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.

Peter's Cooking Diary #24

Well I took a week off from writing on here because I made stuff that wasn't really anything new for me. This week I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I made something that I have never made before, and I actually didn't have a recipe, I just tried something out from my own brain and it really worked. My inspiration this week was Chipotle, I wanted to try to make the ingredients that I get in a burrito bowl. We will start from the bottom up.

This was the first thing that I made, 1 lb of pinto beans, 2 cups of chicken stock for flavor, and 3 cups of water. I added some bay leaves, oregano, cumin, coriander, and some mexican chili powder. The beans  cooked for 5 hours in the crock pot.

This was the finished pot of beans, I drained most of the liquid from them and put them in my container and placed them in the fridge.

The next item I was making was some slow cooked carnitas using this smallish pork roast.

I pretty much used the same spices for the pork as I did for the beans, plus I added some salt to this spice mix as well. I stirred everything to combine in the bowl.

I coated all of the sides of the roast liberally with the spice mixture.

I added the roast to the crock pot dry, to keep the spices from all getting washed off right away.

I poured about 2 cups of chicken stock to the side of the roast as a cooking liquid and also added a few more bay leaves to the pot for more seasoning. The roast cooked for 10 hours on low, or just overnight while I slept.

This is what the roast looked like when it was done cooking. I removed it from the pot and let if cook for about an hour. I let the juices stay in the pan and cool off as well. I removed any chunks of fat that were floating in the juices.

I hand pulled the pork into bite size pieces, and removed any pieces of fat that I found. I also poured the remaining juices over the pork to keep it nice and juicy.

So the final thing I made was some corn salsa, I have always wanted to make some corn salsa, and figured it would go well with the things I was making. So this is 5 ears of corn with husks and silk removed, on a foil lined baking sheet that is coated in cooking spray. I placed them under the broiler for about 10 minutes and rotated them and put them back in for another 10.

This is the final roasted corn, I guess my oven is a little bit uneven as some of the corn got way more roasted than the other ears.

I took a knife and removed all of the kernels from the cob, I also ran the back of the knife down the cob to get as much of the corn out cob as I could.

The next step was to roast the pepper that I was cooking with, I used the broiler to roast the peppers using a method I saw online, removing the stems and seeds from the peppers and flattening them out. If I had gas burners I would have used them to roast the peppers, but I had to use what I have.

I roasted the peppers for about 10 minutes, in retrospect I would have probably cooked them for a few more minutes and gotten them really charred.

While the peppers were still hot, I tossed them in a bowl and popped the lid on to steam from their own heat, this would help to loosen the charred skin from the peppers.

I let the peppers steam for a while in the bowl before removing the skins from all of them. When I said I would have cooked them a bit longer, it was because some of the skins were really hard to get off, a little more cooking would have made that a lot easier.

This is the pile of roasted peppers.

I took them one by one and chopped them very finely, cutting them in strips vertically and then chopping finely across. This might have actually been some of my best knife work and it was at like 11pm at night as well. I wish I would have taken better pictures to illustrate what I did.

This is the corn along with all of the chopped peppers. I also forgot to mention, I used 2 red bell peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers and 2 anaheim peppers. I really wanted to get some poblanos, but the only poblanos that were left on the shelf were super wrinkly and did not feel or look fresh at all.

To finish the salsa, I added some cilantro and some minced red onion, as well as the juice of one line and a little bit of salt for seasoning. This salsa could not have turned out better. I really like it and will definitely be trying to do things similar to this in the future, especially when local sweet corn is available.

I eat the bowls with beans, pork, and the corn salsa, as well as some guacamole and the bowls I have made have been very delicious.