Peter's Cooking Diary #25

I have to admit I have been a bit uninspired with my cooking lately, I need to start making some new recipes or something, because it seems like I have made a lot of these recipes before, and I want to keep making some new things. I will have to start brainstorming new ideas for that, I kind only have a set of a few low carb dishes that I like to make.

The first dish I wanted to make this week was a semi homemade type of thing that I did with things that I made with things that I already had on hand. A friend had left some Ninja Turtles Mac and Cheese which was the start of the dish.

I started off by mincing some garlic and some onion, to add more of a depth of flavor to the dish. I enjoy Kraft mac and cheese, but adding more flavor definitely helped.

I took the butter that would be mixed in with the sauce, and I cooked the onion and garlic down in it until they were softened.

I added a can of tuna to the pan and let it incorporate with all sorts of flavors as well as some oregano and some red pepper flake.

I melted some more butter and tossed some panko bread crumbs in them and just tossed them until lightly toasted and the butter was absorbed.

The last thing I did was chop up some string cheese which I had on hand.

The cooked noodles, some of the pasta water, and the cheese sauce in an oven safe dish.

I stirred in the onion, garlic, tuna, butter, spice mixture and stirred everything together well.

I mixed in the chopped up cheese bits, and then topped the dish with the panko bread crumbs and baked the dish in the oven at 425 for 7 minutes. I went until the bread crumbs were toasted on top. One thing to mention is that I intentionally undercooked the pasta as I knew it would cook more in the oven.

This was the finished dish, my semi-homemade baked tuna mac. It was amazingly delicious and quite possibly the best mac and cheese I have ever made. You could add just about anything you want to the mac and cheese. I really did have all of the things sitting around and threw them in, you could add bacon, you could add any meat you wanted. You could add corn, or peas or any vegetable you wanted to this as well. You can also add whatever spices you want to try in this dish, I just don't like to make things exactly as stated on the box.

Something I never really discussed previously how I use bacon in my dishes. I always keep the bacon in the fridge until I am able to use it. If you are slicing the bacon, it cuts much more easily when it is cold or even frozen than when it is allowed to reach room temperature.

 I slide the bacon because it cooks much faster than cooking it in strips, and I also can get the whole package in the pan rather than doing a few strips at a time.

This is just the normal bacon cooking shot that I have in here quite regularly, I love the smell of bacon, and I love draining it as it cooks. I feel like I can get more grease out of the bacon this way rather than through strips.

The bacon is getting used in this dish, well a portion of it is anyway. I removed it from the pan and drained off all but a few tablespoons of the grease.

I added the onions and garlic to the pan and let them sizzle for a little while, the liquid released from the onions is great at loosening up. The little bits of bacon are definitely good for the flavor of the dish.

You can tell the onions and garlic have picked up some stuff from the bottom of the pan. This is about half way through the cooking.

This is when the onions were about done, I added some thyme, red pepper flake, and some flour and stirred it all together, then I added some chicken stock to get up any last bits from the pan before transferring to the crock pot.

This is everything from the pan plus about half of the cooked bacon, some soy sauce, the rest of the chicken stock, and some bay leaves.

I seasoned the pork chops with salt and pepper and then pushed them into the other ingredients, from there I covered and cooked on high for 5 hours.

This is the finished dish, I removed the pork chops and let them cool, and then allowed the sauce to cool as well, removed some of the fat from the surface of the pan, and then stirred in some apple cider vinegar to balance out the sauce.

Since I have covered oven roasted broccoli previously I won't worry about that too much in this edition. I did get a small food processor, and I used it to make some smashed cauliflower, which is much lighter and fluffier when run through the food processor. I look forward to try to do all sorts of different things with it in the future.