A Pictorial Guide to Pound Cake

So a while ago, we put some pictures up of a lovely pound cake… the recipe is back on that post… but we’re going to do a quick pictorial walkthrough… Preheat the oven to 350.

Step 1, Cream two stick of butter and 1/2 cup of Crisco together.

After everything is all creamed together, grab your 3 Cups of sugar and add slowly to the butter/Crisco.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next comes the rest of the dry ingredients, a half tsp of each baking soda, and salt, and 3 cups of flour.

You grab the dry ingredients and a cup of milk and add them slowly to the mix that’s going… alternating between the dry ingredients and the milk, starting with dry and ending with dry.

After everything is all mixed up, grab your greased and floured pan… I used to use a tube pan… but we got a lovely Bundt pan as a wedding gift…

Pour your mixed cake into your pan and drop it into the preheated oven for an hour… Likely, it’ll take a bit longer… you wait until you can pull a toothpick out of the center clean… after you’ve made a few, you’ll just know when it’s done…

Now we play the waiting game…

-Fin-

And here is the finished product… no description needed…

 

 

 

 

 

Chili Lasagna and Orange Pie...

This was yet another busy week… so unfortunately, nothing too new this week. We made bourbon chicken one night…. but I didn’t feel like making it “right” due to time needed to do so… but it was decent nonetheless. Other than that.. we tried some new stuff…

What you see above is quite possibly the first ever Cincinnati Chili Lasagna… it was an idea I had… so.. I wanted to see it come into real life… I made it like I make my typical lasagna… but instead of mozzarella with the ricotta, I mixed Monterey Jack… and on top, I used cheddar…. it came out rather tasty… especially since I increased the amount of all of the spices in the chili by 50%.

Then today, Virginia got in the kitchen and made some awesomeness… after making oatmeal cookies last night, she made an Orange Meringue pie with some oranges we had lying around…

What do y’all think? It tasted pretty damn awesome to me… Virginia makes a great pie, but we need to work on pie crusts… cause these store-bought pie crusts aren’t … well… any good. But, crust aside, it was still pretty damn awesome.

Time for some leafy greens

Virginia is always trying to get me to eat vegetables… and she doesn’t believe me when I tell her that, without a doubt, bacon is a vegetable. So, I saw Rachel Ray do something with some Chard.. and thought, hey, that looks decent, I could eat that! So… I went to the store, and bought some Kale. … … because I’m apparently not very smart.

This is what a pound and a half of washed and dried chard … I mean… Kale looks like.

and here we start getting things ready… since the original recipe I wanted to follow was for a different leafy green, I decided to throw that recipe away and shoot from the hip. So, in the pot, we’ve got about 2 TBSP of Vegetable Oil, 4 pieces of bacon chopped up, and 1 sweet onion worked over in the Slap Chop. At about medium-high, get the bacon brown and slightly crispy, and the onions soft and happy. Then start adding your Kale.

Get everything nice and happy together, mix it around and the Kale will shrink amazingly. After it’s been in the pot for a little bit, add a can of chicken broth. Get the broth boiling, and then take the heat down to a simmer. Add about 2TSP of salt, 1TSP of Nutmeg, and a handful of golden raisins. Then just let it simmer for 10 minutes or so to get all of the flavors playing well together.

Here is the final product, it’s not amazing to look at on a plate, but I’ll tell you… the stuff is tasty! It has kind of a southern collard greens feel to it, but the raisins and bacon give it a sweet and salty taste.  Normally, this is where I’d talk about things I’d change… but I think we got this one about dead on… It was a bit wasteful with a full can of chicken broth, so perhaps a smaller can would have been better…

MMmmmmmMMmmmmm Pound cake.

Ok. I was “in the zone” when making this, so you don’t get any “during” pictures. But, here is Paula Deen’s: Mama’s Pound Cake. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/paula-deen/mamas-pound-cake-recipe/index.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just follow the directions, and you’ll get the lovely piece of perfectness you see above. don’t let the ingredients sway you. Yeah, it’s 2 sticks of butter, 5 eggs, 1/2 Cup of Crisco, and more flour and sugar than one person should rightfully use… but it’s totally worth it.

Now, this cake is good enough on it’s own, but we like to do something a bit special with it. You can make a lovely pound cake by just sprinkling it with some powdered sugar, but of course we can’t just do that.

Virginia made a lovely sauce for this one with some strawberry jam and orange juice. Just spoon some jam into a pan, mix it up with some OJ to thin it out a little bit, and then cook it until you hit the consistency you want. The joy of doing this yourself is that you can pull some sauce when it’s thin to put a small pool on the plate, then cook it down some to get a bit thicker/stickier serving for drizzling over the top.

While you’re making the sauce, toss the oven on broil and toast the pound cake lightly on each side. There’s no set time or method for this. You have to watch because placement means everything. Pieces in the back of my oven will toast faster than those in front of them, and depending on the direction you have the wedge facing, they will also toast at different rates. So, look at them often, and flip them to get both sides equally browned.

No real notes or changes, but I‘ll tell you the way I normally serve this. Normally, I make and toast as above, but on the plate, I’ll put down a small pool of Irish Cream Liqueur. I’ll place the toasted pound cake on top of that and then drizzle it with either chocolate or caramel, a dollop of whipped cream, and just a little more Irish Cream drizzled over everything.

Cincinnati Chili

A while back, our friend Josh made some awesome Cincinnati Chili for us, and I’ve been craving it ever since. So we found a recipe here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/cincinnati-chili-recipe2/index.html   and decided to give it a shot.

You’ll have to look at the recipe for the instructions on this one… A lot of stuff has to go into making this. … But you have to chop up some onions … and what better to use?

The “Slap Chop” does a rather amazing job with the onions… and of course it doesn’t make you cry, it doesn’t make your hands stink… for a late night TV product, you’d be surprised how often you’d use this thing.

After getting the oil, onions, and garlic going for a bit, you add the meat and get it browning with the spice mixture:

Once that’s going well, you start adding the liquids, and basically stir things around and let them get all happy with each other until some of the liquid cooks off, and you get the consistency you want.

After it cooks down to the consistency you’d like, you can set it aside, or put it in the fridge until you’re ready for dinner… So, you can make this one ahead of time and let it chill in the fridge until you’re ready for it…

The chili is served on a bed of spaghetti with some cheddar and onion on top. It looks rather lovely, and because of the “flowery” nature of the spices, it would have been nice to have some cilantro for the top as well.

• The spices were kind of subdued… it may have been because I made it with 2lbs of meat instead of 1-1/2lbs as the recipe specified… but when I make it again, I’ll likely up the amount of each spice by about 50% or so, with the exception of the cayenne pepper… the level of heat spiciness was just right.
• Following the instructions, you’ll notice that at no point is the grease created by the meat removed from the mixture. There are several fixes here, you can cool the chili in the fridge, and the grease will float to the top and harden where you can remove it with a spoon. Or, you could use a stew-like meat instead of the ground beef as long as you cut it into very small chunks and don’t overcook them to toughness.

Chicken Piccata

This Chicken Piccata Recipe can be found here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/chicken-piccata-recipe/index.html

But, read the notes at the end of this posting for some changes…

Start off by beating some chicken breasts flat, then drag them through some flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs. The making of the chicken really isn’t amazingly difficult.

After the chicken is all covered, put a bit of oil in a pan, and just fry each piece of chicken quickly on each side (about 2 minutes) to lock that breading onto the chicken. After this, the chicken goes into the oven to finish cooking.

While the chicken is in the oven, start making the sauce. It’s a pretty basic sauce with wine, lemon juice and some spices.

You let the sauce simmer for a little while and get a little thicker while your chicken is doing its thing in the oven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We plated the chicken with a bit of the sauce, and garnished with some Cilantro. We figured that with the light, lemony feel of the sauce, the cilantro would compliment it rather well.

• HOLY CRAP Lemony. Yeah. This was crazy lemony. I don’t know what the deal is, but next time, we’ll be cutting the amount of lemon juice in half at least. I don’t think an actual lemon is as lemony as this chicken was.
• Pairs well with a slightly sweet white wine for contrast.

Lasagna Night

It’s been a while, so we decided to make a nice Lasagna for dinner. My Lasagna is nothing special… just your typical run of the mill meaty lasagna. For that reason, the “recipe” will be kept brief.

Preheat the oven to 350. While that’s getting ready, brown 1lb of ground beef.

Add your favorite seasonings to the meat as you brown it, then drain it well so you don’t have too much greasy juices in your lasagna.

The filling… we make a traditional Ricotta filling with 15oz of Ricotta, a few eggs, some parsley, parmesan, and mozzarella.

The key is really to mix it by hand. Something about the heat from your skin mixing everything together just seems to distribute the flavors evenly across the mixture.

After everything is mixed up, grab an appropriately sized pan and lay down a layer of sauce. After the base layer of sauce is down, mix the meat into the rest of the sauce. On top of the sauce goes a layer of UNCOOKED lasagna noodles, then the cheese mixture, then the meaty saucy goodness, then noodles, then cheese, then meat sauce, then noodles, then cheese, then meat sauce, then noodles, then WAIT it changes…for the top layer, you just do noodles and sauce.

So… you have it basically made, cover it in foil and put it in the oven that’s good and pre-heated for about an hour. After an hour, pull it out and grab some mozzarella… ditch the foil and liberally apply some shredded mozzarella. Put it back in the oven until everything is nice and melty. I like to leave it until the cheese is just starting to turn a little brown.

This is the final result. A nice, thick, solid lasagna. The cheese mixture should not be runny. When you cut a slice, it shouldn’t slide and separate. It should be able to stand on the plate without the layers sliding apart. If you keep all of the noodles covered in sauce during cooking, or cheese or whatever, they won’t get crispy and hard and nasty.

• You can use a 50/50 mix of sausage and beef for a more flavorful mix.
• You can replace the meat with spinach (or even broccoli) if you’re one of those weirdos who doesn’t eat meat… but you have to be sure to remove as much liquid as possible from whatever you’re adding.
• If your end product is runny, you either need to cook longer, remove liquids, or add more cheese / eggs.
• Here’s what you need:

• 16 ounces Lasagna
• 1 (15 ounce) container ricotta cheese
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 eggs
• 4 cups (1 pound) shredded mozzarella cheese
• 2 (28 ounce) jars pasta sauce, any flavor
• 1 pound beef, cooked, drained

Crispy Fish Tacos!

Tonight we decided to make a quick and easy meal, so we turned to the fish tacos. You gotta love fish, it’s cheap, it keeps forever in the freezer, but when you’re ready to actually eat it, it thaws quickly. You can cook it on the stovetop, in the oven, heck I’ve seen salmon recipes that cook the salmon in the dishwasher.

Here is the recipe I used for the fish: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Crispy-Fish-Fillets/Detail.aspx

It caught my eye because it used instant mashed potatoes instead of traditional breading. Our fish of choice tonight was flounder, but you could just as easily do this with any fish.

The little change I made to the recipe on the website was to dredge the fish through flour first to make the “breading” stick a bit better, and instead of regular mustard, Virginia’s Dad makes this home-made mustard that is out-flippin standing.

Here is the fish, happy in some Extra Virgin Olive Oil. You have to pay attention to it though, as it will cook rather quickly.

Above in the first pic you can see it browning around the edges (you might have to click on the pic and look at the larger version) This lets you know it’s time to flip.

Meanwhile, Virginia had some potatoes going… she cut them, boiled them, then browned them in a pan with some salt and pepper and other spices to test.

Here’s the finished product… the fish was laid on a bed of lettuce on a flour tortilla and topped off with some pineapple peach salsa. The potatoes of course were wonderful… on another note, we’ve dropped Iodized Salt, and gone to Sea Salt.

Notes:

• The fish was crispy and light, but in the taco, it was overpowered by the salsa and dumbed down by the tortilla.
• On its own, you could taste the potato in the “breading” on the fish, and the gentle mustard flavors underneath.
• We cooked one filet in sesame oil and the result was rather amazing… no heavy olive oil taste, but even with a slight bit of flavor from the sesame oil, there was more flavor than with olive oil.