Easier Than Falling Off a Log
June 20, 2010 at 10:23 pm · Filed under dessert, food
This is the other thing I brought to the barbeque to which I also brought the cucumber salad. I only got to have one, and I really, really wish I’d gotten to have more. I called them Snickers cookies because they have the same bunch of flavours as a Snickers – they aren’t those cookies with mini Snickerses in them. They’ve got peanuts, chocolate, and caramel, in the forms of crunchy peanut butter and those little Dove caramels enrobed in chocolate. And tying it all together is cookie deliciousness. I want one right now, honestly.
I got the recipe from Babble, where it is not called “Snickers Cookies.” They also did not use crunchy peanut butter, and they did not need to use the pastry flour trick because I guess they had real pastry flour hanging around. They also made a point of flattening their cookies down. I did not, and mine probably had a smaller diameter, but they looked bigger because they had more height. I didn’t want to smush them down because I didn’t want to rupture the chocolate holding the caramel! To be honest, this was happening a little bit without my help… a couple of cookies had caramel oozing out the sides.
Snickers Cookies
Ingredients
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
4 tbsp butter, room temperature
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
either 1 2/3 cups whole wheat pastry flour, OR if you don’t have pastry flour, you can make it by replacing 1 tbsp of flour per 1/2 cup with 1 tbsp of corn starch and sifting the two together. In this case, that’s 3 and a bit tbsp flour replaced with 3 and a bit tbsp corn starch. You may recognize this as the cake flour trick. Same deal.
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Dove Caramel Promises, get a whole bag, you won’t use them all but I can’t tell you how many you’ll need
Method
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together butter and peanut butter.
Add honey and brown sugar and continue to cream until light and smooth.
Add eggs, one at a time, beating until fully combined before adding the next egg.
Once you’re all set with the eggs, mix in the vanilla.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour (including the corn starch, if you’re doing the let’s-make-this-into-pastry-flour trick), salt, and baking powder.
Slowly mix into the peanut butter mixture until just combined.
Chuck the whole bowl into the fridge for 20 minutes (the fact that the bowls of stand mixers are metal will work in your favour here, as it will chill the dough faster).
After 20 minutes, take it out and get a baking sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat or something, and start assembling the cookies: take one scoop of dough, put it on the sheet, put one of the chocolates on it, cover with another scoop of dough, and press the sides together to hide the caramel completely. Do this until you run out of dough.
Now throw it back into the fridge for another 20 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 350 while the cookies hang out in the fridge.
Bake for about 15 minutes or until the edges just begin to brown.
So I’ve had this post ready to roll for about 2 weeks now, except that I couldn’t get into my site’s control panel (first because it stopped accepting my password, and then the file for the control panel was magically missing), so I couldn’t upload the photo. But now I finally can! Hooray!
And speaking of photos, I’d have really liked to have gotten a picture of a cookie with a bite taken out of it, to prove that these aren’t just thick and lumpy peanut butter cookies, and that there really are chocolate caramels in the middle, but I didn’t take my camera to the barbeque.
June 4, 2010 at 10:40 pm · Filed under food, side dishes/appetizers
A friend of ours is moving away, and so she threw a barbeque for a going-away party. I brought this cucumber salad from Pikelet and Pie, as well as cookies that I’ll detail in the next post. I ate this salad as, well, a salad – a complement to the other foods on offer, and that’s how I expected it would be received by other people as well. But one genius put some in a pita with some of the grilled meat and some greek yogurt, and I was basically dumbstruck with what a good idea that was. I wish I’d thought of it myself – or at least seen this guy do it before I’d eaten, so I could have copied him!
Cucumber Salad
Ingredients
3 cucumbers, cut into bite-sized chunks
1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
2 tsp sesame oil
1 – 2 tsp white wine vinegar
1 tsp sugar
a few cranks of salt
a couple of cloves of garlic, smashed and broken up – or more if you’re into it
Method
With your hands, smoosh the salt into the cucumber chunks.
Put in the fridge for an hour.
In another bowl, whisk together the sesame oil, vinegar, and sugar until the sugar is dissolved.
When it’s time, take the cucumbers out of the fridge and drain the excess liquid off.
Stir the garlic into the cucumber.
Toss with the dressing mixture.
Sprinkle the sesame seeds over the salad.
May 29, 2010 at 5:46 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Recently, a guy I work with became a father. So a bunch of us decided it would maybe help him and his wife out a bit if we brought them food they could freeze – or even not freeze, there’s nothing wrong with just eating it right away. This is what I made for them, although I don’t think it needs to be reserved for major life milestones like having a baby. In fact, I had to debate with myself over maybe saving a little of this for myself. I didn’t do it – what do you take me for, taking food out of the mouths of babies? Or at least their parents? COME ON – but I thought about it.
The recipe is from My Kitchen Addiction, although apparently it gets around – it went through at least 2 iterations before she got it, and here I am iterating it a bit more. Not a lot, though. I mean, I forgot that I needed an onion, so I didn’t have one, so I decided what it really needed was some garlic instead. Can’t go wrong. And I did huck a bunch of it in a blender at the end (because my birthday had not yet occurred, so Matt had not yet given me an immersion blender, whee, best husband in town!), but I don’t know if I really should have done that… I feel like it probably froze better that way rather than if it was all liquid, but, y’know, whatever. Most people who make this will probably be eating it right away, so its freezing properties are kind of moot. The picture at the top is pre-blender; at the bottom is post-blender. Oh, er, wait, maybe I am iterating more than a little. I forgot that the original called for andouille sausage, obviously, but my grocery store didn’t have them and I’m still a little too nervous to go into MEATLAND, so I went with the never-a-bad-choice chorizo. And finally, I used some of my homemade veggie stock instead of chicken stock, basically because I had it on hand.
Cajun Bean Soup
Ingredients
1 chorizo sausage, diced (about 8 oz, anyway)
olive oil if necessary
1 cup celery, diced (that was about 3 ribs, for me)
1 cup red and green peppers, diced (about half a pepper of each colour, but again, your mileage may vary)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp Tony’s or other Cajun seasoning… are there other kinds? I live in Boston, I don’t know anything
about 1 1/2 cups dry pink beans, soaked, drained, and rinsed (I really need to start writing these right away afterwards, because I can’t remember exactly how much I used… I just used up the rest of the bag I had in the cupboard), or 3 15-oz cans
~3 cups vegetable stock
Method
Over medium-high heat, cook the chorizo in your big soup pot, for about 5 minutes or until you wouldn’t die of eating it.
Scoop it out to drain on paper towels, but leave the paprika oil that rendered out of it in the pot.
If you need to add more oil to the pot, add it, otherwise just go ahead and saute the celery and bell peppers with the Tony’s in the chorizo grease.
Saute for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic and saute for another minute.
Add the veggie stock and deglaze the pot, if you hadn’t already.
Throw in the beans.
Bring to a boil, then turn it down to medium-low and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
At this point, if you’re going to puree any of it, go for it – I put about 3 ladles of it into the blender, but if I’d had my immersion blender I’d have just given it a few whirls around the pot. Blend as much or as little as you’d like, depending on what texture you’re going for.
Stir the chorizo back in, and serve!
May 23, 2010 at 7:46 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
This is one of those recipes that makes your house smell really good. I mean, it tastes good too, that should be obvious, but you have to roast some garlic and tomatoes, and that is something scented-candle companies should look into, because I bet they’d make a fortune. Except that having one of those candles going would kind of get everyone mad at you. Think about it. Someone would come into your house and smell that, and think you’ve got something delicious cooking up for them, and then when you pull out whatever non-roasting-garlic-and-tomatoes thing you have instead (which I’m sure is still good, but if you were cooking something that already smelled of this, you wouldn’t need a candle, now, would you?) they couldn’t help but be disappointed. So maybe I’m not a genius of the candle industry. Whatever. Moving on.
I got the recipe from Joelen’s Culinary Adventures, which, sidebar, it’s easy to get the wrong idea when you see the “joelens” username on the Foodgawker picture, or even if you’re just looking at the URL, because you might think it’s a dude who likes to take pictures: Joe Lens. It’s not. If you click on the link you can discover your error right away, because she helpfully provides her picture to set right the constantly baffled (i.e. me). I understand that this is a take on a restaurant favourite. Having never been to the restaurant in question, I really couldn’t say how it compares – I’d definitely order it in a restaurant, though! Of course, not having the original to go on, I felt pretty free to make changes and substitutions. Sadly, one of these changes was ditching the mushrooms. I can disguise peppers pretty easily, but it’s hard to hide a mushroom without making a mushy horror out of the thing. I bet it would have been mind-blowing with them in. I was also unable to get any sundried tomatoes – we were having kind of a lousy trip to the grocery store, and I didn’t want to draw attention to my expensive and possibly objectionable food tastes by making a detour over to the sundried tomato aisle (hahaha. I mean “the sundried tomato square foot of shelf space”). So instead, I bought a regular tomato, and while I didn’t have all day to dry it in the oven, or a food dehydrator to do it in seconds, I did roast it until it was moderately wrinkly and 100% delicious, so while my version is probably a bit milder-tasting than the original, it’s still very good – and I always think I like sundried tomatoes more than I actually do, anyway. I get all excited about them and then I realize that I don’t honestly love them all that much… once I’ve bitten into one.
Pasta Milano
Ingredients
3 slices bacon
about 1 person’s worth of chicken (I used 2 thin little breast cutlets), diced
4 cloves garlic
1 tomato, cut into 8ths
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup half and half
enough farfalle for 2 people
parmesan cheese – you might need 1 cup or you might need less, but have at least a cup on hand just in case
basil
Method
Preheat oven to 450.
With them still in their skins, chop the tops off the garlic cloves so a bit of the clove itself is exposed.
Arrange the garlic cloves and the tomato pieces on a baking sheet and drizzle some olive oil on them. I also cranked a little salt onto the tomatoes to draw the liquid out a little more.
Roast for 10 – 15 minutes.
Turn the things so that a different face of them is touching the pan.
Put them back in for another 10ish minutes.
Meanwhile, or whatever, cook the bacon.
When it’s done, take it out to drain on a paper towel.
Drain off most of the bacon grease from the pan, just leaving enough to cook the chicken in.
I think you’ll have guessed what comes next – cook the chicken in the bacon-greased pan.
Take the chicken out when it’s cooked – you can put it with the bacon. By the way, at some point, break the bacon up into bits.
Don’t turn the pan off when you take the chicken out, though – just toss the garlic (squeezed out of its papery husks, of course), tomatoes, and chicken stock in there and give it a nice old stir to deglaze the pan and smash up the garlic and tomatoes a bit.
Bring to a boil.
Turn it down to a simmer and let it go for 10 minutes.
Stir in the half-and-half.
Bring it back up to a boil again.
At some point in the meanwhile, cook the pasta according to package directions.
Once both the sauce and pasta are done, mix the two together in a baking dish.
Sprinkle the parmesan cheese over the top.
Garnish with basil.
Sling it into the oven for 5 – 7 minutes or until the cheese is melty and the sauce is bubbling.
May 14, 2010 at 10:59 pm · Filed under food, meals
I made a risotto! I did the whole stand-over-it-and-stir thing! The consistency was good and the rice was toothsome and tender (how’s that for a turn of phrase?), and the only drawback was that when you cook something you hear Gordon Ramsay shout about all day long on Hell’s Kitchen, you imagine him standing over your shoulder belittling you and calling you a donkey. I’m sure I made some donkey moves while making this, but who cares – I was only making it for me, and I liked it.
The recipe came from Avocado & Bravado (which I tend to want to just call “Avocado Bravado”). I halved it since it was only for me, and wound up with enough for dinner and lunch the next day. Also, I didn’t spend my time roasting my own red peppers when you can get perfectly good ones in a jar from the store. When I’m making an “only me” meal, time is at a premium!
Roasted Red Pepper Risotto
Ingredients
1/2 a roasted red pepper (oh, go on, use a jarred one… are you going to roast half a pepper?), diced
1 shallot, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup arborio rice
1 tbsp white wine
2 cups chicken stock (which is what I used because I forgot I still had a 2-cup tupperware of frozen homemade veggie stock in the freezer… duh)
1/4 tsp paprika
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp parmesan
2 tbsp flat-leaf Italian parsley
Method
Very gently warm the stock in a pot over very low heat.
In the pot where you’re actually going to make the risotto, heat a little glug of olive oil over medium heat.
Saute shallot in the heated oil for about 5 – 7 minutes.
Add the garlic and saute for about 30 seconds.
Stir in the rice, roasted red pepper, and wine.
Cook for about 3 – 5 minutes, stirring frequently, which will seem positively laid-back compared to what’s to come.
Add about 1 1/2 ladles of the heated stock (I know, right? Who’s to say how my ladle compares to yours?) and stir until it’s pretty much all absorbed.
Add another ladleful of stock and stir until absorbed.
Repeat until you’ve used up all the stock, the risotto is creamy, and the individual rice grains are tender. These things should all occur at more or less the same time, about 25 minutes later.
Sometime during the stirring of the last ladle (dramatic!), stir in the paprika, parmesan, lemon juice, and parsley. I also added a few cranks of pepper, because I live on the edge.
May 9, 2010 at 11:06 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
As you might infer from the title, this is a version of chili that contains some flavours familiar from Asian cooking – it’s got soy sauce, sesame oil (of which I love) and ginger in it, as well as bok choy – but don’t be confused by the “chicken chili” part of the name. It’s not a chicken chili as you might usually know it, but with the added Asian bonus. It’s more like a regular chili as you might usually know it, but with chicken and with the whole pan-Asian thing. Or pan-east-Asia; it annoys me when people say “Asian” and basically mean “Chinese and Japanese and maybe Thai and Korean.” It’s the world’s biggest continent! It’s diverse! But anyway, my point is that it’s not a white chili, like most chicken chilis I’ve ever heard about are. It’s got tomatoes; it’s sort of… orange.
The recipe’s from The Taste Traveller, where it is billed as being spicy; maybe it’s because I used chili sauce instead of chili paste, but mine wasn’t particularly spicy. It was delicious, though – I don’t regret having less fire. And anyway one can always add more dashes of hot sauce to your own serving. Let’s see, what else did I change? Well, I halved it, of course, and I used a chopped actual tomato instead of a big can of tomatoes because there aren’t small cans of tomatoes. Also, she used chickpeas but said to use whatever was handy, and I felt that chickpeas were too far from a traditional beany bean to really evoke “chili” in my mind or Matt’s, so I went for pinto beans instead. That… might be all? So I don’t know if this tastes anything like the original version. I can definitely vouch for this version, though. Completely yumface.
Asian Chicken Chili
Ingredients
1/2 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
say about a 1-inch piece of ginger, minced
3 green onions, chopped
1 bell pepper – I used an orange one and savaged it in the food processor so Matt wouldn’t know it from carrots (and it worked, too!), but use whatever colour you want and dice it or something
2 carrots, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 heads bok choy, chopped (both stem and leaves)
1 tsp chili sauce, or more
1/2 lb chicken – I used breasts, but use what you like – cut up into bite-sized pieces
1 biggish tomato, diced
1 14-oz can pinto beans, or something else, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 cup flat-leaf Italian parsley
Method
Get your big soup pot out and heat the oil in it.
Saute the garlic, ginger, and green onions for about 30 seconds.
Add the bell pepper, carrot, celery, and hot sauce, continuing to saute until these are softened.
Stir in the chicken.
Cook until the chicken is white on all sides.
Add tomatoes and simmer, covered (or, y’know, not – doesn’t really matter), for about 30 minutes.
Stir in the beans, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, and soy sauce.
Cook for another 10 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in sesame oil and parsley.
May 8, 2010 at 11:26 pm · Filed under dessert, food
I didn’t make this cake for any reason, other than that I had a lot of eggs to use up – we usually buy the 6-pack, but at the drugstore, which was the only place we could get to at the time, they only had the big 12-packs. In styrofoam. Sigh. Anyway, I figured that since it wasn’t cake o’clock for any particular reason, but since I hadn’t brought anything in to work in a while, I could take one layer in, and keep one layer here at home. A novel solution if I do say so myself.
I got this recipe from Spache the Spatula, but I changed the icing (I know, that’s weird because that’s the part she raved about the most). I just get really nervous when there’s that many sticks of butter in a thing. But to make it, you stir a bunch of ingredients together in a pot on the stove, and when I was done that step, it looked like it would spread pretty well already, and it tasted good, so I decided to just stop there and use it as it was. That’s right – this icing didn’t have any butter in it whatsoever. And you know, it might not be to everyone’s taste, but it reminded me of some that my grandma used to make, and those are the magic words with recipes.
I also don’t have cake flour on hand ever, but I do have a trick (that I may have mentioned before… not sure) to turn regular all-purpose flour into cake flour. What you do is that you take out 2 tablespoons of the flour per cup, and replace it with 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, and whisk them together really really well. Donezo! Cake flour.
Chocolate-Peanut Butter Marble Cake
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups cake flour, OR 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour with 4 1/2 tbsp flour removed and 4 1/2 tbsp corn starch whisked in
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature (and to be honest the temperature of our apartment was pretty high that day, so my butter was about 5 minutes away from being called “softened”)
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, melted
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Grease and flour a pair of cake pans.
Whisk together the flour situation (either store-bought cake flour, or MacGyver cake flour… oh yes, I can’t wait to see what searches pull up this site now), the salt, and the baking powder in a small bowl.
Using a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and both sugars for about 5 minutes.
Beat in the eggs and vanilla, until combined.
Turn down the mixer to low and add in the flour mixture and the milk, alternating a bit of one and then a bit of the other, and beginning and ending with the flour. I’m not sure why that’s important, or even if it is – I haven’t done experiments. If you do, tell me the outcome.
Scoop out half of the batter and put it in another bowl. Yes, this is one of those recipes that dirties every bowl in your house. Sorry.
To the half that’s still in the stand mixer’s bowl, add the peanut butter and beat until combined. Trust me that you want to do this with the stand mixture. Peanut butter’s sticky and tough; don’t waste your time with a wooden spoon.
Mix the melted chocolate into the other half.
Pour half of the peanut butter mixture into each pan. As well as dirtying a lot of bowls, this recipe involves a lot of division, which in my case means a lot of eyeballing and calling it good.
Pour half of the chocolate mixture into each pan.
Run a knife through the mixtures to swirl them.
Bake for 30 – 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Cool in the pans for 10 minutes.
Then, if you plan on icing them, turn them out onto a rack to cool completely.
Weird But Still Pretty Good Icing
Ingredients
2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup flour (all-purpose is fine here, obviously)
3 tbsp cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup milk
Method
In a small pot, whisk together all ingredients.
Bring to a boil, whisking constantly.
Keep this up for about 1 minute, being sure to whisk all the lumps out completely.
Let cool before applying to cake.
Now, the original post said it was way easier to slice if you kept it in the fridge, so I did that, but it got kind of dry. After the first day of that, I just kept it out on the counter and it was fine.
May 2, 2010 at 8:53 pm · Filed under food, meals
These two dishes came as a twofer from Slimming Eats. Now, let’s note, I got the link to that site from seeing it on Foodgawker, and I clicked on it because the picture looked delicious. I wasn’t looking for some eats that were particularly slimming, and I didn’t keep the recipe because of that either. So don’t get the wrong idea.
The chicken and its associated veggie department was fantastic, but I wasn’t as taken with the rice. The rice was kind of bitter, and just didn’t taste the way its appearance would have led one to believe it would taste. It wasn’t terrible, but I thought it was going to be the best part of the meal, and it wasn’t. Plus, Matt thought it was going to be Mexican rice, because it was so beautifully yellow, and of course it didn’t taste anything like that. Mixing the rice with the chicken and vegetables was an improvement on eating the rice by itself, though. Interestingly enough, the word “pilau” comes from the same word as “pilaf,” so I’m not weird for thinking this would have a certain taste profile.
The word “dupiaza” means “double onion,” and it refers to the fact that onion is used twice in this recipe, half in a puree and half in a normal fashion. I halved the original recipe, so I was supposed to be using two onions. Instead, I found an onion the size of my face, so I figured that counted for two:
(please excuse the fact that it’s incredibly unflattering)
Chicken Dupiaza
Ingredients
2 chicken breasts (not the creepy steroidal ones, though – the normal-sized ones) or whatever 2 people worth of chicken is for you, diced
2/3 cup water
1 tsp minced ginger
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garam masala
2 onions, or one BEHEMOTH onion, divided in half and chopped (I mean, keep the two halves separate… I know you normally cut an onion in half in the process of chopping it, duh)
1 rib celery, sliced
1 carrot, sliced into rounds
approx. half a container unflavoured Greek yogurt
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp oil
Method
Fill a small pot with water and bring it to a boil.
Add half of the chopped onion (or, if you prefer, one chopped half of an onion).
Boil until soft.
Drain, then dump in a food processor and puree.
Heat oil in a large pan.
Add the celery, carrot, and the other half of the chopped onion (or… well, you know) and saute at a lowish heat until the onions are golden.
In a bowl or something, mix the garlic, ginger, curry powder, chili powder, turmeric, and garam masala and add a little splash of water until it forms a paste.
Stir this paste into the frying vegetables and let it cook for a minute or two.
Then, stir in the chicken until it is nicely coated.
In another bowl, or, if you’re cool, the bowl of your food processor where the onion puree already is, mix the yogurt, water, and tomato paste into the onion puree. If you decide you need to sample a little of this, I’ll look the other way, because it’s pretty delicious.
Mix this into the pan with everything else.
Bring the pan to a simmer and leave it, well, no, stir occasionally, for 15 – 20 minutes, or until the chicken is done.
Pilau Rice
Ingredients
Some of that cooking spray, or if you’re not fussy, a little oil or butter
1 cup rice
1 tsp turmeric
1 bay leaf
4 cardamom pods
4 cloves
1/2 tsp fennel
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups boiling water
Method
Put the rice in a pot and spray it with cooking spray; alternatively, melt some butter or heat oil in the pot and add the rice in.
Stir in the seasonings.
Pour in the boiling water.
Slap a lid on that bad larry and let it simmer on a low heat for 15 minutes, and treat it like regular rice – that is to say, leave it alone; don’t take the lid off, don’t stir it, just leave it until you see “eyes” (little holes in the rice) and they no longer have bubbles appearing in them. This might be obvious, but not everyone is an awesome cooker of rice. Anyway, once it reaches that stage, you’re donesies.
April 25, 2010 at 9:40 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Let’s not lie. This is not soup. However, in the comments to the original blog post on which I found this, namely on Ezra Pound Cake’s site, I found out that it also goes by another name which equally fails to describe it: Frito Pie. It isn’t pie, either. What it is, essentially, is chili. It does have this one distinguishing feature – not to say that it doesn’t stand out by its taste or anything, it’s delicious, but it tastes like another variation on the theme of chili – and that is that instead of maybe garnishing it with tortilla chips, or scooping it up with them as we’re wont to do in my family, you serve it on a bed of Fritos. Or, in our case, broken-up bits of regular tortilla chips from the bottom of the bag.
Oh my wordy word. Why had no one thought of this before?!? (The South: “AHEM.”) Ok, so clearly someone has thought of it before, but to paraphrase an old VICE Do-and-Don’t entry, you know something’s good when it makes you mad at everyone else for not thinking of it sooner. It doesn’t matter that it’s been going on for donkey’s years and just nobody told me. This is going to be my preferred method of consuming chili from now on.
This particular chili? Well, it’s good. I’m not going to throw over my existing recipe for it, but I do like the addition of corn, although I can’t say I’m going to make that addition to my normal chili – I don’t think Matt prefers to have it in. I was going to cook it in our slow cooker, at first, but I made it when a friend was over, and we spent the whole day doing the BARCC Walk for Change – for which I have a (still-active!) fundraising page through the website that I work for. Which, P.S., you should all also make fundraising pages for your own favourite charities. You’re welcome, work! ANYWAY, we did that, and then we went back to my friend’s alma mater, which is here, and she gave me a tour of the place. And we also snuck into their library – thrill! And because of all this, I wasn’t able to start the chili early, so I just made it in a pot.
And I halved it and there were 3 of us and we still had leftovers. So there. In the course of doing so, though, I had to make some changes – I don’t like having to use half a can of something, so I improvised with the un-canned counterparts and whatnot. So the amounts here are the amounts I made up based loosely on halving the original recipe. And I added some water, because I didn’t think the tomatoes were going to express enough liquid, and I don’t know if I was right or not but even the small amount of water I added cooked down nearly completely. So I’d recommend it.
“Taco Soup” Chili
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
1 onion, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 15-oz can black beans
1/2 cup dry pink beans, soaked overnight (or all day, in my case) and drained
1 8-oz can whole kernel corn, drained
1 4.5-oz can chopped green chilis
1/2 an envelope taco seasoning
1/2 an envelope ranch seasoning
chipotle powder (for smokiness)
1/4 cup water
Fritos or broken tortilla chips to serve over, plus more chips for garnishing (or eating with, in my family’s case)
sharp cheddar cheese, grated, to garnish
green onions, chopped, also to garnish
Method
Brown beef with onions in a large skillet over medium heat.
Transfer to a large dutch oven, using a slotted spoon to drain while you transfer (multitasking!). You’d think I’d just say to brown the meat in the dutch oven from the get-go, and it’s true that way you can get more fond in your life, but you wouldn’t get to drain it in the slotted spoon, and the whole tilting a heavy pot and trying to pour out the grease without pouring out the actual food thing is miserable. So do it this way, it’s easier.
Add everything else except the garnishes (which, to recap, are the chips, cheese, and green onions… don’t add those, add everything else).
Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, or longer, depending on what your schedule looks like, stirring every now and again.
Put some Fritos (or broken tortilla chip bits) in the bottoms of the bowls you’re going to eat from.
At any point after the 30 minute mark, if you feel like eating and can’t take the delicious smell anymore, serve the taco soup into the bowls over the wee chips.
Garnish with grated cheese, green onions, and regular-sized tortilla chips.
You may not need to add the water – the tomatoes and onions do emit moisture after all – but by the next day, the leftovers had just the perfect amount of sauciness, so I guess it depends if you’re planning on eating some the next day. I mean, it is chili, so, like all chilis and stews, it tastes even better the next day. This is an immutable law of the universe!
March 28, 2010 at 11:10 pm · Filed under breads, food
I can’t believe I hadn’t posted my soda bread before. I’ve been making it for at least 3 years now. Huh.
I have no idea where I got the recipe from. I obviously didn’t invent it myself, but one soda bread recipe is likely to be much like the next, except that this one doesn’t contain stupid raisins. Why would you want to do that to a perfectly good loaf of bread, anyway? So I, y’know, don’t. I suppose you could, if you like that sort of thing, but be aware that I’ll look at you the same way I do at people who put ketchup on scrambled eggs.
Soda Bread
Ingredients
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup oats
1 cup buttermilk
Method
Preheat oven to 375.
Mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl.
Stir in buttermilk until a dough forms.
Shape the dough into whatever shape you want and plop it onto a baking sheet.
Bake for 40 minutes or until the top crust is golden brown.
It’s magical toasted (or just warm out of the oven). As you can see, I couldn’t resist it myself.
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