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 #14

Well I haven't written about cooking the past few weeks, not because I didn't do any cooking, but because I was underwhelmed by what I made. Sometimes I get ideas of things to cook and they just don't work out too well, the last 2 weeks I have been working with lentils a lot and neither dish worked that well for me, but I have kept on pushing and added some meat back into the situation. I also just don't like putting things out there that I didn't enjoy, although it would be interesting to see where I messed up. I know in one of the recipes I used bagged precut broccoli that had turned or something, it was a little sour. I never buy precut veggies, but for some reason I did for that recipe and it came back to bite me.

The first thing to mention is that I finally bought my own copy of The Joy of Cooking, I didn't have a specific need for another cookbook, but I just thought it was the time

The usual for me of starting the day with making some bacon, the bacon got used as well as some of the grease in my other items which is my MO after all.

Just the finished bacon cooling, I can almost taste it from the picture. I had to let it cool down before I could eat it.

Onions, leeks and garlic cooking in some bacon grease. Cooking veggies in bacon grease always smells so good!

After the veggies had been cooking for a little bit and got a little bit of color to them.

I added some sliced mushrooms to the mixture and cooked it all together, I also added a little red pepper flake and some soy sauce for seasoning.

After everything had a chance to cook together for long enough this is what it looks like.

Some of the vegetables heated with a little bit of butter, with some of the cooked bacon on top and some scrambled eggs on it.

This is the final product of my scramble, it was really good and the flavor really got distributed through the eggs and the mixture.

Today's recipe starts with some ground beef which I cooked through in the pan and drained as much of the grease as I could, but my issue with cooking beef into things is that they always seem too greasy, as much as I work to drain the beef it still leaves a large amount of fat in stuff.

Cooked beef in the crock pot with some crushed tomatoes, bay leaves and some soy sauce.

Onions, garlic, leeks, and celery cooking down in some bacon grease to start the base of my soup to o along with the beef and tomatoes already in the pot.

Paprika, oregano, red pepper flake, and some Italian seasoning were the spices of choice for this recipe.

I added some carrots to the vegetables that were softening some. I was giving them a good sweat to get a lot of the flavor going.

I added the seasoning to the veggies and cooked them a big more to get the flavors going.

Stirred everything together in the crock pot, and added some stock to the pot to loosen everything up. I cooked it all together on high for about 4 hours. I added a few teaspoons of instant tapioca to help everything tighten up in the crock pot.

The finished soup I added a few drained cans of corn and cup of thawed peas. The soup worked out really well, I have never made a veggie beef soup, and I had actually come up with this one on my own, I liked the flavors I was able to create, I should really start using leeks more in my cooking.

Peter's Cooking Diary #12

So this week was a pretty simple meal to prepare, and it was using leftover turkey from Thanksgiving dinner that I had with my family. I want to make something that was low carb as I am trying to get back on that wagon and trying to lose move weight. This was made more or less freestyle, I didn't have a recipe that I used for this, just combined many different ideas.

The first step to most of my cooking is starting cooking most of my vegetables, and in this case I actually used a lot of veggies. I used the whole pack of celery in this, trying to make it more hearty so it would be filling enough when eating it for lunch.

I didn't take a picture of lightly cooking the carrots before adding them to the crock pot, but I used the whole pound of carrots that I bought, I could have used more if I had bought more, but like I said it was just free style. This is the onions and garlic that I use as a base for just about every recipe.

This is the crock pot filled with onion, garlic, celery, carrots, stock, and some tomatoes that I got from my mom. I also added some herbs like oregano, thyme, and parsley as well as some red pepper flake. I also added a little bit of soy sauce, because I like the depth of flavor it adds to a soup. I think for the herbs you could actually just use some poultry seasoning if you happen to have that on hand as well.

My mom also gave me some green beans that she grew in her garden. I cut them up into about 4 pieces and added them to the mix.

I chopped up the turkey and added it to the pot, not sure how much I had, maybe a pound of white meat? I think you could just as easily use whatever leftover meat you have, or you can even make it without meat if you want to.

The second to last ingredient that I wanted to add was some wheat berries, which I think I have mentioned previously on here, but at least from what I have read they are the whole grain of wheat with the husk removed. They take about an hour to cook, and they need to be rinsed well. So I took some and boiled them almost the entire way to being done, but left them slightly undercooked and added them to the soup. They add a little bit of crunch and pop to the soup that was missing from the texture.

This is after I had added the cooked wheat berries to the pot.

The last thing that was added was some small butter beans because I wanted to add some sort of legume to the soup. I liked what they added to the dish as a whole. I have been eating the soup for lunch all week and have enjoyed it very much.

This is the final image I have, its kind of a bonus. My friend and I had another little food party. I guess the theme for this was sort of breakfast we had bagels, jam, some local Wisconsin honey, pears, apples, clementines, dried fruit that my mom gave me, crackers, goat cheese, some sweet oat crackers and some almonds. We actually didn't even crack into the loaf of bread at all.