Thanksgiving!!

No matter how dormant I let this blog lie, I always try to do a Thanksgiving post. This year's Thanksgiving was wonderful. I spent the night at my mother's, and I cooked there. The only thing I prepared the day before was my only new recipe. And hoo boy, they were worth it. Behold, the eggy cheesy buttery goodness that is gougères:

I stumbled across the recipe when I went to the Splendid Table website for something completely different - I can't even remember what I was there for, originally. These are simultaneously eggy and cheesy and light and air filled, all at the same time. They are similar to gruyère laden mini popovers. I crisped them right before dinner, and they were fabulous. I also recreated the chorizo stuffed mushrooms of Thanksgiving past, and they were a hit again. They disappeared. 

Every thing else was very traditional. I took my time on Thursday. Here is a butter and Trocomare slow roasted turkey. I put a quartered onion, a bundle of fresh thyme and a tangerine with some of its skin removed inside. It turned out perfectly.

I made the cranberry sauce with fresh cranberries, tangerine juice, tangerine zest, lime juice, sugar, salt, fresh mint and Grand Marnier. It was divine.

 Very simple pan roasted green beans with shallots. 

 Delicious sweet potatoes! I didn't add any sugar or sweetener to the actual sweet potatoes - they didn't need any. I just added butter and mashed them. The marshmallows were left over from a recent camping trip, and I couldn't resist. The nuts are candied pralines. With so much sweetness in the toppings, I really didn't think the sweet potatoes needed to be doctored at all.

As a nod to Hanukkah, I made a boatload of stuffing with challah. I also made cornbread stuffing with sausage and apple. Both were so delicious. I think the cornbread stuffing may have been my favorite thing on the menu. 

Here is the whole table, including mashed gold potatoes, salad, and the cornbread stuffing. I have been doing this for so many years now, it's very comfortable, laid back and fun. I don't really need recipes for most of it. I consult a few recipes for ratios, but that's usually in the middle of the process, just to confirm what's already happening. 

I hope you all had fun cooking and eating with you and yours!

Fearless comfort food

It was unseasonably chilly in South Florida this week. We actually had frost on our windshields a few mornings!

I decided to make some warm, stick-to-yer-ribs comfort food this week. I made two of my favorite dishes that I have never made myself: chicken and dumplings, and shepherd's pie. I also made another new recipe: shrimp chowder.

The chicken and dumplings were absolutely delicious. We ate it too quickly to take a picture. I (mostly) used the recipe from my American Home Cooking cookbook. I already had homemade chicken broth, so I didn't use the chicken for the recipe to also make broth. I seared it and then braised it in the chicken broth, without boiling it in between to make a quickie, vegetable-less batch of broth as the recipe called for.



I made shepherd's pie with a lot of adjustments and combining of recipes. I also cheated and used ground chicken, since that was all that I had at home, and I didn't want to go brave the near freezing temperatures to get beef and lamb. I added a little bit of A1 and red wine to "beef" it up. I also cooked the potatoes for the topping in buttermilk, and then mashed them in the cooking liquid, as Cook's Country recommended just this month. Mmmm, tasty. I topped the taters with cheese and scallions. It makes for an ugly picture, but it was tas-tee.




This shrimp chowder with bacon and fennel was delicious. Our local grocery store had some lovely shrimp on sale. I was thinking of making a scampi, but I wanted to try something new. Picky made the mistake of saying he was "a little sick" of one of my dishes in the rotation, spaghetti carbonara, so I am going to be throwing some curveballs this week.

I entered in "shrimp" into my epicurious-on-the-go app on my phone, and this shrimp chowder recipe was the first one to come up. It called for shrimp, fennel and bacon, three of S's all time favorite ingredients. Since he will be gone for the long weekend, and this will be his last dinner with us for several days, I sent him off with a bang.

The recipe calls for adding the raw shrimp one minute before the end of cooking the chowder, then taking it off the heat, mixing in the cream, and letting it sit for ten minutes. The shrimp were cooked perfectly. Just past the underdone threshold. Barely not translucent. Bite, but no chewiness.

S and I both had three servings.

Frenchees and bisque

I made the most evil sandwiches the other night, based on a recipe from Cook's Country. They are called "Frenchees", and involve taking sandwiches made with white bread, mayonnaise and American cheese, coating them with cracker crumbs and frying them. Uhh, evil.



I tried to balance it out by serving them with shrimp bisque. That's classy enough, right?

Farmer's market deliciousness

I am making tomato pie with beautiful fresh tomatoes. I stuck to the recipe pretty closely, except for putting in three times the bacon. Uh, yeah, I went there. I made it before and it was scrumptious, but there is a reason why our adopted family name is the baconderfers.

I am making garlic scapes on the side. They are so cool. I woke up dreaming about them this morning, and they were actually at the farmer's market! They are only there for a limited time each year. I must have felt their call.

I will be back with pictures.

I love this recipe!

I found a recipe for butterflied chicken over potatoes that I love. Roasted chicken with crispy skin is total comfort food for me. And, it's something I totally do not have time to make. I made it with TWO chickens last night and it still only took 50 minutes to cook. I throw carrots in the bottom with the potatoes.

Ironically, I was looking the recipe up online last night to use again, and read the intro a little more carefully. It's from my favorite cookbook, the New Best Recipe, which I have. On my shelf.

I highly recommend it. With the carrots added, you have your main dish, starch and veggies all done with little to no hands on work.

Obscene food porn

I made biscuits and sausage gravy from scratch for breakfast today. I am going overboard with this vacation cooking thing. This is my first time cooking with shortening *shudder*, I think. I bought the "0 grams of trans fat" per serving variety by Crisco (I wanted to organic shortening by Spectrum, but forgot to buy it at the health food store, and they didn't have it at the local grocery store). I think it may be zero grams as a technicality, since there are partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients. Anyway, the biscuits were obscenely good, and the trace trans fats may be worth it.

Picky's Father's Day Menu

Salad with fresh tomatoes and red onions and cheddar cheese and my salad dressing (Even my no veggie eatin' brother asked for seconds on salad. Seriously)

Buffalo wings made with my roasted hot sauce (Oops, forgot to buy the wings when I went to the store. We had tons of food, anyway).


Sweet mini pepper "poppers" with roasted hot sauce and cheese

Corn (Red and white sweet corn. It was delish)

Smoked BBQ baby ribs with a dry rub, homemade BBQ sauce on the side (Killer)

Mac n cheese (I used Paula Dean's recipe. Ehhhhh, too eggy)

Brownies a la mode with hot fudge and mini M n Ms (No one wanted the M n M's. I made the brownies with new Hershey's Special Dark cocoa. They were the best I have EVER had, I am serious).

Oh, yeah.

Pictures now posted!

Roasted chicken, white noodles and snow peas

This is a total comfort food meal for me, and a real standard in our house. Even before I became a real foodie, roasting a whole chicken was a form of therapy for me. I had one particular friend, Turtle, with a good sense of smell. He would come from up the hill and sop up the drippings in my poor-excuse-for-a-roasting pan whenever I had a particularly hard day.

I have officially given up on a Cook's Illustrated (no! really!) recipe because it is too high maintenance, and I like my results better. I am not rotating my dang chicken every 20 minutes or so, and please, let me slather it in some form of fat. It just comes out so much tastier! I used grapeseed oil on and under the skin, sprinkled it with Trocomare, and shoved a whole peeled lime in the cavity. I will never go back to butter. It was so tasty.

White pasta

8 oz egg noodles
2 T butter
2/3 cup sour cream
Trocomare

This is a basic super easy white sauce I do. I just cook and drain the egg noodles and add the butter and sour cream and Trocomare (an herbed salt blend). This is gobbled up by everyone in the house, and can be easily added to and made a main course. Add roasted chicken leftovers and spinach and cooked garlic. Or, add peas and prosciutto.

Glazed snow peas

oil
Snow peas, ends trimmed
carrots
grated ginger
diced garlic
honey
soy sauce

Heat oil in skillet. Add snow peas and carrots, cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add ginger, garlic, honey and soy sauce, and cook one more minute, or until garlic just opaque.