So, since my previous entry about cooking seemed to be popular, and since I usually don't write anything else with much frequency, I'd at least post up on Friday what it was I made for the week. Friday being the optimum day because A) it's the last day of the week and B) it makes a nice alliteration with "Food". But since tomorrow Megan and I are off with the young marrieds of the Church for the weekend and I'm sure I'll be preoccupied with getting things ready tomorrow, I'd just drop in and do it on Thursday. So uh...probably next week will be the first official Food Friday Roundup that's on...well, Friday.

Moving along!


Monday - Spaghetti di Rockney

No linked recipe for this one, as it is mostly a recipe used by Megan's family, slightly modified with some elements from a recipe my parents used to use.

Ingredients

Fettuccine Noodles
1 Jar of Newman's Own Marinara Sauce
Sweet Italian Turkey Sausage
Dried Oregano Leaves


Pretty easy recipe; we've made it a billion times so there was no adventures in new skills regarding this one. Meg prefers Fettuccine noodles, as they are wider, so we use those. Dump salt into your pot, boil the water, throw the noodles in. Pretty straight forward.

For the meat sauce, take the Sweet Italian Turkey Sausage (Jenie-O is the brand we use) and throw it on a pan. Now, normally I hate using Turkey as a meat substitute for things like ground beef and the like, but this particular sausage is really, really good. So no complaints from me from this particular turkey product. Anyway, the sausages come in links, not ground, so what you have to do is push the filling out of the skins. Two ways you can do this; Megan does it by hand before putting it in the pan, I usually just squish it out with a spatula while it's on the pan. Either way is find. Throw away the skins and break up the filling and brown as you would with regular sausage or ground beef. Sometimes there's enough fat to merit draining, sometimes not, do as you prefer.

Once the sausage is browned, dump the sauce into the same pan (use a pretty big pan). You could also move everything into a saucepan I suppose, or a pot, but since I try to use as few utensils as possible to save on cleaning times, I use one pan. Newman's Own Marinara sauce is, in my opinion, the BEST on the shelf marinara sauce there is. Period. It's a bit more expensive than other brands, but it's definitely worth it.

Mix the sauce with the sausage. Add the oregano in here if you want; try it with and without to see which you prefer. Sometimes I forget the oregano and it's not a huge deal, but I think it gives it a little something extra. Not a ton, just enough to sprinkle lightly across the surface should do.

And that's pretty much it. Makes good leftovers if you make enough.



Wednesday - Beef Kebabs and Oven-Roasted Parmesan Fries
Here be the link for the Fries.


Ah, beef kebabs. Again, a tried and true food item for us. We usually just buy pre-made kebabs from Ralphs or Gelson's (Ralphs is preferable, as they are slightly cheaper and slightly larger) and cook them in the oven...a bit trickier than maybe using a grill, but for ease and convenience we use the oven. I may get bold in the summer and try our public grill, but for now it works.

For yesterday's quest, I started with the fries first, as they took more preparation. Peel, slice, boil, bake, sprinkle, bake was the process in a nutshell. My slicing is still terrible; very inconsistent. I think it was starting to resemble some sort of consistency by the end of the second potato, but still something that I'll have to continue to develop with practice.

By the way, the recipe calls for 5 potatoes, but we don't need that much. In general for other fried potatoes/fries I've made, I usually do one potato per person; thus two. I also throttled back on the amount of salt used in the bowl, since 1 tablespoon for two potatoes is a lot, and it's much easier to add salt after the fact rather than somehow magically remove it.

So, slicing was ok, boiling was odd. It never did come to a full boil, though I was using my largest pot with the pasta filter in it (for rapid, easy draining of the potatoes). I just kept checking them for softness per the recipe's instructions by using the paring knife, and then just pulled them out.

I didn't bake them long enough. I was on a time constraint since I needed to use the oven for the kebabs as well, so they were still sort of...soft fries. I like soft fries so it wasn't a huge deal, but Megan likes them crispier, so next time I'll do them longer. I think I may also spread the fries onto multiple cookie sheets next time; one seemed a bit too crowded to crisp them rapidly.

So after I cheesed them I dumped the fries into a basket and began kebab cooking. Same cookie sheet, just set the kebabs on there and use a high temperature. In the past I've used the broil setting, which works fine; yesterday I tried it at 450, which was also fine. No real difference, I didn't think. When I cook them, I start with 7:30 per side, then 3:00 per side, then 1:30 until I think they're done (usually checked by cutting open the largest chunk.

I have to admit at this point that while the pre-made kebabs are convenient, I'm starting to feel annoyed by them. The pieces of meat used are quite varied in size, so by the time you get the larger pieces done perfectly, the smaller ones are a little over-done. If I were to do this on a weekend, it might be worth the time to build them myself. I suppose I could pull the more done pieces out earlier, but that makes them not-kebabs anymore as they are removed from the stick. Then again, we tend to pull them off the stick and eat them with a fork and knife anyway...so maybe it's a moot point.

Anyway, this was a successful meal. Just a few notes for the fries for improvement and I think it'll be perfect.



Future Projects!

I'm off to the store tonight, I think, to get things ready for next week. Usually I shop on Sunday, but we won't have a lot of time with the trip and all, so I'll just freeze everything until then. On the docket for next week, at a minimum, is a Pepper Chicken with Lime sauce. I went through the bookshelves last week and found all of our cook books (to which I was surprised at how many we had) and moved them to a smaller bookshelf that we recently bought from Ikea for my law books. Now that they're much more accessible and closer to the kitchen, I can delve into them more frequently. The Pepper Chicken is a recipe from a Williams-Sonoma book we bought, so I'm excited to give that a go.


I also want to make a Minestrone soup to freeze for Megan to have for dinner on the nights that I'm gone. I may do that tonight and report later on how it turned out.

Oh! This one is awesome. Last week, my brother called me and asked what I was doing. Since we had leftover tortillas and cheese from the Fajita Fiasco I was making microwave quesadillas (my microwave can make a perfect quesadilla in 30 seconds). But when I said quesadillas, he thought I said Pizzadillas. And now we're obsessed with the idea of making a pizzadilla. I'll let you guys know how that one goes too.

Once again, any shared recipes will be appreciated. I haven't pounded any chicken yet, Matt, but I did get a tenderizer so I'm ready to go for next time.