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.

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.