A Housewarming Dinner Party

I am, admittedly, a procrastinator. It's not the best of traits to have. However, I'm also a deadline-driven sort. The shorter the deadline and the crazier the expectations, the better.

Do you have a hand grenade that needs to be defused? After someone pulled the pin? No problem. Got it covered. (well, not an actual hand grenade. i wouldn't know what the heck to do with a hand grenade, but it makes for an interesting metaphor.)

These little tidbits of information about me are relevant because I recently moved. Quite frankly, without the right motivation, I would very likely unpack only what I really need and then curl up on the couch with a book and read and read and read. And watch football.

In any case, as a motivator to make unpacking boxes in my new apartment somewhat less onerous, I gave myself a deadline that also doubled as a reward. I invited a couple of friends over for dinner, which would mean I'd have to have things in some semblance of order before my friends arrived. Not to mention the fact that I'd have to have some dinner ready to put on the table.

I purposely kept things simple. In what still qualifies for a new kitchen, I didn't want to risk things going awry with a complicated menu. With that in mind, I decided to make Pulled Pork Sandwiches, Applesauce, Cole Slaw and Afternoon Tea. Plus, in terms of my cooking challenge, I made some decent progress and used three cookbooks. All of the dishes, except for the cole slaw, are new-to-me dishes and each comes from a separate cookbook.

The easiest of the three was Afternoon Tea from "Cowboy Cocktails." This was an easy drink. In fact, I'm not sure it gets too much easier. Iced tea (unsweetened) spiked with light spiced rum and slices of lemons and springs of mint for garnish.

Easy and refreshing. However, given the easiness of this recipe, I feel obligated to try one or two more recipes from this collection of drink recipes. I know. It's a terrible burden, but someone must undertake it.

Oddly enough, the second easiest recipe was the East Carolinian pulled pork, which came from "The South: The Beautiful Cookbook," a cousin to my beloved "Texas: The Beautiful Cookbook" from which I've made a few recipes (see here and here ). I'm sure this might seem like a controversial choice to some. After all, I'm from Texas. What the heck I'm doing going within sniffing distance of this kind of BBQ?

Well, I'll tell you why I made this recipe. I live in an apartment. I do not have a patio. I do not have a stovetop smoker. This is the only BBQ recipe I could find in my cookbooks that did not involve a grill, a smoker or a crockpot (i've made crockpot, bbq brisket already). This was a recipe with oven directions.

If it makes you feel better though, while I made the vinegary sauce from the recipe, I used Stubb's BBQ Sauce when it came time to make sandwiches. Regardless of your BBQ affiliations, this pulled pork dish was good. Well done, moist and flavorful with just the right amount of spicy heat. The leftovers were just as good.

As a side dish, I wanted to make homemade applesauce, especially since it's fall and I was making pork. My applesauce recipe came from "Joy of Cooking: All About Breakfast & Brunch." I've used this cookbook before, but I made muffins, which didn't count as a new-to-me recipe and, therefore, I felt that I couldn't check this cookbook off the list for the purposes of my cooking challenge.

I was nervous about making applesauce. The recipe didn't call for too much liquid and I was supposed to simmer the apples until they were soft. I was certain that, without constant hovering, I was going to burn the apples. I didn't.

Instead, I learned that homemade applesauce kicks store-bought applesauce's keister. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is going to become a go-to recipes. It takes some work with all of the quartering and coring of the apples, but it's definitely worth it.

As a motivator and a reward, I think the dinner was a success. I had a great time hosting my friends and can't wait to host another, even fancier dinner. More importantly, my friends also claimed to enjoy the meal. And I have no reason to doubt them since they went back for more drinks (what does that say about my friends, i wonder?) and cleaned their plates.

Applesauce - Makes 4 to 6 servings
From Joy of Cooking: All About Breakfast & Brunch

3 pounds of apples - choose a mix of apples for a better flavor
1/2 to 3/4 cup apple cider, depending on the juiciness of the apples
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, depending on tartness of apples
1 large cinnamon stick
1/2 cup white sugar or 6 tablespoons mild honey
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 to 1 teaspoon ground ginger (optional)
1/2 teaspoon ground mace (optional)

If desired, peel the apples. Then quarter, core and slice the apples into 1/2-inch-thick slices.

Put the apples, cider, lemon juice and cinnamon stick in a dutch oven. Cover and simmer the apples over low heat until the apples are tender, but not mushy. Stir the mixture regularly.

Stir in the sugar or honey, nutmeg and, if you're using them the ginger and mace. Cook only until the sugar is dissolved and thoroughly mixed in. About 1 minute.

Remove from the heat. Discard the cinnamon stick.

If you peeled your apples, you can probably mash the apples with a potato masher or a wooden spoon. If you're like me and don't peel your apples, you'll probably have to use a blender to get the right texture. Just pulse the apples in batches.

And there you go. Applesauce. Homemade applesauce. You can serve it warm or chill it before serving. It's excellent either way.

Plan C Pinto Beans

Now that fall has arrived and is doing a very good impression of winter, I crave the kinds of foods that make you feel warm and cozy, and that fill the house with the scent of cooking.

Inspired by a chat with my parents, I really wanted a big pot of beans. And I was so proud of my organizational skills because I had all of the ingredients. I had the bag of dried pinto beans, a smoked ham hock, fixins for cornbread and assorted toppings.

However, after I’d sorted through the beans to pick out any possible stray stones and then set them on the stove for a quick soak, I learned that my preparations were foiled by the blasted ham hock, which had decided to grow a fine layer of icky fuzz. Lesson learned: smoked ham hocks actually can go bad.

No fears though. I had a Plan B because the grocery store just down the block from my place has a decent meat department.

Yeah. No dice. The darned store didn’t have a ham hock nor any other suitable replacement ingredients because it was Sunday and they were out of just about everything. Fabulous.

I huffed and puffed and kicked some pebbles around on the short walk home. After that mini-temper tantrum, I decided that this was not going to be the end of the world. I would be resourceful and follow my waste-not rule by using whatever I might have in the cupboards. The pot of beans might not be what my parents would typically make, but it would still be a darned good pot of beans.

Luckily, I remembered I had a container of McCormick’s smokehouse-flavored pepper. This is normal ground pepper, but with a bit of a flavor kick. Since the smoked ham hock had thwarted me, I figured this might make a decent substitute. I was right. Here's the approximate recipe.

Plan C Pinto Beans - Makes about 8 servings
1 lb of dried pinto beans
1 can of Hunt’s Fire Roasted Tomatoes
1 can of Ro*Tel
Salt
Smokehouse Ground Black Pepper from McCormick

Pick through the dried pinto beans to make sure there aren’t any fugitive rocks or icky beans. Rinse the beans (not the fugitive rocks and icky beans) in a colander. After rinsing, put the beans in a large pot filled with water about an inch over the beans and about a teaspoon of salt. Bring the beans to a fast boil and then let them soak, covered, for about an hour.

After the beans have soaked, make sure there’s enough water in the pot to keep the beans more than covered. Season the beans with one to two teaspoons of the smokehouse pepper and ½ a teaspoon to one teaspoon of salt.

Bring the beans to a boil again and let them simmer until the beans get nice and tender. This takes about two hours. Give or take.

Be sure to stir the beans occasionally. If too much water boils off, add more. You want to make sure that the beans can simmer easily and aren’t sticking to the bottom of the pot or burning.

About 30 minutes before you’re ready to serve the beans, stir in the cans of Ro*Tel and Fire Roasted Tomatoes.

At this point, taste test the beans. You may want to add some pepper or salt.

Serve the beans in bowls with cornbread. Top it with your favorite fixins. I like shredded cheese, sour cream and chow-chow.

Enjoy!

Disclosure: Hunt's Tomatoes and Ro*Tel are made by the company for which I work, ConAgra Foods.

Bean & Veggie Soup

My obsession with cookbooks was one of the driving forces behind the start of this blog. In addition to cookbooks, I'm also obsessed with magazines. In particular, food and home magazines. House Beautiful is one the magazines I love the most. It has inspired me on more than one occasion.

However, while House Beautiful routinely features recipes and the like, the October 2009 issue was the first one that drove me into the kitchen. The weather also helped since fall had settled in and brought some cruddy, overcast, stay-indoors-all-weekend weather with it.

There was just one little problem. I didn't have the exact ingredients for the recipe. So, I did what made the most sense to me, I used the recipe as guiding post to make my own soup with the ingredients I had on hand.

The result was a hearty bean and vegetable soup that was even better the next day when I took in to work for lunch.


Bean & Veggie Soup - Makes about 4 servings
Adapted from a recipe featured in House Beautiful, October 2009

2 15oz-cans kidney beans, drained & rinsed
3 to 4 cups chicken stock
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped
1 14.5oz-can diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt
1/4 cup fresh, chopped parsley or 1/2 teaspoon dried cilantro
grated Parmesan cheese

In a large pot, combine kidney beans, chicken stock and garlic. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for about 20 or 30 minutes.

While the beans are simmering, in a separate skillet, saute the chopped onion and celery in the olive oil until soft and nearly translucent. This takes about 5 minutes.

Stir diced, canned tomatoes into the onions and celery. I used Hunt's Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes (made by my company) for the extra kick of flavor. Season with the kosher or sea salt. Simmer for about another 4 minutes.

Add vegetable mixture to the beans. Season with fresh parsley or dried cilantro, depending on what you have at home.

Simmer for about 15 minutes so that the flavors combine.

Serve in bowls with Parmesan cheese sprinkled on the soup for garnish and flavor, and serve with a slice or two of bread to sop up the soup juices.

Enjoy!

Cheater, Cheater, Pumpkin Eater!

Last weekend I was determined to make progress toward my cooking challenge goal. I did. Sorta. I used two cookbooks, but think I can only count one of them because I sorta cheated.

Well, I feel like I like I cheated because a couple of the dishes really didn't meet the qualifications for the new-to-me rule, even if they did meet the qualification for the waste-not rule.

A third dish met all of the qualifications though. That makes me feel a little bit better, but only just a little bit.

Anyhow, on the roster for last weekend's cooking shenanigans were Chicken Fricassee (this is the qualifier recipe), Curry-Coconut Chicken Tenders (cheater recipe - i've made tenders of a different flavor before) and Blueberry Muffins (cheater recipe - please. muffins? muffins?! there's nothing new about making muffins).

Both chicken recipes came from Betty Crocker's Best Chicken Recipes. This is one of a number of cookbooks I received in a previous life as a perk of my job. There were several recipes in the cookbook that looked interesting and that were very pretty in their photos.

The challenge I kept running into is that so many of them called for some sort of jarred, pre-made sauce or some such thing that I'm sure was intended to make it easier to put dinner on the table. However, this recipe approach assumes that you're not up to the challenge of making your own sauce or that you keep the jarred stuff hanging around the house. I don't. In fact, I'm not sure I can imagine buying jarred alfredo sauce. Meh...

Anyhow, the Chicken Fricassee recipe (top photo) did appeal to me (hello dumplings!) and I had all the ingredients in my cupboards already. Although, oddly enough, this Betty Crocker recipe recommended that you make the dumplings from scratch. I don't have anything against from scratch dumplings, but a Betty Crocker cookbook didn't recommend the use of Bisquick? I find that odd.

In any case, I made the Chicken Fricassee and, if you know me, then I'm sure you won't be surprised to know that I actually did make one recipe modification. I skipped the whole from-scratch dumplings step in favor of using Bisquick. Yes, I used the Bisquick. I like the Bisquick.

Once the Fricassee had simmered and the dumplings had finally cooked through, I sat down to a nice casual dinner. For never having made Chicken Fricassee before, I think it turned out pretty well. In fact, it's a dish I'd make again, especially on an overcast, damp sort of day when comfort food seems so right.

The following day, I set out to use the remainder of my chicken as an easy way to adhere to my waste-not rule. From the same Betty Crocker cookbook, I picked out Curry-Coconut Chicken Tenders (middle photo).

This should have been a very simple, enjoyable dish. It wasn't. Due to what I'm sure was operator error, it was icky.

Let's start with the fact that even though I own just about five bazillion spices, curry is not one of them. So, I substituted chili powder. No biggie, right? Wrong. That substitution combined with the use of sweetened, shredded coconut and some other undetermined flaw led to a dish that was barely edible.

The coconut did not crisp up. I used too much chili powder. And the sum total was a bunch of chicken tenders that tasted not so good.

I redeemed the cooking adventures that day with a batch of blueberry muffins (bottom photo) using a recipe from "The Joy of Cooking: All About Breakfast and Brunch." Going against my own belief that not-Maine blueberries are bad, I had picked up a pint of Georgia blueberries along with some other berries. Having committed this egregious error, I had to use them before they went bad. I will concede that these were not awful in the muffins, but that's as much as you'll get from me.

The fun twist in this muffin recipe was using brown sugar instead of white. I liked this twist and think it might account for how moist the muffins were.

At the end of the day, I feel like I technically can say, "Check! One more cookbook down!" However, I feel like I cheated too much in making the blueberry muffins. To redeem myself, I will have to make something else from "The Joy of Cooking: All Breakfast and Brunch" cookbook.

Then, and probably only then, my guilty conscience might shut up and leave me alone.

Breaking in the New Kitchen

At the very end of August, I moved to a new apartment. When I first saw it's floor plan online, I was intrigued enough to book an appointment. Almost from the very first moment I walked into it, I was smitten. Lots of windows. Great space. High ceilings. And, most important, a kitchen designed for entertaining and cooking - much more so than my last apartment.

I love the new place. I couldn't wait to move into it - even though I was in the midst of a ginormous work project and loads of travel. Somehow, I managed the move and the work travel with only the occasional lapse in sanity.

What I did not manage so well was a timely approach to unpacking. I managed to create a semblance of order in my bedroom; found the necessities for the bathroom and kitchen; and hooked up my brand new, fancy TV and cable.

And then I hit a roadblock.

My new kitchen is much, much bigger than any kitchen I've ever had (my parents' kitchens do not count). There are acres of counters and unfathomable depths in my cupboards. Overwhelmed by the prospect of needing to organize my stuff in this much space, I spent several days rummaging through the organizing sections of multiple stores looking for the magic things that would ensure that my kitchen would make sense and that I'd be able to find my stuff in the midst of all this space. A Container Store in Omaha might have made my life a little easier. Alas, no such store can be found here.

And this is where I will call a spade a spade - right before my parents or one of my friends does so.

I was stalling. I was procrastinating.

But thank goodness for Twitter. I made a public promise to make chorizo and maybe even some pate knowing that if I told the world I was going to do something so specific, I'd have to do so.

And I did.

Well, I did make chorizo. I did not make pate. However, I also made roasted tomato soup. I'll try making pate some other day.

Prior to the move, I'd been pouring over Robb Walsh's "The Tex-Mex Cookbook" and remembered there was a recipe for chorizo that seemed relatively straightforward and easy enough. This recollection was confirmed when I finally found "The Tex-Mex Cookbook" in the third box of unpacked cookbooks.

Robb's recipe for El Chico's Chorizo is pretty simple. Not having a full-size food processor though, I cheated and bought ground pork into which I mixed the chili powder, paprika, salt, garlic powder, cumin and red wine vinegar by hand. Robb's recipe calls for buying a cut of pork and grinding it yourself along with the spices. But let's be honest kids, it's way more fun to use your hands to mix ingredients together than a food processor. It's okay to disagree with me, but I'm not sure I'll trust you quite so much anymore if you do. Just saying...

Anyhow, once the spices had been mixed in, I set the chorizo aside to allow the flavors to combine for a bit and turned my attention to making something out of the fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes a coworker gave me.

What I really wanted to make was one of Ina Garten's tomato soups again, but that would be repeating a cookbook and a recipe. Not good since I'm so far behind on accomplishing my goal of making at least one recipe from each of my cookbooks before the end of the year.

Lucky for me, my Mom gave me "Sunday Soup: A Year's Worth of Mouth-Watering, Easy-to-Make Recipes" as a gift last Christmas. This little collection contained a number of tomato-based soups. However, I struggled to reconcile my waste-not rule with my new-to-me rule. Eventually, I settled on Roasted Tomato Soup because it involved actually roasting the tomatoes myself - something I've not done before.

Aside from being time consuming, this too was a simple enough recipe. First, the tomatoes (cut in half and seeded) were roasted after marinating for about 15 minutes in olive oil, salt, pepper and crushed, dried rosemary. Once roasted, I put the tomatoes and some chicken stock in the blender and pulsed them to a slightly chunky texture. This was then set on the stove in a sauce pan and brought to a boil and then left to simmer. Taste tests proved that the salt from the marinating process wasn't quite enough for my tastes, so I added just a bit more.

While the soup simmered, I finished off the chorizo by browning it with a bit of veggie oil and some chopped onion. Once browned, I removed all but a couple of heaping tablespoons of sausage from the pan and cracked a couple of eggs into the pan to make Chorizo y Huevos, a recipe suggested by Robb in "The Tex-Mex Cookbook."

At this point, you might be asking, "How did this all turn out, Steff?"

Well, I'll be honest. By the time I finished making everything, I was tired and cranky. I'd spent all afternoon cooking not because I was making anything complicated, but because I had to remember where in the freaking world I had put my cooking utensils, pots, pans and whatnot. It was irritating and I just kind of snarfed everything down that night. I guess this is part of the process of breaking in a new kitchen.

Fortunately, I made enough chorizo and soup for leftovers. The next night, I made the Chorizo y Huevos again and put them on top of a slice of country bread with some shredded cheese and salsa. Very delicious. Plus, I think the sausage was better for having had a day to allow the flavors to combine instead of just a couple of hours. The soup was good too. But, I have to say, I like the soup I made from Ina Garten's recipe better. Perhaps that's because of the basil and cream though. Just a guess.