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Carrie and I had bruschetta for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday. It's very important to start off with fresh high quality ingredients when making bruschetta . In this picture you see some of the tomatoes that we used. We bought the tomatoes at Trader Joe's because they have very good produce. We also purchased the basil, garlic and cheese there as well as the bread we used on Saturday. The batch we made on Saturday didn't have quite enough garlic in the butter and the basil needed to be pushed a little harder too. Fortunately we had plenty of both ingredients on hand and used more on Sunday. Even so, the bruschetta was very tasty on Saturday and we had no problem finishing off the 24 pieces in a very short time. This picture shows the tomatoes after being sliced up. Two teaspoons of fresh basil have been added and the mixture has been coated with a few tablespoons of olive oil. The bowl goes into the fridge to blend the flavors for a half hour or so. While the tomatoes ar

A recipe I was following the other day asked for ground lamb. Now I don't know about you, but where I live ground lamb isn't typically stocked in stores. Actually, lamb of any stripe is difficult to find. So then the question became should I use ground beef or ground pork. I didn't even bother to contemplate ground chicken or turkey. Ickers! What I would have liked to do would have been to have a mix of 75% pork and 25% beef but given that the packages of ground pork were 1 pound each, I would have had to make enough to feed an army. I could have bought a pound of pork and a pound of beef and just used a quarter of the beef but that wouldn't have been quite enough. In the end I went with just using 2 packs of pork and nixing the beef entirely. Sorry cows! Or like actress Clara Peller used to say in those Wendy's commercials , Where's the beef? So that's what you see over there on the left. Just ground up piggies. Quite a bit of fat in them. At the beginning

I didn't get started on dinner until almost 9pm so I wanted to fix something fast. If I was smart I'd have just made some cheese and crackers and munched on them while watching tv but instead I went Mexican. But very easy Mexican. I used the recipe on All Recipes that I mentioned last week to make Green Chicken Enchiladas. Yum. First I sauteed some chicken, then I layered the chicken and cheese on some flour wraps. Rolled them up and put them in a pan. Poured green chile sauce over them and baked in an over for 30 minutes. That's as far as I've gotten so far but I hope to be eating in another 15 minutes or so. :-) I changed the cheese from Monterrey Jack to an Italian blend. I hope that doesn't end up tasting funny. :-(

Last night Kim and I stayed up past midnight to greet the New Year. 2010, as I recall. To keep busy we watched the entire first season of Better Off Ted (13 episodes) while practicing preparing different types of puff pastries. We're going to Kim's brother's house today to watch football and have a family dinner and the pastries, both sweet and savory are our contribution. H'ors d'oeuvres for while watching the games. It was fun watching the DVDs and eating our practice session. The savory rolls were doing better than the sweet so today we're probably going to go with a roulade on the sweet side. We hope it'll work out better than individual rolls.

On Sunday I roasted a 15 pound turkey. It'd been in my freezer for a year, ever since the great Thanksgiving sales of last year. So, when the sales started this year and I wanted to buy another two turkeys---I had to make room for them by tossing the old one in the 'fridge. I couldn't eat Mr Turkey right away since I was going to Kim's that weekend, and then I was going to my parents in SC for a few days before we all went to Georgia to spend Thanksgiving with my brother's family. And, come to think of it, I had turkey at all 3 places... And as soon as I got home from my parent's place early on Sunday I had to take out that turkey and start roasting it. It'd been in the refrigerator for over a week and since it was a year old to start with... but another turkey???!! As you can see in the pic above, I cooked the bird until it's tender thighs were nearly 185f. Yum-yum. And I've had dinner every night this week, Sunday through Thursday, using the breast

This is a time of the year that we encounter a lot of leftovers. Kim and I got a start on the season by putting the remaining bits and pieces of the breast meat into a pot filled with gravy along with all the meat from the thighs. This really helped moisten the meat which had gotten a mite dry from it's original over roasting and then a 2-day stay in the fridge. Then we poured this gravy-meat mix on top of a bunch of sauteed veggies and plopped some dumplings on top. The below picture was taken just after we added the dumpling batter. Yum-yum! And we had some mashed potatoes on the side. I loved the stew and mashed potatoes but Kim preferred the dumplings. They were a little mushy for me, but the potatoes were on the salty side and Kim wasn't thrilled with them. Good thing we made both!

Getting in some practice for Thursday. You gotta love some of these Thanksgiving week sales. I bought a pair of turkeys at 40 cents a pound. One is 15 pounds and the other 16, and each cost about the same as a big sandwich would have in a store. I didn't flip over the turkey when I was roasting it. Turns out that's really a good step to follow. The meat still tasted great but it could have been a wee bit moister. Next time I'll flip it over! The potatoes, on the other hand, were absolutely perfect and the gravy was pretty good.

I wanted to make a meal large enough to supply a dinner plus some small meals later on. As a result, Kim and I made chicken and dumplings for dinner (and lunch the next 2 days) this weekend. I was inspired by two things. A Food Network show with Tyler Florence ( Tyler's Ultimate ) in which he made the dish, and also that whole chickens were on sale at Food Lion for 59 cents a pound. We ended up using this recipe for the Chicken and Dumplings though we poached the chicken instead of roasting it, as you can see in the photo below. The main reason for poaching was that the Food Network show did it that way---even though the recipe on the website said to roast it.  That's a 5 pound bird (less than $3!) so we let the bird poach in simmering water for 90 minutes in a dutch oven, uncovered. That's me lifting it out of the water in the picture below. The chicken's meat was still tender but the bird was sufficiently cooked that the spine broke in two while I was lifting it out

I made breakfast for dinner tonight. Twice. And made it seem like a near attempt at suicide both times. Sure, we all have off days in the kitchen but to screw up badly twice in one evening? Sad. The first meal was an just-home-from-work quickie dinner using some hashbrowns as the base. At least that was what I was aiming at. I didn't have any russets on hand so I used red potatoes. I also decided to try out a grating grid I'd not used before. The grind was too fine and that combined with the starch content of the reds made for a truly dismal batch of hashbrowns. The worst ones I've ever made. Bleah! A few hours later I made an batch of scrambled eggs with onions and bell peppers. Didn't saute the veggies long enough so they were "crunchy" and the eggs weren't seasoned well enough. Jeeze. There's some days you really should just stay out of the bloody kitchen. :-(

I picked up an excess of food on Thursday in prep for Kim's visit. She'd not been to my house yet and I wanted to be sure to have enough food on hand in case we didn't go out to dinner. The main items were a 3 pound bag of chicken thighs and a 4 pound package of 97% hamburger. Normally I'd go for smaller sizes but these were the ones that were on sale---and you know about me and sales! Kim and I went out to a Mexican restaurant on Friday night but for the most part we ate in after that. In so doing we managed to go through the entire package of hamburger but we never touched the chicken. I'll have to use that up on Monday, I guess. The picture here is me making a rather large meatloaf with the last 2 pounds of meat. It actually turned out quite well and we ate it along with some mashed potatoes that I whipped up while watching The Amazing Race. Rampant domesticity!

The lovely Judy of Imagine fame asked about the recipe for these tasty treats. Well, here goes: One pound hamburger 1/2 onion, chopped 1 TB brown sugar 1 TB Kraft BBQ sauce cheddar cheese, shredded 2 cans Grands biscuits Preheat oven according to biscuit directions, sauté onions until nearly done. Add hamburger, mince in pan until in small crumbles, add BBQ sauce and brown sugar, sauté until brown. Take biscuits out of cans. Using muffin pans, line each cup with one biscuit. Spoon meat mixture into lined cups. Sprinkle shredded cheese on top of each. Bake according to biscuit directions until biscuits are brown and cheese is melted. (makes 18 biscuits) According to Kim's hard won wisdom it's a good idea to wait a few minutes after removing from oven before you take the biscuits out of the cups. They lift out easily at that point. Dig in.

I watched the Food Network trifecta of young stars today. Melissa d'Arabian, Brian Boitano and Aaron McCargo. Two of them won The Next Food Network Star contest and the third is a famous ice skating Olympian. All young (40, 45, and 38 respectively) and good looking---especially Melissa. She's a cutie! I thought Melissa had a very good show today (her third episode) but since the food was salmon and asparagus, I had no interest in duplicating her dishes. Blech. Boitano's second episode wasn't nearly as good as the first but even so it was far better than your average cooking show. That guy is a natural in front of the camera. However every one of his dishes used bacon. I'm the one person in the world that hates bacon. Nasty stuff. So that show, while interesting to watch, held no culinary appeal. Bacon martinis? Yikes. And Big Daddy did his routine of big BBQ type flavors which I don't like. Damn. I went 0 for 3 in the food inspiration department. But it was ni

Last Monday I posted about a Moroccan themed dish that Melissa d'Arabian's prepared on her new show Ten Dollar Dinners (Food Network). Well, I finally got around to making it myself. You can get the recipe by following this link . Here's all the ingredients it takes to make the meatballs and the sauce: Let's tackle the sauce first. So, you want to chop up some garlic and onions and then saute them: Then add in around 4 ounces of olives plus lemon zest: Next up add a half cup of white wine and let it reduce by half: Now we add a quarter cup of chicken stock along with 14 ounces of diced tomatoes plus all the spices and such: Ta-dah! That's the sauce. The cumin and ginger give it some bite. Now let it hang out while we move on to making the meatballs. First mix an egg into 2 TB of tomato paste and then add spices: Then add in the meat-- 12 ounces or so of hamburger: At this point grind up a third of a cup of oats and add to the hamburger along with salt and pepper:

I was watching some Food Network this weekend and I caught one of those biography shows they have (Chefography) on the Pat and Gina Neely. It was quite good. They're such a great couple and I enjoy watching them interact. It's surprising they don't have more Chef-duo shows like that on. I just wish I liked barbecue more. That's pretty much all the Neelys do, and I just don't like the taste. The other show I really enjoyed this weekend was the second episode of Melissa d'Arabian's new show Ten Dollar Dinners . If you'll recall, Melissa defeated Jeffrey Saad to win Season 5 of The Next Food Network Star. Anyway, the first episode was Perfectly-Priced Parisian and I didn't like the recipes very much and Melissa seemed a bit jumpy. Okay, she's always high energy--I should say she was jumpier than usual. But always cute as can be! Yesterday's episode was titled Less Money, More Moroccan and the food really looked good. I plan on trying out the th

It was bloody hot here this weekend. Way up in the 90s on Saturday and in the low 90s both Friday night and Sunday. It was not a weekend to be spending a lot of time outdoors---so we didn't. Cooking and reading were the name of the game this time. I was reading Michael Connelly's new book The Scarecrow and Julie was reading an old favorite, PG Wodehouse's Carry On, Jeeves . On the food side, we had rotisserie chicken and bakery bread on Friday night then used the leftover chicken to make risotto for Saturday with mushrooms and snow peas. Sunday morning had Julie making some Potatoes O'Brien and me eating them. A lovely division of labor, y'know? I can eat all day whereas I'm only good for an hour or so of cooking per day. BTW, I really enjoyed The Scarecrow and heartily recommend it. It's currently on the Best Sellers list so you can get it at a good discount. It's the sequel to Connelly's book The Poet which was published way back in 1996. The P

Like the title says, we have a picture here of a rabbit and one of dinner. Both pictures taken today. It was a lovely sunny day with just a hint of threatening rain clouds in the distance. And that's not a metaphor for the rabbit either.

Today was a killer. My boss was making a lot of demands on my time. Since I'd not gotten to sleep until nearly 5am I really wasn't on top of my game. In fact I was friggin' useless. First thing this morning I took some notes on a cartoon-style illustration that my boss wanted of a chemical pathway. She kinda described what she needed and my poor frazzled brain did the interpreting. I don't have a lot of hope for the results but I won't start on that until Sunday. Anyway, that's for a grant she'll be turning in at the end of next week. Then I took pictures of several groups of slides that I'd worked on during the week. I was using a great new microscope that the imaging lab bought this month but it still takes a lot of time to get good photos. By the time I finished them it was nearly 1pm and my brain was crashing. Somehow I made it to 4:30pm by doing a lot of errands that required walking to different buildings on campus. If I hadn't done so much wa

Like I mentioned yesterday, tonight was "meet the parents" night for me. It's been a while since I've had to do this. My last few relationships have been remarkably relative free. But no longer---Julie's parents have a house just a few miles from hers, her sister lives right around the corner from them and one of Julie's brothers is just a half hour away in Wake Forest. Eeeek. That's the start of a bean dip that Julie put together after work for the family gathering. Three of the attendees had recent birthdays and one of the brothers, the one living in CA, was married 3 months ago. Lots of reason for some celebrating, eh? This is a cat. I don't approve of the species but do admit they often are photogenic. We promptly grilled him up after this picture was taken. Only evil animals were harmed in the making of this post. We promise! The name was Tifa, aka Cream. RIP. (btw, I didn't detect even a hint of cream taste---just goes to show, don't