Stroganoff

Tonight I decided I did not want anything healthy, all I wanted was a delicious dish. I do not try to avoid fat to be healthy. No, I avoid fat so that I can justify having very fatty meals like this. It is nice to occasionally eat stroganoff but I do not suggest doing it often.

I use prime steaks for the meat in this dish. You are not limited by that fact at all. I have done this with gluten steaks, fri-chik or no veggie meat at all. The reason I use the prime steaks is that the gravy complicates the natural flavor of the stroganoff.

You can use fat free sour cream if you are desiring to cut down on the fat, but I do not suggest it. You can use any cream soup. I prefer the cream of mushroom soup, and will often add extra mushrooms. A good side dish to have is cream corn.

Stroganoff

1 bag Egg Noodles

1 16 oz container Sour Cream

1 can Chopped Prime Steaks

1 can Cream of Mushroom Soup

Pinch of Salt

1 tablespoon Onion Powder

2 tablespoons Minced Garlic

1. Cook pasta.

2. While pasta cooks mix the rest of the ingredients.

3. Cook the sauce over medium heat for 5 minutes.

4. Add sauce to drained pasta and cook for another 5 minutes

Misery Cookies

At some point or another all of my friends run into hard times. Whether it is a pet dying, bad grades, or something worse, I always have a meal on hand ready to help cheer them up. For example my fiance needs some kind of homemade chocolate to put a big smile on her face. I like to bake her a huge extra dark chocolate brownie batch.

Recently, one of my friends has been going through a hard time, and I happen to know that she loves chocolate. I decided that it was time to come up with a recipe to put a smile on her face. Quadruple Chocolate Toffee Peanut-Butter Chip Cookies. These cookies are not for the faint of heart by any means.

One thing that makes them quadruple chocolate is the addition of cocoa nibs. Cocoa nibs are small bits of cocoa bean that have been roasted. Cocoa nibs are probably my favorite type of chocolate to cook with. I like the crunch they add to the dish, and the expression on peoples face as they try to figure out exactly what they are.

As with all of my recipes I suggest modifying it to work for your purposes. Normally I cook my cookies on a baking stone, so you may need to change the temperature and or time if you do not have a baking stone available to you. These cookies are of the chewy variety, if you prefer a softer cookie try decreasing the fat content.

Quadruple Chocolate Toffee Peanut-Butter Chip Cookies

1 1/4 cups Butter
2 cups Sugar
3 Eggs
1 tablespoon Vanilla Extract
1/8 cup Heavy Whipping Cream
2 cups Flour
1 cup Baking Chocolate
1 teaspoon Baking Soda
1/2 teaspoon Salt
1 bag Chocolate Chips
1 bag Toffee Pieces
1 cup Cocoa Nibs
1 bag Peanut Butter Chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees with the baking stone already in place.

2. Cream butter and Sugar

3. Mix in eggs, vanilla, and whipping cream.

4. Mix flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt.

5. Slowly add to the cream mixture.

6. Place spoonfuls of cookie dough onto baking stone.

7. Cook for 8-10 minutes and then cool on wire racks.

Scrambled Omelet

I do not have breakfast often, but this morning my fiance and I decided that we wanted to have breakfast together. To go along with our fresh batch of homemade eggnog that we made in celebration of finally reaching the Christmas season, we decided to have omelets.

It seemed natural to have an egg dish with eggnog. Our original idea was to have omelets. We ended up sauteing a few to many vegetables to easily fit inside of two omelets. Not willing to let even the tiniest bit of those vegetables go to waste, we decided to turn our omelets into a scramble.

Normally I would have roasted the vegetables instead of sauteing them, but I did not want to invest the extra time into this dish. The reason I tend to favor roasting over sauteing is that you introduce less fat into the vegetables, and get a more natural flavor from them. While sauteing does have a particular flavor that some prefer, I do not find the extra fat worth it.

My suggestion for sauteing garlic with other vegetables is to add the garlic later in the sauteing process. I normally saute my vegetables on medium heat in a cast iron skillet for about 3 to 5 minutes. I then reduce the heat to medium-low and add the garlic cooking for several more minutes. It is easy to add too much oil while sauteing the vegetables, resist the temptation!

Scrambled Omelet

    5 Eggs
    1 tablespoon Milk
    1 tablespoon Flour
    1 teaspoon Salt
    1 teaspoon Black Pepper
    2 teaspoons Basil
    1/2 cup Mozzarella
    1/4 cup Feta
    1 Green Pepper
    1 cup Mushrooms
    2 tablespoons Minced Garlic
    7 Split Cherry Tomatoes

1. Whip the eggs, milk, flour, salt, pepper and Basil.

2. Place eggs in a lightly oiled frying pan over medium heat.

3. Sprinkle both types of cheese over top of the eggs.

4. Mix in sauteed vegetables.

5. Stirring occasionally, cook until everything is lightly browned.

A Non-Traditional Calzone

Tonight for dinner my fiance and I had calzones. The reasoning behind the title is that I put marinara sauce inside of my calzones. In essence the calzones turned it into more of a stromboli-calzone hybrid. As per tradition, we filled them with all kinds of roasted veggies, zucchini, mushrooms, green peppers, and cherry tomatoes, also some sauteed garlic.

For the most part I try to be healthy, but when it comes to pizza I tend to put a lot of cheese on or in them. Tonight we used mozzarella, feta, parmesan, and romano cheese. I like to layer the different types of cheese between the vegetables so that they all mix together but retain their unique flavors.

More importantly than the cheese is the crust, I use a modified version of Alton Brown's pizza crust recipe. In a future blog I may release my particular recipe but I am hesitant to share bread recipes. With bread there are so many factors involved with making a good bread dough from what brand of flour you use, to the humidity in your house. I spend a lot of time making sure my crust is just perfect.

My first time ever having calzones was at a local pizzeria. This pizzeria prides itself in making authentic New York style pizza. I had always enjoyed their pizzas, the cheese one especially. The defining feature of their cheese pizza was the heaping piles of ricotta cheese. One trip there I noticed on the menu this thing called a calzone. I was about 16, at the time, and I had never even heard of the concept. Theirs was a perfect mix of pizza ingredients, with a salty and well seasoned exterior.

With calzones, like pizza, there is no perfect way to do it. Everyone has there own preference and I always encourage customizing my recipes. I do have a couple of suggestions though. Plan ahead, slow rise pizza doughs are always best. If you rise the pizza dough in the fridge for 24 hours it will have a more classic pizza crust texture. Second, bake the pizza at 500 degrees, and as close to the bottom as you can get. You want it to cook fast, that is why I suggest precooking the vegetables. When the calzones are half baked I lightly spread olive oil on top so the surface gets a nice golden brown with the crispy edges. Finally, try and use a baking stone. Without a baking stone I find that the bottoms get soggy and leak everywhere.

Calzones

    2 Pizza Doughs
    2 tablespoons Olive Oil
    1 cup Mozzarella Cheese
    1 Green Pepper
    1 Zucchini
    2 tablespoons Garlic
    1/2 cup Pizza Sauce
    1 cup Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
    1 teaspoon Sea Salt

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees with baking stone on bottom rack.

2. Fill half the pizza dough with the desired ingredients.

3. Fold pizza dough in half and seal the dough using a bit of water around the edge and using a fork to seal the edges.

4. Bake for 3 minutes.

5. Brush top with olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt. The reason for the sea salt versus normal salt is that I like sea salt better here.

6. Bake for another 4-7 minutes or until top is golden brown.

A Childish Breakfast

On occasion I think that it is nice to do something childish. Some may consider playing in a bouncy castle childish, others it may be jumping in a pile of leaves. I always get the childish giddy feeling every time I make chocolate chip waffles. I love watching the huge pile of whipped cream slowly melting into the waffles.

This morning was an example of one of my many failed experiments. While most of my experiments do not fail, the ones early Saturday morning normally do. I tried making whipped cream out of half and half. I know, I know, half and half does not have enough fat to make good whipped cream. I should have known better, but I wanted to make healthier, and cheaper, whipped cream. So we had a vaguely vanilla flavored foamy milk on our waffles.

There is one disagreement my fiance and I have about waffles. She wants them dead, black and whithered, while I like them lightly browned and fluffy. That is a bit of an exaggeration. I like mine blonde, she likes them brunette. To make a blonde waffle you need to cook it till all the steam stops. For a brunette waffle you cook it for an extra one to two minutes.

Chocolate Chip Waffles

    2 cups Flour
    1 teaspoon Salt
    4 teaspoons Baking Powder
    4 tablespoons White Sugar
    1/3 cup Butter
    2 Eggs
    1/2 cups Milk
    3/4 cups Heavy Whipping Cream or Half and Half
    1 tablespoon Vanilla Extract
    1/2(or more) cup Chocolate Chips

1. Mix all dry ingredients

2. Melt the butter. I admit it, I used the microwave.

3. Mix milk, eggs, cream, and vanilla extract together.

4. Add the liquids to the dry ingredients.

5. Stir till just barely mixed. Do not ever over mix. It might make me cry.

6. Fold in chocolate chips.

7. Cook according to your waffle manufacturers specifications. Nice and blonde.

8. Top with whipped cream and get a big childish grin on your face.

Eggplant Lasagna

I love lasagna for two reasons. The first being you can put basically anything you want in it, whether that be eggplant, veggie meat, or fried eggs. The second is that I love lasagna noodles. I like the frilly edges, and I love eating them by themselves. In general, I just love big noodles of any kind.

Tonight we had lasagna with eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms, green peppers, spinach, and sauteed garlic. My fiance requested the eggplant because it sounded delicious to her, and I had to agree with her.  To me eggplant adds a sense of sophistication to a lasagna dish. Eggplant takes lasagna from a kid friendly dish to something you might find at a fancy restaurant.

In general, I enjoy cooking with eggplant, it is easy to cut, and it absorbs flavors nicely. The one problem I have with eggplant is that it absorbs oil like a sponge. One method I use to work around this is roasting the eggplant before using it. While it does take longer to cook overall, I think that the extra time is well worth it. It adds a bit of a crusty edge to the eggplant, and keeps it from absorbing too much oil from the cheese in the lasagna.

Since we were already roasting the eggplant, we decided to go ahead and roast all the other vegetables before putting them into the lasagna. To roast you preheat the oven to 400 degrees. I lightly coat all the vegetables with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. The time it takes to roast each vegetable varies. For example, roasting brussel sprouts takes about an hour and eggplant takes about 30 minutes. Half way through the roasting process you need to stir, or flip the vegetables.

Eggplant Lasagna

    1 package Lasagna Noodles

    4 cups Tomato Sauce

    1 large Eggplant

    2 cups Mushrooms

    1 large Zucchini

    2 Green Peppers

    3 cups Spinach

    1 head Garlic

    2 cups Shredded Mozzarella Cheese

    1 20 oz container Cottage Cheese

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Slice eggplant and zucchini into ¼ inch rounds, slice the mushrooms and green peppers. I sliced the green peppers into long thin strips

3. Roast the eggplant, and mushrooms for 30 minutes. Roast the zucchini and green peppers for 45 minutes.

4. Saute the garlic.

5. Begin layering your lasagna! We layered it like this. Sauce, noodles, sauce, eggplant, cheese, noodles, sauce, green peppers, cottage cheese, spinach, noodles, sauce, zucchini, mushrooms, garlic, noodles, sauce, spinach, cottage cheese, noodles, sauce, and spinach. Yes we like complicated lasagna.

6. Bake for 15 minutes.

7. Add cheese on top and bake for another 15-30 minutes or until browned on top.

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving for those of you who are out of the loop. I will be later heading over to my fiance's house to share dinner with her family. I am not sure what all will be there already, but I am sure we will have something along the line of dinner roast, green beans, mashed potatoes, corn, and of course cranberry sauce. I will be bringing one of my favorite Thanksgiving dishes, apricot chicken.

I first had apricot chicken about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving. A friend of mine invited me over to her house to have dinner with them. Her parents were both from the Caribbean, so it was far from what you would call a traditional Thanksgiving. I immediately fell in love with this dish, both for its taste and its simplicity to make.

Looking around the internet a bit, it is hard to say what the origins of this dish are. A lot of places all seem to claim that it started with them. The apricot has a much more defined history though. Apricots were first cultivated in China about 4000 years ago. They were believed to increase the fertility of women. By 100 BC the Romans had them and were then cultivating them. By the 16th century they were growing happily in Europe.

One thing of possible worry is that Russian dressing can be very difficult to find. There is only one store here in Walla Walla that sells it. You can always make  your own. I have tried it both with and without frying the chickettes before baking them. I found that it still tastes amazing without frying it, but you lose on that nice and crispy texture of the fried chickettes.  

Apricot Chicken

    2 Rolls Worthington Chickettes
    Pinch of Salt
    2 Tablespoons Minced Garlic
    1 15 oz Container Russian Dressing
    1 19 oz Container Apricot Preserves

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Break up chickettes into 1/4 inch to 1 inch pieces depending on your preference of size.

3. Brown chickettes in skillet with a little bit of olive oil. This step is optional I like it because I like the crispy bits.

4. Saute the garlic with the salt. The salt helps the garlic caramelize.

5. In a large mixing bowl mix the Russian dressing and the apricot preserves it seems to be easier to mix well if you mix it before adding the chickettes.
 
6. Mix together the chickettes, garlic and apricot mix.

7. Place all in a baking pan and bake for 30-50 minutes the tips should be turning a nice brown and the apricot mix should be nice and thick.

Breakfast Burritos

This morning I had a bunch of friends over and had to come up with something good for everyone. One friend will not eat eggs, my fiance does not like spicy food and I personally hate really sweet breakfasts. So the natural answer was breakfast burritos! The reason for this is everyone can put what they want on their particular burrito and everyone can have as much as they want. I normally put out fried eggs, fried potatoes, salsa, cheese, gravy and homemade sausage crumbles, all to be put inside large homemade flour tortillas.

Now as you all know I am a vegetarian, so today I am going to share my vegetarian sausage recipe. I use this base recipe for a lot of different dishes. I will often put it into a gravy, on pizza or modify it to make amazing taco meat.

For the base of my sausage crumble I use either plain dry tvp or beef flavored dry tvp. I always pick mine up at the local bulk food store. I have two reasons for this, it is dirt cheap there, I can get a pound of tvp for a couple of dollars. The other reason is I love to support my local stores!

For this recipe I will assume you bought just plain tvp. This recipe is easy to scale and you can modify the seasonings to get exactly what you want. The oil is to add a little bit of grease that I feel sausages need. If you are trying to cut down on fat, feel free to leave it out. The other nice thing about this recipe is that with a little flour, some corn meal and a couple of eggs you can make easy sausage patties.

Sausage Crumbles

    1 cup Water
    1 tablespoon Olive Oil
    1 cup Tvp
    3 tablespoons McKays Beef Seasoning
    1 tablespoon Whole Fennel Seed
    2 teaspoons Sage
    1 teaspoon Salt
    2 teaspoons Black Pepper
    2 tablespoons Minced Garlic


1. Bring water and oil to a rolling boil.

2. Add tvp, and seasonings and reduce heat to medium. I suggest adding the McKay's seasoning first to make sure that it is fully incorporated into the water. You can use any flavor of vegetarian seasoning in place of this

3. Cover and cook for 5-10 minutes stirring occasionally.

4. For browned meat remove from saucepan and fry in a little more oil. If you do not want to dirty too many pans you can do all of your steps in the frying pan.

Starting with the Mustard

Hello blog world!

I have for many years now followed several cooking blogs, especially the vegetarian ones. The reason being, I absolutely love to cook. I use cooking as my stress relief. Between my own curiosity and having picky eaters surrounding me, I am often trying to find new and interesting things to cook. Frequently I make up my own recipe.

Yesterday my fiance's mother and I attempted to make mustard. To say the least, it was not what I expected. It was very sweet and tasted as if it might go with something Asian, but I was really wanting a good deep, rich mustard, the kind that, if you get too large of a bite, makes your eyes tear up a bit.

After a couple of hours of researching the internet on mustard creating techniques and the history of mustard I finally settled on the perfect mustard recipe. I discovered there are three basic types of mustard seeds: yellow, brown and black. The darker the mustard, the hotter the mustard. So after a quick trip down to my local bulk food store I returned with a couple cups of brown mustard seed. After tasting a couple of raw and digging in my cupboard for some mustard powder I was ready to start.

Part of thing with mustard is deciding how "hot" you want it. The first step towards your heat selection is what mustard seeds you choose. As I stated earlier, the lighter the color the milder the mustard. The second part is the temperature of the liquid that you use. When you mix the mustard seeds with the water you start a chemical reaction that creates the heat. The colder the liquid you use the hotter the mustard will be.

This is the rough recipe that I settled on. I tend to be a dump cook, but I worked hard to give exact amounts. I use a lot of mustard so I made a large recipe. I will be personally using water but if you are wanting more of a French or Roman mustard you should use wine. The nice thing is, not only is this recipe easy to scale, it is easy to customize too your hearts content.

Basic Hot Mustard Recipe

    1/4 cup brown mustard seeds
    3 tablespoons ground yellow mustard
    2 tablespoons salt
    3 tablespoons white vinegar
    1/2 cup water or wine
    Any herbs you may desire.

1. First you need to grind the mustard seeds. I did not have a food mill so I threw them into my blender. How well ground you want them is up to you. Some of the fancier mustards are just barely cracked while others are smooth. I choose the middle ground so I lightly ground the seeds

2. Put the mustard seeds into a bowl with the ground mustard, salt and whatever herbs you desire. I personally used 2 tablespoons of garlic powder in mine.

3. Add the vinegar and the wine or water to the mixture. I used ice water for an extra spicy mustard. At this point put in an air tight container and refrigerate for 12 hours before use. The mustard will have a bitter taste at first but that goes away with refrigeration.