Balsamic Chicken

Balsamic Vinegar is awesome. Add a little chicken broth and slurry, (whisked flour and water) and you have a delicious sauce.

Asparagus is the easiest veggie to make. Cut off the bottoms and saute in butter and garlic on medium heat, add salt and pepper and voila! Crunchy and delicious.

• 10 cloves garlic
• flour for dredging
• 4 boneless chicken breast halves
• salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I like canola oil)
• 1/4 cup Balsamic Vinegar
• 1 1/4 cups chicken broth
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 2 tablespoons water

Preheat the oven to 350 and peel and smash the garlic.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Put the flour on a large plate. Pat the chicken dry with paper towels and season all over with salt and pepper. Coat the chicken in the flour and shake off any excess. Add the oil to the hot pan and swirl to evenly coat. Lay the chicken in the pan smooth side down. Scatter the garlic around the chicken. Turn the chicken once it so it cooks on both sides evenly (about 5 minutes per side). Transfer the chicken to a baking pan and bake until cooked through, about 10 minutes. Leave the garlic in the skillet.

Pour the vinegar into the hot skillet. Use a wooden spoon to scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Boil until almost all the vinegar evaporates and it gets a little syrupy, about 1 minute. Add the chicken broth and bring to a boil.

Mix the flour and water together to make a thin paste (slurry) whisk the slurry into the broth and boil until the sauce thickens, about 1 minute more.  Season the sauce with salt and black pepper. Add any collected juices from the chicken to the sauce. Put the chicken on a plate, pour the sauce and garlic on top and serve.

Pie in the Sky

Sheppard's Pie. It was certainly a "pie in the sky" endeavor, especially trying to find minced lamb in September. I know it's a little early to be pulling out the St. Patrick's Day menu, but it was a special request this week. I am still working on it, but this recipe was much better than most we've tried. Greg found the recipe online. He said that it was more "legit" because the guy used grams for the measurements, hence he must be European. Hence, he must know how to make bangin' Sheppard's Pie. Obviously.

 

 

 We never did find minced lamb, although I'm sure a trip over to whole foods would have done the trick. So, this is just plain ole' ground beef. I'm sure the lamb would have tasted much much better. 

Ok, I know it's a little weird, but I love seperating the egg yolk from the whites. I think the yolk is so cute, just sitting there like a little, yellow..... ball of cuteness. I broke the first one, but this one stayed intact the whole time. It's the simple pleasures....

See the yolk still sitting there in the potatoes, like a little cherry on top of a sundae?

 

 

Ta Da!

 

It was pretty successful. Greg had three helpings of leftovers the next night, so I suppose he kinda liked it.

The Recipe - 

For the meat filling:

• 1/4 cup of olive oil
• 1 medium onion diced
• 5 garlic cloves minced
• 1 lb of minced lamb
• 1 dried bay leaf
• 1/2 white wine
• 2 medium carrots diced
• 1 cup peas 
• 1 cup of beef broth
• 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce (puree)
• a dash of Worcestershire sauce 
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper

Potato Filling:

• 2 pounds of potatoes ( I used 5-6 red potaotes)
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 1/4 cup of softened butter
• 2 small egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• a few pinches of nutmeg

Directions:

Fill a pot with water and a pinch of salt. Boil washed halved potatoes uncovered for about 20 minutes or until tender. Drain and remove peels.

Meanwhile, heat up a large pan with olive oil and cook diced onions on medium heat until slightly translucent (about 10 minutes). Then, add garlic and stir for another 30 seconds. Add bay leaf, minced beef, and white wine. Deglaze by boiling over high heat for about 1 minute. Stir in tomato sauce and cook until liquid is reduced by half (about 7 minutes). Add carrots, peas, broth, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Cover the pan and simmer at low heat for 15 minutes. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Add the potato ingredients and mash together. Scoop the meat filling into an oven-safe dish. Spread the potato topping on top. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes are golden. Serve hot.

Thanks for reading my thoughts about food! Enjoy the recipe!

Making it Work

On Sunday it was Greg and my one year wedding anniversary. It's been a fantastic year, full of fun, exciting, new adventures, but I'm not going to say it was a piece of cake, because Lord knows that one-year-old-cake can be pretty gross - we know, we've tried it. But seriously, there are a lot of compromises that must go into a marriage and we both learned how to "make it work" this first year.

Cooking this year has been both fun and at times, unrewarding to say the least. This dinner that I made a few days ago was definitely a "make it work" moment. It looks pretty tasty, but looks can sometimes be deceiving.  It was supposed to be Garlic Chicken Stir-fry.

 At least this time I was prepared. I chopped everything first and marinated the chicken.

I heated the vegetables in the wok first and then removed them, cooked the chicken, then added the veggies back in the wok, along with the leftover marinade. Then I let it simmer.


The problem was that the recipe called for 12 cloves of garlic. I don't know about you, but I usually cook with maybe a clove or two of minced garlic on a regular basis - but 12, no way!! I wasn't trying to kill vampires or Greg with garlic, especially since this was a few days before the anniversary. So, in what I know now was a poor decision, I omitted about 8 of the 12 cloves of garlic.

It looked pretty good.

But it tasted like nothing. The soy sauce marinade was barely noticeable. Plus I hadn't pre-cooked the broccoli, so it was c r u n c h y as heck. So much for that. Oh well, here's another one that I'll be positive and call a "learning experience." As many times as I have messed up a meal, it is always because I haven't followed the recipe, but I still haven't learned. It turned out all right in the end, we dumped some soy sauce on it, and it tasted, well... fine. But not like garlic chicken stir fry. I guess sometimes in food and in life you just have to look for the positive and make it work.

And by the way, a cake tastes disgusting after 365 days in the freezer with saran wrap barely wrapped around a flimsy cake box. Bleh! The slices missing are from what Greg and I ate for breakfast the morning after the wedding, while we opened presents. Now that was a good idea. After the fact, I hear that there is a proper storage method for keeping the cake fresh for the entire year. But again, we had to just go with the flow. Honestly, we weren't hungry anyways, we had Creme Brulee for dessert that night, and it was perfect.

Thanks for reading my thoughts about food and making it work - one year later. I'll post a few wedding pictures below. Enjoy!

 

You had what for dinner?

Last night Greg and I went to the driving range after he got home from work. Afterward, we were both starving and I had seen a waffle commercial on TV before I left the house, so we went to the Double T Diner for some breakfast/dinner food. Just going in there brought back so many memories of late nights after getting into mischief in high school and college. I almost felt somewhat rebellious eating my Belgian waffle and bacon for dinner at 9:00 PM with my college sweetheart. It was kind of a romantic way to start our anniversary weekend. (One year married on Sunday).

Since I didn't bring my camera, I'll do my best impression of the night...

 My waffle looked like this, and had bacon on the side.

Greg had country fried steak and eggs with gravy.

I dipped my bacon in his gravy. It was so yummy and sinful. I was definitely living on the edge.


Just for a romantic stroll down memory lane, here are some pictures from when Greg and I were in college. We still look like babies in some of these!

Playing cards for $1at Notre Dame.

This is the first year we were together. There was a huge blizzard that snowed us in for days while home on winter break. Greg walked in the blizzard to my house and "accidentally" got stuck there for several days. Here he is still frost-bitten.

Not a great pic, but one of my favs. It was our first Easter together.

At Greg's parents' house. We have a lot of pictures from this night for some reason. His mom must have had the camera out.

So young! I don't even remember taking this picture, but it must have been winter because I'm pale as a ghost and I'm wearing the first J.Crew sweater that I ever bought. (On sale I might add)

Our backpacking trip when we were about 19 or 20. This started our big birthday celebration tradition.

Thanksgiving 2003. In two months it will have been 7 years since then. It really feels like this just happened. Where does the time go?

Thanks for reading my thoughts about strolling down memory lane and bacon dipped in gravy, my best flavor combination to date.

Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezey

 Now that school has started again, I'm finding myself looking for simpler and quicker recipes. If you're in the same boat, here are some things that you might like.

Lettuce from a box

 Once again, I neglected the veggies in my planning this week, but luckily I had purchased a box, yes a box, of lettuce at the store on Sunday. It was super easy to use because it also came pre-cut and pre-washed (and was only $1.50 from Safeway). It tasted so much more fresh than the salad from a bag. For this knife and fork salad I used two whole romaine leaves, red onion, garlic croutons, and Caesar dressing. How simple was that?
 

I have made the following dish twice recently. Greg likes it (almost) as much as the Shrimp and Orzo. It is inexpensive, quick, easy, and delicious. I already had most of the ingredients in my cupboard.

Ingredients:

• 4 4-ounce beef cubed steaks
• 2 tablespoons cooking oil
• 1 cup of sliced mushrooms
• 1/2 cup of chopped onion
• 1 minced garlic clove
• 1 14.5 ounce can tomatos with basil, garlic and oregano, undrained
• 1 10.75-ounce can reduced-fat and reduced-sodium condensed cream of mushroom soup
• 3 cups of hot cooked noodles

First brown the cube steaks on both sides in hot oil.Then set aside and add the garlic, mushrooms, and onion to your pan.

Cook until the onion is tender. Then stir in the can of tomatoes with the juice and the mushroom soup. Return the steaks to the skillet, turning to coat them in the sauce. I bury them in the skillet under all of the sauce. Then, bring to boiling; reduce heat, and simmer covered for about 30 mins. I only simmered mine for about 15 minutes, but I only used two steaks.  Also, I added pepper to the recipe for more flavor.

Serve with noodles. 

Take a look at some other things that can make cooking so much easier!

Start saving your pocket change for this little sucker! 

My bestie, Melanie, might like this automatic cake decorator.

I must be an uber-nerd but this mat would make perfect sized pie crusts every time!

Hmmm, cool idea!

Warm and Fuzzy

Tonight was one of those hectic nights, although it didn't start out that way. I came home with plenty of time to prep the meal for tonight, take care of the dogs, go for a run, etc., etc. But of course I sat around and played online looking up cake plates and Halloween decor. Now that I write this, it seems like a weird combination, but the mind wanders when ambling around the internet. You have to agree that it would be worth throwing a Halloween party just to serve apple cider out of this cauldron with some fake spider webbing strewn around! Anyways, the point is that I waited until the last minute and had to shorten my run in half and just as I was defrosting my pork chops, Greg's car pulled in the driveway! One disaster followed another, but at least now I know that Risotto takes A LOT of time and patience and isn't something to whip up while you have 10 other things bubbling over in the kitchen!

Tonight's Menu:

Oven Fried Pork Chops
Risotto
Bistro Mushrooms
Peas

To start off, I was supposed to have a certain kind of rice, but I couldn't find it at the grocery store, so I used Jasmine rice for the Risotto. Are you laughing at me yet?

Now you're laughing. Yes, I used Stove Top stuffing to coat my pork chops, but I didn't have enough time to crush them into tiny pieces and I don't have a food processor because my kitchen is too small and all of the cabinet space is used up! (I have the hand-me-down bread maker from my mom still stored on top of my dryer in the mud room) So, the stuffing barely stuck to the chops. Therefore, I just dumped a load of stuffing on them in the pan.

Food was flying everywhere! Rice was popping like popcorn out of the pot, onions were dropping all over the floor, I was screaming at the dogs "get out of the kitchen," which is my nightly mantra.

Of course I didn't read the instructions before starting the Risotto and I have never made it the "real" way before, so I didn't realize that you brown the rice a little bit first with oil and onions and garlic and then you pour in 28 ounces of chicken broth a 1/2 cup at a time, waiting for the rice to absorb each bit of liquid, while stirring constantly nonetheless! Meanwhile I was making Bistro Mushrooms (also, for the first time) and had to be stirring those the whole time as well. I was a crazy person in the tiny kitchen. Luckily Greg got home when he did!

Flipping the chops.

Stirring the Risotto. The second pot had the boiling chicken broth that I was adding bit by bit.

Again with my mushroom obsession... This is so easy though, and tastes delish! It's just sliced mushrooms (about 3 cups: button, shitake, cremini, etc.) sauteed in a couple tablespoons of olive oil for about 4 minutes. Then add 1/3 cup of dry red wine or sherry, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper to taste, and about 2 teaspoons of fresh thyme and let it simmer for 3 more minutes while sitrring a bit, and there you go! You will have Bistro Mushrooms. I put it over the Risotto.

Finally it absorbed all it could and thickened up.

And the end result.....

Yay Stove Top!

Where would we be without the peas that Greg made? I'll tell you where, sitting at dinner with no veggies!

So, it was a crazy night. I didn't expect dinner to take over an hour to make, but it ended up tasting pretty darn good. The Risotto didn't have the cheese that it was supposed to because we forgot it at the grocery store this week, and the peas were just from a bag of frozen ones that we keep on hand in case of a vegetable crisis, but it all turned out.   Warm and fuzzy?   I     think     so.