Food for Card Sharks

I think I might’ve fallen off the bandwagon or something.

I’m supposed to be cooking my way through my cookbooks and haven’t made even a teeny, tiny dent in them since June. In fact, I’m pretty sure that during the month of July, I didn’t touch a single one of them except to flip through one or two of them or to move a stack of them from one spot to another.

That’s sad. Really, really sad and maybe just a little bit pathetic too.

Last weekend, however, I felt like I might have turned the corner.

As the co-host for an evening of Euchre, it was my responsibility to bring food. And not just some little nibbles or bags of candy or something. I needed to bring my fair share of treats for about 12 adults and assorted children.

This was a challenge that I was totally up for.

I also knew that I could only get away with only just so much experimenting since I’d have to make all the food in a short amount of time and make sure it was good. None of these experiments where I spend precious time making something that winds up tasting horrid a la Bobby’s Pimento Cheese.

Knowing my friends, I knew sort of what I wanted to make. Knowing that much at least, I went with two recipes I’ve made before – Chiqui’s Creole Cream Cheese Dip and Pecan Chicken.

I modified the Pecan Chicken recipe a bit though. First, I cut the chicken so that it could easily be eaten in a bite or two rather than cutting them into strips. Then, because I forgot to buy more sesame seeds (the recipe calls for a quarter cup), I substituted two heaping tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese. I also switched out the tablespoon of salt and tablespoon of paprika for a heaping tablespoon of Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning. Based on the reactions of the group and the return trips to the platter, these substitutions worked just fine.

Chiqui’s Creole Cream Cheese Dip was done per the instructions – except for one fatal flaw. I combined all the ingredients in my mixer rather than a blender. It makes a difference. The mixer on high speed wound up whipping the heavy cream, which gave the dip a weird fluffy texture. When I made it in the blender last time, I had an appropriately smooth, dip-like texture. So, basically, what should have been an excellent batch of dip was ruined by texture. I hate that.

I made up for one batch of dip gone bad with a different dip – Baked Bean Dip. I saw a photo of this on TasteSpotting, one of my most favorite Web sites, and knew it would be perfect for my group of Euchre-playing friends. Plus, it looked simple enough that I knew I could work into an afternoon of cooking without completely stressing myself out in the making of it and other recipes.

You can see the recipe for yourself at EatWellLivingThin’s Web site. My only tweak was to use a can of Ro*Tel instead of salsa. Based on the reactions of my friends and the fact that the pan was nearly empty by the end of the evening, I think it was a success. In fact, we cracked open a second bag of chips to scoop up as much as possible. Very satisfying.

My last recipe comes courtesy of Bakerella, who recently featured a post about Petit Fours and Cream Cheese Pound Cake. While I’ve gone through the nightmare of making petit fours myself, I could not resist Bakerella’s pound cake recipe. After making it for myself, complete with some strawberries and frosting, I have to say I’m glad I did not bother with trying to resist the temptation to make this recipe. This stuff was delicious and just a little bit decadent.

One of the nice things about this little cooking adventure is that I managed to make everything in less than four hours, including baking time. For me, that’s impressive since I can be so easily distracted by other things. Although, since I had a hard stop of having to be out of the house at a certain time in order to get to my friend’s house to set up before everyone showed up, I might have had more incentive to get everything done in a timely fashion. Personally, I do not think that this fact takes away from my accomplishment. After all, I made all four dishes as planned and didn’t dump one of them due to laziness or a distraction.

The only thing that would have made this night better would have been if I’d had the highest score of the night. I didn’t. Not even close. Boo…

When Did Cheese Stop Being My Friend?

In my family, we have any number of recipes that are handed down generation to generation. These are the recipes that I should know by heart, but I don’t make them often enough to not consult a written recipe for a reminder or three on ingredient quantities or oven temps.

However, there are some odd recipes that aren’t among my family’s repertoire. Corn casserole, for example. I love it, but it wasn’t until I was watching Paula Deen while on the elliptical that I “found” a recipe for it. I memorized it while getting in another mile and then immediately rushed to the store to buy the ingredients and make it for myself. Heaven.

So this weekend, when I was making “Bobby’s Pimento Cheese” from Paula Deen’s “The Lady & Sons” cookbook I expected to be wowed. After all, pimento cheese is a classic Southern recipe loved by many. Plus, it’s made with cream cheese, two kinds of shredded cheese, mayonnaise, the obligatory pimentos and some seasonings. I mean, seriously, how could this be anything less but fabulous?

I made two batches.

The first one came out like crap because I accidentally put too much salt in it. Okay. Fine. My fault. I could fix it by not eyeballing the seasonings.

The second time around, I followed the directions for “Bobby’s Pimento Cheese” verbatim.

Still bad. And by bad, I actually mean, I hated it. Really, seriously hated it.

I feel like a traitor to the South, but it was gross. Too salty and a huge waste of cheese. The only thing I could do with either batch was to feed 'em to the garbage disposal. Poor garbage disposal, it didn't do anything wrong...

When I called my Mom and Dranny to discuss this failure, they could only laugh and tell me that, had I asked them, they could have told me how much I would not like pimento cheese. Then they laughed some more.

Fortunately, my weekend cooking also included making a batch of Baked Beans from my family’s recipe to take to a Memorial Day/House Warming/Surprise Birthday Party (efficient, no?). We make our baked beans with four cans of Van Camp’s Pork & Beans; a ½ pound to a ¾ pound of bacon, cooked and crumbled; an onion and a bell pepper chopped and sautéed; a ¼ cup or so of brown sugar; a ¼ cup or so of ketchup; ½ tsp to 1 tsp of dry mustard; and 2 or so tablespoons of white vinegar – all mixed together and baked at 325 for an hour or so. (Can you tell that we don't believe in exact recipes in my family?)

The Baked Beans turned out just like they were supposed to. Delicious!

So delicious that there were no leftovers. Isn’t that the best compliment any cook or chef can receive?

Oh... Who am I kidding?

There were no leftovers. I wanted leftovers for me. And there were none. I could have cried.

It Started With Some Simple Cheese Straws...

Last weekend started with a simple idea: “Let’s make Cheese Straws!!!” In fact, I’m pretty sure that after I saw the recipe for the Cheese Straws in “The Savannah Cookbook,” I immediately began to imagine just what a smashing success I’d be with my co-workers when I brought them in. Because, I mean, who doesn’t like Cheese Straws?

Since the Cheese Straw recipe looked pretty straight forward, I picked out a couple of other recipes. Crab Tassies and Corn & Chicken Chowder.

For a few reasons though, I wavered about making the Chowder. Mostly because I realize that I’ve been making a lot of soup-y dishes, and it felt like I was either bending my “try-something-new” rule or possibly even breaking it. Ultimately, when I made up my grocery shopping list, I left off the Chowder ingredients. I reasoned that this was a good thing since I need to focus on trying new things and, besides all that, fresh corn on the cob isn’t in season.

This well thought out plan was blown to pieces though when I walked into Whole Foods and saw loads and loads of corn on the cob. I was a goner. I went from a reasonable amount of cooking project-ness to a level of cooking that really ought to have come with a sous chef. Not that I thought about that sort of thing *before* I started cooking. No. That would have been smart of me.

Anyhow, the day started out with me looking around my apartment and realizing that my couple of weeks of traveling and craziness at work had done no favors for the cleanliness of my place nor the level of laundry in the hamper. By the time I’d dealt with that nonsense, it was the middle of the afternoon and I was, finally, ready to get a cookin’.

Looking at the timing of things and what needed to be made when, I decided to tackle the Crab Tassies first. Crab Tassies are, essentially, crab cakes in cream cheesy pastry shells. In other words, they are freaking awesome! I really don’t know what else to say about these except that I loved them. LOVED THEM!

Even better, they were relatively easy. Make the pastry dough, roll the dough into even-sized balls and refrigerate them. While the dough is chilling, make the filling. When dough is chilled, press it into the muffin tins. The recipe called for making 24 mini-muffin tin sized Crab Tassies, but I only had normal-sized muffin tins. Once you have the pastry pressed into the muffin tins, fill it with the crab mixture. Bake. Eat. And eat. And eat.

Seriously, the biggest challenge for me with this recipe was stopping myself from eating all of the Crab Tassies.

Anyhow, once the Crab Tassies were out of the oven and I’d managed to clean up some of the resulting mess, I moved on to the Chicken & Corn Chowder. I manage to justify this as new-to-me in a sideways manner because I followed the recipe’s direction to use fresh corn on the cob and to cut the corn kernels off instead of cheating and using frozen corn.

This may not seem revolutionary to some of y’all, but it is to me. I mean, seriously, I used a sharp knife to slice off corn kernels off the cob – without supervision or medical assistance on call. Brave. Very brave. And messy. Unbelievably messy. It took me two of the five corn cobs to kinda, sorta master the art of cutting off the corn kernels without having corn juice squirt all over the place. Whatever though. It was fun.

Unfortunately for me, by the time I had the Corn & Chicken Chowder ready to sample, I was stuffed. I had had one too many Crab Tassies. I don’t regret it though. Chowder is always better the second day. And I was right. I will say though, that next time I make this Chowder recipe, I’ll go with my initial gut reaction and decrease the chicken from two cups to one cup, and add more corn.

Then I started in on what I had deemed to be the easiest of the recipes. The Cheese Straws.

That’s when I realized that these little buggers are lying, deceptive bastards! Easy? Oh no. Not at all. Not even close. And I didn’t even finish making them.

Let’s start with the fact that the recipe calls for softened butter and lots of cheese. Okay. That’s fine. But softened butter does not like to mix with grated cheese. And my mixer was not up to the task of forcing them into submission. Maybe a food processor would have worked better, but I don’t have one and I just soldiered on.

I’ll be honest. By the time I started making these, it was later than I anticipated and I was more tired than I expected because of the morning spent cleaning and the making of the other two recipes.

So when the Cheese Straw dough refused to work for me, I gave up. What I wound up with was a too dry hunk of expensive cheesy flour. It’s still in the fridge. I’m wondering if maybe I can salvage it some way. I doubt it though.

That’s okay. I’ll consider it a lesson learned of some sort. We’ll see how well I remember it down the road.

Now, two closing notes for important people in my life.

One: “The Savannah Cookbook” is Christmas gift from my Mom. And it’s one of my new favorites. Thanks Mom!!!

Two: My friend Troy called when I was about to start this particular cooking adventure. He asked if I was going to mention him in my blog. Troy, I guess you’ve got your answer now, dontcha?

A Blog Entry in Which I Describe Four, Count 'em, FOUR Dishes!

Last weekend was a busy one in my kitchen.

It was also a bit of torture. And if you think I’m being melodramatic, then I’d like to see you make BBQ brisket in a slow cooker. You spend several hours smelling its BBQ yumminess knowing that you have hours and hours and hours to wait before you can have any, and then you just try to tell me that that isn’t some sort of horrid, self-inflicted torture.

In the end, it has so totally been worth it. The two pounds of brisket that simmered for a little more than eight hours in the BBQ fixin’s turned out just lovely.

Admittedly, this BBQ brisket won’t be winning me any awards, but it was a very good first attempt at making BBQ. Especially if you take into account that 1) I rarely make any dishes that contain a beef ingredient that isn’t ground and 2) that I have no real clue as to what goes into the making of BBQ.

That last comment might be a bit of an overstatement, if I’m being honest. The reality is that there are no BBQ from scratch recipes in my family. At least none that I’ve ever seen. So while I get the differences between Texas, Kansas and North Carolina BBQ, I’ve only ever really had BBQ from scratch while at a joint that specializes in BBQ.

Anyhow, the BBQ brisket was turned into pulled BBQ brisket sandwiches. Yummy. In fact, I had some leftovers last night, and it was just as good, if not better than when it came out of the slow cooker the first night.

At the end of it all, this BBQ attempt has inspired me to do a little more research into BBQ recipes so that I can better understand how it’s done and then I can see what I can do to make it my own.

To go along with the BBQ brisket, I made two side dishes. Cole slaw. Easy enough. I’ve made it plenty of times before and went with my good ol’ standby recipe from my trusty "Better Homes & Garden Cook Book." Unfortunately, since I now use that recipe as more a guiding post than a recipe, I got the proportions a little bit wrong. Oh well. It wasn’t anything that couldn’t be doctored up later on.

The other side dish qualified for the new-to-me category. It was a Baked Mexican Black Bean dish. This one was fun to make, even if I did misread the instructions and underestimate the cooking time by about an hour. It just meant that the BBQ brisket had to slow cook for a little bit longer.

This was a good dish made with a half pound of cooked bacon; onions and garlic sautéed in the bacon and bacon grease; add a whole jalapeño, a pound of black beans and six cups of liquid (chicken broth, water, a combo, or whathaveyou) dumped and in brought to a boil. Then, you throw all of that into the oven to bake for an hour covered up; and then add a can of diced tomatoes and bake it for another hour uncovered.

It was this last step that I missed when reading the directions. On the bright side, I realized this early enough to turn down the BBQ brisket so that it wouldn’t overcook.

Like all bean dishes of this sort, it was great straight out of the pot and has been great in subsequent leftover dishes. Well… Actually, they’ve been really great straight out of the fridge on some tortilla chips, but I’m willing to bet that they’d be great in a burrito or quesadilla too.

And, lest you think I’ve been a horribly lazy person by not blogging about all of this earlier this week, let me tell you that I also made a third new-to-me dish last weekend.

It’s a Tuscan Bean Dip. Very simple stuff. Lots of garlic sautéed in a quarter cup of olive oil until golden. Toss in a couple of teaspoons of fresh rosemary and a pinch or so of hot pepper flakes after the oil was taken of the heat. Now, at this point, if you had a grownup’s food processor, you’d dump all a can of cannelloni beans and all but a teaspoon of the oil in that and process it till creamy enough to suit you taste.

In my case, I have a mini-food processor. So I mixed the beans and the oil together in a bowl and processed it in batches. That worked out just fine *and* I got to use my mini-food processor for the first time ever.

A fact that I hope doesn’t upset my Mom or Dranny too much since they gave it to me eons ago thinking I’d use it to chop veggies.

A note for my Mom and Dranny: I was just scared of it and of liquefying the veggies instead of just chopping them. Really. I swear.

Back to the point…

When finished, the Tuscan Bean Dip was perfect on some toasted slices of french bread along with some goat cheese on some other slices. It was just right for a light supper in my case or would be a good appetizer-y dish in other instances.

At this point, you may well be wondering just how many cookbooks I managed to use this weekend. I am sad to report (sort of) that I only used one new cookbook.

One?! Just one?! Clearly, I am very not efficient at this whole cooking challenge thing.

The cookbook in questions was the surprisingly good “Food Network Kitchens Favorite Recipes.” I say surprisingly good because I half expected this to be full of cast-off recipes that the Food Network stars didn’t like. Instead, it’s actually full of a lot of interesting, basic recipes for all types of occasions.

So while my cookbook usage efficiency is a bit on the crap side of things, the recipes were not. And there you have it.

Now I must be off. I have a new menu to plan.