OK...some back story...

It has been such a long time, I am going to show some pics of what I am doing to catch you up. All 4 of you.

If you want details of one, just let me know.

Here ya are...
The first one is a couple crab cakes I made with blue crab I brought home. They were not bad. Learned some good stuff about steaming and assembling a good crab cake.


The second is the baguette I made. I am pleased. Not difficult, but pretty good bread.


The third is a grilled pork loin. it was very good. Over the hot coals with Jerk seasoning.


The next one is the Jerk Chicken that I did, followed by the pot stickers and a chicken sammich I tried. Need to revisit that.

But wait! There's more!

I also did some home made Ravioli last night. Not as simple as it looks but the initial foray made me see where I need to make some changes. First error was going to thin on the pasta...second was not getting the little guys sealed properly. I think that was a result of the first error.

Here are some pics.

Has it serously been three months???

I stink at this. I really should learn to focus on one thing...

A few short and sweets...

I made Beer Bread with some home made Heffeweissen. I think that it turned out ok. The beer wasn't right because I bottled it too quickly. The flavor never fully developed and it over carbonated. It would up being perfect for bread though.

Here's a peek

Eventually I'll get a decent blog program. Until then...sorry.

More to come.

Jalapeño Lime Shrimp and Steak...

I still haven't found a good Blog editor, so you will have to deal with the pictures being all dorked up.

Sorry.

So, tonight I made a glaze of Jalapeño and Lime which was lovingly used to sauce some shrimp. I love shrimp. I must be careful with shrimp because I will over do it.



The following pictures show the building of the sauce and then the cooking of the shrimp and steak. There really is nothing more to say, so here are the visuals. By the way - the first picture is actually of the making of one of the ingredients for the glaze. The method calls for some Candied Jalapeño Licorice. Rather than try to buy some, I grabbed some friendly neighborhood chilies and made the stuff. After a soak and simmer in some sugar, ginger and cumin...they went into the hot box for a few hours to dry out and become...licorice-ee.

After that, the glaze is easy and oh so good. I will not take out so much of the ribbing of the chilies next time. The sauce wasn't hot enough. Flavor - yes. Heat - not so much. I should-a left more in. Live and learn and cook again.

BTW - the steak was done the same way as before, but without the alarms going off....I pulled the plug. Heh.

This is too easy to not do.

I need to get off my tush and DO this thing more often!

To catch up:

Not a lot of cooking. I made dinner for some friends a couple weeks ago. 40 Cloves and a chicken. Looked a lot like this...well, it looked EXACTLY like this.

Then I have been eating a lot of salad but to me, a good Caesar isn't, without grilled chicken. I have been putting a homemade blackening seasoning on the fowl. Yum...



Ok, THEN Allison came to visit. I didn't cook save for once and that was when I made Basil Garlic Pesto, Pasta and a salad.

The making of the pesto is too easy. Toast some pine nuts, which can be had from your local Whole Foods or any other Long Hair Hippy food store...most Mega-Marts won't have them. In the oven on a sheet pan at about 325 until you can just begin to smell them and then get 'em out or they'll burn. Those along with 2 cups of basil, some salt, a couple three, four, seven cloves of garlic go for a spin in the food processor until they are good and frapped up...then drizzle in about a 1/2 C of Extra Virgin Olive Oyl until a semi-thick paste forms up...you need to incorporate it all so it doesn't separate on the plate...let the food processor do the work for you.









BUT WAIT! BEFORE MAKING THE PESTO
make the pasta (or cook it). I won't go into details. Put on a gallon or two of water to bring up to a rolling boil. While the water heats, you can make the pasta or the pesto if you are just cooking the pasta. The pics below show the process for the noodles.























I started the pesto after the noodles went into the water and they were done and ready to eat about 10 minutes later.


Hints for pasta in case you never knew -
NEVER EVER put oil in the water. Fresh or dried...it will coat the noodle and the sauce will slide off rather than soak in.
After draining the noodles, put them back into the pot to dry out. stir them around so they don't stick, but get them dried off so that the water will not cause the sauce to wander off the noodle.
Salt the water. Salt the water. Salt the water.
For every pound of pasta, you need a gallon of water. The stuff needs room to move.

Ok - back to the end of the story.

Along with the Arugula salad with walnuts and a very good dressing, it made for a nice lunch at home...just the two of us.

Finally did that steak....

So, I finally made my ribeye....it turned out quite good. Not much to say about it other than that I am accustom to having the oven and stove fan vent outside. This particular method presents a difficulty in that it smokes something fierce.

The alarm went off.

The problem with this little inconvenience is that everyone in the three apartments around me KNOW now, that I have done something wrong with the stove. In reality, it is just the way this cooks.

This steak is done in a 500 degree oven for two minutes per side for medium rare. Needless to say, I chose the 1 minute per side for a rare steak. So - cast iron pan into the oven to get to 500 degrees and once there, the pan comes out to the stove which should be on the highest setting. 30-45 seconds per side to give it a good crust and then into the oven for the 2 minutes (or one if you like steak done right!) and then flip and your second time. Once it's done, out of the oven and into a wrapping of foil to rest and finish cooking.

The preview pictures are small since the post is small, but remember that when you click on them, you get the full size.

















Enjoy!

This Friday, I am making my award winning chili. Yay!

Not my normal spaghetti...

While it may not look like much to you, it is a big step for me....just spaghetti, right? I have been making my own sauces for a long time and playing with the software to come up with different textures and flavors. This sauce is a spicy sauce which I am pleased with....but the real pleasure is underneath. It's just pasta, right?

I made it.

My very first batch ever.

Hand kneaded and rolled with a real live Italian pasta rolling machine.

I am actually pretty happy with it. I know that it wasn't the best ever, but it really did the trick. Held onto the sauce and everything pasta is supposed to do. It won't win prizes, but for a first effort, all in all good.

Things I will note:

Mixing it: The dough really needed to be more elastic. I am not sure if it wasn't so due to lack of proper moisture or due to not kneading it enough.

Rolling it: Once it gets down to a 5, it gets long. I'll make the knobs a little smaller next time. That way when they elongate with the rolling, it won't be hard to manage.

Cool thing though...and easier to make than I thought. That's all for now. More to come later. Maybe.

Almost kinda food-ish

Well - today I planted what I hope to be the start of a nice container garden. I figure that since it is mostly going to be herbs and a couple tomatoes, that qualifies as food and therefore I can yammer about it here. I hope to keep the herbs going through the winter and get enough tomatoes to can.

Here's what it looks like today:














Peat pots in a plastic container on a spare chair. Gonna get a grow light to help them and keep them warm and feeling loved. I plan to make friends with a botanist or something!

What you see there are three tomato varieties, cilantro, sage, rosemary and two basil varieties. Yes I know which is where. The notch you see denotes the front and I have made a map of the seedlings. Yeah - that's right. I am not as dumb as you like to think!

So, when we get sprouts, I will begin to get them sun and then harden them off. Then they will get transplanted into their permanent homes and hopefully I will have some continuous growth. Woo hoo!

This weekend, I hope to make pasta and basil pesto. We will see.

Baa Baa Black Sheep....

So, I made the shepherd's pie tonight. After receiving some not so good advice from one relative (who will remain nameless) about just tossing in some ground beef, green beans and mashers on top (you know who you are!) I took to the kitchen and made my dinner. I was very pleased with the results and would only know if I did something wrong if I had someone familiar with the dish to point things out to me. I started at the butcher this morning. I went in and asked for lamb and all they had were lamb chops (Yes - I heard Sheri Lewis' song in my head...kinda weird) and so I ordered up enough to come up with 1/2 lb ground. Remember, get to know your butcher. My butcher at home is so cool, that I was able to get sausage and corned beef sent to me. Love that Brackett's team! Anyway, I walked out of the store with my just over 1/2 pound of lamb ground up form and let it relax on the counter while I got everything together.

This dinner was really easy and even with cutting everything in half, I got plenty of food to include enough for a lunch this week. One thing to remember is that you are putting the mashers on top of the meat before it hits the heat in the oven, so get those going first. Peel and cut the potatoes up and into salted water to bring to a boil while you are preparing the meat and sauce.

The meat goes into the pan first - with a little oil - and you will cook it through before adding the shredded carrot, onion and garlic. Let these cook in quite well. You want them to be very soft and kinda start to disappear into the meat. Then you add the herbs and the Worcestershire letting them go for a few minutes, stirring all the while. (You will notice the Worcestershire is not in the Mis en Plac picture. This is because I am a dork and forgot to pull it out for the photo. It is in the dish though.)You want to stir the whole time for a very important reason: you don't want the herbs (you DO have fresh, right???) to burn or the meat to stick to the pan. Notice that I am once again using a cast iron skillet. If I was making the whole recipe rather than half, I could leave the meat in this, put the potatoes on top and into the oven with the whole works. Handy stuff, this. Then add the wine, letting it reduce to nearly gone and then the stock. That stock will add character and a little depth to the dish, so don't leave it out. If you don't know how to make stock, HERE is the recipe I use and it is VERY good. Makes great soup too. If you don't want to make stock, that's cool - just DON'T use broth. Stock and broth are different. Stock is simmered and reduced over time to extract collagen from bones and will be used as a base for soups and sauces. The bones may or may not have meat on them. Herbs and spices are involved as well as vegetables. Broth is made with viable portions of meat and usually is simmered with veggies and grains. Usually stock is an ingredient while broth is a finished product, so you can use stock to make broth. Get it? Ok - back to the Shepherd's Pie. Once you get the stock in and simmering down, you can turn your attention to the potatoes again.

By now, they should be ready for the ricer or the masher, whichever you have. Important: once you drain the water, put them back into the pan and let them dry out. It will make your dish less watery. Once dry, run them through the masher and then add the egg yolk, Parmesan and some additional salt if there was not enough in the water. - you DID salt the water right? Anyone know why you salt the water when cooking potatoes?

After the mashers are made, the meat should be ready. If you halved the recipe like I did, then you can use a couple small oven dishes to make two single servings. If not, you will want a larger casserole or something like it to put the food into. Meat in the bottom, potatoes spread nicely on top and then add some more of the Parmesan and fluff with a fork. Into the hot box for 20 minutes at 350. Once it is done, pull it out and let it rest about five minutes to settle. Trust me, the thing isn't gonna get cold.

While the baking is happening, make some pan roasted carrots. They went very well with the shepherds pie and were not at all difficult either. Peel, cut and boil the carrots for three minutes in water at a rolling boil to which you have already added some rosemary, thyme and garlic. The herbs work well with the carrots and compliment the main dish as well. After a swim of three minutes, they go into a hot fry pan with a little oil to get them just browned and then add a bit of butter and plate.








Serve with your Shepherd's pie and enjoy. If you want the recipe, let me know. I'll send it along.

Ok - nothing new tonight...

I was going to do the blackened catfish tonight but am missing some of the required spices for the blackening shake. They are supposed to be here tomorrow since I ordered what I needed last week. Fresh spices, pretty good prices. http://www.thespicehouse.com is where I get my stuff.

I made a Jalapeno cornbread tonight though. It was a good thing to test. Muffin method for this bread and I need a more accurate scale. It was alright, but I wasn't happy with the flavor or the texture. It was too...cake-ish and needs to be less so. The flavor was bland. I could taste the jalapenos, but after that it was not impressive. More work to do there before I share with everyone.

I learned how to make pasta from an Italian chef tonight. I want a pasta machine. Now. Yesterday in fact. That and basil pesto...fresh, that stuff is amazing. I will never buy a jar again.

I am out. Thanks for the comments to those stopping in.

New Things A-Comin'!

So, no foodie stuff today except to say that I am preparing to do a couple new things with ideas I have gleaned from reading and listening and one recipe that I received from a friend from HS. (Yes there are people in my HS Class that actually still talk to me. Deal!)

So what are these two lovelies? One is a rib steak and the other is a catfish fillet.

This week I am going to try something I have never done - BLACKENED Catfish. I normally fry it breaded but I have decided that since I have a cast iron skillet, it is time for me to attempt a blackened version.I don't know how it will come out since I will have to assemble the blackening seasoning myself (No pre-bought) and with it I will make a small jalapeno cornbread loaf and make a small batch of beans.

The rib steak is based on a recipe given me by my HS friend and since she was kind enough to share, I was willing to try...problem...I have no bourbon in the house. Funny - I live on bourbon st and yet have none! It is part of her recipe but I have none...but what I DO have is Hefeweissen. SO...a little adjustment here and there and a marinade that tasted good in the bowl and I hope goes well with the steak. Oh - the other thing I didn't have was Tabasco - go fig - so instead, some hot curry. D - I will let you know how it goes!

Keep an eye out!

Saturday night kitchen follies...although Chef Ramsay might call it a nightmare.

I wonder if i had a cuss jar in Hell's Kitchen, would he pay it? Anyway...

I had half a chicken left over from my Sticky Lemon Chicken the other night and I needed to use it or run the risk of my fridge getting a visit from the EPA. Not many things worse in the fridge than an old decaying bird in a bag. My head hurts thinking about it...BUT enough.

I had a very nice day in DC today. I was only in for a couple hours but it was nice to walk around. One of these times I will get into DC when the sky is blue and I can get nice pictures. I am definitely going to go in on a nice day for cherry blossom time. More on that later...this is a food thing.

As I try to do, I got all things together for my mis en plac and as silly as it sounds (it is after all, French), it really helps things move along. In case you wonder why those TV guys get things done so quickly (besides having a staff and tons of money) they have all the software and hardware squared away prior to the start of cooking. Sure, it might take only 30 minutes to make, but often there is at least 15-20 minutes of prep for a 30 minute dinner. Here's how things looked after prep.Please note that the potatoes are not cubed. I should have done that before getting started.

The total dish has several parts to it, but if you have three burners, one small sauce pan and three skillets you can do it all without washing a pan. I used my cast iron skillet for the fowl since it was going into an oven, my non-stick for the potatoes and the small fry pan that came with the apartment for the sauce. The only real hassle I had was lack of decent counter space. {Another rant...I hate cooking on electric. Have I said that yet? You will likely read it again. It's a real pain to get used to after having the luxury of gas for all these years! /rant}

So, away we go with a couple pictures of the bird frying up. Included with the disassembled chicken are olive oil and a couple sprigs of fresh thyme and after the flip, a couple bits of butter go in. You can see how nice and crispy the skin gets after being on the heat for a little bit. Hint for the skin...pat it quite dry with a towel and it will crisp up nicely and without burning.


After about three to five minutes on each side, into a 325 degree oven to finish off. This takes about 20 minutes. During this time, you start the sauce and while the sauce is building, back and forth between the potatoes and the sauce. The asparagus is last and takes only a few moments, so nothing needs to be done right away.

The sauce is built in a couple stages. While the chicken was being prepped and seared, the Morels were re-hydrating in hot water. I wound up having to get those at Whole Foods in Silver Spring because the mega-marts around here are like many others and don't have out of band stuff. Nice store, high $$. Anyway...

The morels will absorb some water and also leech out into the water they are soaking in flavor that you will want to recapture, so don't throw the bathwater out after getting the babies. Medium high heat in a good pan for the sauce and you heat some olive oil and toss in garlic, shallots and thyme for just long enough to get some color on them. Then you will add the morels with a little more oil and some S/P and cook for about another five and then pour in most of the soaking liquid that you held in reserve as well as some dry white wine.

While this is cooking down to almost totally reduced, you can get a start on the potatoes. They are in a small pan which is brought to a boil and they cook for only about 4-5 minutes and then drained and into a skillet. You will cook these with garlic and thyme. Occasionally toss them about to get them brown on all sides. Don't forget the sauce. It reduces down and you add some chicken stock, reduce some more and then add heavy cream. I screwed up at this part. The cream didn't break, (it was out long enough to warm up to room temp so it didn't freak out at the heat) but I got impatient and didn't let it reduce enough so the sauce wasn't as thick as it should have been. It isn't supposed to be anywhere at gravy consistency, but it should coat the back of a spoon. Anyway, it was still good. The whole works goes into a sieve/strainer and you mash on the bits to get all the goodness out and into the sauce.

About now, the chicken is done and out of the hot box it comes to relax for a few while you make the asparagus. When you get the asparagus on you should throw the pancetta into the potatoes to cook in and it crisps up very nicely. A little salt and pepper now on the tubers as well. The asparagus is quick and if you have a griddle pan use that. If not a regular skillet or fry pan will do. Cook it in olive oil and with some salt and pepper and it doesn't take long.

The recipe calls for all breasts. I used the rest of the other bird as I said before, so there is dark meat in there too. If you are like me and appreciate looking at a nicely plated meal, even if for yourself, you can do this with it, set it up and nom nom nom. It was very good.

This isn't a "walk in the park" since there are a lot of variables. I reduced the recipe in my head to make half and it turned out ok. Gotta remember to let that sauce reduce and keep an eye on all the elements. The recipe calls for fresh morel mushrooms to be sauteed and placed on the chicken, but I had a difficult enough time finding the dried ones that I decided I could fore-go them without seriously compromising the dish. I suspect that makes me a donkey to its creator, but hey - I'll do it right next time if he complains directly to me and gives me a budget!


By the way - I am sorry for how the photos and text are all dorked up. The editor I am using isn't very friendly and I am struggling. Any suggestions for a good blog editor would be nice.