What did we do with all that basil?

We got an aerogrow and recently had our first haul of herbs. It was pretty cool, I have to admit. I am notorious for my black thumb. The only plant I've ever managed to keep alive was a crazy spider plant that I totally ignored.

I have even killed mint. It's ridiculous.

But Mike set up the Aerogarden and things started growing. And growing, and growing. We just cleaned it out and started a fresh batch of seeds. Jalapenos, cubanelles, and cute little grape tomatoes. If it goes as well this time around as it did last, I'd expect plant within the next couple of weeks. Basically it speeds up the growth cycle by keeping a timed light on most of the day.

The last batch of seeds we did were basil, cilantro, dill, and sage. The sage never really took off (there was some chives in there, too, that never did anything at all). The dill got used in pickling mostly. The cilantro in many batches of salsas and various other Mexican inspired dishes. And the basil? We used that in Caprese salads and cracker stacks, Spicy Pasta Salad with Smoked Gouda, Tomatoes, and Basil, and, of course, pesto!

In fact, I was able to use my basil and some of the heavy cream from our local dairy together in Pioneer Woman's Pasta With Pesto Cream Sauce. Super yum! My latest batch was over some Buitoni Wild Mushroom Agnolotti and it came out fantastic. A keeper for sure for nights when I want something tasty with minimum effort.

My Peri Peri Chicken and Peppers

Hello, world! We hit up Austin recently on a short road trip to Texas, and of course I had to stop at Tears of Joy -- the best hot sauce shop ever!

Mike laughs at me about the hot sauce thing and frequently blames any ailment I might complain about on my penchant for eating spicy food. Since I couldn't go crazy, though, I limited myself to five bottles (plus Mike's bottle of Susie's, which was at one point too hot for even me).

One of my haul was a Peri Peri sauce made by Zulu Zulu. The shop usually has a handful of sauces out to try, and they had a similar Peri Peri out, but Zulu Zulu's bottle was larger and my idea was to make something in the sauce rather than using it as a condiment. Plus the guy in the store said the two brands tasted pretty similar.

Using a Jamie Oliver recipe as inspiration, I seasoned two chicken breasts with salt and pepper and sliced them into thin, two-inch long strips and sauteed them in some oil until they were cooked through. I then removed the chicken breasts and tossed some sliced onion and bell pepper in the skillet, cooking them through.

Meanwhile, I poured a layer of the Peri Peri sauce into the bottom of a casserole dish. Once the onions and peppers were done, I threw all of it (cooked chicken strips, onions, and peppers) into the casserole with the sauce and tossed it together. Then I baked it the oven (preheated) at 400 for about twenty minutes so that the chicken and peppers could really absorb the flavors of the sauce.

Jamie's recipe has a homemade piri piri -- and is from his 30-Minute Meals show in the UK, so I like the way the recipe is laid out telling you exactly what to do when for the time conscious cook. Also keeping his recipe in mind, I roasted off some potatoes (sweet and red) and tossed them with some olive oil, Mexican cheese and red chilies.

The sauce had a bit of a kick, but not too much. Probably a bit hot for mom, but I thought it made a great summer-time meal. It wasn't terribly heavy and the heat was enough to cool me off (funny how that works, right?). I found some coconut soda water and mixed a bit with some mango nectar (thicker than a standard juice) to go alongside. Yum!

I Swear I've Been Cooking!

I do, I swear it. It's been a long few weeks, but I have been in the kitchen.

I can't remember if I've mentioned it yet, but one of the best gifts I got last year, and one of the most useful, is my new foodsaver. For a while, I'd been buying bulk and freezing (meat, I mean) for those evenings when I really didn't want to head out to the grocery store and found myself scratching my head as to what to make for dinner.

Now that I have the foodsaver, I don't feel so bad about using so many ziplocs, for one, and an individual chicken breast defrosts a lot easier than two stuck together in the same bag. Never mind the fact that the meat doesn't get all freezerburned as easy (they tend not to stay in there long enough for that in the ziplocs anyway, but it is a plus for the foodsaver).

So I was in this spot a few weeks back. What to make, no desire to head to the store, and just staples in the kitchen. So I defrosted two chicken breasts and headed to my collection of saved recipes (yes, I hoard. I see something that sounds good, I bookmark it, and eons later I've yet to try it).

I picked Rachel Ray's Latin Chicken and Rice Pot -- a one pot meal with a bell pepper and green olive salsa and avocado sour cream. Plus the weather was nasty and this seemed like the right thing to warm me up. Throw on some Wallander and I made a weekend out of it with leftovers, too.

The recipe was super easy to put together. I don't know that I'd consider it a favorite, but if you're used to jambalaya, this is sort of a variation on that. Same basic cooking technique. The only real problem I had, though, was in cooking the rice. Rice tends to take longer here in Colorado anyway, and nowhere in the recipe does it say to cover the rice while cooking, which resulted (as I'd suspected it would) in a dry pot with raw rice. No big deal, I added more stock, brought it back to a boil, and covered it to cook longer.

This Dessert is So Wrong, But So Good!

So Saturday rolled around nice and sunny and pretty warm out. Mike bough grass seed to patch the yard and I found an unabeled container of something in the freezer. I decided to be brave and let it thaw so we could see what it was (it could have been any number of things ranging from homemade spaghetti sauce to chili).

Turned out it was Mike's homemade spaghetti sauce after all. We had spaghetti and meatballs and watched Friday's Fringe.

Then the sweet tooth craving hit.

I don't actually make a whole lot of desserts. We're not a desserts every night couple. It's more of a desserts on special occasions. Or if I happen to be walking the baked aisle at Whole Foods (because they usually have tasty looking treats).

I wasn't feeling too hot on Saturday either, a combination of allergies and a sinus infection, so whatever I came up with had to be completely on hand and very easy to make. I started to reach for the apple crisp recipe I mentioned last, when I remembered Banoffee Pie!

I few months back, Saveur posted this classic Banoffee Pie recipe and I'd stored it until I had the ingredients. But my bananas were always overripe, or Mike had eaten them all, or there was no sweetened condensed milk in the house. You get the picture.

It all fell into place on Saturday. Not only did I have everything on hand, I even had heavy cream from the local dairy!

Banoffee, if you don't know, is a banana toffee pie. A cream pie. No baking required. You assemble your crust (we used graham crackers). You cook your sugar, butter, and sweetened condensed milk (you know, I don't know how my grandmother felt about bananas, but I can't believe I didn't find this recipe in time to make it for her). You pour your filling into your crust and one full Fringe episode later, you slice your bananas on top and cover it all with freshly whipped cream -- as I said, I used the heavy cream from our local dairy, no sweetener added. It cut the toffee pudding quite a bit, which was nice.

And since I did two small individual ramekins, we have toffee leftover for dipping!

So wrong on so many levels. I mean, if you spend all day at the gym, you can probably not feel guilty about eating a dessert that's the equivalent of bananas smothered in sweetened condensed milk, but man, it tastes so good!

Sorry no pics. We ate it all.

Easy Apple Crisp

So Easter was going a last minute affair in our house this year. Up until just two days before, I had been planning to do a small pork roast for just the two of us. I'd debated about a ham, but the only ones I'd been able to find were 10lbs or more -- way too much for just two people, although we probably would have made a valiant effort.

But it just so happened that we made plans with company at the last minute. I got one of those spiral sliced jobs with a sweet glaze (because I love sweet glaze on my ham) and I made the on-again-off-again hashbrown casserole (on-again-off-again because it only seems to come out the way I like it about half the time), as well as a creamy broccoli cauliflower soup that was a first time recipe for me.

I wasn't sure about dessert, though. I actually tried to make my grocery trip as short and sweet as possible due to the crowds and I didn't grab anything sweet. I think my initial thought was just that we're always so stuffed, dessert gets left over for us to gorge on later. Something I definitely didn't need.

But we had a ton of apples. A TON! And I had all the basics, including a refrigerated pie crust (just one, though). So very, very last minute (morning of, while the ham was reheating) I searched for quick apple crisp recipes and found this one from the Neelys.

It's a keeper and will be my go to for last minute desserts from now on. So quick and simple to put together! We even had some Boulder Ice Cream brand Sweet Cream ice cream in the fridge (which makes a much yummier topping than simple vanilla or whipped cream!). It was probably the most perfect, inexpensive and tasty dessert I could have found for that day. In truth, I waffled between it and an apple cake recipe that I really want to try, but decided that the oven adventures were not something I wanted to wrestle with considering the rest of the meal I was trying to put together.

Homemade Tomato Soup

I made tomato soup last night. This in spite of the fact that I spent all day looking and pictures of hamburgers and onion rings! Actually, it was to be a meal of tomato soup and burgers, but the meat didn't defrost in time and I really didn't want to go grocery shopping. So it was tomato soup and grilled cheese. Yum!

The best tomato soup ever is one that I've had many times at Cafe Foods in Boulder. Dennis makes a Tomato and Cream Cheese Soup that is absolutely to die for. I highly recommend it if you're out Boulder way at lunch time during the week (they have a killer egg salad, excellent sandwiches, and usually five daily soup options).

With the Cookbooker Smitten Kitchen Challenge, I decided to see of she might have a tomato soup recipe hiding in her archives. Sure enough, there was. You can find the recipes here.

I actually had everything on hand for once. I had in mind that I wanted tomato soup last time I went to the store, so I bought two large cans of canned tomatoes specifically for that purpose. The most time consuming portion of this recipe (and oddly somewhat relaxing and meditative) was seeding the canned tomatoes. After that, it was pretty smooth sailing. The soup was, as the title of the recipe promised, creamy, and the perfect complement to the grilled cheese (Mike's addition to dinner).

I've got leftovers for lunch as well. Nice considering it's been raining all week! Next time I may Dennis it up by adding some cream cheese or a little swirl of pesto instead.

Pickles!

We've got pickles going, folks. I'm trying this Homesick Texan recipe for refrigerator dills. They still have 2-3 days to go, so I'll update you then.

I've attempted pickles before. My uncle had a super easy sweets recipe that actually involved adding stuff to grocery store sliced dills. They're sweet and tangy, but not from scratch pickles.

Ages ago, I attempted various bread and butter recipes that didn't quite work out. I've not given them ago since.

Recently, though, I did have luck with Glass Onion's fabulous overnights (you can find the recipe here). They're fantastic, you can cut the recipe very easily, and they're awesome in the GO Cole Slaw (I'll have to try them in deviled eggs now).

We're pickle fans here, there's no question. In the dill world, Claussen's are second to none for us. I love bread and butters in my potato salad and I will use just about any pickle on a sandwich, depending on the various other fillers.

I've always wanted to make my own, though. One day, I'll find a good fit that I can adapt and twist around -- I would love an excellent SPICY bread and butter. And deli dills knock Vlasic out of the water any day.

Two more days till we get to see if Homesick Texan comes through for me (it was a good way to use up our jungle of dill in the Aerogrow at any rate!).

I Didn't Know Shortbread Was Supposed to Be Difficult

I attempted shortbread for the first time this weekend. I have my grandmother's old recipe, which is very similar to the recipe in Jael McHenry's The Kitchen Daughter. And given that she said you could put the dough together in the food processor, I thought it would be a quick and easy set of cookies to bake (that wouldn't be affected by our stupid altitude issues).

What I wasn't counting on was discovering that our ovens are both a POS. Yes, surprise, surprise. The ovens in the house that we're renting are about a thousand years old and now bake unevenly. Which means that in addition to all the issues I have trying to bake at high altitude (flat cookies), I now have to account for the fact that anything on the back of the pan will be cooking at a higher temp than the front.

But, I didn't discover that until after I fought with the first batch. See, what my recipes don't tell you and what this recipe does tell you, is that you need to chill your dough. You're working with COLD butter. As the warmth of your hands and the working over of the dough heats up that butter, the dough becomes more sticky and hard to work with.

So, chill your dough. Other than that, a test throwaway batch to see how your oven is working might be a given. My grandmother's recipe actually says bake 40-45 minutes at 275. Yikes! I found that the 25 minutes at 350 from the other recipe was still too long in my oven. About 15 minutes at 350 yielded half a batch of ok cookies (because the back ones burned). And 15 minutes at 325 gave me a chance to remove some pretty back cookies and set the front ones back in for 2 more minutes.

Agh. Baking is really not supposed to be this difficult!

Biscuits and Gravy

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of reading Jael McHenry's debut, The Kitchen Daughter. It's fiction, but it does include a handful of recipes (the main character can see ghosts when she prepares a dish from a handwritten recipe card). It's a sweet read and seeing as how McHenry is a foodie herself (she has recipes at her Simmer blog) so I decided to give a few of The Kitchen Daughter recipes a try.

First off, I've never made homemade biscuits. I think I rolled mine too flat, though, because while they weren't dense, they weren't fluffy and flaky either. Well... that's not entirely true. The first batch were rolled out thinner than the next and those second batch biscuits were more what I'd hoped the whole batch would be. So now I know.

For the sausage gravy, I bought some breakfast sausage at Herbs (so yummy!). I ate too much. Probably not the healthiest meal I've had all week, but it was a pretty tasty one!

You can find the recipe and an excerpt of The Kitchen Daughter here at Scribd.

Oh, my goodness! Dr Pepper Pork!

To continue with the pork madness we had last week... I'd planned to make Pioneer Woman's Spicy Dr. Pepper Shredded Pork the day she posted the recipe. I mean, what could be more enticing than a pork shoulder slow cooked in Dr. Pepper?!

I made a run to Herb's and they cut me a 4lb+ pork shoulder roast. Fortunately there was no bone so I chopped it in half and vacuum packed a portion for later. That was the hardest part of the recipe (by which I mean this is the simplest recipe in the world!). We ate it with flatbread (no tortillas on hand that night), roasted potatoes, and green beans. Yum! Mike had leftover sandwiches and we even did some nachos with it one day.

Note to Mom: the sauce is a bit spicy. I'm sure it would be just as tasty without the peppers or with less peppers. Maybe. I actually used a smaller can of chipotles, just because it was what I had on hand.

Ohh, and to Texas it all out, we can finally get Blue Bell here :)

Jamie Oliver's Goulash

I got a foodsaver for Christmas and I love it. For a while, I've been buying meat in bulk so that I'm prepared on days that I don't want to run to the grocery store for dinner. Course, it means planning that morning for dinner that night to allow defrosting time, but it's come in handy always having chicken breasts or pork chops on hand.

Monday was definitely a clean your fridge night. My method of late has been to find a couple of on hand ingredients -- in this case pork chops and bell peppers -- and search for a recipe that works with what I've got in the fridge, freezer, and pantry.

I chose Jamie Oliver's Spicy Pork and Pepper Goulash even though it called for pork shoulder when all I had on hand were pork chops (got one in the freezer now, though). I figured it was a decent substitute, especially in terms of making a three hour dish in a little less time, and I was right. So the only changes I really made were to trim and cut the chops into pieces and saute where the recipe calls for rendering the fat from the roast.

I cooked it for about an hour and a half, knowing that the three hour shoulder roast cook time might be overkill for my little chops, and the meat turned out nice and tender. Barring the fact that the flavors would obviously have more time to develop and that a shredded, tender roast is much different from chops, this was definitely a keeper dish either way. (And we ate it over egg noodles tossed with a little butter and parsley rather than the rice in this case.)

Here's the link to the recipe on Food Network, it can also be found in Oliver's Jamie At Home.

My Yellow Curry Mistake

So I do some shopping at our international stores and a while back I bought two cans each of the red, green, and yellow curry pastes. By now I've used all of the red and green as I frequently come across recipes that call for one or the other, but I'd not done anything with the yellow just yet.

One cold day two weeks ago, I decided I wanted some lentil soup. Lentil with curry and coconut and veggies. But all I had was yellow. No big deal, I thought. Yes, sort of a big deal.

I opened the yellow curry and spooned a massive spoonful into my soup when I realized it smelled fishily familiar. Fishy. Yep. 34% fish paste. I'm not sure if all yellow curry pastes are the same, but I definitely was not expecting it (hey, you gotta try new stuff, but maybe I'd be better off checking those ingredients before experimenting, right?).

Note to self: keep more green curry on hand and don't substitute yellow when you really want green. The soup turned out ok -- not the flavor I was looking for obviously (also tried to hurry the lentils, which never works). Not a big hit, but not a total flub.

Hello again!

First off, if you're reading this, big thanks!

Now, my dilemma with this blog since day one has been this: I don't have pretty pictures. I have a good camera, but I'm not a good photographer. I take food pics for the blog (because all the food blogs I read have such great pics) and then agonize over how bleh they are.

My other issue has been the fact that while I cook a lot, I rarely have original recipes of my own and just linking kind of seemed like a cop out.

I've decided I don't care. I don't, not anymore.

Here's the thing, I have come to realize that I'm losing track of where my recipes come from and when I cook them. Then I sit, scratching my head, trying to figure out what that chicken dish from last month was and where I found the recipe.

That said, I'm also sending recipe recs to family and friends and then trying to track down the sent email and resend to someone new.

So, from now on, regardless of whether I've got a pretty pic or an original recipe, I'm going to use this as a log of meals. I'll link to recipes online or tell what cookbook I got them from if there is no recipe online. I'll also have any tweaks or changes I've made (so that mom can see if she tries it at home).

I'm turning over a new leaf and getting back on track, starting now.