Saturday, March 16, 2013

Month 2, day 7: Hash, Gratin, and Pizza

Today I made:

The corned beef hash was quite a breakfast! It was so greasy and salty! G liked it. "It smelled and tasted delicious, fond everywhere," he says. We had it with fried eggs, just to get a little more cholesterol on our plates.
The recipe has you saute onions with the leftover vegetables and corned beef. Meanwhile, you mash some more of the vegetables with some leftover cooking liquid. When you pour this over the top, it's supposed to bind it together into a pancake somehow. I'm not sure how liquid is supposed to be a binding agent, but this did not flip as one cohesive unit as the recipe made me think it should. Not that this is a problem-- I've never had hash at a recipe that was pancake-like anyway-- but it was a little odd that no one who reviewed on the recipe seemed to have this same problem. G pointed out that many recipes don't turn out quite like the recipe claims, citing yesterday's almond tuiles as an example. This made me look back at the recipe to double-check-- it was heaping tablespoons, right? Um, no-- it was teaspoons. Whoops. I wonder if that would have fixed the cracking problem. This explains why it didn't make 4 dozen, anyway.

The gratin was pretty good too-- at least the bacon was. It might have been a bit more hassle than it's worth though, and it probably considerably diminishes the goodness of eating vegetables. G doesn't like brussel sprouts, but didn't mind them in this. The creamy sauce was good, but maybe this would've been better if it were turned into a macaroni and cheese type dish with broccoli and a creamy, cheesy white sauce. And then you're counting it as a main dish, so there's no pretense of it being a healthy vegetable. It might seem strange that this recipe is from Cooking Light, but there actually is no butter in it! Just some grease from 4 slices of bacon, and some half-and-half and 1% milk (except I just used entirely half-and-half). So maybe if prepared in the directed way it's not so bad. 148 calories and 5.2 g fat, it claims. It feels heavy though. We ate this while the pizza baked, and I felt really full just from a serving of this.

We liked this pizza-- G says "would do again." The chicken apple sausage we used was from Trader Joe's and was very sweet! We used their basil pizza dough, which G chose but was skeptical of later, because he thought it might be whole-wheat. We used a mix of 1000-day gouda and pre-shredded Italian blend. The cheese is light and overpowered by the sausage and onion/fennel mix, so there's no point in using 1000-day gouda, which G has been enjoying as a snack. I like fennel, and the package had two bulbs, so I'll have to find a way to use the other one soon. The toppings were a little dense. I think it's nicer when you still get to taste the crust.

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