Brunch Burger

Yesterday I made:
Brunch Burgers, Every Day with Rachael Ray March 2014

Rachael Ray always has a burger of the month, but I almost never make them. This one looked complicated but decadent, so we decided to go for it. It's a pork (and supposed to be 1/2 beef too, but ours went bad) patty seasoned with fennel, garlic, onion, and sage, topped with cheese, a fried egg, and some maple-sugar bacon. All on an English muffin bun. It was so tall it was hard to eat!
The bacon was really good-- it was smothered in brown sugar and maple syrup before baking. The pork patty was fine, but nothing too special. G observed that if you just bought normal sausage patties and used the maple-flavored bacon, you could do this really easily. So easily in fact, you could do it any time. Ha! Until you ODed on cholesterol and saturated fat. Anyway, this was really good, and it was so fun to have leftovers this morning to just heat up and assemble.

Speaking of breakfast sandwiches, I think this is a really cool contraption:

Make sure to watch the video on Amazon! 

Obviously, it's one of those things you would probably just use twice and then never look at again because it was too hard to clean or whatever, but isn't it such a good idea? I love it, along with those toasters with built in skillets and coffee makers. 

2 dozen eggs and several pounds of meat

This week I made:

• Seared Salmon with Jalapeño Ponzu, Cooking Light May 2010
• Taiwanese Sesame Cucumbers, Food & Wine Magazine November 2010
• Spicy Tomato-Poached Eggs, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Fried Chickpea & Fresh Vegetable Salad, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Beef & Broccoli Ramen, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Salted Caramel Brownies, Cooking Light September 2011
• Pan-Roasted Chicken with Cauliflower, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013
• Kuku Sabzi (Leek and Herb Frittata), Saveur March 2012
• Rachael's BBQ Pulled Pork Tacos, Every Day with Rachael Ray April 2014
• Sautéed Corn, Greens, Bacon, and Scallions, New York Times July 18 2012
• And a breakfast that gets its own post

We had this Asiany salmon with cucumbers and udon. Everything was pretty easy and quick. The cucumbers are pickled, but they're not called pickles so G liked it ;) The salmon came out really nice and crispy (cooked on our grill pan).

Rachael Ray had a little feature on the "new" Mediterranean diet. Not sure what's new about it-- I thought that being old and traditional was part of the point-- but okay. We made two recipes from it. 

We've made shakshuka before (this is what this is, despite Rachael Ray's name). It's hard to remember which is better. But I think I remember something being a bit off about the previous recipe, whereas this one was just fine. It has a lot of jalapeños in it, and also this gremolata made of jalapeños (with cilantro, parsley, garlic, and lemon), but since they were all seeded, it wasn't too spicy after all. Just enough to kind of make me blush. The gremolata would probably be an interesting by itself on crostini or something.

We had this chickpea salad alongside the shakshuka. It was good, although kind of just tastes as you would expect, like a Greek salad or something. The chickpeas are just canned chickpeas rolled in some spices (allspice, cardamom, cumin) and then heated briefly in a pan. We made this too thinking that either dish might be too light on its own, but actually the shakshuka was filling enough on its own and we didn't really need this :-P

 Rachael Ray always has something you can make with your kids. This was it this month. Um, it's exactly what it looks like -- Top Ramen noodles with some vegetables and steak on top. For some reason, you throw away the spice packets and make your own broth, that ends up tasting pretty much the same. What was the point? We had kind of wanted to get real ramen noodles, but were too lazy to go to the Korean store, so oh well. I haven't had Top Ramen in a long time, but this wasn't as comfort-foody as something like the-first-Top-Ramen-in-a-long-time should have been. I guess I'm not really into steak, and the bell pepper seemed out of place. I do remember my dad making ramen with broccoli in it when I was a kid, and so I've always been pretty partial to soups with broccoli. But this recipe seemed kind of stupidly complicated for what still is just instant ramen.

We also wanted to make some brownies. Here's what the picture in the magazine looked like:

And here's what my brownies looked like:

Nailed it!

Again, being impatient while making layered brownies is not a good move. The brownies were supposed to cool completely, the caramel topping was supposed to cool completely, and then the chocolate was supposed to be drizzled on. But the brownies required a lot more baking time than recommended, so my timing got off, and the topping was ready before the brownies. I kind of worried it might solidify in the pan, so I poured it over the hot brownies. It started boiling when it hit the pyrex pan! Then, the chocolate was drizzled while the caramel was still wet (apparently, it doesn't set up that fast after all), so it all just mooshed together. if you look carefully you can see weird oil spill slick looking patterns in it. Erm, oh well. It tastes pretty good anyway, but G says "not worth it." Mostly I am the one eating them each night, heated up (this makes the toppings melt into the cake part and makes it super fudgey) with some ice cream.

This roasted chicken recipe is nice. For the first time in ever, our grocery store actually stocked 3.5 lb chickens! So I was able to make this as suggested. It's very simple to make. You just brown a quartered chicken, then add some lemon, rosemary, and garlic, and roast 25 minutes. Meanwhile, you sauté/steam some cauliflower, and serve the chicken on top. It's nice and comforting. We served it along side baked potatoes from the recipe we loved before, but it didn't turn out quite the same for some reason... too much moisture from incomplete draining? Less time? Different variety? For whatever reason, the potatoes weren't quite so crunchy and nice. They were just like normal baked potatoes or something. This is a really good recipe for fall/winter.

We meant to make this Iranian frittata with some Iranian pilaf, but when it was time to start cooking, we only had like 1/2 cup of rice left :-/ So just the frittata. It had a whole dozen eggs in it along with a huge quantity of dill, parlsey, and cilantro; a grated potato; and a leek. I don't really like dill, but it's kind of cool to have a frittata with so many different flavors to it. It was pretty straightforward to make, except that I got distracted during the 16 minutes of cooking and left the kitchen, so it started smoking a lot and kind of charred on one side :( We just peeled that off, but while eating the leftovers I noticed a distinct smokey flavor. Oh well.

 These BBQ pork tacos are supposed to be served with pickled onions, pickled jalapeños, and queso fresco, but we didn't have any of that, so ... plain meat on corn tortillas it is! We should have just gotten some nice buns and had a normal pulled pork sandwich instead. I really drastically changed this recipe because we kept running out of things or having problems. Like, I thought we had lime juice and were out of lemon, so I bought lemon-- but that was the opposite. We also had run out of paprika just a bit earlier, our chiles all went bad in a really gross way (so the Chile BBQ sauce became BBQ sauce), and I didn't want to use beer. Anyway, the pork is just slow-braised in a broth with some onion, carrot and celery-- deosn't seem too TexMexy. But then it's shredded and mixed with a homemade BBQ sauce. The sauce smelled suuuuper vinegary while cooking, but ended up tasting just fine. I think I prefer Bull's Eye sauce though? Is that bad? And I was kind of just confused about why we used carrot and celery in the cooking broth. 

On the side was this quickly sautéed mix of summer vegetables. I thought we had enough meat for the day so left out the bacon, but otherwise followed it. There weren't too many spices, so it wasn't that special. Maybe that's the bacon difference!

Quick chicken, quick chili, quick St. Patty's, and supposed-to-be-quick-but-I-got-distracted mac & cheese

This week I made:
Quick Vinegar-Braised Chicken with Garlic and Celery Leaves, Food & Wine November 2010
Banana-Flax Bread, Everyday with Rachael Ray March 2014
Black Bean Soup-- Vegetarian Black Bean Chili Variation, Everyday with Rachael Ray April 2014
Soda-Bread Biscuits, Food Network
Slow-Cooker Corned Beef and Cabbage, Food Network Magazine March 2010 (as previously made)
Corned Beef Hash, Food Network Magazine March 2010 (as previously made)
Whole-Grain Pancakes, Everyday with Rachael Ray March 2014
No-Boil Mac & Cheese with Bacon, Everyday with Rachael Ray April 2014


Whaaaaat we're starting to repeat recipes! This weekend I remade the cheesy blintz hotcakes, because they were good and we had extra cottage cheese so why not, and then I also repeated the corned beef and cabbage recipe from last year's St. Patty's day. And later this week the hash! So now I can no longer claim to have repeated no recipes in over a year. I think it was true before, in that everything we made from a recipe was a new recipe. Unless G made like cornbread or something. Oh well.

This chicken dish is supposed to be like chicken cacciatore, but uses vinegar instead of wine because it is fewer calories. Huh? Weird. Anyway, although you could certainly smell the vinegar while cooking, it doesn't have too strong of a vinegar flavor. I guess it mostly burns off. It tasted like something we have made before, but I couldn't figure out what. It seemed like something with mustard in the sauce? Maybe it reminded me of this. Anyway, this was quite fast-- it's just a matter of getting a nice brown on the chicken thighs, then quickly adding garlic, then celery leaves, then broth and vinegar for a few minutes. We had extra pasta left over so I threw that in as the sauce was reducing to get it nice and tasty too. The picture in the magazine shows it looking pretty green, with lots of parsley I guess, so it seemed like it already included vegetables, but really it does not, so this needed a side. Otherwise to eat a filling amount, it was just a lot of meat! I ate a small amount, but then was hungry later.

On Sunday I cleaned out our freezer! I threw away a lot of ham from last Easter along with a few other unidentified objects. We took out a lot of old cookies and put them in the lobby for people to enjoy-- you probably only need one batch in the freezer at a time :-P We also found a bunch of frozen bananas, but G said that we should make banana bread instead of tossing them. Lo-and-behold, there was a recipe in the last issue of Rachael Ray (it was a brunch issue, so I haven't made much else from it yet).

It's secretly "healthy" with flaxseed and whole-wheat flour. G's not big on that kind of thing, and he accidentally saw the recipe and found out! We didn't plan this out well, and didn't finish the batter until midnight. Then it takes an hour to bake (when I looked at the recipe, I had previously noticed the 30 minutes quoted for 6-inch loaf pans)! We took it out and went right to sleep, leaving it out to cool. Unfortunately it was kind of dry in the morning. It's still worth eating, but G had previously said that he hates dry banana bread and would rather have undercooked-but-moist banana bread than done-but-dry. Oh well, he was the one who was in charge of testing the loaf!

 Rachael Ray's magazine always includes a pull-out booklet of like "50 burgers" or "50 cookies" etc. The format is usually a few base recipes with several variations for each, and this month's soup feature was similar. There's chicken, potato, caramelized onion, tomato, and black bean soup bases, each with five variations.
This soup really helped with the freezer cleanup! We had a container of broth with a large amount of chili powder mixed in (and some bits of steak too), sauteed poblanos, the final bit of a can of adobo sauce + chipotle peppers that I've used in a bajillion recipes, and some ground beef that all went into this soup! Since a lot of the flavor comes from things like the adobo sauce and chipotle peppers, it's a very quick chili (~20-30 min total) that still packs a lot of flavor. I used a variety of beans to make it more interesting, and I also skipped blending to speed things along and keep dirty dishes to a minimum. Plus, isn't texture good? This was a fast, filling, and yummy meal. It also has a lot of vegetables of course, so it seems well-rounded and pretty healthy (until you add that sour cream and cheese on top I guess). It was pretty spicy, so I was glad to have the dairy to temper it a bit.

We had ceramics class on St. Patrick's Day, so we had corned beef etc. the day after instead. A few friends were able to join us. This was all the same stuff as last year, except the soda bread biscuits and horseradish-sour cream sauce. G doesn't like horseradish, so when it was just the two of us it didn't seem worth making the sauce. But actually it was really good! The rest of us liked it. The biscuits I made because the food kind of cooked down and I had a moment of worry that it might not be enough food. They really just tasted like scones... other than having baking soda, I'm not sure what the difference was! It called for currants, but I used cranberries instead. It got some extra flavor because something was burnt on the bottom of the oven. This always happens-- something spills over and it's too hot to clean up. We forget about it once it's cooled. Then, the next time I bake something, I preheat the oven and when I open it up smoke billows out! So these biscuits tasted like they were smoked (because they were, I guess). If only we had been roasting some meat or something...

Thanks to the slow cooker (which was only big enough to fit the beef, turnip, carrots, and leek), the rest of the meal (cabbage, potatoes, sauce, biscuits) was able to be put together in 30 minutes. Not bad! That's the secret to a weeknight dinner party.

There was enough left over to make hash on Thursday:

Which we basically didn't eat, because we had had extensive hor d'oeuvres at an Amazon networking event (this event didn't make sense. We were invited I guess because G has a job there starting in the fall, but he doesn't know who he'll be working with or under, so we didn't actually meet anyone from there. Instead, there were just a bunch of random mostly-young professionals who weren't working at Amazon. Huh? But the food was 10/10 would eat again). We had it for breakfast the next day instead!

For dinner on Friday we made this no-boil mac & cheese. It's supposed to be "faster" because the noodles cook in the sauce, but then the sauce takes more than the boiling time to make, so... :-P It was really tasty, with leek and bacon in it. It had 1.5 cups of cheese (fontina, gouda, and cheddar), but didn't come out tasting too cheesy. Other than the top, which was a bit cohesive, the inner part was more just like pasta in some sort of white sauce. While it was baking, I got distracted by G watching gravity, so it baked for almost an hour instead of 30 minutes. Oops! Some of the pasta was hard, but I don't know if it was al dente from not being boiled or if it got rehydrated and then redehydrated from being cooked too long. I think if I made this again I would probably parboil the noodles just in case, and then make sure to take it out in time! The leeks managed to create quite a complex flavor. I could've sworn there was onion and garlic, but no... just leeks, bacon, and salt.
 
For breakfast on Saturday we wanted to make pancakes. This recipe was from the same person who made the banana bread recipe from last week, and it has flaxseed too. The picture in the magazine looks like a nice stack of typically-shaped pancakes. But ours looked like:

What happened? At first the batter was super thick, but I realized it's because at one point I was thinking of halving it (that was the point when I defrosted the buttermilk) but ended up making the full recipe of everything except the liquid. But even when I added the rest of the liquid, it was still pretty thick. It went onto the skillet in clumps, but then puffed up a lot to make these biscuit-like cakes. And then since they were so thick, they kind of singed before cooking all the way through. Pfft. We're not keeping this recipe.

Curry, Curried turkey, Pizza, and Ice Cream Delights

This week I made:
Fall Vegetable Curry, Cooking Light October 2010
Pizza
Margarita Ice-Cream Sandwiches, Cooking Light June 2011
Salted Brownie Sundae Bites, Every Day with Rachael Ray (issue unknown)
Curried Turkey Sandwiches on Naan Bread, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013

On Monday I made this light vegetarian dinner. It's got a lot of good vegetables-- onion, sweet potato, cauliflower and tomatoes, with chickpeas for a little protein. It's very simple too, with some of the vegetables getting briefly sautéed in curry powder before being simmered in broth. This cooked faster than the rice, even on the "fast" setting. It was pretty light though, so when I ate it for lunch the next day I got hungry mid-afternoon.
The smell of the curry powder reminded me of this bread I made when I was in Japan and taking baking classes. The dough had curry powder in it and rolled up with cheese and chopped onion (sprinkled with more curry powder, if I remember correctly), then cut up like cinnamon rolls and baked individually. It sounds like a weird combination of flavors but was really good, so I ended up making it a lot. The selection of cheeses in Japan is pretty limited, this kind being called "factory cheese." I made it a couple times back in the states, but I can't remember what I substituted for factory cheese, ha.

There was  a pizza recipe in this issue of Rachel Ray which made me think of making pizza, but G said he'd prefer to just make pizza on our own. This one had pepperoni, sausage, marinara sauce, and cheese. Pizza is pretty fast when you can buy bags of dough at the grocery store!

Wednesday was our House Cup Competition. The House Cup is a competition between the different halls in our dorm. The competition changes each month, with scavenger hunts, trivia, cooking contests, food drives, etc. This was the dessert night. I brought a few recipes to share with my neighbors, and we selected these two ice cream recipes that might be unique enough to garner up some votes.
The margarita ice-cream sandwiches are not actually alcoholic, but are lime cookies sprinkled with salt and filled with lime ice cream (actually, lime sherbet mixed with vanilla. And by lime sherbet, I mean lime frozen Greek yogurt, because apparently lime sherbet isn't really a thing). The salted brownie sundae bites are a brownie halved vertically and filled with a mix of fudge sauce and coffee ice cream. This one is also salted.
So, both of these recipes demanded like 3-8 hours of cooling, freezing, etc. I just figured that this was a bit overkill and that we could make these both in a 2-hour window. Um, yes and no. The margarita ice-cream sandwiches came out fine. I skimped on the dough cooling (3 hrs -> maybe 30 minutes) with no apparent effect. The sandwiches were not assembled and then refrozen for 4 hours-- instead, at the event we scooped ice cream onto a single cookie for each person. The cookies were great on their own, too. The ice cream unfortunately melted as the event went on, and probably could have used some more time refreezing after warming and mixing together. All in all, these were pretty normal. The brownie bites were not very successful as the recipe stands. There were a few problems-- In particular, the brownie batter totally did not fill out a 9x13 baking pan as promised. It was not thick enough to cut crosswise, so we ended up folding it over on top of itself instead. Then, the recipe calls for 30 minutes of cooling in the pan, 30 minutes of freezing after being cut, and then another 30 minutes of freezing with the ice cream. I tried to collapse this into just maybe like 10 minutes in the freezer before adding the ice cream because we were running out of time. But the brownies apparently had a lot of internal heat still, and ice cream was also pretty warm at this point (we had put it in the fridge to make it spreadable, but then it got a little too spreadable), so when I went to check on it a bit later the ice cream was all melty and pouring out and/or soaking into the brownies. Basically, the two brownie halves were directly touching and sitting in a pool of coffee cream. And then it was time to go to the event!
I cut and plated the brownies, spilling out the remainder of the ice cream. It looked really messy and awful, but I quickly renamed them "salted brownie bites drizzled in coffee ice cream" and poured the rest of the liquid ice cream on top. It looked a little funky, so I grated some chocolate on top which made it look fancy. This ended up being a pretty popular dessert too!
People seemed really excited to try our desserts, but in the end we got 4th (first loser), so we were a little disappointed. We had dared to hope!

On Thursday I made these naan sandwiches. The recipe is for 6 for some reason, and while our grocery store does carry naan, it cost $12 for 6 pieces :-P G was the one who went shopping, so I didn't realize how much it was until he came back. But we probably should've just stopped by one of the many Indian restaurants in the neighborhood for a basket of naan! Oh well. The inside of this sandwich is a patty of ground turkey mixed with mint, spinach, garlic, yogurt, and garam masala. Since the patties are thin, they cook pretty fast. It's topped with a mix of more mint, tomato, and red onions. Pretty good! G dropped half of his naan into the kitchen sink and was very distraught! So I guess it is good that we had 6 servings :)

Eggplant-Parm sandwiches, Curry, Salad, Cajun chicken, and Blintz Hotcakes

This week I made:

• Eggplant-Parm Grilled Cheese, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• Thai Pork Chops, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• Butternut Squash & Arugula Salad, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• served with steak
• Blackened Chicken with Broccoli Slaw, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014
• served with black beans and rice from a package that was G's favorite when we made it a few months ago, but he didn't remember it :(
• Cheese Blintz Hotcakes, Every Day with Rachael Ray January/February 2014

We got to the end of Sunday and were suddenly really hungry! I had planned to make the butternut squash salad, but we didn't want to wait for the squash to bake, so we looked for a fast recipe instead. This one sounded like it would be good, and G always likes to put his George Foreman grill to use with hot sandwiches. In this recipe, the eggplant is broiled in the oven. You cook up some garlic until golden-crispy too. But other than that, it's just cutting up some cheese, tomatoes, and basil, so it's pretty simple. 

The only annoying thing is that it calls for pressing the buttered bread into 1.5 c grated Parmigiano-Reggiano before grilling. First, that's a waste of $, since that amount is uncalled for. Second, it basically all falls off anyway. Or maybe that's because I used no-name parmesan cheese and it knew it didn't fit in?? Anyway, I guess she had to put it so that it would really be eggplant-parm, but it didn't seem to work that well. The recipe was also funny because it calls for a whole eggplant, sliced very thin. And yet each sandwich (makes 4-6) only has a single slice?? It could use some more (and we did, for leftovers).

On Monday we have ceramics, so we always need to cook a quick recipe. (And even then, we are usually late! :-/) This curry was pretty fast, starting with jarred red curry paste. The recipe called for bell peppers, but we had some sweet peas so I put that in too. I guess there's not too much to say about this, because it really depends on the red curry that you choose-- ours was a little more spicy than I would have preferred!

 On Wednesday we had a bit more time, so we made the butternut squash salad. Actually, since I used frozen butternut squash (cut pretty small, too), it didn't take as long as it called for. I left it in for a while anyway though (and forgot about it until some of the smaller pieces burnt and the rest were nice and crispy #overlyhonestmethods). Meanwhile, we made some steak. When I asked G what he wanted to eat with the salad, he chose steak and talked as if he knew exactly how to make it, but then when it came time to cook it he said he didn't want to do it because he didn't know how! We sauteed it in the cast iron skillet and then stuck the pan in the oven for a while after, since we (I?) like steak to be cooked all the way through. It was pretty good-- I sometimes don't like beef that much, but every once in a while I'm hungry or iron-deficient or something and it tastes amazing. I think there was a lot of fat. Oh, and we put a pat of butter on top when we put it in the oven too.
The salad was good too. We didn't have any dijon, so the dressing was just vinegar, brown sugar, and EVOO. It was really thick!

This blackened chicken is super fast and easy, because it's just rubbed with Cajun seasoning and pan-fried. The slaw is just a bagged slaw tossed with lemon juice and mayo. We don't really like mayo that much, so I guess we should've done something else for the side. But the chicken was good! I think this was our first time using the Cajun seasoning that came with the set of spices G has had for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I know that spices aren't supposed to be as good after a while, but they all seem pretty fragrant still!

These pancakes were so good! They're really easy, because it's just mixed in a blender, and can then be poured straight into the pan (another #overlyhonestmethod-- I made big pancakes instead of small ones because the lid of the blender fell off while I was pouring and smushed my nice small batter puddles into a big pond). It's a mix of eggs, flour, milk, sugar, baking powder, and cottage cheese. It's moist and the cottage cheese gives it a good texture. We didn't have any jams except ones so old the caps are stuck on, so we topped them with fresh mango instead. Yum! This is such a simple and great breakfast recipe-- definitely keeping :)