Tonight, due to an onion that got lost on the way home from the store, I had to do some improvising. The original plan was chicken stroganoff, so I had chicken, mushrooms, sour cream as my base. I ended up going with a curry sauce and added some diced potatoes. It was a touch too spicy, but that is a mistake easily forgiven in this household. I should improvise more often, it was actually pretty fun once I got over being annoyed about the missing onion.
Here is a recipe that I make some variation on with great regularity. It varies according to what I have on hand, but with some basics stocked (pasta, garlic, oil, butter, veggies), I can make it just about any time, and it cooks up really fast. This recipe is somewhat vague because there's a lot of "winging it" involved :)
The basics are this. Start some water boiling. Saute up a liberal amount of fresh garlic with some butter and olive oil. Add some pine nuts if you have them. Add chopped up vegetables, in this case broccoli, but you can use all sorts of things, squash, mushrooms, etc. Let that cook for a little while, and while this is going on, add some angel hair pasta to the boiling water. It only has to cook for a few minutes, so watch it closely. Add chopped tomatoes to the other vegetables (I always add the tomatoes later so they don't overcook.) Then crack some green or black peppercorns with the flat of your knife and add them in. Add some cheese if you have it. Obviously parmesan works great, but here I used Fontanella. Stealing a trick from this recipe, add a ladle or two of the pasta water, and stir it up. Drain the pasta and add the veggies. That's it!
You may or may not remember the last time I had the cookie urge. I had just moved in, the cupboard was pretty bare, and it was a bit of a stretch to call them cookies. This time I feel that I acquited myself a little bit more respectably.
I was going to make snickerdoodles, but the recipe for that called for cream of tartar, which is something I do not happen to keep on hand. So I figured sugar cookes with cinammon on them would come pretty close to what I was looking for. I grabbed a recipe for sugar drop cookies from the Joy of Cooking, and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top, and voila, you have what I dubbed sugardoodles. They were a little bit meh, but a big step up from my last attempt!
Preheat the oven to 375F.
Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar and vegetable oil. Add the two eggs and the vanilla, and beat well until smooth. (I like doing this with a wooden spoon, but you can probably use an electric mixer.)
Add the flour mixture and beat well. Shape the dough into 1/2 inch balls, place them on a lightly greased cookie sheet, and press them with a fork in a cross-hatch pattern. Cover with a layer of the cinnamon sugar mix. Bake 1 sheet at a time if you need more than one sheet, for about 10 to 12 minutes, until golden brown. Let stand briefly, then remove to a rack to cool.
I'm pretty excited about this recipe, because I somewhat made it up as I went using a cross between two different recipes. Granted, it's probably pretty hard to screw up beef stew, and it's not like I made it up from scratch, but this is still a new accomplishment for me. It's a hybrid of the Joy of Cooking's French Beef Stew, and the recipe for Beef Stew on the back of the can of College Inn Beef Broth.
First, a tip. Don't buy pre-cut "stew meat" at the store, you don't know what cut it is, and it will be overpriced. Buy something cheap and cut it up into about 1 inch cubes (or smaller if you'd like). Mix the other ingredients together in a bowl, add the meat, and stir it up so the meat is coated. Put it in the fridge for 1-24 hours, stirring it a few times.
Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a heavy skillet over medium high heat. Working in batches, remove the beef from the marinade, saving as much of the marinade as possible, coat it in flour, and brown it evenly in the skillet. Add butter as needed while browning the beef. Add the browned beef to a large (at least 6 Qt) pot.
In the same skillet used to brown the beef, add 2 Tbsp of butter, and saute the diced onion for about 4 minutes, until it is transparent. Then add the marinade to deglaze the pan (stir up and scrape up all the bits of meat and grease). Add the tomato and bring to a boil. When it reaches a boil, add this whole mixture to the large pot with the beef, and turn it to medium heat. Add the beef broth, and bring it back to a boil, then lower the heat, cover it and simmer for 1 hour.
Peel and dice the potatoes and carrots. Add them to the stew, and cook for about 45 more minutes, or until the carrots and potatoes are properly cooked (yes tasting them is half the fun!). Add some more bay leaf, parsley, thyme and fresh pepper to taste. You can also leave the pot partially or completely uncovered for the last 30 minutes of the cooking if you want it to end up a little thicker.
If you're feeling adventurous, the length of time the stew has to cook makes it a great candidate for being accompanied by a fresh loaf of bread. Taste wise, they are also a match made in heaven. This made about enough stew for 6, but since there are only two of us, I froze two servings, and put two in the fridge for later in the week, making this the meal that keeps on giving!
I decided to post this meal because I was starting to worry that from reading this blog, one might get the impression that I'm some talented cook who makes really fancy things all the time. Let me assure you, that would be pretty far from reality. In fact, frying up some kielbasa and onions is far more my speed. This dish is great because you saute the onions, cut the kielbasa into strips, throw them in the pan, cover it, and let it cook. Check it every few minutes and stir it until everything is nicely browned. Drain off some of the oil, and serve it on a roll. It's so easy, that you can probably even finish a sinkful of dishes while it's cooking and earn bonus points with your significant other!
This post is extremely overdue. I considered trying to pawn this off, and pretend I made these a few days ago, but I'm going to fess up, and admit this meal happened two months ago!
Not being a huge fan of the commercial nature of Valentine's day, I try to avoid going out to eat. It is a nice excuse to cook a fancy meal, however. This year I got a craving for scallops in my head, and sort of fixated on it. I spent a while trying to find a recipe that really jumped out at me without much success. Then I ran across this recipe for Seared Scallops over Wilted Spinach and Lemon Risotto. That jumped! Never mind that I had never attempted a risotto before in my life, I just had to make this dish.
Fortunately, Marianne described this recipe beautifully, and guided me right through to a resounding success. Thanks Marianne! I am not going to list the recipe here because she did such a great job, and illustrated it very well. Being a risotto novice, I had my hands full most of the time, and didn't take a lot of pictures.
The sour of the lemon risotto and the sweetness of the scallops were an absolute perfect mix, and the spinach was delicious. I will certainly be making this again some day.
I'm writing this as I eat a slice fresh out of the oven, and of course at this moment, I think Banana Bread might be the greatest food in the world. Tomorrow I might not feel quite as strongly, but I sure do love the stuff. It's an extremely easy recipe, probably the first baking I ever did that wasn't brownies or pre-made cookies. I get my recipe from my trusty Betty Crocker Cookbook
Heat the oven to 350F, and grease the bottom of a 9x5x3 loaf pan. Mix the sugar, butter, and eggs in a large bowl. Thoroughly mash the bananas, and add them, the milk and vanilla to the bowl. Beat until smooth. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt until thoroughly mixed.
Bake about 75-85 minutes, or until knife inserted comes out clean. Remove from the oven, and let cool 5 minutes. Loosen the sides of the loaf with a knife, and remove from pan to cool. When mostly cool, wrap in foil to save. (I actually find that this makes it even more moist and delicious the next morning.)
What do you do when you have some leftover Habanero peppers and a craving for seafood? Well, I suppose there are lots of things you could do. You could make some hot sauce, and then go eat some crab cakes or something, but I guess that wouldn't make for a good story, and I wouldn't have a recipe for you. So I decided to make up a good spicy salmon marinade. I made a quick teriyaki vegetable stir fry and some rice as a side dish, that really went well with the spicy salmon. All in all a great meal. Here's the marinade recipe, I haven't tried it but I'm thinking it would go pretty well with chicken too. (Hint, hint, if anyone wants to try it and report back, that would be great!)
Finely chop the habanero peppers and onion, like so, and mix together. Juice the orange, and add to the onion and pepper. Add the vegetable oil and a pinch of salt.
I was hungry, and at the end of a long day of work, and I just happened across this recipe on The Amateur Gourmet's blog. It couldn't have been a more perfect fit for what I wanted for dinner, fast and delicious. It turned out to be just as easy as it sounded, and even more delicious! I'll recount the recipe below, but really the original blog entry covers all you need to know. In a vain attempt at making this more than a me-too blog post, I'm going to experiment with this new "pictobrowser" doohickey that I saw over on Chez Pim.
Start some water boiling, making sure you have enough to cover the pasta, plus about 3 cups. When the water boils, add the pasta, and heat up your skillet.
Slice the garlic, and cook it in the skillet with the olive oil, and 2 Tbsp of the oil from the sun dried tomatoes. Add the red pepper flakes and cook another minute or two. Slice the sun dried tomatoes into 1/4 inch strips, and add them to the garlic. Cook another minute, then add 1 cup of the pasta water. Simmer until liquid thickens, then add the beans, salt, and another 1.5 cups pasta water. Simmer all of that for about 4 minutes, your pasta should be close to ready now. Drain the pasta, add to the skillet for a few minutes, and mix it all up. Turn off the heat, add the grated cheese, and you're ready to rock!
It's gotten pretty cold here in Pittsburgh, and one great way to deal with cold weather is to make soup. We decided to make some delicious potato soup to take the chill off. It's a pretty simply recipe, basically some really good watered down mashed potatoes. It can be varied by adding other veggies, or probably whatever you want, but here's the basics. Take these with a grain of salt, we didn't measure too carefully when making it.
Dice up the onion and garlic and saute in a saucepan with the olive oil until the onions are somewhat carmelized. Peel the potatoes, cut them up into pieces and boil them until soft (just like mashed potatoes). Add the onions, butter, salt and pepper to the potatoes and mash them up. Put over low heat, and add milk and water (you can vary this based on how thick you want it). Simmer for 30-40 minutes and then eat.
