Posts categorized “Cooking”

Carrie & I made Thoinksgiving din-dins this year!

I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. Of course, I’d had quite a bit of wine myself when I watched it:

(thanks, Unintentional Housewife)

Carrie made something to eat recently, and I thought it was my duty to share. You know how it goes. She made a pesto chicken salad. Intrigued? You should be. It was what we call DELICIOUS.

And it was ridiculously easy as well. A few years ago we got one of those Magic Bullets for a gift, and since then we have not bought any salad dressing at all. We’ve made it all ourselves, on the spot, on demand, as needed for each individual salad. You want to know how? Yes, you do. So, here:

INSTANT PESTO CHICKEN SALAD

What you’ll need:

FOR THE PESTO:
• 2 Garlic cloves
• A handful of basil leaves
• A palmful of grated parmesan cheese
• A palmful of pine nuts
• Olive oil
• Salt & pepper to taste

FOR THE SALAD:
• 1 big chicken breast, raw
• Some sort of mixed greens, whatever you have on hand (please don’t do iceberg lettuce, though I suppose romaine would be okay)
• Spinach or baby spinach
• Gorgonzola or Bleu Cheese in crumble form
• Grape or smaller cherry tomatoes
• Pecans, cashews, slivered almonds, or any other nut you happen to have on hand
• Broccoli stalks (not the tops, just the stems)
• White or Crimini mushrooms
• 1 carrot
• Salt & pepper & garlic powder (or garlic salt) to taste

What you’ll do to make it:

THE SAUCE:
• Add the garlic to the magic blender. Pulse it until it’s nicely chopped up. Doesn’t have to be too fine or anything; just get rid o’ the chunks.
• Toss in the basil, cheese, and nuts. Pour in some olive oil. No, I can’t tell you how much because we never actually measure it. Pulse to combine it all until it starts to smooth out a bit.
• Add salt and pepper to taste, then pulse some more until it gets relatively smooth.

THE SALAD:
• Put a li’l bit of olive oil in a pan on medium heat. Season both sides of the chicken breast liberally with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Pan fry that chicken breast until both sides are golden brown and it’s cooked all the way through. Put it aside to cool.
• Thinly slice up the mushrooms. Turn the pan down to medium or medium/low. Add a tiny bit more oil or butter to the pan and add your mushrooms. Cook them until they’re nice and soft and cooked. You’ll know when they’re done.
• While the mushrooms are cooking you prep your salad ingredients. Thinly shred your broccoli stems lengthwise so that they form really thin pieces, like coleslaw. Do the same with your carrot. Slice the tomatoes in half.
• Once the mushrooms are done, take them off the heat and put them aside to cool. Add the mixed greens in a large bowl. Tear your spinach into it (or just use baby spinach), and add the tomatoes, nuts, Gorgonzola, carrot slaw and broccoli slaw.
• Dice your cooled chicken breast into 3/4″ cubes. Add it to the bowl. As soon as the mushrooms have cooled down a bit add them as well.
• Pulse the pesto sauce a couple of more times just to make sure it’s all mixed up, and dump it all over the salad in the bowl. Toss to combine.
• EAT IT

IT’S DELICIOUS! Here’s a tip to save time: At Trader Joe’s you can buy little bags of pre-shredded broccoli/carrot slaw that is quite good. You can add any other ingredients to the salad if you like. The cooked mushrooms add a really unexpected flavor and texture to the salad, but I suppose you could put them in raw if you like. All the nuts in the recipe can get pretty pricey if you don’t already have them on hand. But you can substitute pretty much any other nut (I don’t recommend peanuts) for the pine nuts in the pesto.

Anyway, not only is it delicious but it’s low-carb if you care about that sort of thing. It’s actually pretty danged healthy, unless you have something against olive oil. There’s quite a bit of olive oil in the pesto, and the chicken and mushrooms are cooked in olive oil. But ask someone from Greece if olive oil is bad for you, and then duck when they try to punch you in the mouth for speaking blasphemy. Dare ya!

So let’s be hypothetical for a moment, okay? Let’s say you’re making some sorta baked good. Y’know, the kinda thing that you’d normally slather a bunch of frosting on top of. Let’s say you’re kinda bored with regular ol’ frosting. You want something that’ll really wow your guests. Really knock there socks off, see?

I recommend hard sauce. How do you make hard sauce?

There are a bunch of different recipes out there on teh intarwebs, but general consensus is a cup or so of butter, a slightly larger amount of confectioner’s sugar, and at least a couple of tablespoons of hard liquor.

Yes that’s right. LIQUOR. That’s why it’s called hard sauce. Though I’m still not quite sure why it’s called sauce instead of frosting or icing.

Most recipes will recommend brandy, but I personally really enjoy whiskey/bourbon hard sauce. You can get one of them tiny bottles of hooch for just a couple of bucks. Go ahead and spring for a tiny Maker’s Mark and you can’t go wrong.

Cupcake photo by sciascia

Anyhoo, you cream the butter and sugar, then add the hooch. Spread it on something um-nummy like zucchini muffins or bread pudding. HOO-BOY let me tells you — that’s some good, good, good stuffs. The flavor of the whiskey/bourbon sweetened with all that sugar is fan-frikkin’-tastic on any sorta baked good you’d normally put regular ol’ frosting all up ons.

It’s Mardi Gras! This year was the first year of my life wherein I participated in a particular Mardi Gras tradition: a series of King Cake parties. Point of fact: I’d never actually heard of a King Cake party before this year, when a new friend (who just moved here from Austin, TX) decided to start up the tradition.

In a nutshell: You throw a party in the middle of January (it generally coincides with Twelfth Night/Epiphany, though in this case it was later — January 22nd or so). Whoever hosts that party bakes a cake — a King Cake: traditionally a ring-shaped cake similar to brioche, with green-and-purple frosting/sprinkles. Hidden somewhere in the cake is a small figurine, often a Baby Jesus. Whichever guest at the party gets the piece of cake containing the figurine is the “King” for that week and has to throw the next King Cake Party the following weekend. This continues every weekend until Mardi Gras!

I actually probably would not have become a part of this tradition (indeed, I missed the first party entirely) had it not been for the fact that Marvel’s X-Men’s female clone of Wolverine X-23 won the first King Cake Party and got to throw the second one at her place, just up the road from me.

It was a fascinating several weeks. Carrie & I got to meet a tonne of new people, as whoever hosted the party invited not only the people who had been at previous parties, but their own friends as well. We also got to go to some places we’d never been before, and experience fascinating things like wood-fired saunas and hot tubs, and all manner of cooking. Not even the King Cake itself was consistent; many of the participants put their own spin on the tradition by serving the figurine in other types of baked goods — even an Apple pie once.

Carrie & I had to miss the next-to-last King Cake Party, but we delegated our participation, and — guess what? — we won by proxy!

For our King Cake, Carrie decided to go old-school: a northern French Galette des Rois (French for “Cake of Kings”). She used a slightly-modified version of the recipe from Zen Can Cook:

For this recipe you will need:

• 1 puff pastry sheet
• 8 tablespoons soft butter
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 2 eggs
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1/2 cup sugar + 2 tablespoons
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon almond extract (optional)
• 1 egg yolk + 1 tablespoon milk for eggwash
• Powdered sugar for glazing

* Preheat oven to 425′F. Cut out two 9-inches circles of puff pastry. Prick one of them with a fork. Place on a tray lined with a silpat. Refrigerate.

For the frangipane (almond filling):

• In the bowl of a food processor combine the butter, 1 cup almonds, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, pinch of salt and almond extract if using. Process to obtain a smooth paste, add the flour and pulse to incorporate (Carrie & I don’t have a food processor, so we just used a Magic Bullet and made the frangipane in batches).

For the galette des rois:

1. Spread the almond frangipane in the center of the pricked puff pastry circle leaving a 1-inch border. Brush the border with eggwash and top with the second circle of puff pastry. Seal the edge with your fingers or the back of a spoon. Brush with the eggwash. Refrigerate for 15 minutes.
2. Bake at 425′F for 15 minutes then lower the temperature to 350′F and bake for an additional 30 minutes.
3. Dust with some powdered sugar. Cool. Serve at room temperature.

Photo by yuichi.sakabura: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skrb/

By all accounts of everyone who was at our party, it was quite delicious. Please, partake… and enjoy.

This year’s Halloween I decided to integrate my costume and my pumpkins. Here’s my costume:

ASTEROIDS!!!

I went as the ship from Asteroids. It was fun! I went to Home Depot and bought one of those swivel joints that you’d use to make a lazy Susan. Then I made the ship out of black foam board. The outline of the ship is just a couple of layers of masking tape. I mounted the ship to the lazy Susan joint (with three layers of foam board padding to push it farther away from my body for easier swiveling) with some screws and hot glue. And I attached the other side of the lazy Susan joint to another three layers of foam board that I attached to my body with two belts (one above the joint and one below).

I also made an asteroid outta foam board and masking tape, with two smaller asteroids. I glued some velcro to the backs so that the little ones could attach to the big one out of sight. I also got a handful of ping-pong balls to use as the ship’s bullets! I had a friend slowly attack me with the larger asteroid while I threw ping-pong balls at it. When I hit it, he disengaged the smaller asteroids and dropped the big one. Just like in the game!

My punkins were carved to match:

And just for fun I also threw in the UFO:

Pretty much everybody agreed that it was the best of the Fools’ costumes at this year’s Fools Play Trick or Treat. But the competition wasn’t really that stiff…

That’s Jamie the Ginger Fool as “Batman,” me, Geoff the Yellow Fool as “Harry Potter” (really), and Mike the Blue Fool as Zordon from Power Rangers.

James won the best costume in the audience competition as a red knight from Castle Crashers. It was very good, though I didn’t get a picture of it. Tia went as a 1960s-style alien space babe, with a beehive hairdo and fantastic boots and silver ray guns and everything. Pretty awexome.

Hween night was spent in the traditional way: Wii Bowling and making a metric tonne of Reuben sammitches and eating my wife’s Russian potato soup with sauerkraut. But I don’t have to tell you about that myself. Our good friend the Unintentional Housewife was there, and she blogged all about it! So go read her posts about my Reuben process and about my wife’s dee-licious soup. Also, Marvel’s X-Men’s “X-23″ was there, and she brought some apple crisp, which was also delicious. Saves me the trouble of having to write about it myself!

A good friend of mine (my wife’s Maid of Honor at our wedding) recently started a blog of her own, Unintentional Housewife. Since we are such close friends, I periodically get to experience the things she blogs about FIRST-HAND!

Case in point: She made these fan-frikkin’-tastic scalloped potatoes, which I ate and then I ate some more. Then she wrote a blog about how she made them, so now EVERYBODY I KNOW CAN MAKE THEM FOR ME ALL THE TIME. Deal? Deal.

CROCK POT CHEESY SCALLOPED POTATOES

(via unintentionalhousewife.com)