic, uh, how do I already forget what else? lime juice. poured it over the tofu and let then prepared the rest of the food while it sat it its juice.

The rest mostly just means pickling some onions and peppers, making a lime siracha sour cream, and oh, of course the kale to grill. cutting up an avocado and some tomatoes. 

The weird thing about that tofu? If your mouth was texture stupid, you would swear it was barbeque chicken. I'm not sure how it turned into barbeque chicken. But it did. Strange food, you're strange.

This was my half hour brunch Sunday. Parboiled potatoes while sauteeing onions and the last long mystery pepper (I just buy peppers at the farmer's markets and let it be a surprise as to what they taste like, these were sweet with just a touch of spice and possibly some of the best peppers ever for generic cooking) threw the potatoes in, added some chard, did the eggs, then broiled for six minutes and voila! Food!

My first souffle!

It's that time again, what time you ask? Challenge season! The challenge given to me for this week was to make a souffle. I've never even read how to make a souffle before, and then no one on the magic internet broke it down into what to do for one serving so I had to do a bit of reading and math. While I love both of those things, not what I expected to be doing on a Sunday morning.

Apparently the first thing you do when making a cheese souffle is to make a cheese sauce. If I had known that I would have been making souffles for years! I can make a mean cheese sauce, and by mean it's mean that you want to lick the spoon/bowl/pot until all the vestiges have vanished from this earth.

So the souffle wasn't that hard and it came out pretty good. Check it out!

Per serving, this was the recipe:
2 T butter
2.25 T flour
6 T milk (in full disclosure I should mention that I used half and half)
1 egg, separated
1/2 t dijon mustard
dash of shallot salt
1/4 c grated cheddar
sprinkles of parmesean

I cooked it at 375 and found 20 minutes the right amount of time. I started checking them at 15 and pictured is the last one that had the most time in the oven.

The resulting dish had all the flavor of awesome homemade macaroni and cheese but with the delectable texture of airy eggs. I'm pretty sure we'll be seeing more souffles in our future.

Pickled Peppers

Jake came home from the store last Monday with this grand idea, we'd make pickled vegetables to go with dinner! I'd done some pickled peppers in the past, so I already had a quick go to recipe. He cut up the vegetables and together we made it happen. The vegetables were green beans, leeks, a red bell pepper, two thai peppers, and some other cute little peppers that shall go unnamed, but I think they looked like cubanelles.

My recipe involves boiling equal parts vinegar (I used cider vinegar in this instance) and water with salt, a smidge of sugar,* whole peppercorns, whole coriander seeds, whole cumin seeds, about 4 smashed cloves of garlic, and um, that's about it for this time.  After it came to a boil** I poured it over the chopped vegetables, placed a plate on them to ensure they were submersed, and let them sit for at least twenty minutes.*** Then you drain off the liquid and voila! Pickled vegetables!

As tasty as they were unfortunately they were not perfect. Jake and I have differing views on how to put together a vegetable dish. He likes his vegetables chopped up into tiny pieces so they're all blended together, in this case he wanted a relish. I like my vegetables independent of one another, long and pretty. My spice blend clung to his tiny vegetables and it was impossible to separate the seeds from the real food and it made each bite a little unpleasant. I managed to suffer through it for the deliciousness. Jake not so much. Next time we'll communicate better and make sure there is more harmony. In this case, the dish was Jake's vision, so I should have thought about the end result and placed the seeds in one of my sachets that I have just for that purpose.**** However if the dish had been my vision and Jake was merely my sous chef, he'd have had to either done it my way or at least talked about it. Anyway, here's the picture. It's not super awesome. You can see the residue left on the vegetables.

*I managed to put the perfect amount of sugar in it, 1/4 cup for 4 cups of liquid. Most pickling recipes, especially the quick ones, call for a lot more sugar but we didn't feel the flavors would work together if it was too sweet.

**We happen to have the perfect "pot" for this boil. I knew it would require stirring and close monitoring but I wanted to minimize evaporation.

***It was probably closer to 40 but I meant to do 20!

****I have reusuable cheesecloth sachets, paper sachets, a metal tea thingy, and actual cheesecloth! Lots of ways that I could have solved it had I just thought about it.

Home Made Ravioli

Super awesome homemade pasta.

Amish Sausage, homemade pasta, butter brandy sage sauce.

Food from July

A close up on a variation of one of my more awesome and regular pasta dishes. 

It's ordinary box pasta, I know, I don't love that idea either, and you can totally taste the difference. Anyway, I made a bechemal sauce, sort of. Made out of some beef stock and onions. It's topped with chicken made a few days earlier on the grill which added a fantabulous smokey flavor. Add some chopped scallions and fresh basil for a basic dish that's scrumptious down to the last bite!

**

Spaghetti Squash!

This dish is totally inspired from watching an episode of Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives. While I can't say I love that show there is the occasional piece of awesome. 

Here I cut a spaghetti squash in half and dropped it in boiling water for fifteen minutes. While that was bubbling away I cooked up some sausage in a pan (Jimmy Dean hot for this particular dish, fancy I know) Opened a can of crushed tomatoes, added garlic, onions, diced carrots and spices to simmer. After pulling the squash out I let it cool just enough to touch them spooned out the "spaghetti" and added it to the sausage, stirred in some of my quicky sauce then refilled the squash shell. I placed a few slices of mozzarella on top then placed it in the over to bake at 375 for half an hour. Meanwhile I let the sauce continue simmering and when it was all done, spooned out the sauce, sprinkled a little cheese and added a little fresh basil to create what you see above. 

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Jake made some braised ribs in scotch. Precious precious scotch. Luckily it tasted fairly amazing, but he'd have to try and remember to tell you himself.  The perfect complement was my cole slaw of deliciouso. Jake doesn't like me calling it cole slaw because he feels that the only thing it has in common with cole slaw is the cabbage. Ingredients include tons of fresh cilantro, fresh squeezed lime juice, cumin, sesame oil, grapeseed oil, soy sauce, garlic, and chiles. Mmmm. I've made this a few times and the specifics can vary but it's perfect every single time.

Also, braised ribs.

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Flank steak rubbed in spices of a Mexican flavor and sit in that for an hour, served on flour tortillas with my black beans, cheese, sour cream, sauteed onions, and cheese. One day I'll talk about my black beans, but they're not your ordinary beans.

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Jake made this steak. I took the picture. I liked the picture more than Jake liked the steak. I thought the steak was fine.

With the steak, (which was grilled) we had the above vegetables, also grilled. While also not great, they too took a great picture.

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Best. Hamburgers. I've. Ever. Made. Fresh chuck from the Amish, not sure if that's what made the difference or if I was starving or if I just finally have figured out how to make hamburgers. First we made the bacon, then grilled the burgers in the bacon grease, then once one was done grilled the bread (slices from Panera's asiago loaf) and onions. I added dijon mustard to mine and the only thing that would have made it better would have been some vine ripened tomato slices. 

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Amish Pierogies with basil.

I don't remember what else he did to them. But I do remember they were good. Hard to believe it was only a week ago.

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Omelette!

Eggs were light and fluffy, cooked on low in a hot pan in butter, filled with feta and fresh basil.