Peter's Cooking Diary #26

Well it has been a little while since I have written about my cooking, I honestly haven't been doing that much cooking, or at least not that much of cooking new things. This week I cooked 2 new things, or at least variations of things that I had never done before.

The first recipe that I will be making this week is slow cooker chicken meatloaf. I have made chicken and turkey meatloaf in the oven previously but I have never made either of them in the slow cooker before. I took a recipe for a tex mex meatloaf in the slow cooker with beef and changed it over to chicken. I had forgotten to get the beef I had originally planned to use out of the freezer the night before, so I made a dash to the store where they actually had ground chicken on sale for an amazing price, so I went with that.

One of the things that I love about my favorite slow cooker cookbook does is that it includes different methods for using the slow cooker. In this case the foil collar will help to diffuse the heat a little bit from the heating element and move it all around the insert.

After the collar, you add strips of aluminum foil going perpendicular to each other to help with removing the meatloaf from the crock pot intact and it also helps prevent the meatloaf from burning to the insert, and it even helps with the cleanup afterwards.

This is the selections of produce that I am using for this recipe, I want to start doing more before shots of things. Those are poblano pepper for people that are not familiar with them, they are a little spicy with what I consider to be better flavor than green bell peppers. The recipe called for a red bell pepper but of course I don't stick to a recipe perfectly. The garlic cloves are the last of what I got from my mom about a month ago.

Chopped up onion and peppers in the big container and the garlic in the other.

The recipe called for vegetable oil, but what better fat is there to use for this than bacon grease? I cooked the pepper and onions in a pan for about 10 minutes on medium high heat before adding the garlic.

Stirred the garlic in with everything else, and cooked for about 5 more minutes.

Added the seasoning of salt, chile powder, and dried oregano as well as some tomato paste, stirred all of the ingredients together.

This is what the veggies looked like all together after cooking. I let them all cool and worked on the other elements of the meatloaf.

This bowl contains one soft kaiser roll torn into little bits, one cup of milk, and one can's worth of beans that I rinsed and drained. I mashed them all together in this bowl until the mixture almost looked like blue milk.

The bowl of mashed up milk, beans, and bread, alongside the ground chicken in its own bowl, I let it get a little bit warmer than fridge temp so my hands wouldn't freeze when I mixed it all together.

The chicken bowl to which I added the milk/bean mixture, cheese, corn, eggs, and the veggie mixture.

Mixing the whole thing together, it is a messy job, but I don't mind it at all.

I added the meatloaf to the slow cooker and evened it out. After this picture I added a layer of barbecue sauce to the top of this, I put the lid on and cooked it for about 5 hours on low.

This is what it looks like once the meatloaf was done, then you take the pieces of foil sticking out and pull them all together and you can lift the meatloaf out. I actually let it cool down a bit before removing it from the pot.

The other recipe I made this week, is something that I had never made this way. I have made roasted cauliflower in many different ways, but this one was actually brown butter roasted cauliflower. To start I preheated the oven to 425. I removed the stems and leaves from the heads. I then rubbed them with vegetable oil and stuck them into the oven to bake for 45 minutes.

After the 45 minutes in the oven, the recipe called for butter to be smeared all over both of the heads, I did this as best I could as they were hot. I then popped the cauliflower back into the oven.

During the last stage of cooking I took the cauliflower out and basted it with the browned butter that was in the pan. This made the cauliflower taste amazing overall, my favorite preparation yet!

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.

Food Adventures: Salt #3

Well my friend Shealaina and I made another trip back to SALT which has to be my favorite restaurant by now, everything I have eaten there has been amazing. This time around we went for the weeknight tasting menu, which was a limited selection of a small plate, salad, and a large plate, and all of it was for a very decent price.

I have shown a picture of this on here from the first time we went, but this was my first course, shrimp and grits with a rich spicy tomato sauce. I liked it so much that I had to just get it again. There was some deep fried noodles and parsley on top. It was great once again, I would eat anything they put with the grits, just so amazing.

This was Shealaina's first dish, it was General Tso's pork belly, and it was amazingly good. It was chunks of pork belly with the flavor of General Tso's, also there were some fried rice balls, some roasted broccolini, and a sriracha aioli. The pork belly was amazing along with everything else in the dish. I would also order that again, such a great combination of flavors.

I was feeling a bit daring, so I thought I would try the roasted beet salad, I have honestly not ever really eaten beets, but I thought I would give it a try. It was large pieces of roasted beets under baby arugula that was lightly dressed with vinaigrette topped with some goat cheese. Honestly I liked every part of the salad but the beets, in the future I will just get a normal side salad, but I liked that I got out of my comfort zone and tried something new. I think if the beets were broken down a bit more they would have been easier to eat with the other ingredients, but it was super hard to cut them in the dish they were served in.

  This was my large plate that I chose, it was call steak kim-chimichurri, and it really did combine the flavors of both kim chi and chimichurri. It was sliced seasoned flank steak, with a papaya slaw(which took the place of kim chi), they were on top of some chorizo croquets, with chimichurri sauce and some guacamole. That is a lot of different elements that really worked well together. I tried to get bites with everything in them and they were all delicious alone and when combined together. I would absolutely order this again. My mouth is watering while writing this.

I have to say it was another awesome trip to SALT, and I know that we will be going back again some time.

Peter's Cooking Blog #21

Well its still my birthday as I am writing this, I want to say thank you to all of those who wished me a happy birthday, I didn't do all that much on my actual birthday, other than some cooking and hanging out with a friend, but at this age I don't really need a whole big hoopla. I spent time with my mom, and also got some birthday deals at restaurants earlier in the week.

This is the cake that I made with my mom, homemade whole wheat chocolate cake and also homemade coconut pecan frosting. She did the baking of the cake, and I made the frosting, which I honestly had no idea how to make this specific type of frosting, but its just stirring everything together while making sure you don't cook the egg yolks. I actually really liked the whole wheat chocolate cake, I was raised eating whole wheat, but it added some depth of flavor that I really liked in the chocolate cake.

My friend that I hung out with this evening made me some coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and toasted coconut on top, they are just absolutely delicious and I am lucky to have a friend who would brinf me cupcakes on my birthday.

My cooking today started off wish some green beans, they weren't local or in season at all but I thought they would go really well with the peanut butter chicken that I was making so I created my own recipe to make with them. I cut the stems and any dry ends off of them, and the cut them into smaller pieces.

I put the beans into boiling water for about 3-4 minutes before i flashed them into some ice cold water to stop the cooking. I did this because I was going to cook them in a pan as well.

I let the beans cool off a bit, and then drained all of the water off the beans.

Some oil in the pan heating, and then I added some minced garlic and cooked the garlic for about 5 minutes before adding the beans.

I tossed the beans in the oil and mixed them around with the garlic and let a lot of the extra water cook out of them on medium high heat for about 5 minutes.

I splashed some soy sauce into the pan and covered them and cooked on medium high for about 5 more minutes.

This is the final result, it was kind of a Chinese food inspired recipe, the green beans are not cooked all the way though, but i like them with a little texture left in them.

I cubed up a few pounds of chicken breasts, and stirred them into some oil, soy sauce, and garlic chili sauce. I let them marinate together for about an hour.

This was the peanut butter sauce that I made for the chicken, it was water, soy sauce, and some chunky peanut butter. The recipe called for creamy, but I wanted chunky.

I whisked the ingredients together until they were smooth, or until they were as smooth as something containing chunky peanut butter could be.

I cooked some more garlic in the pan for about 5 minutes. I then added the chicken to the pan and cooked the chicken, stirring every few minutes.

I continued cooking the chicken until it had been cooked all of the way through, it already smelled really good before I added the sauce.

I covered the chicken in the peanut butter sauce, and simmered on medium high for about 10 minutes, I also added some red pepper flake to the pan as well which you can see in this picture.

This is how I served the food I made, I actually used the steamed broccoli to mop up the peanut butter sauce that was left on the plate and it all worked really well together.