Thanksgiving Photos

sweet potato pie with cinnamon roll crust

apple pie

apple+cranberry sauce

bacon cheddar mashed potatoes

stuffing

Kimchi's plate

the spread

action shot of the sweet potato pie

Kimchi trying to swipe Ramona's dinner

salvage the vegetables before they rot (aka potato) soup

Actually, the title is sort of misleading... the potatoes weren't close to rotting but the celery, onion and carrots were.

Sometimes I buy vegetables because they're "good to have" and serve as a good base for a myriad of dishes. These usually include celery, carrots, onion, and garlic. I bought a whole bunch of stuff over the past several months and promptly forgot about them when I stopped cooking. Looking through my pantry this evening, I found a whole bunch of stuff that was about to go bad, so I threw it together to make a soup and it's pretty good.

Potato Cheese Soup

1 medium onion, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
2 medium-large carrots, peeled and diced
2 T olive oil
2-4 cloves garlic, grated
32 oz vegetable stock
32 oz chicken stock
7-8 medium yukon gold potatoes, peeled and roughly cubed
fresh parsley
celery leaves
grated cheddar cheese

Heat olive oil. Sweat onions, carrots, and celery and add a big pinch of salt. Stir occasionally. Add in chicken and veggie stock and bring to a boil. Add in garlic and then the potatoes. Bring it back to a boil and allow the potatoes to cook until tender. Stick blender it and then taste for seasoning. Add salt, if needed (probably so). Stir in parsley and celery leaves. In each bowl, garnish with a large helping a cheddar cheese and homemade croutons.

Fish'n'Taters

I find Guy Fieri to be crazy amounts of annoying. I only really watch Diners, Drive-ins and Dives because it's probably on the better half of Food Network's programming and nothing is more irritating than listening to Bobby Flay mispronounce "chipotle" every five seconds since he is unable to make a dish that doesn't involve chipotle and ancho chile powder. *Anywho* one of the few high points on DDD was a salmon hash that looked tasty enough to attempt to make at home. The results were nomilicious!

I had a frozen salmon filet leftover from Lent and a failed attempt at dieting, so I had the most "elusive" ingredient on the list already on hand. Hence, I definitely *had* to make this.



The salmon also looked kind of gross after being shrink wrapped in plastic in my freezer for a couple months, so I felt much less guilty for chopping up a perfectly good piece of salmon.

Salmon Hash (or "Fish'n'Taters" as proclaimed by the 'sband)

4 oz salmon
1 large russet potato (~1.25 lbs), cubed into ~1/4 in pieces
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 onion, sliced
olive oil, butter
s+p
1/4 tsp paprika

Heat oil over medium in a large pan, add onions, pinch of salt and cook until translucent and a little bit brown.



Add potatoes and a large amount of salt, and a few grinds of black pepper (and maybe some butter if you're feeling adventurous). Cook until the potatoes are mostly done. Add in paprika and stir to coat all potatoes. Add in garlic and stir for 30s until fragrant.



Add in salmon, some more salt and stir the hash to break up and cook the salmon.



So I admit that the pictures don't look completely appetizing, but not all food must be beautiful to be delicious. I think my biggest problem was that I didn't soak the potatoes before frying which meant that they were still incredibly starchy. It wasn't a huge deal, but as one can see, they left quite a mess on the bottom of the pan. Overall, though, this didn't matter much and it was super duper tasty. :)

Why Cayenne Pepper is Entertaining: A Memoir on Corn Chowder

Colby is funny, but more on that later. After perusing enough tastespotting, I've been itching to make some sort of soup. I found one recipe that seemed promising, mostly because it didn't require a stick blender.

Corn Chowder a la Julie
3 tbs butter
3 tbs olive oil
1 carrot, chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 small tomato, deseeded and chopped
1/4 sweet onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 baking potato, cubed into 1 cm pieces
celery leaves, chopped
1 c chicken stock
4 ears corn
1 c cream
herbs
cayenne pepper
s+p

Melt O.O. and butter in a stock pot. Add in onions, celery, carrots, garlic, potato and s+p to taste. Let cook for ~10 minutes, until the onions turn translucent and everything begins to soften. Husk the corn. Take a large bowl and place the corn in the center, cutting parallel to the body in a swift, downward motion to take off the kernels. You'll probably have to flip it upside down because it'll probably be too hard to get all the way down. Once you're done, take the cob and run the back of your knife down where the kernels used to be and get all of the "corn juice" out. Take one of the cobs and divide it into thirds (I just did it by hand). Add in the corn, tomato, and chicken stock. Also, add the corn cob bits. Take this up to a boil and let cook for another 5-10 minutes. Add in the stock and then whatever herbs/spices you want. I used ~1 tsp of Old Bay, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper, 1 tsp dried basil, 1 tsp dried parsley and let's say 2 tbs of celery leaves, chopped fine. Let it simmer for awhile until the flavors start to blend.

So about celery leaves: Colby and I were discussing whether or not to get celery. I decided to make the soup at about 10:30 PM last night (and by "last night", I mean 3.5 hours ago, but *technically* it was last night) standing in front of the produce section at H.E.B. the local friendly megamarket. I have always felt that celery smells wonderful, but tastes disappointing, since all of that wonderful scent is coming from the leaves. According to Rayray and Alton, celery is related to cilantro or parsley or something that's aromatic and herb-y so I took all the leaves from the celery bunch and treated it just like a fresh herb. I felt all thrifty and creative. Small victories. Anywho, it actually turned out wonderful. I'm guessing that as long as you have the celery leaves, s+p, and like cayenne pepper, the taste will still be wonderful.

So during the making of the soup, Colby started making a pork roast. We're apparently impulse cookers. How cute. He was in the kitchen and standing by the sink and I had just dumped the cayenne pepper into the soup and I wanted to clean off the spoon to use it to taste with, but I wasn't about to eat a mouthful of cayenne with the soup. While my back was turned, Colby put the spoon in his mouth, not really knowing what it was and then turned around to me and told me that "the stuff on the spoon" was hot. Tee hee.

why I shouldn't go grocery shopping whilst hungry or stressed

I can't control food purchases. I can only control my nail polish-buying slightly better... which is why I walked out of Meijer without the four dollar bottle of Sally Hansen, but was armed with baby corn, blackberries, and ricotta. *However* I intend to make Thai-something-curry soup with chicken, potatoes, and other stuff; stuffed shells with ricotta+garlic+basil+mushrooms atop a bed of wilted spinach?; and stir-fry with lots of baby corn, broccoli, mushrooms! Go me. We'll see how much of this I actually cook before it all rots. I forgot the mozzarella!!

I need to make corn bread again soon. I think it's draining my soul.

Graduate applications are a pain

So in the past month, I've made risotto, chicken, some sort of dip, cheese straws, holiday cookies, milk chocolate (by accident), more bread, cream biscuits with cheese, roast lemon chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes. Also a couple drop biscuits here and there. I've also been working on my application to grad school and that's kind of awful... so more updates once those are done.

Also

http://loltonbrown.blogspot.com

Cheesy Smashed Potatoes

So given that I had this corn bread (which is pretty much the heaviest bread I've ever eaten and almost a meal in itself, but not quite), I needed something to go with it, so I made mashed potatoes with baby Yukon gold potatoes, garlic (fried in olive oil), basil, and brie. The brie was creamy enough such that I didn't need to add butter or anything else, really. And I found out that my metal spatula is perfect for smashing potatoes. The basil was left over from the MSU Organic Farm club (which is AWESOME and I can't wait to buy more stuff from them).

So my new favorite game is typing in things I have in my refrigerator and "pantry" in google and seeing what kinds of recipes I get. This was one of the first hits I got with "potato brie basil garlic". Yay dinner!