Thanksgiving

Haven't updated in a while, been taking a bit of a "break". Well more like work, school, appointment scheduling, cleaning for the holidays, etc. We spent Thanksgiving at my Father's, live we've been doing for the past several years. It sort of became tradition, my Mom normally goes out of town, and there's really nobody left on my Dad's side of the family, so I spend Thanksgiving with him. It was like a lot of previous Thanksgivings, which I'm glad about since I enjoy the low-key nature of the holiday, at least for me. No huge crowds, much as I love my family I prefer the small get-togethers. It's easier to talk with everyone, stress is normally low on Thanksgiving. Arrive around 10:30 in the morning, Dad already has the turkey in the oven. Chill and watch the Macy's parade like I do every year. As silly as it gets I still enjoy watching it. I convinced Dad to let me make the broccoli casserole mentioned in the previous post. It's sort of a compromise, he always wants to do green bean casserole and my sis and I really don't like mushrooms. So broccoli casserole it was. I think I made it better this time around. I tweaked the recipe a bit, added more chicken bullion and more cheese on top. Instead of toasted almond slivers I used bread crumbs . It came out much better, the sauce had more flavor, it was nice and cheesy and the bread crumbs were a nice touch. When it came to dinner time we started with some fruit cocktail. Dad takes the basic stuff and adds some strawberries and a bit of orange liquor to the juices to balance the sweetness out. Steve, the guy who hasn't eaten fruit in years, tried some. He enjoyed it but put himself into a state of shock at eating the fruit. Dinner itself was great, the turkey was nice and moist. Had mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, my broccoli casserole, cranberry sauce, and stuffing. I love stuffing, I know it's not the healthiest part of the dinner, but I love the texture and the herbs. Dinner overall went real well, I'm glad to say everyone liked the broccoli. We had it with an Argentinian Torrontes to drink. Only needed one bottle of wine for how small a group there was for dinner, but it went so well with dinner. I found out my sister likes wine too, but she's also one of those party-loving college girls too. Don't worry, nobody got hammered. After dinner we spent more time either napping or watching the History Channel. There was a very interesting program on about popular American foods. Would have watched more of it if Dad hadn't woken up and put on the game. I know football is a crucial part to many on Thanksgiving, but I'm really not that into sports. Back to the program, it was very enjoyable. Learned about the history behind Chinese take out, BBQ, Chef Boyardee pastas, old fashioned soda shops and ice cream treats. I was getting antsy around dessert time, much as I loved hanging out I did have to work. Such is the life of a convenience store worker, if you're not going out of town on a holiday work is mandatory. I had to rush through dessert, Dutch apple pie with tea. Very delicious as well, I think my sister's boyfriend may have made it. He's a culinary student, and couldn't be with is at all this year because of work. He started his new job at the Mirror Lake Inn, training under apparently one of the best chefs in the country. My sister took some leftovers home for him though. I'm hoping everyone else has a great Thanksgiving too! Now we have to tackle Christmas. I know I'll be making a bunch of sweets like I do every year. Cookies, fudge, and peanut brittle, oh my!

Spontaneity!

The past few days have been quite creative for me.  Unfortunately it's put me in a sort of an odd haze.  Courtney has had real trouble keeping my attention on things and such.  Last night though, after a long day of work (where we did no business), I got creative with dinner.

Many weeks back, one of my coworkers recommended a few wines to me, one of which was a Fish Eye Shiraz 2003, and now I'm seriously considering her tastes to be lacking, or she's using me to test out wines before she buys them.  Actually the other two weren't that bad (New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc (I got a Nautilus) and the Fish Eye Pinot Grigio)

The label on the back said to have it with grilled meats and vegetables like chicken and peppers with onion and such.  For whatever reason though, I was in the mood for Pizza.  We went to the grocery store and picked up some dough, cheese, some sauce, precooked chicken strips (because we couldn't find any raw ones to sauté) and green peppers.

I had all of this planned in the beginning. After chopping half a green pepper, half an onion and a few garlic cloves, I sauté-ze-zizzled them (f*** you spell check, sauté is a word and so is Sauvignon Blanc) in our huge enamel pan.  Normally if the store had raw chicken in stock, I would have thrown those in with the mix.  Adding pepper never hurts too.  Meanwhile I prepped the pizza. A few weeks ago we had a wine and cheese party, and we brought some Munster, and we never got around to using it. In all we used Sharp white Cheddar, Shredded Mozzarella, the Munster (I know your humming the theme song), a three cheese blend of Parmisian, Asaigo and Romano, and to top it off some Feta.

Oh yeah and before I forget, Courtney decided not to eat a lot of the chicken in her curried chicken take out last night.  We added some of that too.

It ended up looking like this. Upon cutting though, it ended up being a fork and knife pizza since I added too many topping and I stretched the inner dough too thin.  Everything  was okay, wasn't too bad.  if I had more time to plan it would have turned out awesome, but it was pretty good for an experimental pizza with substandard dough and sauce.

The wine though, was CRAP! Drink it to know what lack luster, thin, zero dimensional wine tastes like.  This tasted like typical red wine fruits (cranberries, rasberries, etc.) with a shot of vodka.  It finished horribly with old cheap chocolate, that rasberry taste ended up turning into gushers with a hint of cheap sour apple candy.  It's like they wanted to make an ultra dry fruit bomb.  The Nose wasn't that bad, it actually smelled delightful, but the actual consuming of the wine was a chore.  I didn't even finish my glass, I went to bed with a full stomach under the effects of alchohol and woke up to a half empty glass.  But the pizza made up for it.  I do miss that pizza.

Steak!

Last night, Steve's boss was supposed to come over for dinner. Nothing fancy or business related, he just wanted to have some of our cooking. Like last week (when he said he'd be over for dinner as well), he never showed up. Well that meant more steak for us then.

I've always enjoyed steak, ever since I was little I liked having steak. For years I didn't eat steak for some reason, but as of recent have been eating it more. I'm picky when it comes to meat really. I don't really like gristle, the texture bothers me. Meat has to be just right pretty much for me to enjoy it. Yet almost anything fruit or vegetable related I'm willing to try. I'm just picky with meat, and really don't like seafood.

For last night I tried a teriyaki marinade on a London Broil style steak. With it I made roasted potatoes with balsamic vinegar. I also tried a broccoli casserole, it was a recipe I found in a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook I picked up for a dollar at a local thrift shop.

I've gotten better at steak, normally Steve will pan-sear it, but I broiled the steak last night. I think I have it down, before I would end up overcooking it and the meat would be dry. This time it was nice and juicy. I can't really count how many times I've made the balsamic potatoes, they're just so good. I love the tangy taste of balsamic vinegar, which complimented the herbs well. It's even better how the vinegar will carmelize over the potatoes, which soak in some of the flavor.

I discussed making the broccoli casserole for Thanks giving with my Dad. He thinks it sounds like a good idea, but we have to get the approval of my ultra-picky sister first. The ironic part is she's living with her culinary arts major boyfriend. We'll see how she feels about the broccoli though, rather than just plain steamed broccoli. The sauce it's in is a creamy, stew broth like sauce with lemon juice, and there's shredded cheddar and toasted almonds topping it off. It's quick and easy but brings some good flavor. Of course to top it off for a good meal, we had wine. This time it was a 2005 Fat Bastard merlot. It tasted sort of like fall in a glass, crisp and earthy. It was very delicious though. In fact as I'm typing this I'm having more of it with cheese and crackers. Steve's boss really missed out.

Pasta Primavera and Spur of the Moment Meals

We're really trying to post more here, can't guarantee how frequent posts will actually be. Both of us are fairly busy, I have work and school, Steve has work and his frequent distractions.

It's been one of those days, more like one of those mid-weeks? Things have been odd lately. It's been snowing all day so I didn't bother planning ahead for dinner, didn't want to go to the store. Make do with what we have right? Okay, have some food, have some wine. Decided to go with a pinot grigio and brought up the nifty applet from wine answers.

Pasta primavera it is! I have made this previously and I found a nice, simple recipe that doesn't require enough food for feeding a small army. It was something I could throw together at nine in the evening. Grocery store was closed, Steve was having a tense moment on the phone with a friend of ours.

As usual, I deviated from the recipe, instead of the vegetables listed I used some frozen ones I had in the freezer, and chopped up a few cloves of garlic. It really didn't take that long to make. While it was simmering I threw together a couple simple salads. Used multi-grain spaghetti, for the pasta. Overall it came out very nicely. Nothing big or fancy, but as a meal it was good.

Sometimes it's more fun to just make things spur of the moment. A few nights ago we had pancakes on a whim. Some days I like planning ahead for meals, other days I like that spontaneity. Usually it's more apparent in the summer when days are longer and there's a farmers' market to supply fresh produce. Spontaneity is enjoyable, it jazzes life up a little, breaks away from the humdrum. Tonight we could have just run to a convenience store and grabbed some chicken nuggets or a frozen pizza. Or we could have just made spaghetti and used sauce from a jar, or maybe we could have just had Pop Tarts or something. Instead we decided to take some time to cook dinner, even if it didn't take long it was still something thrown together that had good results. I'm not going to say that the sauce recipe I used was the greatest, it's okay, but it's something that can be thrown together quickly with things we usually have in our fridge. Damn I love ingenuity.

Chef Boyardee Curry?

Courtney decided to get these instant indian cooking packets at a local store the other day after a suggestion from her coworkers. All I have to say about them is that in general that they are like if chef Boyardee did curry dishes. The whole texture and flavor profile just brings me back to when I was 8 years old during summer break having meatball chef Boyardee with those odd hotdog slices and such.

If you can remember that, add lots of fresh curry and you would have this. It's not bad, but it is interesting. I just want to know what the can packaging would look like if it were Indian Chef Boyardee.

Bacon & Eggs and wikipedia

The day before yesterday, Courtney and I decided to have bacon and eggs for breakfast this morning (today). Why did we plan ahead? We had half a package of bacon left over from when we had bacon and pancakes for dinner that day. Not only that, buy we had recently (sept. 15th) bought a set of egg sandwich molds so that we could have bacon egg and cheese sandwiches. Though, it made me wonder why are those particular foods associated as breakfast foods? A quick search through wikipedia tells me this. Most "breakfast" foods in the world carry aspects of the general palette of cuisine that each country really has to offer. The US though has pancakes, waffles, bacon, eggs, and cereal with an assortment of other things that we would eat on the go. Actually in general, a lot of American eating is centered on living on the go. It's what engendered such things as the french paradox, that the french eat so much more than we do but don't gain as much weight. Though it seems that scientists are figuring out is that instead of enjoy our food, we eat a lot of it as fast as possible telling our bodies we need to put it away as quickly as possible. Yeah, we do already know that our cultural eating habits suck. But as we get back to the point, We as americans see bacon and eggs as the iconic breakfast (if those of us don't think of cereal instead). Some of you may even see sausages in there as a step fancier. well another wikipedia search tells us that:

Bacon and eggs is a popular breakfast meal in many countries, mainly in the Anglosphere. It forms an important component of the full English breakfast, the Irish breakfast, and the Ulster fry, for example, and was popularised in the United States by Edward Bernays in the 1920s and 1930s. In order to promote sales of bacon, he conducted a survey of physicians and reported their recommendation that people eat hearty breakfasts. He sent the results of the survey to 5,000 physicians, along with publicity touting bacon and eggs as a hearty breakfast.[1] More recent studies have shown that diets high in saturated fats and cholesterol (such as bacon and eggs) are contribute to heart disease,[2][3][4] however this has been disputed by low carb diet advocates such as the late Dr. Robert Atkins.

Bacon and eggs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All I have to say that. Happy Valentines Day!

Indian Recipe with a Riesling

Okay! First official food-related post. This one is about forays into Indian cooking. This is one of those deals where we were trying to match a meal with a wine. We had a bottle of Riesling that we wanted to try and planned the meal around that.

Thankfully there's all sorts of ways to plan meals and wines. Whites with light meals, reds with heavy, reds with red meat, whites with white, etc. You can base things on flavors that compliment one another once you are more experienced with wining and dining. Or you can check out the applet on Wine Answers

We of course, chose the latter, and it was decided that I'd make an attempt at Indian style cooking.

First I started by making naan, a type of flat-bread. It starts out like normal bread, make the dough, let it rise, punch the dough, etc. Seeing how we both love garlic I made sure to put plenty of it in the dough. Then came the fun part, cooking the naan in a skillet. I've never made naan before so I was clumsy with the first couple pieces. For one thing I didn't flatten the dough enough and for another I turned the burner up too high and ended up setting off the smoke alarm :O I did get the hang of it afterwards though, and it came out rather well.

After I had finished the naan I started on this tomato-chicken recipe I found online. All Recipes is a great site, practically anything you could want is there. Of course there are other great recipe sites as well, this one's just a one-stop-shop in my book. The chicken recipe itself was rather easy, and the ingredients weren't too hard to find. Living in a small town sometimes makes things difficult.

The sauce for the recipe reminded me of the jars of past you can find in a grocery store, only without all the grease. The puree of onion, garlic, and ginger makes a nice base where you add loads of spices; cumin, tumeric, ground clove, cinnamon etc. It wasn't very hot spice-wise, but it was very aromatic. After adding spices and the chicken you add the tomato, and let it simmer for a couple hours.

I really did not think dinner would take so long, but it's an adventure unto itself. After waiting about an hour I started on some curried potatoes as a side dish. That wasn't as intensive as the chicken. Basically boil potatoes, cut them up, throw them in a pan with spices and let them get slightly toasted. I think I over-boiled the potatoes a bit so they were a little mushy, but still good.

After waiting for hours this is how it came out. It was delicious to say the least. I think I did a good job for my first try at real Indian cooking. More intensive than just following a recipe from a curry paste jar, but a whole lot better as well. It also went really well with the riesling we had with it. St Urbans-hof 2006 German riesling. Wow, that stuff was just a pineapple explosion. I never thought I could taste so much pineapple from a non-pineapple source. I liked it though, and for my first time trying a riesling it wasn't that bad. I'll be sure to try more in the future.