Obsession

This is what happens when you're insane and you live near a Le Creuset outlet store. 

But aren't they purty?

When the Husband is Away....Make Pasta!

I love pasta.  I mean, looooove.  If I were to have a love affair, it might be with a bowl of pasta.  Anyway, I have 3 nights to myself this week, so OF COURSE I am going to make some pasta.  I made Giada's Farfalle with Spicy Sausage and Kale (which, by the way, seems to be only be available on a Borders website, so I don't know how long this link will work).  I used rotini instead of farfalle (sacrilege! considering my favorite pasta shape is farfalle).  I was actually going to make this yesterday, but I forgot to defrost the sausage.  I also didn't have an onion.  Note to self - always keep an onion and a lemon lying around for cooking emergencies! 

What can I say about this recipe?  It's simple and delicious.  Italian sausage?  Delicious.  Onions and garlic?  Delicious.  Tomatoes and kale?  Sure, why not.  Touch of cream?  I won't argue with that!  This was a good recipe for kale.  It was easy to prepare and hardy enough to stand out.  I don't think spinach would have been quite as good. 

Mix delicious ingredients together...

Blanch the kale in water for 5 minutes.  I also used the same pot of water for the pasta.

Stew my pretties...stew...

A one-pot wonder (except for the part where I used 2 pots, but nevermind that)

Thanks Giada!

Sunday dinner: Coconut shrimp for two

Tonight we made Coconut Shrimp from a Southern Living recipe.  It's a lighter version of the standard affair, baked instead of fried.  The recipe called for a honey-mustard sauce... but we like a sweeter sauce with our coconut shrimp, so we made a yogurt-based Apricot-Curry sauce from Better Homes & Garden.

The shrimp recipe was pretty straight-forward, except for the part where it asked for 1 tablespoon of jerk seasoning.  D'oh!  We don't really buy spice blends because they take up space, and we hardly ever use them.  So...step one was making the jerk seasoning, which of course has a million ingredients.  Luckily we had ...uh, 80% of them? Good enough, right?

Clean and peel the shrimp. And by clean and peel, we mean buy frozen shrimp that are already deveined and then take the shells off.  The breading is half coconut flakes, half panko bread crumbs.  The panko is good because it gives it a little more crunch than standard breadcrumbs.

Jenny begins the DredgeReport

I see you dress right, Cedric.

About face, Gentlemen.

Darby's attempt at fancy-pants plating. 

So the long and short... pretty tasty dish with just a tiny bit of heat.  Not nearly as crunchy as fried, but none of the mess or oil either!

Pie! and Cake!

Angle Food cake

Triple Chocolate Mouse

Lemon Birthday Pie

Strawberry Rhubarb

Peach Cream Tart

Blueberry

Strawberry

Buttermilk

Chocolate Pecan!

Lemonade

Apple

Homemade Chicken Stock is a Gateway Drug

So about a year ago, we watched a really good episode of Barefoot Contessa where a friend shows her an old family recipe for jambalaya (which is great.)  As part of this process, they recommend using homemade chicken stock.  Now, we'd been using the Kitchen Basics box chicken stock... which is great.  It keeps forever, and is ready to rock n' roll whenever you need a 1/2 cup or something in a random recipe.  But, as we love to make simple things more complicated... hey, anything to make a Saturday or Sunday completely disappear, we opted to try making a batch. 

Now, the first hurdle to this recipe is that it calls for a 20 quart stock pot.  This is a serious pot.  The man at the Le Creuset Outlet in Round Rock was dubious that anyone should ever require such a pot.  Reasonable people might have halved the recipe... but I digress. 

Old big pot... meet New Big Pot.

The next hurdle in this recipe is the amount of chicken it calls for.  15 lbs or three whole chickens... that you don't get to eat.  This bothered us so much that the first time we made this recipe we followed the advice of some internet commenter and pulled the chickens about and hour in, took the breast meat off, and returned the carcasses to the stock.  The result: a massive amount of really overcooked (and now flavorless) chicken meat.  My advice: buy the chickens (or chicken parts) on sale and write the meat off, or meticulously save leftover, raw chicken carcasses, bones and cartilage in the freezer until you have enough.  I did this.  I felt super frugal.  It requires that you make chicken a lot and that you know how to "fabricate" a chicken.

Next... well next is easy.  You barely cut the vegetables. Dont have to peel the garlic.  Throw a ton of water in and watch something on TV for 4 hours while it simmers. 

When its done... it does not look pretty.

Have a sturdy trash bag ready.  You strain once through a collander to remove bones and solid vegetable pieces.  Then, you strain again through a wire sieve to get this opaque golden goodness. 

Let cool, and then refrigerate overnight.  Then next day, there will be a solid layer of chicken fat at the top of each container.  Relatively easy to remove wholesale.  Apparently, chicken fat is a big component in jewish cooking (called schmaltz) and is essentially used in lieu of butter.   Frugal as I tried to be, there was no way I could ever use all the schmaltz this stock generated.

After that, freeze!  Be careful you haven't overfilled your containers... they will shatter, especially the cheapo Glad quart containers we bought.  I highly recommend filling a couple ice trays with stock and then transferring the cubes to a ziplock.  This way, you can quickly melt a small amount of stock when needed.

Now, to the title of the post: Homemade Chicken Stock is a Gateway drug.  Once you have all this chicken stock, you suddenly realize you never used that much in the first place.  You have to find something to do with it all!  We've ended up trying things we'd never really considered just because they called for sizeable amounts of chicken stock.  Pan-gravies, soups and more soups.  We've been able to make an asparagus soup on a mid-week lark.... a ton of soups are just simmering in stock and then pureeing.

Are these dishes made better by the homemade stock?  I really couldn't say, but it feels good to know we've made it from "scratch."  And we are forever making new things so we don't end up wasting all that damn stock! 

Bastille Day Celebration - Viva la France!

    

We wanted to have a French-themed dinner party, and it just happened to be the weekend after Bastille Day.  Any excuse to have people over, speak in strange tongues, and drink le vin!

First Course - Salad Lyonnaise

Poached egg, bacon, shallot, mixed greens, and Dijon vinaigrette

We first had this salad at Chez Nous in Austin and were intrigued by the idea of putting a poached egg on a salad.  Poaching eggs turns out to be really easy, so it was a cinch to be French.

  Why wouldn't you want to add an egg on top of your salad?!

  The real inspiration for the entire meal was an urge to make French onion soup.  We used a recipe from AmericasTestKitchen.com

 

First step is chopping all of those onions.

 

 6 onions barely fit in this 7qt. pot!

The onions cook down for several hours until they become brown and delicious.  We didn't take pictures of all the many steps...sorry.   Both of our Le Creuset dutch ovens got a workout on this meal.

Slice up some crusty bread, top with Gruyere cheese, and then pop them under the broiler.  The perfect excuse to buy some broiler-safe ramekins from Sur La Table! Cheaper and more practical than buying the special French Onion soup bowls.

 Voila!  French Onion Soup.  It had a surprisingly sweet flavor from the onions.

  Third Course - Dijon Chicken

We didn't take many pictures of this course, which we adapted from a recipe we found on this blog.  We broke a chicken into 10 pieces, browned it, wilted down some shallot and garlic, braised the whole thing in white wine and chicken stock, and then stirred in some cream and Dijon mustard.

 Fourth Course - Chocolate Pot a Creme with a hint of orange.  

 Also adapted from an AmericasTestKitchen.com recipe.  Thick and chocolatey, almost like fudge in a cup! 

Voila, mes amis!