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 #20

well it was another week, and I made a few new recipes this week, one of them was very versatile, and they were all things that I grew up eating, so they are a bit of family recipes, although just my take on them more than anything.

Starting the recipe with some finely chopped green onions, I used most of the green and just about all of it but the white, which can be a bit too oniony for what I was using it for.

I am making some tzatziki, and when it comes to cucumbers that I was using I will almost always choose English cucumbers, or seedless cucumbers. They are a bit more expensive than normal cucumbers but I always feel the need to remove the seeds from them.

I chopped the cucumbers finely, and then squeezed some of the liquid out of them. I didn't want to have too much of the liquid in the mix to make everything too loose.

I actually saved the cucumber water/juice or whatever it is called. I drank it with some water and it was very refreshing.

I just used plain unsweetened yogurt. I bet some people would buy Greek yogurt for added thickness, or nonfat to lower the calories a little, but I have no problem with the regular fat plain yogurt.

So this is 2 chopped and squeezed cucumbers, chopped green onions, 2 cloves of garlic chopped as finely as I could, one 32 oz container of plan yogurt, and some salt and pepper.

I mixed all of the ingredients together, and placed it in the fridge overnight, it takes some time for all of the flavors to seep into the yogurt.

To go along with the tzatziki I bought some gyro meat, which is really easy to get in grocery stores these days.

I heated up the gyro meat in some butter, and let some of the liquid and fat in it cook out so it got a little bit more texture to it.

I chopped up some olives and added to the pan as well as a few eggs and scrambled it all together, and cooked it through.

The finished product was a gyro omelet that was amazingly delicious when topped with the tzatziki. My mouth just started watering seeing the picture and thinking about how delicious it was.

I also used my tzatziki as a salad dressing on a salad with some tuna and some olives in it and it was a great and also light dressing that was quite refreshing as well.

So the next recipe starts with some chicken breast that I marinated in some chili garlic sauce, soy sauce, and stir fry sauce that I bought from the store, mixed well and then I let it sit for just a few hours.

I added the chicken to a pan on medium high heat with a little oil and allowed it to cook all the way though, stirring occasionally. When I dumped the chicken in, I made sure to get all of the drops out of the container with it.

Once the chicken was done I removed it from the pan and set it aside and then added in my aromatics to the pan.

The aromatics I used were garlic, ginger and 3 shallots, I used shallots because the green onions I probably would have used did not look very good at the store, but I still wanted some subtle onion flavor.

After chopping all of them and adding them to a bowl together.

I added the aromatics to the pan to cook, and also scrape up and bits that were left in the pan by the chicken.

I cooked the aromatics down until everything was cooked through.

The main veggies I used in my stir fry were broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. I cut all of them to reasonably small size pieces that were about even.

The other veggie I added was some fresh green beans which I removed the ends from.

I added the large veggies to the pan before adding my sauce ingredients.

To create my sauce I added some chili garlic sauce.

One can of pineapple chunks in juice.

and a bottle of stir fry sauce, as well as some water used to rinse all of the sauce out of the bottle.

Once everything was added to the pan, it was a bit hard to stir together, but slowly I was able to combine everything and cooked the stir fry with its lid on over medium heat for about 20 minutes.

Once the stir fry was done this is what it looked like. I actually removed all of the solids from the pan and cooked the juices/sauce down a little bit. I was not serving this with rice so the sauce being thicker would be even better for just straight up eating.

Well I will say that the way I made the stir fry was delicious, it will be a bit too spicy for some, but the pineapple and the sauce all mixed together as a sweet and sour as well as salty and spicy combination that I really liked.