From the archives, just in time for a perfect Thanksgiving…

Cranberry sauce was always a staple on our holiday table when I was a child, but I must admit that I wasn’t fond of it until recently. My mother like most people from her generation, had a magical method for making cranberry sauce look exactly like a tin can. For the most part it tasted like one as well.

Fast forward a decade or two to the present, and I find that my wife is not only fond of cranberry sauce, but that she’s been making her own for years. As a newly married man I reluctantly agreed to try it last year, and was not only very pleasantly surprised, but nearly awed at the experience.

This sauce is fantastic. A perfect match for turkey, or even as a part of a parfait I’ve been thinking up. It could be drizzled over a shortcake, and nearly always gets “snuck” straight from the bowl at some point. If you’re thinking of placing cranberry sauce on your holiday table this year, you can’t go wrong with this one.

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About a month ago, the good people over at POM wonderful sent me a package of their 100% pure pomegranate juice to try out. Since it got to the house I’ve been tying to figure out a way to do something a bit original with it, and I think I hit the nail on the head with this one. The pomegranate reduction was most definitely the star of the show here and I urge all of you to go grab the ingredients for this and give it a shot.  You’ll be glad you did, I promise!

The fennel and apple salad was a “by the seat of my pants” creation, but no less worthy than the reduction.  It could serve well as a side salad for any meal and has a wonderful flavor, both with and without the pomegranate reduction.  both components paired perfectly with the chicken, but would go equally well with pork or duck.  I can’t wait to try a few more combinations!

And Please don’t let the complicated name on this dish scare you away from trying it. There really isn’t anything complicated about it. In reality it is a combination of three very simple recipes. (Or if you would rather think of it as a complete recipe, it’s a mildly complicated dish with three simple steps.) The reduction can be made up to two weeks in advance if you think you would have difficulty making it on the same evening, so prep can be spread out over time.

Have fun with it!

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Who says meat and potatoes has to be boring?  With just a little thought and a touch or two, the basic american plate of beef and starch can become something exciting.  It becomes an experience, rather than just something you eat.  That’s what good food is all about and I think that this dish qualifies nicely as an adventure in cooking, even though each part of the dish is utter simplicity to prepare.

The petit fillet is not a very tender cut, so either marinade well, cook rare (as we did) or braise for preparation. I use it not only because it’s inexpensive, but because it has a ton of flavor that some better cuts of beef simply can’t compare to.  Since we prefer our meats under the medium mark, just a few minutes sitting in seasoning was enough.  Had I been shooting for medium rare or above I would have marinated the cut for at least two hours.  If you’re still a bit frightened of this cut, try switching it out for a more tender chuck cut or new york strip, but stay away from mild cuts like fillet mignon, as the sauce will overpower the beef.

Add some roasted potatoes and greens of your choice and this is a complete meal in the greatest of American tradition.  My presentation is obviously a more refined take, but there’s nothing wrong with just plopping everything on a plate and drizzling with sauce before going wild with it.

Hey, it’s your kitchen and your family. Do it your way. It will taste just as good no matter how it’s plated.

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Is there really an more perfectly simple topping or dipping sauce than caramel?  In its purest incarnation caramel is nothing more than sugar that has been heated until deeply browned, but the transformation is enough to bring out deep flavors and subtle overtones that simply can’t be found in any other form of sugar. With the addition of a few simple flavorings this humble mix of melted sugar and water can take on sweet, savory or succulent flavors and it plays with each very well.

In this instance we were looking for a sweet caramel sauce for a few desserts.  My wife found this recipe at Martha Stewart’s website and we both thought it would be a perfect fit to some of the other flavors we were going into the mix, so we gave it a shot.

It’s fabulous.  Really.  I can’t say how fabulous. I’ll admit that I upped the butter content over the version at Martha’s site, but I prefer a very rich caramel. (I may have added a bit more bourbon than listed as well.  OK, A tablespoon more… But this has a tendancy to cause the sauce to thicken a bit overmuch, so I don’t reccomend it.)

If you’re going to take the leap and try just once in your life and attempt to make your own caramel sauce, this is the one you should try!  No really, go make this right now.  I’ll wait….

Good, isn’t it?

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A new Cooking by the seat of my Pants classic!  This is one of those times that I’m glad I sometimes just grab what I have handy and create something. As far as simple glazes go, this one is simply delicious, not only on the night it’s made, but even a few days later.  As a matter of fact, it was better a few days later.

Thee inspiration for this came from a combination of things I’d been watching on the idiot box.  Bits of things I’d seen on No Reservations and some Food Network chaff, I think.  In the end, the result was a subtly sweet and rather sublime glaze that brought out the flavors in the chicken while elevating the humble bird to a level it could never possibly attain on its own.

This is not the moment for me to sing my own praises.  This sauce/glaze worked perfectly because the ingredients were perfect and went perfectly with each other.  The tomato was beautifully ripe, the onion fresh and new, the garlic sweet and pungent at the same time.  It wasn’t me that made this the perfect glaze.  Nature did that for me.  All I did was introduce a few different ingredients to each other and let them sing together in a harmony that I could never create myself.  I’ll leave that to nature.

As for the tomatoes on the side…  Well, that’s the next food post.  You’ll just have to wait.  They deserve their own spotlight.

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Welcome to the very first installment of Frugal Fridays, where I (and hopefully other bloggers) aim to prove that you can eat very well and still manage to keep a few dollars in your pocket book for good measure.  The Challenge of Frugal Fridays is to create a meal that will feed a family of four for $10.00 or less.  While I’m not expecting gourmet fare for this amount, I know that if anyone can whip up a meal on a budget that still tastes phenomenal, it’s a bunch of food bloggers.

This dish was a flash of inspiration from a conversation I had with my wife a few days ago.  She mentioned that her favorite seafood was crab and I had an immediate burst of inspiration on what to make. The dish itself is simple, promised great flavor and was planned to make my wife smile. What I didn’t know was if I could do it for under $10.00. It sounded like the perfect Frugal Friday challenge.

My first thought was to use lump crab meat.  Unfortunately, in this part of Texas a pound of decent looking lump crab would have used up my entire $10.00 budget.  I was stuck with using the best canned crab I could find.  Don’t get me wrong, I would have preferred the lump crab meat, but we’re going for a filling meal here, and I didn’t think 2 oz. of crab would do it.

The rest of the ingredients were straightforward and very inexpensive, including the shallot wich I admit took me by surprise.  As I’ve said, for a $10.00 the assumtion has to be made that there are some basic cooking ingredients available, such as oil, butter, salt, spices, etc. so that’s the premise I ran on. In the end I came in well under budget and made a remarkably tasty dish that would easily feed 4 to 6 people to the point of comortably full.

Just to prove that this came in under budget, here’s the complete list of what was purchased:

• Linguine – $1.09
• Crab Meat: – $4.17
• Mini French Loaf – $0.75
• Lemon – $0.59
• Shallot – $0.51
• Garlic – $0.30
• Parsley – $0.49
• ————————
• Store Surcharge – $0.40
• ————————
• Grand Total – $8.30

Not too bad for a seafood dinner for four with bread, eh?  I could have sprung for a salad, but I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

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I have a few go-to recipes in my arsenal and this is most definitely one of them. A perfect combination of heat, sweet and sour, it compliments vegetables, fish or chicken well, without overpowering the flavor of the main component.

And it will leave a little tingle on your tongue in the process.

Garlic Chili Stir Fry Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp. Hoisin Sauce
• 1/4 cup light soy sauce
• 1 tsp. garlic chili paste
• 1 tsp. honey
• 1/2 tsp. roasted garlic rice wine vinegar

Method:

Mix all ingredients in small bowl or shaker bottle. Mix well. Allow to sit 5 minutes and mix a second time to ensure honey is dissolved completely.

Usage:

Add to stir fried foods at end of cooking, or use as dipping sauce for chicken, vegetables, shrimp or fish.

Enjoy!

What I would have done differently had I thought of it at the time:

For more heat, add a bit more of the garlic chili paste. More sour, more vinegar. If using for fish a bit of citrus may be nice, and apple cider vinegar if using for pork with pork. The recipe is very adaptable and you should feel free to have fun with it.

Popularity: 1% [?]

They look luscious don’t they? Rich, huge, decadent ravioli, just barely touched with an intensely flavored, yet extremely light tomato sauce. I love ravioli. I love mushrooms. Mushroom ravioli is a natural progression from those two factors. Unfortunately, I made a fatal error with these. I discovered that neither my wife or I can stand dried mushrooms.

The recipe for these ravioli looked and sounded wonderful, the end result was more like a combination of fish and shoe-leather covered in n absolutely wonderful sauce, though not wonderful enough to hide the flavor of the dried mushrooms.

In that bent, I’ll post the recipe for the sauce here. It would be wonderful on nearly any pasta, and will definitely top our next attempt at ravioli. I’ll wait to post the ravioli recipe until I get it right, I honestly wouldn’t recommend these, they just weren’t as good as they look.

Grape Tomato Sauce:

Ingredients:

1 pkg grape tomatoes, halved
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup chicken or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Sauté tomatoes in olive oil until heated through. Add stock, salt and pepper, reduce by 1/4. Mix in butter and remove from heat. Toss with your favorite pasta and enjoy.

What I would have done differently had I thought of it at the time:

I would’ve used fresh shitake’s… blech

Also, a little fresh basil tossed in the sauce at the last moment would be incredible.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mmmmm, Barbecued Pulled Pork Sammiches. Just typing the words gets me all teary-eyed and makes my heart palpitate a little. And to think, it all came about because of a terrible kitchen mishap!

Sometimes even the most horrific kitchen disasters can be recovered from. At least I like to tell myself that they can, and in this case at least, it worked.

The other night I decided to try using our tabletop oven to cook up a pork blade roast. The idea was that the little oven would use less power, since the roast nearly filled it to capacity and I wouldn’t have to heat a large volume of air. It’s also a convection unit, and should have cooked the roast in less time than our regular ol’ apartment oven.

Yeah, whatever! After three hours (a full hour longer than it would have taken in our regular oven), the roast still wasn’t done. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Apparently the oven manufacturer and I differ on the meaning of 350°.

I set the timer for another hour and laid on the couch to watch some TV…

And fell fast asleep.

My wife tried to wake me up, but to be quite honest, I’d had a few beers while I waited for the bloody roast to finish, and the combination of a pretty stressful day with Mr. Seat of his Diaper and a few Shiner Bock’s on an empty stomach, I was history.

I was apparently just awake enough to tell her to leave the roast right where it was. Being the wonderful person she is, she listened to me and didn’t disturb the still undercooked roast…

And I found it right there in the oven when I got up at 5:00 AM.

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Roasting is one of the most basic ways to prepare chicken. It’s as easy as washing, seasoning and baking for roughly 45 minutes. The only problem is that after a few rounds, a simply prepared roast chicken is a lot like store-bought rotisserie chicken…

It gets boring.

This recipe came of the desire to bring the humble roast chicken to the realm of sublime meal, and I feel that it worked extremely well. You can use this recipe for any type of chicken, whether it be boneless-skinless or a butterflied Cornish game hen. I just happened to have a bunch of leg quarters lying about and needed a good use for them.

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