Recipe for Disaster Aversion

I wish I had a can of Chicken and Stars here in the physics building because that's pretty much the best weapon against Poutybf Syndrome. You take a can of C&S and add in half a can of water, heat heat heat stir stir stir and all bad feelings go away. Except all I have here is Chex Mix and Mountain Dew because I'm healthy like that.

Refrigerator Pie: Part Doo

I'm pretty sure that quiche is a very amazing breakfast food, even if it is 2:40 PM. I set out last night to do laundry and make a spinach-artichoke quiche, but it turns out that artichokes are a) hard to deal with and b) fucking spiny, screw that. It became a spinach+mushroom+garlic quiche. It should be noted that Julie + wilted spinach == bff returns true.

two large handfuls of flat leaf spinach destemmed and washed
2 tsp? of olive oil
2 tbs butter
1/2 thing of roughly chopped mushrooms
mozzarella
colby jack
3 big CLOVES of garlic
s/p/garlic salt

put a little bit of olive oil (like 1 tsp?) into a pan and make sure that you coat the entire bottom. put in spinach... turn turn wilt wilt. season with salt. Try not to eat all of that spinach whilst you're cooking because seriously... you <3 spinach. Add in the 2 tbs butter (this may be excessive and it was kind of like I was boiling the mushrooms in butter) and when it melts, add in the mushrooms and season with garlic salt + a bit of kosher s/p at the end. More on that later. Anywho, take out the mushrooms when they're done. Add in a bit more olive oil, put in the minced garlic and fry until they start to look light brown. add the spin+mush+garlic to a pie crust making sure it's well-mixed and there is space for cheese+royale mixture. Add in handfuls of cheese at your own discretion. Pour in the royale (2 eggs + 1 c heavy cream beaten together) making sure the mixture sinks to the bottom. Sprinkle some kosher salt over top of the pie. Into the oven at 350 for ~45 minutes.

So the quiche came out pretty okay. The garlic didn't come out exactly as I had hoped because apparently Chris' stove runs at 5778 K. Still... if you heat up the garlic slower, it should be better, not bitter. Also, this is the thing about garlic salt. I like using it with mushrooms because I feel like mushrooms pick up the flavor better with garlic salt because it's super concentrated granular garlic. Also salty. Anywho, tonight looks like a good night to try to make the poor man's alfredo sauce, since i have lots of leftover cream and Colby's back in town. Yay heart disease!

Also, the next time, I'm going to look for either a better pie crust or a crust recipe because the crust, I feel, is too sweet. Puff pastry would make this kind of excellent, but again with the heart disease.

Burgerama

So my new "experiment" is with ground beef, which I can't touch without gloves because obsessive compulsive disorder is an interesting phenomenon when it meets raw meat. Anywho. So I've been making various cheeseburgers with varying degrees of success. My latest is mixing in minced shallots, garlic, cheese, and bbq sauce. I used colby-jack the last time because *someone* doesn't like cheddar. Also, I find it ironic that Colby doesn't like Colby cheese. Just a thought. Anywho, Chris is donating some Gorgonzola to me, so maybe that will become a beef-y burgery meal. Or maybe it'll make Colby sick. We shall see.

Burgers! (this is mostly for you, Kyle. Also, I'd rather be writing this than doing homework, or other homework or wedding planning or other homework. Gah.)

makes 2 burgers.. but kind of small burgers because I don't have a black hole for a tummy.

1/2 lb ground beef (I use chuck)
2-3 cloves minced garlic (also, for the love of jebus, kyle, buy actual garlic and mince it yourself)
1/2 shallot minced
olive oil
salt, pepper
bbq sauce (sweet baby ray's was totally on sale at meijer)

heat oil in pan, add in garlic+shallots. when the garlic is starting to brown and the shallots are translucent-y take these out and put them in the GB... which is defrosted and stuff. Also, add in a squirt or two of bbq sauce and some cheese and mix thoroughly and put back in pan and make sure you watch to not start a grease fire. w00t. I should really get ketchup.

I'm thinking about making this a for-realsies blog as opposed to just a place for me to dump recipes to kyle.

Pornalicious

OOh! I almost forgot. My second piece of food porn. Colby, Chris, Nathan, and I went to Omi Sushi on Friday night and Chris' piece of unagi was pretty. The only sad bit about it all is that it turns out that Colby really doesn't like sushi. :( Alas, I will have to find a sushi partner in Austin.

Mushroom Stuffing+Mushroom Pasta

Hokay. So what I'm supposed to be doing right now is a literature search on the observed radii of white dwarfs, but it turns out that that's boring and even though they were stars, they're dead and therefore dead to me. Anywho, Easter was an interesting weekend beginning with horribleness, but ending with a lovely pot-luck dinner party which required some sort of dish. Yay for mushrooms.

I made a mushroom stuffing that turned out *okay*. I think there were too many bread crumbs. Also, I would have liked stronger notes of garlic, shallots and something to "freshen" the taste. Anywho recipe:

portabello mushrooms, roughly chopped
shiitake mushrooms, de-stemmed, roughly chopped
1c bread crumbs (next time, I'd probably use like.. 2/3 c, maybe even less)
6 cloves garlic
1/2 shallot
lemon
butter
olive oil
oregano
Parmesan
fresh basil
salt, pepper

mince 3 of the cloves of garlic, all of the shallots and sautee them in oil. Add in the mushrooms, about 2 tbs butter, and some salt. cook cook cook. when it's almost done, add in the ripped up basil to wilt+flavor and some oregano. Add in a bit of lemon as well also, pepper and more salt. Remove from heat

put in 3 tbs butter + bread crumbs + remaining garlic in the pan + olive oil (because fat is tasty). This is to "toast" the bread crumbs, and is probably ill-advised. Maybe you don't want to do this step and maybe you want to put in all the garlic and butter at once and double the amount of shallots. So combine all this in a bowl, as well as a good dusting of grated parm cheez and mix. yay? Squeeze on some more lemon to make it a brighter flavor. I know that this could be really tasty, but I don't know how. I actually think that this would actually be pretty awesome with couscous instead. Maybe I have my answer.

Anywho, what was kind of interesting about this is that I made something super similar on Thursday night. Chris suggested the mushroom dish. I decided that it was going to be a stuffing. Sometimes I'm afraid that all my food tastes the same. Woo hoo insecurities creeping into my cooking. So yeah, on Thursday:

2/3 box pasta (not long noodles, I used rotelle)
1/2 tray pre-washed, cut white mushrooms roughly chopped (yes, I'm lazy)
3 cloves garlic
1/2 poblano pepper, roasted, skinned, chopped
1/2 shallot
some amount of lemon
parm cheese
mozzarella cheese
butter, oil
fresh basil, torn
salt/pepper/garlic salt

boil boil boil pasta. sautee garlic, shallots in oil. Add in butter, mushrooms. Add in pepper, lemon, salt+pepper, garlic salt. stir stir stir. Add in mixture to hot, drained pasta. Add in cheese... mix mix mix. I think that one turned out better. Also, it turned into a one bowl dinner which is pretty much amazing and my favorite thing ever

So I guess I was inspired by the pasta dish and is probably the reason why it'd work better with couscous. Also, the reason why i used 1/2 a shallot for the second dish is because I used the other half earlier. Heh. I usually have them on hand because i hate hate hate onions, so they're nicer (for me) to have to eat around.

semi-home made ravioli (but way the hell more home made than sandra lee)

So after traveling around over spring break, I came home to a bag of rotten potatoes, some frozen broccoli (because I actually have a refreezerator), and the sad, sad remnants of mire poix fixings. Suffice it to say, I needed to go to el supermercado (which, sadly, does not sound as cool as el gran mercado, but has a helluva lot more food in it). Anywho! I ended up buying a bunch of "random" things, which I thought were random, but apparently make for a fairly standard shopping trip which included wonton wrappers and ricotta.

So tonight, I'm going to attempt to make garlic+mushroom+basil ravioli with the leftover bolognese sauce. Go me!

This is how I think it'll work: (also, someone slap me. I got the sudden urge to do this in LaTeX in math mode... la la la physics is eating my brain)

Drain the ricotta (via magic).

sautee mushrooms + garlic in butter
add M+G, B to the cheese+more (mozzarella) cheese (slap me again. I'm thinking of trying to do this in terms of nuclear reactions... like, you know... MushroomGarlic(Butter, tasty)sauteedmushroomgarlic)...)
put a bit on a wonton wrapper
brush edges with egg wash (and more magic)
put another one on top
boil boil boil

eat eat eat

We'll see how it goes. And I've shamelessly stolen the idea from my new favorite food blog the delicious life.

Lazy-man's Alfredo Sauce

So given that I had all this leftover pasta, I wanted to do something with it because, mostly, I had been watching cooking shows all night (with the wonderful exception of a two hour stint of Law & Order SVUUUU) and so I kind of wanted to cook. This ended up being alfredo-y and not that good, but I have a feeling that it could be easily modified to != suck.

What I did:

2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs flour
1 tsp kosher salt

some amount of chicken stock
some amount of milk
3 cloves minced garlic
~1.5 oz grated Parmesan cheese
2 slices provolone

so I melted the butter+flour+salt to make the base of a roux, added in the wet ingredients, let it thicken, add in the garlic, added in the parm cheese because it was the rest of a container that i had sitting there, and then decided that it was too salty, so I added the provolone, more chicken stock (realized that that made it saltier), more milk... boil boil stir stir. It's edible. Maybe not for me what with the dairy, but it's not spectacular.

This is my theoretical Lazy-Man's Alfredo

2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs flour
1 tsp kosher salt

1 c heavy cream
3 cloves garlic (because, hey, who doesn't like garlic? [also, CLOVES, Kyle, CLOVES])
2 oz Parmesan
2 oz Mozzarella
black pepper to taste

mix mix mix stir stir stir. It should come out way better. Also, sauteed mushrooms would make this better

Flying Spaghetti Monsters sans the flying and monster-y bits

So I haven't written in this in forever. There's a good reason. Actually, no there's not; however, there are always a lot of excuses, including: I was sick for a month.

Things I've cooked since last time... pan fried chicken (not actually a departure from too much, but I learned the lovely process of dredging). Beef bolognese (lots of time, minimal effort, pleaser of crowds). Um... a lot of corn bread, almost weekly. Cupcakes (not from scratch). Stir-fry. Packaged hot dogs. I eat pork again.

So let's go with the bolognese and I'll update the Christmas stuff at some point so I can remember how to do things in the future.

Beef Bolognese

6 Tbs butter
6 Tbs extra virgin olive oil

3 c mire poix:
3/4 c celery, chopped fine
3/4 c carrots, chopped fine
1 1/2 c onion, chopped fine

3 cloves garlic chopped fine
salt + pepper
1 lb beef
1/3 lb pancetta cubed
1 1/3 c tomato paste
1 1/2 c whole milk
2 c red wine
2 2/3 c whole canned tomatoes, torn and seeded
4 c stock
handful of spices
mushrooms

So... melt the butter+oil and, when hot, add in the mire poix mixture and season with salt and pepper. I stole this from a NYT Magazine article on ragus. Simmer in the butter until the colors "brighten" (~20 minutes). Add in garlic and let it cook and get fragrant. Add in the beef+pancetta and let it brown (~25 minutes, longer if frozen). Add in the tomato paste, mix, and let it cook for 5 minutes. Add in the whole milk until the mixture really "takes it" in (10-15 minutes). Do the same with the red wine. This bit takes awhile. The key point is getting it all to reduce well. After that, add in the canned tomatoes, the stock, the mushrooms, and the spices. Mm mm spices. I used basil, thyme, oregano, and sage in dried form. Let it simmer for 3 hours. Stir it once in awhile. Perhaps at the end, you should skim the fat and stick blender it. This is if you're too impatient to let the tomatoes break down and such (I was). Eat-y eat-y yum yum.

Serve with garlic bread... which is made by chopping up garlic, melting butter+garlic in the microwave, letting it get hard-ish in the fridge, and then smearing on a loaf and baking it at 300 in the oven til when you feel like it.

Enjoy.