Peter's Cooking Diary #16

Well it was another good week of cooking. I made 2 different things this week, the first was a semi-homemade item, and the second was a recipe that I have made before, but being me I made some new adjustments to the recipe and added more things than I had in the past.

So this is one of the few semi-homemade pizzas that I make. I usually tend to start of with a decent quality frozen pizza, this was some type of new diggiorno pizza that was on sale, it was definitely pretty well seasoned to begin with. I have used garlic bread pizzas for this recipe as well, but those can be a little bit salty for people who much not be able to handle that.

I always get weird looks when I talk about liking tuna pizza, but thats what this is going to be a tuna pizza. I used on big can of tuna, drained and flaked over the pizza. This is something that I first tried when my family lived in Austria, but my dad would make it for me even when we had moved back, so now this is my own version of it. 

I sprinkled the tuna pizza with oregano, sliced kalamata olives, and some minced garlic, plus a little sprinkle of red pepper flake for just a little bit of heat.

As I tend to do with frozen pizzas, I added some shredded cheese, and also a little bit of Parmesan cheese for some added flavor as well.

This is the finished product, the pizza is so nice and crispy, I love the briny olives with the tuna and the garlic. This is one of my favorite pizzas to make for a reason.

The next recipe is the chicken enchilada tamale bake from my slow cooker cookbook, the recipe needs 4 cups of cooked and shredded chicken breast, so I used the recipe in the book for making that chicken. Salt and pepper on both sides and then cooking over high heat for 5-7 minutes on each side. After the first side is nicely browned, flip the chicken, add a cup of water and cover. The chicken will get less brown on the second side but will cook through nicely in the pan and stay nice and moist as well.

This is the finished chicken, I always let it rest before cutting into it. I then took the chicken and shredded it with 2 forks, it will increase in volume after shredding and 2 lbs of chicken can go a long way when shredded.

This is the beginning of the base of the recipe, my normal onion and garlic combination, sweating down with a little salt, some cumin, Mexican chili powder, oregano, and some paprika.

Stirred all of the seasonings in and cooked more, also added 2 small cans of mild fire-roasted green chiles with the liquid from the cans as well. I love the flavor that gets added from the peppers they are a much in anything Mexican that I make.

This is my slow cooker with the veggies and spices, corn, creamed corn, black beans, and enchilada sauce. I will probably try this same recipe with some green enchilada sauce at some point in the future. Because I am who I am I had to expand the recipe a little bit so I had to add more sauce, when I wanted more corn and more black beans.

Added the chicken and stirred it all to combine and let it cook away while I prepared the topping for this dish. I wanted to see if I could get the mixture to cook down a little before I added the topping.

This is instant polenta and it is incredibly hard to find for my cooking. The only place that I know of in the area that carries it is Wal-Mart and I like to avoid shopping there as much as I can, but this recipe is so good and I was craving it so I had to bite the bullet and go in to buy it.

Added water and salt to the polenta, and then microwaved it while covered. The polenta isn't quite instant but it does cook up really quickly.

Once the polenta had cooked long enough to thicken, then I added butter and cheese to complete the polenta topping.

Added the polenta topping to the top of the mixture and I covered for 4 hours. The final product didn't look pretty enough for a picture, but to be honest, I don't care what something looks like as long as it tastes good.

It was a little soupier because of my tampering with the levels of everything in the pot, but it tasted amazing.

In the next edition I will be cooking my first recipe out of The Joy of Cooking, and it is also a recipe that I have been wanting to make for a long time.