What I Am Thankful For

I just wanted to take some time to write about all of the things that I am thankful for, and also share the food I have made for Thanksgiving. This is not an all inclusive list, but I just wanted to share some things.

I am thankful for all of my friends and family.
I am thankful that I am living a financially stable life, I never knew how wonderful being financially stable was until I actually was stable.
I am thankful for my job, which I look forward to every day.
I am thankful for my dependable car, after dealing with lots of crap from my previous car, it is nice to have a car that I don't need to worry about.
I am thankful for my love of cooking, which I believe I inherited from my family, I enjoy cooking and trying to make new things frequently.
I am thankful that the value of learning was instilled in me as a kid, we would go to museums and zoos to learn about all sorts of things, and this has stayed with me to this day, I still enjoy learning new things whenever I can.
I am thankful for my health.
And last but not least I am thankful for my wonderful cat Astrid who I adopted a few months ago, she has been a wonderful addition to my life. For those who haven't seen here, this is what she was doing while I was cooking today.

She slept like that til I gave her some food, she then immediately got up and ate.

This is my Thanksgiving dinner, roast turkey breast, chorizo brown rice dressing, brussels sprouts with bacon, apple, onion, cream, and parmesan cheese, and some cilantro lime corn with garlic butter.

I brined the turkey breast overnight, which made it nice and juicy. All of the different elements worked so well together, I was surprised by how much I loved the brussels sprouts dish, but I wanted to try some new things and it all worked well.

For dessert I made some apple crisp which I had some vanilla frozen yogurt with. It was a good end to a great meal.

I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

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.

Peter's Cooking Diary #18

It has been a little while since my last entry, I have been a bit busy and haven't done as much cooking as I normally do or as much as I would like to do. Today I finally had the time to cook, and even though I have a shortened week at work I wanted to make something, but before we get into that, I had a product that I really like that I wanted to show off a little.

This is real hand made, locally produced butter that is hand rolled into a tube, it comes in a 2 pound roll that lasts me for a long, long time.

This is what the 2 lb roll looks like, and it comes wrapped in a few layers in wax paper.

So I used my  butter on some nice artisan bread with rosemary, cheese, and bacon in it. Because I don't have a toaster I used a pan on the stove top to brown the bead up.

Toasting the bread in a pan on one side, The other side was also buttered.

Toasty golden brown on the first side time for a flip to brown on the other side.

The next step was to slice the brie, which was going to go on top of the toasted bread.

The bread in the pan topped with some nice slices of brie, the pan was then put under the broiler to toast up and melt the brie.

Under the broiler the bread got nice and toasty, and the brie melted so nicely. I let it rest so as to not burn my mouth but it was very tempting. I sliced up a nice crisp and juicy apple to accompany this and it was quite delicious together.

Once again I started my main cooking for the day, as usual it had to start with bacon, I cooked off a whole pound, this amount got drained and then put in the fridge to get added to some eggs during the week.

This amount got added to the crock pot to start the recipe that I was making. I have made something similar to this with pork chops, but this week I made a pork loin roast because that was on sale.

The next step was to cook down some onions in some bacon grease. I added a little salt and started cooking the onions down.

After the onions had had some time to cook and picked up some bacon bits from the bottom of the pan, onions are a great way to deglaze the pan.

To the pan I added the garlic to the pan, and continued cooking the onions down. I cooked the onions and garlic down for a few minutes.

I added flour to the pan to thicken everything up, and stirred it in with the mixture of onions and garlic, and let it good for a few more minutes to get the flour taste out.

After the flour had been cooked in with the onions for a minutes. I then added chicken stock and scraped up all of the bits that remained in the pan.

Once the stock had helped me scraping up the bit in the pan, I added everything to the crock pot with the bacon, and stirred to combine.

I added some thyme, oregano, and red pepper flake for additional seasoning to the pot.

I added some soy sauce and bay leaves as the final ingredients before the roast and stirred everything together once more.

I always season my meat before cooking it. Salt and pepper on both sides of the roast before putting it into the crock pot.

Once the roast had been seasoned I nestled it into the mixture in the crock pot. The mixture already smelled amazing in the crock pot!

The roast fell apart as I was taking it out of the crock pot showing me that it was definitely done cooking.

I went to remove the fat from the roast, but honestly most of it had melted into the sauce that remained in the pan.

This was the delicious mixture that remained in the crock pot after removing the roast. The recipe states to let it cool and use it as is, but I had other ideas.

I wanted to make a nice onion and mushroom gravy to go on top of the roast. So I heated up the sauce and added some mushrooms and just let it simmer.

The sauce reduced and thickened up nicely, I cooked it until the mushrooms were cooked to my liking and then poured the sauce into a container to cool.

To go with the roast and sauce I wanted to make some mashed potatoes, and to me the Tukon Gold variety is the best to use for mashed potatoes. I bought a 3 lb bag of smaller potatoes to use for this. I sliced them up, some potatoes were halved some were quartered, I just wanted to get them all to similar size so they would cook at the same speed.

I boiled the potatoes in salted water until they were fork tender. I then drained the potatoes.

I added the potatoes to a bowl and mashed them up with some of the same Amish butter that I showed earlier in the post. I like Yukon Golds because they can be mashed up easily and I actually like the texture that leaving the skins on adds to the mixture.

This was the final dish I made with this amount of cooking. Mashed potatoes topped with some roast pork and some onion and mushroom gravy with a side of steamed buttered broccoli. It was delicious and filling.