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
Tag: bacon
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
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
JRR’s Purple Cabbage recipe
After I copied down JRR’s recipe in the comments section of the final garden harvest pictures. Here was the recipe that I came up with:
-1lb 1.5 oz of purple cabbage, cored and thinly shreaded (all the purple cabbage that was harvested)
-4 cloves of minced garlic
-half of a white medium onion (the other half was used in the jalapeno hot sauce recipe)
-2 tsp rendered and solidified bacon fat
-1 TB soy sauce
-1/2 cup Homebrew IPA
-4 strips of pre-cooked bacon, chopped into bits
-Pinch Red pepper flakes
-Salt & pepper to taste
In a sauteuse, cook the onions & garlic in the bacon fat until they start to soften, then add all the cabbage to the sauteuse. I then tossed the cabbage for a couple of minutes to coat in the bacon fat. Next I added the soy sauce & beer, put on the cover and let it steam for about 20 mins on medium/medium low heat. After the steaming is done, I turned up the heat to medium high/high to reduce the liquid. Finally just before removing the pan from the burner I added in the bacon, red pepper flakes and salt/pepper. BAM!
When I tasted the final product on my dinner plate, the thing that I noticed was that it needed a little bit of sweetness. So for next time, instead of using an IPA for the liquid. I’ll trying adding some sort of sweet wine instead, since it only needed a little bit of sweetness to balance out the soy sauce.
Please excuse all the ping-backs, it was just one of those things that happened.
Garbage Nachos Recipe – Fridge leftovers edition
Man was I in the mood to have a plate of nachos for dinner a couple of weeks back. Yeah I said it, nachos for dinner. So basically I went though my fridge, and anything that looked like it might go on top of a plate of nachos, was used for these nachos(which included a lot of leftovers from earlier in the week). So here was what I ended up using for these nachos from the bottom up: Continue reading
Making the Hershey’s Kitchens – Ranch Style Shrimp and Bacon Appetizers
Let me start by saying that this recipe despite the title has nothing to do with ranch dressing, unlike the whole salad with chicken thing. But more like “I’ll be spending the weekend at my ranch, branding cattle the whole time.” Continue reading
My salad with chicken, and not a chicken salad
I don’t understand what people see in the mayo version of chicken salad; you know what I’m talking about, crap like this! Something about “normal” chicken salad just makes me wonder. It doesn’t even look appetizing to me, just a big white pile of mush. Kind of like American style potato salad, which doesn’t hold a candle to warm German style potato salad. But that is a story for another time. Personally I’m not a big salad fan to begin with, due to a couple of bad personal experiences. But I haven’t written off salad completely, it just makes me pickier about the salads that I do eat. Continue reading
