A little tomato, a little wine, a little seafood.  That’s really all it takes to make me happy, at least in this instance.  The fact that my oldest son helped me devour the dish shown above is nothing short or a five-star bonus.  I would have eaten it myself had he not enjoyed it.

(I may have secretly hoped that he didn’t…)

All I can really say about this is that it was sublime.  I’ve spent days staring at the screen trying to find a way to describe it, but words have failed me this time, so I’m just going to get straight to the recipe before I waste any more time.  You guys deserve to have this in your card index, database or PDA.  It’s good.

Really good.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

If you’re looking for something a bit different, completely savory and sumptuous and more than a bit over the top, this is the meal for you.  Preperation is relatively simple and the flavors are something that most only experience in high-end establishments, thinking that something of this calibur could never be prepared in a home kitchen.  While there is a bit of long-term preparation involved the process really isn’t all that hard, it’s just the big fancy name that makes it sound daunting.

To quote the Grand Dame of the American Culinary Revolution:

“Noncooks think it’s silly to invest two hours’ work in two minutes’ enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.” ~ Julia Child

For most people, confit automatically brings to mind images of something cooked in duck or goose fat.  While this is the current trend, confit is actually a much simpler premise than that.  The definition of confit is quite simple:

Confit: [kohn-FEE] A meat slow cooked in its own fat with spices. Or a jam-like sweet spread.

In using this definition, anything cooked in its own fat is a confit, and to be tied to only using duck or goose fat would be a crying shame, since chicken confit is probably the simplest of all to make with just ingredients from your local BigScaryMegaMart, namely chicken leg quarters.

You know the ones.  You’ve seen them before.  They sit in the poultry section in a forlorn ten pound sack, partially packed in an impotent brine. These are the byproducts of the American love of the boneless-skinless chicken breast, cast off to obscurity because someone convinced an entire nation that white meat was the best meat.  In this case their loss is our gain.

The chicken sold in bulk bags is mostly from roasting chickens.  Roasting chicken are larger birds with a higher fat to body mass ratio and because of this have become less popular in todays marketplace.  Bulk chicken is also not trimmed for excess fat, it’s just sold by weight, meaning that the producers are not interested in making it look pretty.  It’s perfect for confit and it usually costs around $4.00 for 10 lbs of chicken!  The rest is almost blissfully simple.

So step out of your comfort zone for a moment and take a journey with me to the land of gourmet, where with just a bit of time and effort the most humble ingredients transform themselves into something more than you could have ever imagined where flavors and aromas transcend the parts that make up the whole and become something entirely wonderful.  The experience may only last a few moments, but it is very much worth the effort.

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“What am I going to make with all these leftovers?“

It’s a pretty common phrase used during the holidays, especially after Thanksgiving and Christmas meals. The refrigerator is overflowing with half-full serving dishes or packed storage containers of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and half-a-dozen desserts still grace trays on the counter tops.

Rather than going for the “same-old-same-old” reheated plates and turkey sandwiches, I prefer to use the leftovers as creatively as possibly. This dish has been one of my favorites over the years and I still go back to it on a regular basis.

The concept is simple. Take all the flavors that were at the table for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, mix them all together and add a little of this or that to freshen them up a bit. It’s a truly comforting meal that you wouldn’t peg for a leftover dish if you didn’t know that it was.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

What do you do with a lonely little piece of leftover chuck roast? You can always make a barbecue beef sammich, or just nibble it to death as a snack, but why not give it a bit of pride in its demise and turn it into something completely different and absolutely fabulous!…

But what would that be?

In this case, the inspiration came from my sister, who sent me a wonderful birthday gift, including plum sauce, sea salt, black bean garlic sauce, a couple sea salt grinders, the cutest outfit for Mr. seat of his Diaper, and a jar of oriental barbecue sauce.

A quick look in the crisper showed half of a bag of Italian salad greens, some arugula, shredded carrots, and my course was set. That lonely lil’ piece of leftover roast beef had a new destiny, and it was going Asian.

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Popularity: 1% [?]

Due to my recent round of heath issues, this round of Your Pantry or Mine has gotten off to a slow start. I want to apologize to everyone who’s been waiting, it took me a few days to get back into the swing of things.

This round of Your Pantry or Mine highlights the ingredients in dew’s pantry, which was more challenging because it holds almost the same ingredients I have in mine, with the exception of just those few I would have normally used to finish off a dish.

With this in mind, and the fact that dew appeared to have an eye for healthy fare, (and an allergy to nuts) I decided that the first round of Your Pantry or Mine, No. 2 should be something on the lighter side, using the freshest ingredients from her list.

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Sometimes things just don’t go as planned, the other night was no exception. The plan was simple and I had high aspirations. I was going to introduce my wife to the epitome of cooking with wine, the extravaganza of culinary wonderment and simplicity that is beef bouguignon (beef burgundy). Not only would it be a wonderful dinner for a cold, rainy Texas night, but it was the perfect excuse to pull out my new casserole/dutch oven.

Unfortunately for me, that’s not the way things turned out. I don’t know if the cards were stacked against me, or if Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa and Robert Goulet got together and decided to play a prank on me. In any case, the dinner I planned was apparently not meant to be.

I was sure I had everything I needed. I’d been planning to make beef burgundy for weeks, and had stocked the ingredients well in advance. Here’s how it played out.

• I bounced excitedly into the kitchen to slice the beef… Not gonna happen, it was still frozen in the middle.
• I went to pull out the mushrooms… Ugh! Those were white mushrooms when I bought them, weren’t they?
• Fine, I can live without the mushrooms, I suppose. I’ll just grab the egg noodles… That I used last week for a pasta salad.

After sputtering expletives and downing one or two glasses of the Gallo Twin Valley Hearty Burgundy that I’d picked up especially for this meal, I gathered myself together and hit the internet for some ideas I could use with the ingredients that were in my pantry.

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