Baked Potato soup

We had a baked potato bar at work yesterday....and we had a pan of baked potatoes left over. Not wanting to see them go to waste, I brought them home, figuring I'd find a use for them other than potato salad.  I've never made potato soup, and love the baked potato soup I've had in restaurants, so thought I'd give it a whirl.  I found this recipe online with a Google search, and used it as a jumping off point.  

Start by frying four strips of bacon in a dutch oven until they are crisp.  I luckily had a package in the freezer, otherwise I would've sent Brother off to the store to fetch me some.  Remove the bacon and set it aside.  I then added 1-1/2 large diced onions and several spoonfuls of the minced garlic from a jar to the bacon drippings in the dutch oven, along with some kosher salt.   No, I didn't measure the garlic, just tossed it in. You can't really have too much garlic.  I didn't have a whole lot of drippings, so I added a little olive oil.   I diced the onions way too big, and didn't really want hunks of onion in my soup, so I let the onions and garlic cook until the onions were pretty much mush.  

I then cut up 8 medium-sized baked potatoes.  Since they were baked in the oven, and not in the microwave as the recipe instructed, the peel was pretty tough, so I removed most of it.  I cut the potatoes in pieces, slightly mashed them with a potato masher, then added them to the dutch oven with four cups of 2% milk and two cups of gluten free chicken broth.  The instructions said to bring it to a boil, then simmer for ten minutes.  After ten minutes, my soup looked pretty gross.  I'm guessing the whole milk called for in the original recipe resulted in a thicker soup, but I had 2%.  And not seeing any sort of thickener in the recipe, I assumed the recipes author used the whole milk to thicken the soup.  I had potato flour in the pantry, so I added potato flour until the soup started thickening up and looking like potato soup instead of a greasy pot of milk and potatoes.  A taste test indicated the soup was pretty bland, so I tossed in what was left of a can of Home Appetit's peppercorn steakhouse seasoning...just to get the can out of the pantry.    Dished up a bowl and topped it with cheddar from a local farmer and some crumbled bacon.  Dang, it's good.  And there's a ton of it, so I shall see how it freezes.  

Drunken Mushrooms

One of the things I like about the Brown-Eyed Guy is he will sometimes let me take over his kitchen without complaining, especially if I teach him something new.  I tend to think he's more agreeable to me taking over the kitchen when I show up with steak like I did last night.

Last night's dinner plans were kind of last-minute, but since I have a side of grass-fed beef in the freezer, my go-to dinner for such instances is steak.  Brown-Eyed Guy likes ribeye, and is usually amenable to the idea of steak for dinner.  I wanted a mushroom sauce, but he doesn't like wine, so I played around with what I had in the pantry to figure out how to make mushroom sauce without wine, with no time to look up a recipe. I had beef stock and balsamic vinegar in the pantry, so I thought I'd start with those.  Baby bellas have more flavor and hold up better, so I stopped off at the grocery store and snagged two boxes.

I'm very much a right-brain person and rarely use a recipe.  If I use a recipe, it's more for ideas or to learn a technique.  On the other hand, Brown-Eyed Guy is a left-brain IT guy and generally wants measurements or a recipe.  This makes for interesting times in the kitchen because I rarely measure anything and "wing it" more often than not.  So, for anyone reading this who needs measurements, I've tried to include something resembling measurements.

Start by melting a couple of tablespoons of butter in a pan.  Add two cartons of baby bellas.  I found garlic and part of a shallot in Brown-Eyed Guy's fridge, leftover from a previous kitchen experiment, so I added three cloves of chopped garlic and half a shallot, thinly sliced.  I poured in about a cup of beef stock, then added half an onion, thinly sliced.  The balsamic vinegar was "to taste", but I ended up using about 1/3 of the bottle.  This was the regular grocery store stuff and not my 12-year old imported, so the type of balsamic will change the amount needed.  Quite honestly, to cook in a sauce, the cheap stuff is fine.  I also added a palm full of Home Appetit's Toasted Peppercorn Steakhouse Spice Blend.

It was Brown-Eyed Guy's idea to add whiskey.  I added a couple of shots (approximately) and let it cook for a bit.  Then we tasted and he decided it needed more, so I added a couple of more "glugs" (yes, that is a cooking term).  Then I left it alone, stirring occasionally.  Once it reduced to the point where there was about half a cup of liquid left, I figured it was done.

This stuff was good.  I mean REALLY good.  We both wished we'd cooked rice so we could've had it to soak up the rest of the rest of the sauce.   I'm sitting here eating the leftovers for lunch thinking of a variation for chicken.  Hopefully, Brown-Eyed Guy will be a willing guinea pig. 

One-Pan Pasta

This particular recipe was shared on Facebook several times, plus I stumbled across it in Martha Stewart living.  The basic concept is you put pasta, veggies and water in a pan and cook it for 10 minutes and then you have a creamy-sauced pasta.  Not having any plans for dinner tonight, I figured I'd give it a whirl since I had both pasta and fresh tomatoes on hand.  The directions are for regular pasta, so I figured I'd have to play it by ear.

Ingredients:
12 oz. pasta
12 oz cherry tomatoes
1 thinly sliced onion
4 thinly sliced cloves of garlic (I chopped it)
2 TSBP extra virgin olive oil
2 sprigs of basil
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes
4.5 cups of water

Basically you put all the stuff in the pan like so:

Then you bring the water to a boil, and let it cook for 9 minutes, or until most of the water is gone, stirring the pasta occasionally.  HOWEVER, gluten free pasta takes 14-20 minutes to cook, so the water was mostly gone well before the pasta was done.  So, I did what any good cook would do...I added wine to make more liquid.  Then I had to add more water....then I figured out putting it on simmer and covering the pan worked too.  It was finally done, and this is what it looked like:

I then added sausage and freshly grated 30-month parmesan cheese for all three of us, but only I got the drizzle of Balsamic vinegar.  .

Philistine #1 proclaimed it delicious and asked for me to put some in the fridge for his lunch tomorrow.  Philistine #2 didn't like the pasta, ate the sausage, and went to bed hungry.  I thought it was really tasty, and next time I make it I plan to add mushrooms, and maybe some veggies. 

Betty Crocker Meets Davy Crockett

As I've mentioned before, I moved three months ago and had to move all the stuff that was in the pantry.  I hate to admit the fact that there were two cases of Betty Crocker gluten free chocolate cake mix in my pantry.  That's 10 boxes of cake mix...and this is what happens when you don't pay attention to the Amazon Subscribe and Save subscriptions.

As a part of my pantry clean-out challenge, I decided to play around with the cake mix.  I have a bottle of Davy Crockett salted caramel whiskey I bought in Gatlinburg, so I decided I'd make a whiskey cake.  So while I was cooking sloppy joes for the Philistines, I whipped up this cake.

The cake mix called for 3 eggs, 1 cup of water and 1/4 cup of butter.  I kept the 3 eggs and then started modifying.  Instead of a cup of water, I used 1/2 water and 1/2 whiskey.  Just for kicks, to drop the fat content, I used a container of Chobani coffee-flavored Greek yogurt with chocolate chips instead of the butter.  And I added a heaping tablespoon of Dagoba organic cocoa powder.   Baked it at 350 for 40 minutes, and got...CAKE.  It had the texture of brownies as opposed to cake, but that's not a huge deal.  Gluten free cake doesn't have the greatest texture in the world, so I'll take brownie-like and be happy with it.  The whiskey taste was very faint, so I probably could've used the whole 1 cup of whiskey.

Then the cake needed frosting.  I'm not much of a frosting eater, and I have no desire to actually make frosting from scratch.  There was no frosting in my pantry, but there was a jar of "Nutcracker Dip" that a friend gave me for my birthday.

It said it was a sweet mix of brown sugar and pecans.  I'm not sure what the heck one would dip into it, but it looked like cake frosting when I opened the jar.  So, .I heated it up and spread it on the cake.  It was perfect on the chocolate cake.  It's way too sweet for anything else I could imagine, but it made great cake frosting.  And it's another item out of the pantry.

Brown-Eyed Guy likes whiskey...maybe I'll share some of my cake with him.

The Brown-Eyed Guy and Chicken

I have to take a few minutes to blog about the Brown-Eyed Guy. I met him in September of last year, and was pleasantly surprised to find out he has a daughter who is supposed to be gluten free, so he wasn't "freaky" about the whole gluten-free thing like the ex-husband always was.  He likes learning new recipes, so it's been fun trying out new things, either cooking with him, or cooking for him.   It's fun to cook at his place, since he has a fantastic gas stove, and now that his oven is fixed, it's broadened the horizons for cooking opportunities.  Not that baking chicken in a toaster oven wasn't successful, you can just bake MORE chicken in the big oven.  I have had fun introducing him to new things in the kitchen, including two chicken experiments.

As I mentioned in my last post, my challenge to myself has been to use up the vast array of condiments that had accumulated in my pantry.   I had a jar of sundried tomato pesto that, prior to going gluten free, would've been spread on toasted french bread and eaten just like that.  Figuring it might work with chicken, a google search turned up this recipe.  Brown-Eyed Guy was game to try it out, so we planned on having it for dinner one evening when I was visiting.  I decided to mix the filling in my kitchen ahead of time, primarily because I didn't know how he'd react to the idea of goat cheese (he'd never had it), and primarily so I could keep the amount of "stuff" getting transported to a minimum.  So, I mixed the sundried tomato pesto with some fresh Herb de Provence goat cheese from Caly Road Creamery, and got HEAVEN.  Oh my freaking gosh...this filling was the bomb.  I texted Brown-Eyed Guy that it was a good thing I'd doubled the recipe, because I ended up eating half of it with a spoon before it ever made it to the fridge.

Fast forward to dinner:  I was out on a volleyball court doing what I do, so  Brown-Eyed Guy got to do the prep work and pound the chicken breasts flat before I got there.  He watched me put everything together  and then we popped it in the toaster oven to cook.  I wish I had thought to take a picture, because this chicken was incredible, and looked fantastic.  It also gave Brown-Eyed Guy some ideas of his own for a variation on this idea that he wanted to try.  We'll get to that momentarily.

So...I know the burning question on your mind is what happened to the rest of that sundried tomato pesto?  I discovered that the filling for the chicken breasts was also quite amazing when spread on gluten free pizza crust, topped with grated parm and baked in the oven.

As for Brown-Eyed Guy's variation on the original stuffed chicken dish....he decided this would be really good if we stuffed the chicken with ham, cheese, and bacon.  The original idea was chicken cordon bleu, but  somehow we went off on our own path, and as we were putting filling inside, Brown-Eyed Guy decided he wanted some jalapenos in his.   He was going to bread it with corn flakes, but we discovered his corn flakes weren't gluten free, so we decided to coat the chicken with the parmesan cheese leftover from the original chicken experiment.  This was also the first time we used the big oven, so we got to cook all four breasts at once.  The finished product was tasty, but we also discovered a couple of things that would've made it better.  First one was we needed something "fat" in the filling.  The swiss cheese didn't provide enough moisture, so some butter or cream cheese inside the chicken would've helped.  The other thing we goofed up on was we used a broiler pan with a grate.  This allowed all the juice to drain away from the chicken, which wasn't exactly conducive to keeping the chicken moist.  Lessons learned, the chicken was still tasty, and no, there are no pictures of this one either.

Pantry challenges

So...it's been awhile since I posted anything.   The husband moved out not too long after I started the blog, so I didn't really do much updating.  I'm getting more creative in the kitchen, and dating a man who doesn't mind being a guinea pig for my new recipes, so I thought I'd give this a whirl again.

I moved about three months ago.  In the process of moving, I had to box up the pantry.  Oy!  Where did all those condiments come from?  Rather than throw things out, I challenged myself to use up these jars of  gourmet oddities.  I've also been challenging myself to use my crockpot more, and to find creative ways to use the roasts that come with the side of grass-fed beef I get every year.  So...my first post in a very long time will hit all three of those goals. 

I my pantry was this jar of caramelized onion confit.  It sounded good at the time I bought it.  So...what do to with it?  Pulled out the crockpot, sliced some roast into fairly thin slices, dumped in the confit.   Debated whether to leave it at that, or add some liquid.  There was a single-serve bottle of red Moscato in the cabinet, and you can never have too much wine, so I put that in, and let it cook on low for the entire day.   Then it got transported to The Loft, where it was to be dinner for me and The Guy.  When I got there, I put it on the stove, tossed in some frozen broccoli and some more wine, and let it simmer for a bit.

The end result:  We got distracted and left it simmering too long, so the broccoli was mushy, but the extra simmer didn't seem to hurt anything else.  I loved it.  The wine and the carmelized onion confit melded together to make a semi-sweet sauce that was really good.  (it was even better cold the next day - don't ask).  The Guy, on the other hand, likes neither wine, nor sweet stuff, so he didn't like it as much.  However, I do have to make the comment that even if he doesn't like what I've cooked, he has the good manners to eat it anyway, and express appreciation for the cook.  His mama apparently raised him properly, even if he did spend most of his formative years as a yankee in upstate New York.