Beef and Tomato

A copy of Better Homes and Gardens was floating around the office a couple days ago. I flipped through it and saw a recipe that involved beef steaks, cherry tomatoes, potatoes and olives. I figured I'd try it.

In my hasty scribbling, I failed to note what exactly I was supposed to do with the olives, so I just added them to the tomatoes. Seems to've worked. The oregano too. I also eliminated a pan - you're supposed to fry the steaks, then put the tomatoes on the same pan to cook, while you fry up the pre-microwaved potatoes in a separate pan. I did meat, potato, then tomato. The meat is a bit cold, but otherwise, this came out really well :-)

Meatballs

It turns out that ground pork is sold in 1.25 lb packages. Who knew? It also turns out that Safeway, on Tuesday, had no chard, and prior to shopping, I didn't see the note that said you can use spinach instead. So I got dino kale, which I like anyway.

Some of the kale is all flavorful, and some less so, I think it probably has to do with how much oil and garlic that bit of kale came in contact with. *shrug*

The meatballs are a touch dry - it would have helped if I'd noticed the "turn once" direction in the instructions. So I flipped them and cooked them for an extra minute or two. They're also not as sweet as I expected. But I do like the pine nuts.

However, this Real Simple recipe worked out quite well.

Day Late St Patrick

Apparently it's been a while since I posted. I know I've cooked since the beginning of the month.

At any rate, today I made corned beef. Boil it to death. Add potatoes, boil it some more. Add some cabbage, carrot, onion, boil again. Take it out, add butter to the veggies, and eat.

Well, simmer after most of the boils.

Either way, I could have done it in the crockpot, but I'm glad I didn't. It would not have fit. It also took a lot less time, obviously. It worked.

It's pretty tasty, but oddly, I like the veggie part better than the beef part. Kind of surprises me, because I usually like meat a lot better. The cabbage was quite good, even. Of course, adding butter to it all probably had something to do with that...

Pork shoulder butt

I kind of made this recipe a couple weeks ago, but I failed in two integral ways: One, I failed to notice that the recipe called for the pork shoulder to be cut up into pieces, and Two, I failed to add any vegetation. If you don't cut the pork up, half of it is above the liquid level, and is a bit dry and isn't saturated with flavor. If you don't add vegetation, it still tastes good, it just has no vegetables. I did learn that it wasn't particularly spicy with less than a tablespoon of the chili garlic sauce (which scares me). Oh, and while I ultimately made it and ate it... I almost didn't, because I forgot to set the timer properly, so it thought I wanted to cook it at night, rather than during the day like I'd planned. Nothing is more disappointing than coming home to a chunk of raw meat when you thought you were going to come home to actual food.

So I tried again.

I learned last time that apparently one does not buy a pork shoulder. One buys a pork shoulder butt. The internet has been a little unclear as to why this is; I have gathered that the term refers to a meaty cut from the shoulder region that's typically fairly fatty. OK. Sure.

So I mixed up the soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, and a healthy spoonful of the chili garlic sauce. I trimmed fat and cut my meat up into chunks and added it to the crockpot. I turned it on (no timer this time!), and went to work.

I stopped at the grocery store for bok choy. I came home. I chopped bok choy. I added it to the pot. I let it sit for more than the 5min recommended in the recipe (wanted my greens actually cooked). I ate it.

Yum. Needs something more though. Oh yeah, maybe the rice that the recipe recommends (was being lazy). Or more variation of flavor - not sure what I'd put in though at this point. Just a touch spicy, pretty flavorful, and has greens in it. What else could I want? :-)

Kale sausage again

I did it again. This time with Nugget's country breakfast sausage (the version that came without the casing) and dino kale. Just as good as it was before, but different. I think I prefer the ginger/soy/pineapple sausage, but they're both tasty :-)

Sausage and Kale

A friend of mine posted a kielbasa and kale pasta recipe on Facebook the other day. Since I'm supposed to be feeding the chinchillas high calcium, relatively low phosphorus greens (for which kale qualifies), I figured I should try actually cooking the stuff for myself.

I bought a bunch of regular kale. About 1/3 - 1/2 of it went to the chins. The remainder got chopped coarsely. Cooked up a couple strips of bacon, sliced up two sausages (I got an Italian sausage and a ginger-garlic-soy sauce-something else sausage at Whole Foods), fried those, added a touch of duck fat (left from the confit a few weeks ago). Added the kale. Added some fresh basil (recipe says julienned, but I just chopped it) and a bit of dried thyme (recipe called for fresh... but I have already learned that I do not have the patience for fresh thyme). Cooked all that up for a few minutes, then added rigatoni pasta. Top with a bit of Parmesan cheese.

Tasty. I think I like Dino kale better - maybe next time do half a bunch of each? For two sausages, I did not use enough kale anyway - could easily double, and probably triple, the amount of greens. The ginger/soy sauce/whatever sausage is really tasty - don't bother with the Italian next time. Overall a quite satisfying meal.

Salmon

So I decided to try this recipe.

I went to Whole Foods and lost my mind and bought really expensive wild-caught king salmon. Like, more than twice the price of the other salmon. It like, doubled my grocery bill for the evening. So I thought I'd better cook the salmon before I forgot about it and it went bad. But in case the recipe wasn't any good, I decided to halve the recipe and freeze the other half of the really expensive salmon.

It's actually really good. I used the Nugget brand clover honey, cos that's what I could find. It could actually use a stronger honey (it's a moderately flavored honey - not super strong, but it's not bland either). And flatter pieces of salmon (to increase the amount of honey sauce). And more sauce (I used most of the whole-recipe's amount of sauce on the salmon). The salmon is tender and flavorful. The spinach and bell pepper concoction is actually really good. I had my reservations, especially because of the chunks of ginger, but mostly the ginger isn't overwhelming, and the spinach tastes good and the bell peppers are cooked enough and stuff.

Overall, I approve of this recipe. Look at me getting my Ω-3 FA :-)

Stuffed chicken artichoke with tomato

So tonight I decided to actually cook actual food. I followed this recipe. Came out ok. Didn't add bread, cos I didn't have any (and decided not to buy any when I went to the store).

Not enough cheese and spices for the stuffing. The chicken breasts I got were not cooked after 7 minutes per side - needed quite a bit longer to cook through. The shallots with the tomatoes were a bit strong - maybe saute first next time? And it turns out thyme has teeny tiny little leaves on stems - stripping the leaves off the stems took too long. Other than that, it was easy to make - just took longer than the 20 minutes claimed in the instructions.

However, it worked. It tastes fine. Not exactly a 5-star recipe, but nothing particularly wrong with it.

Chicken bean surprise

Crockpotted today. A random mashup of ingredients.

Chicken thighs. A leek. A can of cardoza beans. A few carrots. A large can of diced tomatoes. Garlic. Napa cabbage. Salt, rosemary, thyme, sage.

It's a little bland (not quite enough salt or herbs) but otherwise seems to be quite edible. At least it's got lots of fiber!

And it's a good thing I resisted the temptation to add water or broth to the pot, since when I got home, there was plenty of liquid in the concoction.

Duck confit

Today I attempted a cheater's version of duck confit. Not quite all of the fat rendered (the legs I didn't eat (I made 4 altogether) are in the oven again to see if a bit more time and heat will render it out), but it's still tasty. Sauteed a bit of Dino kale with mushrooms and sage with some of the rendered duck fat. The kale, obviously, wasn't as tasty as the duck was :P

Addendum: another hour or so in the oven renders out most of the fat, and the meat becomes more tender and flavorful. So the 90min from the original recipe isn't quite enough. There's a bit of fat left that I will try rendering. Turns out that 4 duck legs yields more fat than one whole duck does. Who knew? Should probably melt and strain the fat I've got, since there are random brown bits in there, from both episodes. Oh, and it's a shame I ate all my bread earlier today, because now what am I going to soak up the bit of duck fat left in the pan with? Sigh.

Lots of food

In the last week, I've roasted a duck (a little dry), crock-potted a leg of lamb, made pumpkin cheesecake. None of these quite comprise a full meal though, since there wasn't as much vegetable matter as there should have been, so they don't really count. Though the lamb had carrots and shallots in the pot too :-)