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Monthly Archives: December 2006
Super Speedy Baked Beans
I whipped these up tonight and they came out really, really well. They’re on the sweet side with a brown sugar “streusel” topping. This is one of those side dishes that could easily show up a main dish. Plus, they’re quick to make so you can easily cook this dish after work!
Super Speedy Baked Beans
3 slices bacon, diced
1/2 large red onion, diced
2, 14 oz. cans navy beans, drained
2 cups low-sodium chicken broth
1/4 cup molasses
3/4 cup ketchup
2 tbsp. dijon mustard
1 tsp. garlic powder
salt & pepper, to taste
2 slices whole wheat bread, diced into small chunks
1 tbsp. butter, melted
1/4 cup light brown sugar
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Heat a medium sized dutch oven or oven-safe pot over medium heat. Cook bacon until most of the fat is rendered and it’s starting to get brown. Add the onion and cook over medium heat until onion is translucent and soft.
Add the navy beans. Stir to combine with onion and bacon. Add the chicken stock, molasses, ketchup, dijon mustard, and garlic powder. Stir to combine. Add salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil. Cover and transfer to oven for 20 minutes.
Place wheat bread chunks into a medium bowl. Add butter and toss to coat the bread. Add the brown sugar. After beans have baked for 20 minutes, remove cover, spread bread mixture over the beans evenly, and bake uncovered for another 10 minutes or until brown and bubbly. Remove from oven and enjoy!
Posted in Comfort Food, Cuisine, Recipe, Side Dish, Starch
2 Comments
Advice: Warding off the Christmas turkey blues.
Dear Kerry, With Whom I Cook,
Hey, where’s the advice column part of this site? I want a recommendation for a Christmas meal. We don’t want to do turkey again so soon, but want something nice, different, unique. Thought about prime rib, but that sounds too hard, and pricey. Any suggestions?
Flummoxed in Frisco
——————–
Dear Flummoxed,
Your question is a good one. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I definitely get bored with turkey over the holiday season.
And you’re right, prime rib is pricey, albeit delicious. But, I think you’re on the right track. There’s something about a big, hunk of roasted meat that makes a holiday dinner special. I suggest you try a pork roast.
Pork is, first and foremost, delicious. It’s also inexpensive. And done right, pork can look just as extraordinary on your Christmas table as a prime rib.
Here’s how I’d do it. I might serve this with some mashed sweet potatoes and green beans with almonds. And of course, finish off the meal with a sinful dessert.
Bacon Wrapped Pork Roast
1, 3-4 lb. pork loin roast
salt & pepper
10 slices applewood smoked bacon
1 large onion, peeled & roughly chopped
1 large carrot, peeled & roughly chopped
1 large celery stalk, roughly chopped
1/2 cup hard apple cider such as Magner’s
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth, divided
1/2 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. fresh thyme
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Season the pork roast on all sides with salt and pepper. Wrap the bacon slices around the roast, overlapping the slices if necessary. Make sure that when you wrap the bacon around the pork roast that all of the ends are on the same side of the roast (i.e. you’ll have a seam of bacon on the bottom of the pork roast.)
Heat a large frying pan over medium high heat. Once the pan gets hot, add the roast, with the bacon seam down (this will cook the bacon together so it won’t fall off the roast during the rest of the searing process.) Sear the roast until the bacon browns on all sides.
In a roasting pan, place the carrot, celery, and onion in one layer and place the seared pork roast on top. Place in the pre-heated oven for 40-50 minutes or until the internal temperature of the pork roast is 145 degrees.
Move the cooked pork roast to a cutting board, cover loosely with tin foil, and let rest for 10-15 minutes while you make the gravy.
To make the gravy, tilt the roasting pan enough to spoon out most of the grease in the pan. Put the roasting pan on the stove over medium heat. Pour in the hard cider and deglaze the pan by using the cider to disolve any brown bits on the bottom of the roasting pan. Add 3/4 of the chicken broth and simmer.
Strain the liquid into a small pot and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Stir together the remaining 1/4 cup of chicken broth with the cornstarch until combined. Whisk into the cooking liquid and simmer until gravy gets thick and coats the back of a spoon. Season the gravy to taste with salt and pepper. Add fresh thyme.
Carve the pork roast into 1/4-1/2 inch slices and serve with gravy.
Posted in Advice, Meat, Pork
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Our Vegas Eats
Wow, I can’t believe we’ve been back from Las Vegas for over a week. Life does fly by!
So, last time I went to Vegas, I went with the girls. We treated ourselves to one fancy-pants dinner at the fabulous Nobhill. This time, the focus was different and we were really there to play some serious poker. We didn’t eat anywhere super special, but of course, we had to eat, and there were a few places we wanted to check out based on a research and suggestions.
We stayed at Sam’s Town a couple of miles off the strip, but a really good value for the money. It’s the type of place the locals go to gamble and as such, the tables are cheap, as are the food values. The first place we ate on our first day in Vegas was the Sam’s Town Firelight Buffet for breakfast. The goal was to make it as close to lunch as possible so that we could get a little breakfast and lunch all at once.
However, we were starving by 10:00 and couldn’t hold out any longer and had to settle for just one type of meal. Overall, the buffet was a decent value — $5.99 or $4.99 with a players club card. There were disappointments. Both the biscuits and the breakfast burritos were crispy and dried out rather than soft and moist due to a lack of a cover over their respective warming stations.
But, the french toast and omlettes made-to-order were both outstanding and made up for what lacked in some of the other offerings. The Firelight buffet also included a ham carving station and a large selection of fresh fruit including delicious and juicy cubes (bricks, really) of watermelon. Considering you’d pay $5.99 for a sub-par omlette at your local IHOP, this buffet was a fairly decent bargain.
However, I think the best bargain at Sam’s Town is in their Harvest Cafe — steak and eggs, every day, for $4.99. We’re talking old Vegas prices. For that, you might assume you’d be getting a hunk of steak resembling shoe leather, however, that’s not the case. The steak and eggs comes with a nice cut of sirloin steak perfectly cooked to your liking (and if not, the servers will take it back as I witnessed at another table.) If that’s not enough, you get two eggs, hash browns, and toast. We ate at the Harvest Cafe twice during our stay, each time the breakfasts were tasty and a good value.
Since I’m a fan of Top Chef, I really wanted to check out Tom Colicchio’s sandwich place, ‘wichcraft, at the MGM. The offerings at ‘wichcraft were on the pricey side. Sandwiches ranged from about $6.50 (for your not-so-basic grilled cheese) to $9.50 or so. Not so suprising since it’s a well-known (now Celebrity) chef’s place in an upscale hotel and casino. But, while the sandwiches were pricey, we got a lot of bang for our buck. Our sandwiches were hefty, filling, and the offerings were creative.
Sean opted for a roasted pork loin sanwich with red cabbage and jalepenos. This was delicious! I kind of wished I had ordered it. Mine was an Sicilian tuna with fennel, black olives, and preserved lemons. Ok, mine was pretty darn delicious as well. I really liked that the tuna was done in more of an olive oil dressing rather than mayonaise and the crispy fennel gave the sandwich a slight sweetness. I’d certainly go back.
Here’s a tip: you can get half-priced dinner at the half-priced ticket booths around town. We found this out when we decided to purchase half-priced tickets to see the Amazing Jonathan at the Sahara. The sales person at the ticket booth asked if we had dinner plans and since we didn’t, she offered up half-priced dinner at a churrasceria in the Alladin. When I heard the mention of meats served on swords and saw the twinkle in Sean’s eyes, I knew immediately where we were eating dinner that night.
For $17, half-off the usual $34 dinner price, we got reservations at Pampas Brazillian grill. The good: the salad bar was beautiful and emaculately clean (I even saw two employees cleaning the ice where people dropped food.) It contained all sorts of cold salads (olive salad, bean salads, etc.) plus a hot foods section for rice and beans and mussels and baked salmon. There were also 8 different types of meats being passed around on swords. The best being the meats wrapped in bacon (filet mignon and turkey) as well as the pork sausage. And of course, there were a couple caipahrinas with dinner.
The bad: the service kind of sucked when we first got to the restaurant. Apparently, there was a large party taking up a lot of room, so we had to wait for a table. We had no problem with this and bellied up to the bar. The problem is that they decided to seat us much faster than they could get the seating area in order, and as such, the servers were confused and the tables weren’t completely set. Sean and I had to share one fork and one spoon for the first 10 minutes of dinner. This frusterated me. To top it all off, our server was a bit flaky and we only saw her about three times. Luckily, we did see another server who helped us out when we needed it (more caipahrinas, please!)
I’d probably give Pampas another try — especially half-priced.
On one of my parents’ last trips to Vegas, they discovered a hidden gem in Binion’s Casino in downtown Vegas. They told us we had to check out the snack bar next to the poker room at Binion’s for their cheap and huge deli sandwiches. On this trip, Sean and I decided we’d check it out.
This proved to be a hot tip. This snack bar, the Deli, serves giant corned beef and pastrami sandwiches made with Boar’s Head deli meats for about $6.50. The snack bar isn’t big — it’s just one counter in the middle of the casino, but the sandwiches were delicious (we split an overflowing reuben) and the service was excellent — I asked for sauce on the side and when they noticed that they didn’t make my sandwich right, they corrected it without me even complaining. This is definitely a hidden gem that any hungry gambler should check out.
Our final stop in Vegas was the Village Buffet at the Paris. It’s ranked in the top few buffets in Las Vegas on most polls you’ll read. Since I signed up for one of their player’s club cards, I got $5.00 of each of our dinners and the call of freshly made crepes sealed the deal.
The crepes, they were fresh and very good with plenty of different fillings (apples, berries, chocolate). But, overall, I was a little disappointed. The buffet wasn’t really any more spectacular than any other Vegas buffet I’ve been to (and at a normal price of $25 — you can certainly eat at another buffet cheaper). The bread wasn’t especially fresh or special and I was expecting better from a Paris-themed restaurant. In fact, most of the food was forgetable.
The buffet did include crab legs which were plentiful. It also included a delicious array of cheeses and dried fruits. The grill station was also a stand-out feature in my mind — the grilled vegetables and lamb were paired with middle eastern spreads and were a refreshing change to a lot of the heavier foods on the buffet (and that I’d been eating all week.)
My advice for anyone who’s going to eat at this buffet would be to fill up on crab legs, cheese, and salad — and then go for the desserts. Aside from the crepes, there was a huge variety of sweets from mousse to eclairs to chocolate tarts.
We left Vegas with empty pockets (lady luck wasn’t on our side during this trip), but with full bellies. We can’t wait to go back again and check out some new eats in between our poker playing.
Posted in Travels
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Where I learn to saute, shallow fry, and bake
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a school update. Braising and stewing is over. I got an A by the skin of my teeth. I thought my practical exam went very well. I felt on time. I felt confident. I felt organized. I felt clean and sanitary.
Unfortunately, apparently, my stew was too thin and had too much lemon juice seeing as the only two comments I got from the chef were, “It’s too thin!” followed by, “It’s sour!”
I honestly thought that the lemon tasted delicious in my white veal stew. I agreed that the stew was too thin and did fix it by adding some cornstarch.
Here’s the thing, I’ll take all the criticism in the world, but dude, you gotta tell me what I did well! And I got none of that.
But, that class is over and now I can throw together a stew with no recipe at all. I’ll consider that a success.
Right now, I’m two classes into “Fundamentals of Food Service Production” where I learn to saute, shallow fry, and bake (casseroles and meat rather than breads, rolls, cakes, and cookies.) So far we’ve pounded lots of meat into thin scallops, made pan sauces galore, and fried many fritters.
The absolute best part of this class is that I get to work on the oh-so-cool pan flip. You know, that one you see on t.v. where the chef’s look so awesome flipping the food into the air and catching it in the pan. I gotta tell you, getting that pan flip down is making me feel like a rock star.
So far, I’ve cooked french toast (duh, but yum!), sauteed flounder with parsley butter sauce, sauteed butternut squash with onions (and bacon, drool), and baked chicken smothered in onions. Everything turned out pretty darn good. Of course, since basically everything is cooked in clarified butter, I guess it would be hard to be bad.
I do hate getting out of bed at 5:30 on Sundays, but I have to say, it’s worth it. I do love this stuff.
Posted in Culinary School
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Andouille & Crawfish Potato Casserole
And we’re back from Vegas. Our trip was a whirlwind tour (like all trips to Vegas should be), and now I’m back to adding post-Thanksgiving recipes.
I wanted to add something else with a creole flavor to our Thanksgiving dinner since we were having the turducken. The original idea was to twice bake these potatoes, but a trick I learned in one of my classes lead me to turn the original idea into a casserole. It reminds me a bit of potatoes au gratin with a kick. Yeah, it’s definitely a little rich, but it’s worth it.
I bought the crawfish tails online at cajungrocer.com with the Turducken and andouille sausage. You could certainly substitute cooked shrimp, crab, or lobster chopped into small pieces if it’s easier to find. You can also substitute chorizo, linguica, or another smoked sausage for the andouille if you’d like.
Andouille & Crawfish Potato Casserole
6 large red bliss or russet potatoes, sliced lengthwise into 1/4 inch ovals
3 tbsp. olive oil
3 tsp. butter
1/2 large onion, diced small
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 lb. smoked andouille sausage, diced small
1 tbsp. cajun seasoning (such as Joe’s Stuff or Tony Chacere’s or, yes, even some Essence of Emeril if you must.)
1 tbsp. tomato paste
1, 14 oz. can petite diced tomatoes, drained
1/2 lb. crawfish tails, cooked
1 tbsp. flour
1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth
1 1/4 cup 2% milk
Salt & Pepper, to taste
Preheat oven to 400 degrees
Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of butter in a large skillet until hot. Add about 1/3 of potato slices and brown on both sides (don’t over crowd the pan — if you don’t have a large enough pan, just brown in more batches.) Move browned potato slices to a cookie sheet. Add more olive oil and butter as needed and continue browning the potatoes in batches until all are browned on both sides.
Once the potatoes are browned, remove or add oil/butter until there’s 1 tablespoon remaining. Add the onions and a pinch of salt. Sweat for 2-3 minutes or until onions are soft. Add the garlic. Cook for another minute. Add the chopped andouille and cook for another 2-3 minutes until the sausage is gets a bit brown and crispy.
Add the cajun seasoning, tomato paste, and diced tomatoes. Cook for about 2 minutes or until the tomatoes start to lose some moisture. Add the crawfish. Cook for another 2 minutes. Sprinkle the flour into the pan evenly over the food. Cook for 2-3 minutes.
Pour in the chicken broth and milk. Add salt and pepper to taste (definitely taste before adding the salt — different cajun seasonings have different levels of sodium so you might not even need salt.) You could also add about 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne pepper here if you’d like.
Bring to a simmer and cook until thick and bubbly. You’ll know you’re in good shape when the sauce can coat the back of a spoon.*
Grease a 9×13 inch cake pan with nonstick spray or a light coating of oil. Add a layer of the browned potatoes. Add a layer of the crawfish and andouille mixture. Add another layer of potato and another layer of the crawfish and andouille mixture. Repeat one more time. You’ll end up with a final layer of crawfish and andouille.
Cover with foil and place in a 400 degree oven for 20-30 minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 165.
It would be best to let this stand for about 15 minutes after it comes out of the oven so it will set up and be easier to scoop out of the pan.
* If your sauce is looking too thin at this point get yourself a slurry of cornstarch (equal parts corn starch and cold water) and add this about a tablespoon at a time, letting the mixture come to a simmer for a minute before adding more of the slurry, until it thickens.