I’ve been working on this recipe for about the last 9 months, until I arrived at the recipe you see below. I’m not going to bother posting any of the earlier versions of the recipe, since they mostly resulted in being complete and utter failures. But some of the low lights from v1 & v2 include bland flavor, soft texture and excruciatingly long cooking times. So with that out of the way, it’s onto the winning recipe listed below. Continue reading
Category: cooking
First Sweet Corn of the Year – July 26, 2010
I just picked a couple of ears of the sh2 sweet corn that I planted this year. And I think that I might have waited to long before starting the harvest. Don’t get me wrong, the corn still tasted great. And I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten sweet corn 30 mins after it was picked. But it did taste like it was starting to go from the “milk” stage to the “early dough” stage, in that the corn had a little bit of a starchy taste. But with all that said, it was still better then any corn that I’ve gotten at the grocery store or farmers market. Continue reading
Sunburst Squash and Yellow Onion Scallop – v1 – July 2010
I grew the sunburst squash, so now I have to eat them. So after a little bit of searching on the internet for a recipe, here was the base recipe that I ended up starting out with. And as usual I made my own heavy handed modifications: Continue reading
Beef Satays – v1 – July 2010
Since I had so much peanut sauce leftover from making chicken satays, I thought that I would make another batch of satays. Originally I was thinking about going with pork. But on Saturday morning I was watching Primal Grill with Steven Raichlen, and he made beef satays on his Lodge Hibachi. So after seeing that episode, it sealed the deal for me to make beef satays with some of the leftover peanut sauce. Continue reading
Cooking Swiss Chard – v1 – June 2010
Swiss chard ended up being one of those random things that I grew in the garden this year. And the only reason that it happened in the first place, was that my farmer neighbor gave me a bunch of swiss chard transplants at the beginning of the season that were headed to the compost pile at the farm if they weren’t planted. So not being one to turn down free plants, I picked a spot in the newer side of the garden for the swiss chard. Continue reading
Bacon Grilled Cheese – v1 – June 2010
For some reason last week, I was in the mood for a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches as a late night snack. But when I checked the fridge, as usual I didn’t have half the items to make a “normal” grilled cheese. So after giving the fridge a quick scan to see what was available to make a grilled cheese. What I had on hand was six slices of Finlandia jalapeno muenster cheese and some cooked bacon. At the time I didn’t realize it, but now that I think about it, I ended up making more of a “ham & cheese” instead of a “grilled cheese”, but that is where the similarities ends. So on to the fun stuff, and making some sandwiches. Continue reading
Chicken Satay – v1 – June 2010
You know, I’ve made chicken satays once before, but that was many many years ago. And since I don’t have central air in my house, I’m looking to cook as much food outside as possible. So doing some grilling fits the bill.
I had two recipes on file for chicken satay, but I really don’t remember which one I used when I made this dish years ago. So I kind of combined parts of both recipes (here & here) and create a new recipe. My usual cooking notes are listed below, so lists get on to the ingredient list:
- 2 Chicken breasts and 2 chicken breast tenders (which were from a whole chicken that I de-boned myself)
- 1 cup smooth peanut butter
- 1 cup Vegetable Oil
- 1/2 cup soy sauce
- 1/2 cup toasted sesame oil
- 2 TB Fish Sauce
- 1 TB Hoisin Sauce
- 1/4 cup fresh cilantro, roughly chopped
- 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 TB of fresh ginger, minced
Combine all the ingredients listed in a bowl ( minus the chicken) and whisk it all together. Personally I used my Braun stick blender to get it all mixed up. Then cut up the chicken so that it is in pieces about 1/2″ wide by 1/2” thick and 2” long. Take the chicken and skewer about two or three chicken pieces onto each bamboo skewer. Once all the chicken is skewered give it a pretty heavy coating of the peanut sauce, and let it marinade for about 24 hours in the fridge. You’ll have more then enough sauce to coat all the chicken skewers, plus 2 cups of leftover sauce.
Once the chicken is done marinating overnight, I cooked the satays on the Weber for about a minute or two a side, but basically until browned and firm to the touch.
And the results, pretty good if I do say so, but check out the side notes for what I would do differently next time. Enjoy.
Side notes:
1) Don’t bother using bamboo skewers. Sure they look cool, but stick with stainless steel skewers.
2) Needs more spice, since I barely tasted any of the red pepper flakes that I did add. So I’d probably pump it up to a full teaspoon the next time.
3) I’m also thinking about tweaking the liquid ingredients. Since I really don’t think that the sesame oil added anything extra, so I would just increase the vegetable oil to 1.5 cups.
4) Also I just happened to find out that fish sauce is totally awesome, so I would cut back on the soy sauce and increase the fish sauce, so that each was a 1/4 cup.
5) Have you noticed that there isn’t any salt in the recipe? It because the soy sauce and fish sauce have plenty of salt to begin with, so adding in some kosher salt doesn’t make any sense.
6) If you don’t want any leftover peanut sauce, just cut the sauce recipe in half.
Smoking Homemade Bacon – 05/01/2010
This was one of those projects that should have been completed at least a couple of weeks back. But each free weekend that I had in March & April, would somehow get booked.
So a little bit of back story on this project. Around mid-March I ended up being part of a syndicate that was going to purchase a whole pig from The Slagel Family Farm down in central Illinois. Well something went sideways in the order, and instead of a whole pig (~200lbs, dressed) being delivered to Mado they delivered half a pig (~100lbs, dressed) instead. It was kind of a bummer to get half a pig, since we were splitting this pig four ways. But in the end, half a pig worked out better, since we were struggling just to refrigerate half a pig. So I don’t even know where we would have stored another 100lbs of pork meat and bones. Continue reading
Bagel breakfast sandwich – v1
I was bored one evening a few months back, so with a pile of bagels in the fridge, I thought that I would make a quick bagel breakfast sandwich for dinner. I really didn’t have a recipe in mind per se, but I did kind of roughly base this sandwich on something that you might get at a Big Apple Bagel’s restaurant. Here is how the sandwich stacks up ingredients wise:
- Poppy seed bagel, lightly toasted
- 3 large scrambled eggs, cooked with a little bit of bacon fat
- 1 slice of colby/jack cheese
- 3 slices of bacon, broken in half
- Homemade jalapeno sauce
French Toast – v1
For some reason last month, I was in the mood for some french toast. So here is the recipe that I came up with, using a basic recipe off of food network as a starting point, and the final product actually turned out pretty good. Continue reading