Peter's Cooking Diary #23

So I want to start off this weeks blog by mentioning how much awesome produce I have received from the mom. I get a wide variety of things from her during the growing months, and also something things during the long winter as well. She has provided me with a lot of home grown and home made tomato sauce, with all sorts of different greens from  mixed salad greens to dried greens like the bok choy I used in this week's cooking. She uses her food dehydrator to make dried apples, banana chips, and even fruit leather. There are numerous of things like garlic that I have used in many different dishes in my cooking. This blog is a tribute to the things my mom gives me that contribute to my cooking.

We are starting off with most of the ingredients being put into my sausage and bean stew. The bags of dried greens that I received from my mom, I had 3 different types of beans in my cabinet that I wanted to use up, some chicken stock, an onion and some garlic. I was going to put celery in the dish, but I just left it in the fridge when I was preparing everything. I also get my absent mindedness from my mom. There was also a yogurt container filled with my mom's tomato sauce going into this.

I am a bit of a bargain hunter at the grocery store, I love the extra discounted meats at Festival foods. Its the meats that are approaching the date they can no longer be sold, and they sell them at a great discount. I do make sure to use it within a day of buying it, or I will stick it right into the freezer. I came across these mild sausages in the that section and though they could be fun to cook with.

The issue with them being in casings and going into the soup is that its just much easier to brown them off without the casings on so I just sliced the casing and pretty easily removed the vast majority of the meat from the casing.

I started the tomatoes in the crock pot, putting it on low, letting it come up to temperature, before adding more.

I added the dried bok choy to the pot with the tomatoes, and some chicken stock letting them start to reconstitute in the pot. I also added a little salt for the tomatoes.

I put the sausages in the pan with a little bit of vegetable oil over medium high heat. I used a spatula to chop the sausage up into smaller bit to cook faster, and also I would want them in smaller bits in the stew.

This was when the sausage had finished cooking, I used a slotted spoon to get the sausage out of the pan and into the crock put, I didn't dump all of the grease out so I could use it.

Wish the sausage grease left in the pan I added the onion and garlic to the pan and spent a lot of time scraping up and of the sausage bits left in the pant.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake to the pan as well as some flour to help thicken the soup.

After the flour had been cooked into the onion, garlic, and spice mixture, I then added the remaining chicken stock to the pan, and stirred it all together, once again making sure I got everything off the bottom of the pan.

This is the soup as I was about to put the lid on, and let it simmer for about 4 hours.

After the soup had been cooking for about 4 hours, I shut the heat off and let it cool down. I then removed some of the fat that settled towards the top as well as the bay leaves. I then added the 3 kinds of beans to the pot. I didn't cook the beans with everything else  I just stirred them in and let it all sit overnight before having some for lunch today.

This is the finished dish. I really like the different colors of beans in the dish, it really looks cool to me like this. This same dish could easily be made with ground pork, ground turkey, ground chicken, or many other things. It was quite good for lunch, and quite filling.

This is the start for my version of puttanesca sauce that I first saw made by Rachel Ray, but of course I had to do my own take on it. Starts with some olive oil, and some onion and garlic as well as a little salt to help them sweat.

I added some tomato paste to the pan and stirred it in. I would have also added some anchovy paste to the pan, but for whatever reason I just forgot that in the cabinet, it is actually one of the traditional ingredients in this sauce.

I added another container of my mom's tomato sauce, and stirred it all together and let it cook for just a few minutes.

I added a few handfuls of kalamata olives as well as the red wine vinegar that they are sitting in. I gently squeezed the olives when adding them to the sauce pan to get a little bit more of the liquid out. It will provide some nice acidity to the dish.

I chopped up some fresh basil and added it along with some dried oregano, and some red pepper flake. I stilled all of the ingredients together again, and gave it a few more minutes to cook together.

I flaked out a few cans of white tuna to make sure it was broken up into small pieces.

I added the tuna and stirred it all together. I brought the sauce to a simmer, and let it simmer on low heat with the lid on for about 30 minutes.

This is the finished sauce. I like it over some kind of curly noodle, or a tube, it is ok with any kind of strand, but the chunks work better for me with something else.

Peter's Cooking Diary: Christmas Edition

Well this is definitely a bit of a belated post, I just haven't felt like sitting down and writing about my Christmas until today. Because of Christmas falling on a Wednesday, I didn't really feel like traveling too far for it. I had also seen all of my family members quite recently, so I thought I would have a more laid back Christmas with my friend Shealaina, because we both enjoy cooking. We were brainstorming ideas of what to make for the meal, and ended up with an interesting combination, that thankfully was not too heavy!

I started off with some sparkling cider, and my friend had some wine. I don't drink so sparkling juice of some kind is my celebratory drink of choice.

The snacking spread of veggies, cheeses, crackers, and smoked salmon dip. It was a good set of foods to snack on before and while we were preparing the actual food.

Sauteing some onions and garlic for the start of the pasta sauce, then added a little bit of red wine to deglaze the pan. To the pan I added a can of crushed tomatoes, Italian seasoning, and some fresh basil and let it simmer on low for about an house to let the flavors combine. After the simmering I added some Romano cheese to the sauce and it was ready.

I really wish I would have taken more pictures of the actual process, but this is actually homemade pasta under the sauce. My friend has a pasta maker so she mixed up some pasta and ran it through, I helped just a little bit. The pasta and sauce were great together, and like I said before it wasn't too filling of a meal, which left enough room for dessert.

My friend is the best, she also has her own brule torch, so for dessert we had some homemade creme brule which was my first time ever having it.

My creme brule, and it was amazing! I hope everyone had a great Christmas, I definitely enjoyed mine and enjoyed that it was nice and relaxed as well.

Peter's Cooking Diary #8

Well I know I had promised that I would be posting again soon, but didn't. I didn't really make anything at all worth noting on here, just random small things. I have been eating a lot of cottage cheese and pineapple, and I did go through a bit of a cold that left me without much of an appetite. Reflecting back on the things I made in this edition have a lot to do with substitutes. If you are not sure if you can substitute something in a recipe, I always search online, if not what you wanted, you can get ideas on other things you can substitute.

This week is the first time I have really baked anything at all, I came across the recipe for this coconut pie one day and thought I should give it a try, it is really simple to make. I ended up substituting brown sugar for the white sugar, and whole wheat flour and baking powder for the self rising flour. I don't know what the regular recipe tastes like, but my version was great with a little whipped cream on top! Recipe can be found here: http://shine.yahoo.com/shine-food/impossibly-easy-coconut-pie-143800186.html

The other main thing that I made this week was my version of meat sauce along with pasta, and my substitute in this dish was using ground turkey instead of beef or pork sausage. I like to use turkey in my meat sauce because it does not weigh down the dish with fat like beef would. I think the turkey does remain filling, and for me at least doesn't leave me wishing it was beef instead.

This is the raw turkey going into the pan, starting to cook. Because turkey is so lean, I added some oil to the pan before the turkey to help with the cooking.

Once the turkey was cooked, I removed it from the pan, and added my onion and garlic to the pan, which is pretty much the base for most of my recipes. I cooked them until the onion was clear and soft.

Once the onions had cooked to my liking, I added the turkey back to the pan to cook them all together for a few minutes

One of my favorite ingredients to add is fresh basil, I also added some dry oregano, and red pepper flake. I use 2 jars of prepared sauce, to 2.5 lbs of turkey. I don't really have a preferred brand for the sauce, but I will get tomato and basil, or tomato and garlic flavors. I just say avoid Ragu as I think it is quite tasteless.

Garlic Break, boiling pasta, and the nearly finished sauce. I usually simmer the sauce with whatever I am adding to it for about an hour before serving. This will allow the flavors to marry a bit, and it will also allow some of the water to cook out of the sauce. I prefer my sauce on the less runny side, so cooking it down a bit is what I do.

This is the final shot of the pasta sauce before serving.

Peter's Cooking Diary #1

Well this is an idea that I had pop into my head, write a little bit about my cooking, and other things related to cooking, with some pictures worked in as well, as always I would love feedback on this. Its just me looking for something to write about, and this is something I enjoy quite a bit. Not sure if this will be a weekly thing, or maybe a little bit less often, when I have something interesting to write, I guess as it is right now, it is a work in progress.

The first thing I wanted to mention is how much I like the products available at Aldi, you can't always get everything on the grocery list there, but I really like what they do have, and the prices are usually much cheaper that other grocery stores, just make sure you bring a quarter for the cart!

They really have great products for parties, summer sausage, some great quality cheeses which are very cheap (I got a $2.99 gouda this last weekend and it is great), cheap dips and hummus as well. Most canned goods that they have most canned goods regularly as well as staples like milk and eggs. There are also cheap frozen foods, but I don't but too much from that area. They also have a variety of more upscale products, an example of that from this week was the whole wheat gnocchi that I got this week for $1.50 for a similar product that would cost about $4 at a different grocery store.

I cooked the gnocchi and it was really quite good, just a little bit of whole wheat flavor which I don't mind at all, they cooked up really quickly as the instructions indicated, they would be good just in some butter with some Parmesan, but I made some sauce that I will mention below to go on them. I just think Aldi is a good place to find some new ingredients to try to cook with, I am all about experimenting with making food.

Today was a big day of cooking for me, as Sundays usually are.

The first thing I started this morning was a modified version of an Italian pot roast recipe from my favorite cooking book Slow Cooker Revolution

I also took an element learned from my favorite cooking show, Good Eats with Alton Brown, and I browned the roast on both sides, which the recipe in the book does not say to. I tried a little bit of the roast this evening, and it sure was delicious, if there is one thing I know how to do, its cook for my tastes. I liked the recipe because it does not have potatoes, while I enjoy eating potatoes, I am trying to go back to my low carb roots and lose some more weight.

The next thing I made was my version of Puttanesca sauce, which I think I may have learned from my days of watching Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals, which is full of good ideas for quick cooking. The sauce consists of crushed tomatoes(I am lucky enough to have a mother who grows her own, and turns extras into sauce. i am sure she will read this, thanks mom!), onion, garlic, dried oregano, dried parsley(also from my mother), red pepper flake, some tomato paste for a little sweetness, kalamata olives that I hand crush into the sauce the vinegar adds a little bit of acidity to the dish, and the final ingredient is canned tuna. The sauce if made in an authentic way would likely have capers and anchovies in it as well. I don't really care for capers, and I completely forgot to add a little anchovy paste that I bought. I like the sauce pretty chunky, with a lot of the liquid evaporated out. Gnocchi might not be the best pasta for the sauce, but I really enjoyed it a lot.

The final thing I cooked today was some roasted cauliflower and carrots. I did the 2 veggies on separate pans, at separate times, the carrots were supposed to cook at a lower temperature, I believe it is because they have a higher sugar content and can burn a little easier. Roasting them is very simple, the cauliflower was with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic. The carrots were with olive oil, salt, pepper, and parsley. I thought of this while I was sprinkling the parsley on, its kind of weird to season carrots with their close relative parsley, strange thought to have. The veggies are going with the pot roast, with a little bit of the pot roast juice with them.

I tasted a little bit of everything for dinner tonight, and it was all good! Well this is the end of the first installment of my cooking diary, please provide some feedback if you have any, ideas for things to talk about on here are always welcome as well.