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.

Haha! Well, fellow food fiends, it's that time again! And while I do have some thoughts to relay about how my first ventures into the Law have been, I would be remiss in breaking my own new format this early. So Law thoughts another day. In a word though: Good.


Monday - Pepper Chicken with Lime Sauce, Rice, Roasted Green Beans

Link for the Green Bean Recipe!
Rice just used a Rice Cooker...

Pepper Chicken with Pepper Lime Dip - Cambodian Dish from the "Savoring Meat and Poultry" book by Williams Sonoma.

Ingredients

2 Boneless Chicken Breasts, with skin
1 teaspoon peppercorn
1 teaspoon sea salt (says coarse salt; I suppose you could use regular salt too)
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoons vegetable oil
6 cloves of garlic, quartered

For the dip: 2 limes, 1 tablespoon ground black pepper, 1 1/2 teaspoon sea salt


Ok, I should start out by stating that the recipe is slightly modified from the one in the book. The book recipe called for like, two whole chickens. But since there are but two of us, I nerfed it down to two breasts. Normally we eat boneless/skinless, but the picture in the book had yummy looking skin so I opted for a bit of extra fat and got some with skin still on. Also, the original recipe called for mushroom soy sauce. I looked at Gelson's for mushroom soy sauce, but I haven't a clue what it is or if it's sold; in all my years of growing up in a semi-Asian household I've never heard of mushroom soy sauce. I wondered if maybe it was something you had to make, but there were no instructions. So I just used regular soy sauce.

For this sucker you have to marinade first. Crushing peppercorns without proper tools is not an experience I would recommend; the book said to use a mortar, but I don't have one. So I used a bowl and an ice cream scoop. It worked out, but it was tiring and in someways quite needless since I do have ground pepper. In any case, you take the peppercorns, quarter the garlic and smoosh it together. The book said to make a paste, but I didn't, I just kinda...mixed it up. I added that to the soy sauce, sugar, oil, and salt and threw it with the chicken into a ziploc bag. I tend to do all my marinating in ziploc bags; you can just throw them away when you're done and they seem to get the job done. It's also easier to concentrate the marinade straight on the meat by turning the bag in certain directions, so when you are marinading for a short period of time (I only marinaded it for 45 minutes) it gets a concentrated effect. Time listed in he book was 1 hour to overnight.

While that sucker was marinading I prepared to use my rice cooker for the first time. Now, attention white people: rice cookers are the ONLY way to make good rice. Period. The end. I don't want to hear arguments about it. You also must use white, long-grain rice; I've always eaten Calrose and had good experiences with it. I've seen people try to make rice other ways and it never comes out the same. Besides, why go through the trouble? With a rice cooker it's dump in the rice, dump in the water, push a button, wait twenty minutes. It's super easy and super effective, so don't go and start boiling stuff in a pan.

I'll reserve my comments about putting butter on rice for another day.

Ok, rice now on auto-pilot as well as the marinading chicken, I had an issue about what to do for a vegetable component. I had picked up green beans and broccoli (for me and Megan, respectively) but I didn't feel like steaming them or sauteeing them, and I hate boiled vegetables (not to mention they apparently remove vitamins, so why bother?), so I ran to the internet to do a quick search. I used a new tool I found called the Food Blog Search, which...well, searches food blogs, and came to a recipe for Roasted Green Beans with Onions and Walnuts. Ironically it was from a blog Jeni had previously suggested I check out, so I knew it was probably a good one.

Now, this one took a little improvising on my part; having not intended to make this side dish I was lacking in a few ingredients; I did happen to have a red onion lying around, but walnuts were a no go and I wasn't sure replacing them with peanuts would be the way to go (not to mention I didn't feel like unshelling said peanuts). I was also out of garlic cloves; I used the last of them in the chicken marinade. So I just used some garlic powder instead with a rough estimate as to how much would be about right. Another super-easy recipe: pre-heat to 450, oil the beans and onions slightly, make the "drizzle" and add at the end.

Cool.

So, oven is now pre-heating, it is now time for me and Mr. Grillpan to go for round three. Taking Matt's previously commented advice, I super-heated the sucker and pounded the chicken as flat as it would go prior to marinading. The beans took about 10 minutes so I put them in right before I threw my chicken on the pan for the suggested "3 and 3" round. Well, six minutes of filling my apartment with smoke later and...

...nope.

Still cooked the outside but not the inside. Inside was as raw as the day they slaughtered that bird. I suppose they're just too thick or that electric stoves and cast iron grillpans are simply not meant to replace a real grill. So, the grillpan and I are on speaking terms only as far as it concerns steaks and hamburgers, the only things it has managed to do correctly.

But! Not all was lost! The outside was beautifully lined and the skin nice and crisp. So, since my oven was already on at 450, I threw it in a 9x13 with a bit of oil and let it cook in there for about 10-12 more minutes. The beans came out in the meantime and the rice was on warm.

The result? Chicken was AMAZING using that process. The center was moist yet thoroughly cooked and the outside was crispy. The flavor was quite unique; the sugar put in a fair amount of sweetness, even enough to cover the usual super-salt intensity soy sauce tends to give recipes I use it with. All in all a success.

What was NOT a success however, was the lime dip. I don't know what Cambodians are like, but if they think that squeezing a lime into a bowl with salt and pepper is a legitimate sauce, then perhaps we shouldn't mix company often. I had a coughing fit the first time I tried it; super potent citrus combined with strong sea salt and added with admittedly too much pepper (I didn't count on the fact that peppercorns take up more volume and that the resulting crushing of those peppercorns would NOT equate to the same amount as using a tablespoon of already ground pepper) was just...gross.

But, since it was a dipping sauce, all was well. The beans were a fascinating mix as the two strongest flavors within it, the balsamic vinegar and the honey, interacted in a way I hadn't thought possible. Megan thought I cut the onions too thick, but other than that a totally successful meal.

I would give it a week-night doability if you're having a leisurely evening. I definitely need to try our public grill though, because this battle against the pan is getting old.


Wednesday - Italian Sausage and Bean Soup

Ingredients


1 lb Italian sausage. Use spicy Italian if you prefer.
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 15oz can of great northern beans (white beans), rinsed and drained
1 15oz can of black beans, rinsed and drained
1-2 cans of beef broth (around 15 oz. We use low-sodium)
1 tbsp fresh basil or 1 teaspoon dried basil
Parmesan cheese for topping

The original recipe also called for a 1 15oz can of undrained tomatoes, but Megan doesn't like them so I took them out.

I also added crushed red pepper flakes...we'll talk about that in a second.


Ok! This is the most amazing recipe ever! It's a super-delicious stew-soup that is cheap to buy ingredients for (after buying bread for dipping, the cans of beans, the broth, and the sausage it was I think like 7 bucks) and takes like no time or skill to make!

Step 1: Brown sausage of choice. You can drain if you want, I didn't.
Step 2: Chop onion and garlic
Step 3: Rinse and drain beans
Step 4: Put all ingredients into pot.
Step 5: Simmer for 10 minutes
Step 6: Serve. Put cheese on top if you want.

Now, a few notes about personal preferences. Megan prefers a more thick stew and less soup, so her favorite is to use only one can of broth. I like more broth though, so I prefer to use two. I split this difference on Wednesday and used 1 1/2, and that seemed to make both of us happy.

In terms of spice, you can use a spicy italian sausage if you want. I decided to add pepper flakes to the sausage as I was browning them and I really liked it, but Megan found it too spicy. The first time I had this soup was during the Ing Annual Gingerbread House Making Extravaganza when my mom made it. At the time I added the pepper flakes in as I was eating it and got the same effect, so if you have different spice preferences you can always add more to your own personal bowl of soup as you go along.

I forgot the basil on Wednesday. I didn't really miss it though, so if you don't have any you can skip it and be fine.

The original recipe also only used 3/4 lb of sausage, but we like more meat.

Like I said, this is an AMAZING recipe. So delicious, reheats well, and take little time and effort. So you readers with babies might want to keep this handy for those particularly crazy nights.


That wraps it up for this week. Still no head way on the To-Try list, but since we were gone at the Young Married's retreat I didn't have time to do my Sunday Store Day (I don't intentionally try to alliterate my life, really I don't). But, I did learn a lot about cooking with alcohol from AJ and this other guy Dave, who apparently went to culinary school. So I think there will definitely be some new experiments coming up, along with delving into the list.

What'd you guys eat this week?