Foodgeek Blog

I’ve started making dinner for my brother, sister-in-law, niece, and myself on Monday nights.  I’ve tried to vary the menu up from week to week, and last Monday my brother gave me an easy opportunity to continue to do so.  We were sitting, eating a fairly rockin’ pork roast I had made, even if I say so myself, and he said, “Next Sunday I’m going to give you four random ingredients, like they do on Chopped.”

I was thrilled, as this was what I’d been trying to get them to do all along.  It’s fun for me, because I’m an improviser, and it works out because I don’t do great with giving them ingredient lists far enough in advance for the shopping to be convenient for them.  Anyway, Sunday night I got my ingredients:

• Tomatillos
• Duck sauce
• Rice pudding
• Cinnamon pita chips

I crushed the pita chips, seasoned them with cumin, garlic powder, and black pepper, and used them to make a crusted chicken breast dish.  It came out pretty well, although if I make it again I’ll use a food processor to crush the chips rather than a meat mallet.  The large chunks didn’t stick extremely well. I’ll also use less cumin, and move the oven rack upward a notch halfway through the baking to get a crunchier crust.

I made some garlic mashed potatoes.  No magic there, other than simmering the garlic in the milk and butter before adding it to the taters.

I used the rice pudding to make some drop biscuits.  I found a basic drop biscuit recipe and used a combination of the pudding and milk to make the batter.  They were ok, but if I make them again I’ll add some sugar.  I left it out because the pudding itself was sweet, but the biscuits came out a little salty tasting.

I had been going to use the duck sauce and tomatillos to make a sort of tapenade for the mashed potatoes.  I chopped the tomatillos and simmered them in the duck sauce, and found it to be a little too tart.  Once I added brown sugar, though, it swung to the other end of the flavor spectrum and became too sweet for the potatoes.  Instead I used it as a glaze for some carrots I cooked in the microwave.

All in all, I’d say it came out pretty well.

This one ended somewhere entirely different than I intended it to go, but it was tasty nonetheless.

I just some sauteed veggies (zucchini, mushroom, tomato, onion, garlic), and then simmered them in a cream sauce (roux, half and half, garlic powder, and a little cumin), and I served the whole shebang over rice.

The rice thing was a miscalculation on my part.  Cream sauce is white, white rice is white.  It made for a boring-looking (albeit good-tasting) meal.  In retrospect I should have used some green linguine or one of the more colorful rices.

Hey err’body.  I’ve recently decided to learn to cook vegetarian.  (I’m not a vegetarian myself, but my girlfriend is, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to make her dinner.)

My first attempt was a sort of Italian eggplant dish that I named “Eggplant a la Megan.”  Bet you can’t guess why…

Bear with me, I didn’t use a recipe, and I didn’t measure.

1 eggplant, sliced thinly

1 green bell pepper, sliced thinly

1 red bell pepper, sliced thinly

1 vidalia onion, diced

1 container of sliced mushrooms

1 jar marinara sauce

shredded cheese (I used an italian six cheese blend)

linguine

Not rocket science.  The plan had been to layer everything, bake it, and serve it over the linguine, but we ended up having to transfer it into a larger pan which destroyed the layering scheme.  Really, just mix it up and throw it into a casserole dish.  Eggplant is a soft vegetable and doesn’t require much time to cook.  Bake it for 20-30 minutes at around 375, put more cheese on top toward the end.  Serve over linguine.  Enjoy.

It came out really well, but in retrospect I’d have used more sauce and more cheese.  Also, the layering thing would have been nice if it had worked out.  This could be done as a lasagna fairly easily as well.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve become the unofficial cold soup guru for our Thursday gatherings.  For a couple of weeks now, I’ve wanted to create a recipe, completely from scratch.  I decided this week would be the week.  Ever since I started thinking about it, I’d had a difficult time deciding what to put in it.  I kept thinking tropical; pineapple, coconut, call it pina colada soup, or some such.  Then yesterday, inspiration hit.

Strawberries.

The plan (as it stands now) is to use apple sauce as the base (a whole bowl of pureed strawberries might be a little overpowering,) add a tub or two of pureed strawberries, some pureed pear to sweeten it up, probably some orange juice, and serve it with fresh whipped cream spiked with a little cream cheese.  (I haven’t thought all the way through the physics of that.  It might not work.)  Trying to decide about seasoning.  Mint doesn’t feel quite right, fresh cilantro sounds interesting to me.  I’ll probably just riff and see what happens.

Results to follow…

I’m running out of food puns. Uh-oh.

I had my first experience in making pesto not too long ago when I was at a friend’s house for dinner.

Pesto really couldn’t be easier to make. It’s fresh basil (a whole mess of fresh basil, 6 cups), olive oil (a whole mess of olive oil, 2 cups), parmesan cheese (1/2 cup), salt and pepper, and two cups of pine nuts. We didn’t have enough pine nuts, so we used a combination of pine nuts and walnuts. Put everything but the oil in a food processor, then turn it on, adding the oil slowly.

That’s it. Pesto change-o! (Aha! I haven’t run out just yet!) The walnuts gave the sauce a really nice sweet flavor. We served it cold over farfale (bow tie pasta), but it could just as appropriately been served hot over linguine or fettucini, or whatever.