Hunka Hunka Peanut Butter Love

Well, my partner in crime has left the building!  Which can only mean…time to eat weird food for dinner!  Put on an old movie and drag out your blue suede shoes.  I know you have suspicious minds... and you'd be right: it’s time to make an Elvis Presley Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich!!

I looked at a couple of recipes online and then decided to wing it.  Plenty has been written on the subject, and there are lots of different versions out there.  There seems to be some dispute over whether the sandwich is supposed to have bacon on it.  I wasn’t quite up for that, so I just decided to go with the classic.



The ingredients are simple:  bread, peanut butter, banana, and honey (that's money).



The steps are simple too:  slather bread with peanut butter.



Viva sliced bananas!  Drizzle with honey.



Put together and then butter the outsides (I suppose you could butter the outsides before you start assembling, but whatever).



Now, because I’m lazy, I decided to go with the good ol’ George Foreman grill.  I could have sautéed it in a skillet, but like I said…I was being lazy.



Ooey, gooey, buttery, and bananay!  It takes awhile to get the bread all toasty, so the bananas get soft and melty and almost disappear into the peanut butter.  Love them tender!

It’s so decadent that I did start to feel somewhat guilty about eating this for dinner.  It's more of a late-night snack or breakfast kind of thing.  I can also see how adding bacon would be nice because it would give it some crunch and contrasting flavor.  I’ll have to try that sometime (maybe….tomorrow?).

Fools may rush into eating a well balanced dinner....but I can't help falling in love with a fried PB&B sammie à la The King!

Fancy Pants Dining: Well Hey Y’all!

So, part of Chez Venza’s food-finding mission to Georgia involved a special trip to Savannah to worship at the altar of Paula Dean.    The restaurant is attached to a 2-story gift shop (they are happy to let you wait there for your table).  Who knew every Dean (including her brother and husband) had at least one book and product line?  And who buys a 15 piece set of pots at a restaurant?
 
Look out, it’s Paula!  She’s so….two-dimensional. 
The Lady and Sons serves the Dean family’s down home cooking.  We went on a Sunday, so it was buffet-only, which wasn’t a problem for us!  We highly recommend reservations if you want to eat at all.  The sign outside said they were full for the entire day with reservations!

Three floors of buffet restaurant (though it’s the same buffet on each floor).  Fried chicken, baked chicken, creamed corn, collard greens, mac n’ cheese, green beans, lima beans, brisket.  And tableside, they serve you a biscuit and a hoe cake. 

All that’s missing (from the photos) is the Ooey Gooey Butter Cake and Banana pudding we had for dessert.

Then we got seconds and made our own spicy chicken biscuits.  Even in the House of Dean, Chez Venza creates great dishes!  We win!

Paneer-ly Perfect

 

Today’s dish is pretty flashy and celebrates all things green.  We’re making the classic Indian dish:  saag paneer!  Recipe courtesy of Cook’s Illustrated.

The first step is making the cheese.   That’s right, for the second time, we are MAKING cheese at Chez Venza.   This is surprisingly easy to do and only requires 3 ingredients:  whole milk, buttermilk, and salt.  I’m not even sure the salt is necessary, but it sure makes it taste good! 

Bring 3 quarts whole milk to a boil.  Then add 3 cups buttermilk and some salt and let it sit for 1 minute.

Presto!  Curds.  The buttermilk curdles the milk and separates the milk solids from the whey.

The mixture is strained through a colander and cheesecloth (yes, cheesecloth!  For cheese!)

And then you twist it up into a tight little bundle in order to squeeze out the rest of the liquid.  See first there was WHEY and now there’s NO WHEY!  Whey?  NO WHEY! 

And then it gets squeezed a little more between 2 plates and a heavy pot.  This sits for about 45 minutes and then it’s done.  So easy!

At this point you can take it out of the cheesecloth and cut it into cubes.  Or you can just wrap it up and put it in the fridge and snack on it whenever you want.  The temptation was great, but we powered through and only snacked on a tiny bit of it.  Chef’s prerogative, right?

Next up is all the green stuff.  This recipe called for an even split of spinach and mustard greens.  If you’ve never seen a mustard green, this is what it looks like!

 

We microwaved the spinach and mustards for a few minutes in order to jump-start the cooking process.  A whole bowl of greens wilts down pretty quickly. 

Some of the greens get chopped up and reserved for later.  The rest of it is going to be pureed in a blender.  But we’ll get to that later.

Now we spice things up a bit with some good ol’ spicy spices.

 

The spices are first “toasted” with some butter in a skillet.  Then you add a diced onion and cook it down for a bit.  Then add jalapeno, garlic, ginger, and canned tomatoes.  This cooks for awhile until all of the liquid is cooked out and you have a nice flavorful sauce.

To the blender!  The wilted greens, half of the onion mixture, some chopped cashews, and a cup of water get pureed.

And then you add the puree back to the sauce pan.  Isn’t that delightfully green?

Stir together, along with a cup of buttermilk and the chopped greens we reserved earlier.  The buttermilk makes the sauce creamy and tangy.

 

Remember our homemade cheese?  It gets cut up into cubes and then added to the sauce.

And just in case we didn’t have enough green stuff in our meal, we made rice with peas and some raisins. 

Garnish with cilantro, cashews, and some naan.

My batik sitar player now presents you with this lovely dish of saag paneer.  Enjoy!

Fancy Pants Dining: Flip Burger

 

We at Chez Venza recently took a food-finding mission to assess Georgia.  Ladies and Gentlemen, the State of Georgia is just peachy.  While we were there, we were able to up our food celebrity quotient significantly. 

The only celebrity we were actually able to meet was two-time Top Chef contestant (and Top Chef All-Stars Champ) Richard Blais.  We went to his big-time fancy restaurant The Spence, where he was kind enough to come by the table and chat with us.  Unfortunately, due to my wife’s (and my own) embarrassment, I couldn’t quite nerd out enough to ask him for a picture.

A couple days later, we visited his high-end (but much more affordable) burger boutique: Flip.

Tres moderne!

                                      

We ordered a “Nutella and burnt marshmallow” milkshake, that was apparently made with liquid nitrogen.  As my unnamed dinning companion noted, “I can’t taste the liquid nitrogen.”  I mocked her at the time, but she’s right.  Unless it’s being made tableside and you get to watch, I’m not sure what benefit there is to the shake being made that way.  It was very tasty though.  The burnt marshmallows were awesome.

This is the chorizo burger with a side of fried okra, cut length-wise.

Fried egg, chorizo, hashbrowns, manchego, romesco……

As you can tell, we hated it.

We also got the Fauxlafel burger (perhaps out of a sense of guilt for the decadence of the chorizo burger?)  I can’t figure out why he named it “Fauxlafel”… it’s a fried chickpea patty…. that’s an actual falafel!  It’s served with Sweet potato tots and “blue cheese foam,” which was great!

So…. yeah!  If you’re in Hotlanta, go get a Flip Burger! 

Can You Tell Me How to Get to Cold Sesame Noodle Street?

 

So this week, we’ve gone healthy and Asian.  Inspired by a recent issue of Bon Appetit magazine, we made cold sesame noodles with summer vegetables.  Aside from the noodles, nothing in this dish is cooked, and it is served cold.  Really, it’s like an Asian pasta salad.  Very healthy, plenty filling, and, with some modifications, super tasty.

 

 

Almost all of what you see here got chopped up and put into the dish.  The jalapeno, ginger, and garlic are my own additions to the recipe.

The only tough part of this recipe is all the slicing.  You have to “matchstick” them all…. so, cut them to look like match sticks!

Close enough!

Who knew radishes tasted so good?

This recipe calls for 8 cups of matchstick cut summer vegetables.  I didn’t quite make it there.

These are Japanese Soba noodles.  They are made from buckwheat, which apparently is a real thing and not just an Eddie Murphy SNL character.  Also, they’re healthy, according to Lance Armstrong. 

After a quick boil, they get hosed down with cold water to stop the cooking. 

The items in the “dressing.”  Strangely enough, the recipe called for salt, but I subbed soy sauce.  I ended up using more sriracha sauce than was called for.  As with any dish, you just have to keep tasting and tinkering until it reaches the right seasoning.  It’s one of the toughest things to do in the kitchen.

Vegetables, cilantro, noodles, sesame seeds, and dressing.  Now just pop that bad boy in the fridge.  Sayonara hunger!