cast-iron skillet

so i got a lodge cast-iron skillet for Christmas this year! i've been wanting one ever since i gave my dad and/or brother one for Christmas a few years ago. so, in order to properly break it in, i made breakfast...all weekend long!

the very first food item i put in the skillet was (and should be) bacon. i then made potatoes and finished with a fried egg. below is what i made the second time around as i was interested in seeing the difference between sausage and bacon as a vehicle for helping the non-stick surface of a seasoned cast-iron skillet. i think i prefer the bacon as the sausage ended up sticking a bit. i think that has more to do with the fact that i didn't let the sausage go to room temperature before putting it on the hot skillet surface. this is a rookie mistake that i'm somewhat ashamed to admit. always let food go to room temperature that you are going to put in any kind of stove top pan. anyway, this is a fried egg served over a breakfast sausage that's on top of a sauteed potato slice. i used a 2-inch ring mold to cut away some egg white for presentation purposes. i love hot sauce so that's what you see along the side. it was really tasty and fun to make. i just love this skillet!

Christmas Dinner 2009

every year Marcela and i have a Christmas Dinner with Bart and his family. we have decided to go on a three year cycle, switching amongst eating at Bart's house, followed by our house and then the third year we go out to eat. it was our turn to host the dinner and so i anxiously started planning this dinner only seconds after swallowing my last bit of turkey from thanksgiving!

this was my second time around with cooking a dinner for the Smith's. i was fairly satisfied with my first dinner, which might even be posted in this blog..., but i have come a long way since three years ago and i really wanted this one to be good. i had used the theme of color, specifically Christmas colors (green and red) for my first dinner and thought i'd stick with that for this one.

i began prepping on thursday night and thought even though i was going to take care of Camilo for the better part of friday, i'd be fine for timing. friday morning we woke up to find both Camilo and Marcela sick. i felt bad for Marcela, but it ended up being a blessing as she was able to tend to Camilo and i was able to get on my cooking. now i have made plenty of multi-course dinner's before and i know that they always take longer than expected, but i didn't realize that even with thursday night's prepping, i would still need the whole day on friday to get it done in time! so here's the menu for the dinner.



the first course is from my amature foray into the world of molecular gastronomy. it is a sweat pea "pasta-less" ravioli. basically you just add sodium alginate to a liquid and then drop it into a bath of calcium chloride. the calcium chloride and sodium alginate react to form a "skin" around the liquid, holding into place until you break the skin in your mouth, releasing the contents.



the second course is a roasted red pepper soup which i chose for two reasons. one, it's red, and two, it's a soup and i just love soup's during the winter months. i think it's a nice way to officially start the dinner too. i wanted to use fresh red peppers and roast them myself, but i'm glad i chose the jarred version as i would definitely not been done on time! this was good, but actually might have been the weakest of my courses.



the third course was something i read about somewhere, internet most likely, and wasn't sure how well it'd turn out and/or be received. what's funny is that it actually turned out great and i'm gonna make it again for Christmas eve with Marcela's family! we had a jar of a mustard vinaigrette that some friends gave us for a Christmas gift and so i just blanched and peeled some cherry tomato's, marinating them overnight in olive oil, garlic and thyme and stacked everything up on a kabab skewer and drizzled with the dressing. it was really fun to eat as you could pull everything off the skewer and mix together to make a traditional salad, or, as i did, just eat it like a kabab, right off the skewer!



the entree course was something i was really looking forward to making. i really wanted to do beef as it's just so good and would allow for easy preparation. i followed a recipe by Tom Colocchio off top chef and his craft restaurant's fame. it called for marinating short ribs overnight in a vegetable wine bath. then, a few hours before serving, i cooked them for a bit on the range before putting them in the oven to braise for a couple hours. i served the short ribs over a carrot ginger puree (not necessarily following my color theme!), fried potato rectangles and some pan fried string beans. i drizzled a cherry port sauce around the perimeter of the plate for an added flavor, which was probably not necessary, but provided a nice aesthetic touch.



dessert was going to be the toughest for me as i am just not good with desserts. Bart had mentioned that Marisa, his daughter, loved apple crisp. so, i thought i'd try and get fancy by (somewhat) deconstructing an apple crisp. the two different parts here are frozen apple mousse and an apple crisp cookie. to give some more color and a little presentation touch, i experimented again with science and food! by adding lecithin to a liquid and then whipping it with an immersion blender, you can get an air or foam to formalize on top of the liquid. left setting for a couple minutes, it holds it's form and can be applied by whisking it off the top and dropping it on a plate. i chose cranberries as they fit the season and i had a bag of them meant to go in a bowl to decorate the table. i guess we got rid of the glass bowls i thought we had so all that was left to do with them was to eat them!



so, i have to say that this was my best dinner to date. the reasons for it were that everyone really enjoyed it and i actually was able to finish everything on time and without any omissions. i really owe a lot to Marcela for taking care of Camilo all day friday, especially while being sick, so that i could spend the whole time in the kitchen preparing this fun dinner. of course i owe her for much more than that, but you get the point!

Merry Christmas everyone!

scallop

i found this picture in my phone while uploading the pictures of the yam cannoli's...

the last time my dad visited we cooked dinner for my mom and Marcela, as usual, and we made a potato soup to be used as a "sauce" for a couple large scallops. unfortunately the soup turned out a little thick and didn't present itself the way i hoped for. so, i made it again the following weekend but i only had enough scallops to put one on the plate. it definitely still could use some garnish to provide some color, but i think this makes a great course in a multi-course menu. i really like little serving pieces when doing multi-course menus, but i think serving a tiny course on a huge plate provides a unique contrast that just looks great. the only bad thing is when, like me, you have a very tiny kitchen and no place or time to deal with dirty dishes!!!

thanksgiving

so it's been almost a year since I last posted. I just can't seem to find the time to write on the computer. I want to, I just am not devoted enough I guess.

anyway, it's not like I haven't been cooking. in fact, I probably cook over 5 nights a week as we just don't ever eat out. most of the time I just make something simple that tries to get the basic food groups covered, a protein, a veggie and a starch. I need to get more fruit in my diet and I don't know whether wine really counts! maybe that will be my new years resolution!!!

this will sound like a broken record, but lately I've wanted to get back into gourmet cooking. actually, it's not really gourmet cooking, but fun, creative cooking that becomes an adventure in its process. I think that's what I like about cooking and food so much. flavors and eating are great, but I just love to experiment in the kitchen and then share whatever I come up with, with family and friends. so, with thanksgiving I thought it was a perfect time to try something that would normally not make sense to make for just two people. I think appetizers are perfect for that. it's great to make appetizers for two, but it becomes more of a challenge and often results in a lot of food waste. as tradition goes, our thanksgivings are always filled with lots of family and friends so I knew I'd not have to worry about waste for that day!

most often what I make is a rip-off of a technique or recipe or partial recipe that I've seen in a book or online or on tv, this is almost a combination of all 3 of those! based on it being fall and my dad telling me there wasn't going to be a sweet potato dish this year, I decided to try this appetizer / amuse bouche that'd I'd had minimal success using regular potatoes in. it's just mashed yams inside a fried yam "cannoli" with a sprig of bacon and then on some of them I placed a slice of jalapeno.

it definitely took me a lot longer to make than I had planned for and if, errr when I do this again I'll definitely make a few amendments, but all in all I think they turned out really well. they weren't too off the wall either which allowed the lil guys to enjoy them too!

tis the season of cooking!!! expect another post before (and hopefully after) new years as we are hosting Christmas dinner with my boss's family...

italian sausage week

the kind of italian sausage we buy usually comes in a pack of 5. i only needed 2 sausages for my sausage fennel risotto so i had 3 left to come up with dinners for this week. tuesday night we made a plain old spaghetti with ground sausage and that left me with one sausage. normally on wednesday's we have small group in which we leave directly from work to go to and end up coming home, starving, around 8:30. the typical dinner on these nights is a frozen, thin crust pepperoni freschetta pizza that we add whatever vegetable(s) we have in the fridge to. on this night we were short on veggies and we had that one sausage left over. my inspiration came from my first fly fishing trip back in 2006 in which my best friend, brian erickson, unbeknownst to me competed with me for when ordering lunch our first day in aspen. see there were 5 of us fishing and we had been eating whatever we caught mixed with the bare essentials for wilderness camping. we found ourselves in a city for lunch one day and decided to order some pizzas. not thinking this was going to be a competitive endeavor, i went for a pepperoni, mushroom, and fresh tomato pizza. brian, who had been in the mode for impressing and "educating" ordered a sausage pizza with red onions and pepperoncini's. apparently the rule was 3 toppings. needless to say, his pizza won over the rest of the crew by about 1 million fold! so, back to our post-small group dinner, i had the makings for a repeat! we had just gotten over a visit from marcela's college friends, mike and katie smith, who reside in seattle, and had samples the freschetta brick oven, 5-cheese pizza as katie is a vegeterian. it was surprisingly tasty despite the lack of meat. marcela and i decided that base pizza was good and we wanted to try it again with our own ingredients. marcela's not a fan of pepperoncini's or onions so i decided to go half and half with our pizza. uncooked sausage is really tough to cut in discs so i par grilled the italian sausage before cutting it. top chef is one of our favorite shows and a recent episode featured a tomato provencal. i have no idea what that is, but one of the criticisms was that the chef didn't pan fry the tomato. i've noticed from making home pizza's before that if you just put freshly cut tomato's on a pizza, they add too much moisture and the cheese doesn't fully melt and "brown". so, i cut the tomato's into 1/4" slices and pan friend them in a tiny, tiny amount of olive oil so i didn't end up with standing oil. i took these pan fried tomato's and spread them across the pizza. then, i put two sausage discs on each tomato before putting thinly cut red onions and pepperoncini's onto my half of the pizza. i can't quite describe in words how good my half (or her half for that matter) was, but let's just say the thin crust pepperoni pizza might take some time before purchasing again!

sausage and fennel risotto

here's the grocery list, ie ingredients, for the sausage and fennel risotto. you make it just like any other risotto so i'll spare you the directions...just trying to post more things on this blog!

prep

i think i'm going to start using this blog as my own personal blog...but if you noticed, i said "i think"...

this morning marcela had to go in to work early (as opposed to staying late yesterday, which i totally agree with her on) to finish up a project and get it plotted before 9:30. i was not in the mood to prep our lunches last night as i ended up making a sausage fennel risotto for dinner last night (after getting the week's groceries) and was too tired. so, i actually spent some time "cooking" this morning! we switch up our lunches quite often, but one of our favorites to eat are chicken wraps. i had set out 3 breasts to thaw overnight and so i fired up the grill at 7:15! let me tell you, it was hard to not start playing the k-state fight song and crack open a keystone light! the last time i can remember grilling anything this early in the morning, i was in manhattan surrounded by my buddies getting ready to watch jonathan beasley and the wildcats get ready for a football game. anyway, chicken wraps are fairly easy to prep for as we usually just add lettuce and tomato's to the grilled chicken, but i still thought it was fun to be cooking in the morning. it also made me reminisce about working at goldfork and having to get all sorts of things prepped for the days service. i definitely love doing architecture, but i think i could have handled working at a restaurant. i wouldn't have even minded just being a sous chef or a line cook. the kitchen is a great place to be.

new years eve

so i brought my camera, but it has been sitting too long and had no battery life. therefore this post will just be words...

i know i said i wanted to post more food blogs without any concern for fancy foods, but as it turns out, i guess i still have something for the finer things of life!

this new years eve plans were to go down to my brother-in-law's place, per tradition, to have dinner and wine and ring in the new year together. his wife, lorena, and i decided we should just do a bunch of appetizers and pretend like we were at a fancy party. everyone there either had child(ren) or was with child...who says that should stop us from having a fun time??? anyway, i was in charge of making 4 appetizers and since lorena chose to theme hers around vegetables, i had to come up with the proteins. after researching and just thinking to myself what would be tasty, i came up with the following 4 items:

vichyssoise with cannellini's

three cheese mac-n-cheese pastry's

squash chips with blackbean chicken salsa

mini beef wellingtons

so here's where pictures would be great, but alas, i don't have any. so, i will just talk about them and let you use your imagination to create the pictures!!

first off, i have NEVER made any of these things, which is pretty much standard when it comes to me trying to cook for family/friends. i knew it was going to take a long time and that there was a greater-than-fifty-percent chance at least one wouldn't turn out so i began this endeavor on monday night. i got all my groceries and did any kind of chopping/cutting/prep work that was necessary when i got home. tuesday night i spent most of the time slow baking the squash chips while also prepping the the mac-n-cheese pastry's. the vichyssoise was going to be the hardest challenge as i've heard it's something you must do right if you attempt at all!!! around midnight on tuesday i had decided i was looking good. the mac-n-cheese pastry's were in their muffin pan, the chips were a crisp golden brown, and though the vichyssoise looked a bit runny, it had excellent flavor.

i had to work until 1pm on new years eve so i was left with only 5 hours to finish everything off. when i got home i pulled out the puff pastry's for the mini beef wellingtons. i let it thaw for about an hour while i diced the ribeye into 1/2" chunks. i selected a roasted red pepper with garlic boursin cheese for my wellington's and i let that get to room temperature too. all i had left was the blackbean chicken salsa. looking good as far as time goes right...oops, i went to turn on the grill only to find us COMPLETELY out of propane! i really needed the chicken to be grilled and not broiled as i needed that crispiness. so, with two hours to go, i grabbed the propane tank and dashed off to the convenient store to reload. once back home i heated up the black beans, without their canned liquid, and a can of rotel (also sans liquid) on very low heat with a bit of chili powder, paprika, and cumin. i ALWAYS use mccormick montreal chicken seasoning as it was a gold fork staple that i haven't found a replacement for. once the chicken strips were done i diced them and added them to the salsa. i started to realize my salsa was a bit too thick for the flimsy, half-baked squash chips...remedy? i put the whole mixture into my food processor and added some of the reserved bean liquid (always save the liquid, at least for the duration of the beans themselves). the results, well, it was more like a tapenade than a salsa, but i think it worked.

anyway, everything was finished, on time, and tasted de-lish. i can't wait to try these items again and if i do, i promise i'll take a picture!